by Ninie Hammon
Then she heard the memory echo of her father’s voice in her head. At age 6 or 7, she’d asked him what he did at the newspaper. She never forgot his response: “My job is to tell as much of the truth as I can in the space I’ve got.”
Marijuana-growing was hurting people, killing people in Callison County, in the little community that would forever define “home.” That was truth. Whether she felt qualified and prepared or not, she had to take up where her father had left off. It was her job to connect the dots for people, just like Jim Bingham had done for 51 years.
She took a deep, trembling breath and began to type. The words of her first editorial for The Callison County Tribune lined up on the page neat as rows of staples in a box.
On my first day in the office, I told the staff of my father’s newspaper that I hadn’t come back home to Kentucky with some grand plan to change the way the paper operated or what we covered, that I didn’t intend to turn The Callison County Tribune into the LA Times.
I said that my only plan, such as it was, would cast me as the prophet Jeremiah. One of my favorite characters from the Old Testament, Jeremiah had an important job to do—rebuild the wall around Jerusalem. But before he started, he determined to step back and study. He took time to survey the wall.
That’s what I’ve been doing, surveying the wall in Callison County. I’ve read old newspapers and talked to so many people I’ve lost count. Here’s what I learned. If you haven’t looked at Callison County, really looked at it in awhile, what I’m about to describe may shock you. But ask yourself, are you really surprised?
Then she laid it out. All of it. She tacked words onto what everybody knew but nobody was willing to say out loud.
She described farmers who haven’t hit a lick at a snake in five years but live like kings. And businesses willing to take mildew-smelling bills—like maybe the money’s been buried, in payment for everything from groceries to dentures.
She chronicled the crimes—the shootings, the stabbing, the beatings, the murder, and described the marijuana trials, the hung juries, the acquittals, the never-been-to-court-at-alls.
She wrote about kids like Gabe ruined for life, and about federal Drug Task Force choppers—thwack, thwack, thwacking, low over the knobs, scanning the wind-whipped vegetation below for a particular shade of “marijuana green.”
Callison County, you’ve been pretending the emperor has clothes on long enough!
There is a mammoth marijuana-growing industry in this county, folks, and don’t tell me you don’t know it. You’ve seen it lurking in the shadows for years. Trouble is, you may not have figured out that marijuana’s easy money has bred greed and evil, and one of these days it’s going to land on you with both feet.
But you don’t have to wait until some doper breaks your door down in the middle of the night and brutalizes your family, or your son gets busted in a dope barn in another county and vanishes into a 20-year prison sentence, or your uncle gets shot in a parking lot or you get attacked in the woods by a savage Rottweiler. You can fight back now. Right now!
The dopers in Callison County think they’re 10 feet tall and bullet proof. Don’t you think it’s time somebody showed them different?
Look around you. Call the sheriff and report what you see. Testify in court. Indict. Convict! Stand up to the dopers and tell them you want your community back.
The Tribune hit the racks and landed in the mailboxes or on the doorsteps of the county the following Friday morning. And by noon, Sarabeth was hosting the sheriff and a man she recognized from Jimmy Dan’s Puckett’s marijuana trial. Kentucky State Police Detective Darrell Hayes was tall and thin. When she saw him testify that day, Sarabeth had thought he was an albino, with his pink skin and wispy flaxen hair. But up close, she could see that the man’s eyes, set inside almost-invisible blond eyelashes and eyebrows, were gray. Gun-metal gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, in the angular face of a department store mannequin.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Detective Hayes,” she said and gestured for him to have a seat in one of her father’s comfortable chairs. “What can I do for you gentlemen today?” As if she didn’t know.
“Well, I certainly don’t question your chutzpah,” the detective said.
Sarabeth cringed. She could have loaded her lifetime supply of chutzpah into a girdle and still had room for a fat woman. Oh, it was easy enough to write a fire-breathing editorial. She’d done that dozens of times. But actually facing the readers’ response, that was another thing altogether.
