The Pilgrim Song (21 page)

“Well, we didn’t jump off buildings, but we lost everything.”

“You run the Cundiffs outta their house,” Simon said accusingly.

“It’s my mother’s old home place. They were just squatting there. We had to have a place to live.”

“How many in your family?” Dora asked. She had sat down across from Josh, who couldn’t take his eyes off her full lips. She listened as Josh named his family and then said, “Let’s eat.”

The whiskey had hit Josh hard. He noticed his hands were steady now, but his reactions were not. He took a plateful of food from Dora, and when he asked her what it was, she said, “Pigs’ feet, grits, and taters.”

Josh’s stomach rolled at the mention of pigs’ feet, but he found the concoction surprisingly tasty and realized how ravenous he was as he began to eat. After he had cleaned his
plate, Dora said, “Maybe you need a drink on top of that.” She refilled his glass. “Here,” she said, “come on over and sit by the stove. You look like you’re about half froze.”

As Josh got up, he was conscious of a ringing in his ears and a numbness over his body. The whiskey was powerful, more potent than any he had ever had before. He slumped down in a cane-bottom rocking chair, took the glass, and sipped the drink. Dora pulled up another chair and said, “Tell me about New York. What’s it like?”

****

“I don’t know about this fella,” Simon said, shaking his head. “We don’t know him.”

Dora looked over at the visitor, who was sleeping soundly. His head was back, his arms limp in his lap. She had poured drinks for him until he had passed out. “This fella might be useful.”

Simon wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know. Useful for what? He ain’t got no money. We took all he had.”

“Pa, you know how bad things have been,” Dora argued. “The law nearly got you the last time you tried to move some liquor. They’re watchin’ us all the time, you know.”

“We’ll just wait until they quit.”

“I don’t think they’re gonna quit. That sheriff’s determined to get us. He’s got some Feds out here too.”

Simon Skinner knew his daughter was right, yet his moonshine still was cleverly concealed so far back in the woods he didn’t think any revenuer could find it. The Feds were afraid, he knew, for one of them had been shot while prowling around. The authorities had never been able to prove it was any of the Skinners, but the whole county knew they were the only likely candidates.

Simon leaned back and looked at his daughter. She and Billy Roy were the smart ones of the family. “What are you thinkin’?” he asked quietly.

“Josh here’s a city fella. Nobody would suspect him of
movin’ bootleg. He says he’s got a truck too. He could pick it up and drop it off to our dealers.”

“He might at that, but we don’t know if we can trust him.”

“We know he’s green,” Dora said, “which is why nobody would ever suspect him. He’s high class, Pa. You seen that, didn’t ya?”

“Yeah, I seen it all right, but I don’t know.”

“We ain’t got much choice, Pa. Besides,” she said, grinning, “I can make him like me if I wanna.”

Simon slapped his leg and laughed. “You shore can do thet, all right. You got half the men in this county runnin’ around after you. You be careful, now, you hear? I don’t want no grandbabies jist yet.”

“I can handle him, Pa. Let him sleep for now. When he wakes up, we can talk to him.”

****

Josh stared at the three men across from him and then glanced at the two women. Mrs. Skinner was back in the shadows, but Dora stood close to his side. Her eyes gleamed with excitement, and she urged him, “You should do it, Josh. It’s a good deal.”

Josh could not believe he was even considering such a thing. When he had awakened in a haze, Mr. Skinner had come right at him with his offer to move his bootleg whiskey. Josh hardly knew what he was agreeing to.

Now, his head a little clearer, he stood thinking,
I must be crazy! Why, I can’t do this!
“It would never work, Skinner. I don’t know anything about the country.”

“There ain’t nothin’ to know. If you got a truck, you just come at the right time. The liquor won’t even be here at our place. We’ll stash it somewhere wheres you can pick it up, then we’ll draw you a map. You won’t have to make but a few deliveries. We wholesale it, don’t you see. And you don’t even need to start till January. We’ve got December covered.”

“A man could go to jail for a long time,” Josh said. “I’ve never done anything like this.”

Billy Roy Skinner laughed. “But you ain’t never wanted a drink and had no money to buy it either, ain’t that right?”

