by Taylor Brown
He rumbled down the porch steps and made for the car.
Granny sucked her teeth again.
“You best not of lost that old poke of mine,” she called out. “I used to eat school lunch out that bag.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He got in the car, slamming the door, and fired the big engine. He turned a circle in the yard and tore off down the drive.
Granny watched him go. She leaned back again in her rocker, smiling despite herself.
That grandboy of hers. If he wasn’t in love, he was close.
* * *
Eli was riding shotgun, stroking the gnarled mass of his beard. Rory looked over at him.
“You do that long enough you think it’ll purr?”
Eli spat out the window.
“Your dick purr for you, all that handiwork you given it?”
“I got hope just yet.”
They were headed up the mountain to deliver the Sheriff’s news, the road forking and forking again, Eli squinting as if to read signs at each juncture, then pointing them this way or that. They wound higher and higher, the leaves darkening on the trees as they climbed, the risen sun slanting down through the branches in heatless planes of light. The tires churned through muddy slogs and bounced over knotty clutches of roots, the big motor roaring against the feathered clutch. The air grew colder, scarcer, and the car-roads petered out into old wagon-trails that branched again and again in ever-steepening runoffs, some of them just the ghosts of roads through overgrown woods. Who knew what histories lay up or down those paths, what births and murders and madness high on the mountain? So many stories jumped mouth to mouth down the slopes and across the hollers, across the years, and so many did not. There were broken-down cabins scattered across the ridges, some more than two centuries old, their roofs imploded by decades of snow burden or crushed beneath storm-felled oaks. Some mere foundation stones, fire-scorched, razed by lightning or oil-lamp or trouble-seeking boys.
“Up here,” said Eli. “Yonder’s his truck.”
The big flatbed sat parked at the edge of a small clearing, covered in camouflage netting like they used in the war. They parked alongside it and got out. Three separate footpaths struck off into the woods.
“Which one?” asked Rory.
“The middle,” said Eli, pointing. “I think.”
“What’s up the others?”
“I don’t think we want to know.”
The track itself was rocky, but Rory could discern cart tracks in the softer places, hoofprints between them. The signs of a workway, a still-path. The trees were gray on either side of them, naked already of leaves, their antlered crowns clattering in the wind.
“Airish up here,” said Eli. He shivered.
Rory didn’t say anything. The air felt a cooling salve against his flesh, as if he were running a few degrees too hot. Eli shrugged and produced his hip flask.
“Least my belly’s warm.”
Eustace had stills scattered all across the mountain, in gullies and coves and laurel slicks. They were run by a small army of old men with gnarled hands and bent backs, many disfigured by war or logging accidents or lovers’ squabbles. Their silence was legendary. They’d farmed rock-ridden hillsides, or tried, and fought Germans with bayonets and trench guns in hells of mud. They’d cut whole mountains to stumps for Northern timber barons, blasted rock and driven spikes for narrow-gauge lines. Then in the 1920s the timber ran scarce and the camps folded. Dry flumes laced the mountains like abandoned amusement rides, and there was no work. They would have to move west to work in the coal mines, scurrying underground like the Welsh sappers they knew in the war, carting out the black rubble of prehistoric swamps to fuel cities they would never see. That or down into the brick prisons of the mills, the heat and lint and machine-gun rattle. A choice of black lung or white, each contracted beneath the shoddy suns of electric bulbs. Then came Eustace, who gave them the moon.
The trees opened onto a grassy bald, a sward of oat grass cut by a crooked black stream that ran tripping and fleeing from the mountain heights. They climbed toward where the stream broke from the upper tree line. A thousand green spires of spruce and fir, untouched by ax or saw. The evergreen cathedral, cloud-rung, which Eustace called home. Rory looked back before stepping into the cold shadows of these giants. They were close now to the summit of the mountain, and the land lay all crinkled and ridged beneath them, studded by lesser peaks the color of woodsmoke. The world seemed unreal from this height, the work of someone’s imagining.
