Since he seemed in a telling mood, I asked, “How’d you learn to make whiskey?”
“Your own daddy showed me. Didn’t he never tell you about that? He used to help his daddy and after Mr. Robert died, he got me to help him, he did. He was real particular about how we made it, too, he was—clean, pure water and we never doctored it up with lye or wood alcohol. That’s how come he always got top dollar for his jars. Nobody never went blind nor even got sick neither, drinking Kezzie Knott’s whiskey, no they didn’t.”
“You ever get caught?” I asked.
“Naw.” There was pride in his voice. “I never made it all that much after we growed up. Oh, I’d run me off maybe twenty or thirty gallons when Elsie needed more cash money than I could lay my hands on, but mostly I helped Kezzie with the distribution. He give me a flat wage, he did, to keep everybody’s cars and trucks running. Dallas used to make him a little spending money when your daddy was short of drivers. Allen, too, if he was staying with us.”
I knew some of the broad outlines of Daddy’s illegal operations. My grandfather had been a poor farmer with a houseful of children and when corn dried up in a drought year or boll weevils got all the cotton, he’d run a little white whiskey for enough cash money to put shoes on their feet and clothes on their backs and maybe pay taxes on his forty-three acres of land.
There’s always been a conflict between the makers of morality and the makers of whiskey, and an ABC store is still the only place you can buy hard liquor in the state. (As the saying goes, “North Carolinians will vote dry as long as they can stagger to the polls.”) But there’s also been a mutual dependence. The evils of alcohol are well documented and make for fiery sermons, yet the higher the sin tax, the more profitable the shot houses, those unlicensed back-country dwellings where you can buy a shot of untaxed liquor day or night and on Sunday morning, too, if the proprietor knows you. In many communities, the biggest bootlegger is also the biggest contributor to local fund-raisers, the first to reach into his pocket when a poor family suffers tragedy, the one who’ll hold a note two or three times longer than any bank. A lot of people may know who’s running whiskey in their community, yet they keep their mouths shut. Not out of fear, but out of gratitude for the personal help the bootlegger may have given to their families in times of stress.
When you throw in the basic anarchist nature of old-time independent farmers, it’s a wonder there’s not a still behind every tree in North Carolina, stills operated by conflicted, God-fearing farmers who can’t see much difference between making whiskey and growing tobacco. What’s all that bad, they’ll ask, about sending corn to market in a jar instead of on the cob? And one or two have even been heard to wonder out loud how come the government supports tobacco, yet outlaws marijuana?
My grandfather was killed when Daddy was still a boy. The revenuers couldn’t catch his souped-up Model T, so they shot out his tires and he crashed into Possum Creek and drowned before they could get to him. Nowadays there’d be a lawsuit for wrongful death; back then it was good riddance to bad trash as far as the revenuers were concerned.
Although he hadn’t even started shaving yet, Daddy took over as head of the household and whenever times were tough, he’d amble off down to the swampy part of the creek and use his father’s recipe to cook up the mash. With the scrimping and saving of his first wife, he accumulated enough cash to bankroll a little country store at Pleasant’s Crossroads and after that he had a loyal supplier of sugar and Mason jars. By the time he married my mother, he had put a couple of layers of insulation between himself and the production end and was directing a distribution network that some people say reached from Canada to Mexico.
That network supposedly included some of the biggest names in early stock car racing, men who bought and then juiced up their first cars with the cash they got hauling moonshine out of Colleton County. Indeed, the sport got its start in North Carolina with young daredevils who outran law officers on moonlit nights and got together on weekends along deserted dirt roads or out in isolated pastures to see whose car could go fastest. Lee Petty always downplayed or flat-out denied any whiskey connection, but Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Little Joe Weatherly, Wendell Scott, Buddy Arlington?
When they hit a roadblock, every one of them knew how to execute a “bootleg turn”—that quick reverse and one-eighty dig-off that throws dirt in the lawman’s eyes and has you flying back down the road like it’s the devil’s racetrack. Before the law can get a good look at your license plate, you’re going, going, gone, and all he sees are tail-lights fading in his rearview mirror.
