Ava's Man Read Free

and said, “Son, you stole my story.”
    Some of them would admit, shamefully, that they battled with the past all their lives and never quite knew whether to be proud of their people or ashamed. Some even pretended that there was no past, that they had no history before sorority rush, or induction into the Mason lodge. For them, the past was a door they locked themselves—but in the closet late at night they could always hear those rattling bones.
    But I am proud of Charlie Bundrum. I want my grandfather to walk out of the past—with Ava, God rest her soul, beside him. If what I have heard about Charlie and Ava is true, he would not have minded having just a little bit of a head start on her, so he could have some fun before she got there.
    As for me, I got what I came for.
    Charlie Bundrum, though I never even saw his face, would have wanted us. He would have held us high in one of those legendary hands, like a new bulldog puppy, and laughed out loud. He would have watched over us, slipping us Indian head pennies and Mercury dimes. And every Friday, when my momma went into town to cash her check, he would have fed nickels into the mechanized bucking horse outside the A&P, to see us ride.
    I am not sure of that because it’s what I want, because it’s the way a boy would have built himself a grandfather. But the actual man, a flawed and sometimes boozy man, would have done it all, if he had lived. I am sure of this because that actual man lived just long enough to reach for one of us, a boy older than me, and prove it.

    In the fall of 1997, an Alabama newspaper sent a reporter to interview my mother. I sat in her living room on the chert hill in northeastern Alabama and shook my head as she deftly deflected the reporter’s questions about her sacrifices, about her hard life, and laughed when she said she was just walking around the house in her old age, trying not to fall off the pedestal that I had put her on.
    Then the reporter, a nice lady from Birmingham, asked her to recall the best day of her life. It was a splendid question. I wrote one whole book about her, and forgot to ask it.
    I thought my momma, who had lived her life in borrowed houses, might say that it was the day I handed her the keys to her own home—partial payment of a debt I will never really repay. Or I thought she would say it was the day that
Shoutin’,
a book that honored her, was printed, and I handed her a copy with her face on the cover.
    I should have known better. Books and houses. Paper and wood.
    “I believe,” she said, “it was the birth of my first son, Sam.”
    It was the eleventh of September 1956, and Daddy was absent,which was a cause for concern but not alarm. He would show up sooner or later, in weeks or months, as soon as he had drank Korea away, as soon as the faces of dead men had slipped once more beneath the calm brown surface of bootleg whiskey.
    When Daddy left he took the rent with him, so she had nowhere else to take the baby except home. Charlie and Ava lived in a rented house on Alabama 21, in the woods behind Wright’s store, and she took him there. What is it people say about home? It is where you go when no one else wants you.
    My grandfather took the baby in his hands, engulfing him, and grinned.
    “By God, Margaret,” he said, “you’ve got Samson here.” And he held him for hours.
    No one slept much that night. The next day my grandfather, grumbling but good-natured, said it was too damn noisy to rest. It wasn’t that the baby had cried. The baby had not cried at all.
    “Margaret,” he said, “you kept us up all night, a’talkin’ to that boy.”
    My momma stopped then, done, as if the rest of the story, the best part, was hers alone. Finally the reporter asked her: “Well, what were you saying?”
    “I just kept whisperin’,” she said, “over and over, ‘You’re mine. You’re mine.’
    “I never did have anything,” she said, which is as close as I have ever heard her come to feeling