A little ways on she stopped behind the thick ridgy trunk of a chestnut tree. The voices had gone suddenly quiet, and in the
backwash of silence she could hear the creek again, louder and more urgent. But her heart was resolved and she moved out from behind the tree. A bugle blared out three strangulated notes like a startled goose, followed by the barking of dogs. She stopped and peered through the tangled spring growth of creeper and sapling, between the gray uprights of trees unbranching until they were clear of some preordained growth that only pertained here in the primitive deep of the woods. The dogs quit barking, as if they’d been hushed, and though she kept shifting her head like a deer to see forward, the tree-on-tree weave obscured her view.
She decided they knew of her presence and that it was best to continue on—she was lost and needed to find people. A few steps farther she saw a black hairlike line at her feet and thought how odd to find a spiderweb of such color. Bending down, she saw that it was a long piece of thread running between two trees—how strange these people must be, how superstitious, she thought, stepping over the thread and reminding herself to ask them about it. She thought she would not be surprised or scared by anything now—a bear even, or a wild boar.
At the limit of her sight a man was standing beside a tree. Or what looked like a man. She came on forward now, more sure of herself and trusting that the sheriff was somewhere close behind. The man wore stained nankeen trousers and a long brown canvas jacket; his hat shadowed his face, and he leaned on a carved stick, the handle at waist level. As she drew closer he lifted his eyes to glance at her, and she saw that one eye was dead. He scanned with great care the woods behind her as though reading and rereading a passage for some important line.
“Hallo,” she said, coming forward.
He nodded, his stringy beard dipping a mere inch. “Who’s with you?” he asked. His voice was low and gravelly, not unfriendly, just cautiously threatening; he was perhaps seventy, or a little older,
around her father’s age, and she suddenly felt sorry for him and guilty for pretending to be other than the law. She imagined he was posted here because he was too old or incompetent to do the real work.
“I’m lost,” she said, for she could not bring herself to say she was alone. “I was out looking for herbs to make tea with.” She pulled the plants from her pocket and held them out in her palm. “Do you know which way the road is from here?”
“What was you looking for, precisely?” Again his good eye only flickered across her, taking her in and then swiftly moving on to the woods behind. But it seemed that the dead eye continued to hold her.
“I mostly was after cohosh. You don’t know where any is, do you?”
“How’d you get in here, if you cain’t get out?” His teeth were stained and one of the two front ones was twisted so that the side was forward.
She laughed in a limp way. “I walked from the road. I guess I’m not much good with directions.”
“You’re not from around here. Where’re you from?”
“From over in Williamsboro,” she said. “Well, I’m really from Hartsoe City.”
“What’s your name?”
She hesitated. “Mary Bet Hartsoe. You might’ve heard of my people.” She looked him in the eye, and then, as though another voice were taking possession of hers, for she’d never asked a man to introduce himself, she said, “What’s your name?”
“Otis Sugg,” he said. A breeze carried the smell of cooking mash, heavier now, and Otis appraised her as though for a sign of comprehension. And because she could think of nothing more to say, Mary Bet finally lost her nerve and looked back. She thought of Lot’s wife losing her faith and paying with her life. As she turned
back around, she cried out, because she saw that Otis Sugg had pulled a pistol from his belt. He lifted it in the air and fired. Then he said, “Your friend’s a-comin’ yonder. I’s just lettin’ him know we was here.”
Mary Bet looked around again, but still could not see the sheriff. She was not sure whether to believe Otis Sugg, but her heart was pounding and she felt bold enough to quit lying. “You were not,” she said. “You were warning the other bootleggers. They’re over there somewhere distilling whiskey, and we’re going to shut you down.”
“You are, huh?” He chuckled as though he were talking to a five-year-old.
“Yes, we are. That’s Sheriff Teague coming with the ax right now.” She thought he looked as if he were considering something, but the sadness in his face made her say, “Aren’t you going to run?”
“What’s the use?” he said. “I can’t run no more. If that’s the sheriff, he’ll tell me I owe the United States government a hundred and fifty dollars. My brother’ll pay it, and that’ll be that.”
She shook her head. “You should be ashamed, out here making liquor.”
