Free Ava's Man by Rick Bragg Page A

turned brown when the red mud washed in from the rains. The river flooded high, clean up into the low branches of trees. It ate into the banks and formed deep caves overhung by the twisted, exposed roots of trees that clung to the disappearing ground.
    Monsters lived here. Fat water moccasins coiled around the lower branches, thick as a man’s arm. Snapping turtles, as big around as a car tire with jaws strong enough to snap a broomstick in two, lurked in the deep, dark holes. Just under the river’s surface, primeval catfish, four feet long, hung suspended in that translucent water as their whiskers, like snakes clinging to their jaws, undulated in the slow current.
    Charlie spent every spare moment on it. He did not have a store-bought boat. He took the hoods of two junk cars and welded them together to form a craft that he powered by muscle, using a long pole to push the boat along the sluggish water. Ava refused to get in it, and he laughed until she stomped up the bank.
    They lived in a house that was not much better than a shack, but Ava’s momma had given her a good kerosene lantern, so they had light. It may have not been just what she expected, but while she did carp and nag—it was her prerogative to carp and nag—she stayed.
    The people were almost as wild as the country, and their language alone could knock a regular God-fearing person flat on their back. It was not that they did not believe in the Bible. It was that they believed in other things, too.
    Here, when people got sick, they sent for healers—women who had a power in them that no one questioned if they were smart—and a healing woman named Lula was known to have taken a cancer out of a man named James Couch, but was called too late to save Pine Knot Johnson.
    No one had to worry about the future. The old women knew how to tell it. They would dump the grounds from their coffee cups in a saucer and move it around with their fingers, and they could tell your fortune that way.
    It could be something of as great import as life or death, or they might look at you and say you were going to get a letter. They read palms, and used herbs to ease morning sickness and cure a baby’s croup.
    People knew that if you dropped a fork, company was coming, and if a piece of food fell to the floor, it meant you secretly grudged sharing your meal.
    If a snapping turtle bit you, even if you cut off its head, it would not turn loose until it thundered. Night birds were bad luck, and babies born at night were at peril if the night birds called.
    And there was no ailment on earth, from a bee sting to a bullet wound, that could not be eased by daubing on a little wet snuff.
    Ava listened to it all, mixing it in her mind with the doctrine of her Holiness upbringing, and stored it away. To her, the girl who loved learning, this was just a whole new kind of knowledge.
    Whiskey ran through the place just as surely as the river, and on every bend, it seemed, the thin, dark trickle of smoke marked the spot of a still. Ava’s man, still a boy, really, brought home money on Friday and only drank homemade likker, and on weekends they went to Newt’s and wound up the Victrola, and danced on the porch.
    In the week she did stoop labor, picking cotton or corn, tended her own garden and waited for a child.
    And late at night, after supper, she read him the newspaper. He sat beside her, and she would have taught him to read if he had wanted, but they never got around to it. He could sign his name, and he could do math—because a boss man would cheat a worker who could not count—but to him books were a secret, locked up tight. And no one wanted a hammer swinger who quoted poetry.
    And so they lived. He was different from many men of his time and place. If they were in the same general area, they sat or stood together. If she hung clothes, he stood at the line. And, unheard of for a man, he helped her cook. She made the biscuits and he fried the meat—steak when he had just