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?