The Whiskey Baron (15 page)

“I believe I’ve about had enough today.”

“It’s too early for you to be talking like that.”

“My body’s not made for sitting on a stool all day.”

The other men laughed and one set his stool to wobbling in manic emulation. The old man only shook his head.

Willie kept his eye on his grandfather, thinking of the other night in the cemetery. The mill could be a dangerous place. You had to pay attention to what you were doing or you’d lose a finger. The men loved to talk about accidents, seemingly more than anything else, perhaps as a way to ward off the bad luck for themselves, or perhaps just one more way to while away the hours. Remember Myrtle Clark, the woman who got her hair caught in a loom last year? Lost half her scalp and made it back to finish her shift. Oh, that’s nothing. Another man heard tell once of a supervisor in Spartanburg. Wasn’t paying attention and got caught in a pulley. The pulley threw him into the ceiling and splattered his brains against a beam. Things Satan himself would have trouble matching.

When Abel righted himself, he caught Willie watching him and said, “You know, I imagine running whiskey’s a tempting job for a young man. Glamorous.”

“Maybe so,” Willie said.

“There’s easier ways to make an honest living. Maybe not in the mills, but not by running shine.”

Willie nodded. He’d heard this before from the old man. You can find your way across the entire world, but you couldn’t ever get out. You were always part of this life, still in the trenches. Just new towns, new names. And you don’t know what you lose from it all until you’re an old man looking back. “If you’re not careful,” Abel had said many times, “you might one day realize that everything you thought you knew about life, the code you lived by, was all wrong.”

“Times are changing, that’s for sure,” Mink agreed. “Violence is taking over everything.”

Abel coughed and rubbed his rheumy eyes, blinked a few times. “Hell, people always been like this. When I was a baby, my oldest two brothers were killed by Confederates.”

“Where you from, Abel?”

“I was born right up on the mountain, west of Gastonia.”

“They was killed by Confederates?”

“Home guard.”

“God almighty.”

“I was only two at the time, but that shadow’s followed me my whole life.” Abel trailed off.

Willie listened to this, pictured two dead men in the street in front of the Hillside Inn, two boys killed by Confederates on horseback in front of a burning barn. Last days indeed.

Afternoon swelter steamed up the weave room, kept the cotton fibers soft. An eerie mist in the air from the sprinklers. For a while the room was silent save the drone of the machines. The hum could put a man in a trance, something almost mystical where man and machine joined and became one entity. Amid this reverie, Willie set to sweeping again. He noticed the old man’s eyes were watery and red. Abel stared fixedly at the loom with his mouth ajar. As soft strands of cotton danced between his fingers, he watched the threading of the cotton, the pattern of the warp and woof, as though he were being presented with a miracle, God’s majesty revealed in textiles. Then he slid off the stool and clattered to the floor.

Willie yelled out and ran to his grandfather. He knelt by the old man, but other men gathered and someone pulled him away. Everyone in the room crowded in and pushed Willie to the back.

Quinn and Joe laid Abel on the bed while Willie and Susannah watched. Mr. Lowry had given all the Hopewell men the afternoon off. A doctor had come to the mill, pronounced it a stroke, and said Abel would need at least a month of rest, and perhaps would never be able to work again. With the other three there to steady him, Abel had been able to walk home. He walked up the steps to the house on his own, lay down, and turned to the wall.

Joe pulled Susannah aside, led her to the porch and into the front yard. Quinn and Willie followed to the doorway and listened while Joe told the story.

“The doctor says his body’s just worn out. Says when you get to be Abel’s age, the blood vessels get clogged like old drain pipes.” Joe wiped sweat from his brow and stared off toward the mill. He said, “I should move up to second hand soon. We won’t go into the hole even if he never works again.”

Willie could hear the frustration in his father’s voice and knew he felt cornered by events beyond his control.

“Daddy,” his mother whispered. “God damn it.”

“He told the doctor he’d had a few episodes before. Did you ever notice anything?”

When she paused, his father read her silence, said, “For how long?”

“Early June?”

“Jesus, Sue, we could have been preparing for this. We could have—”

“What? We couldn’t do anything except wait.”

“Hell we could have done—”

“Nothing. We were getting by, and we’ll get by now.”

