Deadfall

by L. Douglas Hogan

  “What grade?” she asked.

  “Well now, that depends. This school is set up so that kids who progress faster can be in more advanced classes than, say, some kids who aren’t moving along as quickly. Most of my classes would probably be a mixture of ninth and tenth graders, though.”

  “Well now, that’d be something! Good thing the family business doesn’t come up with any job application.”

  “No way,” I told her, kissing her on top of the head.

  She pinched me again and gave me a playful shove backward. “Your grandpa is in the barn working on a batch. He’s probably due for a break if you have it in you.”

  “Sure do. Is the ground hard enough for me to bring my truck back to the barn?”

  “The rain’s been threatening, but it hasn’t opened up yet. You’ve only been gone three days this time.”

  “I know, I know. I had an out of town delivery to make and spent a day and a half there for the interview. Then I picked up supplies,” I told her, dropping a wink.

  “If you’re talking about getting into that rum again…”

  “Not much,” I told her, my hands in the air.

  “Boys and their drinking… Oh crap, you get, you useless bastard.” Grandma used her leg to push Foghorn, her rooster, out of the way.

  He’d charged into the middle of the hens who were attacking the can of corn Grandma had dropped and was trying to flog the smaller hens and the up and coming rooster out of the way. If he hadn’t been my grandma’s favorite chicken, he’d have parted ways with his head a long time ago and been re-named Stew.

  “Love you, Grandma,” I said and walked a wide circle around Foghorn.

  He and I had come to a non-verbal agreement. He avoided me, so I wouldn’t, in turn, invite him to dinner in retaliation. We usually walked a wide path around each other and this time was no different. He broke off, asserting his dominance and looked at me, his head cocked, his good eye staring at me. I headed back to the front of the house near the porch and did a quick ground inspection for anything shiny. Grandpa had been working on the deck, but he was lousy with a hammer. As a kid, he’d sent many a nail flying as he hit it funny, and I didn’t want to get one stuck in my tire.

  Even though we were doing a lot better now than we had been when I was growing up, I was still frugal. I’d become something of an inventor as a kid, and most of my efforts had been figuring out better ways for us to make money when it was winter time, and when I couldn’t be picking for diamonds I’d been using my head to make life easier at home.

  I fired up my little Datsun truck, a relic of the early 80s, and drove slowly back to the barn. The chickens scattered and I got out, leaving the truck in neutral, and opened the large sliding door. I hopped back in the truck and pulled into the barn, backing in next to the horse stalls. A light was on in the second one from the end, and I got out after killing the motor.

  “Close the door, boy, I’m losing temperature,” Grandpa yelled.

  I grinned and pulled the large door closed, not oblivious to the large wide cracks between the sections that made up the barn. It wasn’t air tight nor insulated, which was why I’d made sure the newest still was. The barn was mostly empty in the middle and left sections. The right side had the gardening tools, an old Ford tractor, and various farm implements, and the rest of it was old scrap. At one point, Grandpa got it in his head that he was going to make extra money scrapping in the winter time when he couldn’t get a ferment going, but soon found that it cost us more in fuel than the metal was worth. Old appliances, plumbing fixtures, spools of wire, plumbing and pipes… it had a little bit of anything and everything. Since I’d been enlisted to pick half of it or more, it could sit there for all I cared.

  I opened the stall Grandpa was in and could feel the warmth as soon as I stepped inside. An old alcohol lamp was burning on a side shelf, casting light over the area. The open flame made me nervous when Grandpa Bud was running his old still. It was hardly airtight, and the alcohol vapors were very flammable, like gasoline. I didn’t worry now, though; he was running one of my keg stills.

  “You know, boy, this here setup runs slick,” he said as I closed the stall door behind me.

  “You like it? I thought you said it stripped too much of the flavor out?”

  “I figured it out,” he said with a grin. “I got to run this one a lot slower than my old copper still.”

  “You put a bunch of scrubbers in the mash and column?” I asked him.

