The Angels' Share

by James Markert

  William met Charlie Pipes in the middle of the lot. Charlie was a tall man with leathery skin, coal-black eyes, and a gray beard that he used to keep trimmed. But since the stock market crashed in ’29, he’d let himself go. The beard was long and fuzz had taken over part of his neck.

  “Fill’r up, Charlie. And I’ll take a newspaper and three pieces of taffy.”

  Charlie glanced at the car. Barley tipped his fedora.

  “Is Barley gonna shoot me?”

  “You already heard?”

  “Word travels fast in the Tree.” Charlie wiped his hands on grease-stained overalls. “Willard and Fanny Mae Patterson left before you pulled in. They were in the church and said it echoed loud enough to crack glass.”

  “Crack glass and puncture a car door.”

  “The reporter’s?”

  William nodded. “Mr. Bancroft’s.”

  “Good. Tired of him snooping ’round here.”

  “Lucky, though. Could’a been worse.” William handed Charlie an extra dollar. “I’ll take two papers, Charlie. Keep the rest for yourself.”

  “Thank you, William. Take an extra piece or two for Annie.”

  William closed in on the storefront. Truth be told, the downtrodden man sleeping there disgusted him, as did the pungent cloud of stench that hovered. He admired Charlie Pipes for allowing the man the small courtesy of using the storefront as a windbreak. The nights were getting cold. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Barley wasn’t watching and then handed the man a dollar.

  His voice was a wheeze. “God bless.”

  God bless? William didn’t want to think about God and His so-called blessings. He entered the store to grab four pieces of taffy from the bowl on the counter, catching a whiff of the woodstove churning through pine in the back. Outside again, he dropped two pieces of taffy on the man’s lap and moved toward the newspaper rack.

  “He moves through you.”

  “Excuse me?” William stopped. “Who moves through me?”

  “The Holy Spirit.” The man shifted against the brick wall. “He died for our sins.”

  William faced the newspaper rack and mumbled, “Yes, so I hear.”

  “Just yesterday,” said the homeless man. “He died for our sins. And now he’s coming.”

  William gave a polite nod and grabbed two papers. One he’d read from front to back, and eventually Barley would use it for kindling. The other he’d carefully add to those he’d been saving since Coolidge took over from Harding in ’23.

  “It’s just the way he was,” the man said.

  The comment gave William pause. It was what Henry used to say when asked about his dancing. “It’s just the way I am.” William shook it off and perused the headlines on his way back to the car.

  Ships tied up in harbors with hulls rotting; freight trains idle; passenger cars empty; eleven million people without work; the treasury building bursting with gold yet Congress wrestles a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries overflowing with wheat and corn yet millions begging for food; mines shutting down; oil industries engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers desperate; factories stagnant and industry paralyzed.

  It was the same every day. It was why Mr. Bancroft had recently written in the Post that the End of Days was near.

  William caught a few headlines that struck his fancy. Bruno Hauptmann was indicted for the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son. Adolf Hitler was expanding Germany’s army and navy and looked to be creating an air force.

  The car horn bleated three times in rapid succession.

  One day I’ll have a story front page and center. William lowered the paper.

  “Read it when you get home,” Barley called out the window. “Annie has to pee.”

  William hustled around to the driver’s side and opened the door. He waved to Charlie, started the car, and said to Barley, “Hitler has violated the Treaty of Versailles.”

  Barley grunted. He didn’t care about current events. He didn’t care about much of anything anymore. He was the only one in the car who wasn’t rattled by the gunshot.

  “Is there going to be another war?” Johnny asked from the backseat.

  “The last one never really ended,” Barley said. “I didn’t get around to killing them all.”

  “There’s not going to be another war,” Samantha said matter-of-factly. “And there will be no talk of killing. Get us home, William.”

  William watched his father. At thirty-nine, he still had wavy black hair, although spots of gray had begun to show along the sideburns.

  Barley didn’t return the look. He never did.

  William reached his left hand beside his seat and slid it discreetly alongside the door toward the back, just long enough for Annie to pluck the two pieces of taffy from his palm.

