Moonshine Requiem

The brisk winter wind stung Lillian’s cheeks as she gazed silently at the empty horse stalls inside the run-down old barn, remembering the first time she had talked to Jack Warren seventy-two years ago. Her fingers ached from the cold as she raised the battered silver flask to her lips and took a sip of the moonshine, relishing the warmth of the whiskey’s afterbite. She hardly ever drank, and her granddaughter would be aghast to find her out here in the cold, but Lillian had celebrated her wedding anniversary in this same fashion every year since Jack had passed, and she wasn’t about to let a bit of arthritis get in the way of tradition now.

She smiled, remembering Jack leaning against the side of the Warrens’ newly constructed barn, grinning like the very embodiment of trouble as he raised the same silver flask she held in her hands now to his lips and took a long swig. He had caught her staring at him, and it was too late to turn and walk away.

“You’re looking at me like I owe you money,” he had said to her, eyes sparkling with amusement. She had blushed bright red and wasn’t sure what to say.

“What are you reading?” he inquired, glancing at the book in her hand that she had been trying to sneak away to read.

“Tarzan of the Apes,” she had responded quietly, holding up her weathered copy of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

“Yeah? Let’s take a walk, and you can tell me all about it.”

His invitation had caught Lillian off guard, but she had accepted all the same. Not many people in the rural West Virginia community of Nicholas Hollow, or the holler as they called it, approved of Lillian’s affinity for reading, much less wanted to hear about it. It was abnormal for a woman to read as much as she did, they said. If she kept it up, she wouldn’t be fit for marriage and no decent man would have her as a wife, as her mother frequently reminded her. Lillian shuddered imagining her mother’s rage if she found out about this walk with Jack Warren.

Although Olive Fitzwilliam sat on the front pew at church every Sunday and frequently professed her love for her brothers and sisters in Christ, behind closed doors she made snide remarks about almost everyone in Nicholas Hollow. That is, when she wasn’t otherwise occupied criticizing Lillian or berating her downtrodden shopkeeper husband, Lillian’s father Ralph. While Ralph often found himself on the receiving end of Olive’s rages and the occasional piece of china or furniture she hurled at him, he seemed to take it in stride, resigned to his fate. Lillian, however, was dying inside.

If there was one thing Lillian dreaded worse than being cooped up in the house with Olive when she was having one of her fits, it was her upcoming marriage to Eugene Armstrong, the sanctimonious young pastor who had arrived a few months ago from Charleston. Although Lillian had done her best to avoid him, Olive’s efforts to secure him as a son-in-law had finally proven themselves fruitful when after one of many Sunday dinners at the Fitzwilliam house, Eugene had asked Lillian to marry him. Lillian had taken to crying alone in the pump house that supplied the Fitzwilliam household with water every Sunday after listening to Eugene deliver his sermon at the Poplar Creek Baptist Church, his proclamations of “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord,” echoing in her head like the sentence of a convict condemned to life in prison.

Although Jack wasn’t quite as mirthful as he had been before President Wilson had announced the U.S.’ entrance into the war in Europe and Jack had found himself in France in the middle of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he was still easily the liveliest, funniest person Lillian had ever met. She had laughed until tears ran down her cheeks and her sides hurt when he had told her about the time he and his younger brother Willie had been thrown off the train to Huntington after Willie had smuggled a live possum into the dining car. One afternoon walk was all it took for Lillian to fall for Jack, and evidently he felt the same way about her, as this soon became a standing date that they both looked forward to every Wednesday. She told him about the books she read, the places she wanted to go, and the many ways she fantasized about getting out of her upcoming sentence to life with Eugene. He told her about making moonshine out in the woods with Willie, seeing Paris for the first time, his friends from the army, and even quietly confessed to her that he occasionally woke in the middle of the night startled awake by what many had started calling shell shock.

Lillian finally got her wish to not marry Eugene shortly after she discovered that she was pregnant with Jack’s child. She had hidden her growing bump from Olive as long as she could, dreading the rage that would be unleashed upon her when her belly inevitably became too large to conceal anymore. She remembered how her mother had screamed at her, calling her a whore and a harlot, telling her how she would spend eternity in hell. Olive had thrown her out of the house on a day almost as cold as today. She was shaking so hard she could scarcely speak and her eyes were almost swollen shut from crying when Jack had opened the door of the cramped old Warren family farmhouse and found her there on the doorstep with nowhere to go. She had been terrified to explain to him what had happened, but when she had finally steadied her voice enough to inform him that he was going to be a father, he had wrapped her in a tight embrace and kissed her before carrying her into the house and asking her to be his wife. Although Lillian had suffered a miscarriage a few days later, she had married Jack all the same, and she still remembered her wedding day as one of the happiest days of her life.

