Moonshiner's Son

by Carolyn Reeder

  After supper Tom cranked the sausage mill, grinding the sprouted corn kernels he’d spread on the shed roof that morning to dry in the sun. Already his arm was beginning to tire, but he kept on working. Pa needed the sprouted corn—he called it malt when it was ground—to start the mixture of cornmeal and water in the mash barrels fermenting.

  Tom knew it would save a lot of time and trouble if Pa used yeast instead of malt and added sugar to his mash barrels, the way Eddie Jarvis and Hube Baker and all the other men did. It would take less cornmeal, too. But Pa prided himself on making pure corn whiskey the oldfashioned way—only he called it traditional instead of old-fashioned—and Tom was glad of it. Anybody could make sugar liquor, but making pure com whiskey was a craft a person could be proud of.

  Tom had just finished grinding the last of the malt and was closing the shed door behind him when he heard the sound of hooves on the rocky path. He was almost to the cabin when the preacher stormed through the gate and up to the porch to confront Pa.

  “You lied. Yesterday you told my daughter that sack of com would be used for cornmeal, but you made it into liquor and today you had this boy passing it off as buttermilk! How can you involve a child in this nefarious business?”

  “Who do you think you’re callin’ a liar?”

  Pa had risen to his feet and stood towering over Preacher Taylor, but the preacher held his ground. The air almost crackled with the men’s anger. Tom feared for the preacher—nobody called June Higgins a liar and got away with it—until he had a flash of inspiration. He gave an ugly laugh and said, “You sure don’t know much. Preacher Taylor.”

  Both men looked at him in surprise. “Two things everybody ‘round here knows,” Tom went on. “One is, my pa’s no liar. The other is, you don’t go from com to whiskey in just a day or two. You’ve got to set your mash, an’ then it takes a while to sprout some of the kernels an’ grind ‘em for malt, an’ then you’ve gotta let the mash ferment for at least—”

  “Enough!” Preacher Taylor said, holding up his hand. “I have no desire to learn how you manufacture your evil brew.” Then he faced Pa again. “But I owe you an apology, Higgins. I was wrong to call you a liar.”

  Tom held his breath while Pa looked at the preacher for a long time, as if he were measuring the man’s worth and weighing what his response should be. “See that you don’t never do it again,” Pa said at last. “Now set down in that rockin’ chair and cool yourself off.”

  The preacher shook his head and declared, “It’s my duty to destroy any liquor you have here so I can save the members of this community from the evils of drink.”

  “You won’t find no likker here,” Pa said. He winked at Tom and added, “Only drink I’ve got is a couple gallon of buttermilk.”

  Preacher Taylor’s eyes lit up. “Where’s your springhouse?” he demanded.

  “Ain’t got one. But there’s a spring box out back. Tom, show him where it’s at.”

  Pa was playing cat and mouse with the preacher, Tom realized as he led the way around the cabin. He wondered what they would find in the spring box.

  “Aha!” the preacher said when he saw the five fruit jars immersed in the water alongside the crock that held the rest of Mrs. Brown’s fried chicken and the butter.

  As the man bent forward, Tom said, “Likker ain’t white, Preacher Taylor.”

  “The boy’s right, Preacher,” Pa said. “Some folks call it white lightnin’ ‘cause it hits you like a bolt out of the blue, but it ain’t really white at all.”

  “I know that. But I also know this can’t be buttermilk, because you don’t have a cow.” Reaching for a jar, he said, “I’ll bet you painted the inside of the glass.”

  “Wait,” Pa commanded. “Tom, pick up the one closest to you an’ unscrew the lid for the preacher.”

  Tom did as he was told and hid a grin when he saw that the jar was filled with a milky white liquid. “Want a taste?” he asked, looking up innocently.

  The preacher made a face just like Amy had that morning, and then he turned to Pa. “I hope you don’t really think you can fool me into believing the rest of these jars are full of buttermilk, too,” he said scornfully. One by one, he lifted them from the spring box and opened them. Then, obviously disappointed to find that they all held the same white liquid, he stood up and said, “You’ve won this time, Higgins. But don’t laugh too hard, because before I’m through here, these hills and hollows are going to be decent, law-abiding places for people to live.”

