Wisps of smoke wavered from the swamp below the clearing where Lant's whiskey still was working. The ash wood used for firing burned with a clear flame; only an occasional thread columned blue-white against the cobalt sky. Zeke saw it from his stoop and when his wife's back was turned, slipped away. Lant had moved the outfit up from Taylor's Dread the week before after an undisturbed year. Zeke had not visited him in the new location. If he had timed Lant's activities correctly, the first new batch of mash must be due to run. The smoke against the summer sky was encouraging. Zeke's jug was empty and he was thirsty.
As he cut through the hammock to the swamp, he whistled like a quail. He gave the mating call, which was out of season, for the young quail were lately hatched. An answering whistle came back and he struck openly along the creek. The outfit stood exposed to plain view. Yet nothing but the sheerest accident—such as hunters and dogs on the trail of a deer—would bring a stranger here.
Lant had built a wooden platform high over the slow-running creek. There was room for the rowboat to pass beneath for loading and unloading. On the platform stood a stout brick furnace; a box-like cooker of cypress and sheet copper; drums and barrels. He had driven four long ash saplings into the creek-bed at the four corners and made a canopy over the whole. Palmetto fronds formed a neat thatched roof. Lant squatted on his haunches in front of the furnace, stoking the fresh fire with small sticks of immaculate white ash.
He said, "Hey, Uncle Zeke," without turning.
Zeke said, "I'm about in time to he'p you run a charge, dogged if I ain't."
"I'll put you to work direckly, don't you worry about that."
Zeke peered into the cooker.
"How much do the pot hold?"
"The buck from two barrels. I only got one barrel dipped out. I'm somethin' late. I figgered I'd git my fire goin'. You kin finish dippin' from the other barrel. Don't you rile the buck."
Zeke said mildly, "You got no call to tell me how to handle mash, boy."
He investigated the barrels. The one Lant had just dipped out into the cooker, showed a loose sediment over a residue of close-packed cornmeal at the bottom. Two barrels of mash were midway in their fermentation. They seethed and bubbled. The hissing sounded like a thin batter being poured on a hot griddle. The cap had formed and the surfaces were covered with foam and small particles. The fourth barrel was the mate to the one Lant had emptied. The cap had settled. The liquid, with an alcoholic content of some twenty-proof, was clear.
Zeke said, "Jest about here is where a feller got to hurry. The buck goes flat in no time, and you jest as good to pitch the mash in the creek, for you'll git no more alcohol."
"You don't need to tell me about the beer goin' flat," Lant said. "That were my first mistake."
"Lettin' it stand too long, eh?"
"Lettin' it stand."
Zeke rinsed the bucket with creek water and dipped the strong sour liquid from the barrel into the cooker. The ash fire underneath reached a flaming climax of orange heat. Lant fed it again. The sheet copper shone, hot and clean. The buck in the cooker began to simmer. Lant stirred the blazing sticks to fierce coals. The liquid bubbled and made a complete turn-over, like soap-suds boiling. The pot was ready to cap.
Zeke helped him fit on the tight cypress cover. Its protruding copper pipe made an angled turn and joined the copper coils immersed in a barrel of cold water. Lant raked some of the fire from out the furnace. Zeke nodded.
"A low steady heat's the thing, all right, son," he approved.
The ash burned evenly. The cooker was vibrant with energy. Zeke dipped the bucket into the emptied barrels and mucked off the sediment, leaving the dense mass of meal intact at the bottom.
"Here's your bed," he said.
"Put a chinchy couple o' buckets o' fresh meal in each barrel, please sir, Uncle Zeke. That bag yonder."
The old man measured the cornmeal carefully.
"I got to have he'p with the sugar," he said. "I cain't git a hundred-pound sack this high and not waste it."
Lant left the fire and came to him. They lifted the bag together and shook the sugar in the barrels, fifty pounds to each. Zeke measured creek water with an affectionate slowness.
"Now a bucket-two o' hot buck from the pot, time your charge is run, and these here scapers'll go to work for you. Dog take it, Lant, this is a fine business. I shouldn't never of quit."
"You better start up agin. Go partners with me, if you say."
He shook his head.
"Hit's too late now. I jest ain't spry enough to run."
Lant laughed. The fire burned to slow coals. He sat by Zeke at the edge of the platform. They dangled their legs over the creek and spoke in a low monotone that carried no more than a few feet.
