Ava's Man by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online

1900s. It was a family business. His brother, John Lewis, was in it, and they worked at it together until the revenuer men ran John Lewis clear up to the Tennessee River.
    That happened in 1891, in what family members still refer to as “the trouble.” John Lewis Bundrum was minding a still in Cleburne County when a revenuer, a federal man, surprised him. John Lewis vaulted on his mule and put the heels to him, but the revenuer was better mounted, and was slowly, slowly gaining.
    John Lewis reined in, stepped calmly down off the mule, drew a rifle from a tow sack, took careful aim and shot the revenuer’s horse, which effectively ended any pursuit.
    It was a Christian gesture—toward the revenuer, not the horse—but he would have been better off shooting the revenuer. He would not have been missed that much, revenuers being about as popular as itch.
    But a good horse is a good horse, and they might have hung him if he had not fled to the north, to Florence up on the Tennessee River. That seemed far enough, being almost in Tennessee. When he came home, almost a year later, he found that his wife had died of typhoid fever. Heartbroke, he left Alabama for Arkansas, and he is buried there, in Benton.
    If there was a lesson in what happened to John Lewis, his little brother, Jimmy Jim, failed to see it.
    By the time Charlie Bundrum was ten years old, his daddy was as well known for his likker as for his lumber. Jimmy Jim took Charlie to the woods with him to help carry the whiskey out, tote wood and watch out for revenuers. Before he was even a teenager, Charlie knew how the corn fermented into mash and how the pure, pale likker was distilled a potent, precious drop at a time. It was in his blood a long, long time before he ever took his first drink of it.
    Over time, Jimmy Jim left his older boys to do the lumber work and spent more and more time at his stills. The federal men and county deputies began to find them and when they did they poured out his mash and used axes to bust up his copper plumbing. Soon he was a wanted man. In the north Georgia mountains, they surprised him at his still but he lost them in the brush after some shooting, but no serious shooting.
    But the deputies and the federal men started watching his house and watching the roads, so he couldn’t come home, couldn’t see his wife and children. He went into hiding down in the flatland in south Georgia, as his small wealth dwindled, as his family suffered.
    He would hop a freight train or bum a ride and get off when he was close to Rome, and creep up to his door in the dead of night. But with papers out on him, he had to stay gone for years, and the little bit of money he was able to leave did not help much.
    When Charlie was twelve, Mattie’s hip was crushed by a kicking milk cow, and, her husband being a fugitive, there was no money for a doctor or hospital. The bones grew back wrong and she was deformed and lame, a woman who moved the rest of her life by swinging her whole body side to side. They lived in a shack. Their one salvation was that Jimmy Jim had left them with a few milk cows, and even though Mattie was crippled, she milked and churned butter. That, and charity, kept them alive.
    Riller, who was grown then and married to Tobe Morrison, a steel worker with a good job, came to the house one day and took the youngest, Shuley, to live with them. Kinfolks refer to it as “the day Riller stole little Shuley,” but they know she did it to feed him, to help.
    Charlie went to work for himself. He took a little wagon up into the woods, searching for pine stumps. He hacked them into sections, what folks here call knots, and sold them door to door for pennies. People used the slivers from the fat pine to start their fire. He swung an ax like a man and did any odd job he could find. He grew up thatway, hard, but at night, if she wasn’t in too much pain, he and his momma talked until the fire burned out. I would like to have heard what they said.