Bootlegger’s Daughter

“Listen, Gayle,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d quit acting like I’ve never heard of white liquor, okay?”

She tugged at her seat belt and twisted around to half face me. “You don’t mind talking about it?”

I tapped my horn and pulled around a slow-moving farm truck loaded down with hundred-pound bags of fertilizer. “What’s to talk?”

When I didn’t answer, her hand gently touched my blue-jeaned knee.

“Deb’rah? I’m sorry. I guess it must be for you like it is for me when people slip and talk about murders and shootings and then remember it’s more than just words.”

I was suddenly seized by a perverse curiosity. “What do people say about my father?”

She fiddled with her cigarette and didn’t answer.

“Do they still say he’s the biggest bootlegger in eastern North Carolina? Go ahead. I really want to know. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I’ve heard he used to have men working stills for him all over the county,” she began carefully. “I also heard they even did a television program on him one time?”

“He was mentioned,” I admitted. “The program was supposed to be about Southern politics.”

The filming of that documentary accidentally coincided with right after Daddy got his conviction expunged, and they used his circumstances as yet another illustration of the power wielded by one of our senators back then. Mother probably let me stay up to watch it with the rest of the family so I’d be prepared, but I was only eight years old, for God’s sake. Even though I felt the tension in the living room as the program unfolded, the segment about Daddy must have been full of speculations and i

I didn’t know a thing about those eighteen months in Atlanta till I got on the school bus next morning and was greeted by silent stares. Tax evasion, federal penitentiaries, expungements- none of those terms had meaning for me. I’m not sure I fully understood what bootlegging even was, only that it was something shameful and criminal and suddenly co

I jumped them both and the teacher had to come in and break it up, but not before one girl went flying against the sink and cut her jeering lip. Fighting normally got everybody involved five smacks on the palm with the teacher’s ruler, and though this was my first school fight, I expected the usual punishment. Instead, we only had to put our heads on our desks for the rest of recess. No note went home to my parents and the injured girl’s mother did not call mine, though she had always screamed when anybody touched her precious daughter.

I think that’s the day I realized Daddy did have a dark power that everyone else recognized.

As for the jeering of the other kids, that lasted barely a day. The little twins (three inches taller but fifteen years younger than the “big twins”) were in eighth grade then and Will was a senior. Not that I ever went ru

A slab-sided hound started across the road and I braked sharply. “Fool dog!”

It slunk back into the ditch weeds.

“What else do folks say?”

“Mostly they always talk about what a good man Mr. Kezzie is and how if anybody ever needs anything, they can always go to him.” Gayle leaned over and carefully stubbed out her cigarette in my ashtray. “Just last week he was sitting with some men in the store near Amy Blalock’s, and her mother and Mrs. Medlin were talking about the air conditioner giving out at the parsonage. They didn’t even know he was listening till he stood up and reached in his pocket, pulled out three hundred-dollar bills, and told her to put it in the collection plate toward a new unit. Some of the rough kids at school joke about getting some white lightning as good as Kezzie Knott used to make, but honest, nobody thinks your daddy’s actually messing with it any more. I mean, he’s really old now, isn’t he?”

“Almost eighty-two,” I agreed. Never mind that he moved and looked like a vigorous sixty and could still straight-arm an axe.

What she’d said came close to echoing what I heard from Reid last time I asked. After all, Daddy’d served his time before I was even born. And he’d kept so closely to his own land after Mother died that people were starting to think of him as part of the county’s colorful and rapidly disappearing past.

Or so Reid said.

I just hoped it’d stay that way till after the election, but Aunt Zell’s words yesterday morning had made me uneasy. Everybody “knew” that Daddy’s first wife had kept his secret books, just as everybody “knew” he’d kept that part of his life from touching my mother and-by extension-me. So far it hadn’t been an election issue. Probably because when cancer took Mother and Daddy moved back to the farm, I’d stayed in Dobbs with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash whenever I came home from college.

The road curved again. I made a left turn into a rutted drive, then rolled to a stop, blocked by a heavy steel cable that had been stretched tautly across the lane to Ridley’s Mill. I would have ignored the No Trespassing sign, but the underbrush was too thick and the terrain too rough to drive my car around the barrier.

“Is it a long walk to the mill?” asked Gayle, peering down the lane that soon dissolved behind a leafy green barrier. Judging by its overgrown condition, no one had driven down there since winter.

I threw the car in reverse. “Less than a quarter of a mile, but I’ve got a better idea.”

It was only a short distance to where Old Forty-Eight crossed Possum Creek at the north corner of Knott land and then bordered our farm on the east side of the creek. About a half-mile on, I turned left into a rutted clay-and-gravel road that cut over to New Forty-Eight.

“Where’re we going?” Gayle said as we bucketed along, red clouds of dust boiling up behind us.

“Over to the Pot Shot.” I had to lift my voice to be heard above the rattles of the rough road. “If Michael Vickery’s there, we’ll get him to tell about the day you and your mother were found.”

10 i go crazy

At New Forty-Eight I made another left and headed back north toward Cotton Grove. A few minutes later, we were turning in at a ye olde quainte-type sign that pronounced this the entrance to the Pot Shot Pottery, open to the public only on weekends or by appointment.

This wasn’t the weekend, but neither were there no cables stretched across this lane, so I drove through a double line of high rose hedges for at least a quarter of a mile till the lane opened into a wide level farmyard graced by weeping willows that swept down a broad grassy bank to Possum Creek. Except for that one vista, the rest of the view was obscured by hedge roses, breath-of-spring bushes, mock oranges, and crepe myrtles.

Off to the right and still on the last level area before the land begins to slope away stood a large wooden barn built of weathered gray boards. Yellow roses climbed as high as the second-floor windows on one side and twined up over a trellised doorway in the front. Once the barn had sat in a meadow at the edge of cotton fields. Now the fields were grown up in Queen A

Michael Vickery had converted the barn loft into living quarters the spring Janie died. The ground floor was used as a workshop with a huge kiln out back, and the old wood smokehouse, now a display shop for retail sales, had been salvaged from someone else’s farm halfway across the county.