by Ninie Hammon
And the squirrel hunter wouldn’t be back next weekend.
Bubba turned with a smile, beckoned Daisy, and the two slipped silently back into the trees.
• • • • •
The four-man work crew assigned to unload barrel wagons outside the Double Springs Distillery warehouse called Citation pulled up in front of it as Seth McAllister hurried out of his office across the road and headed toward his vintage 1965 Mustang in the parking lot.
Brodie Jenkins, one of the crew men, spotted Seth and waved a greeting; the distillery owner lifted his hand in an absent-minded response. A tall, muscular man with hair as black as the night sky and eyes the color of a Hershey bar, Seth was distracted and running late. He wanted to stop by Beddingfield’s Funeral Home for Jim Bingham’s visitation before his one o’clock meeting at the cooperage and if he got stuck behind some farmer pulling a hay wagon on the road, he’d never make it.
The truck driver on the barrel crew eased the trailer into position in front of the warehouse. He parked it with the back end inclined at a steep angle down hill so gravity could propel the six 500-pound whiskey barrels lying on their sides in the trailer down guide rails behind it once the gate was removed and the retaining chock was knocked away from behind the back barrel.
A worker lifted the trailer gate off and tossed it into the grass just before the lunch buzzer sounded inside a nearby building. He and the others hopped down off the barrel wagon and headed for the break room.
But Brodie lingered behind, struggling with a fitting on the end of the first guide rail.
“I’ll be right with ya,” he mumbled under his breath. “Just gotta get this dad-gum catch … ”
He suddenly screamed, shrieked a chilling, heart-stopping wail of pain and terror! The back barrel had come loose, crushing his whole right arm as it rolled toward the end of the chest-high trailer. Worse, he was trapped! The five other barrels behind the one pinning his arm were loose now, too. Gravity was tugging them, dragging them down the slanted floor of the trailer. With no guide rails attached, all six barrels would topple off the end—right on top of Brodie!
He screamed again, a breathless cry of agony that ended in a strangled sob.
Out of nowhere, Seth appeared behind him and grabbed the hoop rings on both ends of the barrel a heartbeat before it tipped over the edge.
Brodie moaned, staring wide-eyed at his smashed arm. Then his knees buckled and he passed out, collapsed but couldn’t fall, merely dangled by his pinned arm off the back of the trailer.
Seth planted his feet, locked his elbows, shifted all his weight into his shoulders and arms, then shoved the barrel with all his strength. His knuckles turned white, his face red; black spots appeared in front of his eyes. But his feet were sliding! He could hear the barrel scraping against the rough oak side of the next barrel in line as it inched relentlessly forward.
When he was 10 years old, Seth had wormed his way through a group of workers crowded around something, and before his father could drag him away, he’d seen the man lying in a pool of blood, crushed by a barrel. The man had looked like road kill.
Come on, somebody! he screamed inside his head, but had no air to cry for help.
The barrel inched forward. Seth couldn’t hold it! Any second now …
Voices. The sound of running feet. A man appeared on either side of him, grabbed the barrel and started pushing.
“Here, Seth, we got it now,” the carrot-haired man on his right grunted, but Seth wouldn’t stop shoving until the barrel had been rolled all the way back into the trailer and the gate set in place behind it and fastened securely.
Once Brodie’s arm was freed, he’d collapsed in a heap in the dirt. As soon as the trailer gate was reattached, Seth collapsed beside him, sweat-soaked and panting. A crowd had materialized out of nowhere and everybody was talking at once. Seth couldn’t distinguish any one voice so he ignored them all, just lay there on his back for a moment looking at the blue sky, sucking in the smell of his own fear sweatmingled with the scent of warm grass and wildflowers.
Someone had rolled Brodie over face-up and Seth got to his knees beside him. The short, bald man’s arm was swelling like a water balloon on the end of a hose. It hung at an odd angle from his shoulder, too, and a lump showed through the skin there. Blood squirted in bursts from the compound fracture of his wrist where his right hand had been crushed backward onto the top of his forearm.