And now he gave her a harsh look, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t know what you’re sayin’, missy. Your people don’t know a thing about my people. You live off in some great big mansion with a coach and white horses, and you come traipsin’ out here like you’re huntin’ turkeys.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. “I just—” She saw him looking into her eyes, understanding that she was young and full of wrongheaded suppositions, and he nodded.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t reckon making liquor’s such a good thing, but people’ll be wantin’ to drink it no matter what. You shut this still down, anothern’ll pop up somewhar else.”
Mary Bet could hear footsteps behind her, the leaves and twigs of the forest floor giving notice of a man’s tread. And then Hooper
was beside her, his gun out and hanging at his side. “You don’t mind putting that away, do you, Otis?” he said.
Otis glanced down at his gun, an old long-barreled pistol, as if he’d forgotten it. He tucked it back into his belt and said, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
Hooper smiled and replied, “C’mon, Otis, let’s go see what you and your brother have brewing today. It dudn’t smell like coffee.” He started off, then said, “And you might as well hand me that pistol for safekeeping.” He took the pistol in his free hand and looked at Mary Bet as if considering, then led the way down toward the creek.
They crossed on stepping stones, the hem of Mary Bet’s dress already so bedraggled from the walk that she didn’t bother holding it away from the water. She thought she’d be able to wash the dirt out, which for some reason put her in mind of the teacher Leon Thomas. She wondered who did his laundry and his mending and if he still lived with his parents. Hooper lived by himself like a bachelor, but she didn’t think he would be for long, not that it was any of her business. She had to admit a fondness for him, even though he was her cousin and her boss and had a tendency, like his mother, to say whatever was on his mind.
Mary Bet thought all these things while crossing the clear creek and making her way up the root-plugged bank, following the bootlegger Otis Sugg, who was following Sheriff Teague as the creek took a bend to the right and past a thicket of briars, pines, and pawpaws, the ground spotted with little white bloodroots. They went around a jumble of snags that provided a kind of wall sheltering a clearing not far off the creek. And here was the bootleggers’ lair, with its motley arrangement of wooden barrels and odd-shaped devices. There was no one about, but a man was approaching from the opposite direction.
Leon came into view, shouting a warning, “It’s just me. Don’t shoot.”
Hooper called back, “All right.” Then he went over to a big, squat, hammered-copper pot that was sitting on a fire, a stack of fresh logs beside it. On the top was what looked like a kettle with a long spout coming out one side, with a clear liquid dripping from the spout into a barrel. Hooper pushed his ax head against the kettle until it fell onto the ground, and then grabbed a wooden paddle leaning on the pot’s side and gave the contents of the pot a stir. Mary Bet glanced in at the thick, dark brown mixture, the fermenting smell so sweetly pungent she wondered if she could get drunk breathing.
“Hmmm,” he said, “first run mash.”
Otis nodded and smiled a little. “Shame to waste it,” he said.
Leon came into the clearing. “They all ran off. I saw one, but I couldn’t tell who it was.”
“It dudn’t matter,” Hooper told him. “Otis here’ll be responsible for the fine, won’t you, Otis?”
“Yessir, I reckon I’ll have to.” Otis suddenly looked ancient, his face gone hangdog and blank.
“All right, Leon and Otis, you’ll have to help me here. We’ve got to turn this mash out and chop everything up.”
“Everything?” Otis mourned.
“Every barrel and bottle and copper worm on the premises, and this turnip pot is the first to go. But we got to be careful with it.”
“Bottles too?”
“Yep.”
“Can’t I just pay a granny fee?”
“Granny fee? I’ve never heard of such a thing. I didn’t hear it from you either. You didn’t just try to bribe a county sheriff, did you?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“I didn’t think so. Now give us a hand here.”
Mary Bet stood back while the three men, mostly Hooper and Leon, cleared away enough embers to make room for their feet.
Then they used sticks to tilt the pot over until the concoction oozed from the lip. It sizzled as it ran down the side and into the remains of the fire, and Mary Bet watched the steam rising from the ground as though the ground was angry, scorched by the Devil’s cauldron. Just beyond lay the fallen top with its queer spout, where she knew the whiskey had been issuing forth like the essence of evil spilling into a barrel for desperate people to buy and sell and get crazy drunk on. She appreciated that the sheriff didn’t insult Otis Sugg, didn’t call him “boy,” didn’t say he was a dirty, lawbreaking moonshiner, though she herself had thought up that phrase and a few more besides. But that was before she’d met Otis. Not that she’d want to have him over for tea, and the thought of him sitting down in her living room with Flora, her new housemate, almost made her laugh out loud.
