Sometimes one of Granny’s regular customers, usually one of the town folk from St. Lina or St. Paul, would make a special request for a fancy bottle. They’d show up with husked corn instead of the usual grain. Granny liked making corn moonshine. With the grain stuff, she would never bother checking it or caring what kind of proof it was. She would just bottle it up and send it off. With the corn mash moonshine, she would take extra time. She’d wait about a week after the mash first got cooking until the “dogs head” got going, watching for the large single bubbles coming up every twenty to thirty seconds. She’d slop it back, pouring it onto itself to kick out the cap. Then wait another three days until she really got shining. When she figured it was done, she’d fill half a jar from the still, take it in her right hand, and hit the wrinkled palm of her left hand with the jar three times. Not four times, not two times, but three times. She’d turn the jar onto the side and the shine would separate into three consistent pools if it had been done right.
“Hundothree proof, looking good.” She’d take a little sip. She never drank the shine, would just sip a tablespoon’s worth to check the flavouring. “She’s good my boy, let’s get this bottled up and out of here.”
Granny and her husband were both little kids when the Canadian government dissolved the Papaschase First Nation. All the band members had been off hunting or at the Fort and they took advantage of that and declared the First Nation null and void. When they tried to go back to their home to get some supplies, the mounties were already there and the house was up in flames. They fled with their families to the bush north of St. Lina, Alberta. Eventually, they grew up and started having kids until Granny’s husband up and died one day. My mother told me he died from heartbreak from being forced off the land he had loved, Uncle Jim told me it was TB. Either way, Granny never talked about her husband. And she never talked about the Papaschase land she had grown up on. But she loved woodpeckers. Anytime a woodpecker would be hanging around the cabin she would spend all day rolling hand-made cigarettes, drinking tea, and watching the bird work its way around a white poplar tree.
Uncle Jim showed up back at Granny’s cabin a few days after I turned fifteen. He spent a year after the war “showing those Quebecois ladies how to really jig.” Then he ran out of money and hopped a train back out to Alberta. When he first arrived, we’d sit around Granny’s cabin night after night and listen to him tell stories about Europe and the war. Everyone who was anyone, plus a few others from the area, would be over at Granny’s drinking ’shine and listening to Jim describe how the underwear looked on this lady from Trois Rivieres.
“You watch out she might be your cousin,” Granny would yell, smiling, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth as she ladled out drinks for the listeners. That summer was a real party. We went through more ’shine than we had in a long time, partly because of the nightly story session, partly because Jim drank it all day every day.
Even if Uncle Jim drank the still dry the night before, he would be up for the sunrise. Didn’t matter if the sun was coming up at 8:30 in the winter or 4:30 in the summer, he would rise with it. I woke up every morning to the thwock of the axe splitting birch from the wood pile. The smell of tobacco trailed behind him as he walked past my bed carrying an armful of wood for the stove. I always tried to wait until the stove had the cabin roasting before I got out from underneath the wool blanket.
The morning after Jim fell through the ice on the Amisk River he was moving like a bear with an itch. After the stove got fired up, I could sense him standing right above me, but I refused to open my eyes, hoping he would get bored and wander off to check on the stills. He poked me in the gut with the barrel of the 30-30 lever action rifle we kept by the door.
“Hey girl, those beavers are probably dragging some kid under the ice right now.” He poked me again with the barrel of the gun. “Might even be one of your brothers or sisters.”
“Get out of here, you reek like booze you old bum.” I turned over and pulled the woolen blanket over my head. “That thing better be unloaded.”
“How would you feel about that?” Jim said.
“Don’t really care.”
He wasn’t going to leave me alone. The stove had taken the frost out of the air in the cabin. Jim sat on the chair across from my bed and started rolling a cigarette.
“Roll me one of those and I’ll help you out,” I said.
Jim finished rolling a smoke and passed it to me. Then he started rolling another one for himself.
“I found the spot. Ain’t no more beavers going to be dragging poor unsuspecting folk under the water any longer.”
We saddled up the wagon horses. They both snorted and stomped their appreciation for going for just a little ride and not hauling the wagon around. Granny walked by us on her way down to the still. She nodded at us, the customary cigarette hanging out of her lips, unlit until she finished her walk. Granny never smoked while walking.
“If you see a moose, take that instead of the beavers. We could use the meat,” she said.
Jim gave a faux salute and we set off through the bush. It was a good dozen miles or so to the spot on the river where Jim had gone through the ice. I settled into the saddle and lit the cigarette Jim had rolled for me. The sun had a warmth to it that we hadn’t felt in months. All around us the land was waking up from its winter rest. Birds chirped and fought between the bare branches of the poplar and birch trees, squirrels chattered to announce our arrival as we passed underneath them on the trail, a couple coyotes howled in the distance. The worst of winter was behind us and everything in the bush was out in full celebration. Even Jim seemed to momentarily forget that he had a score to settle with some beavers.
The melting snow had left a series of cracks through the ice on the Amisk River, and you could clearly see the spot where Jim had fallen through after the party. There was a thin layer of ice over the hole and in the busted-up area where he had been dragged out. Whiskeyjacks swooped all around us checking out what we were doing in their area, their grey and black feathers bristling with the prospect of a free meal.
“Awas,” Jim yelled at them, then muttered. “You’re giving away our goddamn position. Damn beavers will know we’re coming now.”