When Butterflies Cry: A Novel by Hammon Ninie

Author:Hammon, Ninie [Hammon, Ninie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2014-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Jesse McCullough went puttering down Carlisle Road, looking like he didn’t have nowhere in particular to go to and wasn’t in no hurry a’tall to get there. Just like he done every time he went out to check the five stills he and Carter had hidden high up in the hollows.

He had lots of kin in this neck of the woods, so he had reasons he could give if he had to come up with an explanation of what he was doing out here.

’Course he wasn’t never going to have to explain nothing to nobody. Even if he’d put a great big ole sign on his pickup truck saying, “I’m goin’ out to bottle up some hooch” wouldn’t nobody call the law. Mountaineers didn’t care if you made moonshine. They was the ones who bought it off’n ya! Besides, nobody called the law about nothing. If you had a problem, you solved it yourself and didn’t expect some outsider with a badge to fix it for you.

He wasn’t going out to work the stills, anyway, just watchin’ over ’em. Carter’d shut them down for the summer and sent the boys off to make a different kind of hooch. Kentucky was broke out with bourbon distilleries and ever’ one of them aged their whiskey for seven years in white-oak barrels. Had to be new barrels with every batch so the old ones was sold off to wineries in California or for folks to cut in half and plant flowers in. But if’n you’s to “borrow” them barrels for a week, say, ’fore they was shipped out, put some water in ’em and leave ’em out in the hot sun…you could leach out some mighty fine liquor. Mighty fine!

Jesse was a big man with a shock of sandy blond hair that hung down over his ears and the collar of his shirt. He had been strong and tough when he was younger, but the strength was gone now. The muscles had slid down into a beer gut, and he’d got three front teeth knocked out in a bar fight. Even Jesse had to admit he wasn’t much to look at anymore. But Angie Faye had got so fat she didn’t have no right to complain about nobody’s looks. Jesse hadn’t had regular employment since…maybe it was four years ago when he was a scoop operator in Northfield No. 2. He knew miners’d been out of work longer than he had. Some of ’em was hurting turkeys, too, ’cause they didn’t have the moonshine business he and Carter had to keep them afloat.

Truth be known, Jesse, didn’t cotton much to Carter Addington. Never had. But kin was kin, and when he needed somebody to help him get the moonshine business he’d taken over from his daddy on its feet, Carter was the obvious choice among all the cousins scattered around the holler. That’d been seven years ago, and now Carter ran the operation. And Jesse wasn’t sure exactly how that’d happened. Oh,

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