FAMILY BUSINESS, by Reavis Z. Wortham

Sitting under this shade tree and studying on the yellow wheel of my John Deere tractor, I’m thinking about how wheels have had such an impact on my family up here in the northeast Texas bottomlands.

It all started way back in the Dust Bowl days, when Great-grandpa John Caissen took a notion to quit the whiskey business. It was probably the worst time he could have chosen, but he decided that he was through runnin’ from the law. Great-grandpa had it in his head to go back to farming, and right at that moment in time, the idea looked promising. A few well-timed soaking rains had temporarily greened the bottoms and he thought the drought was over.

He was kinda right. There was enough moisture in the ground to make a fair-to-middlin’ corn crop that year. Family and friends came together during harvest to celebrate. My dad was there, but he wasn’t much more than six or seven. Stalk after stalk, row after row, they picked corn, twisting each ear free and tossing it into a wagon pulled by a matched set of blue-nosed mules that worked together all day long.

Great-grandpa always preferred mules because they had more sense, were less expensive than horses, and didn’t need a lot of fancy feed. They were happy with hay, grass, and a bait of oats every now and then.

He was especially proud of Molly and Jack, particularly on the way home out of the bottoms each day. The team seemed to know when they were being watched. No matter how tired they were, the mules raised their heads, perked their ears, and trotted past the loafers at the old country store like a couple of high-bred Tennessee Walkers.

A lot of folks tried to buy that team from Great-grandpa, but he never even studied on the idea. Those two were like family and had belonged to him since they were foals. He’d used them for years to plow the family garden, to pull stumps and logs, and to haul firewood from places where cars and trucks couldn’t go. They were a good team and seemed to enjoy the work.

They let him down that one day, though.

Mules don’t spook easily, and they seldom panic, but the buzz of a rattlesnake scares any living thing that draws a breath. It was a big one laying in the middle of the cornfield, and when he rattled, people scattered in all directions. Molly and Jack jerked in the harness, rolling their eyes and snorting at the dry warning of danger. They stomped across the rows, threatening to take off through the unharvested half of the field.

Great-grandpa John was close enough that he tried to jump on the wagon to catch the reins. He would have made it, too, if a cornstalk hadn’t tripped him up just as he sprang for the seat. The wooden hub of the front wheel slammed against his thigh, knocking him ass over teakettle. He fell in a sprawl. The wheel weighed heavy by a half load of corn ran over that same thigh, nearly severing his leg.

From what I’ve heard through the years, that old man was cut from aged oak, and hard enough to bend a sharp sixteen-gauge nail if someone was to try and drive one in him. He didn’t holler much, and they say it didn’t look too bad at first glance because the soft, faded denim of his old bib overalls hid the wound. That is, until blood started pouring out and wouldn’t stop.

His oldest son, Web, was there, along with half a dozen other hard-working folks. Web tied a belt around the thigh, and some of the men held Great-grandpa’s leg so it wouldn’t fall off when they picked him up and put him in an empty wagon waiting in the shade of an oak. The old man cussed all the way home while Web beat their friend’s team of borrowed mules to a foam.

Old Doc Bailey showed up about an hour later. Like most country doctors of the time, he was blunt. “I’m afraid your leg’s done for, John.”

Great-grandpa John was still in his right mind at that point, but barely. “I believe you’re right. Well, go ahead on and take it off. We’ll see what happens after that.” Then he drank a quart of his own diminishing stock of homemade whiskey and Doc Bailey went to work on the mangled leg, but the damage was too great. Blood loss and trauma did him in.

After paying for the funeral, the crop barely brought in enough to even up their grocery bill at the store.

Out of money the next year, Grandpa Web gave up on farming and went straight back into the moonshine business to make some real cash. He dug the copper line and boiler out of the ditch behind Great-grandpa’s house, and a month later started selling what folks said was the smoothest whiskey that ever came out of Lamar County. It was so pure, when customers shook the jar, folks said the tiny bubbles reminded them of champagne.

