Moonshine

by Justin Benton

  Text copyright © 2019 by Justin Benton

  All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact permissions@bmkbooks.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Calkins Creek

  An Imprint of Boyds Mills & Kane

  calkinscreekbooks.com

  ISBN 9781629798110

  Ebook ISBN 9781684378982

  Book data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  First edition

  Book design by Tim Gillner, adapted for ebook

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1

  This book is dedicated to Julian and Mia.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  AUGUST 1, 1932

  I SWORE OFF DRINKING WHISKEY the night before I turned thirteen. I made that decision while throwing up my first glass of moonshine out in the woods where Pa and I secretly made the stuff. It was a test of sorts between him and me, and I guess I flunked it.

  It was just hours until my birthday, but Pa didn’t think that was reason enough to miss a night’s work. As usual, we headed into the woods at what he called the “witching hour.” At that time of the evening, right when the lightning bugs showed up, I could feel a change in my blood. The night made me feel alive, and being nocturnal was of course a natural benefit for us moonshiners.

  That night I mixed the mash as we worked around the fire, circling the big copper pot like the hands on a pocket watch. Pa dumped a half sack of sugar into the cornmeal mash, and right as everything got to bubbling and boiling, I snugged the lid on top of the pot. Soon enough, all that steam off the mash would start shooting through the copper pipes, finally spiraling down the worm. The worm was a coil of pipe that looked like a giant spring and went down into the condenser barrel full of cold creek water. When that hot steam corkscrewed down the worm, the cold would shock it back into a liquid. It was like magic though because it wasn’t just any liquid, it was our own brand of corn whiskey.

  The wind skipped over the edge of the condenser barrel with a whistle. Through the smoke I could see Pa staring into his clear glass of shine, thinking hard.

  He looked across the pot at me. “It’s your birthday now,” he said.

  I glanced up at the sky. The crescent moon sat lopsided over the tops of the pines. That meant it was around half past midnight.

  “I figure it is.”

  “And I got a surprise for you, Cub,” he said.

  We had never been ones to over-celebrate a birthday, but we usually made do.

  “A birthday present?”

  Pa shook his head, his long gray hair swinging over his shoulders.

  “I don’t know you’d call it that exactly.”

  I stopped scraping off the mixing stick and looked at him. He was up to something.

  “What do you mean, Pa?”

  “I mean now that you’re thirteen you’ve got to go to the schoolhouse. No more classes with Miss Avery.”

  I didn’t go to school with the other kids. Never had. Miss Avery had been my teacher since I was four or five, giving me lessons right there in our cabin. She had been a teacher at some big school up in Virginia, probably about a hundred years ago, and Pa had gotten special permission for her to teach me at home a couple hours a week so I could be around to help him farm. Of course, farming for us meant brewing big potfuls of whiskey on the sly, but I was still getting an education.

  Between Pa and Miss Avery, I had learned animals and sums and could even read a bit. The classes weren’t overly long and Pa only had to pay her a half-gallon a week for tuition. It had been a square deal for all of us. The fact was, though, that I’d always thought of my book learning as a temporary thing. I’d already mastered a trade.

  “I don’t need any more teaching, Pa. I always figured I’d be a shineman like you.”

  “You’d make a fine one, no denying that. But that government lady has been by twice now, and she says you’ve got to start this year. If you don’t, she’ll send the sheriff. You know we don’t need the law coming around here.”

  Staring at the flames crawling up the copper still, I thought on this school business. Some mornings I’d catch sight of a group of students slinking off to classes all sleepy-eyed, looking sorry like a pack of beat dogs. Then in the afternoons they’d make their jailbreak and run out of that schoolhouse whooping like a bunch of savages. I was supposed to trade my days sleeping and nights under the stars for that? Whatever school was, I figured I’d been smart to avoid it so far.

  Pa said, “It ain’t so bad. And don’t tell me you’ve never been curious about it.”

  I suppose I had been a little curious. More than that, I had wondered what the kids there were like. I spent my time with Pa or by myself mostly. Thinking about it, I realized those town kids probably had lots of experience with schooling, probably had it down cold. And I imagine they wouldn’t exactly go out of their way to welcome an outsider.

  Pa seemed to read my mind because he said, “And it’s about time you met some folks your own age. I can’t be raising a wild animal out here. You remember what happened with our pet coyote.”

  Just thinking about that coyote made me laugh, and I felt a bit better. Pa had brought that pup in to pull buckshot out of his hide when I was about eight. We had a fine time playing with him while he healed up. But once he was walking again, that thing went savage and tore the whole house to shreds. If Pa yelled at him, he would run into Pa’s bedroom and pee right on the bed. I thought that was hilarious and a good sign of smarts too. That was until I tried to punish him and he did the same thing on my bed. A week later during a full moon he howled once and jumped right out the kitchen window. We had not been sad to see him go.