Seth shook his head to clear it.
Think!
“Somebody get me a belt, a rope. I need to make a tourniquet.” He was surprised that his voice was shaking, then he looked down and saw that his hands were, too.
A round-bellied man quickly unsnapped his suspenders. “These work?”
Seth wrapped one of the straps around Brodie’s arm just above the wound, picked up a stick off the ground, tied the other end around the stick and twisted the stick tight. The spurts of blood from Brodie’s wrist shrank to a trickle.
“Has anybody told Martha to call an ambul—?” Seth stopped. “No, wait.” Yesterday, he’d seen the Callison County Rescue Squad truck parked at Joe Denny’s house less than a mile away. “My radio’s in my jeep. Will somebody get it for me?”
Seth turned to the man who’d given him the suspenders. “That toolbox over there, scoot it up under Brodie’s feet, and get something to cover him up.” He sat back on his heels, ticking off a mental list. If only his hands would stop shaking! He looked up at the men crowded around him. “Anybody know what happened here?”
Everybody replied at once.
“You know them barrels couldn’t have started to roll ’less the chock was out.”
“Maybe the chock come loose.”
“How could a chock come loose with a barrel sittin’ on it?”
“It coulda slipped.”
“Brodie just got careless, that’s all,” someone said, not accusing, just stating a fact. “Nobody in his right mind’d stand behind a barrel wagon ’thout the rails attached.”
A worker rushed up with the radio out of Seth’s jeep along with the quilt off the rocker in the Visitor’s Center. As two men stretched the covering out over Brodie, Seth flicked the switch on the small hand-held device, producing an instant of static. He held his breath. The distillery was notorious for bad radio reception. Then he pushed the button to transmit.
“Joe Denny! This is Seth. You there?”
Static buzzed out of the radio again for a couple of seconds and Seth repeated the message into the mouth piece. When he released the transmit button, the radio hummed.
“What are we gonna do with you, Seth boy?” A twangy, Tennessee accent spoke out of the box. “We’re gonna bounce you out of this squad one of these days if you don’t learn to use call letters and ‘over’ and ‘clear’ and—”
“Brodie Jenkins is hurt, barrel got him.”
“Bad?” The bantering tone was gone.
“He’s bleeding, compound fracture of the wrist, cut the artery. I had to put a tourniquet on it, but he lost a lot of blood and he’s in shock. His shoulder’s dislocated, too, I think. Is the truck still parked at your place? Will it run?”
“It’ll run; fixed it yesterday. My partner’s here, too. We’ll be there in five minutes.” There was a pause. “KWO 376 clear!”
Seth smiled a little at that, then switched off his radio.
But as he sat in the dirt waiting for the truck, the familiar knot formed in the pit of his stomach. It struck him that he’d just experienced a perfect metaphor—a whiskey barrel about to topple down on top of him as the whole distillery was poised to tumble down around him. He had to admit though, being scared he was going to die had at least temporarily trumped being scared he was going to lose the distillery that had been in his family for five generations.
Chapter 4
Seth stood at his office window and watched the late afternoon shadow of the knob stretch out across the meadow toward the distillery.
The shader’s a’comin’.
His toothless grandmother would stop picking tomatoes or shucking corn or drawing water from the well and stand stock still, looking up as the sun dropped below the mountains that cradled her little Eastern Kentucky valley.
When it’s yore time to cross over, the shader’ll come for ye.
Granny Walker had died when he was 14, drew her last breath one afternoon a moment after the shadow of the mountain reached out its dark finger and touched the roof of her clapboard shack.
“So, how did it go?”
Seth had heard Martha come in but pretended he hadn’t, bought himself another few seconds before he had to face her.
Martha Gregory stood 5-foot-nothing and was somewhere between 50 and 200 years old. She’d worked for Seth’s father, Joseph Caleb McAllister III, the dashing young distillery owner who’d swept Granny Walker’s only daughter off her feet and carried her away from the mountains. Martha had been Joe McAllister’s assistant, his “right arm,” and since Joe’s death, she’d done her best to keep his son from making a mess of everything Joe’d worked for.
