Chapter 32 Still Life
Still Life
Lydia Brown
Professor Covey rides in the front seat and Gus in back, and we park on the ridge and follow the path.
My cottage is the best starting point to the graveyard so we don’t get lost. We pause long enough for our visitor to gawk at the view that overwhelms new eyes, and I promise tea and a tour when we return.
He’s quiet on the walk and holds on to a clue that puts pep in his step.
Gus has loaded film in her camera for this second excursion, and as before, the white cat leads the way.
It’s as though Uncle’s natural compass is on point and the graveyard is her true north.
We walk on a mission of the professor’s making, and I don’t think about our destination.
I think about the cat that has captured Gus Flannery’s heart.
My heart has never been owned by an animal, and that’s a shortcoming.
The closest was my affection for a mule on my family’s tobacco farm.
He was as hardworking as any field hand, and he never complained.
When I was a child, Daddy could put me on the mule’s wide back and know I was safe.
Someone had misnamed him Assassin long before I was born.
It was years after his tail had been set on fire by a hateful boy trying to get Lucy’s attention, and later when the mule was poisoned, that I understood the cleverness of his name gone wrong.
Donkeys are asses. Not mules. Our mule was called an ass twice in his name, but he didn’t care.
When he was murdered, I gave him as good a funeral as a girl of six could muster.
Despite barn cats and stray dogs that showed up, Assassin was as close to a beloved pet as I’ve had. He was my friend.
Professor Covey keeps a good pace and only needed two breaks.
The thrill of an adventure has recharged him like a man twenty years younger.
Each time we stop, I spy another white cat in the distance.
If they were lined up beside Uncle, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
No one else seems to notice but me. We arrive at the graveyard in forty-five minutes.
The professor points to a bubbling spring I’d missed. He instructs us to circle the outer wall and note the misalignment of the middle headstone, then asks, “What do you see?”
We don’t answer his rhetorical question because we must not see what he sees.
He steps inside and walks around the three stones.
Using his walking stick, he brushes aside leaves, plucks moss, and tosses twigs.
He drags the stick along the top of two parallel roots.
He examines the large stone and rubs his palm against the markings then pauses over the daisy wheel at the top.
He traces the outline with his knotty finger, pulls a penknife from his pocket and clears the outer groove. Then he presses against the marking.
Nothing happens.
“Ladies,” he says, and we join him and press on the stone till we hear an odd squeal. Like freight train brakes on tracks. The headstone moves.
We step back and breathe heavily, shocked at what happened. He says, “I opened the lever, but we need to push harder near the top. Ready?”
We dig in our heels and use our upper bodies to force open a crack in the ground the width of the main headstone; a cloud of chilled, fetid air escapes. “Don’t stop,” he urges, and we push harder, and the gap broadens. Are we opening the crypt of a witch’s tomb centuries old?
When we have a six-inch gap, Professor Covey is winded and holds up his hand.
“I need to catch my breath.” We step back and rub our hands to release the grit and dirt.
Our palms are dimpled and sore. Professor Covey rests on the rock wall and leans his head against the walking stick.
His face is flushed but proud. He chuckles and hands his flashlight to me. Gus pulls hers from her back pocket.
“Go on. Take a look.”
My niece looks first, confident there is nothing to harm her. “It’s a ladder.”
“As I thought,” he says. “Now, Gus, you need to go on the back side of this headstone. You’ll find parallel tracks.” She hurries around the stones. “You see them?”
“I do.” She drops to her knees and uses a stick to clear the dirt and roots.
“Now let’s press on the large stone again,” he says, and it moves more easily along the freed rails. Soon the opening is wide enough to descend. He warns, “Use care, Gus. Test each rung before you put your weight. The ladder may be rotten.”
At the bottom, Gus says, “It’s solid. Come on down. You guys gotta see this.”
I turn to the professor. “This is your amazing discovery, can you make it down?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
And I follow till we stand in a cavernous room dimly lit by the opening, braced by timbers, lit by our flashlights.
Rusty lanterns hang from iron hooks at all four corners.
There are dented copper pots connected by tubing to wooden barrels.
Empty gallon jugs and rows of smaller bottles with cork stoppers sit in rows.
Professor Covey grins like it’s Christmas.
“How did you know?” I ask.
He chuckles. “I’ve heard every moonshine story ever told.
The clever ways moonshiners disguised their stills to trick revenuers.
There’s an entire bookcase in the store dedicated to the craft.
Your headstones contained too many errors to be accidental.
The stonemason was poking fun, especially putting a single death date on Halloween.
He might have offered his skill in exchange for hooch.
Add the facts that the border combined pagan and Christian symbols and that there were no homestead remains close by, I had a good idea we were looking at a moonshine cover-up.
