by Jeffrey Ford
The annual celebration that involved this drink took place at the Blind Ghost on the last Saturday night in September. It was usually for adults only, and so the first chance I ever got to witness it was the year I was made an apprentice to old man Witzer. The only two younger people at the event that year were Lester II and me. Bildab’s boy had been attending since he was ten, and some speculated that having witnessed the thing and been around the berries so long were what had turned him simple, but I knew young Lester in school before that and he was no ball of fire then either. Of the adults who participated, only eight actually partook of the Night Whiskey. Reed and Samantha Bocean took turns each year, one joining in the drinking while the other watched the bar, and seven others, picked by lottery, got to taste the sweetest thing on earth. Sheriff Jolle did the honors picking the names of the winners from a hat at the event and was barred from participating by a town ordinance that went way back. Those who didn’t get to drink the Night Whiskey made do with conventional alcohol. Local musicians supplied the entertainment and there was dancing. From the snatches of conversation I’d caught over the years, I gathered it was a raucous time.
This native drink, black as a crow wing and slow to pour as cough syrup, had some strange properties. A year’s batch was enough to fill only half of an old quart gin bottle that Samantha Bocean had tricked out with a handmade label showing a deer skull with berries for eyes, and so it was portioned out sparingly. Each participant got no more than about three quarters of a shot glass of it, but that was enough. Even with just these few sips it was wildly intoxicating, so that the drinkers became immediately drunk, their inebriation growing as the night went on although they’d finish off their allotted pittance within the first hour of the celebration. “Blind drunk” was the phrase used to describe how the drinkers of the Night Whiskey would end the night. Then came the weird part, for usually around two a.m. all eight of them, all at once, got to their feet, stumbled out the door, lurched down the front steps of the bar, and meandered off into the dark, groping and weaving like namesakes of the establishment they had just left. It was a peculiar phenomenon of the drink that it made those who imbibed it search for a resting place in the lower branches of a tree. Even though they were pie-eyed drunk, somehow, and no one knew why, they’d manage to shimmy up a trunk and settle themselves down across a few choice branches. It was a law in Gatchfield that if you tried to stop them or disturb them it would be cause for arrest. So when the drinkers of the Night Whiskey left the bar, no one followed. The next day, they’d be found fast asleep in midair, only a few precarious branches between them and gravity. That’s where old man Witzer and I came in. At first light, we were to make our rounds in his truck with the poles bungeed on top, to perform what was known as the Drunk Harvest.
Dangerous? You bet, but there was a reason for it. I told you about the weird part, but even though this next part gives a justification of sorts, it’s even weirder. When the natives gave the deathberry and the recipe for the Night Whiskey to our forefathers, they considered it a gift of a most divine nature, because after the dark drink was ingested and the drinker had climbed aloft, sleep would invariably bring him or her to some realm between that of dream and the sweet hereafter. In this limbo they’d come face-to-face with their relatives and loved ones who’d passed on. That’s right. It never failed. As best as I can remember him having told it, here’s my father’s recollection of the experience from the year he won the lottery:
“I found myself out in the swamp at night with no memory of how I’d gotten there or what reason I had for being there. I tried to find a marker—a fallen tree or a certain turn in the path—by which to find my way back to town. The moon was bright, and as I stepped into a clearing, I saw a single figure standing there stark naked. I drew closer and said hello, even though I wanted to run. I saw it was an old fellow, and when he heard my greeting, he looked up and right then I knew it was my uncle Fic. ‘What are you doing out here without your clothes?’ I said to him as I approached. ‘Don’t you remember, Joe,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m passed on.’ And then it struck me and made my hair stand on end. But Uncle Fic, who’d died at the age of ninety-eight when I was only fourteen, told me not to be afraid. He told me a good many things, explained a good many things, told me not to fear death. I asked him about my ma and pa, and he said they were together as always and having a good time. I bid him to say hello to them for me, and he said he would. Then he turned and started to walk away but stepped on a twig, and that sound brought me awake, and I was lying in the back of Witzer’s pickup, staring into the jowly, pitted face of Bo Elliott.”
