Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (2 page)

“Get out!”
he said. The dog yapped at me, two short, ear-piercing barks. Little fucker. I wanted to toss him across the room. Dad looked past me, one hand wildly clawing out. “Get her away from me! Get this crazy bitch away from me!”

The room went silent, and I felt people move away from the wing chair. I didn’t look up, but I knew that everyone—including Jay—was watching. My face burned, and the tears were coming, like it or not. My father. My own father was screaming at me to get out of his house. But I couldn’t obey him. I couldn’t move. All I could do was huddle there on the floor.

My brother, Wynn, dark hair slicked back and dressed in a navy blazer identical to my father’s, appeared beside the chair. I looked up at him, started to shake my head and babble something about not having said anything to upset Dad. But the light in his eyes dimmed just a bit—the way it always seemed to whenever I showed up—and he held up one hand. I clamped my mouth shut.

“You’re out early,” he said through a frozen smile.

“Just ten days. Wynn—”

Gene Northcut materialized between us, and I stopped abruptly.

“Excuse us, everyone,” Wynn announced to the room. All the faces turned toward him, like flowers to the sun, and I noticed his easy grin and the flash of white teeth. He was good at this. Very good. “My father would like to bid you all good night, so my sister and I can take him upstairs and get him comfortable. Please, carry on. We won’t be long. Althea?”

Under Northcut’s watchful eye, Wynn lifted Dad up by one arm and led him out of the room. I didn’t follow.

From out of the crowd, Jay materialized. “Hey, Althea. You okay?”

I felt frozen. Confused. Everyone was looking at me with expressions of pity and concern. Judgment too, if I was to be honest. Word had spread about me in the past year; it was foolish to think it hadn’t. And now this. This shitstorm of a homecoming. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.

“Can I get you a drink?” he said. “Water or something?”

“Hon.” It was Molly Robb beside me. She touched my elbow. “Let’s go.”

“It was nice to see you,” Jay said. I didn’t answer, just let Molly Robb lead me out of the room and into the front hall. Wynn was already at the top of the stairs with Dad. I took off after them.

“Althea!” she said behind me, but I ignored her and kept going, taking the stairs two at a time.

At the end of the hall, I saw Wynn’s carefully combed head disappear inside my father’s room. The door clicked neatly shut. I ran down the hall and grabbed the knob. I rattled it, but it wouldn’t budge. He’d locked it—my brother had locked me out of my father’s room. I knocked on the door. “Wynn.” I tried to keep my voice low. “Let me in.”

Molly Robb appeared beside me. “Althea, hon? You’re making a scene.”

“I’m not. I just want to see him.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “You really ought to leave.”

“I want to see my father.”

“He doesn’t want to see you right now, hon. I don’t know why you seem so surprised. After what you’ve put this family through.” She lowered her voice. “You have some nerve. Some nerve.”

I turned away from her, closed my eyes, and pressed my fingertips against them.
Breathe,
I told myself.

Yes, it had been a bad year. I’d stolen money from Dad and others. I’d spent ninety percent of my days in a haze from Percocet. So, naturally, he’d packed me off to rehab. And, yes, I’d fought it all the way. But after a while, after I’d been there a couple of weeks, I’d broken. I’d attended the meetings, shared in group. Worked the program. Dad and I traded phone calls, and he sent funny cards. When I moved to the halfway house, he sent me cupcakes from my favorite bakery.

Maybe it was just the strangeness of me being home again. The women in my group had told stories about how tough it could be for family to see you after a long rehab, clean and sober. Healthy, but a stranger.

“You’ve made things very awkward for Wynn,” Molly Robb said. “For me. The questions we have to answer, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Fine. I’ll stay away from both of you. But I will see my father.”

“He has Alzheimer’s, Althea,” she hissed, inches away from my face.

“I’m aware of that,” I said.
Don’t cry.

“It’s much worse than before you went away.” She paused. “He’s about to die.”

Even though I’d known it from the minute I’d seen the cars lining the drive, the news hit me like a gut punch. First my mother, now my father. Fury mixed with despair tingled into my arms and legs.

“So you were gonna just leave me in that hellhole while he slipped away?” I said. The tendrils of anger morphed into vines now and were squeezing me from the inside out. “You weren’t even going to tell me?”

“We didn’t want to interrupt your treatment. We thought it was best. If you had told us you were coming, we could have prepared him. As you can see, your being here upsets him.”

“He’s not in his right mind, Molly Robb. You and Wynn should’ve told me, you should’ve let me come home.” My voice broke. “I’m his daughter.”

