The Whiskey Baron (14 page)

They sat for a time listening to the crackle of the fire. Mary Jane shifted, wishing he had a bottle of whiskey to help him sleep. The old man looked like he might be holding a nip of something, but all that talk of Christians and the Lord made Mary Jane suspect the man for a teetotaler. He stayed quiet and let his hands tremble and his heart beat too fast for him to rest. The fire warmed his wet clothes and made him more comfortable than he’d been since leaving Abigail. A glass of her special brew would go right nice, would help a man forget his troubles as he cozied up to the fire. Thoughts of Abigail, however, hurt his heart, to know what hurt he’d caused with his liquor scheme and what further hurt she’d feel if she ever learned what he’d done with those jars of money.

He’d been a midcareer drunk who couldn’t seem to grow out of those wild days of youth. He’d watched his brother marry, have children, become a man, and although he didn’t begrudge Joe a thing, he felt the disapproving eye of their father every time he contemplated his wasting life, which only made him drink more. In truth, he loved
the thrill of it, finding those honky-tonks hidden from the eye of the law, those secret codes to gain entrance, those nights of one-upping his brethren inebriates with their war stories and their big talk. He grew older and one day found himself no longer the young buck at the bar, but rather the alderman of Lethe, the guide for boys like Ernest Jones and Lee Evans, Tommy Cope and Shorty Bagwell, boys who wanted to belong in the night’s society and looked to him for the right social cues. Hell, there wasn’t anything complicated about it. You showed up, embarrassed yourself a time or two by over-imbibing until you found that line and conducted yourself with great success in the likes of the Hillside Tavern. If you had half a brain, you even learned to shoot pool.

As the senior wild man, Mary Jane considered it his duty to do more than set the example, to stay out later and tell taller tales. His latent, unrefined entrepreneurial instincts gave him visions of his own whiskey empire. Larthan Tull did all right for himself, that was for sure, if that mansion he lived in was any indication. Mary Jane was a simple man at heart. All he wanted for himself was a steady income without having to pick up day labor. He loved to drink, so why couldn’t he find a way to make a living at it? One rule about drunken schemes is that if you think of an idea in a stupor, chances are nothing will ever come of it. If you mention that idea to a friend, still nothing will come of it. But once you mention that idea to two friends, you’ve set the game in motion and there is no turning back.

That was how Mary Jane found himself in a fledgling business with two rangy mountain boys. Lee was a bucktoothed millworker who always wore the same pair of patched-up overalls and a shit-eating grin. Like so many mountain folk, the boy and his father had shown up at the Bell with the clothes on their backs, a Protestant work ethic, and no story to explain their origins. Ernest was even more of a mystery, dropped off like a dog in the country for Abigail Coleman to take in shortly after the sheriff had shot her own son. Ernest refused to speak above a whisper for nearly two years, and only recently, as his friendship with Lee blossomed, had he offered signs of a personality. Mary Jane loved them both as fellow strays.

“Come on, boys, we’re going to make us some money,” he said to
them one night while they were drinking on Abigail’s porch. The three of them enjoyed some of her special brew on a regular basis, a brew that helped him sleep easier than anything Tull cooked up, and made the next day more pleasant as well.

Ernest and Lee smiled through Mary Jane’s sales pitch, how they could distribute Abigail’s product as a select, high-end mountain shine. When he finished, he called into the house, “Abigail! Come on out here! We got us a plan.”

At the end of his rambling pitch, this time embellished beyond what he’d cooked up with Ernest and Lee, so that he’d about convinced himself he was on way to being an outright millionaire, she said, “Y’all do what you want to do, but know this: When Mr. Tull comes knocking on my door, I’m going to tell him exactly where to find you.”

“He’s got more business than he knows what to do with. We’re not opening us a tavern here. Why would he even care what we do?”

She mm-hmmed him and went back in the house, left him flustered and struggling to salvage his brilliant idea. He doubted old Mr. Tull, as she called him, would ever come knocking, but if he did, the least Mary Jane would need from her was her silence.

