Moonshine

by Justin Benton

  “You been by here?” Pa asked.

  “It looks haunted,” I told him. It was plain to see.

  This was not the kind of place I wanted to have my first big meeting, and if I had my choice I’d stay clear altogether, but Pa kept on so I followed him into the yard. The grass was littered with piles of rusted machinery, an old harrow, some teeth off a plow. We finally reached a big front door sitting crooked on its hinges.

  Pa said, “This fellow travels across the whole state for his business and he knows everything that happens, legal and illegal. He’s safe to talk to. You ready?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Always, Pa.”

  PA KNOCKED AND THE LACE CURTAIN covering the little window next to the door flew open. Two milky gray eyes peeked out. The door shot open, almost hitting Pa in the face, and an ancient man in shirtsleeves and a stiff black hat popped out.

  “Well, hello!” he cried, throwing his hands up in a big show.

  I watched in horror as the old man slowly peeled off his black hat. I half expected spiders to come running out.

  “Hello, Herbert,” Pa said. “This is my boy. You probably haven’t seen him in ten years.”

  The man turned and stared at me, his smile pushing his powdery cheeks all the way up into his eyes.

  “Young Cub. Last time I saw you, you were but a tot in your mother’s arms. How do you do?”

  “Hi,” I mumbled. That was all I could manage there face-to-face with the skeleton.

  “Cub, this is Mr. Herbert Yunsen,” Pa said. “We used to work together.”

  The man appeared to be fishing around for something in the side pocket of his black suit. His chalky hand came out with a rainbow of unwrapped sweets stuck to his palm. He extended the clump out to me in offering. Manners obliged me to peel off two candies like scabs.

  The old man ushered us into what looked to have once been a fancy mansion, almost like a castle. We sat at a dining room table as long as a train car and I took a look around the room. Old portraits of unsmiling men and angry-looking women covered the walls, but apart from a wood-burning stove in the corner, the room felt almost empty. A draft blew in from above and my sweaty town shirt gave me a chill.

  “So how’s business, Herbert?” Pa asked, leaning back in his chair and smiling big. Pa was odd like that. You take him just about anywhere and he’d set up shop so comfortable you’d think he’d been born there.

  “Oh, just booming. More people dying every day,” Mr. Yunsen replied, looking satisfied with himself.

  So he’s a killer, I thought.

  Mr. Yunsen must’ve caught me looking at him funny because he leaned across the table and said, “Perhaps I should explain myself. I am a kind of doctor. A mortician. I prepare bodies for their final resting place.”

  This meeting was worse than I could have imagined.

  Mr. Yunsen asked, “Are you also in the moonshine business, Cub?”

  I was suddenly unsure of how much I wanted to be involved with all this. I couldn’t get a solid yes to come out until I felt Pa’s boot kicking at my shin under the table.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I was as well, once upon a time,” Mr. Yunsen said, “though I focused more on the delivery side. Bootlegging it’s called. The transport of illegal goods, often at very high speeds.”

  “You ever think of running shine again?” Pa asked, leaning in, eyes wide with excitement.

  “Think about it every time I get behind the wheel. You should see the Buick I’ve got…” He began to smile and his sentence trailed off. “But think about it is all I do. Those days are long gone for me. Now, I understand you gentlemen are concerned about the shine trade?”

  I said, “More than concerned, sir.”

  “And rightly so, I fear. I’ve heard whispers that the shine business, and I don’t know if this applies yet to Hidden Orchard, but in the rest of Tennessee the shine business is being consolidated into a single group.”

  “You mean folks are organizing?” Pa asked.

  “No. An outside interest is taking over. A group from up North, I believe. Taking over private producers like yourselves. Consolidating and putting those private producers to work for them. Or eliminating them. Usually assisted by the local police force.”

  “But why would they come down here? We don’t bother anybody,” Pa said.

