by Mary Monroe
“Git those mason jar crates off’n the truck while I fire up the still!” he hollered. “And you might as well forgit that man in town and ever meeting him again. His meddling can’t help you way out here. He’s probably on his way back east already.” When Penny moved too casually for Halstead’s taste, he jumped up and popped her across the mouth. Blood squirted from her bottom lip. “Don’t make me tell you again,” he cursed. “Ms. Etta’s havin’ her spring jig this weekend, and I promised two more cases before sundown. Now git!”
Penny’s injured lip quivered. “Yeah Suh,” she whispered, her head bowed.
As Halstead waddled to the rear of their weather-beaten house of orange brick and oak, cussing and complaining about wayward women, traveling salesmen, and slick strangers, he shouted additional chores. “Stack them crates up straight this time so’s they don’t tip over. Fetch a heap of water in that barrel, brang it around yonder and put my store receipts on top of the bureau in my room. Don’t touch nothin’ while you in there neither, useless heffa,” he grumbled.
“Yeah Suh, I will. I mean, I won’t,” she whimpered. Penny allowed a long strand of blood to dangle from her angular chin before she took the hem of her faded dress and wiped it away. Feeling about as inadequate as the names Halstead saddled her with, Penny became confused as to which order her chores were to have been performed. She reached inside the cab of the truck, collected the store receipts and crossed the pebble-covered yard. She sighed deeply over how unfair it felt, having to endure such a beautiful spring day in hell, and then she pushed open the front door and wandered into Halstead’s room. She overlooked the assortment of loose coins scattered on the night stand next to the disheveled queen-sized bed with filthy sheets she’d be expected to scrub clean before the day was through.
On the corner of the bed frame hung a silver-plated colt revolver. Sunlight poured through the half-drawn window shade, glinting off the pistol. While mesmerized by the opportunity to take matters into her own hands, Penny palmed the forty-five carefully. She contemplated how easily she could have ended it all with one bullet to the head—hers. Something deep inside wouldn’t allow Penny to hurt another human, something good and decent, something she didn’t inherit from Halstead.
“Penny!” he yelled, from outside. “You got three seconds to git outta that house and back to work!” Startled, Penny dropped the gun onto the uneven floor and froze, praying it wouldn’t go off. Halstead pressed his round face against the dusty window to look inside. “Goddammit! Gal, you’ve got to be the slowest somebody. Git back to work before I have to beat some speed into you.”
The puddle of warm urine Penny stood in confirmed that she was still alive. It could have just as easily been a pool of warm blood instead. Thoughts of ending her misery after her life had been spared flew quickly. She unbuttoned her thin cotton dress, used it to mop the floor, then tossed it on the dirty clothes heap in her bedroom. Within minutes, she’d changed into an undershirt and denim overalls. Her pace was noticeably revitalized as she wrestled the crates off the truck as instructed. “Stack them crates,” Penny mumbled to herself. “Stack ’em straight so’s they don’t tip over. Then fetch the water.” The week before, she’d stacked the crates too high and a strong gust of wind toppled them over. Halstead was furious. He’d dragged Penny into the barn, tied her to a tractor wheel, and left her there for three days without food or water. She was determined not to spend another three days warding of field mice and garden snakes.
Once the shipment had been situated on the front porch, Penny rolled the ten-gallon water barrel over to the well pump beside the cobblestone walkway. Halstead was busy behind the house, boiling sour mash and corn syrup in a lead pot with measures of grain. He’d made a small fortune distilling alcohol and peddling it to bars, juke joints, and roadhouses. “Hurr’up, with that water!” he shouted. “This still’s plenty hot. ’Coils tryna bunch.” Penny clutched the well handle with both hands and went to work. She had seen an illegal still explode when it reached the boiling point too quickly, causing the copper coils to clog when they didn’t hold up to the rapidly increasing temperatures. Ironically, when it came to Penny that someone had tampered with the neighbor’s still on the morning it blew up, a thunderous blast shocked her where she stood. Penny cringed. Her eyes grew wide when Halstead staggered from the backyard screaming and cussing. Now, that wasn’t unusual because he was always ranting about this, that, and the other. But this time every inch of his body was covered in vibrant yellow flames. Falling to his knees, he cried out for Penny to help him. “Water! Throw the damned…water!” he demanded. She watched in amazement as Halstead writhed on the ground in unbridled torment, his skin melting, separating from bone and cartilage. In a desperate attempt, Halstead reached out to her, expecting to be doused with water just beyond his reach, as it gushed from the well spout like blood had poured from Penny’s busted lip.
