I chuckled and got up to scrape our plates. That day Pa had an old corn sheller that needed fixing and likely a good cussing, so I left him to it. Pa had a way with mechanics and fixing things like I couldn’t believe and which sadly, he had not passed on to me. One time the whole engine block on the hospital’s ambulance seized up and not one of their experts could fix it. Pa went up there with a roll of baling wire and a horseshoer’s hand file and had that thing running in a half hour. My chores around the house were more focused on our food, so I headed out the back door to check on the garden.
Pa had set up the little side garden years ago, back when it was just tomatoes and cucumbers. Each spring we’d add one new thing, like sweet potatoes, squash, or peas, and then that fall we’d have something new. That was the idea at least, but one year the jackrabbits came in and nearly wiped us out. The next year it was the snails, and if it wasn’t them, it was the gophers.
We were getting attacked from all sides and had to bring out the big guns if we wanted to eat. And we did that by doing something so fool-headed I still can’t believe it worked. We junked up the garden. I quit weeding for two weeks. We threw table scraps and bread crumbs and chicken feed and an old tire right there by the peas. Mice showed up by the dozens. And the old jackrabbits and snails and gophers were in heaven. They were eating us out of house and home. Until the snakes came.
From the porch, Pa and I once counted three black snakes zipping along the vegetable rows and just feasting. I put an old tin pan full of creek water for them out by the tomatoes, and as long as we kept that tire there as a hiding-hole, we could always count on at least one snake standing watch over our garden.
That day I just weeded a little bit, careful not to spook any of the snakes, then cut across the north end of the cornfield and made my way to a cleared-out patch at the edge of the woods. It was my thinking place for when something was pressing down on me.
Ma’s gravestone still had some old dried bluebonnet flowers wedged against it. I walked the half-circle around it, careful not to step directly in front of the marker, and sat down in the canary grass. The way her grave was angled and how I was sitting, it was like we were both looking out past the corn at the house. The midday sun was burning down on its tin roof and making it shine like silver.
“I start school in a few days,” I said out loud. “And I’m thirteen now, but I guess you know that.”
A fat grasshopper fluttered out of the clover and up past my face. I didn’t move, just rested back on my elbows and breathed in the breeze.
“And I think me and Pa are about to get in a lot of trouble. I can’t tell if he even sees it coming. I’d fix it if I could, but I don’t know how. Maybe I’ll learn how in school. I don’t know.”
I got up and nodded to the grass and headed back home. If Ma were still around I bet she’d sort this whole mess out and we wouldn’t have to worry about nothing. If she thought Pa was acting foolish I bet she’d tell him so and he’d say, “You’re right, dear,” and everything would be settled.
I wanted to tell him my worries about this business with the sheriff, but it wasn’t my place. We were a team. Questioning him on family matters was heading into traitor territory, and besides if I couldn’t trust him, who was left? Me?
That afternoon before work, we headed down the path and had just reached the shade of the big oak when Pa stopped. He turned to me with this real clever grin and said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
His last surprise had been me going to school. I kicked at the dirt and said, “I ain’t exactly sure I want any surprises.”
“This is more like a real good secret.”
“What’s the secret?”
He shook his head and smiled like we were playing a game.
“Where we at?” he asked.
I shrugged. “The tree, Pa, but that ain’t a secret. I’ve been up it a hundred times.”
“We ain’t going up.”
He kept on grinning at me and waiting for me to figure out his riddle. We were on the path to the clearing, right under the big oak. I looked around the rest of the woods but things looked about the same as they had yesterday, and the thousand yesterdays before that. We were right next to the tree so I figured it held the secret.
The tree towered over everything else on our land, but it wasn’t just its tallness that made this particular oak “the tree” in a forest full of hickory, spruce, and pine. Its bottom branches angled downwards and ricocheted off the thick brush, making the trunk look like it had sprouted spider legs. If five men were to try to wrap their hands around the trunk in a ring, they wouldn’t reach.
I kept studying the tree and all of a sudden Pa turned and left the trail. I followed him around to the backside of the oak, where there was nothing but bright-red briars all tangled up on the ground. This side never got much sun and smelled like wet wood and rot year-round. Pa picked up a stick and shoved the end of it under the curtain of thorns. He levered it up and made a space between the dirt and the briars.
“Go on under. See what you can see.”
“I ain’t going under there, Pa. Ain’t nothing to see and nothing to do but get cut up.”
“Hurry up and get going. If you’re not fast enough all these thorns are going to come down on your head. I’ll be right behind you.”
I groaned and dropped down to my stomach and peered into the darkness. Army-crawling on my knees and elbows, I inched forward. The earth felt smooth under my palms and I realized someone had been down there before. I hooked my pants on thorns twice but kept crawling. The tunnel finally blossomed out and I saw there was space to stand under a canopy of briars and yellow leaves.
Pa called from the other side, “You up?”
Looking around, I started to grin. The sunlight barely trickled in through the ceiling of sticker bushes, but I could see that the briars formed a little room next to the oak. Pa slithered in next to me seconds later.
“It’s like a cocoon, Pa,” I said.
