“I didn’t.” Johnny shrugged, stood from the table. “He gave freebies. Advertisements.” He grabbed Annie’s plate, which was still half full with pork chunks, gravy, and potatoes.
“Your father will eat later, Johnny.”
“I’m not gonna feed Father.” He laughed. “I’m gonna feed Cat.”
“Father said not to,” William said. “Then he’ll never leave.”
“Exactly. And Father’s snookered out. He’ll never know.” Johnny left the room with the leftover food. Samantha didn’t stop him.
William swirled his last chunk of bread through the gravy on his plate, still thinking of Pauline and the rest of the followers. Had she felt the same attraction, the same spark? Was it possible to carry a torch for someone he’d just met? The red lipstick on his mother’s napkin sang to him. “So how did your meeting with Mr. Bancroft go?”
“He accepted the money.” Samantha carried her plate into the kitchen.
“I wasn’t worried about the car door.” William followed her with his dishes.
She started washing the plates, so he helped by clearing the rest of the table. When he returned to the kitchen, he found her staring out the window above the sink, her hands paused in the suds. Down the hillside, the aging house was aglow with candlelight.
Thinking of Pauline—“Friends call me Polly”—gave him sudden courage. “Why hasn’t Father started the distillery back up? It was his whole life before the war.”
“His and your grandfather’s.” She resumed with the dishes. “But your father is in no condition now to run a business. He can barely tie his shoes some mornings.”
William placed the dirty dishes on the counter. “This morning the wind blew one of the empty barrels across the run. I remember that sound. I’d like to hear it again, on a regular basis.”
“William, what are you trying to say?”
“That we should start the distillery again. Old Sam McFee was king. I want it to be again. Mr. Browder—”
“Is a kind old man, but he’s also a dreamer.”
“Maybe so. He’s had dreams of the distillery running again.” William sounded more desperate than he wanted to. It was Mr. Browder’s fight initially, but William now felt like he had more than one fist in it. “He’s been keeping the houses and equipment ready. He’s grown barley and rye, as well as the corn.”
“He grew rye and barley?”
“Yes. We could have barrels aging on the ricks in weeks.”
“But it would be years before our labors could produce fruit. Old Sam ages for at least four years. Some of the batches we’d begun to age for six, seven, eight years—”
“We could sell unaged whiskey while the initial batches are aging. It’s what everyone is used to drinking now, anyway.”
“William, you know nothing about bourbon—”
“I had my first drink of it last night.” It calmed my nerves.
She dried her hands on a towel. “I admire your thinking, but too many ghosts have taken root here. And all the workers are long gone.”
“I could do the bulk of it! I would gladly help Father out. And Johnny. Carly Browder is with child. She’s moved back with her husband. Mr. Browder says they’ve both agreed to work. Mr. Browder stayed behind because he believed it would begin again.”
“I thought you wanted to be a journalist. Distillers don’t have time to report current events.”
“I wanted to be a journalist because I assumed the distillery was hopeless. But Old Sam’s return would be worthy of news. And I could be the one to report it. It could be my first big break.”
She returned to the dishes. “Selfishness doesn’t become you, William.”
“That’s not why I support this. Father needs this as badly as the town does—”
“If your father needed it so badly, he wouldn’t be cemented to that odd chair of his.”
“He just needs to be baited.”
“And what of the cost? Do you have any idea how much money it takes to start such a venture? And the taxes. You have no idea. Every time we need to pay for a war, our country taxes the aging houses.”
“I’m not addle-brained, Mother. I know we have the bees.”
She looked up at him sharply. “And how do you know that?”
“Father doesn’t work.” William gestured toward the living room. “He doesn’t do anything. Not since Prohibition ended. Millions are barely getting by. Hobos are living on the streets”—he pointed out the kitchen window—“and inside our aging house. Yet we are well fed. We have money for you to buy new clothes to look pretty for another man.”
Samantha slapped him across the face, a snakebite, hard enough to turn his head.
His words and her slap surprised them both.
She was wiping tears when Johnny walked in the kitchen with Annie in his arms. “He licked that plate clean.” Johnny noticed his mother’s flushed face. “What happened?”
“We were just having a conversation,” Samantha said, clouding the truth.
Johnny looked at his older brother. “You a big shot now, William?” He put Annie down. “What’d you do?”
“It doesn’t concern you.”
“I think it does, palooka.” Johnny tapped himself on the chest. “Mother crying makes it my business.” He pushed William. “Patsy.”
Samantha saw it just as William did—the likeness to their father: the quick temper and unreadable eyes; the handsome face, hard edged and tough.
He pushed William again. “Daisy.” He shoved him into the wall. “Weak sister.”
“Johnny, stop it!” Samantha cried.
William didn’t want to fight back, had never once thrown a punch. But now that he was cornered with both fists clenched, he was comfortable with it. If Johnny poked him one more time, he was going to paste him.
The poke came, so William lifted his right arm, loaded his weight, coiled at the waist, and unleashed a punch that lifted his little brother from the floor.
