Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  ‘I think we’d all like to have you visit for a few days till the weather clears up,’ she announced. ‘The weatherman says this’ll run the whole weekend. Haggerd’s ma’s house is empty now she’s taken up with Fred. It’s right up the back here. No one else needs it. You can even put your bikes under cover. Stay there till you’re ready to move on out.’

  And so Hurricane Bertha did us one of the great favours of the journey. She had led us into the arms of a family untouched in its structure by the TV dinner, the universal divorce and the video store. None of them were regular church-goers, though we were now firmly in the Bible Belt. Haggerd told me he’d never been inside a place of worship since the preacher stole his whiskey and his morning paper, but kindness to people on the road was as natural to them as sunshine after rain. Visiting was the main recreation, with yarns that were like the best tales of the sea and must have grown just as much with the telling. This was true oral tradition, a form of literature hard to find in Britain and in the cities of the US, but it flourished here in the hollow.

  We unloaded the bikes in the clamouring darkness of the storm. The spare house was built on a slope opposite the store. It must have been just as his mother left it, walking out on her two strong legs to marry a childhood sweetheart. Fred had made good in a nearby town and, like Ma, was in his nineties. The photographs on the wooden walls could have been from folk history books, with tall, rangy, second-generation mountain farmers standing self-consciously for the camera, uncomfortable in Sunday-go-to-meeting outfits. The parents of those people had come here, many from England, Scotland and Ulster, in search of an improvement over impossibly hard times at home. They lived first by trapping, hunting and gathering what they could, only later planting crops near their simple cabins. On a sideboard under one of these images was Ma’s television set, early 1960s with a tiny screen, mute witness to the changes she had seen. Creeping into the adjoining room, we found an ancient bed beneath a wondrous quilted counterpane. In the back kitchen the staple, dried food cupboards were full, but the wardrobe stood empty. Ma had gone for good.

  We unpacked our gear then scurried through the downpour down to Haggerd’s place for dinner. The men were sitting in the shelter of the porch enjoying the air, now cool and washed clean of bugs. Shannon and Dolly were inside cooking. Roz went to join them and Earl poured me a generous shot of what looked like whiskey, out of an unmarked bottle.

  ‘This here is finest mountain dew,’ he announced. ‘Distilled right up in the woods.’

  Haggerd offered me some lemonade to dilute the spirit, but I took a drop of water as I do with my Scotch. The taste was much like a branded sour mash whiskey, but the illegal nature of its origin gave it a savour of its own.

  ‘I didn’t think people did their own distilling nowadays,’ I said, and that was the trigger for a flood of moonshining stories.

  Making whiskey ran in Haggerd’s family but, as always, Earl led off by recalling his own father being hauled up before the judge by a new town deputy for being drunk in public. The judge fined Pa ten dollars and sent him out of court. An hour later, he was picked up again, even more drunk than before, and back to the courthouse he went. The judge now infuriated the lawman by handing out another ten buck fine and throwing him and his freed prisoner out. By this time of day the judge was well into his own cups, and as the deputy opened the door, the judge called out to him to quit bothering the court and to let the old man bring him in a couple of bottles. It was well known by everyone in town except, it seemed, the sheriff’s new representative, that the judge kept a supply of moonshine in a gallon jar that was painted white so it looked like milk. Earl’s pa gave the deputy a jaunty ‘good day’ and went home for the bottles. When he returned to the courthouse everyone had left except the judge, who had passed out on the bench.

  The next arrival on Haggerd’s porch was his son-in-law, Jim, who continued to work a still up the mountain as part of his own family tradition even though, as he observed, trade had quietened down as living standards had risen across the country. He opened a heavy banjo case and intermittently picked out tunes as the talk rambled around to building the simple apparatus needed for the job. Haggerd lamented declining standards in the automotive industry.

  ‘Time was when you could take the radiator out of a ‘Cat’ tractor, clean her out, and set her up in the woods. They was pure copper and they made the dandiest little stills. That’s all gone to hell now, though,’ he sighed, ‘them new radiators is all steel. You can never get all the rust out.’