Hayes leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, put the tips of the fingers of both his hands together in a here’s-the-church-here’s-the-steeple fashion and tapped them as he spoke. “I’m just not sure I’d have declared war without checking with the troops first.”
“I guess you’ve got a point there,” she said.
Sarabeth glanced at Sonny, seated beside him, and discovered the sheriff was smiling.
“I was just thinking about your father,” he said. “About how many times I’ve sat in this same chair delivering this same message after he’d gone off about something—strip mining, unsafe roads, whatever.”
The mention of her father broke her heart along old fault lines that were just beginning to heal. “What I can’t understand is why Daddy didn’t write this same editorial a long time ago.”
“In the past year, Jim was uncharacteristically quiet,” Sonny said. “And busy. He was working on something, I think.” He looked a question at Hayes.
The detective shrugged. “He could have been chasing some story, I guess.”
“He was,” Sarabeth said, and told them about the last message her father had left for her, pointing out that he’d said he needed to “keep his mouth shut” about the story for a little while longer. Hayes immediately perked up.
“Do you know what the story was about?” He was totally focused on her response. “Did he tell you?”
Sarabeth shook her head. “But I bet it had something to do with dope.” She didn’t even realize she’d reached that conclusion until the words dropped out of her mouth.
“Not necessarily,” said Hayes. “Your father was big into environmental issues, too. Did stories on that hazardous materials dumpsite on the county line and on polluted groundwater—a lot of gasoline storage tanks have been in the ground so long they’ve started to leak. Your father had his finger in a lot of pies.”
The detective sat back in his chair and refocused. “You’re busy and we’re busy, so here it is, straight out. Dopers are like those bugs you find under rocks, roly-poly bugs. They operate best in the dark where nobody can see them and anytime you get near them, they roll up behind hard shells to protect themselves. But if you lift up that rock and let the sunshine in, they will come after you.”
“It could be as civilized as getting a bunch of your advertisers to cancel their ads,” Sonny said. “Or all of a sudden the chamber of commerce is all over you for giving the community a bad name, so it’s your fault if a jockey shorts factory decides not to build a plant here and out-of-work folks can’t find jobs.”
“Or it could be as uncivilized as a brick through the window.” The pale detective paused. “Your daddy tell you about that, about the brick through the window?”
“No, but Sonny did.”
“Dopers don’t care about bad publicity,” Hayes continued. “If their reputations mattered to them, they’d probably be in a different line of work. But if the folks in this county take your advice—if they report dopers instead of covering up for them, convict them when they’re on trial and indict the big boys—then those roly-poly bugs are gonna grow fangs and come out from under that rock and bite you. And keep on biting ’til you drop the rock and leave them be.”
“Point made; warning taken.” She kept her voice level, but her insides were quivering like Jell-o hit with a fork. There was no big-city anonymity to cower behind here; Callison County offered nowhere to hide.
“Dope’s seasonal; most of
it’s in barns now and we can’t go looking for it without a warrant.” Sonny sighed. “There’ll be no way to tell if your editorial has built a fire under the good citizens of Callison County until marijuana-planting season next spring.”
And that would have been a natural place for the men to get up and leave. But they just sat there.
“There’s something else we need to talk about,” Hayes said. “If you’re planning on taking the gloves off with dopers, you need to know who you might be swinging at.” He looked at Sonny, tossed him the conversational ball.
“I could make you a list right now of a dozen people I know are raising dope,” Sonny said, “people I’ve been trying to catch for years, but I can’t prove a thing.” He paused for a beat, and in that moment Sarabeth knew. She didn’t know how, but she knew.
After the officers left, Sarabeth sat in her office with the door closed, examining memories that suddenly felt as fragile as crystal Christmas ornaments.
The little boy who dangled his feet in the creek with her, chased fireflies in the backyard with her, and didn’t tell anybody when she accidentally shot him in the back of the head with a BB gun. You’ll shoot your eye out.
