by Amy Greene
As Silver pondered these things, Gracie came to kneel beside her in the garden dirt. While Gracie played in the loam, flies buzzing around them, Silver remembered the one time she had held the child. She’d seen Annie Clyde behind the house hanging sheets on the first warm day of spring, the farm smelling of turned earth and mown hay, on her way down the track to the road. Annie Clyde had waved Silver over. Gracie was crying in a basket at Annie Clyde’s feet and she asked Silver with pins in her mouth to take the baby for a minute. Silver was trying to recall what Gracie had felt like in her arms when the child lifted a woolly worm on the bridge of her finger and showed it to Silver. Silver tensed but held out her hand to let the worm pass from Gracie’s flesh to her own. They looked at each other as Annie Clyde looked down on their heads. Now Silver wanted that moment to be the last one she spent with her kin. She didn’t know if she could face the loss ahead of her even without seeing it happen before her eyes. She didn’t want to remember them riding off in James Dodson’s Model A Ford, its bed piled high with chattel. Their going no different than any of those other departures she had witnessed from her perch on the ridge.
Kneeling there with Gracie in the garden loam last week, Silver had agreed to take the dog. She couldn’t refuse. But even as they walked away from her, Annie Clyde leading Gracie by the hand and their coonhound loping after them, she didn’t want him. Not for any length of time. The only dogs she’d known were those her grandfather used to keep to guard his moonshine still. The last had been the meanest, a shepherd bitch that bit Silver if she got too close. She’d left a tin feed pan and some mildewed bedding up at the still for ages, in the shed where the bitch was put when she went into heat. Silver hadn’t had the heart to throw them out because they reminded her of her grandfather’s affection for dogs. She had none herself, but she owed her niece something. She felt bound to do the favor Annie Clyde had asked of her, as much as she dreaded it. If Silver could write she might have slipped off with the dog in the night and left a note under a rock on the stoop. She wasn’t supposed to take him until tomorrow. But if she did it now, she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to her people. She wouldn’t have to watch them leaving without her.
Silver’s mind had been burdened this way since she woke at dawn. She took a long time lighting a fire and boiling her oats. At last she decided to go down the mountain and figure out what to do about her niece’s dog later. She had other business to attend to in the valley. She’d been meaning for weeks to gather the last of the trumpet weed growing on the west end of the Hankinses’ pasture before it was drowned. She used the long, hollow stems like straws for reaching into the charred oaken barrels she’d buried underground at the beginning of spring. She would draw out the aged whiskey deep inside and swirl it on her tongue. Then she would spit a mouthful onto the mink-scratched clay of the bank to keep from swallowing it. Whiskey was made for selling and not drinking. That’s where her grandfather Plummerman Ledford had gone wrong. He drank about as much moonshine as he ran off until it killed him. When he died Silver watched as her grandmother Mildred placed coins on his eyes and washed his face, pitted and scarred under his whiskers. Then Silver went to the still and plucked a pink clover for his breast pocket. There was no funeral but she had said her own prayers. Before Plum died, he’d showed Silver everywhere trumpet weed flourished. In past seasons she’d hurried to beat the browsing deer and not the coming lake to her straws. These days most of the weed was eaten off, but when she was a girl the meadows of Yuneetah had been thick with it in late summer on into fall, the drooping lances of its leaves and the pale lavender umbels of its flowers rising ten feet over the goldenrod and thistles along the fencerows. Back then she and Plum had been in no danger of running out.
Silver’s grandfather had taught her everything about bootlegging, starting with how moonshine got its name, made at night so the law wouldn’t see the smoke. She had liked being with him up at the still, set into a stream bank high on the mountain since before she was born. The round metal still pot packed in glistening mud beneath the barrel cap. The stack of the furnace, a fifty-five-gallon drum cut in half, jutting out full of kindling. When the still was running flames wrapped around the pot and shot out the flue at the back, vapors collecting in the barrel cap then moving down into the thumper keg and the condenser. Silver would wash out jars in the trickling stream or whatever her grandfather let her help with. He’d taught her to make whiskey without store-bought yeast or sugar or grain, using corn from their garden and home-sprouted malt. They put half a bushel of meal in each barrel, the other half to be heated for mush in the still pot, and left it a couple of days before coming back to stir it with a stick. Then they added a gallon of ground corn malt and one of meal with a cap of rye sprinkled on top to keep the mash warm. A week or so later when the cap fell off and the top was clear, the whiskey was ready to run off. It was only in the years since Plum died that Silver had taken to chartering moonshine, experimenting with the brew she’d been taught to make. Sometimes she mixed in ginger and orange peel for taste. Sometimes herbs and roots to make the medicine she gave to her niece for Gracie, consulting with Beulah Kesterson on what was wisest to use. She’d found that tulip tree bark worked best for fever. She had sold some of her medicine to Beulah before the old woman gave up peddling, but she made it more for pleasure than for anything else. It was the work she needed, the ritual of following the stream upward each morning until the air turned cooler and purer, to where the still was set in the bank beneath a stand of red buckeye trees.
