When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  He wasn’t going out to work the stills, anyway, just watchin’ over ’em. Carter’d shut them down for the summer and sent the boys off to make a different kind of hooch. Kentucky was broke out with bourbon distilleries and ever’ one of them aged their whiskey for seven years in white-oak barrels. Had to be new barrels with every batch so the old ones was sold off to wineries in California or for folks to cut in half and plant flowers in. But if’n you’s to “borrow” them barrels for a week, say, ’fore they was shipped out, put some water in ’em and leave ’em out in the hot sun…you could leach out some mighty fine liquor. Mighty fine!

  Jesse was a big man with a shock of sandy blond hair that hung down over his ears and the collar of his shirt. He had been strong and tough when he was younger, but the strength was gone now. The muscles had slid down into a beer gut, and he’d got three front teeth knocked out in a bar fight. Even Jesse had to admit he wasn’t much to look at anymore. But Angie Faye had got so fat she didn’t have no right to complain about nobody’s looks. Jesse hadn’t had regular employment since…maybe it was four years ago when he was a scoop operator in Northfield No. 2. He knew miners’d been out of work longer than he had. Some of ’em was hurting turkeys, too, ’cause they didn’t have the moonshine business he and Carter had to keep them afloat.

  Truth be known, Jesse, didn’t cotton much to Carter Addington. Never had. But kin was kin, and when he needed somebody to help him get the moonshine business he’d taken over from his daddy on its feet, Carter was the obvious choice among all the cousins scattered around the holler. That’d been seven years ago, and now Carter ran the operation. And Jesse wasn’t sure exactly how that’d happened. Oh, Carter was college educated and knew how to run a business, but Jesse still had his nose out of joint about it. Jesse was the one who’d done all the hard work, overseeing the making of the shine. Only thing Carter done was the part that didn’t get your hands dirty, the money end of it, sales and distribution.

  Maybe that’s why Jesse’d brought Buster along today—’cause he didn’t like Carter calling all the shots. Naw, that wasn’t why. He’d brought the kid because he needed him, but he couldn’t very well tell Carter that!

  He shot a glance at his oldest son next to him on the dirty, torn truck seat. The boy was leaned up against the door with his skinny arms crossed over his chest, his head thrown back, sound asleep. His mouth was hanging open and he was drooling a little—it made him look like a half-wit.

  “Hey.” Jesse reached out and poked the boy in the ribs. You could see his boney chest through a hole in his T-shirt. “Wake up. You’re droolin’ like a retard.”

  The boy opened eyes a shade of blue Angie Fay called “robin’s egg blue.” He had no eyelashes you could see—they was pale blond like his hair. And if he’d had one more pimple, he’d a’had to hold it in his hand. Wasn’t no unmarked skin from his hairline to his chin.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” Buster mumbled, wiped his chin and scooted up to a sitting position.

  “Was you drunk last night?”

  The boy was only sixteen, but he’d got walleyed on hooch the first time when he was twelve, and Jesse was all the time catching him sneaking a beer.

  “I was just restin’ my eyes.” He sounded like a pouty two-year-old.

  “’Cause you gotta be alert, clear-headed. You ain’t gonna get no do-over on this here.”

  The boy said nothing, pulled his WVU cap down over his eyes and leaned back against the door. He’d be asleep again in thirty seconds.

  Maybe Jesse shouldn’t have brought him. But he had no choice. The job had to be done, and he couldn’t very well admit to Carter that he couldn’t do it, that his hands wasn’t steady enough no more, shook so bad sometimes he spilled coffee or beer in his lap.

  Didn’t want Carter the businessman to start wonderin’ what it was exactly he needed Jesse for.

  Jesse passed the Lassiter place—wasn’t nobody home—and turned his old Ford pickup up Goose Creek Road. Soon as the truck started bouncing along the rutted dirt road, Buster sat up sullenly and looked out the window. Jesse drove several miles up the dirt track that traversed the steep ridge until he got to a stand of cedar trees where he pulled off the road and drove the truck far enough back into the woods so that you couldn’t see it.

  “We walk from here,” he said.

