“Thump keg,” she said.
“Is this the doubler I’ve heard so much about?”
Abby had called it that once. She nodded.
“And what does this doubler double?”
“Well, the pot boils the mash, so that’s the first boil, and this is where you get the second boil.”
Pee Wee nodded sagely. “And how does that happen?” He waved a hand. “In detail.”
“The fumes from the pot go through the arm—” She pointed to the copper pipe connected to the thump keg. “And then in the keg they cool down and turn into a liquid again.” She glanced at Abby, but he was watching with his hands over his belly. “So then more fumes come in, and they start heating up some of the alcohol, and that’s where you get the second boil.”
“And where do these vapors go from there?” Pee Wee asked. He kept using that teacher voice.
“Out to the condenser—excuse me, the flake stand condenser.” She wasn’t going to lose points for imprecision. The condenser was a barrel full of creek water; a copper tube wound through it, giving the fumes time to cool and turn back into liquid. It was such a crazy process. One thing turning into something else, then back into its previous form, over and over again—but at each step it got a little closer to its perfect state.
“And then?” he asked.
What more did he want? “And then the whiskey comes out the worm,” she said. That was what Abby called the final bit of pipe, where it dripped into the catch pan.
Pee Wee wasn’t yet satisfied. “Back to the doubler. Why go to the trouble of doing it an extra time? What’s the point? Scientifically speaking.”
Stella glanced at Abby. She’d always been a little foggy on this part. “Well, it gives the bad stuff a chance to fall out of the vapors.”
“Bad stuff?” Pee Wee asked.
“Nefarious chemicals. That’s what Abby calls them.”
Pee Wee said, “That’s just a fancy way of saying he doesn’t know.”
She looked at Abby, alarmed. Was that true?
Abby shrugged. “It’s the same reason we throw out the foreshot.” That was the first few ounces that dripped out of the worm. “Some things you just do because that’s the way it’s done.”
“But…you have to know why,” she said.
“I agree completely,” Pee Wee said.
Stella hadn’t even known she was ignorant. She’d trusted that Abby, an adult, knew the answers, all the way down. But he was just using words to hide what he didn’t know.
Abby said, “Tradition means you don’t have to think everything up from scratch. If it works, it works.”
“My goodness, we’re in transubstantiation territory,” Pee Wee said. “Abby’s invoking faith to explain his miracle.”
Stella was frustrated. Pee Wee was the one who started out talking about miracles, and Abby was on her side about moonshining being science. Now they’d flipped around.
“What I have faith in is this still and this recipe,” Abby said. “Doubling makes it taste better, that’s objective fact.”
Pee Wee waved a hand. “Fine, fine. Final question.” He nodded toward the catch pan. “What’s that pale thing sticking out of the worm?”
“Pee Wee…” Abby warned.
“A scientist should know!”
Stella frowned. Abby had never told her its name. “It’s a stick. It keeps the whiskey from running back along the bottom of the pipe and getting wasted.”
Pee Wee laughed. “That is not a stick, my dear, that’s a coon dick!”
Abby slapped Pee Wee in the shoulder, who laughed harder. “What, you never told her?”
Stella didn’t like to feel dumb. “Y’all are lying.”
“Not at all!” Pee Wee exclaimed. She wished he’d stop laughing. “That is indeed the penis bone of your North American raccoon. Evolution has shaped it for this exact purpose.”
She checked with Abby. He was embarrassed, but finally admitted to it. “Don’t believe him about the evolution part.”
Stella thought of the begging raccoon in Abby’s cabin. Maybe it was pining for its missing pecker.
“So what do you think?” Pee Wee asked her. “Are you going to make your own moonshine someday?”
“Absolutely not,” Abby said.
“That depends,” Stella said.
“On what?” Pee Wee asked.
“How much money we talkin’?”
Stella had never felt so good, getting a grown man to listen to her and laugh that hard.
* * *
—
they let her sit with them for another couple of hours. Every time the pan filled she helped Abby swap it out and fill jars, and in between she sat by the hot fire and ate goober peas and listened to them talk. Pee Wee had opinions on life insurance (against it), something called the proletariat (it was complicated), and belches (enthusiastically and repeatedly pro). He also believed that Stella ought to be allowed to taste the night’s product, seeing as how she was helping, but Abby forbade it.
Stella thought, I ought to tell this to Uncle Hendrick, so he could write it in my book.
April 24th, 1936. Stella demonstrated her knowledge of whiskey distillation to the disbelieving Yankee, Pee Wee Simms.
Part of what thrilled her about The Book of Esther was that it was someone else recording these events, a man paying attention to the lives of his wife and daughter, even if he didn’t seem to understand everything that was going on. Starting with that first line: “God has seen fit to give us a daughter.” That “seen fit” struck Stella a bit testy. In the commentary for the page, Hendrick noted that Russell was about to turn seventy and Clara was only a few years younger. Their children—including the Confederate betrayer, Cyril, and Morgan, who also lived in the cove—were grown and were raising babies of their own. But then Clara found an orphan girl whose parents were casualties of the war and decided they’d take her in.