It wasn’t long past ten o’clock this morning when Silver had strapped on the cotton sack she used for picking and climbed down the winding trail that came out at the foot of the mountain behind the Walker farm. Though she had put a rope in her sack for the dog just in case, she’d kept her face turned away as she went through the hayfield, past the house and on down the track. At the end of the track she had crossed the road and ducked under the fence into the Hankins pasture. She’d gone downhill to where the reservoir was visible, fingers of water pointing farther landward, watching her feet. The cattle were gone but the dried pucks of their manure had come back to life. Soaking up the rain they looked fresh again, sprouting frail clusters of nodding toadstools. She’d stopped when she reached where the lake spilled over, wavering with strands of foxtail and crabgrass. She was surprised at the foothold the reservoir had gained within a few months, how much it had overtaken. Most of the trees and barn sides the power company had slashed with paint to mark how far the water would come had already been wetted. Gulls and herons had already begun to nest. After another night of rain, some of the roads would surely be washed out. Like the rest of the town, Silver was used to the floods and their damage. It was the lake’s stealthiness that bothered her. She had felt it behind her as she sawed at the hollow stems with her corn knife until her arm grew tired, gathering as much this one last time as she could carry home.
Now it was past noon and Silver had remained in the middle of the road for too long looking after James Dodson’s truck, the cotton sack full but light on her shoulder. Even with the day overcast she could feel August breathing on her. It had another look, its own kind of heat. On the way out of the pasture she’d seen the first henbit stalks tipped with clusters of the seed that would spread them. The end of summer was near and then autumn. But this season the stinkbugs and crickets wouldn’t come into the houses for warmth. No leaves would blow down the road on the fall winds, no apples would harden under the frost. Pawpaws would go to ruin at the bottom of the lake with nobody around to taste the sweet mash of their middles. Silver used to think she wanted nothing more than to be left alone like this. Nothing more than room to breathe. Until she was twelve, six Ledfords had lived in the shack near the mountaintop. Silver and her sister Mary. Her parents, Esther and Jeremiah. Her grandparents Plum and Mildred. Before Plum moved his family to Tennessee from Kentucky he and Mildred had eight boys, but Silver never knew her uncles. The Ledford sons had taken off as soon as they ca
me of age. Only Silver’s father returned home with his fortune unfound. He’d brought Silver’s mother with him, already big with Mary.
As close as the Ledfords had lived in their shack, they’d seldom touched. Silver wasn’t beaten or cared for either one. She learned not to seek attention after she woke with the croup and tried to climb onto her hateful grandmother’s lap, slopping the old woman’s coffee over the rim of her cup. Mildred had called Silver a clumsy ox with more contempt in her voice than any grandchild deserved. Not long after that Silver had lost a front tooth and tried to show her father while he was skinning a squirrel. She held out her palm wanting him to take it or at least to look at it, a piece of her fallen off, but without glancing up he just told her to get along. So she closed her fingers into a fist and ran into the woods to throw the tooth down, kicking pine duff over it. Her father had been silent and morose and she’d been somewhat afraid of him. But she’d liked peeking out at him through the front window as he came back from hunting in the dark. His skin polished by the lantern shine, black hair running over his shoulders. Plum used to say Jeremiah took after his Cherokee grandmother that had lived on the reservation in North Carolina. Mildred had called Jeremiah trifling because he would sit in the tree stand with his rifle for hours letting deer pass beneath him, staring off at the distant hills. Silver was too young then to understand her father’s discontent, but now she felt for him. Even though he’d seemed to feel nothing for her.
Silver didn’t miss her father much when he was gone. Not like her mother. Her best memory was of sitting beside Esther Ledford on the edge of the doorsill looking up at the sky, Esther reaching into her pocket and giving Silver a chunk of fool’s gold. “It might be good luck,” she said, pressing it into Silver’s palm. From what Silver recalled her mother was slim with straw-colored braids wound at her nape. She kept a valise brought from wherever Silver’s father had found her, full of fancy dresses. Sometimes Esther put them on, though she had nowhere to wear them. She’d strap her heeled shoes onto Silver’s feet and laugh as her daughter stumbled around in them. Back then Silver believed what her mother told her when they went seining in the river at night, dragging the fishing net along between them as they waded out toward the deeper reaches. “Look at that reflection the moon makes on the water. Prettiest thing I ever seen, until you was born. That’s how come I named you Silver. You was the most precious thing in the world to me.”
But Silver’s worst memory was of her mother as well, Esther drinking down a cup of pennyroyal tea with Mildred standing by to make sure she took every drop. At the time Silver didn’t know what Mildred meant when she said, “We don’t need no more mouths to feed around here.” That afternoon Silver had found her mother lying abed and clutching her belly. When Silver asked what was wrong Esther wept in pain, tears soaking her dress collar. Knowing now what pennyroyal tea was for, Silver guessed she and Mary would have had more siblings if Mildred had allowed them to live. A few months after drinking down that cup Esther woke Silver and Mary with the brush of her lips on their foreheads. “Me and your daddy’s got to go away,” she told them. “See about a job of work. We’ll be back after you soon as we can.” But they never came back to Yuneetah, or wrote to say where they went. Silver knew it was Mildred they were leaving behind, but neither she nor Mary had been reason enough for her parents to stay.