“That’s a lot of moonshine,” she said, staring at the golden froth, trying the word out on her tongue.
The men pushed the emptied pot over to the side. Leon nodded, glancing at Mary Bet, and then chuckled. “It sure is, Miss Hartsoe. That’s a funny thing to say, though.” He looked at her with amusement, and Mary Bet noticed now that he had a slight cast to one eye, the right one looked off a little to the side, but perhaps this was only in certain situations. He looked less like a bumpkin now, even with a stirring paddle in his hands, than like a bright, lively young schoolteacher. He and Hooper went to work chopping and smashing, Otis joining in halfheartedly and Mary Bet thought he was maybe trying to get to some pieces before the other men did, but she saw that they weren’t going to leave anything with just a dent.
“This’ll be good for scraps and not much else,” Hooper said, “time we’re through with it. You could make a cup or two, maybe a tin hat if you fancy one. And the rest you can sell to the junk man. How long you reckon before you’re back at the coppersmith, Otis?” Otis looked up from where he’d been dropping jars, watching sadly
as they broke; he shrugged. Hooper said, “I reckon there’s two or three more stills just like this out in the woods somewhere. I know where one is, and you could save me the trouble by showing me the others.”
“I’ll think on it,” Otis said.
There was not much for Mary Bet to do except watch the men tear the operation apart. Hooper went about the job with no particular relish—he smashed the still and the barrels and the cooling boxes and condensing coils just as though he were chopping wood. Leon Thomas seemed to take more pleasure in the job, but it was a robust pleasure instead of a mean one. His movements were quick and sprightly for a short, stout man. His eyes were keen, his cheek muscles tight with the vigor of exercise as he clutched an abandoned hatchet and looked about for something else to destroy.
Mary Bet went over to a crude little shelter, a canvas tarpaulin stretched between three trees. Underneath stood a few oak rounds for sitting. A Bible lay on one of the rounds, turned upside down, as though the reader had just left off. There were crates of apples and peaches under the tarpaulin, and pots and pans hanging from nails in one of the trees. On a low table—a board stretched over two adzed logs—lay some banged-up tin cups and bowls, one of them still steaming with some kind of thin vegetable stew. A neatly folded blue wool jacket with tarnished gold buttons and a forage cap lay on one of the log seats at the little table; it didn’t necessarily mean these people came from Yankees—more likely they’d scavenged the woods up around Durham, or traded with deserters way back.
After a while, Hooper leaned against a tree to catch his breath and said, “That’s good enough, boys. Otis, I’m going to do you a favor this time and leave the slop in the turnip. You got hogs to give it to?”
“No, but my brother does, and he’d appreciate it.”
“Doesn’t make them sick?”
“Naw, they love it,” Otis said. He’d been sitting on a stump the past several minutes, not apparently seeing any point to making himself sweat. “Best pot-tail we ever give the stock was the coon lot.”
“The coon lot?” Hooper said. Leon came away from a pile of splintered barrel staves and spat.
“That was the time a raccoon fell in the mixtry.”
“What? In the still?”
“Yessir, while it was a-brewin’. I don’t know how it come to get in there, less it crawled up the paddle to get a taste. We didn’t know about it till Thumkin Moss clanged into it while he was stirrin’. Got the tongs and pulled out a hairless critter ‘bout the size of a big cat.”
“How do you know it wasn’t a cat?”
“Well, I don’t, exactly. Thumkin speculated that it was a raccoon, because he’d known them to knock the slop barrels over so the tops’d come clean off.”
“Was it dead?”
“Yep, there won’t nothin’ to it but skin and bones.”
“What about all that hair left in there? You couldn’t sell the whiskey, what’d you do with it?”
“We did too sell it. That was good double-rectified moonshine, one hundred proof.”
“What’d it taste like?” Leon wanted to know. Mary Bet looked at him askance—why did he want to know, unless he was a connoisseur himself. She wished they would just go ahead and outlaw the sale of whiskey everywhere so people wouldn’t be tempted, but, then, maybe they’d be more tempted and there’d be even more moonshiners.