The newlyweds had spent a chaotic but wonderful few weeks in the Warren family home, where Lillian’s large, raucous new brood of in-laws had wholeheartedly accepted her as one of their own before she and Jack had decided to strike out on their own and rented a small house in the nearby coal town of Kingston. Jack had gotten a job in the mines, and Lillian had woken up before sunrise with him every morning to fix his breakfast and pack his lunch before he left. He came home late every evening, filthy from the coal dust and exhausted from working harder than a person should for the pittance the mining company paid him. Lillian sat on the front porch to wait for him every evening, scared that he wouldn’t return home one day, listed as another casualty in one of the tunnel collapses that claimed the lives of far too many of the men who made their living in the pitch black underground hellholes operated by the Rockefellers and others like them that the newspapers had dubbed “robber barons.”

During their years in Kingston, Lillian had borne five children, three boys and two girls. James, Ruth, Catherine, Victor, and Alan, respectively. All but Victor had survived to adulthood, and the day he died of influenza had been one of the darkest Lillian could remember in her ninety-two years. As their family grew, Jack had saved to purchase their first automobile, a battered old model T in Henry Ford’s signature black. While Willie often supplied them with fresh vegetables and fruit along with beef and pork from the Warren family farm, Lillian still purchased a few scraps of meat and produce from the company store along with the bags of flour, tins of coffee, jugs of milk, bars of soap, and other household items they needed, so that the coal company wouldn’t get suspicious. They forbade the miners and their families from having other sources of sustenance, and men had lost their jobs for less.

While Lillian often experienced anxiety in the company store, wondering if the rations of food from the Warren family farm that they so desperately needed to feed their children would cost Jack his living, she was truly terrified on the nights he and Willie stayed out in the woods to make moonshine and drive it into town stashed away in the cavernous trunk of the nondescript 1933 Ford V8 that Willie had spent countless hours modifying to outrun the revenuers. Willie had used his skills as a mechanic to add extra carburetors to allow the big V8 to burn more fuel as well as an intake manifold to increase engine airflow. He had also over-bored the cylinders and added a few extra springs to the suspension to stiffen it up and improve weight distribution. While Willie was the mechanical genius behind their operation, Jack was the superior driver. His weekly runs scared Lillian to death, even though Jack insisted that he was always in control as he took curves at speed, sometimes using the switch Willie had installed on the dash to either kill the lights completely or blind the revenuers pursuing him. More than one revenue man had been left in a ditch chasing Jack in the middle of the night.

To his dying day, Jack had insisted that the closest he had ever come to being caught was the day the revenue man had almost surprised him and Willie at their still. While the still was destroyed, thankfully the revenuer hadn’t apprehended the two brothers hiding mere inches from him in the bushes. At one point, he had even stepped on Jack’s hand, and it was all Jack could do to keep from cursing out loud as the revenue man had stood on his hand for a solid thirty seconds before packing up the axe he had used to smash their still and driving away.

As the brothers’ income from their moonshine business grew, Jack and Lillian had decided to move away from Kingston and build a house on a plot of land that Willie, now in charge of the family farm since his and Jack’s father had passed, had gifted to them. While Lillian was always apprehensive that her husband and his rogue of a brother would end up arrested, she was hopeful that the cough he had developed in the mines would improve out in the fresh country air, and thankfully it did, to some degree.

The only time in their fifty-four years together that Lillian had had to bail Jack out of jail was the result of a barroom brawl started by Willie that had been broken up by the sheriff. Lillian had gotten a call from Jack late that night, imploring her to come and bail him out. “Lil, the toilet’s overflowing in our cell, shit’s shoe-mouth deep, and Willie’s about to set a mattress on fire. Honey, please come get me.” Lillian had waited two hours to pick Jack and Willie up, she was so mad. It was the only time in their married life that Jack had had to sleep on the couch.

Lillian smiled as she savored one last small sip of the moonshine. It had been eighteen years since Jack’s fatal heart attack, and she had never stopped missing him. Although the doctors told her the cancer was spreading and she only had a few months left, Lillian wasn’t afraid. It had been a good life, and she was ready to see her husband again.