The Moonshiner's Daughter. Donna Everhart
of the talker anyway, and was going on about some boy she was wild about, thinking he might like her. If she’d said his name I hadn’t heard it. The bus rolled along, my gut following every curve and dip in the road. Aubrey’s voice faded away. I gripped the metal bar on the seat in front of us, praying I’d make it to school without embarrassing myself by getting sick.
* * *
Mrs. Brewer, our school nurse, had seen a lot in her lifetime. Once a granny woman, she’d come from Grassy Mountain in the next county over to attend to students at Piney Tops after her husband died when his tractor flipped over on him in the middle of a tobacco field. It happened early morning right after sunrise, and she didn’t know. She didn’t go looking for him until he didn’t show up for noon dinner. Minor ailments like fever, dispensing bandages, and the occasional aspirin for some pain here or there was how she now filled her days. She had snow-white hair and looked to be in her seventies.
She scowled at a notepad and wrote my name down with some comment off to the side I couldn’t see well enough to make out. I’d only been once before, back when my stomach was cramping bad enough I couldn’t sit up straight.
She said, “What ails you this time?” as if I’d been coming to see her on a regular basis.
I didn’t look her in the eye. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Mrs. Hardin thought you was ’bout to pass out.”
I said, “I’m on a diet.”
She sniffed. “Dieting. Hmph. You young gals sure is something else nowadays. Always trying some fool notion. You got to et. Dieting? More like starving yerself. Can’t be doing such or you get to feeling like this.”
I didn’t give her any response, and she said, “Wait here.”
Five minutes later she came back with a tray from the lunchroom and plunked it in front of me.
“Et.”
I didn’t want to eat, but given her tone, and the look she delivered, I believed I’d not be allowed back to class until I did. It was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a carton of milk. My belly said yes while my head said no.
She crossed her arms and said, “I hope I ain’t got to tell you ’bout the gal who keeled over and died right in front of me when her fragile heart couldn’t take no more of her ‘dieting.’”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then et what I took the time to bring.”
The miracle that was simply food inside me soon eliminated the floaty spots, and my hands quit shaking too. Mrs. Brewer busied herself arranging gauze and pills in a small cabinet while I tried not to cram the food in too fast.
After a few minutes, she saw I’d finished and said, “Now. I know you got to feel better.”
“Yes’m.”
I was not lying.
“Good. Now get on back to class. If you want to go about it sensibly, there’s something called food a body needs. I want you to drink this.”
She dug around in an enormous pocketbook and handed me a paper packet. I stared at what was scribbled on the front, in her jagged, sharp writing. “Blessed Thistle Tea.”
She tapped it with her forefinger, the first knuckle joint twice as big as it ought to be, and said, “Put about a teaspoon in tea ball, bile, and drink it.”
I nodded.
“Hot, cold, with or without honey or sugar, however you want. It’s good for lots of ailments. Particularly the kind some of you seem to get these days with all of you caterwauling about weight. I ain’t never for the life of me ever heard of such.”
“Yes’m.”
She shooed me out of the tiny room, and slammed the door. I held tight to the packet as I went down the hall, and stopped outside the girls’ bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sandwich that burbled in my belly. The thick taste of peanut butter in my mouth almost made me gag. I’d tried eliminating peanut butter before, and it didn’t work well—at all. The bathroom door banged open and here came Cora with her best friend, Stacy McKinney. I turned sideways to let them pass and they breezed by me chattering like I wasn’t there. I went in, and stood over the toilet. The thought of forcing food up made me weak-kneed. This thing I did, it was hard. Today, there came a clear don’t. I left the bathroom, and by the time I got back to class the taste of what I’d eaten was gone and I wished for more.
That afternoon after school I changed into a pair of dungarees. I sucked in my belly to button them and pulled the zipper up. I got a belt, and cinched it tight around my middle, tight as I could get it. I stood, getting a tiny bit of relief from the gnawing ache with the pressure against my innards. I’d eaten that sandwich and now my stomach rebelled, wanting more food. After two days you’d think I would give up, but I couldn’t. I’d come this far, it had to matter. I fixed a quick supper, fried a few hot dogs, heated some baked beans, and popped open a can of biscuits. They ate and no one noticed I didn’t. I inhaled the aroma of food like smoke off of someone else’s cigarette. I brewed some of Mrs. Brewer’s special tea and drank a cup of it. I hid the packet in the cabinet, behind some canned goods.
After supper Daddy got up from the table and I quickly washed the dishes, staring out the window as he backed Sally Sue out of the shed and came down the hill. Merritt went out and got in the back, sat on the fake seat concealing the jars of liquor directly beneath him. They waited on me, the engine grumbling as if it wasn’t used to idling. I dried my hands, went outside, and got in the front on the passenger side.
Daddy commented, like I cared.
He said, “Got us a full load tonight off Blood Creek earlier this afternoon. Y’all done real good.”
That meant the fake gas tank was full too. The delivery would hopefully be over and done with quick, like most of them. I leaned forward to fiddle with volume on the radio, tuning into WKBC. To my disgust they were playing “White Lightning” by George Jones.
I started to shut it off, but Daddy said, “Now that’s what I call good timing. Turn it up!”
I rolled my eyes and did as he asked, listening to George wail and carry on about making shine. He glorified it. Daddy’s fingers tapped the steering wheel in time to the song, the radio the only sound except the slap of Merritt’s baseball into the palm of his glove coming from the back seat.
We headed toward the obscure back roads where nothing except an occasional house, pastures with cows, or a tobacco barn broke up the landscape. The top of Shine Mountain rose above all others, tall enough to see as we drove south. Soon we turned onto Lore Mountain Road, where the revenuers had been spotted. Daddy obeyed the speed limit, keeping his eye on his side view and rearview mirrors. He motioned for me to turn the volume down. A sliver of the orange sunset leaked through the trees every now and then as dusk created shadows in the creases of hillsides. Sharp curved switchbacks made the road appear indecisive, as if it wanted to first go left, then right. We finally came to a little stretch of straightaway.
Daddy said, “Ain’t nothing like a little evening drive.”
It was like him to try and turn liquor hauling into any old ordinary pastime. I didn’t bother to answer. His window was down halfway and cool air circulated inside the car. The sun was soon gone altogether, and with the veil of night over us, I leaned my head against the back of the seat, occasionally glancing at my side view mirror. At least if I had to be involved, obscurity was always comforting. We descended into one of many hollers, and as we came to the bottom of the hill I saw the flash of headlights in my side view mirror.
I said, “Somebody’s behind us.”
Merritt spun around in his seat and looked out the back window.
He said, “Sure is.”
Daddy kept his speed, and we began to climb again.
He said, “It don’t mean nothing.”