Ava's Man Read Free Page B

bib pocket of the overalls. That he recalls dim and dreamy, and vaguely sweet. He does not remember getting that dime on the string. He just knows he has always had it.

    One fall day, a lifetime later, we were fishing at a lake bracketed by the Roy Webb Road and Carpenter’s Lane, casting rubber worms into the dense duck weed, not saying much, just living. All my life Sam has outfished me, and I’ve come to expect his amused, pitying look as I reel in my spinner bait with a big dollop of algae on the hook and nothing else. I know I should not care about that, but I do, because he is my big brother and forever will be, even when we sit one day wheezing and befuddled in the county home.
    But that day, the world was upside down. I cast into a clear spot in the weed and caught a nice little bass, and then another, and another. I caught six. He did not catch any.
    We finally decided to pick up the tackle and go on home, and it was hard for me, a grown man, not to just prance around and around him in a circle.
    Sam just slipped the rods into the back of the Ford Bronco and, without even looking at me, dismissed the whole afternoon with a grunt. “Ricky,” he said, “I was fishin’ for the big fish.”
    Then he stared up at a perfect blue sky, a sky without a cloud.
    “And everybody knows,” he said, “the big fish won’t bite on a bluebird day.”
    I just looked at him, because I did not have a rock to throw. On the one day I outfish him, he is spouting poetry.
    Yet I could not help but wonder where that phrase, that lovely phrase, came from. Who still talks like that, I wondered, in a modern-day South that has become so homogenized, so bland, that middle school children in Atlanta make fun of people who sound Southern? I found out it was just something my grandfather and men like him used to say, something passed down to him, to us, like a silver pocket watch.
    A man like Charlie Bundrum doesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second-and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers. The thing to do, if you can, is write them down on new paper.

1.
The beatin’ of Blackie Lee
The foothills of the Appalachians

THE 1930 S
    A va met him at a box-lunch auction outside. Gadsden, Alabama, when she was barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from the crowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, “I got one dollar, by God.” In the evening they danced in the grass to a fiddler and banjo picker, and Ava told all the other girls she was going to marry that boy someday, and she did. But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cotton rows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named Blackie Lee.
    Maybe it isn’t quite right to say that she whipped her. To whip somebody, down here, means there was an altercation between two people, and somebody, the one still standing, won. This wasn’t that. This was a beatin’, and it is not a moment that glimmers in family history. But of all the stories I was told of their lives together, this one proves how Ava loved him, and hated him, and which emotion won out in the end.
    Charlie Bundrum was what women here used to call a purty man, a man with thick, sandy hair and blue eyes that looked like something you would see on a rich woman’s bracelet. His face was as thin and spare as the rest of him, and he had a high-toned, chin-in-the-air presence like he had money, but he never did. His head had never quite caught up with his ears, which were still too big for most human beings, but the women of his time were not particular as to ears, I suppose.
    He was also a man who was not averse to stopping off at the bootlegger’s now and again, and that was where he encountered a traveling woman with crimson lipstick and silk stockings named Blackie Lee. People called her Blackie because of her coal-black hair, and when she told my granddaddy that she surely was parched