Oh, he wasn’t making a killing off the profits and getting rich or nothin’, but as the Depression years passed, the Caissens weren’t living on beans and cornbread like lots of other families in the bottoms. They were doing all right when others could barely scrape up two nickels to rub together.

World War II brought a boom. Grandpa Web added more stills in the bottoms and sold whiskey in a steady flow to the thousands of thirsty servicemen coming through Camp Maxey, just north of Paris.

There was always danger in making whiskey, and moonshiners spent a considerable amount of time running from deputies, constables, and revenuers. The Caissens got caught sometimes, and first one still then another was shut down, but my people always paid their way out of jail and hid another boiler even deeper in the woods. It was a fine life full of adventure and excitement, and despite the war, things were good until them sorry Red River County boys, Bill Nichols and Cecil Whip, set up shop in the next county and tried to horn in.

First they tried to buy Grandpa Web out, but he wasn’t having none of it. They tried muscle next, but that didn’t work either, so Bill and Cecil resorted to shooting Grandpa with a twelve-gauge up at our little country store.

We don’t know for sure who pulled the trigger, but the shooter missed as their car slowed on the highway. How you can miss with a shotgun still mystifies me, but he did. They got away, but Grandpa Web found out who done it, and when Cecil stepped out of his outhouse a week later, he walked right into a full load of number four buckshot.

It didn’t do to cross the son of John Caissen.

A month later, a fisherman on the Red River felt a strange weight in his illegal net and found Bill Nichols tangled up with a couple of bass and a big old shovelnose catfish. Nobody could recognize Bill right off, because the fish and turtles had been at him for a while, but the sheriff remembered a blurry anchor tattooed on Bill’s forearm and identified him by that. They put Bill on ice, and took the fisherman to the hoosegow.

By the time the Japs surrendered and the government closed down most of the army camp, the Caissens thought that little hometown feud was over. They figured what was left of the Red River County crew would stay on their side of the line, and our kinfolk on ours.

They were wrong.

Times were harder once all the soldiers left and the boom ended. The Red River boys got hungry and once again decided to eliminate the competition… that is, Grandpa Web.

This time their new boss, Jimmy Ray Whip, took over. He was Cecil’s baby brother and back from the army with a little trick he’d learned as a demolition expert. He wired a couple of sticks of dynamite to the ignition of Grandpa Web’s car. Wouldn’t you know it? It wasn’t Grandpa who hit the starter on that cold November morning in 1946, but a shade-tree mechanic named R.D. Jenkins, who was fixin’ to take Grandpa’s car to his house and rebuild the engine.

Grandpa was standing on the porch with a cup of coffee in his hand when ol’ R.D. and the DeSoto pretty well vaporized. It didn’t help, Grandpa being on the porch and all. One of the hubcaps shot across the yard like a Frisbee and took Grandpa Web’s head clean off.

Grandpa Web had a son, and that was Dad, who was eating breakfast in the kitchen at the time. The concussion blew out all the windows, but he didn’t even get a scratch, though there was glass and blood all in his cornbread and sweet milk.

Dad dropped out of high school and retreated to the safety of Alabama kinfolk for a while. It was there he learned to drive as blocker for a different kind of moonshiner. Those Alabama wild men took bootlegging to an entirely different level, and that’s where Dad found his calling as a driver.

Back then, the blocker drove ahead of a delivery vehicle full of whiskey to draw attention to themselves. When the laws saw the speeding car, they took off after it like a house afire, sometimes drawing more than one police car into the chase.

With the police concentrating on a guy speeding around in a souped-up sedan, the delivery car simply moseyed on down the road, not worrying about getting stopped to see why the rear end was sitting so low on a family car, or to look under the tarp on the back of a truck.

Dad did that for a few years, until he came back to Lamar County with a new idea to put the Red River bunch out of business once and for all. He set up two stills down deep in the woods, brought in half a dozen trusted (and hard-barked) family members, and went to work building the business back up to where it had been in the thirties and early forties.

Dad was second cousin with the new sheriff in Red River County. He dropped by the courthouse with a wad of bills big enough to choke a horse and left it on Cousin Sheriff’s desk, with the understanding that there was more to come if the Red River bunch was to find themselves in a shallow grave, or the pen.

