“Hollis. You gotta swear to tote me safely home,” she reminded, all wide-eyed innocently, patting her hair. She knew she shouldn’t tease him like that, but it was kinda fun, making him promise like that, knowing a senior boy wanted her in that way.
“I swear it, doll baby, swear on my dear ma.”
Patsy took a sip, felt the tingling from his fingers and had herself a bigger swallow. Hollis whispered into her ear, and more easy promises spilled as the flask emptied.
By the time they’d finished the flask, along with nearly another half bottle of bourbon that Hollis had pulled out from underneath the seat, Patsy found herself out of the Mercury, lying on the ground, pinned beneath Hollis under the old elm, her mind muddled, cares slipping more.
She’d gone in and out of a terrible, sweet dream, afraid but all alive and heated in a way new to her. Patsy hated his rough touches, but wanted more of this brother who wanted her, surrendering a purr for all of him, coming around long enough to want none. Soon a deep sharp pain lashed at her, had her crying “no.”
Hollis covered her mouth with his hand, while she squirmed and tried to buck, rear up, and fight.
A few more pumps and he rolled off her with one last braying groan—his bathed boots scented from the angels’ share, sooted, and pointing his victory to a blinding-blue sky.
Nearly dead from the drink, close to passing out, Patsy lay numb, listening to his snoozing, nursing inside herself, eyes fixed to the swaying tree branches, the sunlight rippling through singing leaves, waning.
Something nearby stirred, and she turned her head to the noise. Patsy was sure she caught a movement. Something, someone. She squeezed her watery eyes shut and popped them back open. She could’ve sworn it was someone sneaking—maybe even ol’ Joetta leaning against the tree, motioning to her. Though Patsy had never in her life seen her, she could feel a presence. Something she knew was off.
Patsy blinked and bolted upright. Sitting still, she soaked up her surroundings. Branches and clusters of leaves sent shadows across the trunk, spilling a skirt of light tricks across the dirt bed that Hollis had made for her. Satisfied nothing was really there after all, her vision blurring, her head fuzzed, she lay back to rest her eyes a bit.
But then the sky began spinning. Off-kilter, her stomach clenched and rolled. Wobbly, Patsy pushed herself up, knee-walked around the elm to a spot of velvet moss, and threw up until her stomach lining burned and there was nothing else left to heave.
Moaning, she crawled away, sickened and scared. Falling back onto the grass, Patsy closed her eyes. “You okay, Patsy? Doll baby . . .” Hollis called out, foggy, reaching for her hand, patting before drifting back off.
She let herself surrender to a turbulent slumber. By the time Patsy pulled herself out of the hazy sleep, Hollis was straddling her again. Catching sight of her ripped nylons and pink panties strewn to the side, she pushed him off, jumped up, crying, shouting, “You . . .” She caught her breath. “You son of a bitch.” She straightened down her skirt that he had rolled up to her stomach. “You no-good low-down son of a bitch!”
Quickly, Hollis pulled on his trousers and buttoned his shirt.
She wriggled into her pink polka-dotted underwear Mama’d bought her girls at the fancy department store in Lexington, then to her sobering horror stripped back out of them when she saw the telltale sign of her now lost-forever virginity.
“You.” She stabbed a shaky finger at him, threw down the panties. “You got me drunk. You violated me!”
“I—I thought you wanted to be together. Listen, Patsy, I’ve always had a thing for you—”
“You’re a pig.”
Embarrassment crawled into his eyes, and then just as quick, boiling anger took hold. Hollis swore she’d asked for it, begged even. “Shit. You wanted it same as me.” He rubbed his crotch for the truth. “I tried to stop, but you wanted it too bad. Couldn’t disappoint you, being all sad over junior boy like that—”
Patsy shook her head, screaming, threatening to tell Sheriff Henry. “Liar! Filthy liar. You raped me, Hollis Henry! And your daddy’s gonna hear—”
“But you wanted it!”
“You’ll go to jail—”
Hollis cursed and smacked her, a fear creeping into his eyes. “You sonofabitch. You brought me here to . . . to do this.” Patsy cursed back, swung and punched his broad shoulders, slapped at his head.
