by Jon Billman
It is bad luck to sail into the horizon at sunset. A bee on deck is a sign of good luck. It is bad luck for a preacher or a woman to be on board, which makes Neptune angry. “Unless the woman is topless,” Wayne says. “A topless woman is good luck.”
Harriet is my girlfriend. She plays the tenor saxophone, and like aging mead, her hair is a slightly different color week by week. She’s British and not a Mormon, though the Mormons are how she landed here. She doesn’t like their rules; they did not tell her in England about their rules when she let them in her front door. Harriet calls them sodding Mormons, which in her British accent almost sounds like a compliment.
Now Harriet has submerged herself in Hams Fork. She waits tables at Habaneros, the Mexican restaurant next to Custer’s Last Strand Beauty Salon on the Triangle downtown. She lives in an old shotgun apartment above the restaurant that she gets rent-free from the owners. The restaurant vents are near the window and her apartment smells like greasy Mexican cooking and old cigar smoke. The wallpaper is of yellowed Victorian flowers.
Harriet’s hair now is the kind of blonde that is really brown until she steps into the sunlight. When things get slow she trades the ladies at the salon Mexican food for hair and nail jobs. She is beautiful, with sharp European features, and I don’t know why she is my girlfriend or what she sees in me. She is wild and funny and makes me laugh. I sit and listen to her voice for hours and her stories, which are probably nothing more than small anecdotes, sound like high drama to me. Harriet likes to do things like hike up Sarpy Ridge, take her clothes off, and moon the town. She likes to say we were meant for each other, and this is something I truly believe myself, although I never repeat it back to her.
I know, when were all together, Wayne studies Harriet the way an artist studies a still life.
I come from a family of artists. My grandfather was a bootlegger from Watonga, Oklahoma. He had a line of stills out in the red dirt and blackjacks. Once a week he’d load up his old Chrysler with lugs of moonshine and drive—fishing tackle hanging out the window—to Seventh and Broadway in Oklahoma City, where he’d deal them out of the sales manager’s office of McDonald-Scott Chevrolet. Said he got the scar on the bridge of his nose from drinking out of fruit jars. His whiskey was the best that side of Wyoming—no Arkansas bathtub jakeleg. Grandpa distilled a special Christmas hootch for the local sheriff. He knew who to pay.
The Whiskey Road runs from Hams Fork—our town—to Honeyville, Utah. During Prohibition, Hams Fork was the prostitution-and-moonshine capital of the West, and Hams Fork Moon was famous. Now my grandpa is buried in Oklahoma, and Hams Fork is known only for its huge population of Mormons and its open-pit coal mine. The Whiskey Road is washed out and rutted, but we use it in the warmer months when the Utah State Patrol sets roadblocks on the Wyoming line. We’ve been stuck in the mud. We’ve broken down with a full load of mead. We’ve been shot at by ranchers. But we can always say we’re just hauling honey. This is the can-of-corn part of the job, right down U.S. 30 to our port of call, Hams Fork. If we get stopped, all Wayne has to do is say he likes honey on his pancakes. Wayne loves his pancakes. He catches his breath. Wastin away again in Honeyville … lookin for my lost three-legged dog … The Mormons know our mead is the best— the most medicinal, as they say—this side of the Continental Divide: our mead packs 16 percent alcohol. Stand next to the Hams Fork City Limit sign and you can throw a rock almost into Utah. This I have done.
Maybe sailing the Seven Seas is Robin’s dream too, I don’t know. Robin is the wife Wayne married. She’s a bird-watcher and a math teacher. She’s the kind of woman I’d like to marry but Wayne got to her first. The cat’s name is Heck. Wayne says Heck’s job will be to keep wharf mice out of the hold. Wayne says now he just sneaks around the yard and eats birds. Heck was Wayne’s idea.
Like Heck, Wayne prefers the dark meat too. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, after quaffing much morning mead, Wayne jerks the legs off the hot turkey and hoists them in the air like Henry VIII or a Viking.
Late at night in summer we drive the honey truck up-country and poach shipwood on the National Forest. We choose the cleanest, straightest pines and Douglas firs, fell them and deck them, the hot buzz of the chain saw in our ears. Some of the trees we buck into ten-foot logs and stack inside the truck. Some we leave long and I winch them on top of the truck with a come-along.
