Beulah's House of Prayer by Cynthia A. Graham

Author:Cynthia A. Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary fiction, literary novel, magical realism, historical fiction, historical romance, depression era, dust bowl, oklahoma, small town, grapes of wrath, steinbeck, willa cather, trapeze artist, circus performer,
Publisher: Brick Mantel Books
Published: 2016-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

It was noted by the inhabitants of Barmy, Oklahoma, that several changes occurred in my daddy throughout the winter of 1934. He stopped raising hell, to the disappointment of those who had predicted prison for the boy and hated to be proven wrong, and he began to look presentable. Suddenly the filthy ragamuffin was always clean, his face shaven, his hair combed, his teeth brushed. People began to take notice of this, and one person, in particular was Saucy Martin, the town’s bootlegger.

Homer’s daddy, Linford Guppy, had been drunk for fifteen years. He was drunk throughout prohibition, he was drunk for every birthday, every Christmas, and he was drunk for the whole of World War I.

He paid for his moonshine compliments of a Spanish-American war pension, even though he was too young to fight there. While he would have liked, as a young man, to tell people he was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s rough riders, in reality, he fought in the Philippines some years later and spent most of his time there in the hospital due to a severe case of typhus. This typhus was deemed the cause of his inability to work, thus every month he collected a pension for a war he never saw.

At one time, he had a bootlegger, a nice respectable man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the name of Josiah Brumley, who got his moonshine from a less respectable man by the name of George Kelly. After the arrest of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Brumley decided that bootlegging was too dangerous for him. He turned his operation over to Hal “Boss” Martin and Hal, in turn, was arrested shortly thereafter.

Boss Martin was not bright, but he left his operation in the hands of his more than capable wife, Saucy. Saucy made it a habit of delivering her wares in the company of her children, Autry and Bing. With this kind of cover, not to mention the fact that she had the face of an angel and the heart of a gangster, she was never molested by the FBI and she grew her husband’s bootlegging business tenfold in his absence. After the repeal of prohibition, it became easier to track down the moonshine; Saucy would travel into Texas or New Mexico to get it, although the best corn liquor was still made right there in Oklahoma. But Oklahoma remained a dry state and it was no less dangerous to bootleg alcohol after the days of prohibition than during.

Saucy was a young woman, barely twenty-five, with two sons, aged six and four, and she had been bootlegging for four years. She had red hair, cut short and bobbed, and wore lipstick that matched. Her hat and suit were always clean and crisp and her boys dressed in knickers and caps. To see them driving down the road, one would think they were a nice family traveling to church.

But no church would have Saucy, so she created her own sort of redemption by helping the wretched, hopeless refugees that were casualties of the Great Depression.

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