Clara has named her Esther, which is fitting. She is beautiful but for the blemish that covers one side of her face. Clara assures me it will shrink and fade as she grows.
Hendrick wrote: “It won’t.”
Hendrick also explained Russell’s comment about the fitness of the name: the biblical Esther was an orphan and was so beautiful that the king of Persia took her as his wife, not realizing she was a “Jewess.” (Stella had never seen that word before opening the diary, and for days after she’d find herself saying it aloud: jew-essss, jew-esss.) Esther was such a stunner that when the king’s advisor was about to decree that all the Jews in Persia be killed, Esther convinced the king otherwise and, even better, put out an alternate order that allowed the Jews to kill anyone who threatened their families. A few days later, seventy-five thousand people were dead!
Most of the early part of the diary was about Russell’s wife, Clara. Russell seemed confused and cowed by her. When she demanded he build a shelter over the mouth of the cave, so that Clara could sleep near the entrance with baby Esther, he didn’t understand it, but he did it. Word got out, though, and Russell worried that their neighbors were looking askance at these old folks taking care of an infant.
Russell never got very good at storytelling—he was no Abby, in other words—and Stella wished Clara would take over the diary. Key details were missing, like why did they adopt the girl? Surely their grown children, who all lived nearby, could have taken her in. And why did she insist on sleeping over the cave?
Esther came more to the fore as a character, and she seemed just as stubborn as her mother. In the late fall of 1876, when she was twelve—Stella’s age!—the girl announced that she was a Revelator, just like John in the Bible, and that she alone was allowed to go into the cave. Clara didn’t take this well. Poor Russell, now in his early eighties, was distressed:
I cannot bear all this bickering and backbiting. Mothe
r and Daughter have turned on each other like the Rebels versus the Union.
So Russell went hunting.
Before the war he’d built a round stone hut on top of Birch Bald, and he could stick his gun out a slit and shoot whatever walked into the clearing, though mostly he just watched and waited. He filled two pages of the diary with all the wildlife he could have killed. Again, he was no Abby.
When Russell came back a week later, his wife and daughter had stopped fighting. Esther was in bed with a “fever,” her hands bandaged as if they’d been burned.
I demanded to know what had happened to put her in this state. Clara at first refused to answer, but finally she said, “The God has spoken. Listen up.”
What followed were scores of pages, documenting all the times Esther went into the cave for communion, and what she said, after. Everything she said under the God’s influence remained mysterious and poetic, though after Russell died and Esther’s brother, Morgan, took up the transcription, the words took a turn toward the King James: The God has made his home among the rocks and stones; The first child shall breathe poison yet survive. And the kicker, delivered several times over the course of her Revelations: This is promised to the children, on the day the God steps into the light: thou shalt have one body, ever blooming.
Sometimes Stella grew weepy just reading it.
But the end—the end was terrible. The book just stopped. There was no note to say what Esther went on to do, or if she ever left the cove, or how she died. Nothing.
The first time she got to the last page, she couldn’t believe it. She had an urge to throw the book across the room, and only barely stopped her arm from doing it. Her arm was an excellent critic.
* * *
—
by the time they doused the fire under the still, Pee Wee was snoring in his chair.
“Well,” Abby said, drawing it out so it came out whaaaale. “It’s about time I walk you home.” The moonshine had brought out the Uncle Dan in him.
“I can get there myself,” she said. “What about Pee Wee? Is he all right?”
“He’s not going anywhere. In the morning I’ll walk him back down to his car.”
“How’d you get to be friends with a Yankee?”
“He married my sister.”
Abby had a sister? The night was full of surprises.
He said, “Come on now, let’s check on that sick hog.”
“There’s nothing to check on.” Stella tried to keep her voice steady. For a short while she’d forgotten about the pig. “Motty shot it.”
“What? Why’d she do that?” He was more shocked about a dead farm animal than she expected.
She told him she didn’t know for sure, but that the sow looked sick, walking around in circles. Abby stopped talking and moved faster.
The gate to the hog pen hung open. The tractor had been driven a few yards past the barn door, a rope running from the back hook to a wooden pallet, which now lay just inside the door. Motty was bent over the pallet, sawing through the pig’s carcass.
She saw them and stood up, one hand still holding the saw. Blood splattered her dress. Her face hung slack with exhaustion.
Abby looked down at Stella, as if weighing what he could say in front of her. Then he said, “You haul that beast by yourself? I could have helped you.”
“Don’t need help.” She removed her spectacles, tried to find a clean patch on her dress.
“You want me to call the butcher?”
Motty’s face jerked up. “No.”
“I could—”
“Go back home, Abby. And you.” Her attention turned to Stella. “What did I tell you?”
Stella was banished to the house. She stomped to Motty’s room, found the Bible, and took it back. She thought, I ought to pack up right now and go move in with Abby. She’d change her name to Whitt, run whiskey, and keep the money for herself.
