The Bourbon Thief. Tiffany Reisz
from starting the family business, she didn’t know anything about him.
“I wish there were more of us. But your grandmother was fragile up here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “And her health wasn’t too good, either. After two sons, we had to stop. Then she had her stroke and I can’t remarry, not that I’d want to,” he said, although she sensed he did want to, wanted to very much. She would if she were him anyway, and God knew half the single ladies in the county were counting the seconds until Granddaddy was back on the market. “Your uncle Eric died over in Vietnam before he could get married and start his family. And your daddy, of course...”
“Right. Daddy.” Daddy was dead and had been dead for three years, five months and sixteen days. But who was counting?
“We’d hoped he and your mother would have a big family, but that wasn’t to be, either.”
“I don’t think they liked each other too much,” Tamara said, which was both true and wasn’t. Granddaddy had liked to tease her mother sometimes about the babies she hadn’t contributed to the Maddox family tree and Daddy would tell him to back off and leave her alone, which Granddaddy would counter with “If you didn’t leave her alone, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” She’d never figured her mother and father out. They were friendly and yet they seemed like the last two people on earth who should have been married to each other. “He must not have liked me much, either, since he killed himself.”
“He loved you,” he said, although Tamara wondered. Did men who really loved their daughters shoot themselves in the head and leave them to fend for themselves with a crazy mother?
“I loved him, too. I miss him.” She clutched her pink pillow even tighter to her chest.
“I know you do. We all do. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought about how good it was to hold him in my arms after he was born. And Eric, too. My boys. My beautiful boys. I’d give anything to have that again—a new son of my own. Anything at all. Do you feel like that about something? That you’d give anything to have it?”
“I’d give anything to have Daddy back.”
That answer seemed to surprise him.
“Well, yes. You and me both, sweetheart.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him and she felt bad about that. Granddaddy talked about her uncle Eric all the time—handsome, strong, smart, the son of any man’s dreams. But Nash? Her father? Granddaddy almost never talked about him unless someone else brought him up.
“I wish Momma would come back, too,” she said. But from the looks of the dark and the wet and the new rain coming down, it didn’t appear her mother was coming back anytime soon. She found her grandfather looking at her, studying her. He’d been doing that more lately, watching her. Sometimes it didn’t feel like his gaze was on her so much as his hands. She liked it when Levi looked at her. But not even he looked at her like this.
“Angel, I know it’s not easy being a Maddox. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Your grandmother wanted to go to college instead of getting married. But her family had money trouble, so she got married. You do what you have to do for your family. Like Jacob Maddox.”
“What about him?”
“My grandfather Jacob Maddox got married for money, too. Married a lady named Henrietta Arden. That’s why this house is called Arden, because we wouldn’t have it but for her.”
“Did we get all our money from his wife?”
“No, ma’am. She got ole Jacob out of debt, but the real money? He made that all by himself. Back before Red Thread existed, Jacob had a hemp and tobacco plantation. That was the original Arden. Jacob, as it sometimes happened in those days, fell in with one of the slave girls. Her name was Veritas, but they called her Vera for short. They did love to give out fancy names to their slaves, and she was a fancy girl. Her mother had worked in the kitchens before she died and Vera had taken over her work. The house girls had to dress nice and look nice and act nice. Vera always wore a red ribbon in her hair. One morning Jacob decided he’d rather have Vera for breakfast than steak and eggs.”
Her grandfather chuckled again over the rim of his glass before taking another sip. Tamara was getting real tired of that chuckle.
“But Henrietta was not especially pleased when Vera’s belly started getting real big and it wasn’t because they were overfeeding the girl. One day Jacob went out of town on business, and while he was gone, what did Henrietta do? She sold little Vera. Sold her for a good price. The man who bought her got a good deal—two for the price of one.”
Tamara only stared at the bourbon in her glass. She didn’t want to drink it anymore.
“You can’t sell people,” Tamara said quietly.
“Oh, but you could back then. They say Jacob saw every shade of red when he came home to find nothing left of his favorite girl and his baby but the red ribbon she always wore in her hair and a thousand dollars he hadn’t had before. But he didn’t cry long. You know what he did with that money?”
“Started Red Thread?”
“That’s right. He started Red Thread. He bought a still, bought some corn and got to work making this family the wealthiest family in the state. But you know what? He must have loved that girl Vera, because when he started the bourbon distillery, he put a red ribbon around the neck of every bottle in her memory. Put her red ribbon on the very first bottle. We still have that bottle locked up in my office.”
“Can I see it?”
“Maybe later,” he said. She wasn’t allowed in Granddaddy’s office upstairs. No one was. “It’s been handed down from one Maddox son to the next. It’ll be your son’s someday.”
“We still have the ribbon?” Tamara asked, wanting to see it for some reason, wanting to have it. She should have it, and her granddaddy shouldn’t.
“We do. That red ribbon is what made us our money. Wives would tell their husbands, ‘Honey, go and buy some of that Red Thread bourbon because I want that pretty ribbon.’ Jacob Maddox was a smart man. Must have been a romantic, too. Red ribbon on every bottle? He must have loved that girl.”
“Or maybe loved waving that red ribbon in his wife’s face,” Tamara said.
“Well...maybe he loved doing that, too.”
“What happened to Veritas?” Tamara asked.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know.” Granddaddy waved his hand dismissively. “They sold her, and she wasn’t too happy about it. They say she swore at Mrs. Maddox, vowing she would come back someday and cut us off at our roots. She would end our line if it was the last thing she did. As you can see,” Granddaddy said, pointing at himself with his thumb, “that prophecy didn’t quite come to pass. Although we haven’t had the luck with babies as I’d hoped we’d have.”
“I guess not,” she said, feeling sick at her stomach. Was it the bourbon? She’d barely sipped it. Or was it Veritas screaming curses at Tamara’s great-great-grandmother all those years ago? Poor Veritas. They hadn’t even let her keep her red ribbon when they sold her.
“The Maddoxes are blessed and cursed all at once,” he said, pouring himself another shot of the Red Thread. “God gives us wealth and prosperity with one hand and takes away the children we need to carry on the line with the other.”
“It’s too bad,” she said. She felt for her grandfather. He’d had a brother and sister, but his sister had polio and didn’t make it past thirty and his brother hadn’t lived past age ten—scarlet fever.
“A man shouldn’t have to bury his own sons.”
And a girl shouldn’t have to bury her father. That wasn’t right, either. Nothing seemed right tonight.
Her grandfather lifted the glass to his lips. He lowered it before he took a drink.