The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

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  To the public school teachers

  and librarians of my youth: thank you.

  You gave me the encouragement

  that made my childhood survivable,

  and a foundation that now makes

  living my dreams possible.

  PROLOGUE

  Wednesday, November 23, 1927

  Thanksgiving Eve

  8:42 a.m.

  Week before last, cold shooed warmth into a wish and a memory, then rattled tree limbs to leaflessness with one gnarly hand while gripping the earth with the other.

  Now on this cold earth Zebediah Harkins lies belly down in the shaggy brush line by an old clearing, as if he had crawled here through the forest itself. Truth be told, this morning, as on every morning for the past two weeks, he’d turned off just a mile into the three-mile trek down Forbidden Creek Run, the dirt road between his home and the Rossville schoolhouse, then traced his way to his post along nearly hidden, almost-forgotten paths once cleared to make way for the ironworks business—itself now all but gone.

  A not-yet-sticking snow teases Zebediah’s face with quick melting licks. He aims his Hamilton single-shot rifle at a squirrel, over there by the old stone iron blast furnace. He’d hiked out here last Thanksgiving with his grandpa, who’d told him about working there—clear-cutting trees for burning into charcoal to be fed along with coal into the smelting fires of the furnace. All that’s left now of ironworks in the Appalachian hills of Bronwyn and nearby counties are old furnaces like this, still standing in uncrumbling defiance against time and vines and brush and twenty-year-old trees growing where the old ones had been, and bits of glassy slag littered in among the natural rocks and dirt, and stories like his papaw’s.

  Papaw had passed on this past spring, and Zebediah has learned of late the value of focusing on whatever’s offered in the moment as a way to secure the future—like that unwary squirrel. Wouldn’t Ruthie be right pleased if he brought the critter home for a savory stew?

  But he hears his sister’s weary voice, as if she’s knelt beside him to whisper in his ear:

  Where’d you get that, Zeb?

  Where you been all day, if’n not the schoolhouse?

  And he can see her take note of the dirt on his clothes, of the flashing quickness of his dropped gaze. Not for want of trying, Ruthie is the one person he can’t lie to. Zebediah doesn’t want her to know that he’s been skipping school.

  Zebediah swipes snow from his face. When he refocuses, the squirrel has skittered to just the other side of a makeshift ledge of plank on stone, on which bottles of moonshine are lined up side by side, as if the plank is a proper store shelf.

  God forbid he shoots one of the bottles. Boss would have his hide.

  His job is to keep watch over them and the bigger swigging jug, always set out by the time he gets here, and stowed away, he reckons, in some hidey-hole after he leaves. He doesn’t know where the moonshiner’s still is—probably not too far off—but that’s none of his business. Boss had made sure to tell him that, along with plenty of other admonishments:

  Stay quiet. Watch. Note if someone don’t leave money for their bottle or swig, or overly guzzles, or pockets the coins.

  He will only get a small portion—five cents for every dollar—from the coins he gathers between customers. But plenty of men are coming—he recognizes some from church, or from town—and not just ’cause it’s Thanksgiving eve. In winter’s bone-jarring cold, shining at small, personal stills will be hard, and with smoke rising twixt bare-limbed trees, hiding them will be harder. ’Sides, talk is that revenuers—the federal agents who work for the Bureau of Prohibition—will soon beset the land like ill-timed locusts.

  And ain’t it nice that the boss trusts him? Pa won’t even trust him to come along hunting for wild turkey! Says he was too shaky, the last time they went out for squirrel and rabbit.

  Zebediah’s head throbs. As he sits up, his vision speckles, gray spots waltzing with snowflakes. His hand shakes as he reaches into his pocket, but he manages to grab the biscuit, a remnant from last night’s supper and dried overnight to the toughness of hard tack. Usually, Ruthie cleans the kitchen nice and proper at night, rises early to make a good hot breakfast, and fills his dinner pail for school, but she’s been so preoccupied of late.

