Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly (52 page)

“About the corn?”

“Suppose I said yes. Would you quit this work you’re doing, and stay out here and help me with it?”

“What’s changed you?”

“I can’t stand it when you’re gone.”

“Is it fifty-fifty?”

“Anything.”

“Shake.”

C H A P T E R

3

The mine, which was where I figured to set up our plant, scared me so bad I almost lost my nerve and quite before we began. Except maybe for rats and dust and spiders, I had thought it would be the same as when they took the machinery away, but when we got up there we found some changes had taken place. The top, where the weight of the mountain was on it, had bulged down in a bunch of blisters, about like the blisters on paint, except that they were the size of a wagon wheel instead of the size of a quarter, and as thick as a concrete road instead of as thick as a piece of paper. Each blister had split into pieces, and a lot of the pieces had fallen down, with the rest of them hanging there ready to kill you if you happened to be underneath when they dropped. And the floor had pumpkined up in wavy bumps that about closed the opening in a lot of places. So in the main drift, where I had thought we’d haul stuff in and out on a mine car, and pull it up and lower it down with a falls to the old roadbed below, there were three feet of jagged slabs with a trickle of water running over them, and the car track all buried. When she saw what it was like she begged me not to go inside, but I crawled in to have a look. After a hundred feet I had to stop. Because in the first swag was a pool of water at
least six feet deep, and overflowing to make the trickle that was running out the drift mouth.

When I got out we talked it over, and I had cold feet. But she kept saying a coal mine wasn’t the only place, and she was sulky and I could see she didn’t mean to give up. And then I happened to remember one of those tunnels we had driven the year when they were trying to find out if there was any more thick seam. It wasn’t like a mine tunnel, where they drive their drift into a layer of coal, and there’s rock top and rock floor, with coal for the rib and no need of timber, except of course in the rooms where they rob the coal and have to put in posts as they go or the whole thing would cave in. This tunnel was through shale, with sandstone top, and we had timbered as we went with cribbing. It was a quarter mile around the mountainside, at the top of a straight cliff that dropped into the creek, and we went around there. Sure enough, there it was, all dirty and damp and dark, but with the timbers still holding and the track still in place. I lit up and crawled in, and saw a string of cars on the first siding, about two hundred feet in. They weren’t the heavy steel cars they used on motor trains, but little ones, that we had pushed by hand. I kept on, and found all entries open, even the ones that connected with the worked-out part of the mine, though they were full of slabs, like the main drift. And then at last I came to what I’d been headed for since I first crawled in the old drift mouth, which was the shaft that was sunk for ventilation, and because it would crosscut everything, and they could see if they had anything or not, and when they found out they hadn’t, they quit.

“It’s all there, everything, just like we want it, and specially the shaft. It’s light enough down there to see what we’re doing, we can set up scaffolds for our tubs, tanks, and kegs, so all our stuff will run downwards, and we won’t have to pump. We even got our water just like we want it, because that pool in the swag, it comes from a spring that runs down one side of the shaft, and it’s good sweet water, because I tasted it to make sure. We can trap it halfway up, and run it wherever we want. And nobody will find the top of that shaft, or see it from down
on the road, or smell anything. And there won’t be any smoke, because we’ll use charcoal, and it don’t make any. But how do we get anything up there?”

“You said a block and falls?”

“From the old railroad bed, not from the creek.”

“Could we—use a boat?”

“Yeah, and we could put an ad in the paper.”

“I guess it would look pretty funny.”

“We could figure it out, maybe, why we got the only boat on the creek, but everybody from the state road to Tulip would ask us about it, and when you start something like this you can’t have any asking.”

We were climbing down, through the dogwood that was just coming out, and when we got to the water we crossed over the footbridge that led to my land, and began walking upstream. Then I noticed that the road and the cliff, from the way the stream narrowed at that place, weren’t really so far apart. There was kind of a sandbar that made out from the bank where the road was, but just the same, by using a long boom, anybody on the cliff could throw a light line to somebody parked on the road, and if the line was attached to the block, it could be pulled across as it went down, and then when whatever was going up was hooked on, the light line would steady it, so it wouldn’t smash against the cliff. Then when the hoisting was finished, everything could be pulled up out of sight, and put away till next time. I explained it to her, and she got it, but began asking questions about it. “My goodness, Jess, talk about a boat, me parked in a truck across the road, blocking traffic, while you pull stuff up with two or three pulleys squeaking, that’s not exactly secret.”

“What traffic? We do it at night.”

“That’s right. Nobody’s out at night.”

“We don’t make any new track or path to give us away. You handle the truck and I handle the falls. If we hear anything I pull up and you drive off, that’s all.”

“I love it.”

“Now we’re set, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The tank, from the shack. We can’t haul that up. We got to pack it by muleback, if I can ever figure some kind of cradle to put it in. We take it to the shaft mouth, then lower it down.”

“Well, I bet we can haul it up.”

“How do we get it through the tunnel?”

“Oh. Now I see.”

“It’s just not big enough.”

