Bragg begins by talking about his grandmother, Ava:

She could be gentle as a baby bird and sweet as divinity candy, but if her prescription was off, or if she just got mad, she would sit bolt upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning and dog-cuss anyone who came to mind, including the dead (5).

Ava had a difficult life, including burying two daughters, “one just a baby, one full-grown” (6), and although she was a fiery woman in her youth, she had mellowed a bit in her old age.

She babysat for Bragg when he was younger, and he remembers the other grandchildren joking with her about getting a boyfriend. She would tell them no, “I ain’t goin’ to get me no man” (7), because she already had Charlie Bundrum, her deceased husband who passed a year before Bragg was born:

[Charlie] was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in his fist as hard as Augusta brick, who ran a trotline across the Coosa baited with chicken guts and caught washtubs full of catfish, who cooked good white whiskey in the pines, drank his own product and sang, laughed and buck-danced, under the stars (7).