The Twelve-Mile Straight

SIX

GEORGIA WAS BORN DRY,” THE WHITE-RIBBONERS LIKED TO say. “The pity of it is, she did not stay that way.” The colony of England’s poor and persecuted, every schoolchild knew well, was the first state to try Prohibition. It lasted only seven years. By the time it came around again, in 1908, most of the counties, including Cotton, had already voted themselves dry, but that fact didn’t stop Reverend Quick’s wife, the choral director and a prominent member of the Florence chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, from singing every Sunday, to the tune of “Dixie”:

From Georgia Land so fair and bright

King Alcohol has taken flight,

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord! Georgia Land!

Juke Jesup had before then become well acquainted with King Alcohol. He was eleven and still called John when he took his first sip of moonshine under the railroad trestle behind the cotton mill, then spit it in the river. “Taste like turpentine,” he said, but he went back the next afternoon and took another sip and didn’t spit it out. String Wilson’s older cousins, who visited each summer from the piney woods of north Georgia, had built a crude still in a shed behind the mill. Down by the railroad, they liked to get String and Juke drunk, then spin them in circles and watch them fall to the ground, laughing. Once String landed in the fire pit and nearly burned his left leg off. Juke had to drag him into the river. Another time, the cousins dared String to cross the mill dam and he slipped and fell twelve feet into the water and nearly smashed his head like a watermelon on the rocks below. Then Juke had to drag him out of the river. String was always getting into trouble. It wasn’t his fault; he was too good-natured, too game, too skinny—that was why he was called String. He liked to let folks spin him around. He grew up helping his father in the mill, then, like Juke, married a spinner and had himself a baby. When the war started he got it in his mind to go across the waters and fight, and he came back to Georgia in a coffin made of such fine mahogany that Juke couldn’t help but run his hands over it. String did love to whittle a piece of wood.

It was the same year the boll weevil came to Cotton County. No one knew where it came from. For all Juke knew it had stowed away in String’s coffin and traveled all the way from Europe. Juke remembered the first time he’d seen one, on the pink petal of a cotton flower, common as a cockroach, but with a snout as long as its legs. He’d plucked it off and crushed it between his fingers. That was May. By June, the field was full of them, the grubs eating through the bolls the moment they hatched. In September, String’s father, George Wilson, drove his automobile out to the farm. He snapped a boll of cotton and cupped it in his palm, studying the pod of seeds that never grew. “It ain’t your fault, honey,” George said. “It ain’t no one’s fault.” They stood out there until the sun went down, Juke in his straw hat, George in his white suit and bowler, looking over the ruined field. That year they lost nearly all the crop.

After her son died, Parthenia Wilson never missed a day of church; her husband never went back. String’s widow threw herself off the mill dam and broke her leg and smashed up her face and was sent to the sanitarium, and Freddie, seven years old, moved into the mill house with his grandparents. The old copper still on the river rusted over, until Juke, coming by each evening to sit with George, remembering what String’s cousins had taught him, got it running again. In the upstairs office of the cotton mill, George and Juke drank peach brandy, talking about String and about the farm where, as boys, the two had played. Juke said, “You weren’t too keen on me painting him with tar,” and George laughed and said he didn’t remember. “You ain’t remember? You said he weren’t to play with me no more.” George waved his hand. Back then, he said, the world was no bigger than the farm. On a farm, you played with who was there. On the phonograph, George played the same song, dragging the needle back to the beginning as soon as it ended. They’ll never want to see a rake or plow, and who the deuce can parleyvous a cow? How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

George’s son was dead; Juke’s wife and his father, a sharecropper on the Wilsons’ land long before Juke was born, were dead too. Liquor had a way of making tender feelings duller and sharper at the same time. After a long day plowing, a farmer liked to enjoy a whiskey as much as anyone. Those who were vets liked gin. They’d gotten a taste for it in Europe. George and Juke got a taste for it too. George taught Juke to care more about the liquid in his glass than how fast it got him pissed, and Juke could play fancy as George Wilson. He imagined String in a bar in France, where the gin flowed freely, a pretty girl on the bar stool next to him. For the mash he tried barley, then red wheat, then rye, alternating the cover crops winter after winter; he planted a grove of juniper trees. In the west hundred, which had been cotton, he planted peanuts and corn and the sorghum cane that went into the gin. “Diversify, son,” said George. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s the key to staying ahead of nature.” In with the berries Juke tried everything he could find on the farm—rabbit tobacco, blackberries, tea leaves, pecan paper shells, then on one inspired summer morning settled on the silky white petals of a cotton flower. He brought a jar from that batch to George and George smacked his lips like an English lord and said, “By God, it tastes clean as a cotton field.” The cotton might have closed its fists to Juke but he’d take of it what he could. That was the kind of goddamn ingenuity only a poor man was capable of, but Juke Jesup, goddamn if he would be a poor man one more day.