Eli held out the flask to Rory.
“Tell me about this girl you’re all knotted up over.”
Rory took the flask.
“What girl?”
“Don’t give me that shit. You been brooding.”
“I haven’t.”
“What’s her name?”
Rory sipped from the flask; lightning struck down his throat.
“Christine,” he said.
“She cute?”
“More than.”
“What’s she do?”
“Makes hats.”
“They built a hat factory down there?”
“No, she does them herself.”
“Well, damn. A entrepreneur. She gonna make you something smart to replace that ancient piece of shit on your head?”
“This was my granddaddy’s.”
“Let me tell you something: your granddaddy wouldn’t never have caught a woman like Granny wearing that thing. Not like it is. Looks like something went and died on your head.”
“You thought about that a lot—catching Granny?”
Eli grabbed the flask back.
“Gimme that.”
They stepped into the trees and followed the stream. They found the still first, an eight-hundred-gallon pot shaped like a submarine. Thin blue feathers of flame tickled the base, dancing from lengths of drilled one-inch pipe. There was a sustained hiss of burning gas, like a distant jet. The still was enclosed by a three-walled house of rough-hewn timbers, mud-daubed at the chinks. There was a folding cot against one wall, a burlap flap on the open side pulled back like a curtain. It was a structure that could be built in a day. Probably had been. One of many shelters rumored on the mountain, set in caves and groves and uprooted trees. Several feet away stood an old gray mule, worn nearly dead from packing in sugar and meal, then packing it out again as whiskey. As they stood there the wind came up through the trees. Rory waited for the leaves to rise hovering from the ground, as legend had them.
“The hell y’all doing up here?”
They wheeled. Eustace stood behind them, frowning, eating from a can of beans. They hadn’t heard a thing.
“We had to talk to you,” said Eli.
Eustace squinted at them. He was chewing a mouthful. He swallowed and licked clean his spoon, a little thing with tines like a fork. A souvenir from the war in France, the homemade utensil of a dead German. Rory had never seen him eat with anything else.
“Talk, then.”
Eli looked at Rory, waiting. Rory shifted on his wooden leg. There were stumps scattered about. Eustace didn’t ask them to sit.
“I talked to the Sheriff last night.”
“And?”
“He said no more milk-runs. Said he’s forbidding them.”
Eustace stiffened. He set down the can of beans.
“Forbidding them.”
“Yes, sir. Says we got to run a tank. Sell wholesale.”
Eustace sucked clean his teeth.
“Wholesale.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rory.
“For how much?
“Seven-fifty a gallon.”
The old man tugged his beard, hard, twisting the hair between his fingers. Rory could feel him, his great pressurized bulk, his body seeming to tremble like the cap on a mash boiler—the kind you had to keep down with a big rock or length of chain. He cleared his throat.
“He say what come him to this?”
“He said there’s been too much trou
ble,” said Rory. “Cars sabotaged and such. Said we’ll have a single location for off-load.”
“Where at?”
“This filling station, down at End-of-the-Road. Lately a church.”
Eustace growled, crossing his hands over his chest, thumbs up.
“His daddy’s old place. Mite convenient, that. Payment on delivery?”
“He said.”
The old man growled again. His great belly shook.
“He’s lording,” he said. “It ain’t a thing I’m like to brook.”
“What you want us to do?”
Eustace leaned, arms crossed, and spat. A clot quivered on a nearby rock.
“Do it,” he said. “For now.”
* * *
Granny leaned against the trunk of a red oak to catch her breath. The sun shafted cold and white through the shattered roof of the forest. She adjusted the sling of shells over her shoulder and kept on, tracking the direction she thought the creature had run. She had found no blood-spoor drying on the leaves, no prints in the windblown piles upon the ground. She had found twigs and branches broken as by passing beast, and this she followed, her big man-boots crackling beneath her, her shotgun cradled in the crook of her arm. She was old, she knew, but she wasn’t crazy yet.