My father was no liar, and to prove to my mother and me that he was telling the truth, he told us that Uncle Fic had told him where to find a tiepin he’d been given as a commemoration of his twenty-fifth year at the feed store but had subsequently lost. He then walked right over to a teapot shaped like an orange that my mother kept on a shelf in our living room, opened it, reached in, and pulled out the pin. The only question my father was left with about the whole strange episode was “Out of all my dead relations, why Uncle Fic?”
Stories like the one my father told my mother and me abound. Early on, back in the 1700s, they were written down by those who could write. These rotting manuscripts were kept for a long time in the Gatchfield library—an old shoe repair store with bookshelves—in a glass case. Sometimes the dead who showed up in the Night Whiskey dreams offered premonitions, sometimes they fingered a thief when something had gone missing. And supposedly it was the way Jolle had solved the Latchey murder, on a tip given to Mrs. Windom by her great-aunt, dead ten years. Knowing that our ancestors were keeping an eye on things and didn’t mind singing out about the untoward once a year usually convinced the citizens of Gatchfield to walk the straight and narrow. We kept it to ourselves, though, and never breathed a word of it to outsiders, as if their rightful skepticism would ruin the power of the ceremony. As for those who’d left town, it was never a worry that they’d tell anyone, because, seriously, who’d have believed them?
On a Wednesday evening, the second week in September, while sitting in the pickup truck, drinking a beer, old man Witzer said, “I think you got it, boy. No more practice now. Too much and we’ll overdo it.” I simply nodded, but in the following weeks leading up to the annual celebration, I was a wreck, envisioning the body of one of my friends or neighbors sprawled broken on the ground next to the bed of the truck. At night I’d have a recurring dream of prodding a body out of an oak, seeing it fall in slow motion, and then all would go black and I’d just hear this dull crack, what I assumed to be the drunk’s head slamming the side of the pickup bed. I’d wake and sit up straight, shivering. Each time this happened, I tried to remember to see who it was in my dream, because it always seemed to be the same person. Two nights before the celebration, I saw a tattoo of a coiled cobra on the fellow’s bicep as he fell and knew it was Henry Grass. I thought of telling Witzer, but I didn’t want him to think I was just a scared kid.
The last Saturday in September finally came and after sundown my mother and father and I left the house and strolled down the street to the Blind Ghost. People were already starting to arrive and from inside I could hear the band tuning up fiddles and banjos. Samantha Bocean had decorated the place for the event—black crepe paper draped here and there and wrapped around the support beams. Hanging from the ceiling on various lengths of fishing line were the skulls of all manner of local animals: coyote, deer, beaver, squirrel, and a giant black bear skull suspended over the center table where the lottery winners were to sit and partake of their drink. I was standing on the threshold, taking all this in, feeling the same kind of enchantment as when I was a kid and Mrs. Musfin would hang lights and tinsel in the three classrooms of the schoolhouse for Christmas, when my father leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re on your own tonight, Ernest. You want to drink, drink. You want to dance, dance.” I looked at him and he smiled, nodded, and winked. I then looked at my mother an
d she merely shrugged, as if to say, “That’s the nature of the beast.”
Old man Witzer was sitting there at the bar, and he called me over and handed me a cold beer. Two other of the town’s oldest men were with him, his chess-playing buddies, and he put his arm around my shoulders and introduced them to me. “This is a good boy,” he said, patting my back. “He’ll do Bo Elliott proud out there under the trees.” His two friends nodded and smiled at me, the most notice I’d gotten from either of them my entire life. And then the band launched into a reel, and everyone turned to watch them play. Two choruses went by and I saw my mother and father and some of the other couples move out onto the small dance floor. I had another beer and looked around.
A few songs later, Sheriff Jolle appeared in the doorway to the bar and the music stopped mid-tune.