“I was trying to do more than get by.”

Joe turned and slunk into the coming night. She stood in the yard a moment to watch his fading silhouette before coming back inside where Willie and Quinn waited near the door.

“We’ll be OK,” she told them. She brushed past them and went to her father, sat on the bed, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Daddy?”

“It was a stroke,” he mumbled.

She brushed his silver hair out of his eyes and then rested her hand on his arm. “There wasn’t anything you could have done,” she said.

He turned his head away and, like he was recommending how far apart to space a few tomato plants, he said, “I could have died.”

The brothers moved to the porch, sat on the rockers. Dusk came down like a curtain so that the rail and the bushes in the yard and the road and the trees all faded to a smoky haze of gray. The lengthening
shadows made the world appear ghoulish and strange. A breeze blew through, and the cypress trees in the front yard bent like dancers, held that pose until the air stilled. Willie felt more alone with his brother than he could ever remember.

“Granddad’s going to be all right,” Quinn finally said.

Willie nodded, gazed at the ferns that hung from the ceiling above the rail.

Quinn continued, “I’m going to town. I’ll be back, but if someone asks, you don’t know where I’ve gone. Or tell em I couldn’t sleep, that I’m just walking in the neighborhood.”

Willie watched his brother, like their father before him, disappear into the night, leaving Willie alone on the porch. A breeze cascaded through the roofs of the pines across the street, a lonesome crackle of limbs, the drop of a cone against a neighbor’s roof. The night was cool for the end of August. For weeks now, the days had burned around a hundred and the nights had remained in the nineties, a sticky mess, so the chill air was a relief. School would be starting soon, Willie’s time in the mill come to an end until next summer, unless his father would change his mind about him staying on, now that his grandfather wouldn’t be working.

Willie went inside and found his mother rattling in the kitchen. He sat at the table without saying a word and waited for her to speak, to say something that would clarify the day’s events and restore order to his world. The room was dark save for the flame in the lantern, and in this light his mother looked old to him. There by the sink, pausing, with her hands resting on the counter in front of her, she stared ahead as though looking out the window. Nothing but darkness and spirits out there, he knew, and although she couldn’t have seen anything, she looked anyway. Her hair was brittle and yellow, her skin a dusty ochre in the lantern light. Lines pronounced, crow’s feet at her eyes, and grooves in her narrow cheeks.

“Momma?”

“Yes, Willie.”

She continued gazing out the window at the darkness.

“How is granddad?”

“He’s resting now, you just saw him,” she said, and she turned to
him. She walked over and put her hand on the back of his neck and rubbed the hairline. “Don’t worry about him,” she said.

“I’m not worried.”

She continued to rub his hair for a moment, and he closed his eyes, relaxed with the comforts of his mother.

He said, “If I had told Daddy—”

“That wouldn’t have made a difference. Your granddad was in bad shape, and there wasn’t anything anyone could have done to prevent this.”

“You told me not to tell. I didn’t.”

“I know, and I’m proud of you. Part of growing up is learning how to keep a secret.”

“I thought secrets were bad.”

“Generally they are. But there can be good secrets. Grown-ups think all kinds of things they don’t say to one another. It keeps us civil. What you’ll find out more and more is that we all have our things we’d rather keep to ourselves. Like your granddad’s dizziness. It wasn’t our place to go telling the neighborhood, so we didn’t, and I’m proud of you.”

She came around and leaned over Willie’s face and kissed his forehead.

He sat at the table while she went back to the sink, folded a towel. “Go on to bed now,” she said.

He rose and as he was leaving the room, she blew out the lantern and everything went dark. From his bed he heard her walk through the room and close her door. He lay on his bed, the room ashen and dim in the moonless night, and he pondered what his grandfather had meant by his code being all wrong. What code? Do unto others? Love thy neighbor? An eye for an eye? Honor thy father and mother, the commandment said, but it didn’t say what to do when your father and mother were at odds, when honoring one meant dishonoring the other. Yes, he’d kept his secret, and his mother was proud of him, but did that make it right? What she said sounded true, we do keep secrets.