The boy who killed a snake with a rock before it could bite her. It had turned out to be a blacksnake, totally harmless, but neither one of them knew that at the time, so the act of courage counted.
The kind soul who’d held her hand while a judge passed sentence on her father’s murderer.
“ … sorry, Sarabeth, but your cousin, Billy Joe Reynolds, his name’s right up at the top of that list.”
• • • • •
Jake Jamison sat on the back deck that overlooked the pond behind his house and shoved his size 13D feet into a pair of new Nikes. It was early Saturday morning, just about time to leave for football practice in town. The first and second offensive teams were scheduled to scrimmage the junior varsity squad today.
He stood up and looked out over the pond. Three swans slid silently across the glassy surface—they’d gotten bigger birds after the catfish ate the baby ducks. The trees mirrored in the water were just beginning to turn, the edges of their leaves outlined in red and gold. He stopped to listen to the dogs. Target and Lucky were chasing something through the woods. Daisy was probably with them but she’d run down whatever they were after and kill it without making a sound. It was likely just a rabbit. Hopefully, not a porcupine! He’d had to take Target to the vet last week after he lost a battle with a porcupine and came home with a snout full of quills. And please, Lord, don’t let it be a skunk!
The boy loved animals. And that made a good excuse to get out of going hunting with his father. The real reason he didn’t want to go was more sinister. He just couldn’t stand his father’s cruelty. Bubba never killed anything straight out; he always figured out a way to make his prey suffer so he could watch.
“The best part’s seeing it in their eyes,” his father told him once as they stood over the helpless body of a wounded doe. “When they know they’re going to die but they can’t do a thing about it.”
A lot of Vietnam veterans refused to talk about the war but Bubba loved to. The day they’d shot the doe, he told Jake about the time his company had been questioning suspected Viet Cong sympathizers when two C119 Flying Boxcars laid down a wall of napalm on the hillside above the village.
“We had four gooks tied to posts at the bottom of the hill and all at once there were rivers of fire flowing down, coming right at them. It was like lava from a volcano. Seeing death come for you, that’s worse suffering than dying. Watching it, and there’s nothing you can do but scream.”
Jake would never forget the look that had been on his father’s face. It had been a hungry look, a profoundly evil look. Jake shuddered at the memory, turned to go into the house and there stood Bubba.
“Daddy!” Jake gasped. For a huge man, his father moved as silently as a mouse on a cotton ball. Out of nowhere, he was just there, behind you or beside you. It was more than just unnerving; it was spooky. It was calculated, Jake knew, designed to un-settle. And it worked every time.
Bubba had been standing behind Jake, studying the boy, for a full minute before he’d turned around. The big man didn’t often have mixed feelings. He knew what he liked, what he didn’t, what he wanted and how to get it. But he had mixed feelings about his only son.
The boy was a mystery to him, a profound paradox, one he thought about often, turned over and over in his head the way you worried a lemon drop with your tongue in your mouth. Bubba understood that his son was fundamentally different from his father in just about every way possible. Oh, he’d gotten his father’s size. At a thick, muscular 6 feet 4 inches tall, he was big for a 17-year-old. And he looked more like Bubba than Jennifer did. Jennifer was the image of her mother. But Jake had his father’s hawk nose, dark hair and eyes and square chin. He had Bubba’s voice, too, or would someday, deep and booming. It had been comical to listen to it slide up and down the scale when the boy was 13 and turning into a man.
But in all the ways that mattered in a human being, Jake was not his father’s son. Oh, he was tough. You didn’t want to fight him; he’d put you on the ground in a heartbeat. Mess with his little sister and he’d break your arm, had actually dislocated the shoulder of a boy on the school bus who put gum in her hair when she was in elementary school. Jake didn’t enjoy fighting, though; he wasn’t belligerent and aggressive like his father. He had an easy smile that lit up his eyes, he laughed a lot, had tons of friends. He was a good student, too, on his way to college after he graduated. Bubba had never completed high school and few people guessed how brilliant and clever he actually was, which was fine with him. What other people thought was of colossal unimportance to Bubba Jamison.