  “I’ve got enough to keep the sulfur taste out,” he said.

  My latest still had been made out of an old stainless steel beer keg. The ball that trapped the air and the tube that connected it had been removed, and with tri-clamps, I’d fitted a copper column that could be run as both reflux and pot still. A reflux column made the alcohol work a little harder to escape and condensed the water back down, so the only thing that came out was the various forms of alcohol. Acetone, methyl, and, of course, the kind we all love to drink - ethyl alcohol. It was great if you wanted to make extremely high-proof liquor, but at the cost of stripping the flavor out of it.

  The section that came off at a near forty-five degrees angle had its own condenser on it as well. You could run just that part without the other, and it’d work much like the old timers’ stills without stripping the flavor. Copper was used as much as possible. It neutralized the sulphuric flavors in the whiskey or rum.

  “Good. I bought more supplies on my way back from the school interview,” I told him, hooking a thumb over my shoulder.

  “Corn and sugar?” he asked.

  “That, and some enzymes and ten gallons of farm-grade molasses.”

  “Mole Asses. Boy, you and your rum is—”

  “Hey, this is for me, not a big project,” I told him.

  “Oh. Well, come take a seat, tell me about your interview.”

  I did, noting Grandpa was wearing his famous bibs and a white t-shirt underneath. He had been losing weight rather quickly, but refused to go to the doctor. I knew off the top of my head it could be a few things. Diabetes, cancer, or something else. He still ate like he had a tapeworm and his eyes weren’t turning yellow, but Grandpa told me two weeks ago he’d rather not know than to know and worry about when his time was up. Grandma couldn’t be persuaded to talk to him about it either.

  “First things first, how you like the new water pump?” I asked him.

  “Beats pumping by hand,” he said. “How you figure out how to do that?” he asked me.

  “Oh come on, Grandpa, you’re the one who taught me to wire a house up,” I told him, remembering many repairs and upgrades to the homestead.

  In truth, though, we could have wired the barn for electricity but hadn’t. It would be a lot of work and a lot of costs. The electrical panel in the house was old, and I wasn’t sure we had enough amperage to get all the way out here. My fix had been to install a few solar panels on the back side of the barn, facing away from prying eyes, and hooking them to a charge controller that powered eight batteries I’d picked up at the junkyard. I didn’t use a DC to AC converter, but instead had used a DC electric submersible pond pump and various plastic hoses to use as cooling water.

  The conventional wisdom said that you should use a cold water tank at least as equal in volume as the amount you ran. Since my keg system was fifteen gallons, that should’ve been all I needed, but I’d over-engineered it and used what I had on hand, an old fifty-five gallon blue barrel. To use it, all you had to do was make sure everything was hooked up and flip a switch I’d wired at chest level and adjust the water flow with a series of gate valves.

  “I know, but I never thought about this. It’s slick; I’ve run two batches today, and the batteries ain’t run dry yet.”

  I got up and went out into the other stall, opening it, and saw in the gloom the shine of the LED readout. The battery bank was more than enough, he’d barely used a third of it. He’d be good for another third before he’d have to make sure he didn’t discharg
e it too far and kill them. It also helped that we were getting power right now, as night hadn’t fallen.

  “If anything ever happened, we could put a cistern up on a stand and let gravity do it,” I told him.

  “If anything ever happened. You and your fancy tv shows. Doomsday… Bah.”

  “Those guys are extreme, but it isn’t all that crazy of an idea,” I told him, retaking my seat. “Where are we at with this?”

  “Hearts,” he said, nudging a large one-gallon glass jar.

  “Just starting?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, already did my first cuts,” he said, pointing to the pint jars off to the side.

  “Ok, I’m going to unload the truck, then I can take over,” I told him.

  “Day I can’t run shine is the day you bury me out back, boy. You hear me?”

  I was used to this, and it had nothing to do with Grandpa fearing his morality; it’d been something I’d grown up hearing him say.

  “You got it,” I told him, grinning.

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