Where had his father gone? His brother? Mary Jane? The night was lonesome, a time when spirits would come out from wherever
they came. The mill hill was civilized, everything on a grid, folks so close you were never alone until the day wound down. He remembered nights he’d lain awake at his grandfather’s farm, before it was sold. Abel had lived up north on the other side of King’s Mountain, and when the family would visit, Quinn and his brother would lie out in ticks in the yard, the house too crowded for the kids. Warm breezes and the calling of crickets. The days building forts in the cane patches, or crawling on hay bales, the nights for stargazing.

One time, though, he woke to the sound of something rustling in the brush in the field. He lay still and watched the tall grasses quiver, the moonlight so bright it might as well have been day. Some manner of beast, sure as the ground beneath him now, came out like a large cat and crept along the field line and into the grasses of the yard. Willie felt as though his body were in a trance as the thing moved along. He wanted to call out, to warn his family, to bolt off to someplace safe, but he couldn’t move, was held in some deep paralysis the likes of which he’d never felt before or since. He could only watch as the cat-beast stood and hovered over his brother’s body, only a few feet away now. As the beast rose up on two legs, its claws forked from its paws and a low rumble came from its throat.

But it didn’t strike. It paused, and in that pause the screen door slapped shut. Willie’s eyes flickered, and he saw his grandfather lumber out with a shotgun. When he looked back to Quinn, the beast was gone.

Quinn stirred when their grandfather came over, and the old man said, “Why don’t you boys come inside for the night?”

“Did you see it?” Willie asked.

“I saw something, to be sure,” Abel said as he led the brothers inside. “Don’t worry, it can’t get you inside.”

“What was it?

Abel leaned the shotgun against the wall and said, “They say the spirit of an animal haunts this land. A remnant from way back, when all this was wilderness, and only Cherokee and Creek lived here.”

Their grandfather sat with them in the living room as they unrolled their beds and settled once again. Quinn fell asleep instantly, unaware of the danger he just missed, but Willie was up for the night.

His grandfather said, “I never heard tell of a beast like that attacking anyone. I always thought they might be something of a superstition.”

“That wasn’t a superstition I just saw.”

“I didn’t mean you didn’t see something,” his grandfather said. “Go on and get some sleep.”

Willie would never see such an apparition again, though he would remember that night on occasion and wonder how much of the memory he could trust. Perhaps people were predisposed to believe in certain things, and maybe he saw something that not everyone would. Maybe there were more things in this world than exist on the constant plane we all walk through in our daily lives. Maybe there was something beneath the surface that, if we listen, we can actually touch. Willie had no doubt of this underworld, but, except for some moments out in the country, he never felt in tune with it, almost as if those moments of sight were mere dreams.

Tonight he pictured his brother, once again unaware of the danger lurking in the country shadows. Quinn would be approaching the railroad tracks now, where Evelyn would meet him, twin figures in the darkness. Dogs howling in the distance. Trunks of pines clacking in the wind. The muted thump of cones falling in the dry leaves on the forest floor. Outside his window, the sky glowed, a sheen of white haze from the stars over the black void beyond. Willie imagined them walking on, both conscious of the unknown ground upon which they tread. Last year, Judy Singamore had gotten pregnant, and no one knew where the father was. Rumor had it the boy was with a traveling salesman, meandering across the state with a trunkful of books, and seemed to stay gone twice as much now that there was an infant in the house. Judy didn’t have friends anymore, didn’t see anyone from the school. Then there was Carol Evans, who eloped with Jimmy Lee Carter last spring, just a few months shy of their sixteenth year. They rented a house on the mill hill, Carol already pregnant and Jimmy Lee working full time in the mill, weekends as a carpenter’s helper in town.

Quinn and Evelyn could run steady, but they needed friends around. If you didn’t want to wind up in the same rut as your parents,
married young and working in the Bell, you didn’t go out on dates. Couples went to the picture show in a group and tried to sneak a moment together. A safety net in numbers. But Quinn and Evelyn ran in different circles, and Evelyn truthfully didn’t have many friends. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t the reason people were intimidated by her. Other girls’ parents didn’t want her coming over for sleepovers, and boys weren’t about to ask her father for a date. Father and daughter had shown up in town when Evelyn was a child, no roots and not much of a story. Evelyn Tull: always outside the circle, a beauty who did well in school, who always went to church even when her father missed. She took piano lessons and could often be seen in a front window practicing Chopin.