Today, the Highway Patrol calls it a three-point turn and they teach a sedate version in Driver’s Ed, but everybody out here knows who invented it.
And why.
“Did you know Daddy was a bootlegger when you married him?” I asked my mother that summer she was dying.
She nodded. “But like every woman since Eve, I thought I could change him. He didn’t need the money anymore. The store was doing well, he had land and sons to help him farm it and tobacco was booming. He swore he’d quit if I’d marry him. And he did quit.”
Mother’s smile was rueful as she reached for the old battered Zippo lighter that was always near to hand. Even though she seldom lit a cigarette anymore, she liked to hold it in her thin hands, run her fingers over the worn insignia engraved on the front, then flip open the cover and make the little flame blaze up inside the wind guard. “It’s like the way I quit smoking a dozen times or more. Quitting’s easy. Staying quit’s a different matter. Right now it’s been almost eight years for him.”
She shook her head. “Or maybe I’d better say I think it’s been eight years since he’s messed with it. He could have started up again yesterday or he could start tomorrow. Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about. At least, it’s the only lie I ever caught him in.”
And then she did laugh, a rich warm chuckle that sounded almost like her old self.
Laughter balanced so tightly on the edge of tears that summer and her voice was tremulous as she touched my face. “Oh Deborah, honey, try to marry a man you can laugh with, okay?”
“Okay,” I promised, unable to keep my own voice from wobbling.
She smoothed my hair away from my eyes and said, “You reckon you’ve met him yet?”
“Come give ’er a try now,” said the man I’d married before my mother was two months in her grave.
I went over and got inside my car and cranked it up.
Almost immediately, Allen declared the operation a success. “Your battery’s charging good as new now, darlin’, but your oil looks a little dirty. Better let me change it for you, long as you’re here.”
He didn’t really wait for my consent, just started jacking up the front end so that he could squeeze underneath while lying flat on one of those rollerboard creepers.
If Mr. Jap hadn’t been sitting there with a hopeful look on his face, I’d have paid Allen and left. Instead, as Allen disappeared underneath the front of my car carrying an oil pan, I went back over to the open doorway and leaned against the jamb. There was really nowhere I needed to be this afternoon and Mr. Jap clearly wanted to talk. I kept thinking of Daddy with eleven living sons and Mr. Jap’s one son buried over at Sweetwater Baptist with Allen Stancil the only blood kin left to him.
Whatever Allen wanted here—money or a temporary place to hole up—I was pretty sure that when he got it, he’d be long gone and Mr. Jap would be alone again except for Merrilee and her dutiful Sunday morning check on him.
“Some folks don’t even have that much,” my internal preacher reminded me.
I stared out into the rain while Mr. Jap talked happily about his plans for the garage. As soon as Billy Wall paid him what was owed, he was going to get that hydraulic lift fixed and buy a bigger air compressor so that they could ran an air chisel and a sandblaster, start blasting the rust off some of those old cars. Why, there was a doctor over in Widdington been after him for o
ver a year for that old Stingray.
“Offered me nine hundred dollars just as she stands, he did.”
And Allen knew a dealer out in Charlotte that’d write him out a check tomorrow for ten thousand dollars if he’d give the word and let the man haul ’em out, but he and Allen were going to do the restoring themselves and make a bundle.
Allen had turned into a car-fixing genius, to hear Mr. Jap tell it. He’d bought a badly wrecked car from some guy on the other side of Raleigh and almost overnight he’d fixed it up good enough to sell.
“And that’s just with my old tools, it was. Think what he’ll do when we get us a new acetylene torch and a paint sprayer and maybe some of them newfangled electronic testers.”
He lit another cigarette. “I know a lady over in Cotton Grove as can reupholster seats and make new head linings, she can. Real good and real cheap. Yes, ma’am! Give us another five or six years and we’ll be the place to come for restoring old cars, yes we will.”