  “Quit your daydreaming, boy. Help me get the fire going hot again.”

  I started feeding the fire, but in my head I kept imagining a class full of students and some fancy professor laughing as I bumbled my way through a lesson. Before I realized it, I’d pitched about a dozen trees’ worth of deadwood under the pot. I was standing close enough to catch my overalls on fire, but all I felt was an ice chunk in my stomach.

  “Pa, we’ve just got too much work for me to go off to school.”

  I rushed over to rinse all the glasses in the rainwater barrel so he could see how busy I was helping him shine. How was Pa going to get by without me?

  “And don’t kids go to school an awful lot?” I asked. “It’s every Monday and Thursday, isn’t it?”

  Pa bit his lip and gave me a worried look.

  “Uh, it’s a little more than
that. But you’ve still got three weeks of summer. And you’ll do all right. I promise.”

  The fire was crackling good, and as I passed it an ember popped up onto my overalls. Brushing at it, I took a step back and almost knocked Pa’s jar of moonshine off the top of the condenser barrel. I grabbed it and leaned against the still, staring hard into the glass like I’d always seen Pa do when he was thinking.

  Pa squatted down, his knee bones popping like twigs, and he flicked at the drip tube as the shine trickled out. He looked up and saw me holding his glass.

  “No need to drown your sorrows about school,” he said with a grin.

  I kind of smiled and started to hand him his glass, but then stopped. That whiskey was still in my hand. I had spent nearly every night of my life back here in the woods making the stuff for folks to drink. I should at least be able to try it. Then maybe Pa would see I was man enough not to be bothered with school.

  I lifted Pa’s moonshine up to have a little sip, but before I could even put my mouth to the glass, the fumes off the stuff punched me square in the nose. My whole head nearly jumped backwards off my shoulders like I’d smelled an old dead mouse.

  Pa shook his head but kept smiling at me. He wasn’t going to stop me from drinking it. He was waiting for me to stop myself.

  “That’s a good batch to try, boy, our secret flavor too. Finest in Tennessee. And it tastes even better than it smells,” he said with a laugh.

  That first sip, that first little bit I got past my lips, I swear it scorched a hole straight through my tongue. My eyes watered up and I couldn’t make that whiskey go anywhere. It was just sitting there like I was holding a fireball in my mouth.

  “Are you going to swallow it, or you just savoring it?” he asked.

  If he’d kept his mouth shut I probably would have spit that moonshine right on the ground. But he was just so tickled by it that it was like he was daring me, so I choked it down like I was swallowing a baseball. My stomach bucked, but I kept it down.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me how good we made it? Or you ain’t man enough yet to appreciate it?” Pa asked. He was having himself a big time now.

  I didn’t say anything—just gave him the meanest look I could muster, then took an even bigger gulp to show him I could handle myself.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  I was drunk right off. And it wasn’t what I’d call fun. The feeling reminded me of when I was a little fella and I’d turn circles in the yard, just whirling around until I’d spun myself stupid. The only thing I could focus on was the moon overhead and I took a notion to howl at it, but my guts clenched up. Next thing I knew, that whiskey was coming right back up into the sticker bushes.

  I kept heaving that shine out of me and decided then and there that my drinking days were done. I tried to stand straight but was just twisting around like a leaf in the breeze. Pa came running and grabbed me right before I hit the ground.

  The squawking of hens in the coop out back woke me the next morning. For a second I was surprised to find myself in my own bed. The memory of having drunk moonshine came back to me, followed shortly by the recollection I had to start school. Thirteen was shaping up to be a heck of a year.

  I was getting dressed when I heard a rumbling coming down our drive. I walked out to the kitchen and saw Pa standing by the table, looking as startled as I was. The only visitors we ever had were during a sale, and none of those folks had the money for an automobile. Pa stepped fast out the door, his long legs crossing our whole house in two steps. I ran over to the window to peek out.

  The county sheriff’s Model A was parked out front. Sheriff Bardo was climbing out, looking at our little cabin and frowning about as hard as I’d ever seen a person frown. The sheriff did a good job of making himself look like an Old West lawman out of one of the motion pictures, with his silver mustache and that giant white cowboy hat he wore.

  My first thought was he’d found the still in the woods, but there’d been no sign last night of anyone else having been out there. I stood there panicking, then remembered that government lady. Maybe she’d called the sheriff early about my going to school. If that was it, then I owed it to Pa to make sure he didn’t get in trouble on account of me. I ran out onto the porch to join him.

  Pa met him in front of his patrol car, and the sheriff said, “Earl Jennings, you make me search those woods and I’m going to be real unhappy. You and I both know you’ve been making liquor.”

  “Liquor?” Pa said, his face all scrunched up like he was confused. “No, sir. That’s against the law.”