He staggered, snatched the belt from his britches and smacked her arm with its buckle.
She cried out. “Mama . . . my mama’s going to have your tail for messing with me. Messing with an underage girl—”
“I gave you just what you wanted, slut. You’re whining now? Hell, you weren’t whining when I gave it to you.”
“You took—”
“You liked it.” Spit blew out of his mouth.
“I hate you, Hollis Henry.”
Hollis looked like he’d been hit. “I gave you something you liked. You know what, bitch, I can easily give you something you don’t—” Hollis drew back and snapped the leather across her shoulder once, then struck her arm, drawing a trickle of blood. He tried again, just barely missing her jaw.
Patsy raised her arms over her face and stumbled back against the tree, sniveling.
“Just try to tell. I swear I’ll make you sorry, Patsy. Swear,” he hissed in her face. “You tell a soul, you’ll find yourself living in a Hell worse than my daddy’s jail.”
“You . . . you . . . sonofawhore! You vile—”
Hollis grabbed her arm, dug his fingers in, squeezing until he had her on her knees, cowering. “Nobody, ain’t nobody going to believe a common tramp over the sheriff’s son. The ol’ moonshiner’s spit.” He raised the belt again. “’Specially when I have my own brother to vouch for me. You hearing me, Patsy?” He knocked his leg against her head and shook his belt.
Patsy gasped. Danny would never have her if he knew.
“ ’Cause our Danny boy’s going to hear a lot if you so much as—”
“You sorry—”
“You!”—he jerked on her—“You ain’t gonna tell nobody about the disgraceful way you came on to me, dropped those drawers real quick for me, Patsy.” He towered over her, dug his fingers even deeper into her bone, bruising, threatening until she cried out, broke down sobbing.
Hollis straightened his tall, thick frame, then nudged a foot at her soiled panties and shredded nylons. “You best clean yourself up and hide your whoring—bury them things in the dirt there.” He kicked a fallen branch for her to use, grabbed the nearly empty whiskey bottle, and sauntered off to the Mercury to wait.
Weeping, Patsy began digging a hole to bury her undergarments beside the tree, silently promising never to mention the indiscretion to another living soul.
* * *
Now, here she found herself, again, pinned against the elm with the wrong brother on her prom night. How did she let this all happen?
“Give us a chance. We can start now while the boy takes his nap.” Hollis hitched a thumb over to sleeping Danny in the backseat, pressing in with another rough kiss to Patsy’s lips while holding down her batting arm.
CHAPTER 7
Flannery
1972
Flannery pulled her Chevy off the road next to a guardrail and rested her forehead on the wheel, pinning her runaway thoughts and wanting for more time.
She thought about turning around, turning tail and leaving Glass Ferry like the day she had turned her back long ago.
There were places, she knew, that you could drive to, where you could round a winding bend, breeze by a yawning pasture, and feel safe, happy, and your bones would get a tiny itch and scratch out a Hallelujah. But such a place wasn’t in Glass Ferry. Had never been in Glass Ferry for her after Honey Bee passed and Patsy split on her like that.
Flannery had found that kind of rejoicing in the doings of the city. In Louisville’s night lights and stretching streets, tall cradling buildings, and sharp-rounded corners.
Th
e university had been a place to start anew, a wonderland to escape troubles and forget her sister’s abandonment.
Reluctant to let her baby girl go, Mama finally relented and sold Honey Bee’s old car, his tools in the barn, and the old tractor to pay for Flannery’s college.
Flannery had been homesick the first two weeks, sick about leaving Mama like that, worried for her well-being. They talked on the phone every day, sometimes calling each other as many as three, four times in one day.
Then Flannery met a guy on campus the third week of school, her first real steady, a senior boy named Thomas Gentry, the son of a druggist who took her to the lavish Seelbach Hotel. Inside, he’d led her down the marbled staircase into the Rathskeller, a Bavarian-styled cathedral cellar with colorful Rookwood pottery tiles lining the walls, columns, and graceful arches, patiently telling her details about the famous architecture.