  Buster reached back and took Jesse’s .22 rifle off the gun rack above the seat. Jesse picked up the small mason jar on the passenger side floorboard among the empty beer bottles and shoved it down in the front pocket of his overalls, cursing himself for not having the good sense to fill the thing up with mud when he’d come here yesterday to scout out the ambush site.

  It was a hike up the mountain and down the other side where Blood Creek wound down from the spring. Jesse figured somewhere near that spring was where the Campbells intended to set up shop—if they hadn’t already! Spring water was the best for moonshine, of course, and they couldn’t very well use the creek water farther down. Folks said there was a lot of iron in the dirt on this side of the ridge, making the sticky clay soil red, which, of course, was why the stream running down through it was called Blood Creek.

  The McCullough’s first still, the smallest, was in the other direction, over the next ridge in Tree Frog Hollow. It used the water from a spring that bubbled up clear as rainwater. Three other stills were scattered close around it on Stag Ridge. The fifth, the biggest, was hidden in these woods. Daddy’d always said their liquor was better’n other folks’ hooch because the water was better, and Jesse was certain Daddy’d been right.

  There was no trail, so Jesse and Buster had to make their way through the woods to the top of the mountain. Carter’d said the ambush had to be along Blood Creek so’s Jesse could bring back mud Carter could use to make it look like that’s where Grayson’d been.

  When Carter told him Grayson was actually going squirrel hunting today, Jesse could only marvel at the good fortune that seemed to grace everything Carter Addington touched. ’Course, everybody knew the best squirrel hunting in Cochran County was north of Aunt Marian’s house, not south toward Blood Creek, so Grayson wouldn’t be anywhere near…would he? If Grayson really was as goofy as Carter said—nutcases was likely to do most anything. A cold knot formed in the pit of Jesse’s stomach. You don’t suppose Grayson might actually be…Jesse scanned the woods around them, but you coulda hid a army of Graysons in there and wouldn’t nobody see ’em.

  “Whatcha lookin’ for, Pa?” Buster asked.

  “Nothing,” Jesse said and brushed it off, had to concentrate on the business at hand. But every now and then he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder, wondering.

  He’d studied on it and determined the best spot for Buster to shoot Zeke was in the lower leg, below the knee. That was the safest, so if his aim was off a hair, he wouldn’t accidentally hit something vital. Nobody wanted to kill the kid! But even a .22 shot to the leg was going to do some damage, no way around that. It was gonna bleed. So what if the kid lay there and bled to death? Had Carter thought about that? No, he had not! But Jesse had. Every morning for the past couple of weeks Riley’d drove Zeke out to the bottom of Roberts Hill and let him out, then came back to get him about two o’clock. So if Jesse waited until Zeke was going back down the mountain to meet his brother, then Riley’d get concerned about Zeke when he didn’t show up. Riley might even hear the gunshot! Either way, Riley’d go looking for the boy and find him before he could bleed out.

  Jesse had made it to a small clearing on the top of the ridge, huffing and puffing. Sweat soaked his shirt and the headband of his Pirates cap. Buster hadn’t even broke a sweat and was breathing normally, but Jesse had to pause to catch his breath or he’d pass out.

  Buster looked nervous.

  “You all right?” Jesse asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  But he wasn’t.

  Jesse said nothing, merely wiped the sweat out of his eyes and started down the other side of the ridge. But now he
was the one getting nervous. When he’d first told Buster about the plan, the kid’d jumped at the chance. He was gonna shoot a Campbell, kin of the man who’d ambushed his granddaddy. Made him feel like a man. But now that it was actually coming right down to it, now that he was really going to shoot somebody, the kid was getting hinky.

  * * *

  The rifle felt good in Grayson’s hands and that surprised him. He would have sworn that once he got home he’d never touch a firearm again. Instead, the gun felt more than just normal. It felt safe. He had felt almost naked without it. Surely, this would pass. Surely, so many things would pass.

  He’d jumped at the chance to go hunting for reasons Piper didn’t understand. He needed to engage in some activity he used to enjoy, to crawl back into that skin again and grow accustomed to the feel of it. And he needed to get away by himself to try to sort out his tangled emotions and memories.