“Well?” She tapped her foot.
“It was awful.”
He tossed a file folder onto the pile of papers on his desk and sat down hard in the big, high-backed chair. “I suppose it could have been worse, but that would have involved incendiary devices and dead bodies and—”
“Don’t be cute with me, Seth,” she interrupted. Only it didn’t sound like a reprimand from his third-grade teacher. He looked into her eyes and saw compassion. That was harder.
“Ok, screw cute. Anderson Bertrand is a piranha and he smelled blood in the water.”
“Bertrand was there?” Martha sank into the chair in front of his desk, like maybe her knees couldn’t hold her up anymore. Seth had seen men go dead white when they saw Bertrand file into a divorce hearing beside their soon-to-be ex-wives. He was the lawyer who took the criminal cases nobody else wanted, soaked his clients for every dime they had, and then somehow managed to get most of them off, even when they were guilty as sin. No, especially when they were guilty as sin. Bertrand went for the jugular every time.
Seth’s meeting had been held in the board room of the cooperage just outside Brewster that had provided employment for generations of tough, strong men. At one end of the building, teams of workers operated huge band saws, slicing virgin white oak lumber into thin strips called barrel staves. Further down the line, a crozier machine fit the staves together, bent them into a barrel shape and attached metal hoops. Then the barrels, open at both ends, rolled down a conveyor belt toward the dragons—at least, that’s what Seth thought they were when he was a little boy.
The first time he went to the cooperage with his father and older brother, he’d taken one look at the gigantic flame-throwers shooting fire through the open-ended barrels, and bolted for the car. The unique, American whiskey called bourbon was developed in the early 1800s when a distiller in Bourbon County, Kentucky, discovered that a charred, white oak barrel gave whiskey aged inside it a distinctive color and taste. Since then, bourbon had become America’s most popular whiskey.
“Sam Abernathy and his accountant were there, too, of course, but you can guess who did most of the talking.”
The men in three-piece suits had made nice for awhile. Seth’s altercation with the whiskey barrel had made him too late to make the visitation, but Abernathy and Bertrand had come to the meeting from the funeral home. They all talked about Jim Bingham’s murder. It was the buzz of the community. Then they switched to the Callison County High School Wildcats’ abysmal showing in the Sweet Sixteen Basketball Tournament in the spring and the football team’s chances in the fall.
Seth had taken the offered seat at the head of the conference table where everybody who wanted to take shots at him would have a clear line of fire. He said very little during the small-talk stage. Then the nasal-voiced, bespectacled little accountant, who was the CFO of the cooperage, cleared his throat and picked up a file folder in front of him.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the size of the overdue balance on your account,” he said to Seth. “We’re here to discuss the options available to Abernathy Bourbon Cooperage, Inc. to recoup the losses we have incurred re your distillery.”
“Look, I think I can save all of us a lot of time by not doing some kind of dance here,” Seth said. “I know what the numbers are. So do you. I owe you roughly $375,000 and change, right?”
“Not counting interest and late fees,” Bertrand added.
Bertrand was a bookish, tweedy-looking man with a long, narrow face and pale blue eyes behind thick glasses. “I’m sure you’re aware that the contract you signed allows my client to charge 10 percent interest on any amount in arrears more than 30 days.”
Seth didn’t miss the “my client” part and knew he wasn’t supposed to.
“And to assess late fees on any account more than 60 days past due.” Bertrand shoved a paper with yet more numbers across the big oak table toward Seth, “I have here the amount owed if the debt were to be settled in full today, which I take it you didn’t come here to do.”
Seth glanced down at the number and the knot in his stomach cinched tighter: $421,120.76.
“I am correct, am I not? You are not here to make payment in full, are you Mr. McAllister?”
“Cut the Mr. McAllister crap, Andy. I knew you when you had zits the size of hominy. I didn’t come here to make payment in full, but I didn’t come here to play games either.”