Thomas had pointed to the Rathskeller’s ceiling covered in fine-tooled leather, and then to the noble columns where pelicans made from the Rookwood were perched. Disturbed, Flannery looked away, remembering she’d read about the strange pelican symbols. The legend said a mother pelican would stab herself in the breast with the beak to feed her starving young the blood from the piercing, only for the mother to die herself.
It was still a sight to sit in the fairytale room. They’d listened to the latest jazz recordings.
Thomas showed her where F. Scott Fitzgerald and king bootlegger and gangster, George Remus, had once sat, sipped bourbon, and smoked expensive cigars together. He told her
Fitzgerald had used the beautiful hotel for a model in The Great Gatsby, and talked about the secret gangster tunnels that had been built inside the hotel.
She and Thomas talked over drinks. Later, he swept her up to the Grand Ballroom where they danced.
There were kisses, many, and in many places—the overlook atop Iroquois Park, an alley behind campus, inside dark movie houses and other shadowy hideouts where those kisses caught fever, and Thomas’s hands burned, leaving them both with bigger wants.
Still, Flannery vowed to bring chastity to her marriage, and soon Thomas moved on to a girl willing to bring more to his bed and sooner.
The city was busy. Her dorm loud. She’d made friends, and it wasn’t long until she had a bunch of sisters. Sisters who didn’t compare her with a twin they’d never met, who made her their “one and only.”
Weekend nights brought panty raids from across campus when the boys would sneak over to the girls’ dorm after the resident director went to sleep.
More than once, her roommate, Gina, talked her into going to the big Ben Snyder’s department store downtown and buying scanty bloomers.
Flannery bought herself a shocking-pink, silky pair trimmed in lace. That night the girls gathered in the darkened halls to throw their underwear out the windows to the hooting boys waiting below.
Some girls wrote their telephone numbers on their underwear, but Flannery didn’t dare. Still, she managed to drop hers into the hands of a hulky football player who’d knelt down on the grass, whistled up at her with prayerful clasped hands, begged the favor of her prized undies.
Everyone in the dormitory squealed at that, teased her good-naturedly. And when he came calling the very next day to ask her to the Woolworth for lunch, the girls shared their makeup and clothes with Flannery, sending her off with congratulatory kisses.
She found all kinds of wonder in the beginning when she’d moved away after high school. Lost it for a while too, but lately she’d been trying to grasp it back, was sure she’d gotten a good hold on the tail ’til now and news of the wreck in the river.
Here in Glass Ferry there was nothing but buried truth and the beginning of a desperate prayer from what had been birthed on Ebenezer long ago. And now, she could again feel her safety slipping away if she wasn’t careful.
Today, Mama had made Flannery promise to bring her sister home.
Flannery raised her head off the steering wheel and once more looked over at the river stretching below. Needing air, she stepped out of the car and over to the rail, leaning against it, gnarling her fingers over the rusty metal.
Flannery wondered if the old Mercury might have plunged down here, rolled down the craggy side and crashed through the spindly trees. She studied about just where, knowing it could have been anywhere along here, but no telling how far the mighty river had tugged that death car downstream—no telling if a guardrail had even protected this stretch of the Palisades back then.
Images, not of the car, but of her daddy, surfaced again. She could use some of that River Witch whiskey about now, should’ve gulped it down with one of Mama’s Valium while she’d had a chance.
She had saved that old bottle Honey Bee’d corked just for her. Toasting him on his birthdays with a small nip each and every year.
Her daddy had introduced her to whiskey before he died in the spring of ’50, not long before her fourteenth birthday, passing her the special tulip-shaped glass, one of his mother’s old sherry glasses he and his taster always used.
* * *
“We got to test this new barrel, you and I,” Honey Bee said. “If this is good, then we know the whole batch is good.”
“Me?” Flannery said, looking around for Merrick Jackson, her daddy’s best friend and master taster, who everyone called Uncle Mary. When folks began to kick off the ck at the end of Merrick, the old-timer insisted that they at least starch it up some and fasten an Uncle to his nickname.