Wayne’s painting studio has become a workshop. An edger, a planer, a table saw, drill press, lathe. Sawdust covers the floor, the easels, the framed figures of buxom models. Sketches of boats are taped to everything. The log that will become the boat’s prow is solid European maple, from a 150-year-old tree we felled at two A.M. in the bishop’s front yard.
“A good boat is like a woman,” Wayne says. “The malty smell of warm wood, the sanded lines of the bow, curves you can get lost in. You can fall in love with a boat.” Wayne says that someday he’s going to capture love in his art. He says “love” like it’s the rarest of wild animals, never been snared before, and this boat is the most cunning of traps. I help Wayne with the heavy wooden pieces because Wayne has a bad back and cannot lift anything heavier than a camel-hair paintbrush.
A wooden fence surrounds the Cuba Libre’s skeleton in the back yard Wayne now calls the Tropic of Kerr. In winter, like now, the boat’s backbone and ribs stick out of the snow like giant wishbones on a white beach, a whale beached in snow. I stand inside what will be the Cuba Libre’s doghouse and I’m like Jonah, Jonah of Hams Fork. You can tell the temperature by the sound your boots make— the colder it is, the louder the crunch.
Lot Young, next door, pretends to do yard work—raking snow, shoveling frost—so he can watch Wayne Kerr build his dream. Lot is caught in a role with many kids and one wife and can no longer have dreams. “Say, Noah!” calls Lot. “How long ‘til it starts raining?”
“Not long now!” yells Wayne. “Just time enough for me to finish building and collect two of each kind!”
“How’s that?”
“You know: two blondes, two brunettes, two redheads!”
When the Vikings died and went to Valhalla, the warrior maidens served them horns of mead: when the battles ended, the Valkyries became waitresses. Four o’clock is tea time. I’m on the tea standard now. Before I met Harriet, four meant a Coke and two cigarettes. Now, no matter, four means tea.
Our meadery is in Wayne and Robins basement, where everything is safely hidden from taxes and regulations. Heck and I sleep in the basement. I keep a cot in what used to be Robin’s sewing room. Every Saturday Robin changes my bedding. Harriet’s futon is warm and her sheets are flannel, but I like the independence of being able to stay in the meadery sometimes, where I drift off to sleep to the smell of honey and yeast, and not enchiladas.
But in the afternoon—after checking thermometers, hydrometers, fermentation locks, sterilizing barrels—when the winter sun has started to drop behind Utah, I stroll over the Tropic of Kerr, through the gate, across the alley and the Coast to Coast parking lot, to Habaneros on the Triangle. Robin will be there, grading papers, forever grading papers, and we’ll tear open little restaurant packets of artificial creamer and honey and drink tea with Harriet and eat sugared little greasy things Alex the cook fries up for us between real orders. It’s in the four o’clock hour that it just doesn’t matter that I have a chimichanga haircut, need some dental work, have no health insurance. I’ve lived here long enough to know this Wyoming wind could bring a tempest, could bring anything. The honeybees came on ships from Europe almost four hundred years ago. Now the bees are the figurehead of a state that doesn’t even allow mead.
Sometimes I picture them on the Cuba Libre —Wayne in the pulpit, a mad Viking, gray hair and beard in the wind like an unfurled jib, spray over his bow. Robin is grading papers. Wayne could rape and pillage all of Great Britain while Robin stayed aboard to finish red-penning eleventh-hour geometry quizzes.
The only thing I remember about geometry class is that you are allowed one “giv
en.” This is my given: I know how to make mead.
The legend is that mead is an aphrodisiac, so in a way what I do is ferment love. The Mormon men drink mead for virility and fertility: It is believed that mead drinkers father more sons.
In the days of the Norsemen, when great men were made from the spit of gods, dwarfs brewed a magic mead from the blood of a poet. The dwarfs lured the poet into their caverns and ran him through with swords. They poured his blood into three jars and mixed it with honey. From this wort they brewed the magic mead. Anyone who drank the mead could have wisdom.