“I can assure you, Seth,” Bertrand purred as his pale eyes narrowed in rage, “that the only game we’re here to play is hardball.”
“Fair enough.” Seth turned to face Sam Abernathy, whose shaggy gray eyebrows looked like dead wooly-worms over his eyes. “You pitch.” He turned to the accountant. “You catch.” His gaze returned to Bertrand. “And I’ll see if I can hit one out of the park.”
“I have here,” Bertrand said, “a copy of a motion I plan to file Monday morning in Callison County Circuit Court seeking—”
“Whoa!” Seth said, glaring at Abernathy. “Since when did we start dragging courts into our business affairs?” Maybe it was time to eat a little crow. “Sam, I think you know what’s going on here, that what’s happened to Double Springs is my doing.”
Sam and Joe McAllister had been good friends. If Seth had accrued any emotional capital from his father’s relationship with Abernathy, now was the time to spend it.
“I’m sure Daddy told you about the changes I wanted to make.” Seth winced at the memory of the look on his father’s face when he’d shared his plans. “You know how he was, wanted the Springs run the old way.” He struggled for an aw-shucks grin but couldn’t pull it off. “Classic story—clash of the generations.”
It had been more than that, of course. It had been the prodigal son story, too, except the father hadn’t greeted the boy with open arms. It had also been a ghost story, with his dead older brother sitting in as the invisible third party in every conversation.
“When Daddy died, I wasn’t prepared … You know nobody ever dreamed … ” Joe McAllister had suffered a massive coronary at the Fourth of July picnic two years before, was, the EMT later told Seth “dead before he hit the ground.”
“And all at once I was in charge.” Seth paused. “I was an idiot.”
No one offered any argument.
“I made some business decisions that I can see now were neither wise nor prudent.”
Like refusing to lay off employees. The bourbon industry had hit the skids hard and every other distillery had cut its workforce and tightened its belt. Not Double Springs. When Martha had confronted Seth about it, he’d lashed out at her.
“If you want me to throw 18 people overboard, then you get to decide who,” he’d said. “Tatum? Joel starts to law school in the fall. Or Rebecca? She’s pregnant, you know. Or…”
Seth had kept right on bottling bourbon even though it wasn’t selling.
“My business plan wasn’t—”
“We could sit here all day and listen to you sing mea culpa,” Bertrand interrupted. “But we’re not here to discuss your poor business judgment. It is totally immaterial to my client why you incurred the debt to Abernathy Cooperage. He’s only interested in collecting it.”
“Good, because I’m here to talk about paying it.”
That wasn’t what any of the men at the table expected to hear. It was now clear why they’d been gathered in the room all stiff and formal and awkward. They hadn’t come to badger, browbeat, or cajole Seth. They planned to get a judgment against the distillery and attach its assets. They were going to shut him down.
Seth opened the briefcase Martha’d gotten him for Christmas. It still smelled new. Taking out a document, he slid it across to Sam Abernathy. He had only one copy; he didn’t know there’d be a party. Let them fight over it.
As the men huddled around Abernathy to get a look at the document, Seth continued.
“That’s the payment schedule. Spells it all out—for the original $375,000.” He waited for Abernathy to lift his eyes from the paper, then grabbed his gaze and held it. “I’m not paying any penalties or interest. If you expect a dime more than what I owe you for the whiskey barrels you sold me, then you are going to have to drag this into court and let a bunch of strangers settle it.”
He figured Abernathy had sense enough to take a bird in the hand when he saw one. If he had to pay Bertrand’s legal fees, collecting the penalties and interest could end up costing the cooperage more than Abernathy would get back if he won.
Bertrand barely glanced at the document, just said to Abernathy. “Don’t take this offer. Our lawsuit will demand payment of the full amount owed.”
“Any barrels you purchase between now and when the balance is paid in full would be cash-and-carry,” the accountant put in quickly. “That would have to be part of the agreement.”