Flannery thought Uncle Mary looked like God, or at least the closest image to Him that she could conjure from pictures. Not from around Glass Ferry, Uncle Mary told folks he’d slipped in from “over yonder somewhere in the winter of 1930.” A bit of a loner, he was even old-like, the way God was, always cutting an angry, cold brow that might cool in the second you used to lift a foot to hightail it from what you believed was going to be his wrath coming down on you.
Uncle Mary had a shock of white hair that matched his right brow and eyelashes. But on the left side of his face, a bushy orange arch sparked above identical colored lashes, making him pop like a mad marigold. Flannery heard folks speculate that God had battled Satan for Uncle Mary’s soul and won, but not before the devil swiped his fiery thumbprint across Uncle Mary’s face.
Uncle Mary could strike a look to the most feral of Kentucky blackhearts and was strong enough to fight off the meanest dog barehanded. But he also reserved a gentle touch that could lift a fallen chick back into its nest and coax the thirteen potted granny violets he had growing in his small cabin into bloom. He knew his whiskey, knew Kentucky, and knew the river. He liked Honey Bee’s way of thinking and decided to pal up with him long ago.
Flannery asked Honey Bee, “But what about Uncle Mary—”
“Pay attention, Flannery girl,” Honey Bee quieted. “We’ll know in a minute. If it’s not ready, you might let it sit for a bit longer and see what that does.” Honey Bee pulled out the bung in the chest of the barrel, just far enough to let the liquid drip two fingers’ worth into the glasses, then plugged it back.
“We’ll start with the nose on this batch,” he said. “Test the aroma first.”
Flannery held her glass up and thought the color was pretty enough, like the sun-bathed bark of a tree that had lived an old life.
“Smells like a fine one—fine witch water,” Honey Bee said. “Here, just pass it under your nose and breathe it in.”
Flannery didn’t understand exactly why he wanted her to do all this, why he didn’t go get Uncle Mary, but she was so curious that she didn’t ask more. Here Honey Bee was treating her like a man, a grown man with the smarts for such things, letting her taste the very first batch of the season right along with him, though she had, in her mind, no idea how to judge the whiskey.
Flannery sniffed the bourbon and smelled oak and hints of maybe caramel candies like her grandmother had made. She looked at Honey Bee.
He jiggled his wrist at her, and then Flannery remembered
to hold up the back of her hand, take a breath of skin first.
When Honey Bee nodded, she decided to make extra sure, so she prepared her nostrils again for the first smell by sniffing her flesh again, cleansing, to get a true whiff of the batch.
Flannery stuck the tip of her nose into the glass. Now it smelled of pepper, faint, but present, sure enough, with the oaky scents of the barrel that had picked up the soft pinches of vanilla and a slip of salt. Flannery told him what she smelled.
“Good.” He raised a surprised brow. “You’ve told me about the nose of the whiskey. Don’t you know, I think I may’ve grow’d myself a real Catherine Carpenter,” he teased proudly.
Catherine Spears Carpenter had been a widow, a mighty brave and fierce Kentuckian who’d lived in Casey County in the late 1700s. She’d lost two husbands, but not before she’d birthed nine children, remarkably all healthy babies who lived long lives in the harsh wilderness. Mrs. Carpenter had been well-educated, and worked her dead husband’s distillery, raising her children alone with the money she earned from her famous sweet and sour mash recipes. She was legendary for that, and for surviving the savage Indian attacks and brutal existence the land offered.
Flannery split a wide grin and glanced at her daddy who’d poked his nose the same as she had. Then Honey Bee tilted his face to the sky and exhaled. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, smelling, and then pushed his nose back into the glass and parted his lips to inhale the fiery fumes, and then sniffed again. She copied him, mimicking each and every little movement.
Honey Bee set his glass down and said, “Put some on your tongue, let it sit a spell, then spit it out. Go on, now.”
Flannery had been confused. Why wasn’t Honey Bee tasting it too? Still, she took a drop, let the whiskey warm her tongue, then spit it out, coughing. It had tasted like the river flowed today, a rough lapping across flesh with a peppery bite of other savory and unsavory things she couldn’t yet name.
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