8
1948
There are backroads in the cove, and backroads to the backroads, rutted tracks, barely wide enough for a car, that followed the old Cherokee trails up into the mountains and along the ridges. The park service hadn’t mapped them—can’t map what you don’t know about—but Stella had learned to drive on these roads. Abby Whitt had told her that when you see the revenuers coming up the hill, you best have an escape route. Yet when the police did come for him, he didn’t run.
Stella took the road slow, fighting the ruts and easing the Ford’s wheels over roots and rocks. Tree branches scraped the paint from the doors.
After thirty minutes she nosed into a small clearing and set the handbrake.
This was the spot where Abby used to run his still. The only clue that this was home to the greatest moonshine ever made was the nature of the trash: broken Mason jars, cornmeal sacks, a spool of black rubber hose, a split wooden barrel. Bessie had been hauled away while Abby was in prison, the copper too valuable to go to waste.
There ought to be a historical marker here, Stella thought.
She had another ten-minute hike ahead of her. It would have been much faster to walk to Abby’s place from Motty’s house, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with Veronica and Ruth.
She was a hundred yards along the old path through the trees when she heard a rustling, something big in the undergrowth. She froze. Black bears didn’t bother people, mostly, but she didn’t want to blunder into one.
After a minute of silence, she started moving again, head swiveling. Thirty feet farther along she saw a white-tailed doe, lying on its side. The animal wasn’t moving except for one twitching back leg, the hoof scratching at air.
She’d heard no gunfire—maybe it had been shot a while ago? The hunter ought to be beating the bushes for it. Unless he got spooked—hunting in the park was a federal crime. Or maybe the deer was diseased.
Suddenly it thrashed, a full-body spasm, but its legs weren’t working. It collapsed back onto its side and went still.
The doe’s huge dark eye regarded her. It was still alive.
“God damn it.”
She didn’t own a gun. Didn’t trust herself with one.
She walked back up the trail, scanning the ground. Finally found a good-sized rock. Carried it back, hoping the animal had expired in the minute she’d been away.
No such luck.
* * *
—
abby sat on a stump in his front yard, a metal tub between his knees, washing bones. The finished whites were laid out on a cloth on the grass, a few long bones among a score of small ones. Stella tried to reconstruct the creature in her mind.
“Raccoon?” she asked.
“Possum.”
She raised her eyebrows and he said, “It’s a fine and noble creature. I was thinking of mounting it hanging from a branch by its tail.”
“Artistic.”
“I owed it to a fella. Thought I’d finish up.”
He seemed happy to see her. He’d cleaned up his yard a bit in the last ten years, but there was still plenty of garbage in the gully a few yards away. Thirty years of dumped trash didn’t just disappear. And that stump—it had always been the throne of the yard. She remembered sitting there alone one night, heartbroken, when a single snowflake drifted down in front of her. Then another fell, and another. She held out her arm and caught them in her hand.
Ugh. She hadn’t thought of that night in a long time.
She grabbed a paint bucket and sat down across from Abby. “See?” she said. “Patio set. I’ve just increased the value of your real estate.”
“You mean Motty’s.”
“Shit. Right.” The shack wasn’t his, never had been. It sat on Birch land, and belonged to the park service now. They’d demolish it when they tore down the rest of Motty’s buildings.
She offered him a cigarette, knowing he’d decline, and lit it fo
r herself with her Zippo. The door to the cabin was ajar, but the girl was nowhere in sight.
“There’s a dead deer back there,” she said. “A doe. She was twitching and couldn’t get up. I had to put her down.”
He thought for a moment, hands working a wire brush. The air smelled of bleach. “Any idea what was wrong with her?”
“I didn’t see a wound, so probably disease or parasites. Screwworm, maybe? I wouldn’t butcher it for meat, but she might make a pretty trophy.”
He nodded. He knew she was here for a reason but was content to wait. He said, “You all right? You were hitting it pretty hard last night.”
“I’m feeling it.”
After leaving Hendrick in the chapel she’d opened a new jar and drank most of it herself. She didn’t remember saying goodbye to Abby last night—wasn’t even sure when he’d left. Hell, she didn’t remember climbing into her car. She was a drinker, no refuting that, but she didn’t usually overrun her headlights.
“Where you thinking of going?” she asked. “After.”
“Haven’t quite worked that out.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t you worry. I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”
It was selfish of her to ask him to take on Sunny. He’d already done enough for her. After Lincoln Rayburn’s body had been found, he told the police he was to blame for the liquor Lunk got ahold of, not Stella. The seven-year sentence was severe, considering most other moonshiners got off with fines and deferred jail time. But Lincoln was well loved, and his father highly respected—justice was going to come out of someone’s hide. And now Abby was practically indigent, with no equipment for making whiskey even if he had the desire to do it. There couldn’t be a lot of money in preserving dead animals.
He lifted out the little wooden tray that held the possum’s spine, let the water run off. Gently slid the bones onto the cloth. A lovely snakelike thing. When she was young she hadn’t realized how few taxidermists worked with skeletons. It was tricky work, a puzzle of bone and wire, but Abby had a head for anatomy and he was meticulous in taxidermy, as he’d been in moonshine.
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