Ava's Man

When Margaret is 3 years old, she is wearing a new dress made from a feed sack, when it catches on fire:

Edna and Ava heard her screams and come running, and caught her just as she breached the door. Ava knocked her to the porch and the two of them started to smother the flames with their bare hands. Edna cried and Ava prayed and cussed and they just beat at the fire until their own hands were blistered, until Margaret lay smoking on the porch, deathly, terrifyingly quiet (122).

Afterwards, Margaret says that while she was on fire, she “went up and up and […] was flying, but [she] didn’t see the Lord” (122). She is badly burned, and Edna and Juanita go to get Charlie, who is working. He comes home drunk and doesn’t think her burns look too bad. He gets her some ointment and goes back to work: “But it was bad. The blisters rose up big as teacups and got infected” (124). When he comes back home sober, he sees her miserable state, takes her to the doctor, and feels guilty.

Charlie doesn’t make much money at construction, but he makes quite a bit selling his homemade whiskey because people trust that “his product was clean, because it was pure, and because it was safe as Kool-Aid. […] He never sold a sip—not one sip—that he did not test with his own liver” (125). Although he already favored the drink, Charlie also “drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold” (126).

Bragg explains that for the men in his family, drinking is “almost a religion, in the deep woods” (126). Charlie continually makes new whiskey stills hidden in the deep woods and abandons them when the police get wind of where they’re hiding. One night, Charlie takes his son James with him to his still. They see a light far off and think they’ve been caught, but they come to find out it’s “just a lightning bug” (130). Bragg highlights the peculiar sight, commenting that “[g]host stories begin like this. But then, drinking stories begin this way, too” (130).

Bragg acknowledges that although his grandfather enjoyed drinking and the subsequent stories that often followed, alcohol eventually ended his life:

He would have lived longer, and his wife and children would have had him longer, if he had not been a man who liked his life sweetened with whiskey. His grandchildren would have known him. But for some men, drinking is like breathing. He made a living despite it. He never laid out drunk, he seldom slept in the day, the way drinkers to. I guess you could say he got happy (135).

Charlie gets a government letter asking him to come in for an examination. If he passes, “they were going to give him a green suit like the one Hootie wore, and put him in the army” (137). He goes in, hoping to be chosen so that he can do his duty, but the officials don’t pass him because he has too many children depending on him.

Charlie and Ava’s new neighbors, the Reardens, “loved conflict more than chocolate pie” (141). For Charlie and Ava’s kids, visiting the Reardens was like “sneaking under a circus tent. They fought all the time, made whiskey, ran from and sometimes got caught by deputies and revenuers, often escaped, but came straight home to Coyle’s Bluff to get caught again” (143). Everyone in the Rearden house is nice except Jerry, one of the sons. He’s mean, and Hootie is scared of him. While the Reardens are decent neighbors, Charlie and the family move up the road away from them for a roofing job.

One night, the family is getting ready to eat in the new house, when Hootie comes rushing in. Jerry is in the yard accusing Hootie of stealing some of his whiskey. This is clearly untrue, and Charlie goes outside, empty-handed, to confront Jerry. Jerry shoots at Charlie, but the bullet blows right past him. Charlie jumps on him and grabs his gun. Jerry’s girlfriend jumps out of the bushes and tries to attack Charlie, but he shoots her in the chest. With both Jerry and his girlfriend lying wounded on the ground, Charlie “told them they best be out of his yard before too long, and he walked on up to his house” (148).

Charlie fears he may go to jail over the incident, or that Jerry’s parents might come and beat him up, but this fear does not come to fruition:

[The] Reardens never came, maybe because they respected him, or because they thought it wasn’t worth their time. The law did not even investigate. No deputy ever came into the yard. Like some people need killing, some people need shooting, and need being knocked upside the head (150).

Grace is a sharp contrast to her sister Ava and lives a life that Ava might have had, if she hadn’t married Charlie. Grace married a wealthy café owner and could afford luxurious clothing, her personal style, and a car:

[Grace] smoked slim cigarettes, drank like a man and wore makeup, and when she rumbled down Carpenter’s Lane in her big car, the people’s heads swiveled to follow her, because it was a fine automobile, and because Grace was pretty fine herself, sitting in it (151).

Ava, on the other hand, wore dresses made from “flour sacks and feed sacks, and she picked cotton in them” (152). While Grace never had to do manual labor, Ava had to do hard physical labor as a necessity of survival. However, despite the obvious differences between their lifestyles, Ava loves Charlie and never complains about the life she chose.

After moving back and forth between Georgia and Alabama, Charlie and his family finally settle in Alabama for good. By this time, some of the children are grown and one is still a baby, and he feels like a rich man because his family is still together. The Depression is over, and Calhoun County is “growing and carpenters were looking for roofers. And Charlie still had some faithful customers there of his sideline business” (157).

Once settled, Ava and the children start attending a Congregational Holiness church, and the little girls start school: “It was the first time they ever lived very long in one place in their lives. But in a way they were still movers, still renters, still leasing the dirt they walked on, the birds they heard, the air they breathed” (159).

When Ava is nearly 40, she has one more baby girl named Sue, and James and William get drafted into the army and go to a training camp in Mississippi. Times are financially better for the family. There is now plenty to eat, the babies are healthy, and the older girls are going to school: “Times were kind. The federal government was even passing out free peanut butter” (162).