  The sheriff passed a fat wad of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other, his meaty face puffed up on one side. I slunk up next to Pa.

  “You moonshine too, boy?” the sheriff asked. He looked me up and down.

  I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t, so I just focused on my boots and kept quiet. This was worse than any business about school.

  I watched the sheriff’s shadow cover my boots as he leaned in over me. He made a horrible swishing noise, then let fly a soupy brown gob of tobacco spit that splashed down next to me. I stared at it, scared to look up.

  “You’re that boy who doesn’t go to school, aren’t you?” he said.

  I shuffled around there in the dust, waiting for Pa to say something for me.

  The sheriff laughed and said, “You ain’t even teach him to talk, Earl?”

  “You got the wrong men,” Pa said. “We aren’t doing anything wrong.”

  “You’re no different from any other crook here in Hidden Orchard. And don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Prohibition. Congress passed that law more than ten years ago, so anybody who makes, sells, or drinks alcohol is a criminal. You stop making moonshine or I’ll take you to jail for as long as I want.”

  The word jail hit me so hard I thought my heart had stopped.

  “You can’t do that,” I stammered.

  I looked at Pa to be sure, but he didn’t look back at me. He was staring right through the sheriff, like he was about to tear into him.

  The sheriff leaned down toward me and said, “So you can talk? Well you be a good little boy and wait your turn because this is grown-up business. If you wanna say something, say so long to your pa.”

  “Get out of here,” Pa growled. I saw his hands curl into fists by his sides.

  The sheriff only smiled under his big hat.

  “Go ahead, Earl. Take a swing. See what I do to you. Last deadbeat who tried to test me is rotting in jail now.”

  For a long moment, nobody moved or spoke. I’d seen Pa brawl a few times before, mostly attacked by customers and once by bandits. I had never seen him beat, though I prayed nights I never saw him fight again. Anything that hurt him, hurt me. Pa finally took a step back and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “No more shining,” the sheriff said again as he backed toward the police car. “I looked the other way on your piddling little operation out of pity for you and this boy. And because I’m such a charitable man, I’ll even let you get rid of what you’ve got. But you best find a new trade. Prohibition, Earl. You make alcohol, you go to jail.”

  The sheriff gave me an awful smile and then took off in his automobile.

  Pa asked, “You all right?”

  “Is he serious, Pa? He knows we’ve been shining. He said he was going to search the woods.”

  My insides were juddering like a jar of jelly. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dust cloud at the end of the drive.

  “He won’t find a thing.”

  Pa wiped his face with his sleeve and headed back in. I kept standing there feeling stuck in the mud, wondering how I was going to keep Pa out of jail if I was trapped in the schoolhouse all day.

  TWO WEEKS PASSED with no further sign of the sheriff, but not one minute went by without me worrying about jails. We didn’t stop shining though, not even for one night. Pa made a big point of saying it was a bluff, maybe a call for a bribe. He even said if the sheriff weren’t a lawman he�
�d sock him right in his fat melon for how he’d talked to me. Still I sensed that something big was on the horizon, like before a tornado when my bones felt electric and the air smelled hot.

  That morning, the sun had barely risen when a nightmare of Sheriff Bardo creeping through our woods and grabbing me spooked me awake. I couldn’t get back to sleep so finally I just got up and pulled my red blanket up across my old horsehair mattress. My room was easy to keep straight because there was hardly anything in it—my mattress, and on the floor two drawers from a dresser for keeping my shirts. Pa had the other two drawers in his room. Neither one of us had the actual dresser.

  The kitchen was empty, so I pulled the black pan off the wall and sawed off some chunks of ham to throw in. When the fat was bubbling around the ham and the pan was good and greased up, I cracked a pair of eggs into it. I’d been making breakfast for myself for four years now, usually for Pa as well.

  The back door clapped and Pa came stomping through in his boots and faded coveralls. His hands were so dirty it looked like he’d been soaking them in oil. There was no telling what time he’d gotten up to work around the farm, or if he’d even gone to bed at all.

  “Eat up! Get your energies up. We got work to do,” he said.

  He was a mess of energy no matter what time of day.

  “You eat, Pa?”

  “Yeah, but that don’t mean I can’t do it again.”

  Pa slid into a chair at our wobbly two-man table, and I dumped some ham and eggs onto our tin plates. The salty smell filled our little cabin and would hang around until a wind pushed it through the cracks in the old wood panels.

  “Pa, how long I got ’til school starts?”

  He patted my shoulder. “You sure are worked up over schooling.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “A couple days. And I won’t lie to you. School can be downright awful. There are times it will crush your whole spirit. But it can also be good—real good. Because it gives you opportunities.”

  “Opportunities, Pa?”

  “Take me, for example. A schooled man,” he said, puffing his chest out. “Now my old neighbor Otis did not go to school. So I had lots of opportunities to tell him he was stupid.”