Stella heard a breath on the line. “Georgette, is that you?”
“What?” Alfonse said.
“Just a second,” she said. “Georgette, quit rubbernecking or I swear to God I’ll march over there and smack the receiver out of your hand.”
There was no answer. But the click was clear.
“Maybe we should meet in person,” Alfonse said. “I’ve got a hell of a sample for you.”
“It’s that bad?” She didn’t have time for this. “Can you handle it?”
“It’s not something in my bailiwick.”
“Oh, your bailiwick. Don’t want to offend your wicks.”
“I’m just the bootlegger.”
“So where’s the kid?” Meaning Hump.
“I stopped by the farm but he wasn’t there. I think you’re going to have to go up there to suss out the problem.”
“Not tonight,” Stella said. “I can’t.”
“Yeah, you’re probably going to need daylight. Tomorrow, then?”
She poured two fat fingers of bourbon and tossed it back. Looked hard at the bottle. She’d probably had enough for tonight, especially if she had to get up in the morning.
Then she thought, At least Hendrick doesn’t drink. Sunny’d be better off with someone more stable than a moonshiner. She sure as hell would be better off growing up far away from here.
She poured another glass.
* * *
—
alfonse took a hand off the wheel and reached under his seat, came up with a jar. “See what you think.”
She unscrewed the lid, keeping it away from her lap. They were bouncing along an unpaved county road three miles outside of Alcoa. She sniffed. A faint smell, like smoke—not a good sign. Took a sip.
“Good lord,” she said.
“Yup.”
“Tastes like…” She searched for an accurate description.
“Shit?”
“I was going to say burnt tires.”
“Burnt tires rolling through shit.”
“There ya go. Is it all like this? Is this from the foreshot? I told Hump he has to throw out the first few ounces.”
“Nope. It’s the whole batch, near as I can tell.”
“Fuck me.”
“Bartender Willie couldn’t reach you, and word got back to me. He’s plenty mad. Wants a refund.”
“Of course he does. But we already spent his money on supplies.”
A night’s sleep in her own bed had brought her halfway back to life, which is to say, merely miserable. And now Hump Cornette had fucked the batch and her along with it.
As usual they parked in the trees. No other cars were tucked in there, which was mixed news. Annoying that Hump wasn’t working, but a relief nobody else was snooping around.
They walked up through the brush, taking a meandering route—she didn’t want to wear a path, and they needed to finish their smokes—until they were atop the hill behind the Acorn Farm. Maybe a dozen people had heard of the farm. Eight knew it was real. And six knew it was located here.
It wasn’t much to look at: a 1,500-square-foot warehouse in a stand of oaks, a half mile from any other house or barn. The only things tethering it to the outside world were a rogue power line illegally piggybacking off the main line, and a narrow track that used to be a road. Stella had used it to haul truckloads of lumber during construction of the farm, then let it grow over. Nobody had any good reason to come down that road.
“All right then,” she said. “Put out your cigarette.”
She unlocked the side door and flipped on the main lights. Her heart quickened every time she walked in. The building and everything in it had been built to her specifications. If a still was a machine for turning corn into money, this was a money factory.
At one end was a set of bay doors and a small window that faced the old road—her lookout. At the other end of the room sat Queen Bess—a glorious, eight-hundred-gallon steel vat, whose throne was a brick and iron hearth. A thick copper pipe exited from her top cone at a right angle and ran to the custom-designed thump keg, then to the condenser, where a coil wound down through 110 gallons of water in a long steel tube. High-capacity pipes could suck up a hundred gallons a minute from an underground stream running beneath the hill, send it through the still, and dump the warm water back underground, all without pumps—the whole system ran on artesian pressure. She’d picked this location for the farm because of that stream—and because it was at the ass-end of nowhere. The factory ran on water, heat, sugar, microbes, and privacy.
“At least he didn’t leave it running,” Alfonse said. The industrial iron burners directly under the queen’s bottom were off, the taps to the oil tank closed. Good thing, because the fans in the huge vents were off, too. Run an indoor still without ventilation and you were asking for either asphyxiation or conflagration. The air in the building smelled only faintly of alcohol, which was fine, and the sour smell of stewing mash, which was typical.
She said, “Let’s check the mash first.”
There were forty fifty-five-gallon barrels in the room, two holding just water, and a few filled with cracked corn, but the rest, wrapped in electric blankets and industrial heat strips, contained mash at various stages of fermentation. The newest smelled mildly of puke, as usual, but the aging barrels were bubbling along nicely, soupy and golden, with ground corn floating on the surface like gold cream. She resisted the urge to start stirring. “Keep eating that sugar,” she said, just loud enough for the yeast to hear. She loved her busy fungi the way other women loved babies.
She did a cursory check of the rest of the still. The queen’s vat smelled clean, the crossover pipe was clear, the condenser intake valves grime free. The catch barrel was damp but unobjectionable.
