"Lead Burns Red"

A multi-part crime fiction story

Photo by Jaunathan Gagnon on Unsplash

Part I: Jones Island

On the night her Daddy died, Joanie Carhart had been down in Pine Grove Valley when she wasn’t supposed to be there. It saved her life.

          She was trotting back from Pine Grove Valley down a dry creek bed, the cadence of Ranger’s hooves on the blanket of fallen leaves were muffled as she rode. Joanie made it a point to call the area where she’d been “Pine Grove Valley” even though the men in town called it a “holler” and put an ugly term in front of it that Joanie didn’t care for. It was their way of describing the kind of people who lived there, and Joanie didn’t like the looks on their faces when they said it. Or how their voices sounded.

          She’d been up there to see Nat Davis, but no one was supposed to know that. Not Daddy or Mama, not even Clara, though she usually told her baby sister everything. Just a few years ago, she’d been told they’d won the War to End All Wars. Thousands of boys, including her older brother Jimmy, had died in France supposedly to carry the banner of freedom to Europe. In six days, the country would elect Calvin Coolidge to be President of the United States and ole’ Silent Cal even gave a speech saying that Blacks had rights just as any other citizen. But in Roane County, the men who ran things saw Nat only by the color of his skin. If they saw him at all. Being with a girl like Joanie Carhart after dark—a girl with hair the color of straw and eyes as blue as a summer sky—would put Nat in the gravest kind of danger.

          Before she’d rode off on Ranger, she’d told her Daddy that she was going up to Cave Creek to get nightcrawlers so she could catch some bluegill or catfish for Sunday supper. But the way Daddy looked at her, she knew that he knew. Daddy always did. He hadn’t said a thing. Just smiled that smile of his and told her to be careful.

          She saw the flames before anything else. They waved in the distance like a fairy’s wings, throwing waves of little red stars high into the air. Joanie pushed Ranger’s ribs with her heels, but the horse already sensed calamity and picked up his gait all on his own. Getting out of the creek bed and on to Buttermilk Road would have been faster but Joanie’s instincts told her to keep her current route. Confirmation of that decision came moments later when she saw three automobiles—headlights off—race by in the opposite direction.

          They were followed by a car bearing the markings of the Roane County Sheriff.

          The fire had engulfed her family’s house by the time she jumped out of the saddle. The cracks and hisses of blazing rafters and joists echoed in the night like the sounds of a distant battle. It had been a moonless night but the deathly glow of her childhood being swallowed by insatiable flames, gave her the chance to see two mounds laying in the meadow in front of where her house had once stood. At first, she didn’t know what they were. And then, terribly, she did.

          Mama was on her knees when they shot her. Her body was bent back over them, her arms were outstretched, and her eyes were turned to heaven. Seeing nothing. They’d tried to hang Daddy. She could see the rough rope noose still caught around his neck, his once-white shirt now crimson with blood. The stains were darkest over his heart.

          “Clara!” Joanie’s voice was ragged and choked with smoke. She wasn’t sure anyone could hear her over the sounds of the flames. Joanie called for her sister again. Nothing. Her eyes fell on the burning house. “Please god…don’t let her have burned.” Ranger whinneyed and bucked. Joanie looked at her horse, wondering if he had seen something. Wondering if they were coming back. For her.  

          Instead, her eyes narrowed to something across the meadow. The barn. It was a couple hundred yards away from the house and untouched by the flames. Joanie grabbed up her skirts and ran hard, covering the distance with a fury borne of apprehension and fear. She lifted up the board that held the barn doors closed and threw one of the doors open.

          “Clara! Clara, it’s me! Clara?”

          “Joanie?” The voice was a squeak. Joanie’s eyes started to adjust to the pitch blackness after having been out by the gruesome firelight. She caught a tiny motion on the half-floor above her head.

          “Clara!” A shriek of relief. Her little sister, in a practiced motion, grabbed the edge of the floor and swung down, dropping onto the pile of hay below. They held each other, sinking to the dirt floor, weeping. After what seemed like a lifetime of shared sobs, Joanie began to deal with the here and now. And the after. She asked:

          “What happened, Clar?”

          But Clara was still crying so hard she couldn’t answer. Eventually, after her older sister smoothed her hair and whispered comfort to her, Clara Carhart told the story.

          When the Sheriff first arrived, Daddy hadn’t looked worried. He had looked like he always looked. But he had told Clara to go to the barn and to take the back way through the woods to get there. Clara had gone to the highest corner of the barn, where that eagle mama had cared for her babies two summers ago, and could see everything in the meadow.