  “I don’t laugh at folks who act accordin’ to their convictions,” Pa said, “but I don’t much cotton to them that try an’ make me act accordin’ to their convictions.”

  The preacher pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dried his hands. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess we both know where we stand.” And stuffing the handkerchief back in his pocket, he walked quickly around the cabin.

  Tom looked up at Pa and asked, “How’d you know he was comin’? An’ what did you put in them jars?”

  “Use your head, boy. You told me yourself how nosy that li’l gal was down at Miz Brown’s springhouse. What do you think she saw in them crocks?”

  Closing his eyes, Tom tried to picture the contents of the crocks—fried chicken, milk, butter, maybe some clabber cheese. His eyes popped open. So that was why Amy had ignored him when she left. She knew he’d lied about the Widow Brown’s cow being dry.

  “Bet it didn’t take the preacher’s gal that long to figure out what was goin’ on,” Pa said. “Anyhow,” he went on, self-satisfaction evident in his voice now, “I mixed me some lime an’ water till it looked enough like buttermilk I wanted to drink it, poured it into them jars, an’ set back to wait for Preacher Taylor to come ridin’ up here.”

  “What’s he gonna do next, Pa?”

  “I don’t know, boy, but whatever it is, you can bet I’m gonna be ready for him.”

  Tom didn’t doubt that for a minute. The preacher didn’t stand a chance against his pa.

  7

  “That’s him—he said he’d holler.” Tom tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. He ran to the gate to meet Andy, but Pa kept his place on the bench.

  Tom greeted their guest and escorted him to the porch. “This here’s my pa,” he said proudly as Andy stooped to keep from bumping his head on the low porch roof.

  “So you’ve come to hear a story,” Pa said, standing up.

  “That’s right,” Andy said as they shook hands.

  “Wal, have a seat in that there rocker, an’ we’ll discuss it,” Pa said, lowering himself onto the bench again.

  Tom frowned. What was there to discuss?

  Pa gave Andy an appraising look and said, “I hope you don’t expect me to give my tales away without gittin’ nothin’ in return.”

  Andy looked surprised. “What did you have in mind?”

  “A swap. For every tale I tell, you tell one. An’ you can start, since you’re a guest.”

  Good for Pa, Tom thought, reaching into his pocket for his whittling knife. “Do you know the one about the kings, Andy?” he asked hopefully.

  “Which kings do you mean?”

  “Agamemnon and Odysseus,” Tom said, wondering how many kings there were.

  “The Iliad!” Andy exclaimed. “Sure, I know that one. It’s the story of how the Greek kings and their men fought a war with the Trojans over Helen, the beautiful queen who had been stolen away from her husband by a prince from Troy.”

  Tom shaved a curl of wood from the ear of the fox he was carving. At least his ma hadn’t been stolen away by another man, he thought. Pa wouldn’t have stood for that any more than those kings did. But it would have been easier for him to understand than her leaving of her own free will. And leaving him behind. Suddenly catching the name Agamemnon, Tom turned his attention to Andy.

  The sun was low by the time Andy leaned back and said, “This is a good stopping place—it’s much too long a story for one night.” He reached into his hip pocket a
nd drew out a flask. After he drank, he passed the flask to Pa and said, “Try this. You won’t find any better.”

  Pa reached for it and took a swallow. “You’re right,” he agreed. “You won’t find no better. Where’d you git this here whiskey?”

  “Whiskey? That’s buttermilk. I found it in Mrs. Brown’s springhouse.”

  Tom grinned as he shaved away a bit of wood from his fox’s tail. Andy sure was different from Preacher Taylor.

  Pa wiped his mouth with his sleeve and handed back the flask. “Wal,” he said, “my story happened a long time ago, too—back in my grandpap’s day. But it happened right here in this holler. An’ my story has a king, not a king with a army, but a man the neighbors all looked to as a leader. Sometimes folks called him King Britten, but even when they was callin’ him Josiah, they knew better ’n to cross him.”

  “Folks sometimes call Pa King Higgins,” Tom said. “Did you know that, Andy?”

  “You know better ‘n to interrupt my story, boy,” Pa growled.

  Tom bent over his carving and muttered “Sorry,” but he knew Pa hadn’t really minded the interruption.

