There was nothing but charred remnants of staves and rusty hoops left of the barrel through which the copper worm had run, while the copper still itself was reduced to a battered heap. The worm and the thumping keg and all the essentials for making whiskey leaped into a living scene, however, when Jorde Foley got to telling of the days when he and Cynthie and young Ben, peaceable and contented, earned a meager living at the craft.
“Set your still right about here,” Jorde hovered over the remnants of the stone furnace, “and you break your mash once in so often. A man’s got to know when it is working right. The weather has a heap to do with it fermenting. Sometimes it takes longer than other times. No, you don’t stir it with a stick but a long wooden fork. I’ve whittled many a one.” He retrieved from the pile of stone what was left of the stirring fork. “Have it long so you can retch far all around the barrel,” he said, measuring the fork against his own height. With unconcealed pride he explained the various steps of making corn whiskey in his own primitive way. He told how the thumping keg in which it was aged was first carefully charred inside to add a tempting flavor, and how the barrel in which the cornmeal and malt were placed was made of clean staves of oak or chestnut, or whatever wood was at hand. The wood was cut green and when the mash began to work the liquid caused the staves to swell and thus make the barrel leak-proof.
Never once in his explanation did Jorde Foley say moonshine, or shine, or mountain dew.
“Whiskey, pure corn whiskey,” he repeated, “when it is treated right won’t harm no one. And when a body sees the first singlin’ come treaklin’ out the worm, cooled by the cold water that this worm is quiled in,” he indicated the location of the barrel, “somehow there’s a heap of satisfaction in it. Seeing that clear whiskey, clear as a mountain stream come treaklin’ into the tin bucket or jug that is settin’ there to ketch it, it makes a man plum proud over his labors.”
Jorde looked inward upon his thoughts. “Many a time me and Cynthie would take a full bucket to a neighbor’s when there was a frolic, set it in the middle of the table with a gourd dipper in it, and let everyone help hisself to a drink. Why, there was no harm in whiskey in my young day. And us people up here didn’t know or need no other medicine.”
In the bat of an eye Jorde Foley explained how pure corn whiskey had cured cases of croup, saved mothers in childbirth, cured children of spasms and worms, and saved the life of many a man bitten by a copperhead or suffering from sunstroke. “Once I saw Brock Pennington stob Bill Tanner in the calf of the leg with a pitchfork. Bill he bled like a stuck hog and we grabbed up a jug of whiskey and poured it on his leg. Stopped the blood! No how,” Jorde was off on another defense, “land up here and in lots of places in these mountains is not fitten to farm so we have allus made whiskey of it after exceptin’ out enough for our bread. Good, pure whiskey that never harmed no man that treated it right, that’s what we made. In Pa’s day he sold it for fifty cents a gallon. Us Foleys in my day sold it for a dollar a gallon and let the other fellow pack it off and sell it for what he could get. Why, I had knowin’ of a man on Chester Creek in Fentress County over in Tennessee that sold it for three dollars a gallon. But that is a plum outrage!” Jorde spat vehemently halfway to the cliff.
“After Pa died, me and Mose Keeton got to makin’ together. We halved the corn and halved the work and halved the cash money and never no words ever passed betwixt us. By the time Mose died my boy Ben taken his place.”
Only once did a smile light the grim face. “One day Cynthie and me was busy here and Ben’s pet pig followed him up here when he brought us a snack to eat. The pig snooted around and found the place where we had dumped the leavin’s of the mash after we had took off the brine. Well, sir, that pig just nat’erly gorged itself and directly it was tipsy as fiddlesticks. I never saw such antic was out of a critter in my life. It reeled to and fro and squealed and grunted and went round and round tryin’ to ketch its own tail. Finally it rolled down the hill. Ben packed it back up again and it reeled around, its feet tangled and it rolled down again. Kept that up till it got sober. Its eyes rolled back in its head, it sunk down in a grassy spot over yonder and slept till dark. It follered at Ben’s heels meek as a lamb when we went down the hill that night. That pig was too sick to eat or even sniff a nubbin of corn for two whole days, just laid and groaned. ‘Now, Ben,’ says Cynthie to our boy, ‘you see what comes of gettin’ tipsy.’ And Ben Foley learnt a lesson off the pig and never did take a dram too much.”
Again Jorde’s eyes sought the neglected grave far off. He looped back to the story of his son. “Everything was peaceable here, though we did miss Cynthie powerful after she died. But me and Ben made on the best we could. We had a living from our whiskey. Then come Effie! That woman nat’erly tore up the whole place. She kept gougin’ Ben for more cash money.” Jorde pointed a condemning finger toward a ravine. “There’s a half dozen washtubs rustin’ away under there.”
A part of a zinc tub protruded from the brush heap. “One day,” Jorde continued, “unbeknown to Ben’s wife, Effie, I snuck off up here away from that Jezebel though she had talked no end about me being too old to climb the mountain. ‘You’ll get a stroke, Jorde,’ she’d warn me. ‘You best sit here in the cool, or feed the chickens or the hogs.’ Effie was ever finding something for me to do if I offered a word about comin’ up here to see how Ben was getting on. That made me curious. So I snuck off from the house and come up here one day.” Jorde’s eyes turned toward the ground. “When I come up on Ben I couldn’t believe my own eyes. My boy had a fire goin’ not under just one but a half dozen tubs! What’s left of them are over yonder.” He jerked a thumb toward the brush covered ravine. “My boy Ben was stirring around not with the wood fork like he had been learnt, but with a shovel!” Jorde lifted scandalized eyes. “A rusty shovel, at that! He was talking in a big way to his helper—a strange man to me. I come to find out he was a friend of Effie’s from Cartersville.”