“No,” I gasped. “Did I kill him?”
“Not outright. He’s flopped over a time or two since I’ve been watching him.”
He had burned Pa. I had burned him.
“I knew I could right things between us,” I said.
Pa turned and frowned at me.
“Wasn’t ever anything wrong.”
“You know there was, Pa. And I was feeling so danged guilty about you getting hurt.”
“You let that guilt of yours fly off in the wind. Maybe we argued a bit, but that’s what families do.”
“You were just so ornery all the time. I had to make it up to you.”
He scoffed.
“Boy, I was the one who got us into this whole mess in the first place. It’s not your job to take care of me. You’ve only got to take care of yourself, and I’ve seen now you can do it,” he said. “The ornery part I can’t help you with though.”
Whether he wanted to admit it or not, I had put things right between us. Maybe no mending had been needed in his eyes, but on my side I’d had something to prove. To him and to myself.
He said, “You know, I felt like I’d deserted you out there, what with me running off one way, leaving you to run the other.”
His voice hitched and I looked over and saw the firelight reflecting in his eyes.
“Nah, Pa. We had to go separate ways. He couldn’t chase the both of us.”
“No he couldn’t, and he went after you. He had that .38 trained on the back of your head. Most cowardly thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“He was chasing after me?”
I hadn’t even realized it. Salvatore could have shot me.
Pa said, “And he’s a strong runner for a fat man. I saw him heading toward you and I turned around and ran right back at him before he could shoot. Jumped on his back and wrapped him up like a spider.”
“You jumped on him?”
“I did. We wrestled around there and his pistol went off, but I knew if I held him long enough you’d get away and use your smarts.”
“I heard the shot. I was so scared, Pa.”
“You don’t need to be scared. Not about anything.”
For a long moment we sat high above the growing crowd. People continued to stream in by car, on horseback, and on foot. A pair of long black cars like I’d seen in Knoxville pulled in and I wondered if the agents had finally shown up. Guess we hadn’t been that important to them after all. Didn’t even bother to show their faces until I’d blown up half the world.
The back wall of the house collapsed inward and I pictured our table and chairs and beds getting crushed into black dust.
“We should go down,” I said.
“In a minute,” he said, his voice dreamy like he was falling asleep.
I reckoned tonight had been about as much excitement as any man could desire. I reached over to pat his knee and he caught my hand in the air without even taking his eyes off the fire. He kept holding it there, and I looked over at him but couldn’t make out much besides his grinning face in the firelight. He wore that same contented look I’d always seen when we were working the still and he knew he had the fire at the perfect temperature.
He was so calm, watching our old house turn to nothing but ash and smoke. All our possessions and memories drifting up to the heavens, and him without a care in the world.
Pa swung his boot over so he was straddling the limb and leaning back against the trunk, his hand still clutching mine. Over the top of our hands I could see his shirt, a dark wet stain right under his heart.
“Pa, what’s that?” I asked. I tried to lean in and see, but he just kept holding my hand up between us.
Down below, the roof finally caved in and the fire flared up one last time. The firelight illuminated Pa. His shirt was soaked in blood.
“Pa, are you hurt?” I asked, as he slipped his hand out of mine.
He closed his eyes like he was going to sleep, then opened ’em big and smiled at me.
He said, “No sense in us missing each other. You’re me and I’m you.”
He leaned forward slowly, then tumbled sideways off the limb. I grabbed for him, but he crashed through the briars below and landed on the roots of the tree.
WINTER HAD COME EARLY that year and my boots crunched across the frosted grass as I made my way to the edge of the woods. The red flannel that was all mine now nearly fit me and I used one sleeve to wipe the dirt off the face of the gravestone. I hadn’t been there for months.
“I would have come before, but…but things were hard for me for a while, real hard,” I said out loud.
My voice came out in a puff of fog that rose and was gone forever. The words echoed in my ears until my cheeks had grown numb. A pair of warblers crossed overhead and chided me and I rubbed a hand over my face.
“I’ll be coming around more now. Can’t have you getting lonely.”
I heard footsteps coming up the hillside behind me.
“I bet you thought you’d be burying me up here too, didn’t you?”
“I knew you were too stubborn,” I said over my shoulder.
