Dorsetts moonshine was of no ordinary hill recipe. The dead Dorsett man had cultivated a process begun by his father before him. Ona had further enhanced the still, its capabilities. She had thrown in some new ingredients. The results were what some would call miraculous. Men paid top dollar for that shine, though they knew not where it originated. The middleman who sold it to them had taken an oath of holy secrecy to the dead Dorsetts widow, and he intended to keep it. It was said a drop of the stuff could spin your brain like a top, feather-tickle your pecker hard. This mule-kick possessed no odor.
Ona took it herself, once at Trenchmouth and Clarissas bedtime, once at her own. Shed long since realized her blend had none of the unfortunate effects other blends had. On the contrary, Dorsett shine caused her to read at night, fortified her vocabulary. It made things clear as the new glass windowpanes town folks had. Headaches and slurred speech were not part of the bargain. The only physical change an observer would take note of occurred in the eyeball. Pupils, upon first swig and for a minute thereafter, spread wide to the edge of the iris. Exploded like perfect black planets. This gave the drinker a look of animal capability. It was beast-eye.
Ona Dorsett sat at her kitchen table on a Saturday night in May of 1903, her pupils gradually rescinding to normal. By lantern light, she read a book called Following the Equator by Mr Samuel Clemens. It was near eleven oclock when a knock came at the door. She looked up to the loft where the little ones slept sound, then rose to answer. On her way to the door, she took her Remington Double Derringer out of a big empty flour tin. She held it behind her back when she answered.
A man stood before her. He was dirty, his clothes nearly worn past their life expectancy, all tears and patches. Onas dress and the fabrics she put on her children were not without flaw, nor were they contemporary, but this man was something else. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. When he smiled there were cigar-wrap pieces the size of cockroaches in his yellow teeth. How do missus, he said.
What can I do for you? Ona said softly.
The man looked behind her into the house. His eyes rolled left, right, up, and down like he wanted to gain his bearings but would never remember them. A habit of the sharp-eyed gone sour. You got your youngins up there in the loft, I reckon? From where he stood outside, he looked up where he couldnt see.
What can I do for you?
You can drop whatever pea shooter you got tucked in your spine bone there. His smile widened. There was sweat under the brim of his brown slouch hat though it was cold outside. Just put it off on yonder floor there. I aint lookin to take it from you, he said.
Ona pulled the gun out to her side, feigned dropping it for a second before she swung it around to his neck. He caught her wrist with his left hand before she reached his shoulder. She did not fire. The man reared back and slammed his forehead against the bridge of her nose. Bone crunched like thin cornstalk. Ona hit the floorboards.
While the man regarded the pistol and rubbed at his forehead, she fought blackness and the little popping stars that broke through it. He was re-positioning his hat when she got most of her sight back and pulled a stag-handle knife from her felt-button boots. She came up off the floor like the serpents strike and had the eight-inch blade buried in his neck before he could discern the occurrence. She was silent as she pulled and pushed the handle made of deer antler, maneuvered it so that it nearly went in one side and came out the other.
His knees never gave. He stood there, gun dropped to the floor, one arm limp at his side and the other touching his neck and the thing piercing it like a kabob. He gurgled a little. Said something to her that she couldnt quite get. He was only one foot inside the door when she put her boot sole against his stomach and forced him backwards onto the dirt. She put the pistol back in the flour container, took a belt off the house jar, and went outside. She stood over the man, dead now, a wide stream of blood traversing down the incline beneath his head. She said nothing, though she had an unexplainable urge to spit in his eyes. Instead, she went around back and got the shovel.
Ona lashed heavy rope around the mule she had to smack to make move. The other end wrapped the base of the outhouse. The mule, called Beechnut, strained his old, nicked haunches and pulled the outhouse a good six feet away from its designation over the hole. Ona told him good boy. The hole was half-filled. Two months worth of shit and piss. The Widow had her work cut out. Widen it by four feet, deepen it by three. She began digging the mans grave.
It was just the time of spring when the earth was finally diggable.
Before she rolled him into the hole three hours later, she went through his pockets. A half dollar and a mouth harp, silver and worn, but well-made. Cheap cigar and kitchen matches, loose, no package. A folded photograph of a woman in a lace-fringed dress and fur hat. She tossed the photograph of the woman into the grave, then rolled the man in on top of it. He went still at the bottom, belly up. There was loose dirt on the end of her shovel. She held it above his face, dropped half on one open eye, half on the other. I know you, she said. The man looked like he had on straight temple spectacles, the glass lenses tinted mud black.
