Page 1 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

M orning sunlight filtering through a frosted storm window woke A.J.

Nowak where he slept on the narrow bed beneath two quilts, navy watch cap pulled down over his ears.

Through clouds of breath, he studied filigreed ice patterns on the window.

There he spied a white dog running across a snowfield etched on the glass.

Beyond the glass he heard a blue jay squawk.

He found his heavy wool sweater and blue jeans on the frigid Masonite floor beside his bed where he had left them, slipped the sweater over his head, and pulled the jeans up over his long johns, then stretched wool socks tall on his calves and finally slipped his feet into combat boots, so-called, with laces and buckles.

Next, he moved to the cold coal stove at the far end of the narrow room—the former fishing shack’s screened back porch, where storm windows were affixed in winter.

He shook the grate, found a few embers still glowing, and fed in more coal from a tin bucket on the floor, the stale smell of the black dust rising to him.

He straightened and moved to the window behind the stove, short coal shovel still in hand.

With it he scraped a square in the ice so he could read the green metal Orange Crush thermometer nailed to the eave.

Ten degrees Fahrenheit, where it had been holding for two days now.

The lake would be good and solid again after weeks of warmer weather.

He opened the door to the main house and stepped into a coffee-scented kitchen forty degrees warmer than the room where he slept, thanks to an electric space heater on the counter and a stoked coal stove in the adjoining front room.

His Aunt Helen, in a blue wool dress, high heels, and flowered apron, stood pouring a cup from a percolator that she then replaced on the front burner of the gas range.

Her dress and shoes reminded him it was Sunday.

Which meant he’d have to make excuses so as not to go into Granite City with them and sit stone still in the First Presbyterian Church for an hour when he could be out skating on the lake or stealing across the fields of shorn corn stalks with Lonnie Sullivan and his dog Tippy, carrying their narrow-gauge shotguns in search of rabbit or bobwhite.

“Coffee?” she whispered.

He nodded at her back. “Yes, ma’am.”

Now that he had turned twelve and thus considered a man he was allowed to drink coffee and hunt with the .410 his uncle had handed down to him on his birthday.

“Uncle Raymond still sleeping, huh?”

She turned, handed him a mug of black coffee and lifted her eyes to the clock above the sink, fashioned as a yellow plastic dog whose black eyes moved left or right with each second’s tick.

“I’ll wake him in a half hour… You wearing your boots and stocking cap to church?” she asked looking him up and down.

He scooped two teaspoons from the sugar bowl on the counter into his mug and reached for the Pet Evaporated Milk can beside it, holes punched in its top.

Ever since he was a tot the label fascinated him, with the cow peeking from another Pet Milk can lying on its side whose label depicted yet a third can with another cow peeking from it and so forth, he imagined, to infinity.

He poured a stream of ivory-colored liquid into his coffee, turning it muddy brown like the Mississippi.

“Well, I was thinking, since it’s so cold and the lake is froze solid, and it might get warm tomorrow…”

“It’s not going to melt overnight. No school tomorrow for Washington’s Birthday. You can skate all day.”

He looked up to his aunt who was struggling to suppress a smile, her dark eyes shining, reminding him of his mother.

Both had the same dark-chocolate hair and high Cherokee cheekbones (his great-grandmother had been a full-blooded Indian, he’d been told) that made them both beautiful, especially his mom.

His aunt touched a warm hand to his chin. “I suspect you’d feel closer to God on the lake than you would in that old brick building. You go ahead before your uncle’s up. I’ll fix it with him.”

A.J. beamed. “Thank you, Aunt Helen.”

For the last year and a half, Uncle Raymond strove to be a strict disciplinarian, trying to be the father A.J.

had lost in the war yet hardly knew. However, at heart he was a kind, inward-looking soul, more keen on hunting, fly fishing, and tending his vegetable garden than acting the stern patriarch.

He would likely and gladly have foregone church for ice-skating with his nephew if given the opportunity by his wife.

“First sit down,” she said, “take your hat off inside the house, and eat some Wheaties, champ.”

“Yes, ma’am,” A.J. said, doffing his stocking cap and sliding into a wooden chair at the oak table, on which sat an orange cereal box with a portrait of Stan Musial.

