Good Vibrations (6 page)

6
BANJOS,
MOONSHINERS
AND THE FEDS

The rain started in earnest as we arrived at Haggerd's store. With its rickety wooden sidings, sloping roof and porch propped up with rustic posts, it nestled in the West Virginian hollow like the sleeve image of a country music album. Haggerd was out back checking his oil tank, wearing blue dungarees that appeared to have grown on him. His powerful face looked out from a shock of white hair making him appear nearer fifty-five than his actual seventy years as he moved with purpose to greet us. Roz and Shannon splashed in through the door, but Earl and I hung out under the porch with him drinking bottled beer. Haggerd unloaded his grief concerning bureaucracy which, he said with Earl's full concurrence, would bring the country down.

‘Fifteen different permits I needed to erect this here oil tank,' he grumbled, ‘and eight thousand dollars in administrative fees. Not so long ago you could have built the thing for that money and had change.'

‘Surely they have to have some sort of regulations so people don't spill the stuff all over the place,' I observed.

‘Ain't nuthin' to the guys who make the rules if we do spill it,' grunted Earl. ‘They're hundreds of miles away in the city. But these tanks today are so tight that there ain't no more spillage. All that paper serves no purpose… 'cept to breed more of the same useless crap.'

He lobbed his empty bottle expertly into a waste can 15 feet away and opened the fly screen into the store. Inside, the place was out of time. Shelves lined the walls, forming the alleyways typical of a small supermarket anywhere in the Western world, but these were of well-worn wood, not some easy-clean composite, and many of the products on sale were 1950s and beyond. Hardware like Grandpa used peeped out from behind buckets of nails. The basics of handed-down cooking skills were prominent, including yeast for home bread-baking. Jostling the packets for space were cans of Stockholm tar, a vital unction for traditional boats and now almost unobtainable in coastal communities anywhere. Horses use it too, though I've never understood why. Baseball hats and other crucial items of gentlemen's outfitting drooped from the ceiling, while huge bags of potato chips were piled up near to the counter so that whoever was running the show could grab a snack.

The overall effect was one of a darkness where anything on earth could be found by an informed searcher. Save for the small front windows and the door, the only light came from an unshaded bulb dangling over a sagging, round table where the weeks' newspapers were open to be read by the customers. Coffee was available. A tattered sign announced that alcohol consumption on the premises was illegal, but the regulation group of ‘good old boys' sat minding their own business, enjoying an ‘Old Milwaukee' in the late-day humidity. The rain pelted down on the still-hot tin roof.

Haggerd picked a cardboard six-pack out of the tall cold-locker and tossed it on to the table. We pulled up shaky kitchen chairs, flipped the tops off our bottles and settled on to our seats. Shannon came and sat on Earl's lap. Roz was still over at the counter with Dolly, Haggerd's wife, who was confiding that Shannon, the lady we had marked down as in her early twenties, was actually thirty-nine and the mother of four. Her first grandchild was almost due. Perhaps her eternal youth was something to do with being part Indian.

I looked at Shannon sideways in the dimness. Her colouring was pure Anglo-Saxon settler, but the native blood showed in the outline of her face. I remembered the memorial to the victims of the Indian massacre back in the shade of Sharon churchyard and the terrified child who hid in the bushes to see her parents butchered and then went on to raise children of her own. Somewhere, as the wheel turned, one of her descendants or a compatriot had done better than call a truce with the red man.

Travelling in the young land of America, it is easy to see that when an energetic population pushes forward into new territory under pressure from behind, fate is on the march. Nobody can stop what must surely happen. Those caught at the frontier, whether advancing or retreating, are hurled about like rag dolls, their souls laid bare by the harsh searchlight of their times. Heroes arise on both sides, and cowards. The greedy, the hardworking, the rapacious, the cunning, people who will die sooner than give ground and those ready in the end to submit and change, all find their place. Some display the best in humanity, others the worst; many just keep their heads down and live their lives, but none will alter what must inevitably come.

Earl, meanwhile, was revealing himself as something of a Man of the Road.

‘Used to be a gang of us with motorcycles,' he was saying, leaning forward, elbows on knees. ‘We'd meet Friday nights down the valley, drink beer an' shoot the breeze. Sometimes we'd go off for a ride together. We had a sort of pres'dent who said where we'd go, an' that was the end of it. Either you went there with the rest or you was out. We took it in turns to be pres'dent.