Well. She’d kept her silence all right, even while Tull ransacked her house. Building a business takes some effort, and, drunk most of the time though he was, he passed more and more time with her, less and less time at the Hillside. She went from tolerating him to—what? He wasn’t sure how she really felt about him, in the deepest corners of her heart, but he knew how he felt about her, and it startled him to think how fast passion seized hold of you, like a conflagration of your very soul.

Dogs bayed in the distance, and the old man stirred and cocked his head, farther from sleep than Mary Jane thought possible. How to explain his own presence on this mountain, if the old man asked? It occurred to Mary Jane that you wouldn’t find your way up here unless you were on the run or, apparently, were called by the Lord.

“I’ve got some business up in Charlotte,” he said quickly. “In a few days.”

Ephraim nodded, as if all were clear.

“I appreciate the supper.”

“You’re welcome to bed down for the night. It’s not much, but it’s a long ways to some place more hospitable.”

“You know how far we are from Charlotte?”

“I don’t reckon I’ve ever been to Charlotte.”

“I know it’s two hours by car from Castle, but we’re a ways from town and I’ve got no car.”

“That’s a different perspective, being able to get in an automobile and go wherever you please. I remember when it was a day’s ride if you wanted to get anywhere, less of course you already lived where you wanted to go.”

“I’ve never thought much of it,” Mary Jane said.

“No, I don’t suspect most folks do. You in the war?”

Mary Jane nodded. Then he grunted his assent.

“You’ve been around the world then, and seen about all there is to see.”

“I don’t know about all that.”

“No, I wasn’t always blind. You don’t need to feel sorry for me and what I haven’t seen, because there’s only one sight I aim to see, the only sight worth seeing, and no automobile nor ship nor airplane can take you there. People move so fast, they’re losing their sense of direction. You say you got business up in Charlotte, which I respect. Every man needs a profession, but let me ask: what kind of business is in Charlotte that wasn’t where you came from?”

The man had a gift for preaching, Mary Jane gave him that, but the twentieth century was no place for prophecy or soothsaying. He said, “I just need to meet with someone.”

“Maybe someone needs to meet you somewhere else. Maybe you’re going the wrong direction.”

“If I was, how would I know?”

“It’s all about having that sense of direction. Take me, for instance. I wasn’t always blind, but now I see better than before because I know where I am and where I’m heading.”

“I know where I’m heading. I just don’t know the easiest way to get there.”

“Everyone finds his own way,” Ephraim said. “But few find the right way.”

Ephraim quieted and sat before Mary Jane as though time were on his side and he could afford to waste many a night warming by a fire. He wondered how the old man came to find this place with no eyes, and how he settled in with a cord of neatly chopped firewood. He was sure Ephraim would reiterate the line about the Lord providing, as though all one needed to do was look up to the heavens and say, “Help me out, God, I need you.”

From the foot of the mountain, voices carried up along with the sound of the dogs.

“There’s some men down there,” Mary Jane said. “Hunters, I reckon.”

Ephraim nodded. “Likely the law on the hunt. They’s a murderer on the loose, and they’ve got a dragnet over three counties to catch him.”

“Say again?”

“Man beat a police officer to death up in York County on Sunday night.”

Mary Jane laughed in relief. “Where’d you hear that?”

“When you don’t have eyes, you keep your ears to the ground.”

“I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no offense. Just I hadn’t heard about a dead cop.”

“Beat to death with a tire iron. Farmer found him the next morning, the bloated body already swarming with flies.”

“They Lord.”

“These are dark times we live in,” Ephraim said, and he turned his head as though he could see Mary Jane with eyeless eyes. Between them the fire dulled to hot coals glowering in the hearth. “Men on the road with no direction, bad things is bound to happen. That’s how sin works.”

“I hope they get their man,” Mary Jane said.

“He’ll get his, in this world or the next,” Ephraim said. “For he that doeth wrong shall receive again for the wrong that he hath done, and there is no respect of persons. The Lord knows your heart, and there is no escape.”

G
ossip was a way of life in the mill village. When the millhands weren’t insulting each other or telling lies about their past exploits, the weather and last days were safe topics. But nothing as exciting as the Hillside murders ever happened in the Bell. Hence on Wednesday, three days after the murder, conversations repeated themselves in an endless refrain, hushed voices following the cotton from ball to cloth.

