Ava's Man by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online Page A

But I guess the words don’t matter all that much.
    There are few photographs of that time, but one, if you look at it hard and long enough, tells the story pretty well. It was taken when he was still a boy, during bad times.
    The photo’s backdrop is a ragged shack of rough, unpainted board and the windows, without glass, are covered by a flap of black tar paper. The poverty is burned deep into the print. But the boy in the foreground is not one of those pitiful, hollow-eyed urchins who stare up from photo books of the Appalachians. Instead, he has a faint, almost imperceptible smile, as if the hard-eyed kinfolks who pose with him just haven’t heard the joke yet.
    His sister Riller, already grown and married, stands beside him, her severe face framed by a black cloth hat. Someone has strung a garland of flowers, on a string or a vine, and looped it over the crown.

    Mattie died at fifty-four, when Charlie was barely fifteen, and her children buried her in the pretty graveyard at Mount Gilead Church, in Websters Chapel. Hills rise up from the cemetery on almost every side, creating deep shade around the church. It is a lovely place to rest, that little pocket of cool, quiet dark.
    Charlie never, ever talked about the funeral, about his momma in death, so I don’t know what was said, what was done for her. But in time I would learn that it is a tradition with us. We blot out the funeral—we erase the image of the coffin and the flowers and even the prayers—or at least we try. It is as if the dead just walked off somewhere, just after leaving us with a story, or a covered dish, or a whittled toy.
    I have always said my people are smart.

    By his momma’s death, Charlie was more man than most ever get, a tall, hard, strong and smiling man, as if he were immune to the fires that had scorched him, if not purified by them.
    He lived for fiddle music and corn likker, and became a white-hot banjo picker and a buck dancer and a ladies’ man, because women just love a man who can dance. At seventeen he could cut lumber all day, then tell stories all night, and people in the foothills said he would never settle down or maybe even amount to much. But the boy could charm a bird off a wire. And there seemed to be no fear in him, no fear at all. It was almost as if he had died already, met the devil and knew he could charm him or trick him or even whip him, because what did ol’ Scratch have left to show him that he had not already seen.

    His daddy was an upright citizen, toward the end.
    The warrants for Jimmy Jim’s arrest had all faded to yellow, and he came home from the flat country to marry again, this time to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl named Ruth. But little Ruth died less than a year later in childbirth, and he buried her with the baby, an unnamed girl child, in a grave in Georgia, the still infant resting in her rigid arms.
    No one seems to know why the lawmen in the foothills, on either side of the state line, let him be. It may be he was older, and seen as less dangerous. It may be they just forgot him. He went to work making coffins, and traveled, visiting his children and grandchildren.
    It is mostly a myth, I believe, that men will mellow with time—there are men in my family who would hack off your ear as they waited to die in the nursing home—but Jimmy Jim seemed to change, to bend, I guess.
    I heard from my momma that he would go to his children’s houses and teach their wives how to make stew. He met my grandma, Ava, and Ava, hard to impress, said late in her own life that she liked the old man.
    It may be, as some said, he just felt hell licking at his ankles and tried to change. It happens a lot, down here. It is why a lot of the deacons are old men. But Jimmy Jim was not used up, not quite yet. At sixty-two, he married Dolee Semmes Fowler, and soon she was expecting a child.

    He had been a dramatic man all his life. But on February 15, 1927, his heart just stopped. It would have been more befitting