Free Ava's Man by Rick Bragg Page B

finished a job, or pork chops, or thick smoked bacon—and made the gravy. There was plenty of work then, so they ate good, real good. There were no one-egg days, but two-and three-egg days. They lived, though simply, richly, if rich means a good cup of coffee.
    They did not have a car, but had a mule who hated most human beings, for reasons that only mules can tell. The mule would pull a plow if he wanted, but he often did not want to plow in a straight line. When anyone put him in harness, he would start out in a clean, straight line down the row and then just turn hard right or left and, as fast as he could, snort and buck and drag the plow and the cussing plowboy across the field. He would also lie down and refuse to get up, even when Charlie demanded it—and he always seemed to hate Charlie a little less than most.
    Finally Charlie learned that if he went in the house and got his shotgun and sent one shot high across the mule’s ears—kind of like firing a warning shot across a ship’s bow—the mule would snort indignantly, bray at the sky and rise.
    If he and Ava had to go a good ways off, to town or to family, he saddled the mule and she climbed up, cautiously, behind her husband, arms locked around his waist, and they traveled. If that mule bucked, he would club it one good time across the ears, which sounds a tad mean but not to anyone who has ever had to argue with a mule. And Ava would mumble to his back about why in God’s name did they not own a wagon.
    He was good to her, except for calling her “Four-Eyes,” and he was never mean to her when he drank. In fact, she never saw him drink. She just dealt with the fallout.
    Once every few months he would not come home for supper, and it was torture for a wife still not eighteen. But late at night she would hear a slow thud of hoofbeats in the yard, and she would carry her good lantern out to the porch, to see Charlie’s mule stomping into the yard.
    Charlie would be drunk as Cooter Brown and singing cowboy music, and if he had not lost his hat, he waved it, and tried to get the mule to rear up like he was Tom Mix or Lash LaRue.
    But mules rear from the back end, and the mule—it was such a distasteful creature that it was never given a name—would fling itshind legs straight out and duck its head and Charlie would go flying to the earth headfirst, too drunk to alter his trajectory.
    The mule, to his credit, would not stomp him to death, and would step carefully around Charlie—a good mule will do that—and trot to the pasture. And Ava, depending on how mad she was at him, would sit her lantern on the porch and go down and half carry, half drag him up to his bed.
    Or not. And he would lay on the ground, mumbling about how, someday, Lord, he sure would like to have him a nice, gentle horse, one that would let him down easy. After a while he would notice that he was alone, that the ground was hard and that the night was cold, and go hunt for a door handle that—dammit to hell—didn’t seem to be where he had left it. He must have wasted years, groping for that knob.

    Her tongue was sharp, from the beginning. And, in the beginning, he liked it that way.
    She was more prone to voice her opinion, probably, than most women of that time, and with Ava there was never any such thing as a compromise. But while she complained a lifetime about being cast into the damned wilderness, she always knew she had found something in this man that she had never seen in another, certainly not in any of the Congregational Holiness she had known since birth.
    He talked to her.
    He did not grunt about crops and scripture. He talked.
    If he dug a well, he did not say, “Well, today I dug a well.”
    It might just be a hole in the ground, but he made it seem like a tunnel into adventure.
    “You should have been there, Ava,” he told her once as they sat at their little table, their heads close together within the circle of lamplight.
    “Why would I want to be in the bottom of