Samantha screamed. Annie stood in the doorway, crying. “Henry won’t like this!” The dog was behind her, barking. And then Barley’s voice boomed.
“How’d the dad-blamed dog get in here?” He stood in the doorway behind Annie, staring at Johnny knocked out cold on the floor. Samantha was on her knees, tapping her son’s cheeks. William was frozen in his punching stance. Everybody watched him. For a moment William hoped Barley would praise him for his willingness to fight, for doing something worthy of manhood.
“Get out.” Barley’s eyes bored into him. “And take the dog with you.”
FIVE
Candle glow showed through the windows of the aging house. The twelve apostles. Maybe they were getting drunk on the lingering angels’ share. Now there was a story: HOBO THOUGHT TO BE JESUS CHRIST.
William’s first instinct was to walk to Mr. Browder’s cottage, but he stopped when he realized he was crying. He muttered a word he’d never imagined coming from his own mouth, the worst word he could think of. One of his father’s words. His knuckles were sore from pasting Johnny, and his cheek stung from the impact of his mother’s hand. That wound had brought about the tears. That slap.
He backtracked through the trees and sat on the barrel run and gazed across the field. He allowed himself to picture Polly’s face: her porcelain skin freckled across the nose and cheeks, her eyes like emeralds, her hair so red it appeared aflame. What would it be like to kiss her? What did she do to end up following a jingle-brained Christ figure? He should go talk to her.
He stood from the barrel run and cold chills followed by an intense wave of warmth coated his skin. He clenched his fists and wished it away, but then he started sweating. He kicked a twig across the grass and sat back down on the barrel run. He let the word escape his lips again. And then louder. It felt more familiar each time he said it. “Practicing a new word, William?”
Mr. Browder appeared with a shotgun. He hadn’t heard the old man’s footsteps. “Oh, hello, Mr. Browder. I’m sorry.”
Mr. Browder wore plaid cotton pajamas. Bony wrists and ankles jutted from the arm and leg holes. His leather slippers were scuffed and barely holding together. He dropped the shotgun to the grass and sat with a grunt beside William on the barrel run. In the shadows he looked as black as the bark of the whiskey trees; the whites of his eyes were a stark ivory contrast.
“It’s not loaded. Usually I just point it and they run off. The raccoons.” He patted William’s knee. “I’ve never heard you curse before. My momma would’ve cut my tongue out.” Mr. Browder stared at the aging house. “But hell, she’s long dead.”
“I just pasted Johnny. Knocked him out right on the kitchen floor.”
“Did he deserve it?”
William thought on it. “Yes.”
“Then don’t lose time on it. You know how many times I pasted my brothers?”
“How many?”
“Not enough, I’ll say that. Just ’cause you love someone don’t mean you don’t occasionally wanna paste ’em.”
“I talked to Mother about the distillery. She said no.”
“Ah, that’s okay. For now. You planted the seed. Seeds need time to grow. Jus’ gotta be patient. You know how many times I asked my wife to marry me?”
“How many?”
“Seven, eight times.”
“What changed her mind?”
He shrugged. “Got more handsome as I aged, I guess.” He flicked a ladybug off the knee of his pajamas and shot William a confident wink. “And I still haven’t stopped.”
They sat silent for a moment, the two of them watching shadows move about inside the aging house. “What do you think about them?”
Mr. Browder pursed his lips and blew out some air. “You know me. I’ve always had an open mind to the mysterious.”
“You think that’s what this is?”
“I don’t know what it is, exactly. Maybe this Asher was just a man. Maybe he wasn’t.”
“Are you saying he could actually be . . . ?”
“All I’m saying is he obviously touched lives, William. Whether he was what they think or not, he must have had a kind way with people. And wasn’t kindness one of Jesus’ main messages?”
“I suppose so.”
“That man may have been no more of a Jesus than Al Capone, but don’t they deserve the right to grieve how they want? What’s funny?”
“Nothing. You’re just the opposite of my father.”
“I respect the dickens out of Mr. Barley, you know that. But no one has ever accused us of being like-minded. Ssshhh.” Mr. Browder pointed across the field, toward where three deer had moved silently up toward the door of the aging house, and a fourth walked toward Asher Keating’s grave. He moved his arched finger to the north. “There’s three more.”
William leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “They were here this morning too.”
“Do you remember the deer when Henry was born?”
“No.”
“The storm? That twister chewed up trees for miles, spitting them out like grass. Tree trunks looked like twigs in that funnel cloud.”
“And Henry decided it was the most opportune time to come into the world.”
“It jumped, William. I stood there and watched it. Started lifting a couple hundred yards or more before the whiskey trees, roaring like a thousand trains. And then the temperature plummeted. The wind stopped. It got so quiet I could hear your mother screaming inside the house. That funnel lifted and I feared the ground was coming up with it. A loose two-by-four from the old Crawley house across the way came whizzing by and stuck inside the wall of the fermentation house like some giant had hurled a spear. A mailbox flew over the house. A cow from the farm flew across the main road like it had wings.
