Ava's Man by Rick Bragg Page A

When the boots finally wore out, they threw them to a hound puppy, which gnawed them down to the bootheel, then nothing. They came from Lehigh, Pennsylvania, and they cost a week’s pay, so a man had to get the good out of them.
    He was bareheaded only when he ate and slept, otherwise wearing a denim cap low down over his brow, so that his eyes, which had a natural shine, looked like headlights in a tunnel. The cap, like everything else, wore out from the weather and dry rot, and his hair stuck through it. People smiled at that, too. Stick a punkin’ on his head, and prop him there in the corn, they joked, to scare the crows and coons away.
    He didn’t own a watch. The boss man told him when to come, go and eat his lunch, which was biscuit and cornbread, mainly. He was sixteen, going on seventeen, gangly, gaunt, with air-conditioned pants.
    But if you looked down, down to the ends of those skinny arms, you could see signs of the man’s character—the man the boy would be—in his hands.
    Not the arms. His arms were abnormally long, with long muscles from real work, but so narrow and thin that his elbows stuck out like onions. Just the hands.
    The hands were magnificent.
    They hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, so big that a normal man’s hand disappeared in them. The calluses made an unbroken ridge across his palm, and they were rough, rough all over, as shark’s skin. The grease and dirt, permanent as tattoos, inked his skin, and the tar and dirt colored the quick under his fingernails, then and forever. He could have burned his overalls, changed his name and bought himself a suit and tie, but those hands would have told on him.
    And they were strong, finger-crushing, freakishly strong, as if the tendons in his arms were steel cables that worked a machine made to kink pipe, crush rocks and pull stumps. He could grip a man’s wrist and squeeze—just squeeze—and make his eyes water.
    When he would tell a story, he would clamp one big hand down on his listener’s leg, at about the knee, and—especially if he had been nipping a little bit—squeeze to make a point. Grown men would wince, cuss and howl. But he always got to finish his story.
    In a fight, and there were some, he clenched his fingers in a fist the size of a baking hen, and it was like being hit in the face with a pine knot.
    But that was just sideshow stuff. The hammer seemed to dance in his hand, and he was twice as fast—machine-gun fast—as most men on the rooftops, slapping down shingles, pounding them in place. His daddy, Jimmy Jim, had strong hands like that, agile hands. Charlie got them from him.
    After work, the big hands with the long fingers could pick out beautiful notes on the banjo, which he learned from his kinfolks. When Charlie visited them, he would sit a baby on its bottom in one big hand and just stare into its face, until it gurgled or grinned or squalled. He wasn’t rough with them, and he liked to hold them.

    Few doors were closed to him, because of his nature. Sober, he was a fine listener. Drunk, he hogged the very air. He spoke in the language—the very specific language—of the Appalachian foothills. It was an unusual mix of formal English and mountain dialect. The simple word “him” was two distinct sounds—“he-yum.” And a phrase like “Well, I better go,” was, in the language of our people, more likely to sound like “Weeeelllll, Ah bet’ go.” Some words are chopped off and some are stretched out till they moan, creating a language like the terrain itself. Think of that language as a series of mountains, cliffs, valleys and sinkholes, where only these people, born and raised here, know the trails.
    Charlie spoke with a smooth, low voice. If he wanted to make a point, he just said damn, for punctuation, as in “That’s a damn big house, fellers, to roof in this damn heat.”
    He did not curse in front of ladies, usually, and among men he drew a line between good, solid biblical