  Zebediah snaps off a bite. His mouth waters for want of the squirrel, enough to soften the biscuit.

  Mayhap it’s just as well if he doesn’t bring home squirrel. When he complained about the sameness of Ruth’s suppers last night, Pa backhanded him so hard that his vision blacked out for several moments. From the other side of this inflicted darkness, he’d heard Pa growl: Don’t go making work for your sister! She’s got enough.

  By which Pa means—tending to Ma, dying.

  Course Pa don’t call it dying. He calls it taking a bad spell. As if Ma just has a touch of fever. But Ma knows. Ruthie knows.

  Zebediah knew before even they did. There’d been that day back in early September, when the last breath of summer taunted red-tinged leaves loosening on high limbs and made the Rossville schoolhouse so suffocatingly warm that Miss Cooper, the schoolmarm, had let everyone tote their dinner pails outside when the mine’s noon bell rang. Zebediah had kept right on toting over to Forbidden Creek Run. At their farmhouse, he found Ma out on the side porch, coughing so fiercely that she bent near double as she held her stomach. As she looked up at him, the glassy terror in her eyes told him something was bad wrong.

  Ma took to her bed shortly after that. Ruth, who is in the eighth grade and loves school so much she has pretensions toward high school, dropped out to tend to Ma and the toddler twins, while Pa works as a laborer for Sheriff Lily Ross and others in Bronwyn County, and spent the rest of his time at the River Rock Holiness Church, praying for a miracle. Till recently. Sunday before last, he proclaimed it good for nothin’. At least twice since, like last night when he was backhanded, Zebediah thought he smelled liquor on Pa’s breath.

  Imagine Pa showing up here as a customer—a prospect both terrifying and amusing.

  Both Ma and Pa expect him to just keep on going to school, even though he’s the opposite of Ruthie. For him, reading is especially hard. The letters lift off the page and swim around. Why, he ought to be the one dropped out, tending to Ma, but Ruthie is older, and a girl—

  A snapping sound startles Zebediah to wide-eyed alertness, in time to see that it’s just a small branch, wind-flicked from a treetop to the ground near the plank.

  Zebediah shifts on the hard ground, seeking a comfortable divot. The pouch of coins digs into his hip. His stomach rumbles. That hard biscuit won’t stave off hunger for long.

  And yet he grins, thinking about the fanciful books Ruthie covets at the Kinship General Store—most especially one that’s been in the store for nearly a year, The Blue Castle. Soon, with his portion of these coins, Zebediah could go back, buy that book for Ruthie for Christmas—he’d memorized the cover
with its goldenrod yellow binding and, on the front, the outline of a grand castle impossibly built into rocks and clouds. Maybe getting the book will remind Ruthie of who she was before Ma took sick—who she still is, deep down, below weariness and sorrow.

  He’d like to earn enough to get himself something else he’d seen in town—a new Winchester repeating shotgun. Better than this kid’s gun. He’d have to buy it himself—Pa won’t trust him with it, after that hunting trip where he’d shook so bad.

  Footsteps crunch the frozen spikes of grass on the other side of the old iron furnace.

  Zebediah quickly goes back down on his belly like a sneaky snake—he grins at the notion—hidden but still able to see who approaches.

  He doesn’t recognize the men, and they’re not the sort he expects—farmers, coal miners, hunters. One is in a fine wool coat and boots, the other in just a suit and two-toned leather lace-up dress shoes. Both wear fedora hats. Zebediah frowns. There’s a speakeasy in Kinship for men like this—everyone knows that. Even the ladies and children at the church they used to attend know. The pastor, Brother Stiles, railed against it often enough.

  “Here it is,” the man in the coat and boots says, gesturing at the makeshift shelf.

  Zebediah’s frown deepens. This man’s voice has the sound of the hills and the hollers, each word jangling into the next like beads on a string, but something makes him seem an outsider even more than the younger man, coatless and in fancy shoes too fragile for backwoods hiking. Are these men part of the revenuers people have been talking about?