“I need you to do something for me, son,” Bubba said.
“Sure thing,” Jake said. “What can I help you with?”
“I want you to make friends with Ben Malone.”
It was such a totally bizarre request that Jake was afraid he hadn’t understood it properly. Ben Malone was the red-headed California kid who’d moved to town right before school started. He’d come out for football, but since he hadn’t been around for summer practice, Coach had pretty much written him off. You didn’t sweat with the team in the summer, you didn’t play with the team in the fall. Ben had ridden the bench the first two games, though it was not going unnoticed that when the California kid was running sprints, he was a rocket. Jake didn’t know him; didn’t like or dislike him. But how did his father know Ben? And why would he want Jake to become his friend?”
“You want me to … ?”
“You know who he is, don’t you?” Bubba rumbled.
“Yeah, I know,” Jake said, but how do you?
“Then you do what I said. Get to know him. Be his friend. I want you two to become buddies.”
Jake had been around the block often enough not to ask any questions. His father wouldn’t answer him if he did, and with Bubba’s hair-trigger temper, Jake could very easily get decked for asking.
“Ok,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever you say.”
“Good. Go on now, you’ll be late for practice.”
Jake turned and headed out the door.
Bubba went out on the deck where he could hear the dogs getting all over some critter in the woods. He pulled the folded-up copy of The Callison County Tribune out of his hip pocket, sat down in the chair Jake had just vacated, and opened it to the editorial page where a headline read: And the wall came a’tumblin’ down.
Bubba sat back and read it again.
Chapter 10
Ben had already left for football practice when Sarabeth looked at her watch. Squinted. Moved her arm closer to her face, then farther away. Still blurry. She’d just have to get a watch with bigger numbers on it, that’s all. The clock on the dresser confirmed she needed to get moving if she was going to get the house clean and the laundry done before her one o’clock interview.
She’d set it up after she saw the front page of the Kentucky section of Thursday’s issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal. A story there under the headline “On the Rocks” described how the state’s bourbon industry was tanking, with sales at their lowest point in almost 30 years. Stiffer drunk-driving laws, new federal excise taxes, people out jogging instead of sitting home drinking had combined to send the industry into a tailspin, causing huge losses at Jim Beam, Barton and Heaven Hill.
It was one sentence at the end of the story that caught her attention, though. Seems Double Springs Distillery in Callison County appeared not to be experiencing the same financial difficulties as the others. It was bottling whiskey just like it had two years ago without a single layoff. One distillery chugging along like The Little Engine That Could.
She figured she’d go out to Double Springs and shake a few trees and see if anything fell out. And there was the niggling little itch in her mind she couldn’t scratch. Double Springs distributed bourbon all over America. Maybe Daddy’s national story had something to do with the distillery.
As the sun moved westward past noon, Sarabeth pulled her car off the road and parked in a shaded gravel lot beside one of the few remaining covered bridges in Kentucky. She slipped the strap of her camera around her neck, fit a 20 mm lens on its nose and stepped out to shoot a couple of wide-angle shots of the collection of ancient, blue-shuttered buildings scattered like a child’s toys over the top of Ballard Ridge knob high above the Rolling Fork River. Even the full-color brochure she’d picked up at the chamber of commerce office didn’t do justice to the grandeur of the distillery so untouched by the years it had been named a National Historic Landmark.
“Double Springs—where the making of fine, Kentucky bourbon is more an art than a business.” At least that’s what the brochure said.
Sarabeth fired five or six quick shots, then slowly lowered her camera, shaded her eyes with her hand and stood staring up the hill. There was something about this place, something almost mystical. She’d been here a couple of times with her father when she was a kid and she’d felt it then, too. But whatever the special it was, she knew she hadn’t tacked its image spread-eagled to the film inside the camera dangling from a strap around her neck.