by Amy Jo Burns
“Seems Briar should call out sick more often.” Ivy pursed her lips. “You’re much livelier without your friend.”
Flynn wiped a dark lock from his brow. “I’m my own man, same as him.”
Ivy smiled. “I’m sure you are.”
“Your own man, are you?” Ruby bit her thumbnail as she gave him a grin. “Ain’t you a moonshiner’s son?”
Flynn shrugged. “Ain’t we all?”
In this his father had taught him well. Denials make a man reek of guilt, Sherrod had told him. Charm the truth like you would your favorite girl, spin her around, and take her out.
This kind of wooing had worked mysterious wonders on Flynn’s mother, but Ruby didn’t bite.
She flicked her braid over her shoulder. “I don’t trust men who keep secrets.”
“I don’t trust women who can’t,” Flynn shot back.
Ruby laughed. “Women are better than men, I suspect.”
“That so?” Flynn felt his confidence gaining. “Then let me show you something.”
“Now?” She cinched her lips. “Church’ll be over soon.”
“Naw,” Flynn said. “Brother Arledge ain’t even sung the offertory yet.”
Ruby looked to Ivy.
“Y’all go ahead,” Ivy said, leaning back against the willow’s trunk. “I’ll keep watch for Ruby’s daddy. If I see him coming, I’ll crow.”
Flynn knew this was his chance, and he took it. He led Ruby down the hill to a clump of crowded hardwoods, their backs curving toward one another like they’d been caught in a poker game. Years earlier, when his daddy still attended church, he had buried a flask of whiskey beneath the eastern tree root. The bottle was still tucked under a hemlock root arching up out of the ground—dirty, but full. Flynn knocked it back, and the liquor scrawled its rough signature on his throat. He offered it to Ruby. She shook her head.
“I don’t drink,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“It ain’t right.” The blood in her cheeks flared. “Plain as that.”
“You think the world’s gonna stop turning?”
She sighed. “I ain’t got to like it just because you made it.”
Flynn could feel the sweat on his back leaving paw prints on his shirt. “What makes you think I made it?”
“Why else would you drag me down here?”
“Maybe I just wanted to talk,” he said.
“So talk.”
But Flynn could think of nothing to say. This was when Briar would have swooped in, spinning yarn and winning hearts, while Flynn stood stark as a stump. There was something unapologetic and helpless in his muteness, and Ruby must have found it funny, because she laughed.
“So you’re going to spend your life making shine?” she asked.
“Looks that way.”
“Guess I ought to taste it, then.”
Flynn hadn’t realized it, but this was his hope in bringing Ruby here. He wanted his shine to speak for him. Mountain men could get drunk anywhere—they didn’t need his daddy’s whiskey for that. But if they wanted a piece of the mountain, something from the ground they stood on and the water they drank, a spirit made from sweet, white West Virginia corn hulled and ground at its peak by the hands of a loving father, cured and cooked until only the stoutest part of it remained, then it was Sherrod’s shine they wanted. That’s why they chose it: to taste the life they lived.
Ruby took the flask, brought it to her lips. Drank. When she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, Flynn’s heart parachuted into his gut.
“Well?” he asked.
Ruby’s lip ticked. “It’s fine,” she said.
He stepped toward her. “It’s better than fine.”
She looked at him—her stare a knot of feeling that Flynn wanted to spend the rest of his life untangling.
“Don’t you want to earn honest money?” she asked.
His lips clenched. Folks thought shiners were rolling around in tax-free dough so deep that even their briefs were lined with it, but that hadn’t been true since Prohibition ended more than sixty years ago. Sherrod chose this life because it allowed him to provide for his family through the magic of his own two hands. He didn’t need anyone else but his loyal customers, and he had them by the barrelful.
“Ain’t nothing more honest than this.” He pointed to the bottle. “It comes from the earth. Our earth, Ruby.”
Her mouth was so close he could have kissed it. Tasted his shine on it. He spied her tongue and dared to change her mind.