“Hey, the mice have gotten in again,” Alfonse called. He was scrutinizing the floor around the south wall where they kept their supplies: crates of quart jars, dozens of brown gallon jugs, bags of dried corn and sprouted malt; and sugar, lots and lots of sugar. Alfonse gestured to the stack of twenty-five-pound Domino bags. “They’ve chewed through and there are turds along here.”
“God damn it. I told Hump to watch that.” A drawback of being out here in the woods was that the mice had home field advantage. She’d told Hump to mix up sugar and baking soda in hopes it would kill the little fuckers, but he hadn’t followed directions.
This was the problem with trying to make money from whiskey—you had to trust too many people, and trust cost money. Over the years she’d recruited five moonshiners, each with his own setup, work schedule, and capacity, each a unique pain in her ass. She insisted on them using Uncle Dan’s recipe, and her methods. They didn’t like taking orders from a girl but they were happy to take her money. Quality control, however, was a nightmare.
The farm was supposed to be a solution to all that, but so far it had cost her more to build it and get it running than she’d made back. She’d had to hire a discreet contractor, a morally flexible power company linesman, and a plumber who owed her a favor, then pay them enough to keep everything off the books. Then she had to find an assistant to run the still when she couldn’t be there, buy the supplies, and not fuck the batch.
She moved on to the aging barrels, the last step before being decanted to bottles. The first one she opened, the burnt smell hit her. There was something floating in the moonshine, half submerged. No, lots of somethings. She reached in, fished one out. It was a lump of black. Then she recognized it.
“Alfonse,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Bring me the head of Hump Cornette.”
* * *
—
two hours later, Alfonse came back to the farm, dragging with him a tall, skinny white boy with unfortunate teeth. Hump Cornette knew he was in trouble, but didn’t know how much.
“Hey, Stella.”
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“Don’t you hey me.” She nodded at the chair opposite her. “Sit down.”
He dropped onto his butt quick, as appropriate. Alfonse stood behind him, arms crossed. Hump said, “I can explain.”
“Explain what?”
The three mental gears in his possession seized up. “Um…everything?” His eyes were darting around, looking for clues. They were in the part of the warehouse Stella called her office—three walls of sugar bags around a workbench and her tools, an army cot, alarm clock, and automatic percolator.
“What’s my rule?” she asked.
“Knock before I go in the bathroom.”
“The other rule.”
He drew a blank.
“The rule when we’re running a batch.”
“Oh! Stick to the recipe.” He could see she was seething, and knew he was in deep trouble. “Please, Stella, if you just tell me what I done.”
She opened her fist. Inside was the hunk of black material. He blinked at it.
“What’s this, Hump?”
He shook his head. She tossed it at him. It bounced off his chest and he had to scramble to retrieve it.
“I found them floating in my hooch like black turds.”
“Charcoal’s in the recipe! You said it smooths out the shine, absorbs the last of the, the—”
“Nefarious chemicals,” Alfonse said.
“Those!”
“That’s not charcoal,” Stella said.
“It is!”
“Sit your ass down,” Alfonse said.
Hump sat, looking at the lump. Now tears were in his eyes. “The bag said…”
“This bag?” Stella asked. An empty ten-pound bag, brown with red lettering, lay across the workbench. She’d found a dozen just like it, crumpled and empty, stuffed into the split barrel they used for a garbage can. On the front of each it said:
Ford Charcoal Briquets—
The Modern Form of Charcoal—
Perfected to Burn Twice as Long as Common Charcoal
“Jesus,” Alfonse said.
“What the recipe says, Hump, is to soak overnight with white oak charcoal. Hardwood chips.”
“We were out! You told me to buy more.”
“And you decided to buy charcoal fucking briquets?”
“But it’s charcoal!”
“No. No it’s not. You know what they put in briquets?” God, she hated that made-up word. “Sodium nitrate, borax, tar, dirt—”
“Burnt tires,” Alfonse said.
“Burnt tires, and actual shit.”
“I didn’t know!” Hump said.
“And that, hammerhead, is the only thing saving your ass. See, I blame myself. Because I did not think that you were such a God damn idiot. What I blame is my lack of imagination.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m glad that—hey!” Alfonse had smacked him in the back of the head.
“You fucked up, and now you owe me. Hours and hours of owe me, to make this right.”
He nodded. Squinted at her. Zero lights were going on in that noggin of his.
“We have to dump everything,” she said. “Everything from that batch that’s already in jugs, everything in the soaking barrels. You’re going to scrub those barrels, too. And then you’re going to help me run a full batch, right now. And a hundred and sixty-five of it’s going to Willie Teffeteller.”
“Fifty free gallons?” Alfonse said. “That’s generous.”
“I’m not losing his business because Hump thought he was going to a God damn picnic barbecue. This is an apology delivery—think of it as long-term investment.”
“Where are you going?”
“To buy some fucking white oak charcoal.”
* * *
—
well after midnight and Hump was laid out on the cot, snoring. She would have woken him up as punishment, but that meant she’d have to talk to him, and she needed time to think. Time alone with her machine.