  “It’s no coincidence that a good bit of the country’s liquor comes from this area. We have generations of knowledge and the room to grow. You don’t believe someone’s going to plant an acre of corn in New York City, do you? Or produce a single gallon without blowing themselves up?”

  “So that’s why the sheriff is after us now,” Pa said. “Consolidating or eliminating.”

  “Sheriff Bardo?” Mr. Yunsen asked. His white eyebrows arched upwards and he shook his head. “As I understand it, people can be made to do most anything for the right amount of money.”

  I couldn’t figure how a sheriff could be working with a group of shiners. Or whatever that group was from up North. So shiners either had to work for them, or got eliminated. I knew which group we were in. At that moment, a figure passed through the doorway at the far end of the room, and I started, thinking maybe there really were ghosts there.

  “Rebecca,” Mr. Yunsen called. His voice echoed through the giant room. “Come say hello to some friends of mine.”

  The figure backed up into the doorframe and walked slowly toward us. It was a girl, wearing a faded gray dress with small purple flowers. She walked up on us real careful, studying us with eyes so big they looked like two walnuts. Her hair had sun streaks in it, proof of a summer spent outside.

  “This is Rebecca, my granddaughter. Rebecca, this is Mr. Jennings and his son, Cub.”

  Me and the girl looked at each other cautiously. Pa stood up like a gentleman to greet her. She bowed slightly.

  “Hello, dear,” Pa said. “Are you starting school tomorrow?”

  Her face turned grim and she nodded.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be in Miss Pounder’s class, would you?” he asked.

  She nodded again, lips pressed together tightly.

  “What do you know, Cub is in Miss Pounder’s class too.”

  My teacher was named Miss Pounder? That was not a good sign.

  Rebecca turned and studied me hard. Turning back to Pa, she shook her head.

  “You’re wrong, mister. He’s not at Hidden Orchard School. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He has never gone to school before. Tomorrow will be his very first day,” Pa said.

  “He’s never gone to school?” she asked. “Never ever?”

  Pa shook his head. She looked at him with suspicious eyes. Then she turned to me, smiled about as warmly as I ever saw, and eased closer like she was approaching a scared puppy.

  “Hi. My name is Re-be-cca,” she said slowly, tapping herself on the chest in time with the syllables. “Re-be-cca.”

  “I know,” I said. “Your grandpa just said so.”

  Even with her summer tan, her face turned bright red. Still though, she couldn’t have been half as embarrassed as I was.

  She muttered, “Oh, forgive me. I thought if you never went to school you were…you know…slow.”

  I felt myself flush too, but finally had to laugh a bit as well. “I’ve never been in school. But I can talk and stuff.”

  She smiled at me and mouthed the word Sorry.

  I relaxed a little and said, “Did you know that school is actually five days a week? It’s Monday to Friday.”

  Pa had been prepping me on all the details.

  Her mouth opened to respond, but no words came out for a long moment.

  “You sure you’re not slow?” she said.

  “Pretty sure, yes.”

  She giggled and said, “Folks are going to eat you alive at school.”

  Before I could respond, Rebecca curtseyed to Pa and left.

  Pa and Mr. Yunsen talked a little more, but my mind was distr
acted. I had met the first of my new schoolmates, and after ten seconds she had determined I was somewhat of a dolt. After a few minutes, Mr. Yunsen led us out and shook our hands.

  As we walked out into the sun, Pa said, “We got a big problem.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and said, “Yeah, at school tomorrow people are going to think I’m some half-wit monkey.”

  “People are messing with the moonshine business.”

  He was right. There were two problems. I looked over at him and realized that one of those battles I was going to have to fight on my own.

  THE NEXT MORNING, around the time I normally would have been coming back from the still, I was heading for school, all dressed up in Pa’s old church shirt he had made me put on, and my hair combed over to make me look a right fool. I was clutching my lunch bag so tight my fingers punched through the paper with a loud rip, dumping my biscuit and sausage onto the grass. I picked them up and blew as much dirt off as I could, then wrapped the food back up in the ragged paper and shoved the whole greasy mess into my pocket.