“Even our Scots-Irish ancestors lived this way, Ruby. They brought their stills across the ocean so they could make whiskey in peace. You ever heard of Robert Burns?” he asked.
Ruby shook her head.
“He’s my daddy’s favorite poet. Burns calls those tax collectors ‘horse-leeches.’ They have no right to take money that belongs on this mountain.”
Ruby frowned. “Your daddy ought to make it to church for a Sunday or two. Read him something else.”
Flynn shrugged. “Even Jesus turned water to wine.”
She smiled. “He did.”
He couldn’t help himself. Flynn leaned into her, and she leaned into the hemlock.
“I’ve never kissed anyone before,” she said.
“It don’t hurt.”
Her eyes: wide, honest, succumbing. “Don’t it?”
Flynn kissed her soft, then hard. Ruby wrapped her hands around his neck. His palms circled her waist—a small, unconquerable circumference. His knees sank into hers. He gripped her skirt, pulled it up, and clutched her bare hips.
He’d taken it too far. Ruby pulled away and slapped him. She stared him down as she wiped his kiss from her lips just like it was shine. Then she ran up the hill and left Flynn with his heart and his daddy’s flask, both open and half empty.
* * *
All week the memory of that slap tortured and elated Flynn. He was wrong to push her. He’d always been guilty of wanting too much—too much whiskey, too much Ruby. He wanted so much of her that there would be nothing left for anyone else. Thoughts of her consumed him as he stirred a boiling vat of corn and sugar water while Sherrod sprinkled yeast on top. After an hour they poured the mash into a wooden barrel with a lid and left it to bubble beneath a camouflage of netted saplings. Flynn wished he could leave behind his heart for Ruby like that, so he could return a week later to find it made new.
There’s danger in letting your desires define you, Briar might have said—Briar, whose own appetite for miracles brought him back to church every Sunday. And here was the thing about Sunday—it was always coming. Their lives could be sung by an arrangement of Sundays like measures on sheet music. Flynn knew he had to apologize. He wanted to. He thought of risking the hike to Ruby’s cabin on the south end of the mountain, but he’d never get her free from her father’s watchful eye until church kept him inside the gas station. Flynn wouldn’t be able to contain his apologies when he saw her beneath the willow. They’d spill from him like water from a pitcher. I’m sorry, Ruby. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.
And that was the way of it. The next Sunday, Brother Arledge took his time making it up to the pulpit. When his knees got to jiggling and heads bowed, Flynn sprang up and out the gas station’s door.
A special kind of heat: running in summer, running with regret, running with shame. Queenlike, Ruby sat beneath the willow, and Flynn fell to his knees.
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She gazed straight ahead, so unmoved it appeared she hadn’t even heard him.
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” he said again. “I know you ain’t that kind of girl.”
Her jaw rocked to the side. “Your conduct is your own. Don’t use me to excuse it.”
“You’re right.” He was sure his throat had filled with sand. “I did wrong
.”
She frowned and smoothed the orange-and-red pleats of her skirt. “I don’t like you being so agreeable,” she said.
“Would you like to fight instead?”
She smiled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I would.” He paused. “So you forgive me?”
Her smile faded as she nodded. “Just answer me one question.”
“Anything.”
“You and I grew up out here every Sunday.” Ruby pointed beyond the vacant gas pumps. “We went to school together, too. You never talked to me—not once—until Briar didn’t show.”
Flynn bristled. “What’s your question?”
“Don’t have one, I guess.” She sighed. “You don’t need to hide behind him, is all.”
He’d never thought he hid behind Briar, even though everyone else did. “So you think he’s saving my soul, too?” he asked.
“Your soul is fine on its own.”
Flynn could have died happy if those had been her last words. But they weren’t.
“Besides,” she said, “Briar can’t get you into heaven anyhow. Your salvation is between you and God.”