She loved the farm when a batch was running. The roar of the fans and the hissing burners beneath the vat were as soothing as a South Carolina beach. The air swam with alcohol. The smell of mash was so sour it became sweet in her lungs, a miracle the papists would have called transubstantiation.
There was that dark year, the first after she left the cove, when she had no idea how to glue together her broken mind. The idea of humans had repelled her, and the outside world seemed like chaos. She became a Dorothy who wouldn’t leave the house because it was spinning through the air.
Fuck Kansas. Fuck Oz.
In the end it was whiskey that had saved her. Not the drinking of it, though she came to love that, too. The work of it. The chemistry and engineering and art of it. Distillation burned away the impurities and made something beautiful that people would pay good money for. Money was the only shield a woman could count on in this world. Oh, she’d had to go into debt to build the Acorn Farm, but that was short-term risk for long-term security. And in the meantime if anybody came for her or what she’d built, they’d get a fight.
She checked the catch barrel but it was only half full. Distilling was a slow business, but that was soothing too—usually. It pissed her off that her thoughts kept turning back to the cove, and Sunny. While she was out shopping she’d learned that Motty’s funeral was tomorrow—they were going to bury her on the farm. After that, Sunny would be in Hendrick’s care.
What choice did Stella have? She couldn’t raise the girl herself. Stella was a God damn moonshiner.
Stella pulled up a chair next to Queen Bess and stared up at her bright steel belly. Stella’s proudest moment had been when she welded the last seam on her. The metal was vibrating gently the way it did when cooking smooth. She closed her eyes.
Willie would accept her apology, and the free gallons. Tomorrow morning they’d pour the last of the new batch into the jugs, and she and Alfonse would deliver it to him. She’d save this business. She’d save Motty. And the deer—the bushes shook, moved by a hidden shape. An animal? No, a girl. Sunny. She was holding the deer’s neck, squeezing—
Stella jerked in the chair, suddenly awake. A hand lay on her shoulder.
Alfonse said, “Easy now, didn’t mean to startle you.”
Had she been dreaming? She reached for her thoughts and they fled like fish.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Three in the morning.” Thank God. She’d only been asleep for a half hour at most.
She checked the barrel. Three-quarters now, and it smelled clean. The still had stopped working, so the batch was finished. She cut the burners but kept the fans on.
Alfonse tasted a spoonful. “There it is. The pure recipe. Your work here is done.”
“We’ve got to get this to Willie.”
“I’ll do that. Go home. You’ve got a funeral to get to.”
“About that.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I was wondering if you could do me a favor. After the delivery, come with me.”
He looked skeptical. Weren’t many Black folk in the cove. “You want me to come to the funeral, I’ll be there.”
“Yes—and after. There’s something I got to do that may go south. I’d appreciate you having my back.”
“How south we talking?”
She thought of the pale man and his non-pale pistol. “Georgia, maybe.”
“Hmm,” Alfonse said. “As you know, I have a firm policy against people messing with my business partner.”
11
1936
One november when Stella was twelve years and eight months old, she snuck out of the house to meet a boy. It was a Sunday morning, and the boy was a God-fearing Baptist, so maybe a waste of a good sneak.
Lunk was waiting for her on the road, looking nervous with his hands jammed in his c
oat pockets, black Bible tucked under one arm. Then he saw her and he jogged to her, which was sweet.
“I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said. His breath clouded in the chilly air.
“It’s not even eight yet.”
“I mean, I didn’t think Motty would let you come.”
“I’m in charge of my own soul.”
They walked side by side back the way he’d come. He was so much taller than she was, all that baby fat squeezed to make inches of height. He looked extra handsome with his hair combed. She knew he was working up the courage to hold her hand. Not that she would have let him, for a couple of reasons. She kept the Bible in her hand between them, and he noticed.
“I’m glad you brought it,” he said. He mentioned that Bible every time he saw her. On Fridays, when he was off from his fancy Maryville school, he mooned around the cove schoolyard in the afternoons, supposedly waiting to walk Mary Lynn home. “Did you read it cover to cover yet?” He always brought that up, too.
“I may have skipped some of the begats.”
“So you really haven’t gone to church before?”
“I have, just not among the primitives. Y’uns are cannibals, or…?”
“That’s not what it means! It’s the one true church, directly descended—”
She laughed. “Relax, Lunk.” He’d never objected to her name for him. He either liked it or was happy she called him anything at all. But law! the boy was nervous. She bumped him, and the back of her bare hand touched his. “Besides, I’ll try anything once.”
Oh, that got him all flushed.
“There are some rules I better explain,” he said.
“Sure, I can follow rules.” He made a noise and she said, “Did you just snort at me?”
“The first thing is, you have to sit with my mother.” The men and women sat on opposite sides of the church. Also, she shouldn’t expect any piano playing or guitar, because that wasn’t biblical. Neither was Sunday School. There’d be lots of singing, though, and then a sermon delivered by Elder Rayburn. “Whatever you do, don’t say anything. It’s not allowed.”
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