In the most peculiar act of indifference, Penny raced past a water pail on her way toward the front porch. When she couldn’t reach the top crate fast enough, she shoved the entire stack of them onto the ground. After getting what she went there for, she covered her nose with a rag as she inched closer to Halstead’s charred body. While life evaporated from his smoldering remains, Penny held a mason jar beneath the spout until water spilled over onto her hand. She kicked the ten-gallon barrel on its side, then sat down on it. She was surprised how fast all the hate she’d known in the world was suddenly gone and how nice it was to finally enjoy a cool, uninterrupted glass of water.
At her leisure, Penny sipped until she’d had her fill. “Ain’t no man supposed to treat his own blood like you treated me,” she heckled, rocking back and forth slowly on the rise of that barrel. “Maybe that’s cause you wasn’t no man at all. You just mean old Halstead. Mean old Halstead.” Penny looked up the road, when something in the wind called out to her. A car was headed her way. By the looks of it, she had less than two minutes to map out her future, so she dashed into the house, collected what she could, and threw it all into a croaker sack. Somehow, it didn’t seem fitting to keep the back door to her shameful past opened, so she snatched the full pail off the ground and filled it with the last batch of moonshine Halstead had brewed. If her mother had ever planned on returning, Penny reasoned that she’d taken too long as she tossed the pail full of white lightening into the house. As she lit a full box of stick matches, her hands shook erratically until the time had come to walk away from her bitter yesterdays and give up on living out the childhood that wasn’t intended for her. “No reason to come back here, Momma,” she whispered, for the gentle breeze to hear and carry away. “I got to make it on my own now.”
Penny stood by the roadside and marveled at the rising inferno, ablaze from pillar to post. Halstead’s fried corpse smoldered on the lawn when the approaching vehicle ambled to a stop in the middle of the farm road. A young man, long, lean, and not much older than Penny, the took his sweet time stepping out of the late-model Plymouth sedan. He sauntered over to the hump of roasted flesh and studied it. “Hey Penny,” the familiar passerby said routinely.
“Afternoon, Jinxy,” she replied, her gaze still locked on the thick black clouds of smoke billowing toward the sky.
Jinx—Sam Dearborn, Jr.—was the youngest son of the neighbor, whose moonshine brewery had gone up in flames two months earlier. After Jinx surveyed the yard, smashed mason jars, and the overturned water barrel, there wasn’t anything to do but ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“That there Halstead?” he alleged knowingly.
Penny nodded that it was, without a hint of reservation. “What’s left of ’im,” she answered casually.
“I guess you’ll be moving on then,” Jinx concluded in a stoic tone.
“Yeah, I reckon I will at that,” she concluded as well, using the same even pitch he had. “I haven’t seen much of you since yo’ daddy passed. How you been?”
Jinx hoisted Penny’s large cloth sack into the back seat of his c
ar before responding to her question. “Waitin’ mostly,” he said, hunching his shoulders, “to get even.”
“Yeah, I figured as much when I saw it was you in the road.” Penny was one of two people who was all but certain that Halstead had killed Jinx’s father by rigging his still to malfunction so he could eliminate the competition. The night before it happened, Halstead had quarreled with him over money. By the next afternoon, Jinx was making burial arrangements for his daddy.
“Halstead got what he had coming to him,” the young man reasoned as he walked Penny to the passenger door.
“Now, I’ll get what coming to me,” Penny declared somberly, with a pocket full of folding money. “I’d be thankful Jinxy if you’d run me into town. I need to see a man about a dress.”
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2006 by Mary Monroe and Victor McGlothin
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Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2006928697
ISBN: 978-0-7582-5918-9