He did as he was told by his aunt and his uncle, most always, so they wouldn’t have reason to send him back home. He loved his mother more than anything. Nonetheless he was afraid to go back to live with her nowadays, afraid of what could happen.

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He fetched his ice skates from the cedar wardrobe beside his bed along with his pea coat, rabbit-fur gloves, and wool muffler.

The skates had been his father’s, though in the last year he had grown into them.

He carried them laced over his shoulder as he pushed out the back door and made for the graying and rickety picket fence guarding the steep lake bank.

The cold stung his face and pinched his nose. The air lay calm. A whistling call made him look up into the denuded plum tree just beyond the fence to spy a female cardinal, beige and red, and, perched just beyond, her brilliant crimson mate.

Through the creaky gate and down wooden steps to the dock which he had helped Uncle Raymond rebuild last summer.

The old slats had plunged into the lake one Sunday afternoon, leaving neighbor Homer Martin and his daughter Judy stranded at the dock’s far end, where they had been fishing.

Even frozen hard as it was this day the lake still smelled earthy like the flat fields surrounding it.

A.J. sat on the cold dock, undid his boots one at a time, laced on his skates then dropped down to the gray-white ice.

He headed north toward Mitchell on the frozen lake, though it looked more like a river being only some hundred yards wide and seven miles long.

Some said Long Lake was a dead branch of the Mississippi, which lay just a few miles west across the American Bottom, and nearby Horseshoe Lake a shallow remnant oxbow left behind when the river changed course eons earlier.

His long-bladed speed skates cut the ice, accelerating him, the feel of wind on his face growing. He veered around a dark patch of thin ice where one of the underground springs that fed the lake poured forth keeping the ice from freezing solid.

He was moving swift and easy now and didn’t mind the cold.

These skates carried him faster than the short-bladed kids hockey skates he had learned on.

His father had used the speed skates on lakes in Forest Park, across the river in St. Louis where he had lived when courting his mother.

A.J. harbored a keen memory of his father skating hand-in-hand with her over Long Lake ice, pulling him behind atop his steel-runner Flexible Flyer sled.

Now the speed and movement made him feel free, a lithe, graceful animal.

Sliding faster, faster as he bent his knees and pushed to the side with lengthy strokes, tucking his head low and curving his back to lessen wind resistance, just like Uncle Raymond taught him.

Though slender as he was, the wind didn’t have much to grab onto, and his long legs, still growing, jetted him over the lake.

Ahead he spied the railroad tracks and the bank that severed the lake just south of Mitchell and so began to slow and start a wide turn.

Now heading back toward home he flew across the smooth ice again gaining speed.

Soon he passed the dock where his combat boots sat, crouching low, arms swinging at his sides, tall naked cottonwood trees flying by on his left where they guarded the Conyers farm.

On his right he sped past humble homes like his aunt and uncle’s, clubhouses, and fishing shacks, some with crude wooden docks, and Sis’s Tavern, where the lake turned to the right.

Soon he approached his house, his mother’s home, which was more than just a fishing shack.

It was a modern cottage, with tall windows facing the lake and a white stone fireplace at the den’s south wall.

Staunch maples rose above the lake bank and in the front yard willows and sycamores shaded it from the hot afternoon summer sun.

A.J. slowed as he passed the wide dock and boathouse and looked up the lake bank at the white clapboard home with green shutters.

The back porch light was still on, the shades drawn, as if she was still in bed.

Alone perhaps, for he spied only her Buick in the gravel driveway.

When he looked down again ahead he saw ice shards protruding from the frozen lake where he knew another subsurface spring to lie, and where earlier the ice had apparently broken then refroze.

He lurched to skid around it. As he did a purplish flash beneath the ice caught his eye.

He pointed his skates together and walked to a stop.

A.J. turned and stood erect, staring back at the jagged ice. He skated there. Dropping to his knees huffing, he brushed the ice aside.

Beneath it, suspended in the lake, hung a burgundy coat with brown fox-fur collar, his mother’s good overcoat. And she wrapped inside it, her dark brown hair pulled to the side, eyes wide, lips parted, her last breath captured in ice as it bubbled toward the surface.

A.J. knelt staring, captivated by the fantastic tableau as if in a diorama box, a scene seemingly beyond reality yet one that would forever be etched in memory, like an ice pattern on frigid glass.