‘One time, we was down at Harry Harper's place late on, havin' a brew an' a barbecue. Harry was the pres'dent. He finishes his steak an he says, “I dunno 'bout you boys, but I'm headin' out to Nashville for breakfast.”

‘There was some grumblin', let me tell y'all, but we was all fuelled up, so away we went.

‘We rode all through that summer night, through the Cumberland Gap and on down across Tennessee. The moon came up late as we was passing Knoxville an' we was in Nashville for bacon an' eggs like the man said.'

‘So then did you all slug back home?' I enquired. ‘No sir,' Earl took a deep swig. ‘We kick-started those bikes an' Harry headed straight on out West. We blasted clear across Arkansas and Oklahoma. It came on dark around Oklahoma City – which was eight hundred miles from the Grand ol' Opree. We stopped for gas and food and damn me if Harry didn't kick her over an' keep right on going. By now some of the guys had gone back an' a coupla ol' knucklehead Harleys had broke down, but the rest of us, that'd be half a dozen or so, we followed that crazy bastard on down into Texas.

‘We ran the panhandle in the night-time at ninety miles an hour. Never saw no cops. In the mornin' the sun came up behind us an' we was in New Mexico. We swung north and climbed off in Santa Fe.'

‘So what did you do then?'

‘We drank some whiskey an' turned for home.'

Whether or not this yarn was true, it was well-received. Earl's audience now began pumping him for details.

‘Was you all ridin' Harleys?'

‘Mostly. One British Triumph and a Honda 400.'

‘A 400! How did that ever keep up?'

‘She was quick enough,' Earl expanded. ‘Feller ridin' her was nearly eighty. He never gave up, but on the second afternoon he starts askin' the guys to spell him cos that saddle was mean. I took her for an hour an' that was enough, let me tell y'all. How that ol' feller sat on that thing to Santa Fe I'll never understand. I didn't say nothin' when my hour was up because these were hard men. Your butt hurtin' wasn't somethin' you'd admit to, but I had to hand it to him. He had balls.'

The talk ran on until it was almost dark outside.

‘Where you folks restin' up tonight?' asked Haggerd.

‘We'll get back to the highway and find ourselves a room. Then on down towards the Cumberland Gap in the morning.'

Earl shook his head.

‘You don't want to be goin' anywhere in that rain,' he said, and it was true. A wall of water was falling from the sky and the road outside the store had turned into a muddy stream. It was motorcycle mayhem out there.

‘You could leave the bikes with Haggerd an' stay at our place,' offered Shannon, but Mrs Haggerd was a jump ahead in her hospitality.

‘I think we'd all like to have you visit for a few days till the weather clears up,' she announced. ‘The weatherman says this'll run the whole weekend. Haggerd's ma's house is empty now she's taken up with Fred. It's right up the back here. No one else needs it. You can even put your bikes under cover. Stay there till you're ready to move on out.'

And so Hurricane Bertha did us one of the great favours of the journey. She had led us into the arms of a family untouched in its structure by the TV dinner, the universal divorce and the video store. None of them were regular church-goers, though we were now firmly in the Bible Belt. Haggerd told me he'd never been inside a place of worship since the preacher stole his whiskey and his morning paper, but kindness to people on the road was as natural to them as sunshine after rain. Visiting was the main recreation, with yarns that were like the best tales of the sea and must have grown just as much with the telling. This was true oral tradition, a form of literature hard to find in Britain and in the cities of the US, but it flourished here in the hollow.

We unloaded the bikes in the clamouring darkness of the storm. The spare house was built on a slope opposite the store. It must have been just as his mother left it, walking out on her two strong legs to marry a childhood sweetheart. Fred had made good in a nearby town and, like Ma, was in his nineties. The photographs on the wooden walls could have been from folk history books, with tall, rangy, second-generation mountain farmers standing self-consciously for the camera, uncomfortable in Sunday-go-to-meeting outfits. The parents of those people had come here, many from England, Scotland and Ulster, in search of an improvement over impossibly hard times at home. They lived first by trapping, hunting and gathering what they could, only later planting crops near their simple cabins. On a sideboard under one of these images was Ma's television set, early 1960s with a tiny screen, mute witness to the changes she had seen. Creeping into the adjoining room, we found an ancient bed beneath a wondrous quilted counterpane. In the back kitchen the staple, dried food cupboards were full, but the wardrobe stood empty. Ma had gone for good.