He reached into a dark crack in the oak’s trunk. His hand came back out cradling a copper bowl with a half-melted white candle in it.
“You keep that here, Pa?” I asked.
With a funny grin he said, “I keep a lot of things back here.”
He flipped a match against the back of his two front teeth and the flame ignited with a hiss right in front of his face. With the candle lit, Pa stooped down to squeeze himself through the hole in the oak.
“Wait, Pa,” I said.
“It’s all right, son,” he said, his voice echoing deep from inside the oak.
I wiggled through the crack and followed him into what felt like a giant wooden cave inside the tree. Something in there smelled mighty familiar. As Pa lit row after row of white candles in lantern glasses, my eyes adjusted and I saw, among other things, a stockpile of moonshine that could take down an army. The insides of the oak trunk had been fitted with rickety boards that made for shelves holding all different shapes and sizes of green and purple bottles.
I turned a full circle, admiring the size of the wooden room and the different levels of glasses. It was like a spiral staircase of shelves, with the big jars and fat oak barrels sitting low, while all the fine glass bottles twisted up nearly out of sight. With a dozen candles lit, the yellow light bounced from jar to jar and the tree glowed warm.
“So what do you think?” Pa asked.
I couldn’t get over how danged pretty and put together the whole thing looked. There were even footholds cut into one side of the room, likely for climbing up and reaching the highest shelves.
“But who made this?” I asked.
“Me, of course,” he said, beaming.
I should have known. Only Pa could have turned an old tree into a work of art.
“Told you it was a surprise,” he said.
It was a bombshell all right.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” I asked. “You think I’d get us caught?”
“Nothing like th
at. This is more for an emergency. Or for you if something happened to me.”
That was an ugly thought, about the ugliest possible. Was he talking like if he went to jail? Or did he mean something worse?
“But when did you put everything in here?” I asked.
“Early mornings I’d barrel an extra batch or two. Roll it on through the briars and cut myself to bits. Just little times when I could.”
I let all this sink in. It was a lot to take. How had I never figured it out?
“You got any more secrets?” I asked. I reckoned I didn’t know Pa as well as I thought I did.
“Yes, sir. I am terrified of spiders and I prefer not to be in the company of ducks. But other than that, you know it all now.”
I let my eyes wander up the different levels of bottles again. The place was beautiful. And if I hadn’t come up on it in twelve years of running through the woods, I doubted the sheriff could find it.
“I reckon we’re full-on partners now,” Pa said as he snuffed out the candles. “And tomorrow we’re going to see an old associate of mine. Our first proper meeting as partners.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Partners. That was the real surprise. It looked like I’d become a full-on shineman earlier than I’d planned. I felt the thrill of something new in my stomach, but it was not all gladness like I would have expected.
The more I thought on it, I realized this was a heck of a time to get promoted, what with the sheriff saying he was going to bust us. If we were partners, did that mean we’d go to the same jail if they busted us? I wriggled out of the brambles and stood with scratched-up elbows and what felt like the whole world on my shoulders.
Pa started off down the trail and I ran to catch up to him.
“Did you show me the tree now because I turned thirteen or because the sheriff came?”
He smiled his one-sided grin at me and announced to the woods, “Write it down in the history books—at age thirteen, Cub Jennings officially became smarter than his old man.”
I laughed as we walked on, but didn’t correct him.
“What’s the meeting about, Pa?”
“To see how we can get the sheriff off our backs. That way you won’t have to worry about it the next day.”
“What’s the next day?”
“School. Day one.”
WE SET OUT FOR THE BIG MEETING noontime the next day and right before we hit the end of our dusty drive, I asked Pa why we shined. Shining had always come as natural to me as walking or talking, but now with the sheriff’s threat of jail, I was feeling like I didn’t have a right idea of it.
He kept walking, never falling out of step, but I could see the plainness of my question had caught him by surprise.
“You don’t like it?” he asked.
“Of course I do, Pa. I just never really thought about why we do it. Now I have.”
We rounded the corner of our east field and headed down the side of the main road into town, Pa silent. I knew he was thinking though because he was bobbing his head like a chicken.
“I reckon you mean why don’t we just farm? Am I right?” he asked, motioning to our field.
That was kind of what I’d meant so I nodded.
“It’s a fair question, son. Especially since making shine ain’t exactly legal.”
“I know, Pa, and I won’t tell nobody,” I swore. “Never have, never will.”
“I know you won’t tell. And we don’t need a fancy life, but with our tiny patch of crops, selling corn is only going to bring us misery and rock soup.”
We both looked over at our field, at the dried-out stalks that didn’t even come up to my shoulders. As far as a farm went, we certainly weren’t going to be winning any prizes. I’d seen some farms, plantations they called them, that were bigger than a whole town. We had twenty-two acres of corn so ugly the crows didn’t even come.
Pa went on. “But imagine we take the little bit of corn we do grow and turn it into something that sells for more money. Let’s say we take that same bushel, run it through the furnace here, and then sell the Old Jennings white lightning for a quarter a jar. We do that every two weeks and you know how much money we got then?”