Billy Roy had hit the nail on the head.
If I can do this just long enough to make some money and save it all, I can get back to New York. I should have stayed there in the first place. Arlen would help me get set up. I can go into business with him. His family still has plenty.

Everyone’s eyes were on him, and it was Dora who said, “You will do it, won’t you, Josh?”

Josh nodded slowly and said, “All right, I’ll do it.”

“You understand this,” Billy Roy said, pulling out a pistol from his pocket. He held it loosely in his hand, but Josh could not take his eyes off of it. “You say one word to anybody ’bout this, and I’ll blow your puny head off. You got that?”

Josh nodded. He got it very well. He had no doubt that he was hearing the exact truth.

“I won’t talk. After all, I’ll be sent to jail as quick as anybody else.”

“That’s right,” Simon said, grinning. “This will be a good thing for us, Winslow. Nobody would suspect you. You keep your mouth shut, and we’ll make a lot of money together.”

“Come on, I’ll drive you home,” Dora said.

****

Dora stopped the car a half mile from the Winslow home and said, “You’d better git out here. I don’t want your folks seein’ you ridin’ with me.”

“All right.”

Dora had questioned him as she drove the Chevrolet along the rutted frozen road. As Josh grabbed the door handle, she reached over and pulled him back by the neck. She kissed him full on the lips, holding him there for a moment before releasing him. She was laughing, her eyes gleaming. “You and I could git to be real good friends, Josh.”

Josh didn’t know what to say. He picked up the jug and got out. Josh knew he was moving into dangerous territory, yet he felt there was no turning back. He had gone through a door and locked it behind him. The past seemed tarnished and dull, like a worthless trinket . . . but the future looked just as bad.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Different Kind of Christmas

As Hannah straightened up, her back gave a twinge. She had been down on her hands and knees scrubbing the upstairs hallway floor. She could not believe how the grime of years had ground itself into the wood. Beginning at one end, she had taken a square foot at a time and scrubbed fiercely with the strongest laundry soap available until the golden color of the heartwood pine came through. Now, as she stood up and looked down at the distance she still had to go, she sighed despondently.

The days of hard, grinding labor such as she had never before experienced had passed until it was now Christmas Eve. She could not differentiate between the days, for they were all alike, passing like the ticking of a clock with no face and no hands. A numbness filled her as she thought about what a grim Christmas it would be.

Slowly she picked up the bucket of filthy water and started downstairs to heat more. Moving down the stairs, a sudden thought flashed into her mind, even as tired as she was. She remembered a stone archway in the church she had attended in New York City. One of the ushers had once told her when he saw her looking at it,
“The keystone never sleeps. It holds the others in place.”

The words had stayed with her, and now they brought some sense to what she and her family were going through. Her weariness lately had been crowding out all other thoughts, but now she saw with great clarity that the keystone of their
lives had crashed, the arch had fallen, leaving only a group of stones heaped together, where before there had been order and beauty.
How can our lives be put back together into something meaningful?

When she reached the kitchen, she found Clint sitting alone at the table drinking coffee. He looked up at her, concern in his eyes. “You’re worn out. Let me get that for you.” He got up and took the bucket from her, opened the outside door, and threw the wash water onto the ground. When he came back in, she reached for it, saying, “I’ve got to go get more.”

“It’ll wait. Sit down and have some coffee.”

Hannah willingly sat. He filled a mug with coffee and put it before her. “One of these days I’m going to have to learn how to harvest some honey. That’ll taste good in our coffee.”

She looked up, surprised. “Can you really do that?”

“I guess so. Jesse Cannon says he’ll teach me.”

“I’d like to come with you. I’ve never seen such a thing.”

“All right.”

The two sat quietly for a time, Hannah remaining even more silent than usual. She was not a woman given to light talk, and Clint had learned over the weeks to admire her stubbornness. He had seen her work when she was so tired she could hardly pick up one foot and put it ahead of the other. He glanced down at her hands now and noticed that they had changed. Once they had been well cared for and soft, but now they were roughened by the strong soap and calloused from the hard work. “The house looks good,” he said. “It’s a fine old place when you get through all the dirt and grime.”