Flynn sank down and leaned against the weeper beside her. He’d grown tired of church folks’ love affair with heaven. People talked about the afterlife when they really meant to speak on something else: pain, death, damnation, loss. Because that was the truth of it—if you believed in heaven, there must be a hell, as much dark as there is light. There ain’t no healing if you ain’t sick.
Before Flynn could respond, Briar sidled up beside him and kicked him in the ribs.
“Where you been?” Flynn asked.
“Testifying to the congregation,” said Briar. “About the lightning.”
“Good to see you on your feet.” Ruby shaded her eyes from the sun.
Flynn leaned toward her. She looked pure beneath that tree, barefoot and breezy, as if she’d sprung up out of the ground like the violets at the edges of Sherrod’s land. Flynn turned his gaze on Briar, who had a grin propagating across his face. He’d never paid Ruby any mind, but how the compliment of a young woman can lasso a man’s heart. His white eye glowed, and Flynn witnessed Briar notice Ruby for the first time. Flynn felt a sneeze coming on.
“What was it like?” Ruby asked. “Getting struck?”
“Can’t remember a lick of it,” Briar said, handing Flynn the hankie out of his pocket. “But I did have a dream while I was unconscious.”
Flynn would sooner join the women’s choir than use a hankie. He stuffed it in his pants and wiped his nose with his sleeve.
“Well, are you going to tell us what happened, or just leave us to wonder?” Ivy came and sat cross-legged beside her friend.
“I could see two worlds,” Briar said, holding both hands outward like he’d just cracked open an egg. “This world and the spirit world, which looked blue.”
Ivy took the bait. “Did you see ghosts?” she asked.
Briar thought on it. “I don’t know what they were—but I can still feel them. Some of them are here right now.”
“Doing what?” Flynn asked.
“Listening,” Briar said, and Ivy shivered.
She sniffed, remembering herself. “Sounds like flimflam.”
Briar smiled that pastoral grin that Flynn would come to loathe. “All I know is, a frost came down and I heard a voice, praying a psalm over me. Then I woke up.”
Flynn let him finish the story. I woke up and saw Flynn waiting for me, Flynn who had run to my rescue, Flynn who had fetched the healer. But he didn’t.
“Do you think the dream was a vision from God?” Ruby asked.
“I do.”
Flynn turned his attention back to Ruby, and his heart curled in on itself. She’d gotten swept up in Briar as if she had seen him for the first time, too. He was no longer Briar, the long-gone logger’s son, but Briar who’d heard from God.
“What else did you see?” Ruby asked.
Briar knelt and detailed all the new ways he’d seen their world—the mountains shaded with cobalt, the trails flecked with indigo, the creek shimmering in sapphire. Flynn had never seen Ruby’s face lit with such wonder. Every time Briar paused in his descriptions of his epic journey to the other side, Ruby tilted forward, just a little, and grabbed the hem of her skirt. Briar was rosy-cheeked and spooky-eyed and just as fetching as ever. This was no logger or miner or shiner. Briar Bird was something fresh, all his own. To see the familiar anew was a miracle indeed.
Flynn noticed Ivy peering at him.
“Come with me, Flynn,” she said.
Flynn felt relieved. The pair strolled down the hill toward the same spot he’d taken Ruby to one week earlier, the hunched hardwoods still looking like they were in on some secret. He longed to go back in time and undo the slap and all that had caused it.
He dug out his daddy’s flask, took a swig, and offered it to Ivy. She took it in kind.
“I hear you’re a grabber,” she said, swallowing. She lifted her skirt above her knees and started to laugh.
“No secrets between you two, I see.”
“None.” She tipped back the flask for a second hit.
“So?” Flynn asked, pointing to the bottle. “What do you think?”
Ivy replaced the cap. “I’ve had better.”
“Bullshit.”
Ivy laughed again. “So,” she said, leaning into the tree just as Ruby had done. “You believe what Briar said about his dream?”
Flynn considered it. “I don’t think he’d lie.”
“I didn’t ask if he was lying. I asked if you believed him.”