The wind soughed through the trees, kicking up swirls of leaves, and that lonesome sound put her in mind of her past. So much of her life had happened in the falling season. She could see that now. It was a fall day when she set out to learn a way of making a living for the little boy that had become her warrant. Her old life had been swallowed in the rising of the lake; her Bonni had been sent away. She would have no more of towns with their kept little women, soft-skinned in houses of brick and stone, bitter when their men followed strange bents in the night. Shapes to which they themselves would never deign kink. Women who whispered that her daughter had asked for what she got. That God had struck her dumb. She who should never have been consorting with a boy of high birth, when she wasn’t but a whore’s daughter. Perhaps it was her own mother at fault, for sin will out.
Granny had needed a new way of living for the boy, and she sought it out herself. She went deep into the mountains with only a mule, toward the Cherokee lands, the leaves coming down in a whispering storm, blood-colored and gold. The first frost came with her asleep in the crater of a wind-felled oak, waking to find herself clutched in the icy talons of the tree’s exposed roots. Three days later she found the woman she sought, a white healer living in a one-room cabin near the Tennessee border. People said she’d been widowed in 1865, her husband hanged by secessionist guerrillas from a black oak in the front yard. According to Granny’s calculations, that made her something more than eighty years old.
She waited three days beneath that tree for the old woman to open the door. The first snow fell, ledging itself upon the brim of her slouch hat, in the creases and folds of her shawl. She sat cross-legged on the ground, shaking, and she knew somehow that building a fire would only keep the door barred against her. Will must be proven. Wisdom earned. She waited, eating dried pork from her sack, drinking snow she melted in the cup of her hands. After three days, the door opened, a pane of rectilinear yellow light giving unto a whole other world. Granny rose and struggled toward it, stoving blue holes in the snow, stunned at the woman she met at the door. A woman so like herself, twice-distanced down the same hard road.
“Welcome,” said the old woman, as if she were expected.
* * *
Granny bent to the ground before a deadfall of graying timber and brushed at the wind-piled leaves. In the earth an indention, vaguely angular, such as the edge of a boot sole might make. She kept on, climbing over fallen limbs moldering slowly back into the earth, their bark sloughing away to reveal the pale flesh beneath. She searched for claw-slashes in the softened wood, or the strike of heels, finding neither for certain. She went on. The wind rose again, the woods murmuring in a low ocean of voices. A hare exploded in a fire of reddish leaves, a streak of brown fur shooting up the nearest rise. She reached a creek that ran nearly straight across her path, the black sluice speckled with fallen leaves, tiny ships in fleet.
She searched the soft earth of the banks, finding nothing, and thought of turning back. Instead she clung to a sapling grown aslant the creek, her arm shaking slightly as she stepped nearly across. Her boot sank into the soft mud at the edge of the creek bed, the water bubbling at the throat of her boot, and she climbed the far side, the shotgun still tucked in her arm. She was a little ways farther on, rounding the mountain toward the south, when she stepped through a broken tangle of brambles and found a boot print in a soft patch, perfect as a mold. She knelt. It was a number-ten shoe size, or thereabouts, and the toe-strike was deeper than the heel, as of a man in flight. She sniffed and spat on the ground beside it. A few yards on, the trees broke onto the skinniest excuse for a road, such as the kind teenagers favored high on the mountain for necking and carrying-on. She cocked her head. Tire tracks, unmarked by paws or hooves or feet.
“Got you, you son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 12
It was near hog-killing time and the feed store had plenty of barrels in stock. The clerk led them out back of the place. Fifty-five-gallon steel drums stood in ranks along the fence. All through the hills, the barrels were buried at a diagonal in the ground and filled with scalding water. Bled-out hogs were dunked long enough to loosen their coarse winter hair, then hauled smoking onto wooden pallets, their scalded hides scraped hairless with dull knives.
Rory scratched his chin.
