Up Jumps the Devil

8

« ^ » … the very first year the purchaser made 11 hogsheads of brandy of the peaches and apples in his garden and some cyder…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

Annoyed as I was with Allen, though, I had to admit he was handy with a wrench.

While he wrestled my faulty alternator out of the engine and installed the new one, I stood at the front of the shabby cinderblock garage and talked with Mr. Jap, who’d come over from the house when he saw that Allen’s truck was back.

I noticed that someone had painted over the purple cross on his front door and I guessed that the “Holyness Prayr Room” was out of business.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Jap with a sheepish smile on his grizzled face. “Religion never does take on me, it don’t. I just can’t seem to stay right with the Lord. And anyway, them Mexicans has gone back to Florida, they did.”

The rain began again as he came in, and the old man pulled a slat-backed chair over to the open doorway so be could sit and watch it fall. There was no wind. The heavy drops came straight down, hammered the tin roof, then sheeted off the edge of the front shed like a waterfall. Inside, cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of steel tools and machine oil and gasoline fumes—masculine smells I would always associate with my father and brothers as they endlessly tinkered on cars and tractors, tobacco harvesters and bean pickers, mowers and hayrakes.

Something’s always breaking down on a farm and men are always cussing and putting it back together with duct tape and baling wire and a squirt of WD-40.

But Mr. Jap wore a contented smile as he settled deeper into the chair and watched the rain come down. Every once in a while Allen would drop a wrench or mutter and Mr. Jap would look even happier.

“Just like the old days,” he said, “when Dallas or some of your brothers would come over and work on their cars. Sometimes I couldn’t find a wrench for my own work because they was using them all, they was. Good as he was at driving, Dallas didn’t have much feel for a engine. Your brother Frank, now—”

He cocked his head at me. “Where’d Kezzie tell me Frank is these days?”

“Southern California. San Diego.”

Frank’s my next to oldest brother. He spent twenty-six years in the Navy as a machinist and retired as a master chief petty officer. He and Mae come for a long visit every other year and they talk about how nice it’d be to live closer, but she’s from California and their kids have married and started families of their own out there, so we don’t really expect them to move back.

“That Frank, he could do anything with a motor that needed doing, he could. Many a time he’d just listen to it running and hear what was wrong before he ever lifted the hood.”

He cut me a sly look. “Good at making things, too, he was. When he weren’t but twelve, he made the prettiest little copper worm you ever saw. Not a kink nowhere.”

A worm, of course, is the coil that runs from the cap of a still through a barrel of cool water and acts as a condenser. Some of those homemade copper stills are works of folk art and the worm is the hardest part to shape because copper tubing is so soft it’ll crimp and collapse when you start to bend it. A lot of operators won’t bring their coil out to the still until they’re ready to start running a batch.

And even though destruction is their job, few ATF officers are so hardhearted that they can bust up a pretty copper cooker without a niggling regret when they smash the worm.

Or so they tell me.

They do the telling with sidelong glances if they know my daddy’s reputation and I’m never sure whether they really do feel that way or if they think they’re making Brownie points with me.

“Some of both, probably,” Dwight said when I once asked him about it. A deputy sheriff hears a lot of scuttlebutt. “They’re the hounds. Mr. Kezzie was a fox. A hound won’t have much fun if there’s no fox to chase, now will it?”

Trouble is, I’m not comfortable asking Daddy about those days and he never volunteers. I know the older boys talk about it amongst themselves once in a while, but it’s almost like they’re the Masons and Adam and Zach and I have never quite learned the secret handshake. Most of what I’ve heard about making illegal whiskey comes from ATF officers, SBI agents and occasional old-timers like Mr. Jap.

“So how’d Frank make the worm?” I asked Mr. Jap.

The old man laid his finger alongside his nose. “Don’t know as I ought to be telling a judge, no I don’t.”

I smiled. “The statute of limitations ran out on Frank a long time ago.”