  I asked if people were ever caught in the act of distilling

  ‘You still need to be careful,’ he sipped his drink, ‘but thirty years ago them revenuers was everywhere. Folks would always set their stills half-way up a hillside. If you heard the revenue men comin’ through the woods you’d have to leave it to get busted up, but they’d never catch you on account of how you’d placed yourself.

  ‘They’d have to be on foot,’ he explained, ‘because there weren’t no four-track vehicles to get into the woods in them days. By the time they reached you, they’d already climbed a few hundred feet so they were pretty well washed up. You were fresh. So long as you ran uphill, you’d leave them standing.’

  Earl had never been a prime mover in the distilling industry, but back in his extreme youth in the 1950s he had been a runner, carrying moonshine down to Georgia and North Carolina in souped-up automobiles. It had been a sort of deadly game, like motor racing with an honest profit for the winners. These were usually the moonshiners, but there were accidents and occasional convictions as state troopers with massive V-8 motors latched on to them. There were also shoot-outs, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The truth probably was that much of the trade had been far from homely fun, but in Earl’s memory, the whole business had taken on a Robin Hood flavour.

  Earl’s favourite car had been a 1940 Ford with a three-speed on the column and a vacuum two-speed axle. This mighty motor was so hepped up that it would pull 125 mph in second gear and Earl knew there wasn’t a patrol man in three states who could catch him. Then a rumour began spreading about a ‘hemi-head’ Mercury with two four-barrel carburettors in the pay of a giant revenue man, but nobody in Earl’s circle had ever seen this rocket ship. ‘Feller who told me about it claimed it burned so much gas that you either had to switch off the engine to fuel up or find a fast pump, because even at idle it was using up the stuff quicker than you could fill that tank.’ One night, Earl had unloaded down in Georgia and was driving home to the hollow through North Carolina. The absence of speed limits in the happy days before the 1970s oil crisis meant that you couldn’t be pulled merely for driving fast, so long as you weren’t killing people. Earl was cruising through the darkness at a modest 100 or so when a pair of headlamps appeared in his mirror.

  ‘That car come up fast,’ he said, ‘and he drove in so close behind me that I couldn’t see the lights no more ’cause they were under my trunk, just this bright glow. It had to be either a cop or a criminal and either way I didn’t want him, so I booted the Ford on some. At 130 the lights were still under my fender, so I stamped the gas pedal hard down on the firewall. We was flat out through them pine woods. That road ran dead straight for fifty miles clear to the state line and I knew I’d out-run him. At 160, when I had no more to give, he just cruised up alongside me an’ turned on his blue light.

  ‘I stopped and he pulled in ahead of me. Wasn’t nuthin’ else I could do. I didn’t want to end up in the ditch at that speed. I climbed out quick, ’cause you’re always better looking ’em in the eye, and I checked their car. It was the Mercury all right. Fat bulge on the hood an’ it was burble-burbling away on idle, the whole thing sort of shaking like there was a wild animal inside it just waitin’ for the gas pedal to let her out.

  ‘Well, let me tell y’all, one of the biggest men I ever saw climbed out of that car. The trooper who was drivin’ got out too. He was a sizeable man, but he looked like a little kid alongside this revenue man. That guy
weighed three-fifty pounds and then some more and he had tobaccer juice runnin’ down from both sides of his mouth.’

  Jim had lit a hurricane lamp and now he passed around the bottle. I had been so engrossed in Earl’s tall story that I didn’t even realise my glass was empty. I poured a stiff slug as Earl continued.

  ‘The trooper kept me covered while the big guy checked through the car. All the jars had gone of course, but we used to keep a whiskey tank in the trunk. He opened her up an’ she smelled to high heaven, but there wasn’t even a puddle left inside.

  ‘“OK,” he says, “Where d’you drop the stuff off.”

  ‘“Not in this state anyway,” I told him. I thought I’d get a pistol whippin’ at least, but they just steps back an’ the big feller says, “There’s a diner open twenty miles up the road. Seems it’d be the neighbourly thing for me to buy y’all a coffee there, but your ol’ Ford’s so slow the coffee’d be cold by the time you dawdled in to drink her.”