Pa had slept for four days in the Nashville hospital before waking up. I spent those four days in a chair next to him eating stale gingerbread and oranges from the Salvation Army and praying as hard as I could. Lucky for him, the bullet had gone through the side of his belly and hadn’t torn up his guts too bad. I got Mr. Yunsen to drive up with a lawyer and some special smelling salts and Pa woke up long enough to sign some papers that meant we gave up the white house. That had been my idea. Pa maybe didn’t exactly know what he was signing, but the bank got the white house back, plus they kept a good chunk of the money we’d already paid them. I got the rest of our money back, which I gave right to the doctors who took the bullet out of his belly. It was the finest hospital in the state.
We lost our nice house before we even got to use it, and I didn’t care for a second. If Pa had realized I was sacrificing that whole house just for him to get cured, he would have popped up in that hospital bed and lit into me like the devil. I sat there hoping for exactly that.
While Pa was still knocked out, two federal agents came to visit. They didn’t even stay long enough to take off their hats. I asked why they hadn’t shown up and the tall one told me there had been a whole band of bootleggers around that night and that they got hung up chasing other mobsters. Said they were chasing one another in automobiles, which sounded so ridiculous I figured they were lying. If I hadn’t blown up the truck they wouldn’t have ever come. Only good thing they did have to say was that Salvatore would be in jail likely ’til he died. Pa had done his duty.
Pa slept for another day then sat straight up, opened his eyes big as an owl’s and said, “Time to go, boy.”
No more than a minute later, he was walking down the hall and the nurses were all yelling and patients were gasping at him.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said. “I just needed a rest and some time to think.”
Everybody kept yelling but he marched straight on like he was leading a parade. I ran up next to him just grinning.
“Folks here had counted me out, huh?”
“You showed ’em, Pa. You showed ’em good,” I said as we walked out that hospital door, me smiling so hard it hurt and him in all his glory with the back of his hospital gown open.
There on the hill visiting Ma, we stood shoulder to shoulder.
Flowers were scarce, but I’d brought a handful of yellow goldenrods I’d found under the fence line. I pulled them from under my flannel and set them on her grave. They glowed bright against the pale grass.
Pa said to the gravestone, “Me and the boy here were fixing to move into our old house. That nice white one. He gave it up though just to save my sorry hide.”
I’d been right enough about Pa’s reaction to losing that house. He was beside himself.
I turned to him and said, “Would you have given it up if I’d been the one who’d gotten shot? If yo
u’d needed money to save me?”
He scoffed and looked at me all indignant. “What do you think?”
I nodded and said, “Well there you go.”
He was quiet and I thought maybe my words had gotten through to him. It wasn’t just about him looking out for me anymore. And as much as Pa liked to complain, things weren’t all bad. We’d been staying with the Yunsens the past two months while Pa finished recovering. One cool morning, the two of us had hitched a ride on the back of a hay truck up to the Blind Tiger, where I got to introduce him to Mr. Bridges. The two of them took a liking to each other right off the bat, and when Mr. Bridges told him how popular our pumpkin pie moonshine was, Pa called me over for a little meeting, which turned out to be our last as shining partners. We decided to pass the secret recipe on to Mr. Bridges. In turn, Mr. Bridges sent a telegram to an old partner near Hidden Orchard who owed him a favor, and not two days later Pa was signed on as a mechanic for some new government project, something rumored to be called the Tennessee Valley Authority. The job was good money and fit Pa’s natural talent for fixing things, but meant him being gone months at a time on different projects. A year ago just the thought of him being gone so long would have killed me dead.
“I’m heading out Saturday,” he said. “You sure you’ll be all right at Yunsen’s?”
“Sure, Pa. And I’ll see you for Christmas.”
“You can count on that. And really when you think about it, it ain’t long at all ’til then. I’ll be back before you know it. Shoot, you just blink your eyes and I’ll be right back here.”
I wondered if he was talking more for me or for himself.
“You know, Pa, I finally got to understanding the last thing you said to me. Right before you fell out of the tree. You remember what you said?”
We were both still staring at her grave, but I heard him chuckle and he said, “ ‘No sense in us missing each other. You’re me and I’m you.’ ”
“I get it now. It’s like as long as I’m living, you’re living too. That’s what family means,” I said. “That’s nice. Almost poetic.”
“Thank you.”
The wind whistled over the crowns of the eastern pines and I could feel a stinging in the tops of my ears.
“Who’d you steal it from?” I asked.
He laughed and nodded toward the ground before us.
“Your ma. Those were her last words to me.”
JUSTIN BENTON grew up on a farm in Georgia, where he had the chance to spend time at various distilleries and stills, legal and otherwise. Moonshine is his debut novel. He lives in Cartagena, Colombia, where he is a teacher and print translator.
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