  I reached Hidden Orchard and there was none of that little thrill I felt when I went there with Pa. Everyone was walking fast, heads down, all business. I had never been one to venture out into town just for the heck of it, though Pa would have let me if I’d asked. It had always seemed too big, and now it felt like it had grown two sizes overnight. All the sparkle was gone from it and I knew the worst was yet to come.

  * * *

  ● ● ●

  As I came up on the stubby little school building, the chatter of folks my age snapped me out of my thoughts. A group of four girls wearing rough dresses sewn from flour sacks got real quiet when I walked by, then busted out laughing and squeaking. I took one last breath of free air and pushed through the schoolhouse door.

  The whole building felt like it had been waiting for me. Pa had told me that this school was one of the nicest in the county, in that it had not just one room but two. Everybody from ten to fourteen would have class in one room, and the older folks were in the other. There was a little hallway that was like a mineshaft, and I stood there looking for where to go as people pushed past me in big groups. Pa had told me all I had to do was find the right room, walk in, and sit down at one of the desks, taking care it was not the biggest one. That one was for the teacher. A sign in big black letters was tacked to the door on the right-hand side. POUNDER.

  I walked in with my head down, didn’t look at a soul, and dropped into a seat on the side of the room. A couple students were whispering to each other and a big mountain of a lady with a red mouth stood up front. She was next to the big desk and I was mighty glad I hadn’t taken her spot. She had her white hair combed straight down from the middle of her head and it hung down hard, making her look like an angry white gumdrop.

  As more and more students filed in, I pressed my hands hard between my knees and looked around. There was a little patch of chalkboard behind the big woman. There were twelve oak desks, all different sizes, most with deep grooves and carvings in them. A flag drooped over the middle of the chalkboard, and there was a yellowed map of somewhere tacked onto the wall, a top corner loose and sagging.

  The chairs were even worse than what we had at home. They were round pine logs, stumps barely big enough to hold a body, with a scrap of board nailed on the back of the log and sticking up to make a seat back. Some of the students were sneaking glances at me and whispering. The one thing I could be sure of in there was that I was the only new student.

  As the last folks came running in, the woman at the front wrote something on the board, crashing the chalk into the board with each letter like she was carving a gravestone.

  “POUNDER. Arithmetic, Composition, and Social Graces.”

  There were six boys, including me, and six girls, not including the teacher. The kids looked how most kids looked, which was mostly normal with a couple exceptions. Rebecca was up at the front of the class. It felt like she was the only one who wasn’t staring at me.

  The teacher kept banging the chalk into the board, throwing up a cloud of white dust all around her.

  Finally she turned and asked in a real deep voice, “Now who can read this for me?”

  The buzz around the room stopped right there and everybody froze but me. I kept looking at the teacher and her eyes locked right on to mine.

  “You, with the blond hair that needs cutting. Are you that new boy?” Her voice shook the whole room.

  I could feel my head and my hair that needed cutting turtling into my shoulders.

  “Um, yes.”

  She looked all insulted by my answer and tapped her foot like she was waiting for me to continue.

  “Complete sentences in here, sir. Yes, what? ‘Yes, you are.’ ”

  “Um, okay, right. Yes, yes I are.”

  One of the flour sack girls next to me giggled and then the rest of the class started cracking up. Their laughter was a punch in the gut and the temperature in the room seemed to spike hot enough to light the schoolhouse on fire. I thought, I hate this place.

  Miss Pounder said, “That is neither correct nor funny, if that was your aim. Now, who here can read this?”

  Suddenly, everyone wanted to participate and a bunch of hands shot up. A barefoot boy on the other side of the room read the words, and Miss Pounder took off on a string of announcements and exercises that finally drew the students’ attention off of me.

