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.