Silver’s mind had been burdened this way since she woke at dawn. She took a long time lighting a fire and boiling her oats. At last she decided to go down the mountain and figure out what to do about her niece’s dog later. She had other business to attend to in the valley. She’d been meaning for weeks to gather the last of the trumpet weed growing on the west end of the Hankinses’ pasture before it was drowned. She used the long, hollow stems like straws for reaching into the charred oaken barrels she’d buried underground at the beginning of spring. She would draw out the aged whiskey deep inside and swirl it on her tongue. Then she would spit a mouthful onto the mink-scratched clay of the bank to keep from swallowing it. Whiskey was made for selling and not drinking. That’s where her grandfather Plummerman Ledford had gone wrong. He drank about as much moonshine as he ran off until it killed him. When he died Silver watched as her grandmother Mildred placed coins on his eyes and washed his face, pitted and scarred under his whiskers. Then Silver went to the still and plucked a pink clover for his breast pocket. There was no funeral but she had said her own prayers. Before Plum died, he’d showed Silver everywhere trumpet weed flourished. In past seasons she’d hurried to beat the browsing deer and not the coming lake to her straws. These days most of the weed was eaten off, but when she was a girl the meadows of Yuneetah had been thick with it in late summer on into fall, the drooping lances of its leaves and the pale lavender umbels of its flowers rising ten feet over the goldenrod and thistles along the fencerows. Back then she and Plum had been in no danger of running out.
Silver’s grandfather had taught her everything about bootlegging, starting with how moonshine got its name, made at night so the law wouldn’t see the smoke. She had liked being with him up at the still, set into a stream bank high on the mountain since before she was born. The round metal still pot packed in glistening mud beneath the barrel cap. The stack of the furnace, a fifty-five-gallon drum cut in half, jutting out full of kindling. When the still was running flames wrapped around the pot and shot out the flue at the back, vapors collecting in the barrel cap then moving down into the thumper keg and the condenser. Silver would wash out jars in the trickling stream or whatever her grandfather let her help with. He’d taught her to make whiskey without store-bought yeast or sugar or grain, using corn from their garden and home-sprouted malt. They put half a bushel of meal in each barrel, the other half to be heated for mush in the still pot, and left it a couple of days before coming back to stir it with a stick. Then they added a gallon of ground corn malt and one of meal with a cap of rye sprinkled on top to keep the mash warm. A week or so later when the cap fell off and the top was clear, the whiskey was ready to run off. It was only in the years since Plum died that Silver had taken to chartering moonshine, experimenting with the brew she’d been taught to make. Sometimes she mixed in ginger and orange peel for taste. Sometimes herbs and roots to make the medicine she gave to her niece for Gracie, consulting with Beulah Kesterson on what was wisest to use. She’d found that tulip tree bark worked best for fever. She had sold some of her medicine to Beulah before the old woman gave up peddling, but she made it more for pleasure than for anything else. It was the work she needed, the ritual of following the stream upward each morning until the air turned cooler and purer, to where the still was set in the bank beneath a stand of red buckeye trees.
It wasn’t long past ten o’clock this morning when Silver had strapped on the cotton sack she used for picking and climbed down the winding trail that came out at the foot of the mountain behind the Walker farm. Though she had put a rope in her sack for the dog just in case, she’d kept her face turned away as she went through the hayfield, past the house and on down the track. At the end of the track she had crossed the road and ducked under the fence into the Hankins pasture. She’d gone downhill to where the reservoir was visible, fingers of water pointing farther landward, watching her feet. The cattle were gone but the dried pucks of their manure had come back to life. Soaking up the rain they looked fresh again, sprouting frail clusters of nodding toadstools. She’d stopped when she reached where the lake spilled over, wavering with strands of foxtail and crabgrass. She was surprised at the foothold the reservoir had gained within a few months, how much it had overtaken. Most of the trees and barn sides the power company had slashed with paint to mark how far the water would come had already been wetted. Gulls and herons had already begun to nest. After another night of rain, some of the roads would surely be washed out. Like the rest of the town, Silver was used to the floods and their damage. It was the lake’s stealthiness that bothered her. She had felt it behind her as she sawed at the hollow stems with her corn knife until her arm grew tired, gathering as much this one last time as she could carry home.
Now it was past noon and Silver had remained in the middle of the road for too long looking after James Dodson’s truck, the cotton sack full but light on her shoulder. Even with the day overcast she could feel August breathing on her. It had another look, its own kind of heat. On the way out of the pasture she’d seen the first henbit stalks tipped with clusters of the seed that would spread them. The end of summer was near and then autumn. But this season the stinkbugs and crickets wouldn’t come into the houses for warmth. No leaves would blow down the road on the fall winds, no apples would harden under the frost. Pawpaws would go to ruin at the bottom of the lake with nobody around to taste the sweet mash of their middles. Silver used to think she wanted nothing more than to be left alone like this. Nothing more than room to breathe. Until she was twelve, six Ledfords had lived in the shack near the mountaintop. Silver and her sister Mary. Her parents, Esther and Jeremiah. Her grandparents Plum and Mildred. Before Plum moved his family to Tennessee from Kentucky he and Mildred had eight boys, but Silver never knew her uncles. The Ledford sons had taken off as soon as they came of age. Only Silver’s father returned home with his fortune unfound. He’d brought Silver’s mother with him, already big with Mary.
As close as the Ledfords had lived in their shack, they’d seldom touched. Silver wasn’t beaten or cared for either one. She learned not to seek attention after she woke with the croup and tried to climb onto her hateful grandmother’s lap, slopping the old woman’s coffee over the rim of her cup. Mildred had called Silver a clumsy ox with more contempt in her voice than any grandchild deserved. Not long after that Silver had lost a front tooth and tried to show her father while he was skinning a squirrel. She held out her palm wanting him to take it or at least to look at it, a piece of her fallen off, but without glancing up he just told her to get along. So she closed her fingers into a fist and ran into the woods to throw the tooth down, kicking pine duff over it. Her father had been silent and morose and she’d been somewhat afraid of him. But she’d liked peeking out at him through the front window as he came back from hunting in the dark. His skin polished by the lantern shine, black hair running over his shoulders. Plum used to say Jeremiah took after his Cherokee grandmother that had lived on the reservation in North Carolina. Mildred had called Jeremiah trifling because he would sit in the tree stand with his rifle for hours letting deer pass beneath him, staring off at the distant hills. Silver was too young then to understand her father’s discontent, but now she felt for him. Even though he’d seemed to feel nothing for her.