Lant said, "This is the least worrisome business I ever been into."
Zeke said, "I ain't talkin' about worry. When lightnin' strike, you got no time to worry." He sang softly, under his breath:
"Raccoon is a cunnin' thing,
Travels in the dark.
Don't know what trouble is,
'Til he hears ol' Ranger bark."
He added, "Then he know."
Lant spat into the swamp.
"I jest don't figger them gov-mint 'Rangers' is goin' to bark up this creek," he said.
Zeke agreed. "Well, I reckon hit ain't likely. Floridy ain't never been too much bothered that-a-way. Take back when I were makin' it. Up to the time I had that pure accident, you never heerd tell o' no revenooers in these parts. 'Course, the law was different then. Whiskey-makin' was all right if you paid the tax. Half the folks I knew, used to make a leetle jest for theirselves. Sho, nobody paid no mind."
Lant moved across the platform to mend the fire. A slow procession of crystal drops passed out at the end of the copper spout. Where the sun struck, they flashed blue-white like diamonds. Lant touched his finger to the spout and tasted the warm liquid. He winced and held his lips open to the air to cool them.
"Take a fool to drink that first of it," he said. "It'd burn the guts outen you if it ever got past your throat."
Zeke went on with his ruminations.
"Now they've got the new law since the war," he said, "and nobody don't belong to make whiskey at all, no-way, no time, tax or no tax. And boy, don't you think them new kind o' revenooers ain't comin' into the state. And the county, too. But now, hit's one thing for them strangers to find a still in open blackjack. Or by a branch in the piney-woods. This here river is jest another matter."
Lant grinned.
"Them tryin' to find their way thu the swamps, eh? Sinkin' down in the muck—puttin' their ol' hands on a log and jest missin' a moccasin—I reckon it don't suit them Prohis too good."
Zeke said, "'Bout the only way they'd git to a feller 'round here'd be for somebody to turn him up. Ain't nobody fixin' to do that. All the Jacklins hates Lem Posey. Sharp Kinsley romps on Luke Saunders mighty nigh ever' time he crosses his tracks. Sho, Lem and Luke got no cause to fear they'll have their livin' interfered with. A man's livin' is somethin' it takes a mighty low-down white man to mess with."
Lant said, "Well, I don't mess up with nobody no-ways. I figger ain't nobody'll mess up with me."
"You'll keep outen a heap o' trouble," Zeke said, "mindin' your own business and keepin' to the scrub this-a-way. Hit's a scaper like Lem Posey'll git the law takin' notice, always whoopin' and sooeyin' and sic-a-boyin' the way he do."
They sat in silence.
Zeke asked, "How's ol' Red?"
Lant said, "He's been havin' more o' them fits. He seemed some better when I left the house this mornin'."
It made him unhappy to talk about Red and he began to hum under his breath. The warm crystal stream dripped steadily from the coils. The scent of the distillate was rank and sweet.
Zeke said, "That's about fitten now."
Lant said, "Take a can and git you a drink."
The old man gulped half a cupful. Courage and discontent possessed him.
"I'm goin' on home," he announced, "and git my old woman told."
Lant was as well pleased to be alone. After Zeke's steps had faded away, he went to his favorite seat in an area he had cleared in the hammock above the creek. He sat with his back to a magnolia overlooking the platform; hunched; idle with the immobility of an animal. He liked the work, he reflected. He had liked it from the beginning. He would want to make corn liquor, he thought, if there wasn't a dollar in it. There was, in fact, a good living. His profits during the year ranged from four to ten dollars a week. Moonshining was more certain than farming; than trapping or 'gatoring.
He liked the smell of the sour mash and the heat of the copper. When he ran a charge at night, he liked the blue flame of the burning ash in the black of the night, and the orange glow on the sweet-gum leaves. Here he liked the intimacy with the hammock. Its life washed over him and he became a part of it. The scrub yonder sent its furred and feathered inhabitants past him to eat and drink, and he and the scrub were one.
He liked to know all there was to be known of every animal and bird and tree. At the Dread he had seen a wood-duck walk down with her puff-ball ducklings on her back, submerging in the cool creek water so that the young ones were floated gently on the new element. He had watched pole-cats with their young in single file. Black snakes had mated a few feet away. Since he had moved to the swamp below the clearing, he had seen a wild cat with her kittens, and half-grown fox-pups tumbling within a stone's throw of him, quarrelling over a rabbit.