  The coatless younger man shivers so hard that his voice crackles as he asks, “This is it? You were supposed to lead me to Vogel’s main operation!”

  Vogel? Zebediah wonders who that is.

  “Well, one small operation leads to the bigger ones.” The older man grins as if he’s clever, but he looks more like a rat baring its teeth.

  Zebediah’s heart pounds. Something is not right. He wants to yell at the younger man: Run!

  The younger man says, “It had better. We’re paying you enough—”

  “No. The pay isn’t all that I’m after. You promised—”

  “You’d better not be toying with the bureau. We’re deadly serious—” The younger man pulls out a revolver, but it shakes in his hand.

  Damn, mister, thinks Zebediah—he’s rooting for him, whether he’s a revenuer or not—stop shaking! Maybe he can’t help it, just like Zebediah can’t.

  The older man’s expression stiffens. “Let me show you some markings on the jug that will help you believe me—a symbol that leads straight to Vogel. Put away the damn gun first.”

  Markings? The only marking was three Xs, signifying that the whiskey was triple-distilled. That won’t lead to whoever this Vogel is.

  As the younger man puts away his gun, something blue and gold pinned to his vest flashes in the spare morning sun. He steps toward the plank.

  The older man pulls out a pistol from inside his overcoat, and shoots, grazing the stone furnace. At the cracking sound, the younger fellow whirls around—and a second shot hits him in the head. Blood spurts as he goes down to his knees, dropping his weapon, grabbing at his head, knocking his fedora to the ground. But then his eyes roll back, his bloody hands drop, and he falls forward. The older man strides over, kicks the young fellow over to his back, stares down as if regarding nothing more than a fallen tree limb.

  Run. The moonshiner had told Zebediah to run if there was trouble—and this is the greatest mess he’s ever seen. But all he can do is stare, transfixed.

  The older man’s mouth curls, just the slightest self-congratulatory smile.

  Startled by the odd, cold reaction, Zebediah gasps, drawing the man’s glassy gaze. Zebediah holds his breath.

  A chipmunk darts out from the old iron furnace, making the man jump, look away. Then he laughs, pulls a flask from his hip pocket, tries to take a swig. Frowns, irritated that it’s empty. He opens the sipping jug, drinks—one gulp, two—then sloppily pours moonshine into his flask, which he caps and pockets as he walks away, whistling some merry tune, off-key and wheezy.

  Tears burn Zebediah’s cheeks as he waits for the man’s wretched whistling to fade. Finally, the only sounds are a thin hum of breeze, birdsong, creaking bare-limbed trees.

  For a long time, Zebediah lies where he is, staring at the younger man’s body. What to do? Wait for someone else to come along? Run to find the moonshiner?

  The man’s hand twitches.

  Zebediah swallows back a whimper. Surely that was just the man’s body shutting down. He’d seen that with deer and pheasant out on hunts with Pa—the postdeath twitch.

  But then there’s a soft moan. It grows louder. Zebediah rises stiffly, as if he’s aged a decade in the last minutes. His mouth is sticky, parched. He opens the sipping jug, wipes the top with his jacket sleeve. He takes three long gulps. The liquid burns as it goes down. He gasps.

  The man moans again.

  Zebediah moves slowly toward the man, like he’s trying to run in a muddy creek bed.

  The man’s eyes open in a glassy-eyed stare. He does not appear to be breathing. Had Zebediah only imagined the man’s moans?

  The man’s jacket, fallen open, reveals a pin on his vest—the flashing item from moments ago. The pin, knocked loose by the man’s fall, is in the shape of a shield, with a bright royal blue background, a coin-like insignia, a U, an S, the other letters rising up, floating around, like they do in his schoolbooks. Ruthie would know right away what the letters say.

  Ruthie.

  Zebediah starts crying again. He wants his big sister.

  Another moan. The man’s eyelids flutter.

  Zebediah stares at him.

  “Mister?”

  CHAPTER 1

  LILY

  Thursday, November 24, 1927

  Thanksgiving Day

  9:50 a.m.