“Althea,” she said. “Pull yourself together. We have a house full of people, here to honor your father. And”—she lowered her voice to an urgent whisper—“to support Wynn’s campaign. Gene Northcut is almost single-handedly funding the whole thing.”

“I don’t give a damn about Gene Northcut or Wynn’s campaign.”

“Which just proves how unbelievably selfish you are. This family has sacrificed everything for Wynn’s campaign. Everything. You know how much this means to your father. He’s wanted this for Wynn since he was a boy.”

She was right. Dad’s hopes had always been pinned to his golden boy. Never to his daughter. The most anyone could hope from me was that my fuck-ups wouldn’t ruin Wynn’s shot at political stardom.

“I don’t care about any of this. I want to see my dad,” I said.

“How could you be so cruel?” She shook her head. “He’s terrified of you.”

Before I could wrap my mind around the impossible idea that my six-foot-three bull of a father was afraid of me, I heard his voice boom from behind the locked bedroom door. It sounded strong. Self-assured, like I remembered.

“You tell her,” he shouted. “Tell that girl I said thirty’s a bitch. If her mother was here, she’d say the same. Thirty’s a goddamn bitch!” And then he burst into a gale of laughter.

Chapter Two

September 1937

Sybil Valley, Alabama

Women came from the holler, the mountain, even as far as the next valley over to buy Jinn Wooten’s honeysuckle wine. Usually they walked. Once in a while they rode mules, which drove her husband, Howell, plumb crazy. He was a farmer, his father a farmer and his grandfather before him, and to his way of thinking, mules were for plowing and not for transporting ladies on their errands.

Howell had been planning on pulling it all out, the mass of honeysuckle vines that had taken over the lower meadow. It was that Japanese stuff the government had put in across the eastern part of the country, over a hundred years ago. It was nasty as cancer and useless besides. Howell had been considering putting in some cotton down there, for extra cash, but lately, he’d been thinking cotton might need too much fertilizer and fussing over.

When the women came around, yoo-hooing for Jinn and asking for the honeysuckle wine, Howell usually vanished. All the same, times being what they were, she gave him whatever money she made. Well, most of it. At the beginning, anyway.

The honeysuckle wine had started off like any ordinary wine. Jinn had followed her aunt’s recipe for dandelion wine the first couple of times, but then she figured out some
tricks
—some extras here and there—and it became, more or less, a cross between a brandy and the white lightning her father made.

Jinn said she didn’t know exactly how the recipe had evolved—she was one of those cooks who said
a little of this
and
a little of that
when she told people how she made peach pie or rabbit stew—and she always told her customers she couldn’t quite remember the process of making the wine. Or what, exactly, made it so intoxicating.

But she knew if she mashed the blossoms by hand, rather than with a potato masher, it made the flavor purer. She knew just how many extra days letting the concoction ferment would give it that extra kick. She was the only one who knew about the special yeast she ordered from that fellow over in Cedartown. She knew.

While the men of Sybil Valley—all drinkers of moonshine—wouldn’t be caught dead imbibing honeysuckle wine, the ladies were a different story. They had discovered, a couple of years ago, that it was just as potent, but far smoother, than corn liquor. Word spread all the way across the state line to Chattanooga: Jinn Wooten, the girl whose hands always smelled like crushed honeysuckle, made an elixir that got you nice and toasty without taking a bite out of your fanny the next morning.

One day, when Howell was working in Huntsville with the Conservation Corps boys, and Jinn was fixing dinner for the kids, a pair of ladies from Chattanooga knocked on the Wootens’ door. They wore smart wool dresses with matching hats and velvety red lipstick, and drove a silver car that looked like a dragon.

They were nothing like her regular clientele, but they’d come for the same thing. They bought out her supply, and, as she watched them lay the milk bottles on the floorboards of the car and cover them with blankets like newborn babes, one of them shaded her eyes with a gloved hand.

“You ought to go to Hollywood,” she said. “Get yourself a screen test. You’re about the prettiest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She turned to her friend. “Madge! Don’t you think she ought to go to Hollywood?”

Walter and Collirene had joined their mother on the porch. The boy stood, feet apart, arms folded, watching the proceedings. His eyes darted like a crow’s, from his mother to the women, and his mouth turned down at the corners.

Madge straightened up and gave Jinn an appraising look. “She’s way prettier than Myrna Loy. How old are you?”

“Almost thirty. In a month.”

“Woo-wee, girl, you don’t look it. You look all of about seventeen.”

Jinn’s daughter, Collirene, moved close and gathered a fistful of her mother’s skirt.

“You want to go to Hollywood, sugar?” Madge asked her. “Like your mama?”