  He stopped and took a deep breath of air scented with pine, spruce and cedar.

  Sometimes, it seemed to Grayson that the contents of his entire mind had been divvied up and stored away in boxes, and he couldn’t allow himself to see what was in the black ones. Oh, he’d had a black box before he ever went to Vietnam. Becky’s black box. But now his mind was littered with them—small square land mines—and he had to edge carefully from one part of life to another to keep from stepping on any of them.

  Grayson continued on a diagonal up the mountainside. The best squirrel hunting in Cochran County was here, though he didn’t intend to shoot anything. He didn’t know much about the new Grayson Addington, the man who had come home so changed from the war. But one thing he did know for certain. He would never again kill another living creature.

  He hadn’t come this way for the squirrels. He’d come this way because it was a shortcut to his father’s church.

  The air gradually filled with birdsong. The coo of mourning doves, the “chick-a-dee” of chickadees, the chirps and tweets of bluebirds, killdeer and larks mingled with the ever-present hum in his ears. He topped a rise, and the simple white building came into view up ahead. There was a steeple on the high-pitched roof and wide porch steps. Turtle Road dead-ended at those steps.

  As Grayson drew closer, he could see the abuse of disuse the building had suffered. Paint had peeled down to bare wood, the front door hung on one hinge, the roof sagged and all the windows were broken out. But the beautiful stained-glass window Uncle Jim had paid for above the porch roof was miraculously untouched. Grayson could only imagine what the inside must look like, but he didn’t intend to find out. He’d last been in the building the week his father’s wild-eyed, raving lunacy had reached such a fever pitch that Grayson’s mother had taken the boys’ hands and walked with dignity out of the church and said she’d never go back. The next week, his father had died from a snakebite during services in the Stinkin’ Creek Pentecostal (pronounced penny-costal) Church, way back in a remote hollow.

  Grayson sat down on the splintered porch steps and looked back down into the valley where silver mist rose off all the creeks. A sudden love of the mountains welled up in his throat so powerfully he feared he might burst into tears. He had never felt at home anywhere else. Oh, he had lived in Louisville, Kentucky, during seminary when he and Piper first married. He’d liked it there. It wasn’t awful. Neither was Spindle Rock, where he’d taken his first church, gotten involved with the young men in the community and signed up for the Kentucky National Guard infantry company there so he could minister to them. Never in his wildest dreams did it occur to him—or to anybody else—that the unit would actually go to war.

  He was at a wedding rehearsal for Bobby Clarkson and Emily Filiatreau when Emily’s grandmother rushed into the sanctuary in hysterics and herded the whole wedding party down to the church basement where there was a television set.

  They stood in mute surprise as U.S. Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford announced the call-up of nine National Guard units, two of them in Kentucky—the 138th Artillery, Battery C in Bardstown, and the 151st Infantry, Charlie Company in Spindle Rock.

  Emily started to cry, wailing that the unit call-up would interfere with the honeymoon they’d already paid for in Acapulco. Then Bobby’s groomsmen—fellow guard members—began to process the ramifications in their own lives. Porter was a dairy farmer. If he had to leave…just leave, who was going to milk his cows twice a day? Who would care for Mattingly’s ailing wife, who was expecting twins? Who’d help Haggarty’s elderly father cut tobacco?

  Grayson went home and told Piper, and they had dropped to their knees in prayer.

  When was the last time Grayson had prayed? Maybe it was the Sunday service the night before Clarkson, Porter, Haggarty, Mattingly, Hawkins and the other Kentucky soldiers died when The Birdhouse was overrun.

  But even then, he’d only been mouthing words. Saying what he was supposed to say. He’d stopped believing…when? When had he realized he’d spent the better part of his life perpetuating a grand hoax?

  He leaned the rifle against the porch steps, set the knapsack in the dirt and tried to puzzle it out. Because it mattered. A man ought to know where that crossroads was. When his life had been steaming down a channel in one direction at full throttle and then without warning stopped, turned and went down another river altogether.