And wouldn’t you know it? Two months later, a right smart number Whips and Nichols turned up dead. Them that survived, and that included Jimmy Ray Whip, had their mail delivered to the Walls unit down in Huntsville.

It wasn’t long before Dad’s new business was running smooth as clockwork. He graduated from driving the whiskey himself, to hiring it done. His crew was professional, and they handled everything from buying the supplies to delivery. Dad built a modest two-story on a hill overlooking the river bottoms, bought some bottomland, and went to farming cotton, corn, and eventually soybeans. As the cash rolled in from the whiskey, he plowed that illegitimate money into the ground and when the crop sold, it went into the bank as clean cash.

The Caissens were once again in high-cotton, as they used to say.

But Dad never lost his love of driving fast after those Alabama years. He even drove us to and from church so fast it looked like we were trying to outrun the old Devil hisself with that rooster-tail of dust rising high behind our sedan. It didn’t have to be cars, though, for him to get that taste of speed. Dad drove the dog-water out of an old 1948 Ford step-side pickup that was a leftover from the good ol’ days. Folks often talked about it shooting down the highway like a rocket.

Like ol’ vaporized R.D., Dad was also a great shade-tree mechanic, and could tear an engine down on Saturday morning for a ring job, and have it back together in time to drive into town that same night for the evening street dance.

He taught me how to drive it in the river bottoms, on the dirt roads between his fields of cotton or corn, but it nearly killed us both when I was learning how to shift the gears. No matter how many times I sat behind the wheel, I couldn’t get it through my head when to push the clutch on a shift, or when I needed to brake.

One day we were moving along at a right smart clip, with a big rooster-tail of dust blowing up behind us. I was pretty proud of myself for driving, and couldn’t take my eyes off the rearview mirror and the cloud of dirt that boiled up and then drifted across the fields.

The old man was pretty calm at first. He just shifted his chew to the opposite cheek so he could talk better. “Slow down, son. We’re coming up on a curve.”

When I saw the hard left turn coming up on us so fast, my mind went to mush.

Dad saw it too. “Said slow down.”

I let off the foot-feed and pushed in on the clutch, but forgot the brake. We slowed, some, but not enough. Dad reached over with his big old hand, and grabbed the wheel. He shoved it and the truck slewed to the right just in time to miss a lightning-struck pecan tree that would have split us down the middle like a meat clever. We hit something in the tall Johnson grass and the front fender went sailing away like a wounded quail fluttering in the air.

That broke me free and I stomped the brake. We slid to a stop and the pickup jerked a couple of times and died.

Dad sat back and ran his fingers through his wavy red hair. He leaned out to spit a long brown stream, and then grinned. “I believe we need to practice some more out in that big meadow of hay grazer.”

So I learned to drive in a five hundred acre field of alfalfa and became part of the business, hauling whiskey for the old man.

He taught my baby brother, Tommy Lee, to drive that same truck with similar intentions. Tommy Lee was just like Dad. He was a natural-born mechanic who could fix anything. He loved speed, too, which is how we lost him in 1988 when he replaced the ’48’s original six cylinder engine with a V-8. Tommy Lee dropped that motor in on Saturday morning, and was haul-assin’ down Highway 271 to deliver a load of white lightning to a big distributer we used in Oklahoma.

The highway patrol estimates that when the right front tire blew out and caused the steering to fail, Tommy Lee Caissen must have been going about a hundred and twenty in a forty-year-old truck designed for farm work.

The highway patrol told a local newspaper reporter that he was impressed with Dad’s truck. “Hell, the bearings on those wheels must have been made out of some space age material. They were still spinning when we got there, and didn’t stop for fifteen minutes after. I never saw nothin’ like it.”

Dad drove up five minutes after the wheel quit spinning round. That one was hard for the old man, because he blamed himself for Tommy Lee’s death. We all told him the only fault lay with my brother using a farm truck like a race car, but Dad didn’t see it that way.

