Ava's Man Read Free Page A

sorry, even a little, for herself. It was just that she wanted her visitor to understand.
    “I didn’t even have a doll. But he was mine. He belonged to me.”
    I understood. I had heard her tell stories of the poverty she and her brothers and sisters had been born to, heard them all recount hard times with that benign nonchalance of their generation, like the poverty was some mean dog that had long since died from old age. Even with a daddy who worked hard, luxury was a piece of hard penny candy, plucked from a tiny brown-paper sack. It melted, in minutes.
    But now here was this amazing, tiny thing, and she would have him, with luck, all of her life. And as long as her own father lived, the boy would be protected as she had always been protected. Only the generation had changed, not his character. The sky would still clear.
    They got so much more than that. Charlie Bundrum, in the last year of his life, seemed to focus all his love, all his attention, on Sam. He would rest in the yard with one long, skinny leg crossed over the other, and for hours he would talk to the baby, sing to him, just look at him. He drilled a hole in a silver dime and put it on string, then slipped it over the boy’s head. He carried him around on his hip or in the crook of his arm, and recited senseless rhymes …
    Ain’t goin’ to town

Ain’t goin’ to city

Goin’ on down

To Diddy-Wah-Diddy
    … until the baby would laugh.
    He would buy soft candy, in the shape of a peanut, and hide it in the bib pocket of his overalls. Sam learned, over time, that it was there, and would go prowling through the pocket with such dead-serious intent that my grandfather would just sit and laugh.
    At night, as my grandfather slept, the boy would toddle over to the coal bin and pick up a piece of coal, then toddle back across the room and drop the lump in one of my grandfather’s work boots. He would repeat the process, over and over, as my momma and grandmother sat and smiled, until he had filled both boots full of coal. Sam was single-minded, even then, and when he was done he would look proudly at my momma and gurgle something, as if to say, “See what a fine boy you have?” Then she would scoop him up and scrub his hands clean, to get rid of the evidence.
    In the morning my grandfather would awaken, and without evenglancing at the boy he would reach down, pick up his sooty boots and dump the coal back into the bin, wearily shaking his head, mumbling, “Now how do you reckon that got in there? Must be fairies.”
    Sometimes, in the mornings, the still-young man would hold his side, from sharp pains deep, deep inside him, but would go off to work anyway, if he had a house to roof that day. If he didn’t have work, he scooped up the boy and walked outside, a worn-down man and a brand-new one, killing time.
    “Daddy,” Momma told me, a lifetime later, “was a fool over Sam.”
    Part of the story I had heard before, about the day my daddy came for them, how Charlie Bundrum told him to git or take a whip-pin’, then told my momma she was grown and could make up her own mind, but if she left, she could not take Sam. She did not return to my daddy until her father died, when Sam was not yet three years old. Life was hard after that, for a real long time.
    “I’ve always figured that if Daddy had lived he would have killed your daddy, for the way he treated us,” she told me, softly, almost in a whisper. It was not just something to say. It was something that would have happened.
    People still say what a shame it was that he died so young, at fifty-one, but I cannot say he died too soon. He lived long enough to see most of his children grown. He lasted, with his liver and heart ravaged by whiskey and hard living, till my brother Sam came into this world, and then he hung on, to save my mother and big brother from the sadness beyond his door, for as long as he could.
    Sam, being so small, remembers almost none of it, none of it except the candy in the