Uncle Vertis caught up with us, well out of sight of the women back at the house. They would have had a conniption if they had known what he was up to, ever last one of them. He handed me the bag Boo had brought the moonshine in. A ragged shoelace was tied around the top with a double knot so I couldn’t open it, although I did try.
“Now there’s no need to get your grandma all worked up, so keep this little bit of business between you and me and Missy,” Uncle Vertis said, after asking me to drop the bag off at Boo’s place.
“It’s Sissy,” I told him. “Her name’s Sissy.”
“Just as well not mention it to any of the womenfolk back at the house,” he said again, like he didn’t think I understood him the first time. “If they get their dander up, feathers are likely to fly,” he said, tucking his hands under his armpits and flapping his elbows like wings. He folded my hand around a quarter he’d dug out of his pocket.
I knew it was a bribe.
I took it anyway.
“You go and buy you and Missy a bottle of soda pop or one of them ice creams.” Uncle Vertis turned to head back toward the house.
“Her name’s Sissy,” I hollered after him.
Uncle Vertis flapped his wings.
“Turn around before you get to the Galway Place,” Mother had said. So we did, three times for good measure. “And don’t be writing your name on anybody’s car,” she’d added. We didn’t. Instead we wrote KILROY WAS HERE in the dust on cars parked close enough to the road that we wouldn’t get caught.
Narrower and less tended the higher it went, the road dead-ended at the top of the mountain. Just stopped sudden, like there was no place past that particular point anybody would ever have the need to go. Boo Boudreaux lived at the end of that road. To get there we had to pass the old Galway place, empty for years. Although we’d never worked up the nerve to go inside, we were somehow drawn to the idea of ghosts or dead bodies. Uncle Vertis claimed he’d seen strange lights inside many a night. “Galway’s ghost most likely,” he’d said, making his black eyes big and scary.
Grandma told him there was no such thing as ghosts and he was to stop filling our heads with such foolishness because she was getting awful tired of having to cut the lights on before we went upstairs to bed every night and make no mistake about it he was squarely to blame for putting that fear in us and here he was a grown man and ought to be ashamed of himself scaring little children out of their wits.
Uncle Vertis listened to every word, nodding like he agreed. Then he’d made his hands into monster claws and chased us halfway to Sunday.
Grandma just shook her head.
The Galway place went out of its way to make you believe it was haunted. Weeds and brush had taken over most of the yard, and the outhouse had been tipped over, probably by kids some long-ago Halloween. The house sat at the end of a dirt lane that was barely passable. We picked our way through the bramble as far as the falling-down porch. Morning glories, their purple trumpets blaring silently into the sun, threaded around and through the broken porch rail and sagging shutters. I pulled one of the plants out by the roots to give to Aunt Nalda, wrapping it in damp leaves to keep it alive like I’d seen her do.
We stopped at the porch. Even though Sissy dared me and called me a scaredy-cat, I refused to go inside.
“You go,” I said, calling her bluff.
“I will if you will,” she said.
We both chickened out.
We started around the house, her in the lead. It’s what we always ended up doing, hoping bigger hoodlums than us had torn the boards off a window so we could stand on our tiptoes and look inside, but nobody had, at least not yet.
Sissy stopped, turning to shush me. She pointed to a contraption of pipes and kettles almost hidden by the forest. Although busted-up stills were scattered all over these mountains, I’d never seen one that looked ready to run. We were turning to leave when we heard the sound of something clanging against metal over and over again.
Hunched over, Sissy and I backtracked out of there, sneaking looks over our shoulders to make sure nobody was after us with a double-barrel shotgun that could take both of us down with one scattered blast. When we got to the road, we took off running and didn’t let up until we both got a stitch and had to catch our breath, bending over like hunchbacks to clutch at the sharp pain in our sides. As soon as we could straighten up, we ran the rest of the way to Boo’s house. His wife, dark and sharp-featured like him, was sitting on the porch nursing a baby that looked to be two or three years old. She was singing a song.
Just as we got to the porch Boo pulled up in his car. I noticed the door handle was missing. I’d heard somebody say, Uncle Vertis maybe, that moonshiners took the handles off to make it hard for the law to get in. It was a dead giveaway somebody was a real moonshiner, not just running an occasional batch of shine for his family and friends.
Boo walked over, swinging a ball-peen hammer in his hand. “Where in tarnation y’all pick up all them beggar-lice?”
He seemed a little too interested to me. But then again, that could have been my nerves working on me. I looked down. The daisy-flowered pedal pushers Grandma had made from feed sacks were covered with the flat sticky seeds that grew in a pod almost like a green pea.
