Ava's Man

On Sundays, Charlie drives Ava and the girls to church, but he never goes inside with them. Charlie doesn’t consider himself religious and looks within himself to distinguish right and wrong:

[H]e lived by his own morality, which a lot of people say they do, but it doesn’t count much if your heart is black as coal dust. The good people of the foothills could call Charlie a sinner in the purest sense, because of the likker and more, and because he never talked to God (219).

However, in the middle of the night, Charlie wakes Margaret up and tells her that he found God:

‘I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing this music, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So I walked outside, and I saw that the music was coming from above, from where I guess heaven is. And then I heard a voice tell me that this was my last chance. I just wanted to tell you, tell you I was saved’ (219).

After this encounter, Charlie quits drinking.

One day, while Charlie and Hootie are fishing, Hootie tells Charlie that he wants to go back home. Charlie is sad to let Hootie go because he’s been part of the family for so long, but he does. Charlie vows to check on Hootie whenever he can.

Charlie gets a “good-paying job in Clearwater, on the west coast of Florida, early in 1958. It was the farthest he had ever been from home, but he went down and pounded nails and came home with a wad of money in his pockets” (224). Even though Charlie has stopped drinking, he is getting increasingly sick. The doctor tells him that “he had lost too much of his liver, told him he was going to suffer, and he was going to die” (225). He pushes himself to keep working, until he physically can’t anymore.

Charlie accidentally left his tools in Florida, and after he gets too sick to work, Juanita and William drive him to retrieve them. Charlie is so sick by this point that he just sleeps curled up in the backseat the whole drive.

As Charlie’s illness worsens, Ava reflects on the years she has spent loving him:

Ava and Charlie had been together for more than three decades. Thousands of nights, she helped him find his bed when he came home befuddled, grinning and stumbling and singing about love and trains. Thousands more, she worried herself old waiting for the rumble of his truck in the driveway (229).

Now, Ava is crying because Charlie is dying. However, he doesn’t want to die at home with his wife and youngest children watching. Instead, he decides to stay with his eldest daughter, Edna. While Edna is cooking dinner, Charlie goes for a walk. He then collapses by a random pasture and dies.

Charlies’ funeral is packed with people who loved him, and everyone is distraught over his passing. Even Margaret’s estranged husband, “who had killed at least one man with his bare hands in Korea, sat beside Margaret and cried like a child” (233). Hootie doesn’t come to the funeral, and no one expected him to: “Not long after Charlie died, they found Hootie’s homemade boat caught in a snag on the river, and not far away, they found the little man dead on the bank” (236).

Ava keeps on working after Charlie’s death, and the older girls help her as much as they can. Margaret goes back and forth between leaving her husband and staying with family, to going back to him. No one in the family can bring themselves to talk about Charlie because it’s too painful to remember that he’s no longer with them. 

Margaret has three children now. Tired of taking Charles’s abuse, she takes the children and moves back in with Ava, leaving him for good. 

When Ava is 65, Juanita takes her to visit Emma Mae’s grave for the first time since she was buried 40 years ago. It’s difficult to locate since the only way to get there is by remembering landmarks, but they eventually find it. The rocks on the grave are still in the same pattern that Charlie had arranged them in, and seeing the grave makes Ava remember all the joys and sorrows of her and Charlie’s life together.

When Ava is in her 70s, her youngest daughter, Sue, dies of cancer, and her other children don’t have the heart to tell Ava about it for a long time. Ava dies in 1994, and “an odd thing happened. Her children stopped talking about her very much, because it hurt them so bad to touch her in their memories, and what good is that?” (244).

Despite never having met Charlie, Bragg often tries to picture them together. He imagines that he’s a boy, close to his grandfather. Regarding finishing the book about Charlie, Bragg imparts his final image of his grandfather:

[N]ow that I have a picture of my grandfather, one so much finer than torn black-and-white, I imagine him always in summer, always in his boat made from two car hoods welded together, feeling for the mud and sand of the bottom with the end of his pole. The boat glides and glides (245).

Bragg prepares to attend a family reunion in Jacksonville. While on the journey, he thinks about the difference between the South of Charlie’s time and the new South: “In the new, true South, it is harder to be poor and proud, harder to work your way into an unapologetic, hard-eyed independence” (249). He thinks about how his grandfather was poor but proud, and how he wasn’t ashamed of who he was.

Bragg moved away for a job while most of his family members never left his hometown. When he gets to the reunion, he reunites with most of them. Instead of eating all the delicious food he remembers fondly from childhood, he talks with his relatives about Charlie. After it’s all over, he goes back to his mom’s house to see Ava’s old and beloved kerosene lamp. Bragg ends the book with a commentary on the perception of change:

It seems, people here say, that the weather is worse than it used to be, like the storms come harder and more frequent, knocking down power lines. People blame the fact that so many trees have been hacked down, or the hole in the ozone layer, or, like Ava, they blame the men who walked on the moon. Or maybe, it is only because there is no one left to clear the sky (259).