Collirene didn’t answer.

“You want to be a star of the silver screen?”

Collie tried to bury herself in the folds of the skirt, and Jinn placed a protective hand on her curly head. Walter was her fearless child. He carried himself like one of the rangy backwoodsmen who lived up in the laurel wilds of the mountain—watchful eyes and a smart mouth, even at twelve. Not her Collie.

“She’s too shy for that, I guess,” Jinn said.

“Shy don’t set the world on fire,” Madge pronounced, then the two ladies climbed into the silver dragon. They promised her they’d be back, and, when they’d driven off in a cloud of dust, Jinn folded the wad of bills in her skirt pocket. There was over one hundred total, but she wouldn’t tell Howell about it. She would ask him who Myrna Loy was, though.

During supper, Walter’s crow eyes stayed fastened to his mother. “Who was they?” he asked.

“Who were they?” Jinn corrected. “Just friends. That’s all.” He gave her a look—and for one brief second, she thought how much he resembled her own father. Without a word, he pushed back from the table and clattered out the back door. He hadn’t finished his collards, but she didn’t call him back.

Later that night, after tucking in the children, Jinn crept down to the cellar where she kept her buckets and tubes, cheesecloth and corks. She slid the one hundred dollars, a couple of bills at a time, into an empty jug. She corked it, then set it up high on a shelf, next to the jugs that held the fermenting wine. Howell generally stayed out of the cellar and out of her business, other than an occasional question about whose wives and daughters and grandmothers were buying how much, just to keep track.

When Jinn had been a girl, there’d once been a madwoman in Sybil Valley. One of the Luries, who’d gotten ahold of her husband’s stash, drank near about the whole thing, stripped down to nothing, and climbed the fire tower on top of Brood Mountain. People came for miles—mostly men, of course—to stare. The next day, after it was over, Jinn heard that the Lurie girl hadn’t even tried to hide herself. She’d just stood there bare-assed and bare-breasted like some kind of cheap whore, hollering about her brother getting after her. She’d threatened to jump from the tower all day and then, when the sun finally went down, she did. She should’ve broken her neck but her luck failed, and her family packed her off to Pritchard Insane Hospital instead, with nothing but a purple ankle and a gash down her side. People said that was what her husband got for losing track of her.

Like the Lurie girl, Jinn had figured things out. She knew that when her mama was locked in her bedroom, sick or having one of her spells, her daddy went roaming the mountain like a tomcat. She knew what he got up to; she saw the way his hands brushed the backs of certain girls in town.

She knew some things about Howell too. Nothing near like what her daddy did. But, all the same, illegally poached deer steaks did show up in her kitchen once in a while. And moonshine from a still in the grove behind their house.

Unlike the Lurie girl, though, she knew how to keep her mouth shut.

Jinn had loved Howell once, although it’d been so long ago, it seemed like another life. She used to wear her hair down, the way he liked it. Used to let him shimmy off her nightgown and run his hands over her every morning, even before the sun had come up, even though she’d been up half the night with babies.

But these days he jumped out of bed right when his eyes cracked open. He got dressed, even down to his boots, and headed out with a curt nod. He sure didn’t notice which way her hair was done. He didn’t notice much, except when she did something wrong.

That kind of thing—that
settling
, her mother called it—happened in a marriage, and there wasn’t no sense in crying over it. The secrets he kept from her, that was part of the settling, she reckoned. And now she had her own secrets. The ladies from Chattanooga. And the other, most important one, the secret she held like a love letter, close to her heart.

The conversations with Tom Stocker.

Jinn blushed and pushed the jug a bit farther into the shadows. One hundred dollars! With the money hidden away, she’d have time to figure out what to do with such a windfall. Maybe she
should
cut out and go to Hollywood. Pack up the children, hop a train, and get herself a screen test, like the ladies said.

Howell would be fit to be tied. He might even come after her. For sure he’d want Walter back. Collirene, he’d cut loose pretty easy, but he’d need the boy on the farm. Maybe she should leave Walter behind. But Collie was five, her baby. She wasn’t going nowhere without Collie. The girl still sucked her thumb and cried for her at night.

Jinn decided she needed to lay out her options side by side, like laundry hung on a line, so she could examine each of them clearly. But it would have to be just the right time. When she was out in the meadow gathering her honeysuckle, Collie by her side, as always, collecting dried locust skins for her cigar box. In the meadow she could think, work it all out in private. She couldn’t do that in the house. Howell could tell what she was thinking just by looking at her. He’d suss out somehow what she was plotting, for sure. Then he’d get to stomping and swearing through the house, and there was no telling where that would lead.