Ava's Man

One night, James decides he’s going to kill a man named George because he called James a liar. James is drunk, and he goes inside Charlie’s house to grab a gun. Charlie sees what’s going on, and he asks James what he’s doing. James tells him, and Charlie follows him as he walks with the gun. Charlie says to James, “[Y]ou got a wife and a little baby in that house” (177). James keeps walking, and Charlie punches his son fast and hard in the jaw. James falls over and passes out. When he wakes up, Charlie is still there, and he says that if James does something so stupid, he would end up locked away without anyone to care for his family. Later in life, James looks back on this moment and is thankful his dad stopped him that night.

To reflect how little his family dwells on the sad happenings of life, Bragg keeps this paragraph-long chapter brief:

It is not a family that will talk for long about sadness, and on some days, sadness is all there is. James’s two smallest babies died when his and Phine’s house burned that year, while he was at work and she was at the neighbor’s home (180).

Margaret and Juanita, who are both young teenagers now, help Charlie roof sometimes. However, he doesn’t let them help in town because they’re too pretty, and he doesn’t want men staring. One morning, Charlie suddenly falls ill: “[H]e went bone white from the pain in his insides, and couldn’t eat” (182). Charlie goes to a hospital, stays for a while, and goes back home.

Years later, the family finds out that he went to the hospital “because of his liver. It was bad. The doctor cut a part of it out. A lifetime of moonshine whiskey, the only bad habit he had except for fighting and a little snuff and some discreet cussing, had rotted his liver” (184). Despite being sick, he doesn’t let it get him down. He still works and fishes, and the only real change is that he spends more time with his family.

One day, Charlie takes his extended family, including some young nephews, on a ride in one of his homemade boats. “His boats were never store-bought. He still made his own boats from car hoods, and this time he had taken the hoods off two 1940 Ford coupes and welded them together to form a fat, stubby canoe” (189). That night, they camp along the riverbank and hear arguing and a gunshot in the distance. Charlie sees men carrying a presumed body in a tarp. Thinking quickly, he pushes the boys down on the ground and buries them in the leaves. If the men were brazen enough to kill a man, they would be brazen enough to kill any witnesses. Charlie saved the boys’ lives that night.

Jacksonville is growing into a place Charlie doesn’t recognize: There’s movie theatres, ice cream parlors, and the revenuers now have airplanes that can find hidden whiskey stills from above. Even the culture of the time is changing:

A man couldn’t drive drunk now with all the cars, all the cars that went so fast on the creeping blacktop, and if a man fought the police or the deputies in an honest, bare-knuckle fight, it almost seemed as if they did not appreciate the contest in it, like they lost their sense of humor (194).

Margaret first meets Bragg’s father, Charles Bragg, in town and becomes smitten with him: “His hair was slicked back and almost black, and he had striking blue eyes in a face that was Cherokee dark, his cheekbones high and his nose a little hooked” (197). Charles is about to go off to Korea for the war, and he asks Margaret if he can write to her while he’s there. Although “he looked like he could be mean, if he wanted to be” (197), she says sure.

The world Charlie had always known is changing, and one of these changes it the damming of the river. While the dam, built in 1939, made the fishing more exciting because of the monster-sized catfish that now grew on the bottom, Charlie didn’t like it, even though he liked fishing:

[A] river was supposed to run narrow and wild, and was supposed to change in size and speed and character when it rained, or in drought, and should never, ever be so wide a man could not cross it on a footlog—a tree that had fallen in a storm, creating a natural bridge (200).

One day, he goes fishing, but it starts to rain and flood. That night, Charlie doesn’t come home. They find his truck, but no signs of Charlie. After two weeks of looking for Charlie, his family presumes the worst: “They checked all the hospitals and the morgues, but no one who matched Charlie’s description had been brought in. Then, out of common sense, they started checking the jails” (203). Eventually, they find Charlie in the Birmingham jail. Apparently, after the flood, Charlie took a bus to town. Because he was in ragged clothes and looking rough, the police arrested him for vagrancy.

When Charles comes back from the war, he begins courting Margaret. He continually brings her stolen flowers:

The boy come home from war a whole man, or at least that was how it seemed, and Margaret was just happy he had come home at all. He didn’t talk much about all the killing he had seen or done, he just stole flowers (208).

Charles ends up working with Charlie, and he is respectful towards him. Margaret and Charles end up getting married. Charlie says he’s “happy for her, but she couldn’t understand why such a tough man would have a tear in his eyes” (210). Even though Charlie likes Charles as a person, he’s afraid that he has a mean side that he doesn’t want his daughter to ever know.

Charlie nicknames Edna’s daughter, Linda, “Flour Girl” (211) because she likes to sneak into the flour when no one is looking. By this time, Charlie has a lot of grandkids, and he couldn’t be happier. He loves kids, and they love him. Charlie was heartbroken when James’s two babies died in the house fire, and he’s heartbroken again when Juanita’s infant son dies. Juanita looks to her dad as a beacon of strength after her loss: “They all went to him when it hurt. The grandchildren learned early on to run to him when the dog but, or they slashed by a brier. […] Like Margaret, they just figured he could fix anything” (213).