“The sheriff shut down the Hillside yet?” one man asked.

“Naw, Tull’s got him paid off.”

“Chambers wouldn’t take a bribe.”

“How else you explain it?”

“He’s the law. You got to have evidence fore you can do anything.”

“Hell, two boys shot in the street ain’t evidence enough?”

“That’s the thing, they weren’t in the Hillside itself. Tull’s a smart
man. Boys get shot in his bar, he’s liable to feed the bodies to some hogs before the law gets involved.”

The men muttered their agreement. Everyone knew the kind of man Larthan Tull was, but no one really knew him. They might have bought whiskey off him, but he kept his cards to his chest.

“No, no,” Leuico King said. “The man’s not part of the mob. He comes from a family of mountain shiners.”

“How you know?” asked Mink Skelton.

“Seemed like I heard him tell it one day at the Hillside. Said his great-great-grandpappy was servant at Mount Vernon. Got George Washington’s recipe and then moved to Tennessee to start a business.”

“You think Tull’s brewing a recipe his family learned from George Washington?”

“That’s what I heard, is all.”

The men laughed at that.

“Anyway, it’s not the recipe,” Mink said. “Anyone with shine now can make a living. You got to have business sense. You got to have prospects.”

“Tull’s got more than prospects. I hear he reads minds.”

“What you saying?”

The men quieted and leaned in as Leuico had his say.

“I’m saying, Tull knows things he ought to have no way of knowing. I don’t think it was any accident those boys were shot in front of his bar rather than inside it.”

“Yeah, if he did it, he pulled them out before he pulled the trigger.”

“What I’m saying is, he could have made them disappear. Whether he shot them or Mary Jane shot them, didn’t no one have to know about it.”

“What are you talking about, L.K.?”

“I’m saying, things don’t happen around the Hillside without Tull wanting them to happen. Any of you planning to make shine and try to cut in on his business?”

The men all leaned back at once. No, they knew better than to even consider crossing a man like Larthan Tull. Without knowing a thing about him, they knew he was the kind of man who would break fingers just for an inconvenience. They believed that any one
of them could end up dead in the street if Tull had a notion, and the thought of that set them back to the looms.

Willie shucked at the dust with his broom. He liked the work in the mill, liked contributing to the family, liked listening to the old timers talk, and liked the break times when he and the other boys would play around the machines. But this week the mill had grown solemn, for one of the boys who had been shot, Lee Evans, was from the Bell village. Lee and his father lived up the street, a quiet pair of men. Harry worked in the weave rooms, and Lee had been a card hand, Quinn’s job. Harry was out today. The funeral was tomorrow and the superintendent told him to stay home for the week.

As Willie passed through with the broom, his grandfather coughed and took him by the arm, said, “Don’t let any of this talk scare you.”

“I ain’t scared.”

Abel nodded and patted the boy on the back.

“Y’all ever hear anything from Mary Jane?” Mink asked awhile later.

“Not a thing,” Abel said. “Joe don’t think Mary Jane shot them boys, and I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Mary Jane’s always been real fun to hang around.”

“He’s got his problems, but killing some folks seems out of character for him. Course Willie here suggested Mary Jane might well have done it.”

“Did he now?” Mink said, and they both looked at Willie.

“I didn’t mean that,” Willie said, and he felt hot in the ears thinking of Mary Jane out by the river, his shoulder torn up. Shame was funny like that. You remembered those moments, things said and done, lies told, secrets kept, and you felt the weight of them later, all the more painful for your inability to edit the past. He’d done wrong to think his uncle could be a killer, but, worse, he couldn’t say he saw Mary Jane toting whiskey from the river, because if his uncle were guilty, to talk would be wronging him twice.

“Who knows what went down at the Hillside?” Abel said. “Bad folks gather there, and any one of them could have shot Ernest and Lee.”

The men muttered in agreement. Abel leaned his stool on two
legs, holding onto the loom, stretching his back or puzzling over the work, when the stool tipped over. He shuffled one foot to the ground, and the stool clacked and squeaked beneath him.

“You all right, Abel?” Mink asked, laughing.