  “Street clutter,” he heard her whisper. “I’m telling Henry that.”

  A dented blue jalopy pulled into the lot and stopped in a cloud of rock dust at the second pump. It was the Jeffersons from down the road.

  William waved but they didn’t wave back.

  They glared, though.

  Must have heard about Barley’s gunshot, a fresh pinprick on an already-festering bruise. Twisted Tree was a town of less than eight hundred people now, several hundred less than the population at the height of the distillery, at the height of Old Sam McFee bourbon. The McFees didn’t know everyone, but it seemed the entire town knew the McFees.

  Barley especially. Henry, too, as he’d acquired a hint of local fame.

  William had seen the glare before, from plenty of people over the years. No one in town blamed Barley for the demise of Old Sam bourbon, not even the faithful who’d stayed behind after Prohibition agents shut it down. And they especially didn’t blame Old Sam himself—he was a hero, even if he had stepped away from God long enough to hang himself.

  But William sensed an undercurrent of resentment building. The distillery’s demise had led directly to the death of the town, which, like many other bourbon towns, had started declining a decade before the Great Depression shook the rest of the country. Prohibition plastered its own dark shadow.

  But Prohibition was over now. William said, “It’s legal to distill spirits and sell booze again, Dad.”

  “So? Why do you care?” Barley asked.

  “Just because I do.” William wanted to say more but was unwilling to poke and prod through the garbage.

  Because before he died, Grandpa Sam told me I’d run the distillery someday.

  The town’s resentment wasn’t because the distillery had been swallowed up; it stemmed from Barley’s utter lack of interest in opening it again. The crowd that showed for the dance marathon a week before Henry’s death had assumed it was a party to signal the beginning of things. Why else had the McFees moved back to Twisted Tree? Why return, if not to rekindle Old Sam, to fill the ricks of the aging house to the rafters with full barrels of dark amber bourbon? To hear the familiar rumble of five-hundred-pound barrels rolling across the runs?

  But then, after Henry outdanced everyone in town, the beginning of things never happened.

  TWO

  Not much was said during the four-mile ride home from the gas station. Samantha went quiet whenever she was mad. William had watched her in the rearview mirror as he drove past the town’s boarded-up homes and shops. Her jaw never unclenched.

  Barley finished another cigarette and flicked it out the window before they turned onto their property, which stretched out like a wagon wheel through the woods of Twisted Tree, their driveway a meandering spoke of dust and gravel leading to their two-story home in the center. They owned twenty acres just south of the Ohio River, where springs and creek beds filtered through an abundance of limestone, making the local water as well known as the spirits produced from it. Barley’s father had purchased the land before the turn of the century and started one of the most sought-after bourbons in the region.

  William spotted Black-Tail stan
ding on its hind legs in the weeds, sniffing at flakes of peeled white paint on the porch, as he pulled to a puttering stop on the gravel outside their house. “Well, look at that, it’s Black-Tail.”

  Johnny saw the squirrel next. Barley reached for his gun as he shut the car door.

  Samantha stood beside Annie. “Barley, put it away. Haven’t you done enough today?”

  Barley homed in and got as far as closing one eye to shoot before he lowered his gun and handed the Colt across the car’s hood to William. “Here, you shoot it.”

  William kept his hands in his pockets. “I’m not shooting Black-Tail.”

  The squirrel wasn’t born with a black tail. After it had terrorized the McFees’ garden, plucking cucumbers and tomatoes from vines and leaving the half-gnawed vegetables on the ground, Barley set a trap. The rodent’s life was spared by Johnny’s brilliant idea: “Paint his tail black. That way if he comes back, we’ll know if it’s the same squirrel.” Barley had jerked a nod like it was the best idea he’d ever heard.

  “Daisy,” Barley said under his breath but loud enough for Johnny to hear and laugh. It wasn’t the first time he’d called his oldest a daisy, or a weak sister. Barley told people at the dance marathon that William liked to “traipse” through the woods with a book instead of the rifle he received for his tenth birthday. Even little Henry, at four, had fired a pistol at a deer.