The Sheriff had told Daddy that Daddy should take the deal. Daddy said he wouldn’t. Said the Sheriff knew that he wouldn’t. A couple other cars full of men had pulled up by then and they all got out. Looking mean. Mama was standing next to Daddy. Her hands were shaking so bad that Clara could see them shaking from where she sat atop the barn. They told Daddy that it would go easier if he told them where. Daddy said he couldn’t. That he wouldn’t.

          When they got out the rope, Clara screamed. But the mean men hadn’t seemed to notice her. Mama was crying. Begging. They had put the rope over Daddy’s neck and were trying to get the other end of it over a branch on the big sycamore. But Daddy had fought them. Two or three of them at a time. The crack of the Sheriff’s long rifle had made Clara jump. One crack. Two cracks. Mama screamed. Three cracks.

          By the time the men started the fire in the house, Clara was crying so hard she was sure that the men would hear her, even as she was hiding under a foot of hay. Or they’d hear her heart which had been beating out of her chest. And she prayed aloud. First, she prayed for Daddy and Mama. Then, she prayed to die so she could be with them in heaven and with Our Lord.

          “Our Lord ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Joanie couldn’t help but say.

          “Why’d they do this to us, Joanie? Them Klukkers. Why us?” Clara wailed. But her older sister didn’t respond. Joanie, like the rest of the Carharts, had been dodging the Klukkers in Roane County for years. That’s what Daddy had called ‘em. The Klukkers. Dressed up in all white. Like chickens. But it wasn’t the Klukkers who’d done this, and Joanie knew it. Sure, they’d have strung Nat up in a heartbeat if they so much as knew how Nat and Joanie looked at each other. Much less all they did past looking. But they wouldn’t attack Big Jim Carhart’s family over that.

          “Klukkers are sonsofbitches,” Joanie concluded, “but it wadn’t Klukkers that done this.”  

          “Then what?”

          “It’s about Jones Island.”

          Clara’s eyes widened like her sister had revealed the holiest of holies to the world. She rubbed the tears off her cheeks.

          “We ain’t supposed to know about Jones Island.”

          “But we do. I do.”

          “But we ain’t supposed to.”

          Joanie shrugged. Daddy had taken her to Jones Island maybe a hundred times since Jimmy hadn’t come home from France. Maybe two hundred. Unspoken on their trips was that if his eldest son couldn’t run the family business then maybe his eldest daughter could. She was smarter than all of ‘em anyhow. Don’t tell your sister. She ain’t old enough yet. Joanie wondered if Clara was old enough now. Even if she was, Joanie didn’t want to take her tonight. But they had to go somewhere. And not get caught.

          Sneaking Clara out of the barn at night was easy. The Carhart girls were used to running barefoot through the woods and meadows around their childhood home. Their feet barely touched the cool grasses, and they flitted like rabbits between the trees. Ranger, always loyal, had a knack for finding his girl. He was waiting for them underneath a big oak tree, just out of sight from the now-dying house fire. The sisters hopped on Ranger’s back. Clara looked at the crumbled remnants of their home and sobbed quietly.

Joanie was done crying.

          They rode back down the dry creek bed, out of sight from Buttermilk Road. Just to be sure. Once back in Pine Grove Valley, Joanie tied Ranger’s reins to a cedar tree and told Clara that if something looked out of sorts to ride into the hills by Whiteoak Lake. Joanie slipped through the woods to a clearing where two shotgun shacks sat across from each other like silent sentinels in the night. One shack was dark. A light plume of white smoke billowed out of the chimney of the other. She sighed. He was awake.

          As she peered through the windowpane, she could see Nat sitting by the firelight reading. Treasure Island. She knocked on the glass, startling him. Once his guard came down and he saw her, the shock was plain on his handsome face.  

          “What are you doing here?” His young voice already rang with the baritone of someone older. She told him. He swore and embraced her. She held on to him tightly and then told him what she needed. A few minutes later, Clara was safely tucked away in Nat’s bed and all of the candles in the shack were extinguished. As they climbed on to Ranger, Joanie looked back at the clearing. The shacks were so dark it was impossible to tell if anyone lived there.

          “What will your Paw do if he finds her in the morning?” Joanie asked as they galloped from Nat’s house.

          “Nothing,” Nat said with confidence. “He’ll pretend he didn’t see a damn thing.”

          “What about Killebrew?”

          “What about him?” Contempt rushed in Nat’s voice like a rapid. Herman Killebrew owned the land that the Davises sharecropped on. What he exhibited in unfairness, he made up for with sheer enmity.

          “What if he comes around?”

          “He won’t.” Nat hugged Joanie tight around her waist. “She’ll be okay.” Joanie took one hand from Ranger’s reins, placed it over Nat’s and squeezed it.

          Jones lsland sat between the now-ruins of the Carhart house and the shotgun shacks that Nat Davis and his parents lived in. It squatted in the middle of the Clinch River, a lazy triangle of land that slumped like the end of a melted candle. No one lived on it and no one in Roane County was quite sure who owned it. To the outside world, there was never a reason to find out. Ain’t nothin’ on it, anyhow.

