Ava's Man (34 page)

The funeral singers, women and men who traveled from death to death, offering their skills, sang about the mystery of death and the beauty of living, which was a fine idea, considering the man.

Hoyt Fair and Big Fred McCrelless, two mighty men of God, preached him home.

Big Fred could not preach for crying. Charlie, the onetime whiskey man, had been his friend. He had been one of the people Charlie loved to talk to when he saw him in town.

Fred, built like a refigerator with a hat, could boom from the pulpit and send sin scrambling like a spider for a dark hole, but now his voice was low and soft. The good of the man just overwhelmed his faults, he said.

“Ava, James, William, Edna, Juanita, Margaret, Jo, Sue,” he said. “I loved him, too.”

Hoyt Fair, a man with a stern, harsh face who shoved Satan aside the same way he knocked down trees with his big yellow bulldozer,
was oddly humbled, and said he belonged down there with the family—his son, Ed, was Charlie’s son-in-law.

The two men painted a picture of a man with courage and heart, a man who was a defender of the weak and a smiter of the wicked, a man of charity, but one who never asked for it. They praised him as a fine father, which was the gospel, unbending truth, and as a fine husband, which was true mostly and anyway it was a funeral.

They said he had found God just in time, and then everybody prayed, and the funeral singers did “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.”

Grown men cried in the pews as they sang, which does not mean anything unless you know that type of man.

After that, Ava often retreated from the world to sit on the edge of her bed. Sometimes you could hear her singing a funeral song, not from Charlie’s service but from her own momma’s funeral, long ago.

She missed him terribly, but maybe not as much as the others did. Because she still spoke with him, from time to time.

No one had expected Hootie to come to the funeral, and he didn’t. He would have been terrified of the people, all those people, and he only could have stood it if his tall friend had been beside him.

If Charlie was, as his Bundrum cousins claimed, the last bridge between those old, wild days of the river and this more civilized time, then Hootie’s path between those worlds vanished with the death of his friend.

Charlie had kept his promise to look after him, and he would even go fetch the little man and ride him around on errands. But after his death, Hootie was never seen in town again.

Not long after Charlie died, they found Hootie’s homemade boat caught in a snag on the river, and not far away, they found the little man dead on the bank.

As in his life, the rumors swirled around his death. Was he beaten to death for his money, or had he dug it all up and planned to flee in his boat, but been caught? With no champion to shield him, did they come for him in the night?

Or had he just gotten old and lain down to die in the dappled shade, in a place where he could see the sun dance off the water?

In time, most people forgot he had ever been at all. But when people talk about Charlie, they will snap their fingers and a smile will creep across their face, and they will say, “Hey, remember that little ugly feller, the one who followed Charlie round like a dog?”

His name was Jessie Clines, and he was unvarnished proof that my grandfather was a good man.

For his family, there was something much worse than grief to live with.

“There was a silence, then,” Jo said of her family’s life, after Charlie was buried in town. Ava almost never mentioned Charlie. The children almost never mentioned him. “It was just too hurtful,” said Jo, who was only seventeen when a lifetime of silent mourning began.

What a funny legacy for a beloved man, to be pushed out of the minds of the people who loved him, to have the mention of his name all but vanish from the day-to-day language of his family.

But it had to be that way, to go on living.

Ava did not go crazy. She went to work. She had cracked, but did not shatter, and she chopped and picked cotton for Walter Rollins and in Mr. Homer Couch’s fields, and picked blackberries, to sell by the gallon. In a war, they would have called her one of the walking wounded.

Her hands got infected and they swelled up so big it hurt Jo to even look at them, and her legs were scratched bloody because she still believed a lady did not work in pants, but she worked on.

She was clumsy with an ax but she chopped their firewood herself, and every third whack, it seemed, a block of wood would kick off the chop block and slam into her bony shins, and she would cuss under her breath and whack at it again, and when she got mad she would flail at it so hard and fast and wild that passersby could not tell if she was chopping wood or just beating it to death. When she was done, her legs would be bloody.

Where she hurt most, no one could heal. But Ava had two daughters at home. Jo and Sue were in high school and junior high school, and clothes had to be bought and lunches paid for, and rent made.

Jo and Sue picked cotton with her, but everyone knew Jo would be gone soon. A good-looking boy named John Couch was courting her, and it was just a matter of time before he asked her. Homer was his daddy, and Jo would pick cotton in her school clothes—her nicest clothes—to try and catch his eye, and she did. “He had brown wavy hair, real wavy,” said Jo, and she made Margaret and even Juanita come to that field one day to see him, and they said that, yes, he did have a head full of hair.

The older girls helped when they could. When Jo was taking typing in school, Ed and Juanita bought her a typewriter on credit. “They went into debt for me,” said Jo.

To escape the sadness of the house, Sue tagged along when Jo and John went to the fair or to town or to the drive-in. She was perhaps the most beautiful of that family. She was a cheerleader at Roy Webb Junior High School, and a queen at the Halloween Carnival. She made good grades without trying.

Her life, outside that place of mourning, was a happy life, but she never understood why her daddy had to leave them so completely. The death, she understood. But she wondered why her daddy could not come and visit, in stories and memories, the way others did. Only Ava, in the middle of the night, said his name aloud. He came to visit her, and just her, but that was only because of the cracks in Ava’s mind that let him slip through.

Margaret came and went, often, from that sad place. She had gone back to her husband after her daddy’s death, because Charles Bragg had been kind and decent at the funeral and because there was really no place else for her to go. But the whiskey twisted him, so she drifted from one house where she dreaded the sound of a car in the driveway to the now cold place where her daddy was everywhere, and nowhere at all.

M
argaret was grown now, and three children pulled at her skirts. Three years after she had Sam, she had me, and three years later, Mark. And three years after that, she had a baby who died soon after birth.

For twelve years, her husband had shown her flashes of warmth and kindness, but he fought his war, still, and drank his paycheck, and he let his babies do without.

And now and then, a taunt from Margaret’s childhood would echo in her mind.

“Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat,” the other children had chanted, because she was meek and seldom fought back. But it hardly mattered then. She did not need any backbone when her daddy was alive.

Now she hated herself, for just absorbing it, for taking it, for not showing the strength her daddy would have shown, to … to what?

The last thing her daddy said to her, had begged of her, was to
protect her children, and she had done that, every day for twelve years. She stepped in front of her husband’s rage, meekly, her eyes cast down, shielding her children. How much more backbone that must have taken, to do that, than to strike him down, as her daddy would have done.

And now, on a winter day in a raggedy white house in the little community of Spring Garden, on the day when she saw that his demons had him for good, she found the backbone to walk away.

She got up from the kitchen table and started putting her babies’ clothes and toys into brown paper sacks, and they walked away down a railroad track, walked away for good.

She went back to Ava’s house, and she let it be known that she was taking in ironing for pocket change a pound. When fall came she asked Mr. Walter Rollins if he needed cotton pickers, and he did.