  The next evening Andy came to the cabin again, and this time he had a notebook with him. “Later I’m going to write down your story in this,” he explained when he saw Tom and Pa looking at it. He rocked quietly for a moment and then picked up the story of the Greek kings where he’d left off the night before. Tom listened, entranced, as Andy’s voice rose and fell, sometimes tense with excitement, sometimes almost a whisper.

  Finally, Andy stopped and reached for the jar of moonshine Pa passed him. After he drank, he handed the jar back to Pa and said, “I’ll be writing down your story, June, but don’t worry about whether I’m keeping up. I won’t have any trouble at all.”

  Pa took a swallow from the jar and screwed the lid back on, and Tom couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or nervous about all this.

  “Actually, what I’m gonna tell you tonight ain’t really a tale,” Pa said. “It’s somethin’ that happened to me a couple years back. It was a night in late October, with a big ol’ moon a-hangin’ in the sky all round an’ yaller, an’ I thought to myself. Now this is a night for a coon hunt if I ever saw one. So I got my gun an’ called my dog Blue, an’ off I went.”

  A little shiver of anticipation ran down Tom’s spine. Pa’s coon hunt stories were among his best. The Jack tales and the King Britten stories Pa had learned years ago from his uncle, but the coon hunt stories were his very own.

  “Wal, directly I met Cat Johnson on the path an’ I say, ‘Hey Cat! Git your ol’ hound dog an’ your gun.’ Pretty soon we had us a group of five or six men, each of us with one of the finest dogs that ever walked these woods, an’…”

  Tom was putting the finishing touches on his fox carving when Pa came to the end of the story. “Then, just as the moon went behind a cloud, we heard somethin’ comin’ up Jenkins Branch. We knew it was fearful big, from the splashin’ it was makin’. An’ as it came closer, the trees whipped to and fro like in a great wind, but there wasn’t even a breeze stirrin’, an’ the dogs tucked their tails between their legs an’ whimpered. Other ’n that, the only sound was that terrible splashin’, gittin’ closer and closer to us. By now, of course, we was all behind that big boulder beside the branch, peerin’ over the top.

  “Then all of a sudden the moon came out from behind that cloud an’ it seemed ‘most light as day, an’ we could see the water splashin’ an’ churnin’ in the branch—but there was nothin’ there! An’ then the splashin’ an’ churnin’ stopped right opposite the boulder we was behind. The trees stopped their wavin’, too. Wal, by then we’d all ducked down behind the boulder, but I peered ’round the side of it, an’ what do you think I seen?”

  “What?” breathed Tom. He hadn’t heard this tale before.

  “I seen wet footprints appear on the steppin’ stones. Huge wet footprints, an’ there was nary a creature making ’em!”

  Tom frowned. He knew the boulder Pa was talking about, but there weren’t any stepping stones. Just the footlog.

  “An’ while I watched, one by one, them steppin’ stones just sank right down into the water. Whatever made them footprints was so heavy it pushed ’em clean down in the mud so’s they disappeared. We never did know what it was we didn’t see, but nobody doubted we didn’t see it, ’cause them steppin’ stones was gone. An’ they still are. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

  Tom nodded, wondering if Andy would think about Pa’s story when he crossed there on his way back to the Widow Brown’s cabin. Would he shine that fancy flashlight of his all up and down the branch before he stepped onto the footlog?

  Tom watched the man close his notebook and clip his pencil into his shirt pocket, and suddenly he wished he could write. He wondered why somebody didn’t tell Preacher Taylor that if he really wanted to help the people in these hills, he’d hurry up and build that school.

  8

  Tom couldn’t remember when the trip to the settlement had seemed to take so long. For the hundredth time, he glanced back to make sure the two sacks Pa had knotted together for him to drape across Ol’ Sal’s back were still safely in place.

  He wished he hadn’t volunteered to take Pa’s whiskey to the store. He should have just walked down and told Ol’ Man Barnes that Pa wouldn’t be able to make his delivery tonight because he’d twisted his ankle. But instead he’d offered to take the whiskey two miles down the mountain, pretending the painted jars were filled with buttermilk.