Flynn paused again. “I ain’t sure.”
Ivy nodded, slow. “We’re alike, you and I.”
“How so?”
“Skeptics.” The shine brought a flush to her wintry cheeks. “Ruby and Briar, they’re romantics. And every romantic needs a skeptic.”
“You got things figured out pretty good,” Flynn said.
She ran her fingers underneath the collar of his shirt. “Do you kiss any girl down here, or only Ruby?”
Flynn braced at her touch, caught the honesty in her eyes.
“Only Ruby,” he said.
Ivy sighed and nestled the flask back into its hiding place. Flynn smiled as he took her arm. Together they trudged back up the hill toward their friends—who still talked beneath the weeper and looked very much like they were falling in love.
VERSE
It was strange for Flynn to witness his best friend transform from boy to legend, but even he couldn’t deny Briar’s new dimension. His blighted eye had a wizened sojourner’s look to it, like he was an old man telling stories of war. Under easier circumstances Flynn would have made a joke of it—called him Pap, offered to knit him an afghan—but it had been a while since Flynn had found himself in a joking mood.
Briar was just so damn proud of it, was the thing. He didn’t realize lightning was unkind. It ought to have sent him into a coma, like Brother Arledge’s nephew, who took a fall in the gorges and never opened his eyes again. And that could have been Briar, should have been him, to hear folks talk about his miracle recovery. His trust in God was so cavalier, so self-satisfied, that Flynn almost wanted to remind Briar that his daddy had chosen a saw blade and a tent over him and his mother. Not to hurt him but to show him that his heart still remembered how to bleed.
Flynn had a flurry of questions for his friend—like how could Briar see out of that white eye, for starters—but Briar didn’t feel like explaining. What Briar did feel like explaining, in copious detail, was his infatuation with Ruby. Flynn and Briar had been taught by hunters and loggers and farmers that a young woman was an uninhabited land until a man laid claim to her. Both boys saw Ruby as territory to be conquered, each of them its rightful pioneer.
Flynn came by th
ose illusions honestly—the Sherrod boys had long been the country kings of their mountain. Sherrod set his own working hours, spent his time and his earnings as he chose. He lived by his own apothegms: Never leave the woods, never cut your hair, never tell a lie. Speak in code, work outdoors, pay in cash. Sherrod never referred to the still as a still. She was a woman. She’s cooking good today, he’d say. The still was his mistress, Flynn’s mother his hen. That’s what he called his wife: Hen. Half of Trap had forgotten that her real name was Patricia. Sherrod loved his wife and yet never remembered her birthday. He’d worn the same pair of overalls and driven the same Chevy for so many years that the rivets on his back pockets had left a cavalry of miniature bullet holes in the driver’s seat. His beard had seen more Christmases than Flynn had. Sherrod had fashioned a good life by never leaving the hills that had borne him. He worked harder than anyone Flynn had ever seen, and for the first time in his life Flynn found himself wanting to work that hard for something, too.
But as much as he hoped to emulate his father, Flynn still possessed a trait his father did not understand: hope in the face of doom. He wasn’t ready to give up yet. If only he could get Ruby alone again, he thought. He’d be a better man. He’d show his heart and its canyons. He had a soul, and he had faith, too—just not the Sunday-best kind that Ruby admired in Briar. Flynn’s soul gazed not upward into the clouds but down deep into the roots of the West Virginia earth. For him it was a soul-splitting miracle each and every time corn and water got each other drunk.
The next Sunday, Flynn strutted toward Ruby as church let out. He knew that his chances were ghosting quick, so he caught her before the willow tree, before Ivy, before Briar. He came close enough behind her to see the stitching of her dress locked against her spine. He whispered in her ear. He didn’t care who saw.
“Meet me tonight,” he said. “Whenever you can get free. At the river behind your house.”
She stepped back from him, pulled her braid over her shoulder. “You know I can’t.”
“I know you can,” he said, then started to walk away. “And I’ll wait.”