  ‘It’s three in the morning by this time and it’s midsummer, but it’s still dark. Away goes the Mercury. I heard him burn rubber as he changed into third an’ he must have been doin’ well over 100 by then, but I wasn’t about to let him get away with his mouth. I was still tremblin’, I’ll tell you, but I give the Ford her head and ten minutes later I was walkin’ into the diner. Like the man said, it was twenty miles. They’d bought me a coffee, an’ it wasn’t cold. I drank it and tried to get neighbourly, but they just stared me down, so I cleared out an’ never used that road again.’

  ‘Quit your jaw, boys. Supper’s on the table.’ Dolly called us through the open front door.

  We ate braised steak and potatoes with macaroni cheese and the ‘biscuits’ of the South. These are more like large lightweight dumplings than anything else and are generally served with gravy, which they soak up with remarkable efficiency. As we filled our boots, Earl mentioned his plans for hunting over the weekend and Haggerd remarked that things had quietened down a lot since he was a kid.

  ‘In them days, we’d only get beef steak once in a while, when times was good in the store. Mostly, Pa’d go up an’ shoot squirrels. That squirrel gravy was often the bes’ thing we could manage with our biscuits.’

  ‘What about the ’coon hounds, Haggerd?’ asked Dolly.

  ‘My ol’ pa, he had the best pair of ’coon hounds in the hollow,’ Haggerd rose to the cue. ‘Specially bred they was, to ‘tree’ them suckers…’

  ‘Which suckers?’ asked Roz.

  ‘Them racoons,’ continued Haggerd, emphasising the first syllable. ‘You can’t get close enough for a shot often. They’re quick when they know you’re after ’em. But them ’coon hounds’ll run ’em up the nearest tree. Mebbe there’d be two or three. Once you’ve got ’em cold you could shoot up there amongst ’em.’

  ‘What did they taste like?’

  Haggerd hesitated. ‘Kinda like ’coons, I s’pose.’

  ‘When I was bein’ raised,’ he continued, ‘most families kept pigs. Hog butchering was a community activity. Folks’d bring their animals together in an open field down the way, then Pa and the other men’d slaughter up to twenty-five at a time. Nothing was wasted and sometimes me and the other kids’d be given a cup of that good, warm blood. Ma said it’d make us strong.’

  ‘And did it?’ Roz was hanging on to her steak gamely.

  ‘Sweetest thing you ever did taste.’ With his fork, Haggerd cut up another chunk of meat.

  ‘Ma’d bring the carcass home, cut it up, scald it and shave it clean. She’d salt some down, but Pa’d come in and demand we ate a hunk fresh while it was there. We had some famous parties on hog-killin’ night. But hard times aplenty came in between. Buttermilk and corn bread was all we saw some weeks.’

  I remarked to Dolly that I had noticed no black people in the hollow, and she replied that when she and Haggerd were children there had been a fair sprinkling of dark faces. The Haggerds’ neighbours were black; the children played together and often went into the kitchen of one another’s homes looking for tit-bits. There, however, any fraternisation had to stop. Total segregation was enforced in school and Dolly remarked to my astonishment that intermarriage was illegal in Virginia until over a decade after World War Two.

  Black people had first arrived in the area one by one as runaway slaves. They were taken on by the local landowners, many of whom helped them out by giving them soil to till as well as a job. It was these workers who led the way clearing the fields, but as time progressed they moved to the industrial centres looking for regular wages. By the 1990s, not a single African American remained in the area. There had been no open racial strife. The migration appeared to have come about as a result of some mysterious economic process that did not apply itself to the whites.

  Notwithstanding an open-handed attitude to the question of colour, Haggerd’s father had maintained a tight grip on the way his children should live and who they should adopt as role models. When the white neighbours were visited by their relatives from the next valley there was always music and singing across the lane from the store. This is no surprise when you realise that the callers were Mabelle Carter with her family, who later recorded with Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs, and whose daughter June would grow up to marry Johnny Cash.

  ‘Pa’d git madder ’n Lucifer if we went anywhere near them girls!’ Haggerd chuckled to himself and poured a round of whiskey and lemonade.