Sheriff Cleave shut down the still within a few years, claiming it belonged to an unknown group of mill workers; the Messenger ran a photograph of him hacking into it with an ax. But it was Parthenia Wilson, not the law, they needed to divert, along with Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife, and Tabitha Quick, the reverend’s wife, and their whole bonneted mob of the WCTU. The operation had outgrown the shed, anyway. In the wooded acres in the southwest corner of the crossroads farm, just up the bank of the creek, Juke Jesup built a log cabin with a new copper still so shiny he could see his face in it, and one night in 1921 the first cases of Cotton Gin, as it came to be known, were driven into the mill yard in Juke’s brand-new Model T truck. George Wilson was there to receive the shipment, which was warehoused in an upstairs storage room of the mill, just inside the office. George never called it a partnership, but that’s what it was, with agreements like any other. Juke carried out the production. George handled the business. Farmers drove their cotton into the yard and left with their truck beds full of gin, the cases clothed in the mill’s cotton seconds. Just keep it out of the hands of the mill folks, George warned. They had to be in the right mind to work.

That first year, while the boll weevil grubs still wormed their way through the fields of Georgia and the price of cotton dropped from forty-two cents to ten, Juke and George made four times as much on King Alcohol as they did on King Cotton. Enough to give Sheriff a case on the first of every month.

When the Wilsons left the farm and moved into town to the mill, Juke’s father said they needed some womankind about, so he married a girl he’d met at a camp meeting in Coffee County, a dark-haired, thin-lipped creature closer to Juke’s age than his father’s who liked to clean Juke’s pecker in the washbasin. Tug, tug, tug, the same dazed satisfaction with which she milked a cow, and when to Juke’s astonishment he yielded into the water his own milk, “There you go,” she’d say, “all clean.” Sometimes she seemed almost to laugh over him, a joke between her and herself, and Juke wanted to be in on the joke. “You bigger than your daddy,” she said once, “but he ain’t no bigger than a boy’s,” and all at once in his chest came a feeling as unstoppable as the one between his legs—as much pride as hate, hate for her and her ugly thin-lipped mouth, hate for his small-peckered father, hate for himself for the way his body went limp and helpless under her hand.

Each month, on certain afternoons, he was sent down to the creek to fish—“Go catch supper”—while his father and stepmother thrashed about in their bed like a couple of trout in a pail. When the red rags appeared over the ledge of the outhouse, it meant his father would disappear into the woods and shoot squirrels. From this game his stepmother would produce a stony kind of stew, which the family would consume in penitent silence, the stew thinning to a squirrel-colored broth, until the next time Juke was sent to the creek, and then it was fish cakes for supper, battered with hope, crispy. After the meal, she drank primrose tea, and then at last the tea did its work. Juke was to be a brother. For a time there was bacon and cobbler and warm beaten biscuits from their own wheat—it was the year they grew wheat—and fish fry and fish cakes and fish stew, for Juke was sent down to the creek every day, for hours. He began to take his baths there. His stepmother told him he was old enough to wash himself. He took off his shoes and rolled up his pants legs and waded in and pretended String was still there with him. Their feet knew every stone in the creek. The sun was warm. The fish were small but they were plentiful. They filled the bucket. Juke carried it down the road back to the farm, where one afternoon he returned to a red rag hanging over the outhouse ledge, the bloodiest yet. In church, the neighbors offered a prayer for the Jesup family’s loss.

Not long after that, on a Sunday morning, Juke’s stepmother packed her things. His father didn’t try to stop her—she could take her worthless womb back to Coffee County—but first he sent Juke out to the creek for another hour and took the stepmother, whose name was Jenny, to their narrow bed. Juke could hear her screams from there. If anyone else heard, they pretended they didn’t. When Juke came back his father told him to go in the house, it was his turn in the bed with her. Juke was about twelve by then and he reckoned it was. He had not had to tell his father about the washbasin—his father seemed to know that she should be punished, and in this knowledge Juke was assured of the righteous order of things.

So the ghosts Juke lived with were many, and they still inhabited the big house when Elma was born into it and Jessa joined the ghosts. Juke would not remarry. A mother was a mother; she couldn’t be swapped out for a suitable substitute. “Go forth and multiply,” the Reverend Quick reminded him. “Have you some sons.” But childbearing was the bloodiest business Juke had known, bloodier than the slaying of hogs, which didn’t profess to be anything but slaying. His father had survived on the farm with one child; so would Juke.

This was a gift, Elma was meant to know, a sacrificial offering dangled by her father so often it became like a dark, shiny fruit. She was inclined to reach for it and snap it off the branch. What was so wicked about a stepmother? A momma to plait her hair like Ketty did Nan’s, to let down her hem, scrub behind her ears? In church, she busied herself by fancying all the ladies who might make her daddy a good wife. Each family took up a whole pew, eight sandy heads, ten, a dozen. No one got lonesome in a family like that. Elma and Juke knew what it was to be the only child in a house, to roll over in bed without knocking into someone else. They knew the power of ghosts, and imaginary friends, and real ones. They knew how easy it was to fashion a sibling, even when the sibling slept under another roof, with a family of its own, even if it was a family hired and not born by blood.