He was walking faster now, excited.
“How much, Pa?”
“A heck of a lot more than we’d get for corn, that’s how much.”
“But it’s against the law,” I said.
Something about that first drink, in fact everything about it, had me thinking maybe there was a good reason this stuff was illegal. And the sheriff sure enough felt the same way.
Pa sighed and I could tell he wanted to help me understand, but didn’t know how. We walked on past the Jefferson place, where an old, hunched-over woman was dragging a burlap picking sack down the rows of cotton. The bolls had barely started to peek white and I knew she wouldn’t fetch a good price for early cotton. Surely she knew it too, which meant she must have been real hard up to be picking now. Off in the distance, I could make out the steeple of Beckwith Methodist. We didn’t live but three miles out of town, but sometimes it felt twice that.
Finally, Pa said, “Lemme ask you something. You remember when your ma passed away?”
I shook my head. I’d tried plenty of times, but I never could really remember it.
“You weren’t but a young pup then. But when she went, some folks around here wanted to take you off to Nashville. Said I couldn’t raise you on my own, us being a forty-year-old man and a boy and some half-dead crops.”
“Nashville? I ain’t got no business in Nashville.”
“It was to put you in a place for boys whose families couldn’t take care of ’em. Like an orphanage. The government folk can just snatch a boy up if they think he’s underfed. And they were eyeing you. Of course I would’ve kicked and scratched like the devil if they’d tried it, but I found another way.”
“Moonshining?”
Pa slowed his stride and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“I had a month to get you fed and looking right to pass their inspection. And when that government lady came back, you were sparkling like a new Ford. I told her your ma’s family had inherited me some money. Told her money wasn’t a concern anymore.”
“So you lied to ’em.”
“Dang it, boy. Yes, I lied to ’em. But you’ve got to understand why. I had to make a decision to work on the other side of the law. It was a hard decision, but it wasn’t a decision at all, you know what I mean?”
We walked on and I fell into a daze thinking about what Pa had said. He’d had to start shining because of me.
“It doesn’t hurt no one, does it, Pa? I mean really hurt ’em?”
“There’s more than one way of looking at things generally. Like a fire will keep you warm, but it’ll burn you if you get too close. Or the oil lamp will help you see the way home or it’ll blind you if it’s right in your eyes. I try to look at shining like that.”
I nodded to him. “It’s like we shine to get by, not just to do something bad. That’s not hurting anybody.”
He chuckled and said, “It’ll blow you sky-high if it touches flame. Liquid dynamite. And of course it’ll hurt your mouth if you drink too much.”
Just the thought of drinking it made my whole body shudder. We had crafted this special flavor that customers were going goofy over, but I’ll be danged if it hadn’t tasted like sucking on a bonfire to me.
“It is against the law,” Pa said. “No two ways about it. Even before Prohibition making your own drink was illegal ’cause the government didn’t get any money off it.”
“But why should they get any money? They didn’t make it.”
Pa smiled at me real big like I’d pleased him, but I couldn’t see why. I hadn’t said anything that weren’t real obvious.
“That’s how most folks feel. But now you can’t even take a drink of whiskey, much less make it. It’s like it’s double illegal.”
I kicked a rock straight down the road and grinned at him. “Then I gues
s we’ve got to be double careful.”
“We good then?” Pa asked, smiling back.
“Always, Pa.”
We hit Main Street and I got those same funny jitters I felt whenever I went to town. It was the strangest thing—half of me always wanted to run back to the house and woods, but the other half kind of got a kick out of seeing all the people and fancy things.
I got a look into Gibbons Drugstore with its front window jammed with advertisements for candies and makeup powders and Coca-Cola. A freckly boy inside the store looked out at me and I wondered if he would be at the school. We stared at each other through the glass for a long second before Pa tugged me along.
The sidewalk was packed with the church crowd spilling out of Beckwith Methodist. A few of them gave Pa a less than friendly look. I didn’t know if it was on account of his long hair or rumors of his occupation, but I pretended I didn’t notice.
As we came up the big hill on Elm Street, I heard the clop-clop of a horse approaching.
The sheriff occasionally made his rounds on horseback and I was scared he’d spotted us.
Pa nudged my elbow.
“You see that?” he asked, with a laugh.
I craned my neck and looked down the road toward the center of town. It was not the sheriff, but a rugged old mare pulling some kind of cart. A couple steps later that gray horse and its load came into view and I started laughing as well. The cart had chrome fenders, a sleek black paint job, and an embarrassed-looking fellow sitting inside with his wrists perched on top of the steering wheel.
“It’s an automobile, Pa.”
“You remember Miss Avery telling you about President Hoover? There goes a Hoover carriage.”
“But why’s the horse pulling it?”
“No money for gasoline. Poor fella probably bought it a few years ago, lost his job or something. Happens more than you’d think.”
I waved to the man and horse as they lumbered by and the man returned my greeting with a honk of the horn.
We turned left off Elm onto a dusty yellow road and a shabby old mansion appeared in the distance. Purple wisteria climbed all over its walls and porch columns, its windows covered in a maze of dark vines.
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