You already know about our Utah honey. We use high-quality European champagne yeast and yeast nutrient that we dissolve in hot water. I splash cold Hams Fork River water against the sides of the fifty-five-gallon honey drums to oxygenate the honeywort. The city has come around asking why we use so much water. “Could there be a leak?” they ask.
“I water my lawn and flush the toilet a lot,” Wayne tells them, this in December, Wayne not having much of a yard in June anyway.
Then I pitch the dissolved yeast and yeast nutrient into the honeywort, add a blow-off tube to each drum lid, and wait. We don’t boil our honey. The alcohol content is high enough to kill any contaminants. Kerr Mead is aged nine months, and when it is finished it tastes like sweet honey wine.
Everything, fermentation especially, and love too, I suppose, amounts to time. Sometimes the fermentation sticks. Just stops. The hydrometers indicate that the sugar isn’t finished fermenting throughout the anaerobic cycle.
This is when we use yeast skeletons. Normally throwaways, these yeast hulls are the cell walls left behind during the yeast extraction process. The yeast skeletons absorb fermentation-inhibiting poisons produced by yeast when too much alcohol gets to them too soon. Unsticking fermentation is a little like magic.
Time in Utah is an odd concept. Utah is like another country, another culture altogether, less like Canada than Mexico with its odd rituals and ancient customs. They still have real live firing squads in Utah. I guess that it’s the noble way to go if you’re on Point of the Mountain’s death row, say, for intent to deliver high-octane mead to Honeyville, or stabbing your girlfriend’s lover in the throes of passion, and the final grain of sand just slipped through your hourglass. The last cigarette probably isn’t allowed. They pin a paper target over your heart and buckle you into a chair. Take it like a man, good night, lights out. No last cigarette, no last belt of whiskey. So much in Utah is lost to time.
You have to be wary of the wild yeasts. They can live and propagate themselves in mead wort if your champagne yeast doesn’t get the jump on them and kill them with the alcohol. There are thousands of types of wild yeasts in Wyoming. Let them get at your mead and what they make of it isn’t fit for Utah or anywhere else.
Wild yeasts infected a dozen barrels of our mead once. It was like discovering your girlfriend or wife has been cheating on you—we felt violated. We’re not sure how it happened—an infected syphon hose maybe. We loaded up the barrels one midnight over much cursing and drove to a river access above town. “Kinda like the goddamned Boston Tea Party,” Wayne said as we pried the bungs off the barrels and dumped the mead into the Hams Fork River. The river under our flashlights turned blond as the bad mead caught the current and flowed through town.
Harriet was baptized in Utah, a baptism of sorts, anyway. She let the Mormon missionaries—white shirts, black ties and slacks— into her drafty East London flat one afternoon. They refused tea and told her stories about Zion: the brilliant deserts that smell of cactus bloom, the blue mountains that hold wild elk and summertime snow. Milk and honey. They described the contradictions for her without telling her in plain English that that’s what they are, contradictions. They told Harriet about the brave British immigrants of almost two hundred years ago. They told her the miracle of Elizabeth Ann Walmsey Palmer.
E.A.W.P. had been one of the first Mormon converts in England. She immigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois, then whipped an ox team to Utah Territory and settled here in the 1860s, She was an invalid, and the legend—Mormon history—says she was carried into the lukewarm water of the Great Salt Lake and walked out unaided.
Harriet had been working in a department store in London. She packed a steamer trunk and worked her way here shoveling cow shit on an Argentine cattle ship. She came ashore in New York and rode the Greyhound to Zion.
She can’t swim. Harriet waded into the briny water off Antelope Island last summer and had to be carried out by a photographer from Mona who was disappointed she didn’t require mouth-to-mouth, but he had the powers of a bishop and proclaimed her officially baptized. She hitchhiked eastward and got as far as Hams Fork, where she met Robin in the IGA. Robin is the one who introduced us. Harriet’s visa will run out in the spring. Legally, she cannot work at Habaneros, but the Mexican owner is cutting her a break. I could marry Harriet and make her legal, but it’s something we talk over and around. Robin is the only one who is completely convinced that Harriet and I should get married.