He blamed the whiskey, because that’s what was in the bed, and said enough was enough. He shut down the stills, sold the copper and boilers, and our family went to farming full time. After that, it was corn, soybeans, and marijuana. That last little cash crop sold better, made more money, and was perfect for folks who knew about agriculture.

Why did that pop into my mind on this bright, cool autumn morning, looking at my John Deere upside down in the bar ditch? Well, it’s like this. I read once where Robert Todd Lincoln, President Abe Lincoln’s son, was cursed. He had breakfast with his dad the morning before he was assassinated in Ford’s Theater. In fact, they tried to get Robert to join them for the show that night.

Sixteen years later President Garfield invited Robert to accompany him to the President’s college reunion in New Jersey. Robert was late, and arrived only seconds after Garfield was assassinated. The poor bastard wasn’t done yet, though.

In 1901, President McKinley invited Robert to attend the Pan-American Exposition with him in New York. Robert got to the expo minutes after the President was shot and killed. Robert was there for three presidents’ deaths, more or less, and after that he never wanted to meet another one.

Thinking about how so many of my kinfolk died because of the family business, it’s gonna be the same for Dad as it was for Robert Todd Lincoln. He’s watched one after another Caissen go on to their rewards.

I forgot my water jug this morning. Even though he’s eighty-seven, Dad still gets around pretty good, so he’ll see it on the kitchen table and bring it to me. Because of that, he’ll be a part of what happened today, and it’ll follow him to his grave, probably sooner now than later.

No, I wasn’t driving fast, and it wasn’t my fault the tractor rolled. That fault lies on the other side of this dirt road, where a black Ford Explorer is wrapped around a red oak tree.

I was just coming up to that old plank bridge over there, heading for the field, when that sorry son-of-a-bitch Chris Whip steered the Explorer around me and tried to pass. Let me tell you, he was a-flyin’ and I think he intended to run me into the ditch to set things up for this new century of ours. Him and some of these other dumb bastards around here have started making crystal meth. They should have stayed with corn whiskey, or grass. Those two products are safer by far, and have a proven track record that won’t kill the customers.

But when he shot past, the driver’s side wheels slipped off the bridge and he lost control. He was trying to compensate for the slide when his back bumper kissed the front of the tractor and knocked me sideways into the bar ditch.

Tractors are like tricycles. When you get them overbalanced on an incline, they’ll roll pretty quick, which is what mine did.

Just before I went over, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Explorer hit the tree and explode. Not with fire like you see on television. It exploded in a cloud of dust, fiberglass, and the contents of the car. You wouldn’t believe how much dust is in a live tree, either. When Chris hit the oak, dust flowed down and out like someone shook out a lint mop.

Containers of anhydrous ammonia flew everywhere. A couple of them ruptured and hissed empty in a low-lying fog that’s still hanging over the rows. Others scattered on the dirt road and in the field like unexploded bombs. We use anhydrous as liquid fertilizer these days, but that wasn’t why they were in the Explorer. Meth cookers mix it with a few things such as battery acid, drain cleaner, and paint thinner to make meth. Better living through chemistry, right?

Chris was probably high as a kite on his own product to begin with, carrying that load of supplies to his trailer down by the creek. I can see him laying there in the dirt, and he ain’t moved since he quit plowing with his head.

I’ll never know, though, because my tractor wheel that’s been spinning all this time is slowing down, and so am I.

It’s kinda nice sitting here in this shade as a cool breeze moves the late season grass. I’m disappointed that I won’t be in the woods next week after the first freeze to watch the leaves fall. That’s one of my favorite things to do, you know.

But I guess this circle of life continues. Or Wheel of Death is more like it.

I drug myself to this tree, after the tractor rolled over on me. My chest feels really squishy and I think a lot of things aren’t in their right places anymore. I believe the Red River boys have killed me, and most likely didn’t intend to.

Ain’t it something that so many of us Caissens were done in by wheels?

At least one thing is funny in all this, though. From where I am, I can see the personalized rear license plate on the stolen Explorer.

It reads, WHEELZ.