“I heard the steel gives the whiskey a tang.”
“Not our department,” said Eli. He looked at the clerk. “You got a dolly?”
They wheeled the barrel out to the car, and Rory paid the man from the sheaf of bills stashed in his back pocket.
“You been selling more of these than regular?”
The clerk made change from the canvas apron he wore, then cocked his head toward the car.
“Seems boys in V8 Fords got a special taste for pork chops this season.”
“You sell to any of them Muldoons?”
The clerk grimaced like someone had elbowed him in the ribs.
“I really couldn’t speak to that, young fella.”
Rory peeled off a ten-dollar bill.
“What if Alexander Hamilton was asking?”
The clerk looked Rory in the face.
“I’d tell him to duck next time.”
* * *
They sat in the singed air of the garage, the doors open. Dusk was falling over the mountain, the sky purpling over the jagged black trees. The ribbed drum lay sideways in the trunk of the coupe, set on a plywood cradle and secured with leather straps. Eli had welded on a filling spout. A long snake of garden hose looped from the spout and slithered out of the garage. There was the hollow, distant rumble of water filling the tank, like someone drawing a bath in a claw-foot tub.
Eli sipped from his hip flask and smacked his lips.
“Who you think is behind all this trouble the Sheriff was talking about?”
Rory leaned back on his stool and held the jar of water he was sipping to the light. He could have told it wasn’t whiskey just by feel. It was too heavy in the glass, rolling and muscling its way around.
“I’m not for sure.”
“Could be it’s the Sheriff himself behind it.”
“I thought of that.” He sipped from the jar. The water was cold, from deep in the mountain, and tasted almost sweet. “You know that preacher down there, his brother? He’s only got one eye.”
“So?”
“So you know my mother carved out the eye of one of those nightriders.”
Eli set down his jar.
“Lot of people lost a eye around here. Half the mountain’s caught a splinter cutting timber, seems like.”
Rory nodded.
“I know,” he said. “But I’ll always be a little prejudiced against one-eyed sons of bitches, thinking they migh
t could be the one.”
“It isn’t something you’ll ever know. Not unless you had an eye to match it with, and you don’t. You got to make peace with that.”
Rory stood.
“Come on, tank’s about full. Time for a shakedown run.”
Highway 321 sped through the high country, clutching blasted rock faces striated by dynamite grooves, crooking in hairpins sheered against the stars. Guardrails zagged in the headlights like endless bolts of lightning, striking ever deeper into the night. The blacktop heaved beneath the car, cresting, then dropped quickly away, the two of them floating against their lap-belts as the road sang beneath a ridge that put Rory in mind of ambush. He glanced up as he drove, half-expecting to see men on horseback silhouetted against the sky.
Eli was sliding side to side in his seat, sipping from his jar, casual as an old woman riding a buckboard wagon to church.
“Tell you what, I’d eat the crust off a heifer’s teats about this moment.”
Rory skewed his mouth toward his friend, keeping his eyes on the road.
“You ate an apple not two hours ago.”
“Mushy as mule shit.”
“You’d bitch if they hung you with a new rope.”
Eli touched his neck with the blackened tips of his fingers, squinting with thought.
“Hell,” he said. “I might.”
The tires bawled into the belly of the curve, the motor exploding off the stony wall of the ridge. The car jostled through the sharpening curves, a mighty hulk prompted in one direction, then another, roaring as it went. The wheel was light in Rory’s fingers, the accelerator a mighty button beneath his foot. He was letting the machine do the work, his arms rowing through the gears, his feet dancing among gas and brake and clutch, his heart calm, not racing the throttled engine.
“Yonder’s the spot,” said Eli.
“I know where it is.”
Rory let off the gas coming down toward the roadhouse, the exhaust popping and crackling as the car decelerated. They rolled crunching into the graveled lot and Rory cut the engine and they got out.
“What you think?” Eli patted the trunk.
“She’s solid. And you don’t got to worry about busting any glass.”