Not a haunted wood but rumors designed to keep the curious away.
When I saw the natural spring, I knew before we even opened the chamber.
Water’s essential for moonshine but not for a graveyard.
They would run a pipe when needed and dismantle it when not.
The smokestacks are contained in the headstones. Very clever engineering.”
The space is roughly thirty feet square. Chunks of upended logs serve as stools, probably where the shiners sat while the moonshine cooked. A dusty miner’s coat hangs on a wooden peg.
“How old is all this,” Gus asks, “and where do the tunnels go?” She shines her light toward the black holes framed with roughhewn planking. The puny light is swallowed by inky black.
Professor Covey guesses. “It could connect mica or gem mines. It might lead to a cave on a neighboring mountain. And while this room goes back decades, it’s not centuries old as the dates imply.
Those dates were made up. Why it was shut down is the big question.
It wasn’t revenuers because they would have destroyed the still. ”
Gus snaps pictures and I look for something that would give us a clue to the time frame.
A newspaper or calendar. Empty burlap sacks are neatly stacked, and I take one off the top and shake off the dust. I also take the old miner’s coat.
My headache ratchets up, but now I know why: a sealed underground room where 110-proof liquor was made.
I feel a pinch of sadness that this mystery is based on something as common as illicit liquor. But there are still things to understand. Who devised this clever ruse? And if we ever followed those dark tunnels, will we find the bones of men whose dreams came to a tragic end?
We’re back at my cottage late afternoon, and I put on the kettle for tea while Gus and Uncle sit on the porch with the professor.
The door and windows are open, and I put earthenware mugs on a tray and a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies Gus made yesterday.
I hear her ask, “You said moonshiners are sneaky. What other things do they do?”
“A common one was wearing clip-on deer or cow shoes on the bottom of their own shoes, much like adding roller skates to saddle oxfords. The imprint in the dirt hid their man-made footprints leading to the still. It can be a cunning game.”
“What was the clue that told you about ours?”
“There was too much off in that graveyard, but when you and Lydia felt sick and chilled kneeling by the headstones, that was the kicker.”
I bring out the tea tray. “Professor, is there a map of the tunnels?” I pour Earl Gray in our mugs and pass the cookies.
“You’re asking a complex question, Lydia.
There are hundreds of independent mining companies in these counties, especially mica, and there’s iron and copper mines too, but there’s no reason to share tunnel information.
They’d have a stake in their own enterprise on their own land, but not their competitors’.
And then there is a labyrinth of ancient mines discovered in this county that goes back thousands of years.
You’re easily talking about a thousand tunnels.
Personally, I believe there are more miles of underground tunnels than there are county roads, but I’d be surprised if anyone has compiled an overall map. ”
“Does anybody live there?” Gus dips her cookie in her tea.
“Sometimes strangers come to town with grime etched in their pasty skin. They blink beady eyes against the light like a mole. Folks speculate where they come from. In desperate times, finding any place out of rough weather would be a prize.”
The burlap bag sits on the old man’s thin legs.
He fingers the material and stitching and notes the printing on the sack: Lester Pfister.
It held a bushel of corn and weighed fifty-six pounds when full.
Mr. Pfister printed proof of his product’s quality on every bag.
Grown and processed under my personal supervision from inbreds developed by me.
“What are inbreds? I know what the word usually means, but clearly it’s different here if Mr. Pfister is boasting about it.”
“Inbreeding involves the transfer of pollen from an individual plant to the silks of the same plant. It’s tedious work done for several generations of corn before it stabilizes.
Plant breeders create varieties with specific traits.
They might be fast-growing or able to tolerate drought, or they’re particularly resistant to a pest like the European corn borer.
That extra work would be reflected in the price.
Your moonshiners had a first-class operation. ”
He sets the feed sack aside and holds out his hand for the denim coat I took off a peg. It’s a worker’s coat caked with dried mud and smelling of the dank. The familiar name Levi Strauss is legible at the neck. The coat has lived a hard life. Professor Covey fingers the seams.
“What are you looking for?”
“Secret places to hide gems or gold,” he grins, “or notes from a ghost.”
“Really?” Gus stops petting Uncle and leans forward.
He finds an inside slit in a seam and pulls out a thin notebook smaller than an index card.
He hands it to me, and I squint at the tiny print.
Gus leans over to see. It’s a ledger of clients.
Dated 1918. Sixty years back. She says, “Looks like moonshine was going for six dollars a gallon and a dollar a pint. There are pages of names in tiny print—first initial, last name. I wonder if they knew their names were being recorded?”
Professor Covey returns to the denim jacket when something crinkles in the upturned cuff. Paper? Money? It’s a folded note. He pulls out a small magnifying glass from his shirt pocket and catches the light. What he reads aloud turns our world upside down.