Читать книгу The Sisters of Glass Ferry - Kim Michele Richardson - Страница 13

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.

Fall arrived, and Honey Bee had the boat hauled out of the river and stored in his large pole barn near the banks.

Honey Bee and Flannery scrubbed the ferry’s wooden sides, rubbing pine tar into the hull’s plank seams, weatherproofing the old bucket. Flannery’d polished the wood railings and shined the brass, mostly inside the wheelhouse, until it gleamed, while Honey Bee took out the four passenger benches below to make room for his firewater.

It wasn’t long until Honey Bee took a bottle of his good bourbon and christened the old boat The River Witch.

In early spring and every spring after, Honey Bee would roll out old bourbon barrels he’d made from white oak staves. He and Flannery would char them by rolling the barrels on their sides and taking fire to the inside, charring for a good three minutes, as much as five even, until Honey Bee thought the staves had a rough, shiny texture that looked like alligator skin.

Once in a while she and her daddy would lightly rub the casks with salt, pinches of coarse pepper, and sometimes tobacco into the lids. After, Honey Bee’d fill the oaken drums with spirits. Other times he might distill a special whiskey by having Flannery press and squeeze the sorghum stalks to use the syrup in his spirits. But most times, Honey Bee had claimed the river could do better than any of those things.

Finished, Honey Bee lugged the barrels on board, locked them inside on wooden racks he’d built under the refinished bench seats, and daily, weather permitting, he and Flannery would carry the whiskey up the river a ways and back, letting the motion rock the spirits, caramelizing, aging it until late fall.

For eight months Flannery’s daddy let the Kentucky River breathe into his hooch until the spices and sugars turned to fire.

Folks from as far north as Cincinnati and as far south as New Orleans and as far west as St. Louis would come and pay top dollar for Honey Bee’s Kentucky River Witch Whiskey—beg his secret, beg to know its cut. Every time Honey Bee Butler swore it was the river, his beloved Kentucky River giving it life, cutting the whiskey with its glory. “Mother river whips it with its gentle paddle. You know there’s a paddle for every ass, and my beautiful ’tucky River spanks the very fires into my whiskey.”

Flannery flicked through the memories. For generations the Kentucky River had given the Butler family a grander life than most in Glass Ferry, lent Flannery a buoy to make her feel safe for a precious thirteen years before snatching it all away.

It was hard for Flannery to believe a crueler river would be her sister’s paddle. That the same river that had given her so much would take yet another from her.