  ‘“Bunch o’ damn gypsies! Always singing.” Said they’d never come to no good. Wish he could see ’em now…’

  Haggerd was interrupted by two of Jim’s cronies arriving with guitar and fiddle. They settled in with the ritual drink, tuned up and away they went. It was a good night for music, with sweet songs and driving rhythm beating down the storm.

  The rain stopped on Monday morning, but the sky said there was more to come. The weekend had resounded to the sound of incessant gunfire echoing around the hollow as the mountain men bagged their victuals. Now all was quiet. They had returned to their jobs, Haggerd was serving in the store and it was time for us to go. Sadly, we packed our saddlebags to haul out for Cumberland Gap and the widening countryside of Tennessee. As we cruised onwards, each locked inside our individual reflections, my own head still rang with the hard-driving lick of Jim and the boys ranting through ‘Soldier’s Joy’.

  Following the route blazed by Daniel Boone towards the sunset, we passed a selection of motorcycles coming in the opposite direction. As they swung by, each rider stretched out the left hand of brotherhood offered by all-American bikers on the highway. The fingers never touch, but the gesture helps generate tribal feeling. A few were on giant Honda Gold Wing cruisers that made me think of armchairs on wheels. These guys always seemed to wear helmets. In contrast, the hard men and their girls on Harleys snatched off their headgear on principle every time they entered a state with no compulsory helmet law. Often they flouted enforcement where the regulation was nominally in force. The Honda Gold Wing is so sophisticated that it seems odd to me that anyone would choose one in preference to an automobile. Our noisy, inefficient, powerhouse Harleys embodied the spirit of Earl’s mad dash to New Mexico and I was content with a bike which that symbol of American freedom might select if ever he travelled west again.

  We stopped for the night in a motel run by a family from the Indian subcontinent. The cooking smells wafting into the office would have seemed to be more at home in the Indian quarter of Bradford, England, than in the Appalachians. Roz asked the sari-clad woman taking our money if there was any chance of a chicken tikka, but was given the thumbs down. Instead, we ate from the local store. The victuals didn’t come near Shannon’s standard and seemed a bad choice until we remembered the large bottle of mountain dew that Haggerd had stuffed into the top of my pack as we left. We drank some now, and felt a whole lot better.

  Just before Roz fell asleep, she suddenly spoke from her side of the immense bed.

  ‘If Daniel Boone had been offered a motorbike to break through
into Kentucky, do you think he’d have ridden a Gold Wing or a Harley-Davidson?’

  I turned on the light. The lines at the corners of her eyes were laughing at me and although the banjos were still marching through my own mind, I rejoiced, because I understood that she at least had returned to the road and was looking ahead. The visit with the mountain folk had settled her into this huge, wayward land, leading her thoughts from her immediate challenges and helping her shed the worst of her novice’s nerves. She was beginning to feel a pride in her iron pony.

  Roz had once given me a book about sailing the oceans and had written a quotation from John Masefield inside the flap. It was put there for me, but really it was her.

  Most roads lead men homeward,

  My road leads me forth.

  7

  FIRETRUCKS

  AND BIBLES

  The following morning we traversed the Cumberland Gap near the tri-state border of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. This crucial pass to the West was discovered in 1750 and named for some reason to immortalise the villainous ‘Butcher Cumberland’, the unlovely English Duke who had harried the Scots to their hearthstones after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, 4,000 miles from here on Drumossie Muir. The pass was not blazed as a settlers’ route until twenty years later by Daniel Boone and a group of hard-nosed veterans of the French and Indian Wars. Using ancient Indian tracks, they constructed the ‘Wilderness Trail’, along which 100,000 settlers penetrated to the wide, undulating richness of Kentucky as far north as the Ohio River.

  As we breezed down a broad valley from which the blue mountains seemed to have backed right off, Hurricane Bertha had dissipated into thin air, but the atmosphere was beginning to show signs of the constant threat of the summer storms of central USA. West of the Appalachians, a good day is just plain hot, but as one sunrise follows another the weather works itself into a series of steamy, humid climaxes until massive electric storms clear the sky.