Hed rolled easy into his new home five feet below the outhouse basin. The earth went smoothly back to where it originated, patted down without much trouble like it had never moved. Ona re-dug the waste-hole and Beechnut hefted the outhouse to its original location. She gave him an apple which he ate with finick.
Inside, Ona climbed the ladder to the loft before washing her hands. The two of them were there, the baby boy in his wicker bassinet, the three-year-old girl on the horsehair mattress. The Widow stared at them for ten solid minutes before she descended the stairs and washed up with cold well-water over the tub. She put on a sleeping gown that had been her mother-in-laws, ascended the ladder again and slept between her two children, marking the patterns of their sleep breathing in her mind, smiling when the inhales and exhales matched up. Matching her own to theirs.
THREE. Climbing And Digging Came Natural
By the spring of 1906, it was evident that three things separated Trenchmouth from the ordinary two-year-old. There was of course his oral ailment, which required higher doses of nightly moonshine as his weight swelled. But the other two things were remarkable in an entirely different manner. The boy could climb and dig in such a way that only boys thrice his age had mastered. He scampered up hillsides like a Tibetan antelope, and his hands dove into mud like a posthole digger. Climbin and diggin is what comes natural to boys, the Widow Dorsett would say, and this one here is more natural than any.
Trenchmouth buried things. Found things too. An 1859 Indian Head penny. The skeletal structure of a barn cat with a.22 hole in its skull. Seventeen clay marbles.
On a warm, overcast day in early May, the boy did what he often did while he was supposed to nap. He pulled himself up and out of the crib the Widow had made, and he descended the ladder from the loft to the main floor. Two-year-olds shouldnt and most couldnt do these things, but such was the boys stock, determined. His mother and sister were out knocking tomato worms off newly sprouted yellow Hillbillies. Trenchmouth reached up for the front door latch, opened, and ran for it.
He was a big boy at two years and four months. Long since off the diaper and expertly outhouse-trained. On this day, he felt the mornings oatmeal churning so he headed for the backhouse, as Ona called it. The half quarter moon cut-out was lined with cobweb. Inside, the seat was two-holed, big for the Widow, small for Trenchmouth and Clarissa. He perched himself. Afterwards, like he was taught, the boy reached in the scoop bag and dropped lime down the hole, on top of his business. Something always caused him to run out of there afterwards, some stench he could not place.
He could heave rocks. While Ona and Clarissa tended plants, Trenchmouth stood in the barn and threw rocks and dirt clods at Beechnut the mule. The animal swished his tail and rocked his head side to side. He generally didnt care for being hit with such things, but he took it. Blinked his eyes. Snorted. The boy laughed and clomped his way to the tack room. He knew the Widow kept a paper sack of sugar cubes in a saddle bag high up. That climbing came in handy.
Out back of the barn, the boy sucked on a cube, then set it down and watched the flies come to it. The flies only landed on licked sugar cubes, never dry. Little Trenchmouth could already figure such things as useful somehow. He buried more clay marbles in a quick-dug hole next to another hiding the jawbone of a fox. Hed come back for all these in time. Theyd all have their uses.
When he walked up to them, they were bent at the waist, Ona strong and middle-aged and wiry, Clarissa a miniature version of all these things. It was as if they were blood kin. Their dresses were made from old window curtains.
Get to bug knockin, the Widow told Trenchmouth. Shed long since stopped scolding for naptime escapes.
Get to bug knockin, Clarissa said directly. She liked to mimic her mother. She was tall and thin, not quite grade school aged, but already taller than the first and second graders, girls and boys both.
Trenchmouth made a noise at them not unlike a cats call before a fight. Deep and verging on howl. The boy was gifted physically, and he could figure the way things worked quick, but he could not, or did not, speak a lick. Just moaned and howled and grunted, and, when he really got bothered, smacked his own head on both sides with little open palms.
He began knocking worms and bugs with his little squared-off fingernails. He bent at the knees. Concentrated. Licked his rotten gums and teeth and stared wide-eyed. But something bad got in the wind again and he stood up, sniffed. The smell made his lip quiver. It was too much for his olfactory to take, something awful hed not caught wind of so strong before. The Hillbilly tomato in front of him went blurry, filled his vision with red, and his ears went to ringing. Terror took him, sudden and unexplained. He spat and grunted and ran for his mother, clinging to her rough-stitched muslin skirt until the gray hem ripped and she shook him loose like a wet dog does water.