Bulleit Proof. Tom Bulleit
determine that to get this distilling company up and running, to partner with a functioning distillery, to put together some kind of rudimentary marketing and publicity strategy, to hire a barebones staff, and keep this all running for at least six years while the bourbon ages in barrels, will cost millions of dollars.
“I will have to take out a loan,” I say.
“You know every banker in town. They all love you.”
“I don’t know if they love me that much.”
I nod, take this in.
“I’m going to put this off, for now,” I say. “I need to have a preliminary conversation next week.”
“Which banker?”
“Not a banker. My father.”
* * *
Shortly after my marriage, my sister and I move my father into an assisted living facility in Louisville. My mother had passed away the previous year. She was the life force in our family. With quiet efficiency punctuated often with outbursts of joy, she took care of everything, including taking care of my father. She bought the groceries, cooked the meals, did the laundry, paid the bills, planned the social calendar. When she passed, it was as if the engine that ran our home had been shut down.
Right after she died, I felt disoriented, and then I felt numb. But I wouldn’t or I couldn’t allow myself any public display of emotion. I forced myself not to cry. A generational response, I suspect, or perhaps it comes down to gender. I had been raised to keep my emotions inside, in check. I was allowed a measured, stoical response to difficult things. That was the male, military, and maybe even the Southern way. But one day, months after my mother’s funeral, driving alone in the car, I saw myself as a child in the kitchen with her, the two of us laughing, and her loss overwhelmed me, and I began to sob. My chest heaved and the sobs came harder. I pulled over, leaned my forehead onto the steering wheel, and I cried.
I’ve never known a better man than my father. He taught me how to be a soldier, a fighter, and the value of work. Work defines you and work can save you. His words or my inference, I can’t be sure. And my mother? She taught me how to talk, how to interact, and how to be.
* * *
My mother’s passing does my father in. He appears lost without her. He doesn’t seem to know what to do, where to go, or, worse, who to be. He retreats into his one-room apartment at the assisted living facility. When I visit from Lexington, he appears diminished. It’s as if his whole world has begun shrinking in front of him.
He continues to drink his beer and bourbon and smoke his cigarettes, even though the assisted living place has a strict no-smoking policy. He chain-smokes two packs a day and opens the door of his first-floor room so he can blow his cigarette smoke outside. Always vain and fastidious, he’d started to let himself go, allowing his ashtrays to pile up with mounds of white ash, unemptied, untouched. Visiting him one time, for some reason, I remember when he would take me fishing. I had no talent for fishing, and less patience. But my father had a gift. I would fish. He would catch. He would wade into a pond and pull out a six-pack of bass. I could drop a stick of dynamite into the same pond, same spot, and wouldn’t pull up a single slimy catfish.
I told Dad once, “You know, you really need to exercise.”
He shot me a look of sheer disbelief. “I exercise. I fish.”
A fishing pole in one hand, a bottle of beer in the other, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
He called that exercise. Several times a week.
When I visit him, we sit, talk some, and mostly stare at whatever vague blue image blankets us from the TV. Then, sometime after my conversation with Betsy, I visit him with a purpose, an agenda. Twenty-two years have passed since I’d told him I wanted to become a distiller. I had fulfilled every promise I’d made to him. I’d completed my undergraduate education. I’d served in the military. I’d gone to law school … twice … and earned two law degrees, become a lawyer. This day, I’ve come to tell him I have not given up on my dream.
By this point, my father has entered his dotage, although his mind remains sharp. I’m 44 years old. I don’t need to ask my dad’s permission to change careers. But he is my father. I still need his approval.
“I’ve done well as a lawyer,” I say. “But I’m going to become a distiller of bourbon.”
My father looks concerned. I can read his mind. He has often told me to follow the money. I can tell he is worried about the finances.
“You sure?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Well, Tom,” he says, his forehead furrowed, nodding slowly, “that’s between you and your banker.”
* * *
Fast-forward.
1989.
My father has suffered a stroke and my sister and I move him out of assisted living and into a nursing home. His condition worsens. When I visit, he stares at me without recognition, routinely moving his empty fingers to his lips as if he held a cigarette. I can’t bear seeing him like this, ghoulish, a shell of himself. I finally say to my sister, “This is enough. I can’t stand to see my old soldier this way. If my old soldier saw me like that, he would do something.”
Incredibly, he had been evaluated with only 10 percent disability. I tell Mary Jo that I want him reevaluated at the Veterans Administration for a 100 percent disability.
“If we move him, it may kill him,” she says.
“I can’t stand to see him like this.”
The move to the V.A., his war wounds, and the shrapnel still embedded in his brain do kill him.
The heartbreak I feel is physical, an aching that roars throughout my body that at times immobilizes me. I force myself to press on. As he would have.
The dream becoming a reality.
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