Wayne bought a video: Basic Sailing Made Simple. Harriet is excited about going sailing with Wayne when he finishes the Cuba Libre and trailers it to the Great Salt Lake for test runs, as if the brine of that lake still holds another miracle, and sailing over it in a ketch with Admiral Kerr might produce some effect of love total immersion didn’t. Who here wouldn’t want to sail a desert ocean with Wayne Kerr when every day, everywhere you look is a sea of sagebrush. I know that, though beautiful, the lake is sterile and holds only the lowly brine shrimp.
We make love and drink hot cocoa. She’s never said so, but the chocolate part is her favorite—the chocolate part is not my favorite. Even in winter Harriet plays her saxophone on the rusty second-story fire escape. She leans over the railing, hair wild over her face, and blows love into the unappreciative wind. “Isn’t there an ordinance against that?” I’ve heard Mormons walking below say.
When it snows sideways down her alley she plays in the glow the streetlights make through the leaded glass of her apartment window. Now and then a big, slow winter fly, stunned by geography and cold, drones heavily around her apartment. Killing it seems too easy, so I slide the heavy window open and shoo the fly outside, where it has to face Wyoming on its own or die. I’m sure they crash-land in the snow and freeze to death almost immediately. Harriet has a sensual overbite, an elegant neck, sculpted British nose, sea-green eyes, pale skin, and she loves Billie Holliday. I’ve never had such a beautiful woman before. It makes me anxious, as if one day I will come back from Utah and it will all be gone. I don’t know if she loves me or not. It is not a word we use between us.
Mead lasts. It gets better with age and can last for years; unlike so many things, my mead gets better as I get older.
Viking tradition had it that if mead was imbibed heavily for one moon—one month—after the wedding, then in nine months another celebration would ensue at the birth of a son. Having many sons was especially important in the days of constant war.
Wayne says mead was the drink of orgies. “Look at that honey moon.”
Today we are on our way to Honeyville. The return trip. Full of mead. I’m not hungry, but I force down a piece of toast. It settles my stomach. Wayne is out of bed at high noon. He splashes water on his face, puts on his Rockies cap, ready for business. We check the oil, brake fluid, and antifreeze. We check headlights, taillights, running lights, turning signals, and brake lights. Tire pressure. Fuel. Horn. The trip to Honeyville, loaded down with contraband alcohol, is a bit more tense. Wayne drives, lapsing into song as we sail by the Wyoming Port of Entry at the edge of town. Livin’ on pancakes … watchin’ my dog bake … My back is sore from loading the drums myself.
Another thing about the trip to Honeyville is that we do not know who to pay off. Trust no one over there, Wayne says, and almost no one on the Wyoming side either, for that matter.
Wayne checks his mirrors and stops his humming to inform me of something. “You know, the sailors with the rea
l huevos soloedaround the world. Picture that, at the helm on a starry night. Next day its rum and mahimahi at some maiden-infested island paradise. I’m thinking about soloing around the world in the Cuba Libre”
“What about Robin?” I say but the old milk van leaks wind at its seams and rattles like a washing machine so Wayne doesn’t hear me.
Just across the Utah border at Garden City we turn west and grind up the pass before dropping into Logan Canyon and down narrow U.S. 89 through the Cache National Forest and its timber, the thousands upon thousands of potential ship masts. After an hour of canyon we reach Logan. It’s almost four, almost dark.
The most beautiful girls in the world live in Logan, Utah. Wayne says it’s the gene pool. But considering the Viking tradition of mead, you’d think there’d only be sons. Little real love lives in this town, Wayne says. Everything in Logan is too pasteurized, too sterile, too filtered. The van lumbers away from each stoplight like a loaded ice wagon. Even with overload springs in the rear, the front end rides high, causing our low beams to glare off the windshields of oncoming cars. They flash their lights at us. Wayne flashes back. We drive on.
“So when are you going to marry Harriet and grant her citizenship?” Wayne is blunt.
I look at him in a way that says I’m thinking about business. His talk, I think, turns to Robin.
“They’ll do anything for us. They cook. They do dishes. They scrub toilets. They have sex with us. They raise our children. And for what? All they ask is for one thing. Just one thing, and it’s small—tiny—in comparison.” A coffee dusk settles hard over the Cache Valley. The dashboard lights cast Wayne’s shaggy face in a virulent green glow. “All they ask is for us to love them.”