The way he talked about stretching that corn money, he sounded like a fat man who expected to button a thirty-eight-inch waistband around a forty-two-inch beer belly. Of course, he could also be counting what he might eventually receive from Dallas’s estate.
“I guess you’ll be glad when the trial’s over and everything’s settled,” I said.
Mr. Jap’s lips tightened. “I don’t see why it has to take ’em so long. The DA says it’ll probably be June and then if she’s found guilty”—he almost spit the word she—“he says she’ll probably appeal and it could drag out for years. Well, let her, say I. In the end, she’ll burn in hell, she will, for a thousand thousand years. Ain’t no way she can appeal that!”
He leaned his head toward me and spoke confidentially of how John Claude Lee was handling things. “Dallas didn’t have no will, so Mr. Lee says I’ll get at least half of everything anyhow, but he’s sharp, he is. Got her believing that if she signs the land over to me, it’ll make the jury think she didn’t want Dallas dead for the money. Maybe let her get off with manslaughter instead of murder.”
The rain was coming down even heavier now. It thundered on the tin roof, cascaded off the eaves and flooded the rutted drive. I’d have been more concerned if I didn’t know that twenty minutes after it stopped, the rain would soak right on through this sandy soil. Creeks may flood out of their banks after hard rains, but puddles don’t stand for very long around here.
“Will it bother you if she gets off easy?” I asked.
“Ain’t no jury that dumb,” he said with conviction, “and I’ll finally get my land back, I will, and then I can sell—”
He broke off with a guilty air.
“You’re thinking of selling it?”
“Just a little bit, but I promised I wouldn’t say nothing about it right now and you got to promise me you won’t say nothing to nobody neither, ’specially not to Kezzie, you won’t.”
It was one thing for Dick Sutterly to be maneuvering to develop G. Hooks Talbert’s relatively small acreage, if that’s indeed what he had in mind. But Mr. Jap’s was much bigger and alarm bells clanged in my head at the very thought.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jap, but if you’re planning to sell some land between you and Adam so Dick Sutterly can get at G. Hooks Talbert’s land, don’t you think my daddy has a right to know about it?”
“That ain’t what I’m selling,” he said hotly, “and even if it was, it ain’t nobody’s business but mine, no it ain’t.”
9
« ^ » Vegetation is amazingly quick in this province; the soil, in general, will produce most things; the climate has something so kindly, that the soil, when left to itself, throws out an immense quantity of flowers and flowering shrubs.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
I’d planned to sleep in next morning, but the telephone beside my bed woke me at first light and it was Haywood’s wife Isabel in my ear explaining why they hadn’t driven over to Kinston yesterday to catch that chartered plane to Atlantic City as they’d planned.
“You know we always go on a Friday so we don’t have to miss church, but the cows got out yesterday and by the time we got them back in, it was too late, so Haywood and Anthony, they’re going to walk all the fences today instead.”
I listened groggily, wondering what cows and missing their gambling weekend had to do with me. The whole idea of Haywood—Haywood, for Pete’s sake!—sitting in a casino in Atlantic City blows my mind whenever I try to picture it. For starters, he’s just over six feet and weighs just under three hundred. He’s most comfortable in his size 14EEE brogans, denim overalls, and an old felt porkpie hat, out on the tractors with Anthony, his black tenant. And he’s usually pretty frugal with a dime.
But somehow he and Isabel got talked into trying a “free” weekend in Atlantic City a few years back and they loved it so much that every two or three months, they’ll join a bunch of similar-minded folks from eastern Carolina and head for the flashing neon lights. The flight, overnight accommodations, meals and floor show are all complimentary—glamorous bait for the gullible. Sometimes the promoters sweeten the pot even further with a couple of rolls of quarters.
But unless their free charter flights are bringing in bigger gamblers than Haywood, I can’t see that they’re getting much return on their investment.
