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grandfather’s nephew and the last, rickety bridge to Charlie Bun-drum’s childhood. “When I was eighty-three I had pneumonia, and they give me up that time, too. Now they say I got kidney trouble and … Well, a man can’t live always.”
    He remembers his granddad sharp and clear, like a broken bottle. He remembers how everyone walked soft around him, like he was king of the woods.
    Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot of them, don’t understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot.

3.
Jimmy Jim
The foothills

1900–1920
    H is temper was hot as bird’s blood, and his eyes seemed to burn, even in photographs. He had a hooked nose and thick brown mustaches and wore overalls with a black suit coat over them, and was known to carry a little .22 pistol in his coat pocket. He largely disregarded any laws or influence outside his own will, and some people did not like to look him dead in the eye because it made them feel weak. “He was dark-headed, and wasn’t scared of the devil,” said Claude Bundrum, who grew up in Jimmy Jim’s long shadow. “He always drank, and done what he wanted.”
    But then, there were not many saints working at the end of an ax handle in the woods of Alabama and Georgia, as an era of failed, corrupt reconstruction gave way to a new century.
    The history books showed it in black-and-white, and in my mind’s eye, as a child, I imagined it that way, a place just too mean for color. I saw a gray landscape under lead-gray sky, where white-robedKlan rode through dead gray trees, where convicts striped in gray and white swung picks into the bleached, colorless ground, where even the big rivers, in my mind’s eye, ran black as tar.
    In the text, we read of babies who died of scurvy because oranges cost too much for farmers to afford, and as I read I would imagine a ripe orange, in full color, not merely as an antidote for the scurvy but as an antidote for that whole sorry mess. Even now, when I see oranges, I think about that.
    But the foothills were not black, white and gray. They were loud, and green, and often splashed with red, and smelled of manure, and honey, and hot biscuit dough. There were women named Birthannie and mules named Rachel, and about the only things gray were those raggedy uniforms in the attic, which the women cut up and used for quilt scrap.
    To the south, where the land flattened out and turned from red to black, there was still a stained white remnant of a plantation culture in the late 1800s and beginning of the 1900s. But here, in the hill country, they would have fed the gentility to their dogs.
    Most of the Native Americans who survived the wars were marched out of the foothills at bayonet-point, on a shameful relocation called the Trail of Tears. By the Civil War, the deep woods belonged mostly to white men, but it would be wrong, maybe, to say that what they brought with them was civilization.
    Scots, Irish, English and French, men who had starved across the water, came to the foothills to farm, log hardwoods and pine, strip-mine granite, make whiskey, raise kids, hunt deer, breed hunting and fighting dogs, preach, curse and brawl. There were few slaves here because it was too hilly for big cotton—that required good bottomland—so the poor whites did most of the heavy lifting. They were a lot like the Irish who helped settle New Orleans, who came to dig canals and died in heaps from yellow fever because the slaves were just too valuable to waste.
    James B. Bundrum, the old rebel soldier, had not left his childrenmuch, and few of them could read or write. But in that bare-knuckled culture, his children—and Jimmy Jim, in particular—were at home. They grew in it, the way a weed grows in a crack in a