  The clank of the jars made Tom nervous, and he tried to reassure himself that no one would suspect they weren’t really full of buttermilk. After all, delivering a batch of moonshine wasn’t a boy’s job, and it wasn’t something you did in broad daylight, either.

  It seemed like a long time before Tom passed the cabins scattered along the trail near the mouth of the hollow. He drew a deep breath, relieved that his trip would soon be over. When he came into the settlement, he saw a magnificent black horse tied in front of the store. Several men were admiring it, and without thinking, Tom hurried to join them.

  As he approached, the men turned toward him. One look at their faces when they heard the clanking of jars in the sacks slung across Ol’ Sal’s back told Tom that the powerful horse belonged to a revenuer. And as if to confirm this, he heard two shots from the direction of the Rigsbys’ house. Lonny must have been at the store with his pa and slipped home to fire the signal when the revenuer arrived.

  Tom’s mouth went dry. What should he do now? As he hesitated, a portly stranger with steel-gray hair came out of the store and glanced around. When the man’s eyes fell on Tom, he knew he had no choice, so he took a deep breath and started forward again. With trembling fingers, he tied Ol’ Sal to the porch rail, and then he joined the group around the sleek black horse. He could feel the stranger’s eyes on him as he greeted the men and ran his hand along the animal’s neck.

  Then, trying to look like a boy who was bringing buttermilk to trade at the store, Tom untied the sacks, left one on the ground, and picked up the other. The jars inside clanked together as he hung the sack over his shoulder, and the stranger came down the steps of the store and said, “I’ll give you a hand with that.” But instead of picking up the second sack, he began to open it.

  His heart pounding, Tom started up the steps to the store. “It’s easier to carry them jars if you leave ’em in the sack,” he said over his shoulder. The men standing around the horse stared at him, and when the stranger followed him inside, Ol’Man Barnes stared, too. Beads of sweat gathered on the storekeeper’s forehead.

  “I’ve brought some buttermilk for you to sell in town tomorrow, Mr. Barnes,” Tom said, hoisting his sack onto the counter. He thought his voice sounded unnaturally loud in the suddenly quiet store. “There’s five jars in each sack,” he went on, rolling down the top to show the two-quart jars.

  Ol’ Man Barnes drew a deep breath and reached for his ledger. “That’s twice two-and-a-half gall
on, five altogether,” he said, his voice quavering. “Put it in the spring-house while I record it.”

  “Thanks for carryin’ that in for me, mister,” Tom said to the stranger. As Tom headed toward the back door with his load, he glanced behind him and saw with relief that the man had lost interest in his jars.

  Outside, his knees almost buckling under him, Tom managed to stumble to the springhouse and open the door. The rush of cool air made him shiver as he ducked inside. He put the jars in the trough of cold water, just as if they really were full of buttermilk, and then, suddenly aware of how dry his mouth was, he reached for the dipper and drank. Unsteadily, he got to his feet and headed back to the store for the second sack.

  An hour later, as he approached the cabin, Tom saw that Pa hadn’t moved from the rocking chair on the porch, where he sat with his foot propped up on a wooden box. All the way home, Tom had rehearsed how he’d tell Pa about his narrow escape at the store. But now, seeing the stony expression on Pa’s face, he wished he didn’t have to say anything about what had happened. He knew, though, that the story was bound to be the talk of the hollow for days, and that Pa had better hear it from him first.

  Tom slid off Ol’ Sal’s back, and after he turned her into the pasture and hung the bridle on its peg in the shed, he squared his shoulders and walked to the porch.

  “What took you so long?” Pa asked irritably.

  “I had a little trouble,” Tom admitted. And then he described his encounter with the revenuer.

  “That was a chance we hadn’t ought to of took,” Pa said. “From now on, if I can’t make the delivery, it just don’t git made. You understand?”

  Tom nodded. “I understand,” he said. He wasn’t about to argue—he’d been half scared to death down at the store, and he had no desire to go through anything like that again. But he was disappointed that Pa hadn’t said a word about how well he’d handled the situation.

  “Dadburn preacher,” Pa muttered. “Never had all this trouble before he came here. Him an’ that li’l gal of his. Now c’mon, boy,” he said, bracing himself with his stick as he struggled to his feet. “We got work to do.”