“Okay,” he said, hitching his pants up over his gut and removing his black, wide-brimmed hat, “time to get the lottery started.” He moved to the center of the bar, where the Night Whiskey drinker’s table was set up, and took a seat. “Everybody drop your lottery tickets into the hat and make it snappy.” I guessed that this year it was Samantha Bocean who was going to drink her own concoction since Reed stayed behind the bar and she moved over and took a seat across from Jolle. After the last of the tickets had been deposited into the hat, the sheriff pushed it away from him into the middle of the table. He called for a whiskey neat, and Reed was there with it in a flash. In one swift gulp, the sheriff drained the glass, banged it onto the tabletop, and said, “I’m ready.” My girlfriend Darlene’s stepmom came up from behind him with a black scarf and tied it around his eyes. Reaching into the hat, he ran his fingers through the lottery tickets, mixing them around, and then started drawing them out one by one and stacking them in a neat pile in front of him on the table. When he had all seven, he stopped and pulled off the blindfold. He then read the names in a loud voice and everyone kept quiet till he was finished—Becca Staney, Stan Joss, Pete Hesiant, Berta Hull, Moses T. Remarque, Ronald White, and Henry Grass. The room exploded with applause and screams. The winners smiled, dazed by having won, as their friends and family gathered round them and slapped them on the back, hugged them, shoved drinks into their hands. I was overwhelmed by the moment, caught up in it and grinning, until I looked over at Witzer and saw him jotting the names down in a little notebook he’d refer to tomorrow as we made our rounds. Only then did it come to me that one of the names was none other than Henry Grass, and I felt my stomach tighten in a knot.
Each of the winners eventually sat down at the center table. Jolle stood and gave his seat to Reed Bocean, who brought with him from behind the bar the bottle of Night Whiskey and a tray of eight shot glasses. Like the true barman he was, he poured all eight without lifting the bottle once, all to the exact same level. One by one they were handed around the table. When each of the winners had one before him or her, the barkeep smiled and said, “Drink up.” Some went for it like it was a draft from the fountain of youth, some snuck up on it with trembling hands. Berta Hull, a middle-aged mother of five with horse teeth and short red hair, took a sip and declared, “Oh my, it’s so lovely.” Ronald White, the brother of one of the men I worked with at the gas station, grabbed his and dashed it off in one shot. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and laughed like a maniac, drunk already. Reed returned to the bar. The band started up again and the celebration came back to life like a wild animal in too small a cage.
I wandered around the Blind Ghost, nodding to the folks I knew, half taken by my new celebrity as a participant in the Drunk Harvest and half preoccupied with watching Henry Grass still sitting at the table, his glass in front of him. He was a young guy, only twenty-five, with a crew cut and a square jaw, dressed in the camouflage sleeveless T-shirt he wore in my recurring dream. By the way he stared at the shot glass in front of him through his little circular glasses, you’d have thought he was staring into the eyes of a king cobra. He had a reputation as a gentle, studious soul, although he was most likely the strongest man in town—the rare instance of an outsider who’d made a place for himself in Gatchfield. The books he read were all about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle, the Chariots of the Gods; stuff my father proclaimed to be “dyed-in-the-wool-hooey.” He worked with the horses over at the Haber family farm and lived in a trailer out by the old Civil War shot tower, across the meadow and through the woods. I stopped for a moment to talk to Lester II, who mumbled to me around the hard-boiled eggs he was shoving into his mouth one after another, and when I looked back at Henry, he’d finished off the shot glass and left the table.
I overheard snatches of conversation, and much of it was commentary on why it was a lucky thing that so-and-so had won the lottery this year. Someone mentioned the fact that poor Pete Hesiant’s beautiful young wife, Lonette, had passed away from leukemia just a few months earlier, and another mentioned that Moses had always wanted a shot at the Night Whiskey but had never gotten the chance, and how he’d soon be too old to participate as his arthritis had recently given him the devil of a time. Everybody was pulling for Berta Hull, who was raising those five children on her own, and Becca was a favorite because she was the town midwife. Similar stuff was said about Ron White and Stan Joss and Henry.