  Barley smirked at Johnny as if to say, “Watch this,” and then leveled the gun at Black-Tail. Just when his finger pulled back on the trigger, Annie took a step behind the car. Her leg braces rattled enough to alert Black-Tail, who darted off.

  “Quit rustlin’, Annie,” Barley muttered, never taking his gaze from the escaping squirrel.

  He fired, missed, and then fired again, watching Black-Tail disappear into the woods.

  Jumpy like the blackbirds now scattering from the trees, William flinched with every pull of the trigger. Then Annie was crying, not because she’d wanted Black-Tail dead, but because her braces had made an untimely noise. Again.

  Barley looked off toward the woods, toward the red, orange, and yellow leaves, toward the black-barked white oaks—the whiskey trees—that towered over the old milling barn, cooking tanks, and empty cottages. He breathed deeply, as if he could conjure up the smell of rye, barley, and corn, charred oak and sour mash.

  “You need to stop throwing your cigarette butts into the woods, Barley,” Samantha blurted, pronouncing it like she’d added an addendum to a contracted list. “It hasn’t rained now for weeks. You’re apt to burn the entire distillery down.”

  “What distillery?” Barley asked, monotone, still gazing toward the woods, or perhaps toward the two trees in the distance for which the town was named, where he had found his father, Samuel, hanging the morning after the distillery was raided, his feet dangling two feet above the snowfall.

  Samantha walked Annie into the house. She kicked at the same flaked paint Black-Tail had been sniffing and then peeled a white wedge the size of a corncob from one of the porch’s four columns. She let it feather to the floorboards. She had her ways of reminding Barley the house hadn’t been painted in years.

  Fifty yards past the water well, a plow horse driven by a man named Frank pulled a wagon into the tall grass of the neighboring potter’s field, carefully navigating the few standing wooden crosses. On the flatbed a burlap sack bounced in cadence with the rickety wheels. William had seen the sacks bounce right off, and he cringed every time they hollow-thudded to the ground. Frank would stop and load them back on like a bushel of apples.

  “Another indigent getting planted.” Barley straightened his fedora.

  Frank waved and Barley tipped his hat.

  As Frank began to slide the body from the wagon bed, William’s vision clouded and sweat blasted his skin. Death was close; he could feel it in his shrinking lungs. Johnny noticed and hurried over, but William’s knees crunched the gravel before Johnny could catch him. Barley looked over his shoulder and pity filled his eyes. William hated him for it.

  “You okay?”

  Barley’s question was obligatory, but William nodded respectfully. He could breathe again. If only he could predict his attacks, then he could prepare. “It’s just who I am.” It was Henry’s voice again. William was just an anxious person; Henry’s death had made it worse.

  “That’s two bouts of hysteria today,” Barley said. “You had one in church earlier.”

  “Everything’s jake.” William shrugged free of Johnny—five years younger but just as tall—and wiped dust from his knees. “Just mind your own.”

  Barley viewed his son’s nerve attacks as weakness, just as the military viewed shell shock. But doctors had recently found credence in the claims. Barley chewed the inside of his cheek and swallowed some pride. “Maybe we should go back to the doctor.”

  Johnny patted William on the shoulder. “Yeah, William, maybe you should.”

  “And he’ll tell me the same thing as before. It’s just something I’ve got to live with.”

  William returned his attention to the potter’s field, where Frank attacked the soil with his spade and readied the grave. Who was the deceased? Was it a man or a woman? What had they done in life to have become so irrelevant?

  These unattended burials were too commonplace as of late.

  Barley, when he was William’s age, had asked his father how many bodies were buried in that field. Sam said, “Hundreds, if not thousands. Probably stacked like bricks in a wall too.” When William, at ten, had asked Barley the same question, Barley gave the same answer, but he’d added, “Does it really matter?”

  To William it did. “If they’re stacked like bricks, won’t they eventually push out of the ground? Won’t they eventually grow too high?”

  Barley had shrugged, and those questions went unanswered.