  Just a moment more.

  Behind her house, Sheriff Lily Ross kneels by her garden plot. After a cold snap two weeks ago, she’d harvested the last of her sugar pumpkins and acorn squash, then hand-tilled most of the plot, turning under dried husks of tomato vines and cornstalks. Snow, sifting down into these Appalachian hills since yesterday, now shrouds the mounds of dark earth like fine white chiffon.

  In one garden corner still unturned, sage yet spikes toward the cold winter sun. Lily adds another stem to her thick bouquet of the herb. Might as well harvest it all—some for Thanksgiving dressing, most to dry in bound bundles in her cellar. Lily glances up at sodden, bulky clouds, gray horns of plenty spilling an early snow. She should hurry—so much yet to do before the day’s feast.…

  Just a moment more.

  This is her chance for a few minutes alone before her house fills with a houseful of family and friends—a blessing, to be sure. But it’s also a blessing to have a few moments alone on a day off from her duties.

  One in particular hounds her. The telegram, on her desk at her office in the new wing of the courthouse, flits across her mind: Expect Special Agent Barnaby Sloan, Columbus office of Bureau of Prohibition, to visit Friday 25th, a.m., to review forthcoming visit by Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt. She will address value of Prohibition at Kinship Opera House, Wednesday next. Requests your briefing on local situation—Lily assumed that meant moonshining in the county’s hills and hollers. She’d shaken her head in surprise and wonder at the telegram, then shrugged at the notion of a briefing. What could she possibly tell the highest-ranked woman in the country?

  Now Lily shakes her head to clear it of work worries and plucks one fuzzy gray-green sage leaf, rubs it. Ah. That savory scent, a summer season’s warmth infused from the earth itself.

  Lily gazes across her land, past the empty clothesline strung between crosses, beyond outbuildings of barn and chicken coop and cold frame and outhouse, on down to the tree line along Coal Creek. Her twenty acres of crops—split between buckwheat and corn—are beyond view, but she imagines them now, restin
g under a soft thin sheet of snow, thinks back briefly to Mr. Harkins, whom she’d hired to work the fields, and who had last come three weeks ago on a Sunday just after they’d gotten home from church. Mr. Harkins had worked the fields for the previous owner, who’d told her the Harkinses were a good family. She knows them as such, from attending the Presbyterian church with them in Kinship, but they hadn’t been for a few months.

  Well, it’s not her place to judge the Harkinses’ religious practices, but still, Sunday’s an odd day to be working the fields. Some would say a sure way to draw bad luck for next spring’s crops. Lily isn’t the superstitious type, but still she’d been startled to find the Harkins boy at the mudroom door. She almost hadn’t recognized Zebediah, whom she reckons is twelve or maybe thirteen. He’d shot up since summer’s end to a smidge taller than Lily’s five-foot-three.

  Pa’s loading up the cart, Zebediah said. The boy’s hands shook, imperiling a quart jar of canned apples. For pies. Ruthie wants you to have it.

  Lily’d recollected that Ruth had come several times to help Lily in the big garden but had stopped of late. The girl was no doubt busy helping her mother with the younger children—twins, just turned two. And yet the boy looked worried as he thrust that jar of apples at her. And why was the girl proffering gifts, and not her mama?

  Ruthie wants you to pray for us, Zebediah said as Lily took the jar.

  Tell her thanks—though I’d pray without a gift of apples. But why—

  Mr. Harkins had come around the corner, and Zebediah cast his gaze downward. Mr. Harkins said he’d be back in the spring if she’d have him, only nodding when she told him of course she would—quieter than usual. She went back in her house briefly, to get the money she’d been planning to pay him later in the week. By the time she returned, Zebediah was heading back to the mule cart.

  Now Lily refocuses her thoughts on her own family. There’s a fine line between trusting the instincts that serve her well as sheriff—such as how to deftly handle that upcoming visit from Willebrandt—and putting her nose in another family’s business where it’s not needed.