          When they got to the banks of the Clinch, Nat took off his boots and hid them under some pine branches off the shore. They slid into the water and swam the couple hundred feet of river to the island shore. Ranger, always a strong swimmer, pushed past them. Once he got to shore, the horse shook out his mane and scanned the river to focus on his charge and her companion. Once ashore, Joanie and Nat climbed on his back again and they trotted into the cover of the woods. The early morning hours were cold. Joanie and Nat pressed against each other for warmth as Ranger plunged forward along a trail barely visible to the naked eye but well known to him.

          On the northeast part of the island, in a small dip that could generously be called a valley, sat a tiny outpost that where Joanie Carhart had come to see her inheritance. Ranger had slowed his gait to a shuffle as they approached. Joanie and Nat were silent until they were sure they were alone. Nat spoke first and unnecessarily.

          “They ain’t here.”

          “’Course they ain’t.”

          “But it’s what they was looking for.”

          “I know it.”

          “So they don’t know where it is.”

          “Naw.” She bit her lip. “Daddy wouldn’t tell ‘em. He always said he’d rather…”

          Joanie slipped off Ranger first. Her wet dress clung to her, and it was all she could do not to shiver from the cold. She thought about making a fire. Wasn’t worth the risk. The cold wouldn’t kill her. The men who might see the smoke rising wouldn’t hesitate. They’d proved that tonight. She walked around the outpost, examining everything. It was just as she had last seen it a few weeks earlier when she Daddy had brought her out her to help him with a big load.

          “What you gone do, Joanie?”

          “You know what I’m gonna do.” Resolution rang in her voice. “What Jimmy would have done. Billy Ray Ross ain’t god. He’s just a man.” Nat shook his head in disbelief.

          “He’s the Sheriff, girl.”

          “I don’t give a damn who he is.”

          “The rest of the county might.”

          “To hell with them.”

          “You can’t do it alone.”

          A puckish smile crossed her face briefly. The dawn’s light was starting to break and she met Nat’s eyes. He’d seen that look before. He didn’t like it.

          “I don’t have to.”

          “A girl and a colored boy ain’t much much for the law. And all the people in town. And the Klukkers.”

          “We ain’t kids anymore, Nat. You told me that yourself. The first night.”

          Nat exhaled and looked uncomfortable. Having his words thrown back at him—words that she knew damn well had been designed for something else—was hard to argue with.

          “We gone buy an army, then?”

          Joanie looked around. She put up her arms and flung them out, like she was casting a spell over the whole island. And everything in it.

          When the preachers, the politicians, the grim-faced and humorless men, and their prim and proper ladies had all gotten their way and passed Prohibition, they probably figured they’d won the war against the demon alcohol. But they’d only started it. Men from all over had tried to figure out a way to give people what they wanted. And how to make money doing it. Big Jim Carhart held no less ambition. With his only son in a French grave, breaking his back growing corn and tobacco seemed more like a fools’ errand with each passing Sunday. Joanie’s great-granddaddy had started making ‘shine after he’d come home from Shiloh with one less leg than he’d gone there with. Big Jim had found Grandpappy’s old recipes and gone out to Jones Island. Unlike the rest of the folks in the county, the Carharts knew who owned Jones Island. They did. Major Archibald Lester of the 47^th Tennessee Regiment had deeded Jones Island to Corporal Walter G. Carhart in gratitude for saving the Major’s life at Shiloh, even at the cost of the corporal’s left leg. The deed was still buried in a box on the island.

The first moonshine still that Big Jim built sat in that little valley on Jones Island along with its two, larger sisters. Big Jim had christened them the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. They would use them to sail on an ocean of booze to a new world. Carhart moonshine was the most sought after white lightning not just in Roane County but all across the state. It’s quality was legendary. One night, as they considered their little kingdom under a full moon bright as noonday sun, Big Jim told his daughter that no less than Boss Crump of Memphis himself—the King of Tennessee—would be chauffered hundreds of miles from his suite at the Peabody Hotel all the way to Roane County just to pick up a case of Carhart moonshine. At the time, Joanie had marveled at the wonder of the power of the clear liquid that bubbled through the pipes and tubing. Back then, she hadn’t stopped to think that such power was the kind that people would kill to get their hands on.  

Moonshine had run in her Daddy’s blood. Now it ran in hers.  

          “With what we got, we ain’t gone have to buy nobody.” She dropped her arms. “They’ll pay us for the privilege.” She looked into Nat’s eyes.

          “Then what?” He asked.

“Then we burn all those bastards to the ground.”

          Check in next week for Part II of “Lead Burns Red”: The Bootleggers Daughter