Good night, my sister, my brother, they thought, from under the other roof. Tomorrow we will meet at the creek.

SEVEN

MANFORD RAWLS’S OFFICE WAS ON MAIN STREET, NEXT DOOR to Pearsall’s Drugs and down the street from his home. It was the only doctor’s office in town. There, between the hours of eight and four, he gave shots, set breaks, dispensed medicine, depressed the spotted tongues of children with his wooden stick. He was a stubborn old white man, no traveling country doctor. If you went into labor in the middle of the night, you fetched a midwife. If you caught a fever in the evening, you waited until morning. One night when Nan was nine, returning home from delivering a baby with her mother, a man flagged down the truck they were in, his flannel shirt a bloody belt around his waist. His stomach had been cut with the glass of a broken bottle, and Nan watched as Ketty took out her satchel and sewed up the wound with a needle and thread, the man lying on the green corn husks in the bed of the truck. He was a colored man; the driver was too. The driver, who two hours before had become a father, left the man with a jar of Jesup’s Cotton Gin on Dr. Rawls’s step, where he slept until the morning, and even then the doctor made him wait until he saw a white woman with a rash on her legs.

But when Dr. Rawls learned about the twins, when word had reached him that their mother had no intention of parading them into town, he made an exception to his hours. On a Friday evening, he drove his beady black Plymouth out to the farm. The puppies heard the engine and went tearing out to see who it was. He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.

“Babies need to be seen,” said the doctor, coming through the breezeway to the back porch, where he lifted a towel from the rocker that had not been offered him and seated himself in it. Nan and Elma were giving the twins their weekly bath, both babies squeezed into the aluminum tub, their skin soapy blue in the last hour of sunlight. The day was cool and crisp, the first day that felt like fall. Nan had been enjoying the evening, her hands in the warm water, the babies splashing. The doctor looked at them admiringly, as though they were a pair of his own prize pigs.

Juke sat on the top porch step, his shaving bowl between his bare feet on the step below, a tumbler of gin at his hip. His left cheek was smooth, his right still bristly with red and silver and gold. When Dr. Rawls took a seat, Juke shuttled the glass to the third step. He turned and tipped his straw hat, but he didn’t take it off, and he didn’t stand up. “Doctor.”

“Mr. Jesup.”

“These younguns got a sickness I need to know about?”

The doctor lifted Wilson out of the water, slipped him straight out of Nan’s hands like a fish. Nan and Elma were still crouched behind the tub, and Nan moved to stand up, but Elma yanked her down by the hand that wasn’t holding Winna in the bath, then slipped it into hers. The doctor settled Wilson onto the towel on his lap. “I’m just here for some preventive care. Standard practice.”

Juke slipped his straight razor into the bowl of water and leveled it against his right cheekbone, scraping it down to the wedge of his jaw. You could hear the blade on his skin, rough as a rake over stony soil. He was not going to offer the doctor coffee. He was not going to tell any stories. “Is it standard practice to call on a patient after supper?”

“In exceptional cases it is.”

“Don’t make no exception for us, please. These babies are as standard as they come. They got ten fingers and ten toes, same as anybody.”

The doctor was combing through Wilson’s hair with his fingers, inspecting his scalp, and Nan had to squeeze Elma’s hand to keep from leaping up again. “Miss Jesup,” the doctor said, not looking up, “you want your children to be healthy, don’t you?”

“Course I do.” Elma let go of Nan’s hand, scooped up Winna Jean, and wrapped her in a towel. “That’s why I keep them at home, so they won’t catch nothing.”

“They’s plenty a child can catch on a farm, even out here in the country air.” From his satchel he removed his stethoscope and fit the disk to the boy’s chest. “You folks don’t need me to remind you.” He turned his head and, for the first time since he’d arrived, met Nan’s eyes. “Tetanus. Smallpox. Diphtheria.” She remembered the first time he’d pressed that cold stethoscope to her skin, and the first time he’d pressed his tongue depressor to her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth and he saw there was nothing to depress, he jumped back as if she’d bitten him.

“They’re preventable diseases now,” the doctor said. “Medicine has come a long way.” In the doctor’s lap, Wilson stared transfixed at the shiny faces of his glasses. The doctor took a loaded syringe from his bag and sank it into the naked baby’s thigh, as casually as he might stick a cooked turkey. Wilson opened his mouth and released a cry.

Nan released a cry too. She shot up from the porch floor and clapped her hand over her mouth. It was the kind of cry she tried to keep inside, a lonesome, ugly cry, like an animal in pain. It had been so long since she’d made the sound that it sounded alien to her own ears. The others looked at her, eyes wide. She didn’t care. Without Elma to hold her back, she rushed to Wilson and took him in her arms.

“Doctor!” Elma said, and Nan was grateful for her voice. “What in Heaven!”