Hannah smiled faintly. “That upstairs hall is a horror. I’ve scrubbed half the morning and haven’t gotten five square feet clean.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let me go over it with a blade of some kind. There’s an old plane out in the barn. I can get the rust off of it, sharpen it, and plane off the grime
right down to the wood. It’ll look like new. I’ll have to do a little sanding, but it’ll beat all that scrubbing you’re doing.”

“Oh, but you’ve got enough to do, Clint.”

He did not answer, but she knew him well enough now to know that he would do exactly what he said. He never seemed to tire, or if he did, he never mentioned it. She sipped her coffee and glanced at him. He appeared so solid and alert, the irregularity of his features so masculine. A small smile touched his lips, and she thought it signaled his inner character. It showed the world a serene indifference, yet there was also a sadness in him that she believed indicated he had lost contact with the world and could depend on nobody but himself. As they sat quietly together, she wondered about what truly guided his life. She knew he’d weathered some hard times, but he had survived those years and now used his experiences as a protective armor against the harsh demands of the world. She had ambiguous feelings about him, for she was aware she had fenced off men from her life. She had long ago put away all thoughts of marriage and children. Now she wanted to ask Clint if he had ever loved a woman, but she could not bring herself to do so.

“Stopped snowing,” Clint observed, glancing out the window.

“That’s too bad. I wasn’t sure we’d see snow at all this year, so it’s nice to have a little on Christmas Eve.”

Clint did not miss the sorrow in her eyes. “You look sad,” he said gently.

“I am, in a way. We always had such big celebrations at home, decorating and giving gifts and singing. I don’t mind it so much for myself, but I hate it for Kat.”

Clint stared into his coffee cup, turning it in his big hands. “It’s not too late.”

Hannah shrugged. “We don’t have any money for gifts.”

“Doesn’t take much money.” He smiled at her. “I’ve had quite a few moneyless Christmases. Tell you what. Let’s do it up right.”

“What do you mean, Clint?”

“I mean, there are plenty of trees out there. All we have to do is cut one down and bring it in. We don’t have to have store-bought decorations, do we? We can make our own.” He grew excited at the thought, and it struck her that it took little to make Clint content. This man could take an idea and run with it, and now the idea of having a Christmas celebration brightened his eyes. He straightened up and swept the air with his right hand. “It’s Christmas Eve. Let’s get started.”

Hannah smiled. “All right. What do we do first?”

****

Clint worked like a whirlwind all day, and his enthusiasm carried at least some of the family with him. Joshua had been strangely silent, almost sullen, for the past few weeks. He had disappeared from time to time, borrowing the truck, and Hannah had wondered what he was doing with himself but could not bring herself to ask him. In any case, on this particular day he actually made himself useful by going out with Clint and Kat to hunt for a tree. When they had found the right tree, Josh chopped it down, and he and Clint dragged it back to the house. Josh starting making a frame to hold it upright while Clint took his gun and went out again.

“A bunch of wild turkeys have been beggin’ me to shoot ’em. The pesky varmints will probably disappear today,” he said, grinning.

But he came back two hours later with a huge wild turkey. He tossed it down with a thump on the porch, saying, “I shot it. Someone else can clean it.”

Lewis volunteered to do that messy job, and following Clint’s instructions, Hannah and Jenny baked corn bread for the dressing.

As for Kat, her eyes glowed, she was so excited. She and Clint went out to gather red berries until they had a sackful of them. When they returned, he put her to work threading them on a string with a needle and thread. As for Clint, he
directed the making of the corn-bread dressing as if it were a great project. Hannah crumbled the cooled corn bread and transferred it to a mixing bowl while Jenny chopped onions and diced an apple. She added a little oil to the mixture and then added it all to the crumbled corn bread. Hannah added a lightly beaten egg, some broth and salt and pepper, and mixed them all together.

“Now just cover it and set it on the porch till morning. Then we’ll stuff it inside that big old bird I shot, and we’ll have a fine meal tomorrow.”

With preparations for the next day’s festivities completed, the women worked together on the evening meal. By the time it was ready, everyone was hungry, so they ate generous helpings of eggs and ham. Since Clint had fenced in the chickens and built a hen house for them, the family’s egg supply was plentiful. After eating, they popped popcorn and strung this on thread as well.