“Well, I’ll tell you then,” he said happily. “He set right over there on that workbench with a piece of copper tubing and we saw him studying and studying on it, me and old Max Pleasant, Leo Pleasant’s daddy, we did. Max says, ‘What you making, young fellow?’ and Frank told him.”

“He did?” That surprised me. Whenever I do get my brothers to reminisce a little about those early years, they always say that they knew to be closemouthed about whiskey making. Mr. Jap would have been safe since he’d operated a still on contract to my daddy, but Max Pleasant?

“Oh, yeah. You think because Leo’s so set against that new ABC store they’re building out here in the country that nobody in his family ever messed with making it? Leo’s daddy took Kezzie’s money same as a lot of us, yes he did. And so did Leo’s mammy when Max got caught and sent away for two years. No need for Leo to act so prissy pants. Whiskey paid the taxes on his farm many a year back in the thirties and forties, yes it did.”

A deep cough rattled Mr. Jap’s thin chest as he lit a cigarette and took a long drag.

“Anyway, Max asked young Frank if he needed some help. ‘No, sir,’ says Frank, all polite. ‘I reckon I can figure it out myself.’ And danged if he didn’t. Oh, he messed up a couple of inches when he tried to bend it around a big iron pipe after he got it soft with my blowtorch. But he just set there and studied some more and finally we seen the light bulb go off in his little head. He went out yonder to the edge of the field, he did, and got him some sand, wet it down good and rammed it in the tubing till it was packed solid. Then he hit it with the blowtorch again and that tubing near ’bout wrapped around the pipe all by itself with not a dimple in it. After that, he flushed the sand out and it was perfect. I used it for eight years, I did, before the liquor agents found it”

Since he seemed in a telling mood, I asked, “How’d you learn to make whiskey?”

“Your own daddy showed me. Didn’t he never tell you about that? He used to help his daddy and after Mr. Robert died, he got me to help him, he did. He was real particular about how we made it, too, he was—clean, pure water and we never doctored it up with lye or wood alcohol. That’s how come he always got top dollar for his jars. Nobody never went blind nor even got sick neither, drinking Kezzie Knott’s whiskey, no they didn’t.”

“You ever get caught?” I asked.

“Naw.” There was pride in his voice. “I never made it all that much after we growed up. Oh, I’d run me off maybe twenty or thirty gallons when Elsie needed more cash money than I could lay my hands on, but mostly I helped Kezzie with the distribution. He give me a flat wage, he did, to keep everybody’s cars and trucks running. Dallas used to make him a little spending money when your daddy was short of drivers. Allen, too, if he was staying with us.”

I knew some of the broad outlines of Daddy’s illegal operations. My grandfather had been a poor farmer with a houseful of children and when corn dried up in a drought year or boll weevils got all the cotton, he’d run a little white whiskey for enough cash money to put shoes on their feet and clothes on their backs and maybe pay taxes on his forty-three acres of land.

There’s always been a conflict between the makers of morality and the makers of whiskey, and an ABC store is still the only place you can buy hard liquor in the state. (As the saying goes, “North Carolinians will vote dry as long as they can stagger to the polls.”) But there’s also been a mutual dependence. The evils of alcohol are well documented and make for fiery sermons, yet the higher the sin tax, the more profitable the shot houses, those unlicensed back-country dwellings where you can buy a shot of untaxed liquor day or night and on Sunday morning, too, if the proprietor knows you. In many communities, the biggest bootlegger is also the biggest contributor to local fund-raisers, the first to reach into his pocket when a poor family suffers tragedy, the one who’ll hold a note two or three times longer than any bank. A lot of people may know who’s running whiskey in their community, yet they keep their mouths shut. Not out of fear, but out of gratitude for the personal help the bootlegger may have given to their families in times of stress.

When you throw in the basic anarchist nature of old-time independent farmers, it’s a wonder there’s not a still behind every tree in North Carolina, stills operated by conflicted, God-fearing farmers who can’t see much difference between making whiskey and growing tobacco. What’s all that bad, they’ll ask, about sending corn to market in a jar instead of on the cob? And one or two have even been heard to wonder out loud how come the government supports tobacco, yet outlaws marijuana?

