“Flannery,” Patsy pleaded, “where do you think you’re going? You can’t go. You can’t just leave me here like this. Please, Flannery? Don’t go.”
Her sister turned away.
“Come back here, now. Mama’s going to be real mad at you,” Patsy said, fuming. “Real mad, you leaving me like this, undressing like that in front of the boys, going into town naked-leg,” Patsy threatened. “Please, I’ll be late for my prom.... Help me now, and I promise I won’t tell a soul what you—”
Flannery snapped up her sweaty arm and kept walking. She struck a finger to her wristwatch, tapping. “Can’t,” Flannery hollered back. “I’m eight minutes late for my nifty night.” She picked up her feet and broke into a light jog away from Patsy and the boys. Away from Ebenezer Road.
CHAPTER 5
Flannery
1972
Flannery slowed down as she drove past the old vacant Butler distillery and wound her way alongside the Palisades toward the location where the wreck had been pulled from the river.
At the last minute, Mama’d been so fraught with the nerves over the news, Flannery feared her heart would surely give out. Flannery called the doctor. He dropped by and gave Mama a sedative, ordering her straight to bed.
Flannery cranked the car window all the way down, letting the cool mountain breezes soothe her nerves. Memories flooded back to her like the great Kentucky after spring rains, thoughts of her daddy and what he did on that river and in that distillery up the bank a ways. The old 950-gallon submarine still Honey Bee and his own daddy had built shortly before her granddaddy passed, nailed and riveted and welded together from hammered sheets of copper and stainless steel and planks of wood.
Each year in the fall, Flannery and Honey Bee would travel up north to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, to purchase sorghum. He’d let Flannery help load up the grasses. “What sweetened the child’s tongue will liven the old,” Honey Bee told Flannery as she chewed on the sorghum stalk, sucking the sugary liquid he sometimes used for his whiskeymaking. Same as his daddy and granddaddy had done.
Flannery loved everything about whiskey, loved that Honey Bee had taught her the secrets of its doings. Loved the dark earth and the mystery of its scent that tucked itself into a strange sweet growing time.
She learned that where they lived was a perfect spot, and a “Heavenly home for the whiskeymakings,” he’d told her. “God’s sweet breath blows through these old rocks,” Honey Bee said many times. The purest waters were found in their neck of the woods because of the limestone and the twisty Kentucky River, the streams and creeks that coursed through the rock-heavy landscape filled with the precious bluish-gray rock.
The waters doing that, running through the rock the way they did, made for the finest tasting bourbon around. “The limestone pulls out the stink of iron and sulfur, makes it pure and innocent,” Honey Bee’d said. “Then my ’tucky River does the rest.” He’d winked.
But her sister was more like Mama, and couldn’t stand the business. “Devil’s stinky hind quarters,” Patsy and Mama called it for as long as Flannery could remember.
“This ain’t your rotgut corn likker those old bootleggers try to pass, Jean. Ours is even better than ol Jeptha’s.” Honey Bee took honest offense.
Jeptha Jones was a moonshiner known for the smooth liquor he made from Bloody Butcher corn. Jeptha’s family had been growing the blood-speckled grain for generations. Every year he’d save Honey Bee a bag of grist so Jean Butler could use it to make the cornbread Honey Bee fancied.
“I use fine grains, the finest touch,” Honey Bee said. “That stuff some of those counterfeit pea-brains make will burn the hairs off your tongue, scald your gums, and leech out your ass, and light your skin afire. Leave you nothing less than mean-dog, knee-waddling inebriated. But, mine—”
“The devil’s water,” Mama insisted.
“Now come on, Mama. My ’tucky River Witch is respectable. It’s licensed. A true gentlemen’s whiskey. There’s no cut of bath water or cheap sugars in my spirits. No, ma’am,” he’d said.
“Respectable? Only because we have to keep that sheriff’s pockets full with his granny fees,” Mama complained.
“Taxes,” Honey Bee said.
“Sinful bribery by the Henry brood,” she booted back. “Smelly.”
“An angel’s sweet hand and what your pastor has said, and what your ‘respectable’ card club ladies come a’calling for when their menfolk’s leashes unspool a bit. Heaven.” Honey Bee would rile back and point to the family’s fine two-story that overlooked the river and was had from the whiskeymaking.
Mama would fuss a little more until Honey Bee reminded her, “Woman, it saved us through the ’37 flood, and more than once during the hellish Depression and Prohibition. Those government men only allowed four of us distilleries to stay open in Kentucky. Only handed out four measly licenses to produce medicinal whiskey”—Honey Bee had wriggled his fingers—“and sure enough granted me one, same as the fancy Colonel Albert Blanton up there in his Stony Point mansion on the hill.”
Colonel Blanton was the president of the fine George T. Stagg distillery down on the Kentucky River. Folks said that when Blanton was sixteen, he became an office boy at the Old Fire Copper distillery, toiled like the devil, and eventually worked his way up to president of the company when George Stagg bought it.
Flannery had heard the whiskey stories many times, and of the hard times that fell upon the business. “Men seemed to be accident prone during those times, convalescing a lot longer,” Honey Bee’d recalled. They would come to her daddy, show him their note from the doctor, which stated something along the lines of Mr. Brown’s convalescence necessitates the infinite use of alcoholic spirits. Then the doctor would add the instructions that the patient should take the drink at all meal times, quantity indefinite. Carry this at all times was stamped under the physician’s signature.
Flannery never understood the big fuss about any of it. But Patsy and Mama claimed the whiskey made them sick—the way the vapors settled into seams, soaked every crevice, darkening, seeping onto cornerstones, blotching rooftops and skin. It had to be the devil’s imbibing to do all that.
In the summer of ’43 when Flannery and Patsy turned seven, Patsy’d begged Honey Bee to let her quit her simple chores at the distillery. The sweeping, and the dusting of the old stills in the barn.
Honey Bee ignored her pleas until late summer. He’d found out Mr. Glass was selling the family ferryboat because the government men were finally going to build the bridge that would connect Glass Ferry to other counties and the rest of the world. Despite Mama’s complaints and the cost to keep it up, Honey Bee bartered with Mr. Glass and brought the ferry home, docking it on the river bank down from their house.
Soon the government called on Honey Bee, offering him a small fee to keep the old boat in service for the sake of commerce and goodwill. But Honey Bee turned them down. The state pleaded with him to at least consider providing service a couple of days a week for those stranded folks needing to conduct business and family matters up and down the river.
Honey Bee settled on Saturdays for passenger toting, and pocketed the small change, gaining the sleepy but approving eye of the government for his other totings, he’d told Mama.
Flannery was so excited to ride in the boat she nearly burst. “Can we go to the city? Will we see oceans? Can we visit China?” she asked Honey Bee. But her sister sulked. On board, Patsy’d fretted about her pale skin burning, then turned green at the gills from the motion. Patsy didn’t want to help clean the boat, saying she would surely be the boat’s Jonah and jinx Honey Bee’s ugly old ferryboat.
At that, Honey Bee sent Patsy straight back to Mama’s apron, then gave Flannery her sister’s duties, making her helmsman of the old scow that had once belonged to the original ferriers and first settlers of Glass Ferry, Kentucky.