  But William grew older and deciphered an explanation—the bodies decomposed, and as more were buried, the older bodies sank deeper into the ground. Or maybe there never were as many bodies in the potter’s field as Grandpa Sam had thought.

  The McFee family cemetery, however, was easily counted. There were six headstones in two parallel rows. The top row had four while the second had two, the most recent—Grandpa Sam and Henry McFee. William hadn’t known any of the top four. One was Grandpa Sam’s sister, Jane, who’d died of yellow fever when she was twelve. The other three were cousins who’d played important parts in the formation of the distillery.

  The plot was located on the other side of the house, surrounded by tall evergreens and much more secluded than the larger potter’s field. When Grandpa Sam was asked why he’d decided to build so close to a place where indigents were buried, he’d always said very matter-of-factly that he liked the location. Liked the white oaks—they were perfect for aging bourbon whiskey. He also liked the proximity to limestone-rich creek beds that naturally added calcium to the water and removed the iron. The location was ideal and he knew it would make them money. The neighboring potter’s field would add perspective and keep them humble.

  William watched as Frank hammered a small wooden cross in the ground and said a quick prayer over the buried. And that was that. He’d be back the next day or the day after with another. Seeing a burial on Henry’s anniversary made William melancholy. And talking to that man at the gas station, the more he thought on it, had made him uncomfortable.

  He needed to acknowledge Henry’s anniversary. Barley was already heading into the house. He nodded to Johnny and they both headed to the family headstones. William sat on the bench opposite his brother, his back to the evergreens that cast a shadow across all six stones.

  “Annie still talks about him in the present tense.” William cleared his throat; he felt on the verge of tears. “She did it in the car today.”

  Johnny said, “I heard her.”

  “When Henry was three, I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have while Mom and Dad were in the city.” Probably the last time they went anywhere together. �
��He climbed the dining room table. I’d yet to clear it from supper. He decided to finish off what was left in the glasses. Annie’s milk. Mother’s tea. The backwash from Father’s beer. ‘Drinked Daddy’s beer, Will’m. Drinked Daddy’s beer,’ he said when I found him, on his back and belly sloshing. He moved it side to side to listen to it. ‘Like bathtub water, Will’m.’ I said, ‘Get down off that table, Henry!’ I told him not to drink after everybody. Well, if you remember, he was just starting to use the toilet about that time. An hour later I saw him outside the bathroom, pants around his ankles. I yelled, ‘No, Henry, you can’t pee there.’ He said, ‘I no pee here, Will’m.’ And then he pointed across the hall to the crapper ten feet away. ‘I’m gon’ pee way over there.’”

  Johnny smiled.

  “He made it too. A perfect rainbow. Like the crapper was a pot of gold.”

  William sighed, looked to the ground, wished for the millionth time that he could redo that last day. Henry had cried a lot, because he was four and, as Barley stated, growing up to be too much like William. William knew Barley didn’t know what to think of Henry’s dancing. “Gonna keep you tough, Henry,” Barley liked to say. And then he’d put a rifle in Henry’s hands and lead him into the whiskey trees to shoot something. But Henry never stopped moving, even was always tapping a toe, and he’d end up alerting the deer or rabbit.

  Now William looked at the dozen red roses angled against his little brother’s headstone. His mother must have been out at sunup. She must have eaten her breakfast here, alone. Or had his father been out too?

  The surviving brothers stood and headed back to the house. They knew Barley, half deep into a bottle, was already vegetating in his La-Z-Boy.

  Six companies had been allowed to produce legal bourbon for the country’s medicinal trade during Prohibition, and four of them were located in Louisville. Barley drank Old Forester because it was quality aged—rare so soon after repeal.

  “What are you drawing over there?” Barley called from his chair, his torso lit by moonlight shining through the bay window. The ledge was decorated with five dust-covered empties of Old Sam McFee, Bottled in Bond. William had grown up hoping to one day fill those bottles with bourbon he distilled but had recently given up on the notion—with Barley’s lack of drive, it was a dream even more naive than becoming a journalist.