My grandfather was killed when Daddy was still a boy. The revenuers couldn’t catch his souped-up Model T, so they shot out his tires and he crashed into Possum Creek and drowned before they could get to him. Nowadays there’d be a lawsuit for wrongful death; back then it was good riddance to bad trash as far as the revenuers were concerned.

Although he hadn’t even started shaving yet, Daddy took over as head of the household and whenever times were tough, he’d amble off down to the swampy part of the creek and use his father’s recipe to cook up the mash. With the scrimping and saving of his first wife, he accumulated enough cash to bankroll a little country store at Pleasant’s Crossroads and after that he had a loyal supplier of sugar and Mason jars. By the time he married my mother, he had put a couple of layers of insulation between himself and the production end and was directing a distribution network that some people say reached from Canada to Mexico.

That network supposedly included some of the biggest names in early stock car racing, men who bought and then juiced up their first cars with the cash they got hauling moonshine out of Colleton County. Indeed, the sport got its start in North Carolina with young daredevils who outran law officers on moonlit nights and got together on weekends along deserted dirt roads or out in isolated pastures to see whose car could go fastest. Lee Petty always downplayed or flat-out denied any whiskey connection, but Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Little Joe Weatherly, Wendell Scott, Buddy Arlington?

When they hit a roadblock, every one of them knew how to execute a “bootleg turn”—that quick reverse and one-eighty dig-off that throws dirt in the lawman’s eyes and has you flying back down the road like it’s the devil’s racetrack. Before the law can get a good look at your license plate, you’re going, going, gone, and all he sees are tail-lights fading in his rearview mirror.

Today, the Highway Patrol calls it a three-point turn and they teach a sedate version in Driver’s Ed, but everybody out here knows who invented it.

And why.

“Did you know Daddy was a bootlegger when you married him?” I asked my mother that summer she was dying.

She nodded. “But like every woman since Eve, I thought I could change him. He didn’t need the money anymore. The store was doing well, he had land and sons to help him farm it and tobacco was booming. He swore he’d quit if I’d marry him. And he did quit.”

Mother’s smile was rueful as she reached for the old battered Zippo lighter that was always near to hand. Even though she seldom lit a cigarette anymore, she liked to hold it in her thin hands, run her fingers over the worn insignia engraved on the front, then flip open the cover and make the little flame blaze up inside the wind guard. “It’s like the way I quit smoking a dozen times or more. Quitting’s easy. Staying quit’s a different matter. Right now it’s been almost eight years for him.”

She shook her head. “Or maybe I’d better say I think it’s been eight years since he’s messed with it. He could have started up again yesterday or he could start tomorrow. Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about. At least, it’s the only lie I ever caught him in.”

And then she did laugh, a rich warm chuckle that sounded almost like her old self.

Laughter balanced so tightly on the edge of tears that summer and her voice was tremulous as she touched my face. “Oh Deborah, honey, try to marry a man you can laugh with, okay?”

“Okay,” I promised, unable to keep my own voice from wobbling.

She smoothed my hair away from my eyes and said, “You reckon you’ve met him yet?”

“Come give ’er a try now,” said the man I’d married before my mother was two months in her grave.

I went over and got inside my car and cranked it up.

Almost immediately, Allen declared the operation a success. “Your battery’s charging good as new now, darlin’, but your oil looks a little dirty. Better let me change it for you, long as you’re here.”

He didn’t really wait for my consent, just started jacking up the front end so that he could squeeze underneath while lying flat on one of those rollerboard creepers.

If Mr. Jap hadn’t been sitting there with a hopeful look on his face, I’d have paid Allen and left. Instead, as Allen disappeared underneath the front of my car carrying an oil pan, I went back over to the open doorway and leaned against the jamb. There was really nowhere I needed to be this afternoon and Mr. Jap clearly wanted to talk. I kept thinking of Daddy with eleven living sons and Mr. Jap’s one son buried over at Sweetwater Baptist with Allen Stancil the only blood kin left to him.