Beyond the still he could glimpse his mother's swamp garden, where she grew collards and turnip-greens in the dampness the year around. Seeing a shadowy movement there, he crept close. A pair of quail trailed by a new-hatched covey was feeding under the tall collards. They reached on tiptoe, turning their small heads this way and that, picking insects from the under-leaves. The cock kept up a running conversation, making small sweet sounds, to which the hen now and then responded. Lant swooped down and picked up half a dozen of the young in his square brown hand, each bird no bigger than his thumb. He said to the fluttering adult birds, "Hell, I ain't fixin' to harm 'em," held them a moment and let them go.
He thought he heard the sly dip of a paddle out on the river. He held his breath. Any untoward sound was the signal to stop and listen: the clatter of a squirrel along hickory limbs; the crackle of twigs in the swamp; an alarmed flight of duck or crane or water-turkey. Sounds from the river he dreaded most. From that way would come danger. Listening, his innate wariness was intensified. But the ripple he had heard was only the murmur of the river current. It breathed sometimes like a live thing.
The new buck was yielding the proper amount and quality of raw whiskey. Ten gallons averaged a hundred and twenty proof. He jugged it and ran into separate containers another eight gallons of low-wine that tested forty. The low-wine was sour-tasting and full of undesirable elements. He was tempted to mix some of it with the first-run whiskey, for he had an order for more than he could fill. Many 'shiners, he knew, drew a scant line between the two grades. He decided to follow his custom of adding the low-wine to the fresh buck when he ran his next charge; re-distilling it to extract the alcohol and leave behind the impurities.
He thought, "I'd not drink the stuff the way 'tis and I'll not sell it to no other man to drink."
He dipped out buckets of steaming buck from the cooker and added one to each of the two barrels of fresh-set mash to hurry fermentation. He planned always to set new mash at the time he ran a charge. Then the old bed of meal, which needed to be changed only every two months, was not wasted. Sometimes he was not paid on time for his whiskey and he was without cash for sugar. Then he must either ask the storekeeper for credit, which was distasteful, or let the old bed of meal spoil, and start all over again when he was in funds. The proportion of fifty pounds of sugar and thirty gallons of water to each fifty-gallon barrel was the same on any set-up. The waste was in the meal, for it took fifty pounds to start a barrel of mash all over again.
He puckered his lips and whistled soundlessly. He was pleased with the run; pleased with the new location. A summer rain had set in. He worked in comfort under the thatched roof. Silver sheets of rain slid musically down the palmettos. Beyond the platform limpkins walked stiff-legged in the downpour, searching the creek for snails.
He concealed the jugs of fresh liquor under adjacent low palmettos and went to the house in the rain. Piety was waiting on the breezeway. She wore a print dress the colour of her hair. He noticed her greyness, blending with the grey of the rain.
She said, "Hit'll soon fair off. Why didn't you wait? Seem to me you jest enjoy gittin' soaked to the hide."
He said, "Hit's the next best thing to goin' naked." He looked at her. "What's the matter, Ma?"
"You'll hate it," she said. "You'll jest perfeckly hate it. Red died while you was to the outfit."
His throat tightened.
He said, "He's out-lasted hisself. He should of died two-three years ago."
"I know you feel bad," she said.
His eyes burned. He set his teeth. She had not complained of Red in late years, for the dog had become gentler, but he said, "Well, I know you don't. I know you're jest proud he's gone. You'll have nothin' but them bastardly cats to feed."
She blinked at him. He turned and walked across the yard and into the smoke-house. She watched after him. Then she went into the kitchen and fired the range and baked a sweet-potato pie. She watched him at the supper table, but he seemed unconscious of the deep-lidded eyes fixed on his face. He was restless. He bent his head low over his plate, his forelock almost touching it. He ate his potato pie.
He said, "'Tain't as good as Kezzy's."
He cut himself another piece.
He said, "I'm goin' some place tonight."
"Some place acrost the river?"
"I dunno."
"This is Friday. You like not to find Cleve and Kezzy to the house. She said two weeks ago they aimed to go to the next frolic."
"I ain't said nothin' about Cleve and Kezzy. I'm like to go to the damn frolic myself."