There were places, she knew, that you could drive to, where you could round a winding bend, breeze by a yawning pasture, and feel safe, happy, and your bones would get a tiny itch and scratch out a Hallelujah. But such a place wasn’t in Glass Ferry. Had never been in Glass Ferry for her after Honey Bee passed and Patsy split on her like that.
Flannery had found that kind of rejoicing in the doings of the city. In Louisville’s night lights and stretching streets, tall cradling buildings, and sharp-rounded corners.
The university had been a place to start anew, a wonderland to escape troubles and forget her sister’s abandonment.
Reluctant to let her baby girl go, Mama finally relented and sold Honey Bee’s old car, his tools in the barn, and the old tractor to pay for Flannery’s college.
Flannery had been homesick the first two weeks, sick about leaving Mama like that, worried for her well-being. They talked on the phone every day, sometimes calling each other as many as three, four times in one day.
Then Flannery met a guy on campus the third week of school, her first real steady, a senior boy named Thomas Gentry, the son of a druggist who took her to the lavish Seelbach Hotel. Inside, he’d led her down the marbled staircase into the Rathskeller, a Bavarian-styled cathedral cellar with colorful Rookwood pottery tiles lining the walls, columns, and graceful arches, patiently telling her details about the famous architecture.
Thomas had pointed to the Rathskeller’s ceiling covered in fine-tooled leather, and then to the noble columns where pelicans made from the Rookwood were perched. Disturbed, Flannery looked away, remembering she’d read about the strange pelican symbols. The legend said a mother pelican would stab herself in the breast with the beak to feed her starving young the blood from the piercing, only for the mother to die herself.
It was still a sight to sit in the fairytale room. They’d listened to the latest jazz recordings.
Thomas showed her where F. Scott Fitzgerald and king bootlegger and gangster, George Remus, had once sat, sipped bourbon, and smoked expensive cigars together. He told her
Fitzgerald had used the beautiful hotel for a model in The Great Gatsby, and talked about the secret gangster tunnels that had been built inside the hotel.
She and Thomas talked over drinks. Later, he swept her up to the Grand Ballroom where they danced.
There were kisses, many, and in many places—the overlook atop Iroquois Park, an alley behind campus, inside dark movie houses and other shadowy hideouts where those kisses caught fever, and Thomas’s hands burned, leaving them both with bigger wants.
Still, Flannery vowed to bring chastity to her marriage, and soon Thomas moved on to a girl willing to bring more to his bed and sooner.
The city was busy. Her dorm loud. She’d made friends, and it wasn’t long until she had a bunch of sisters. Sisters who didn’t compare her with a twin they’d never met, who made her their “one and only.”
Weekend nights brought panty raids from across campus when the boys would sneak over to the girls’ dorm after the resident director went to sleep.
More than once, her roommate, Gina, talked her into going to the big Ben Snyder’s department store downtown and buying scanty bloomers.
Flannery bought herself a shocking-pink, silky pair trimmed in lace. That night the girls gathered in the darkened halls to throw their underwear out the windows to the hooting boys waiting below.
Some girls wrote their telephone numbers on their underwear, but Flannery didn’t dare. Still, she managed to drop hers into the hands of a hulky football player who’d knelt down on the grass, whistled up at her with prayerful clasped hands, begged the favor of her prized undies.
Everyone in the dormitory squealed at that, teased her good-naturedly. And when he came calling the very next day to ask her to the Woolworth for lunch, the girls shared their makeup and clothes with Flannery, sending her off with congratulatory kisses.
She found all kinds of wonder in the beginning when she’d moved away after high school. Lost it for a while too, but lately she’d been trying to grasp it back, was sure she’d gotten a good hold on the tail ’til now and news of the wreck in the river.
Here in Glass Ferry there was nothing but buried truth and the beginning of a desperate prayer from what had been birthed on Ebenezer long ago. And now, she could again feel her safety slipping away if she wasn’t careful.
Today, Mama had made Flannery promise to bring her sister home.
Flannery raised her head off the steering wheel and once more looked over at the river stretching below. Needing air, she stepped out of the car and over to the rail, leaning against it, gnarling her fingers over the rusty metal.
Flannery wondered if the old Mercury might have plunged down here, rolled down the craggy side and crashed through the spindly trees. She studied about just where, knowing it could have been anywhere along here, but no telling how far the mighty river had tugged that death car downstream—no telling if a guardrail had even protected this stretch of the Palisades back then.
Images, not of the car, but of her daddy, surfaced again. She could use some of that River Witch whiskey about now, should’ve gulped it down with one of Mama’s Valium while she’d had a chance.
She had saved that old bottle Honey Bee’d corked just for her. Toasting him on his birthdays with a small nip each and every year.
Her daddy had introduced her to whiskey before he died in the spring of ’50, not long before her fourteenth birthday, passing her the special tulip-shaped glass, one of his mother’s old sherry glasses he and his taster always used.
*
“We got to test this new barrel, you and I,” Honey Bee said. “If this is good, then we know the whole batch is good.”
“Me?” Flannery said, looking around for Merrick Jackson, her daddy’s best friend and master taster, who everyone called Uncle Mary. When folks began to kick off the ck at the end of Merrick, the old-timer insisted that they at least starch it up some and fasten an Uncle to his nickname.
Flannery thought Uncle Mary looked like God, or at least the closest image to Him that she could conjure from pictures. Not from around Glass Ferry, Uncle Mary told folks he’d slipped in from “over yonder somewhere in the winter of 1930.” A bit of a loner, he was even old-like, the way God was, always cutting an angry, cold brow that might cool in the second you used to lift a foot to hightail it from what you believed was going to be his wrath coming down on you.
Uncle Mary had a shock of white hair that matched his right brow and eyelashes. But on the left side of his face, a bushy orange arch sparked above identical colored lashes, making him pop like a mad marigold. Flannery heard folks speculate that God had battled Satan for Uncle Mary’s soul and won, but not before the devil swiped his fiery thumbprint across Uncle Mary’s face.
Uncle Mary could strike a look to the most feral of Kentucky blackhearts and was strong enough to fight off the meanest dog barehanded. But he also reserved a gentle touch that could lift a fallen chick back into its nest and coax the thirteen potted granny violets he had growing in his small cabin into bloom. He knew his whiskey, knew Kentucky, and knew the river. He liked Honey Bee’s way of thinking and decided to pal up with him long ago.
Flannery asked Honey Bee, “But what about Uncle Mary—”
“Pay attention, Flannery girl,” Honey Bee quieted. “We’ll know in a minute. If it’s not ready, you might let it sit for a bit longer and see what that does.” Honey Bee pulled out the bung in the chest of the barrel, just far enough to let the liquid drip two fingers’ worth into the glasses, then plugged it back.
“We’ll start with the nose on this batch,” he said. “Test the aroma first.”
Flannery held her glass up and thought the color was pretty enough, like the sun-bathed bark of a tree that had lived an old life.