The Bootleggers

i- A liquor dispensary, locally known as Bund Pig or Blind Tiger, in Knott County, Kentucky about .1900. V^£» (From files of HindmanSettlement School) ^AI The Bootleggers by DEAN CADLE Wint climbed up on the pile of lumber slabs and slipped a Nehi pop bottle from one of Dad's old coats that hung on the wall. The bottle was half empty. Wint put it to his lips and tasted the wine. "Boy! This stuff's getting better every day." "Well, it ought to; it's been working long enough. Put more sugar in it, though, and put it back to work." Sometime in the darkness before morning it had turned cold, and the big soft flakes that had been so thick in the air yesterday afternoon and tickled our eyeballs as we came from school had stopped falling. Through the window between the stacks of sawed wood we could see the white slope of the yard, and we could tell where the path from the kitchen door led only by the location of the two waist-high cedars near the alley, now looking like big white eggs standing on their bigger ends. The houses on both sides of the hollow had grown thick roofs during the night. A mile up Yellow Creek we could see on the hillside a black patch of the slate dump where the snow had not lain because of the heat from the smoldering shale inside; lazy smoke drifted from the patch to disappear against the white background. Crawling on the slabs on his knees, Wint moved on down along the wall, patting the pockets of all the coats and overalls for the bottles we had hidden. He took out one bottle after another, added a teaspoonful of sugar, and slipped each one back into its own pocket. "Sure don't want to get these stoppers too tight," he said. "Bust some night just like dynamite caps." I finished sawing my slab and 62 placed the blocks neatly on the high stack near the window. "Hot zing!" Wint said, sipping from another bottle. "This stuffs sure going to knock somebody's block off. You want to taste it?" He handed a bottle down to me. "Still pretty sour." He put the bottle away and sat down on top the slab pile. "What're we going to do with it all?" "Why, we'll drink it. That's what we made it for, ain't it? Drink it and give Mr. Carroll some." "Yeah, we got to give him some for sure. If it hadn't been for him we mighta ruint it all. He says he never knowed how to make blackberry wine. But I bet he's made plenty of it, else how'd he know so sure putting vinegar in it made it stronger and better ? I bet he's just kidding us." "I don't know, now. Cause he's made a lot of whiskey is no sign he's fooled around with wine. There's just never been any money in wine." Everybody in camp, of course, knew the tales about Mr. Carroll's whiskey days. As a young man he was supposed to have made the best whiskey on Yellow Creek. He had been a rough bird in those days. But now he was a changed man. He had the Holy Ghost for sure, and he was a deacon in the church. During the summer he plowed gardens and gathered herbs and roots that he sold to a drug store in town. He did a lot of reading, too. That's about all he did do during the winter. He always let me read his magazines, and as far as Wint and I were concerned he was a well-read, all-right fellow. Mother never took to our association with him, though. She wouldn't let us call him "Uncle Jake" like everybody else did. "It'll be much nicer if you just call him 'Mister Carroll ,' " she would say. Used to we never saw much of him, but after Dad died and Mother went to work in the overall factory we began going herb digging with him, and Wint...