Whatever Allen wanted here—money or a temporary place to hole up—I was pretty sure that when he got it, he’d be long gone and Mr. Jap would be alone again except for Merrilee and her dutiful Sunday morning check on him.

“Some folks don’t even have that much,” my internal preacher reminded me.

I stared out into the rain while Mr. Jap talked happily about his plans for the garage. As soon as Billy Wall paid him what was owed, he was going to get that hydraulic lift fixed and buy a bigger air compressor so that they could ran an air chisel and a sandblaster, start blasting the rust off some of those old cars. Why, there was a doctor over in Widdington been after him for over a year for that old Stingray.

“Offered me nine hundred dollars just as she stands, he did.”

And Allen knew a dealer out in Charlotte that’d write him out a check tomorrow for ten thousand dollars if he’d give the word and let the man haul ’em out, but he and Allen were going to do the restoring themselves and make a bundle.

Allen had turned into a car-fixing genius, to hear Mr. Jap tell it. He’d bought a badly wrecked car from some guy on the other side of Raleigh and almost overnight he’d fixed it up good enough to sell.

“And that’s just with my old tools, it was. Think what he’ll do when we get us a new acetylene torch and a paint sprayer and maybe some of them newfangled electronic testers.”

He lit another cigarette. “I know a lady over in Cotton Grove as can reupholster seats and make new head linings, she can. Real good and real cheap. Yes, ma’am! Give us another five or six years and we’ll be the place to come for restoring old cars, yes we will.”

The way he talked about stretching that corn money, he sounded like a fat man who expected to button a thirty-eight-inch waistband around a forty-two-inch beer belly. Of course, he could also be counting what he might eventually receive from Dallas’s estate.

“I guess you’ll be glad when the trial’s over and everything’s settled,” I said.

Mr. Jap’s lips tightened. “I don’t see why it has to take ’em so long. The DA says it’ll probably be June and then if she’s found guilty”—he almost spit the word she—“he says she’ll probably appeal and it could drag out for years. Well, let her, say I. In the end, she’ll burn in hell, she will, for a thousand thousand years. Ain’t no way she can appeal that!”

He leaned his head toward me and spoke confidentially of how John Claude Lee was handling things. “Dallas didn’t have no will, so Mr. Lee says I’ll get at least half of everything anyhow, but he’s sharp, he is. Got her believing that if she signs the land over to me, it’ll make the jury think she didn’t want Dallas dead for the money. Maybe let her get off with manslaughter instead of murder.”

The rain was coming down even heavier now. It thundered on the tin roof, cascaded off the eaves and flooded the rutted drive. I’d have been more concerned if I didn’t know that twenty minutes after it stopped, the rain would soak right on through this sandy soil. Creeks may flood out of their banks after hard rains, but puddles don’t stand for very long around here.

“Will it bother you if she gets off easy?” I asked.

“Ain’t no jury that dumb,” he said with conviction, “and I’ll finally get my land back, I will, and then I can sell—”

He broke off with a guilty air.

“You’re thinking of selling it?”

“Just a little bit, but I promised I wouldn’t say nothing about it right now and you got to promise me you won’t say nothing to nobody neither, ’specially not to Kezzie, you won’t.”

It was one thing for Dick Sutterly to be maneuvering to develop G. Hooks Talbert’s relatively small acreage, if that’s indeed what he had in mind. But Mr. Jap’s was much bigger and alarm bells clanged in my head at the very thought.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jap, but if you’re planning to sell some land between you and Adam so Dick Sutterly can get at G. Hooks Talbert’s land, don’t you think my daddy has a right to know about it?”

“That ain’t what I’m selling,” he said hotly, “and even if it was, it ain’t nobody’s business but mine, no it ain’t.”