Free Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

could clot the blood and stop a man from bleeding to death.
    But as fast they could cake it on, the blood from the stab wounds washed it away, until Newt and Mr. Hugh were bloody up to their elbows and most of the people had begun to pray. Mr. Hugh searched his mind for a scripture that could save the man. Just because a man is drunk does not mean he cannot speak to the Lord.
    “Does anybody know that goddamn Bible verse?” he shouted. “This son of a bitch is bleeding to death.”
    “Which ’un?” several people asked.
    “Ezekiel,” he yelled.
    Ava, who hated any violence she was not directly involved in, had stood trembling. But now she stepped smartly forward as if called from on high, and knelt at the man’s side.
    “And when I passed by thee, and see thee polluted in thine own blood,” she quoted, “I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live ye.’ I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live.’”
    “That ’un,” Mr. Hugh said, looking at Ava in something close to awe.
    “Chapter 16,” Ava said.
    Mr. Hugh said that seemed like it.
    “Verse 6,” Ava said.
    It would be a grand story if the blood had ceased to flow right then, at that precise moment, but it didn’t. Yet somehow, either through the will of God or the coagulating properties of brown sugar, the wounds soon stopped pouring and began to seep, slowly. Of course, by then Jeff was bled almost white.
    They figured there was no need to take him to a doctor, and when he came to he told them, “No, I reckon I’ll just lay here and die.”
    He paid Sis and Newt’s other children a nickel a day to brush the flies off him, and he waited to die for a long, long time. Finally, after a few days, Newt told him that if he wasn’t going to die he sure did want his porch back, and Jeff got up and walked on down the road.

    This was the life Charlie had delivered Ava unto, a place where people still lived shrouded by the trees, where the local sheriff was a deacon who meted out justice based on the season, because all the roads in and out of the backcountry were dirt and his old Model T was bad to sink up to its axles in the mud. Here, the people knew, a man sometimes just needed killing, and if it was more or less unanimous,the kilt man was buried quietly and no one ever saw any reason to call the law.
    Here, Ava would need every scrap of Bible she ever knew.
    She was not a city girl. Ava had been raised with a hoe in her hand, swatting at sweat bees, and she had stood on the fence and gazed unblinking when her daddy entered their hogpen with a .22 rifle and a razor-sharp butcher knife. But the place Charlie took her to was not safe and solid country living the way she had known it.
    Charlie took her to a high place in Georgia, cut by three rivers. In Rome, smack-dab in the middle of that city, the Etowah and the Oostanaula converged to form the Coosa, and it was the Coosa that, all his life, ran through Charlie’s heart.
    Rome bustled with cotton mills, cement plants and ironworks that specked the night sky with orange fires. It had a massive drawbridge down on Fifth Avenue that opened to let the barges through. Endless trains, hauling tons of iron ore, belched smoke and shook the earth. Children put pennies on the tracks and the weight mashed them thin as notebook paper.
    Most roads were dirt and brick, but the place had a clock tower so high that it disappeared from sight on a cloudy day, and a brand-new federal courthouse, lousy with revenuers.
    Charlie didn’t much like town, but the industry meant workers and workers meant houses, and a good hammer swinger could make a living here. But like many men who had grown up in the woods, he saddled his mule and rode off into the trees when the boss man said quit, and he did not stop until the foundry fires were lost in the distance and the ground did not shake from machines.
    The river ran there, right there. The Coosa, a muddy green where it ran clean and swift around giant rocks,