Love and Lament Page 25

  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 fo
r 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.

  “God’s truth, I don’t know. Warn’t made for drinkin’. ’Twas made for sellin’. I don’t remember gettin’ any complaints. Fact, one customer said it was the best busthead he’d ever drunk. That’s the truth.” Otis couldn’t help but laugh, his mouth opening in delight and showing his twisted tooth and a mottled fringe of rotting gum.

  Hooper took his hat off and fanned his face. His shook his head. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “All right, we’ve done all the government business here we can for one day. Otis, I’d give you a ride, but we’ve got a full load, with my two deputies here.”

  Mary Bet looked at her cousin, expecting him to wink at her, but he was straight-faced, and she suddenly felt more important than she ever had in her life. The men touched fingers to their hats in token of farewell, and then they began walking out of the woods, leaving Otis behind to sort through the piles of broken glass and wood and metal.

  The sun was lower now, painting the trunks of trees so that they seemed to pulse with their own light, and the heat of the day was giving way to slips of cool air that rose from sinks in the forest floor as if from lost icehouses. Mary Bet listened to the tread of the men upon the leafy duff, over which the sound of her own exhilarant breath was like a new voice coming to life.

  And yet from all around the darkening woods, like a rising chorus of winged insects, long-dead voices tugged at her, at her terrible guilt and unworthiness. They would never let her go, if she lived to be a hundred. She had committed the worst of sins possible—how could she ever be forgiven?

  CHAPTER 21

  1916–1917

  MARY BET HAD moved into a little cottage west of the courthouse in the early spring with her best friend, a thin, angular woman named Flora Whitson. There were two bedrooms, and she had no intention of turning the study into another bedroom, even though she could have taken in another boarder. “We’ll be just fine by ourselves,” she told people.

  And so they were, she and Flora, a woman with no attachments and a self-declared old maid. Flora was as skinny as a broom handle, Mary Bet thought, watching her at her work in the evenings, the way she leaned, straight-backed over the machine, feeding the hungry needle, her dress front puffing open off her flat chest, her bare, bony arms working and working the cloth in an expert way that Mary Bet admired. “I could never in a million years do like you do,” she said. “You’re so fast, and you never make a mistake.”

  Flora looked up again, a faint smile on her lips—the only part of her that was fleshy and sensual—then shifted her eyes back to her work. “It’s just sewing, Mary Bet.”

  “But I wish I was that good, you’re a natural. I’m not a natural at anything. I wanted to play piano once—” she hesitated, then, deciding it was okay to bring the dead into their cozy little communion, said, “like my sister.”

  Flora glanced up again, even more briefly, as she fed the fabric with her hands into the biting needle, her foot busy on the treadle. She nodded and said, “You’re smart as a whip, Mary, that’s enough.”

  “I reckon it’s all right.” Mary Bet turned back to her darning—the ripped socks and blouses in a basket at her feet would not be finished before there’d be more to mend.

  Being smart was all right, but was it enough? A new world was coming, people said, and Mary Bet tried not to think of it with fear but with hope. A world in which the railroad was no longer king, a world where unmarried women weren’t pitied and humored as eccentric aunties, a world of peace and electricity. But now there was a great war in Europe, and everyone prayed and hoped that it would end soon.

  She wanted to be as drawn to the future as Flora, who seemed to have no reason for it. But it was not the future that drew Mary Bet. Even something as simple as a warm breeze on a cool day, something quivering and unaligned that seemed to come from a deep pocket of earth, from beyond the edges of dusk and the places where pasture gave way to meadow and woods, illuminated a way back into the world of childhood and the Devil and incantation. It was a world of candlelight, of muddy roads not macadamized, the sound of iron-rimmed carriage wheels crunching sand and gravel across a stream, the froth of horses cantering an open field to a stone fence at the far end.

  The balance of her days could not be rectified against the weight of what she had lived already. There was too much … and yet if she could free herself, could find her brother’s secret sorrow and her father’s, she might be light enough to step across into another part of life. If she could be borne into the bright new world, the shadows of the old might no longer determine where she put her feet.

  Sometimes she wanted to have no past, to be as a child, to be an idiot, deaf as her dead brother to the rock hardness of her memories, which were as fixed and unyielding as the shape of the land, the X of the crossroads where she was born, the granite in Love’s Creek Cemetery, the words in the Book, which she knew as well as her own voice. Then there would be time enough for play and laughter and kissing her friend. There would be time for the moon to cast its orange light across the Haw River and across her pale skin and to feel its warmth and the touch of a boy, not her brother, but a boy whom she knew from far back in her mind with its ceaseless clamoring.

  But her mind would give her no peace, nor would her father’s mind give him peace, and so on back through the generations like the turning of the leaves in the Book. Why must it always be so, the already written fi
ghting with the yet-to-be written?

  She saw herself an old crone, sitting amid the ashes of her memories and her drooled thoughts, thin and wasted, her ripeness gone to seed, her hair white as the eyes of dead crows, hands withered like the skin of gone mushrooms. She saw herself alone and teetering, in a rocking chair far out at sea, the smoke of her ship the final thing she knew of humanity and love.

  LEON THOMAS HAD become principal of the Elisha Springs School and it was rumored he was being considered for superintendent of public instruction. He was so full of boundless energy and enthusiasm he could light up a room with his voice and his broad smile, offering his meaty hand all around, his body in near constant motion as he talked, as though his mind moved to a different rhythm from regular people. And he had such ideas—he wanted to improve the Negro schools and consolidate the white schools so there would be more teachers per student; he wanted to get state loans and float district bonds for more brick buildings; and he wanted to add vocational teachers and implement state standards so that Haw wouldn’t be limping along like a country ragamuffin, but leading the charge.

  He was all the time reading things. Mary Bet would see him coming into the courthouse on school business, walking past her office to the superintendent’s down the hall. Half the time he’d have his nose in a book or pamphlet of some sort. And it was kind of a large nose, even larger than her own, which somehow endeared him to her. He’d be padding down the hall early in the morning, and she’d scrape her chair or clear her throat so he’d look in. He’d tuck his book under his arm and poke his head in and say, “Why, Miss Mary Bet, how fine you look this bright morning.”

  She’d glance up as though she had no idea who it was and say, “It doesn’t look any too bright to me, Mr. Thomas. I’ve heard they’re calling for rain.”

  “Who’s calling for it? I think it’s a fine day for going out on a raid. What do you say we go catch us a bootlegger or two?” He’d tilt the upper half of his body in a comical way and then step into the door. As soon as he was in the anteroom where she worked, though, he became the polite gentleman, and it was up to her to keep the conversation going.