  Had he stopped believing even before he left for ’Nam? Wasn’t he merely going through the motions even then?

  No, he’d believed, but it had been passive belief. Belief set in neutral. Just coasting. And you couldn’t take that kind of belief into battle with you. That kind of belief wouldn’t sustain you when Mattingly got his arm blown off and the squirting blood splashed in your face and you hunkered down in the hole with him, trying to stop the bleeding. And then it did stop.

  That kind of belief was nothing but the dregs left when real belief had leaked out a hole in the bucket. When Grayson really needed it, reached into the bucket for it, to scoop some up in a cup and feed it to men desperate for it—to drink some of it himself—the cup scraped on bare metal. Made a sound Grayson could hear now, deep in his soul.

  So what could he say to Piper? He was a minister. That’s what he’d trained to be, what she expected him to return to now. How did he tell her it meant nothing anymore? That the black bags they zipped the boys in to ship them home were no more silent than the God of the universe when you cried out to him to protect—

  Sadie! Almighty God, Please protect her!

  The day the trucks transported his unit away from Yan Ling, leaving Nguyen behind, he’d dropped to his knees in a walking blackout.

  He hadn’t thought about it since. What he’d seen in the blackout was utter darkness. Then the darkness moved, writhed, rumbled, twisted and roared. A malevolent darkness from the pit of hell roared down the mountainside, its gaping maw open, hungry, eager to gobble up Sadie while she slept.

  A sudden silence fell, like a giant bell jar had been lowered around Grayson. The birds stopped singing. The aged creak of trees in the breeze grew quiet. And Grayson found himself turning slowly to face the giant coal slag dam that formed an ugly smile between the ridges. As he stared at it, he felt a kind of fear he’d never felt in ’Nam. Oh, he’d been terrified knowing Charlie was hidden somewhere in the jungle waiting to kill him. But that fear was perfectly rational, and what he felt now was totally irrational. What he feared now was mindless evil, death with a black grin, smiling malevolently out over the little valley it intended to devour.

  Chapter 20

  There was a rock outcrop that hung out over Blood Creek about half a mile from the road where Riley Campbell would be waiting for Zeke. The creek bank narrowed there. Zeke would have to walk beneath that overhang; it was the only clear path back down the mountain. Buster and Jesse would snuggle down among the rocks on top of the overhang, rub dirt on the barrel of the rifle so it wouldn’t shine in the sun, and after the boy had passed beneath them, Buster could take a steady aim and put a bullet in his calf.

  The overhang was
the only place they could remain hidden and still get close, and they had to get close because a .22 wasn’t dead-on accurate beyond about thirty yards. The shells it fired made little holes, and traveling so fast, the bullets usually went all the way through. It’d be nice if there wasn’t no bullet to be pulled out of Zeke’s leg ’cause there was ways the law could identify what gun had shot a particular bullet. ’Course, a thing like that wasn’t never gonna matter ’cause the Campbells would take Zeke to the doctor and get him patched up, and if the sheriff asked, they’d say he’d got shot accidental. They wouldn’t go broadcasting around that somebody’d got the drop on him in the woods!

  From the top of the overhang, Jesse and Buster could hightail it back up over the mountain and down to the truck on the other side. Even if Zeke turned immediately and looked up—which he wouldn’t because he’d be more concerned about the bullet hole in his leg!—there was no way he could see who was up on top of them rocks.

  Yes, siree, Jesse’d planned it all out perfectly. But the toothless grin occasioned by that thought didn’t sit comfortable on his face. He couldn’t shake the uneasiness. Grayson was out here in the woods somewhere, too. With a gun.

  * * *

  Marian sat on the examining table in Dr. Rutherford’s office. What little butt she had was numb from sitting there for so long. That was the least of her aches and pains, of course, aches and pains that wouldn’t be around much longer because neither would she.

  She tuned back into what the doctor was saying. He was talking to Piper as if Marian wasn’t even there. What was it about doctors—when they had something bad to say, they wouldn’t look you in the eye and say it, straight out? They had to wrap it up in technical mumbo jumbo and tell it to somebody else so you’s just eavesdropping.