Once Silver’s mother was gone, she clung to her sister. Silver was younger by two years and followed Mary everywhere. They played together from morning until evening, chasing each other through the woods, scuffing up leaves to hear the brittle stir of them. They spent whole days on the riverbank, hiding from each other in the rushes and skipping stones, making cane poles to fish with. They walked the dirt road to the schoolhouse holding hands in the cool of the mornings, a strip of grass up its middle like the brush of a mane. The other children looked sidelong at Silver’s burlap sack dresses, the snags of hair down her back. They would play with Mary but not with her. She quit after the third grade, but Mary went on until the eighth. Silver couldn’t say when she and Mary first turned over and slept with their backs to each other. They grew farther apart as their legs grew longer. Then when Mary turned fifteen she went to work for Clyde Walker. His wife had died in the winter from rheumatic fever and he needed a girl to help with the household chores. Silver noticed how much time her sister was spending on the Walker farm, not coming home until after dark, but she didn’t want to believe it when Mary announced she was getting married. She asked Mary what she wanted with a man thirty years her senior and Mary said there was nobody kinder alive than Clyde Walker. Once Mary left the mountain she didn’t come back, even to visit. Just like their parents. Mildred claimed she had got above her raising, thought she was too good for them. But Mary hadn’t got above. She had got away.
After Plum passed on and Mary took up with Clyde Walker, Silver was alone with her grandmother. She couldn’t see how her lighthearted grandfather had ended up married to such a shrewish woman. Before Plum died Mildred was always harping on him about the farm the Ledfords had in Kentucky before he went to jail for bootlegging, a two-story house with a stocked pond and strawberry fields. Silver figured that farm was what Mildred had wanted with Plum in the first place, but when he was caught by the revenuers he’d mortgaged it to pay his legal bills. After he was convicted he lost his land. Mildred claimed she would have left him then if not for the baby she was carrying. She hadn’t uttered a kind word to him within Silver’s hearing, but he’d always seemed more amused by her than anything. Silver vowed that she wouldn’t be cowed by the old woman either. They went weeks without speaking, Silver spending most of her time making moonshine. When the still was frozen into the stream bed under clumps of snow-drifted laurel she ignored Mildred as best she could. She stared into the fire until shadows crept across the floor and up the room corners, drafts sending dervishes of dust like whisking tails across the floorboards. She’d watch the flames dwindle to glowing coals until the sound of her own clacking teeth brought her around. Then she’d get up with blued toes and gather enough wood to burn through the night. Those winters Silver slept under buckskins, the only covering that held in her heat once the fire died. It seemed the memories of deer transferred into her dreams as she moved through the woods with no voice in them, as she swam across the river at sunset parting the water with herself. She slept and dreamed the hours away, waiting for the thaw when she could go back up to the still. Until finally one spring the old woman died and Silver buried her in the hollow graveyard where the ground was darkened by the maples pushing against the fence. She stood under the leaves tossing dirt on her grandmother’s casket until someone took the shovel from her. Then she went back to making moonshine and had been at it ever since. Her business hadn’t waned until the dam gates closed. Customers kept coming to her back door, trading hanks of salt pork, cured hides and strings of squirrel for something to make their heads feel lighter. But even if nobody bought her moonshine, Silver would go on making it.
She would have stood there longer with her thoughts if the wind hadn’t picked up and pushed her from behind, blowing her hair in knots and fetters before her, shuffling the trumpet weed in her sack. She glanced up at the skies and got moving, following the grooves James Dodson’s truck had made in the road, her feet marring the rankled print of his tires. Still deciding what to do when she reached the Walker farm, she almost walked into the back of the Model A Ford pulled over to the shoulder. When she saw it parked there she stopped short. Then she took a hesitant step forward, trying to see through the back window into the boxy cab. She had never been this close to the vehicle that would take her people away. The rusted hubcaps and running boards, the arched fenders and the round headlamps on either side of the grille. Through the stakes she could see there was nothing inside. But she pictured it loaded with furniture that once belonged to her sister. It crossed her mind that if she raised the hood and yanked out a cable the Dodsons would be going nowhere tomorrow. She might have done it if
she hadn’t been distracted by a bustling behind the barbwire fence. She thought at first it must be James coming back to the truck, though she couldn’t think why he’d be in the Hankins pasture. Then a blackbird burst out of the hedge and disappeared in the trees above. The roadside bank was astir with them, foraging for seed, grub and cricket before the rain. She could sense the beads of their eyes watching her, as if they knew what she’d considered. She bowed her face and hurried to the other side of the road, dragging her sack through puddles floating with canoes of willow leaf.