I stood for a long time next to a table where Sheriff Jolle and my father and mother sat with Dr. Kvench, and listened to the doctor, a spry little man with a gray goatee, who was by then fairly well along in his cups, as were his listeners, myself included, spout his theory as to why the drinkers took to the trees. He explained it, amid a barrage of hiccups, as a product of evolution. His theory was that the deathberry plant had at one time grown everywhere on earth, and that early man partook of some form of the Night Whiskey at the dawn of time. Because the world was teeming with night predators then, and because early man was only recently descended from the treetops, those who became drunk automatically knew, as a means of self-preservation, to climb up into the trees to sleep so as not to become a repast for a saber-toothed tiger or some other onerous creature. Dr. Kvench, citing Carl Jung, believed that the imperative to get off the ground after drinking the Night Whiskey had remained in the collective unconscious and had been passed down through the ages. “Everybody in the world probably still has the unconscious command that would kick in if they were to drink the dark stuff, but since the berry doesn’t grow anywhere but here now, we’re the only ones who see this effect.” The doctor nodded, hiccupped twice, and then got up to fetch a glass of water. When he left the table Jolle looked over at my mother, and she and he and my father broke up laughing. “I’m glad he’s better at pushing pills than concocting theories,” said the sheriff, drying his eyes with his thumbs.
At about midnight, I was reaching for yet another beer, which Reed had placed on the bar, when my grasp was interrupted by a viselike grip on my wrist. I looked up and saw that it was Witzer. He said nothing to me but simply shook his head, and I knew he was telling me to lay off so as to be fresh for the harvest in the morning. I nodded. He smiled, patted my shoulder, and turned away. Somewhere around two a.m., the lottery winners, so incredibly drunk that even in my intoxicated state it seemed impossible they could still walk, stopped dancing, drinking, whatever, and headed for the door. The music abruptly ceased. It suddenly became so silent we could hear the wind blowing out on the street. The sounds of them stumbling across the wooden porch of the bar and then the steps creaking, the screen door banging shut, filled me with a sense of awe and visions of them groping through the night. I tried to picture Berta Hull climbing a tree, but I just couldn’t get there, and the doctor’s theory started to make some sense to me.
I left before my parents did. Witzer drove me home and before I got out of the cab, he handed me a small bottle.
“Take three good chugs,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“An herbal tonic,” he said. “It’ll clear your head and have you ready for the morning.”
I took the first sip of it and the taste was bitte
r as could be. “Good God,” I said, grimacing.
Witzer wheezed. “Two more,” he said.
I did as I was told, got out of the truck, and bid him good night. I didn’t remember undressing or getting into bed, and luckily I was too drunk to dream. It seemed as if I’d just closed my eyes when my father’s voice woke me, saying, “The old man’s out in the truck, waiting on you.” I leaped out of bed and dressed, and when I finally knew what was going on, I was surprised I felt as well and refreshed as I did. “Do good, Ernest,” said my father from the kitchen. “Wait,” my mother called. A moment later she came out of their bedroom, wrapping a robe around her. She gave me a hug and a kiss, and then said, “Hurry.”
It was brisk outside, and the early-morning light gave proof that the day would be a clear one. The truck sat at the curb, the prods strapped to the top. Witzer sat in the cab, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. When I got in beside him, he handed me a cup and an egg sandwich on a hard roll wrapped in white paper. “We’re off,” he said. I cleared the sleep out of my eyes as he pulled away from my house.
Our journey took us down the main street of town and then through the alley next to the sheriff’s office. This gave way to another small tree-lined street, where we turned right. As we headed away from the center of town, we passed Darlene’s house, and I wondered what she’d done the previous night while I’d been at the celebration. I thought of the last time we were together.
She was sitting naked against the wall of the abandoned barn by the edge of the swamp. Her blond hair and face were aglow, illuminated by a beam of light that shone through a hole in the roof. She had the longest legs and her skin was pale and smooth. Taking a drag from her cigarette, she had said, “Ernest, we gotta get out of this town.” She’d laid out for me her plan of escape, her desire to go to some city where civilization was in full swing. I just nodded, reluctant to be too enthusiastic. She was adventurous and I was a homebody, but I did care deeply for her. She tossed her cigarette, put out her arms, and opened her legs, and then Witzer said, “Keep your eyes peeled now, boy,” and Darlene’s image melted away.