We unpacked our gear then scurried through the downpour down to Haggerd's place for dinner. The men were sitting in the shelter of the porch enjoying the air, now cool and washed clean of bugs. Shannon and Dolly were inside cooking. Roz went to join them and Earl poured me a generous shot of what looked like whiskey, out of an unmarked bottle.

‘This here is finest mountain dew,' he announced. ‘Distilled right up in the woods.'

Haggerd offered me some lemonade to dilute the spirit, but I took a drop of water as I do with my Scotch. The taste was much like a branded sour mash whiskey, but the illegal nature of its origin gave it a savour of its own.

‘I didn't think people did their own distilling nowadays,' I said, and that was the trigger for a flood of moonshining stories.

Making whiskey ran in Haggerd's family but, as always, Earl led off by recalling his own father being hauled up before the judge by a new town deputy for being drunk in public. The judge fined Pa ten dollars and sent him out of court. An hour later, he was picked up again, even more drunk than before, and back to the courthouse he went. The judge now infuriated the lawman by handing out another ten buck fine and throwing him and his freed prisoner out. By this time of day the judge was well into his own cups, and as the deputy opened the door, the judge called out to him to quit bothering the court and to let the old man bring him in a couple of bottles. It was well known by everyone in town except, it seemed, the sheriff's new representative, that the judge kept a supply of moonshine in a gallon jar that was painted white so it looked like milk. Earl's pa gave the deputy a jaunty ‘good day' and went home for the bottles. When he returned to the courthouse everyone had left except the judge, who had passed out on the bench.

The next arrival on Haggerd's porch was his son-in-law, Jim, who continued to work a still up the mountain as part of his own family tradition even though, as he observed, trade had quietened down as living standards had risen across the country. He opened a heavy banjo case and intermittently picked out tunes as the talk rambled around to building the simple apparatus needed for the job. Haggerd lamented declining standards in the automotive industry.

‘Time was when you could take the radiator out of a ‘Cat' tractor, clean her out, and set her up in the woods. They was pure copper and they made the dandiest little stills. That's all gone to hell now, though,' he sighed, ‘them new radiators is all steel. You can never get all the rust out.'

I asked if people were ever caught in the act of distilling

‘You still need to be careful,' he sipped his drink, ‘but thirty years ago them revenuers was everywhere. Folks would always set their stills half-way up a hillside. If you heard the revenue men comin' through the woods you'd have to leave it to get busted up, but they'd never catch you on account of how you'd placed yourself.

‘They'd have to be on foot,' he explained, ‘because there weren't no four-track vehicles to get into the woods in them days. By the time they reached you, they'd already climbed a few hundred feet so they were pretty well washed up. You were fresh. So long as you ran uphill, you'd leave them standing.'

Earl had never been a prime mover in the distilling industry, but back in his extreme youth in the 1950s he had been a runner, carrying moonshine down to Georgia and North Carolina in souped-up automobiles. It had been a sort of deadly game, like motor racing with an honest profit for the winners. These were usually the moonshiners, but there were accidents and occasional convictions as state troopers with massive V-8 motors latched on to them. There were also shoot-outs, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The truth probably was that much of the trade had been far from homely fun, but in Earl's memory, the whole business had taken on a Robin Hood flavour.

Earl's favourite car had been a 1940 Ford with a three-speed on the column and a vacuum two-speed axle. This mighty motor was so hepped up that it would pull 125 mph in second gear and Earl knew there wasn't a patrol man in three states who could catch him. Then a rumour began spreading about a ‘hemi-head' Mercury with two four-barrel carburettors in the pay of a giant revenue man, but nobody in Earl's circle had ever seen this rocket ship. ‘Feller who told me about it claimed it burned so much gas that you either had to switch off the engine to fuel up or find a fast pump, because even at idle it was using up the stuff quicker than you could fill that tank.' One night, Earl had unloaded down in Georgia and was driving home to the hollow through North Carolina. The absence of speed limits in the happy days before the 1970s oil crisis meant that you couldn't be pulled merely for driving fast, so long as you weren't killing people. Earl was cruising through the darkness at a modest 100 or so when a pair of headlamps appeared in his mirror.