  It was a nightmare of a morning. In a moment of inspiration, I reached down onto my stump seat and picked off a thick splinter, then jabbed it into the web between my thumb and forefinger to see if it would wake me up. It was not a success and I had to suffer through the spelling lesson with a bloody hand.

  At lunch I sat by myself, eating my cold biscuit in the shade of a maple tree. A couple of boys with smudged faces ran around the yard with sticks, and a group of girls was singing and clapping out a song. Apart from Miss Pounder, I hadn’t said a word to anybody all day, but I felt about as obvious as a fly in a pitcher of milk.

  Something rustled behind the tree and I guarded my biscuit between my knees. A voice called out from behind me, “Hi, Cub.”

  Rebecca Yunsen ran out from behind the tree and stood in front of me. She had on the same dress as the day before.

  “Good job with Miss Pounder this morning. You’re going to fit right in here.”

  “You think?”

  “Sure. Almost everybody in our class is dumb.”

  “That’s…good?”

  She arched her eyebrows at me.

  “How come you didn’t have to come to school before?” she asked.

  “I had lessons at home. So I could help my pa.”

  “Help your pa? Every day?”

  More like every night, I thought. I just nodded. She kept looking down at me. With the sun straight behind her it was hard to see her face.

  “Everybody is talking about you,” she said. “They thought you were new in town. I told them you were just new to civilization.”

  “Thanks.” I wasn’t sure if that was nice or not.

  “I said your pa was a bank robber and you helped him carry the loot and you couldn’t come to school because you were always on the run from the law.”

  It hit me then that maybe she knew we were shiners. Maybe her grandpa had told her. Or maybe she was kidding me. I hadn’t been around a lot of girls, but I had always heard to be careful around them.

  “Ain’t you going to ask if I’m serious?” she said.

  I still couldn’t see her face because of the sun, but her voice sounded like she was smiling.

  “No,” I said.

  We were both quiet for a moment, Rebecca scratching her bare leg with her shoe. She seemed to be waiting for something and I didn’t know what to say.

  “I hated those candies at your house,” I said finally. “I about puked ’em up. I ate one and threw the other in a badger hole.”

  She laughed. “I don’t like them either. Grandpa keeps ’em i
n a box from before the war. There’s ants in the box,” she said with a giggle. A teacher on the side yard called us all back inside.

  As we headed for the door together, Rebecca turned to me and asked, “What did you have to help your pa with anyways?”

  Before I could make up a story, two older kids stepped in front of us. One of them had hair and eyebrows the color of red clay. The other had hair cut so short he looked bald. Probably because of head lice. I could see over his shoulder that everybody else had gone inside the school.

  “Your name Jennings?” the red-haired one asked me. He had a face as plain as a piece of lumber.

  I nodded.

  “My folks told me about your pa. Say he’s not respectable. Makes moonshine. A criminal.”

  “That ain’t true,” I said back.

  “You saying my pa’s a liar? He’s preacher at Beckwith Methodist, and if you call him a liar I’ll bash your face in.”

  I stood there thinking back if I had called his pa a liar, and then started wondering if bashing someone’s face in was “respectable.” But I had never been one for arguing and I didn’t want to get beat up or get lice, so I put on my best confused face and asked, “What’s moonshine anyways?”

  Red Hair looked at me hard. “I don’t rightly know.”

  Rebecca giggled and Red Hair said, “Shut it, gravedigger.”

  She raised a fist and looked over the top of it at him. “Don’t think I won’t whup you.”

  The bald-headed kid snorted and said, “You’ve got a big mouth for a girl.”

  Rebecca turned to him and cocked her other fist up. “I got one for you too, ugly.”

  They stared hard at me, then turned and went inside.

  I stood there with my leg tapping up a storm from nerves, trying to keep my breathing calm. I looked over at Rebecca and her face was all red. She looked a little embarrassed, but mostly good and mad. I probably looked like I was about to have a heart attack.

  “I hate that name ‘gravedigger.’ And stupid Shane thinks he runs the school,” she said.