He gets a big kick out of playing the slot machines, pushing his quarters in, pulling the handle, and watching all the lights and symbols flicker and dance. He paces himself though and he knows to the quarter exactly how much he and Isabel can lose, usually two or three hundred dollars. Once their modest stash is gone, he quits. He figures it’s worth a few hundred to get off the farm for twenty-four hours, walk on the boardwalk, enjoy the food and the entertainment. “Don’t cost no more’n a weekend down at some fish camp in Salter Path,” he says, “and it shore is a purty sound when all them quarters come spilling down.”
Isabel doesn’t care much for gambling. She plays the slots till her three or four rolls of quarters are gone, then she walks around the casino and enjoys the glitter. She people watches or holds a friend’s place at a hot machine while they go to the bathroom or grab a bite to eat; and when her feet start hurting, she goes upstairs to their room, orders room service, then either watches television or naps till Haywood comes up to take her down to dinner—“Prime ribs with au jus,” Haywood tells me, patting his ample waistline with remembered pleasure—and the floor show.
Some of my churchier brothers and sisters-in-law think this is all vaguely sinful, but Haywood just shrugs. “Sin is in the eye of the belittler,” he says. “We gamble on the weather, we gamble on tobacco prices and the price of beef. Don’t you reckon it’s all mute to God?”
So I yawned and listened to Isabel’s tale of those dratted cows and eventually she worked her way around to why she was calling.
“They’re having a special two-night promotion because Thanksgiving’s such a slow day. They’re even going to give everybody fifty dollars playing money, so I was talking to Nadine and Minnie and they say it doesn’t matter to them whether we get together Thanksgiving Day itself or next Saturday since Adam’s planning to leave Wednesday and won’t be here anyway. And Mr. Kezzie never cares if it’s Thanksgiving or not, so if it’s all right with you, it’s all right with everybody else ’cause Amy and Will were supposed to go to her mother’s on Thursday and this way, they can—”
“It’s fine, Isabel,” I assured her. “Whatever y’all want to do. Just tell me what to bring and where to bring it.”
“Well, why don’t you bring the paper plates and napkins? Nadine says she has plenty of plastic cups if we don’t mind blue. Not very Thanksgiving-y, but they’ll drink the same. And Minnie and me, we thought we’d have it at the homeplace. We can set up sawhorse tables in the potato house and bring in some heaters if it turns off cold. It’s good for the grandchildren to get together there, don’t you think? Before they all get grown and scattered and Mr. Kezzie gets too old or something?”
A pang went throu
gh me at that “or something” that none of us ever want to name.
“Stevie’ll still be off from school that weekend and Valerie and her family can come, too,” said Isabel. “I don’t know about Robert’s children, but Doris said she’d ask them.”
“Daddy doesn’t like to give Maidie a lot of extra work on the weekend,” I warned.
“She won’t have to do a thing. We’ll be bringing all the food and the boys’ll set up the tables and bring down chairs. No dishes to wash.”
I told her it sounded good to me, that I’d try to find some plates and napkins to match Nadine’s blue cups, and that if I didn’t see her before then, for them to have a happy Thanksgiving in Atlantic City. Then I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but it was no use. I was wide awake now and even with the windows open, the room was too warm for comfort.
I slipped on a light robe and stepped out on the second-story brick veranda that runs the length of the house. The rain had stopped around midnight but nothing had dried off. The bricks were still slick with water and Hambone’s paws almost skidded out from under him as he came bounding up the steps to greet me with his coat damp from dew and fog. The morning air was so heavy and humid, I felt I could almost squeeze it like a sponge.
Downstairs, I poured myself a glass of juice and watched live shots of falling snow on Aunt Zell’s kitchen television. Colorado had already had a blizzard or two this year and now a strip of the country from the Blue Ridge right up through northern New York was getting snow today. According to the weatherman, though, Colleton County, along with the rest of eastern North Carolina, was going to remain under the influence of this humid offshore southern breeze.
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