“And that’s when the deer came. Dozens of them from the south woods, even more from the whiskey trees. They gathered in a great big cluster across the potter’s field and watched, just as I did, while that twister lifted up and jumped right over the distillery, taking nothing more than a few shingles from the main house and a garden rake your father left propped against the downspout. It touched down another couple hundred yards in the distance, echoing like a herd of buffalo for miles.
“The deer, they hung about for a few minutes, stunned like I was, before they retreated back into the trees. One of them looked at me, William. Looked right at me. Then took off in a sprint. It was like they knew it was going to jump the potter’s field, and that’s why they’d come.”
“But twisters jump, don’t they?”
“Twisters jump.” He nodded. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“And another?”
“Maybe our famous twisted tree kept it away.” He chuckled at the improbability, but Mr. Browder had a way of making anything sound possible. “The twister saw those two trees already coiled in a loving embrace and assumed the damage here’d already been done.”
“But twisters don’t see—”
“No, they don’t. But I once knew a blind man who swore he could drive a tractor. So I bet him five dollars he couldn’t.”
“And?”
“And I lost five dollars. First he got on and drove about five yards in a straight line. ‘Pay up,’ he says. I was about to and he brushed my hand away. He was only needling me, you see. He started that tractor back up and drove for twenty minutes like a man with perfect sight. Knew the turns and angles of his acreage by the dips and undulations of the field. Could tell his speed by the sound of the wind against his face.”
William worked his sore jaw. What was he missing?
“The moral of the story, William, is don’t doubt people until you know some facts.” He smiled. “And next time I come face-to-face with a twister, I’m running away, ’cause there ain’t no chance it’ll jump the distillery twice.”
“I spoke to a man yesterday. He said something peculiar that makes sense if you believe twisters can see. He said he died for our sins.”
“Who? Jesus?”
“That’s what I assumed. But he said ‘just yesterday.’ He died just yesterday for our sins.”
Mr. Browder pursed his lips as he gazed out toward Asher Keating’s grave, where the four deer nosed the tall grass. “You think that man was in town early, waiting for Asher to be buried?”
“Could’a been. Or he could’a been a lunatic.” William made as if to get up but stopped suddenly. “Mr. Browder, was there something special about Henry?”
“Special how?”
“You know. The tornado. The deer. Mother said Henry never cried when he was born. The way he danced left everybody in awe. It was like he was put on earth to make people smile. And you said in your eulogy, at Henry’s burial, about his dancing . . .”
“Not everything is learned.” Mr. Browder tightened his jaw. “Some things just already are.” He used William’s leg for leverage to push himself up from the barrel run. “The first time I held Henry, his legs, they just kept moving. Barley, he said, ‘Look at’m, Ronald, the boy kicks like an overturned turtle, don’t he?’ I looked at the boy, watched him close. It wasn’t some random kicking, William. There was a rhythm to the way your brother’s legs moved, a cadence. I didn’t tell Barley, but it looked like dancing to me. And in hindsight I’m sure that it was.”
Mr. Browder bent down for his shotgun. “But since you asked, yes, I believe that sometimes God puts a little extra into the recipe.”
SIX
The front door opened and Samantha came out with a brown grocery bag in each hand.
“You packed my bags already?”
“No.” She put the bags down and stood beside William, hugging his arm. She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, William.”
“I am too. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
“My open hand is usually reserved for Johnny’s backside.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s in bed. His ego is hurt more than anything.”
“And Father?”
“He’ll forget about
it all.” She let go of his arm and put both hands on the porch railing. “You’re not completely wrong in assessing my relationship with Mr. Bancroft.”
He didn’t want to hear that she was having an affair. The reality would fully crack what Henry’s death hadn’t.
“We’ve had a lunch and a dinner, and one evening we went to a picture show. It’s nothing as bad as you’re imagining.”
William’s heart slid slowly back down from his throat. He didn’t realize how badly he’d needed to hear her say it.
“I needed to get out and have conversations with another adult. He showed me attention that I haven’t had in a long while.”
“He is snooping for dirt about Father.”
“Even I thought there may have been more to the wreck. And I was so upset at your father. Mr. Bancroft caught me in a weak moment and I agreed to lunch. And then a dinner. And then—”
“And that’s when he started coming to our church?”
“It was foolish, I know. I’ve become aware that we are not similar at all. He’s too extreme in his religious beliefs, and yesterday he spoke down to a poor Negro man simply because of the color of his skin. I despise that hatred. But the man is harder to shake off than a tick. He claims to love me.”
“Do you love him?”
“Of course not. I’ve only ever loved one man.” She folded her arms against the nighttime chill and chuckled. “Can you believe the bullet found that exact car, though?”
“Went right into his door. Like it had eyes.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking.” Samantha sighed. “And I don’t know what your father did during Prohibition, William. I asked once. He told me not to concern myself, but I had my suspicions. He was on the road too often and his clothes smelled of gunpowder. I laundered enough bloodstains to know he wasn’t following the straight and narrow.”
William looked at his mother. “So how much cash do we have?”
“Enough.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Enough.” She indicated the bags she’d carried from the house. “Come on. Let’s take our visitors some warm food.”
“Father said not to feed them.”
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