So we went to work, and it split up about even, the things I could do and she couldn’t, and the things she could do and I couldn’t have made myself do in a hundred years. I’m no mechanic, but I’m handy with tools, and all the stuff that had to be made and connected up, there was no trouble about it, except it took time and was a lot of work. Like I told her, the first thing was the hundred-gallon tank from the shack up the mountainside, but I got a light wagon up there, and when I started down with it there were a couple of places where I had to use planks, ropes, and chocks to work it along, but I had a lot less trouble with it than I expected, and got it to the shaft mouth in one day. Another day saw it lowered down inside, and I could go ahead with my scaffolds. For them I used lumber from the old loading platform of the railroad, and for pipe to connect everything up I used the water pipe of the old filling station. I kept steady at work, and it wasn’t very long before I had one deck of tubs, covered over with lids, and one leading to the other, where I trapped the water from the spring, and connected it with my mash tubs, on the next deck, and my still, which was right on the ground. For my heating chamber I used the tank, and for the cooling system the old heater, with the coils reconnected so they ran down through cold water. I figured everything out pretty good, like the intake of cold water down at the bottom, the drain for hot water at the top, so once we got started it all worked almost automatic.

She attended to whatever had to be done in Carbon City, and that was plenty, but I couldn’t have gone in there and had people look at me, and know from what I was buying what I
was up to. She got the tubs we needed for the water, and for the mash, and the kegs for aging the liquor. Everything had to be small, on account of the tunnel, as I didn’t want to drag any more stuff to the shaft mouth than I could help, but nothing gave us much trouble but the kegs. They were supposed to be charred, but I couldn’t see that they were, so we had to char them. While I worked on my pipe, she’d fill them with chips and shavings, until they were almost full up to the one end I’d left open after slipping the hoops and taking out the head. When it was going good with the flame she’d roll it around with the hook end of the fire poker she’d brought up from the cabin, until all over the inside was what they call the “red layer.” Then we’d souse water in it, and next day I’d put the head back in and tighten the hoops, and we had one more container ready. For all that stuff I gave her money, but it didn’t cost as much as I had thought it would, because she got a lot of it second-hand, and beat them down when she could. But some things, I don’t know where she could have bought them. For instance, the hydrometer she got, that you have to have to test the proof with, came in a long pasteboard box. And stamped on the box was “Property of Carbon City High School.” I kept telling myself I had to ask her about it, but I never did.

After a long time, after staying up late mealing corn, making charcoal, and doing all kinds of things that had to be done, came the day when we warmed some water in the still and put down our first mash. And three days after that we made our first run. I felt nervous, because even if nobody could see us it was against the law and against all the principles I had. But it was pretty too, after you got going with it. On a little still you put in a toothpick, but on this one we used a skewer, a wooden pin that you dress meat with, that’s sharp on one end and six or eight inches long. We stuck it in the end of the pipe, where the coil came out, and as the fire came up, there came this funny smell I had never smelled before but that I liked, and the pin began to get wet. Then on the sharp end, that was
outside, came a drop, like the drop of a honeysuckle when you pull the cord through to taste yourself some honey. It fell in the fruit jar we had under it, and then pretty soon here came another drop. Then the drops were falling one after the other. Then they came together in a little stream, the color of water, but clearer than any water you ever saw. When the first jar was full, she poured it in the tall glass that the hydrometer worked in, dropped the gauge in, and took the proof.

“What does it say?”

“One seventy.”

“Very good.”

“My goodness, if it’s that strong at the start we can run it clear down to thirty and it’ll still be one hundred when we mix it for the keg.”

“We’ll run till it mixes one twenty-five.”

“The more we get the more we’ve got.”

“Maybe this is a case where the less you act like a hog, the more you put on some fat. We can run it till we got a lot and put it in the wood at a hundred. But then it dries out and gets weaker, and if it’s weak it won’t sell. And the weaker it is, the slower the charcoal works on it. If we put it in strong, we got color, flavor, and mellowness in a month, anyway enough to be a big help when it’s mixed with regular liquor. But at a hundred we could be a year and we’d get nothing they’d pay us for. The longer we got to keep it, the more kegs we got to buy, the longer we wait for our money.”

“That money’s what I want.”

“Then watch it, it don’t get too weak.”

“Then anyway we can have music.”

She had a little radio up there by then, and turned it on, and I didn’t mind, as it would be a long day, watching that stream off the end of the pin.

“And a drink.”

“What?”

“What we making the stuff for?”

“You mean this?”

“Sure.”

She climbed up, got a bottle of Coca-Cola out of the basin the spring ran into, and the tin cup we kept there. When she came down she poured from the jar to the cup, dumped some Coca-Cola in, and handed it to me.

“Taste it, it’s good.”

Now nobody could live their life in mountain country without learning plenty about whisky, but that was the first time I ever tasted it. It tasted like Coca-Cola at first, but then I began to feel good, and wanted another swallow. She had the cup by then, taking a swig, and then was when I knocked it out of her hand.

“There’s to be no drinking in this.”

“I’ll have a drink if I want to.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Will you kindly tell me why?”