Page 8 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

H e stepped down into the gray wooden rowboat and released lines cleated to the dock fore and aft.

He positioned himself on the center bench seat and pushed off.

When the boat cleared the dock, A.J. fitted the oars into the oarlocks and lowered the blades into the water.

He pulled on the oars and the boat slid south past the fallow field next door and the Sullivans’ dingy home with its Gerry-rigged chicken coop and rabbit hutch.

Two Sullivan boys stood on the sandy shore baiting a trotline.

They looked up at A.J. as he passed and waved.

The family ate carp and mudcat and whatever else the boys pulled from the lake.

Despite their humble existence he envied the Sullivans.

Their house was just a repurposed tavern, the long back-bar mirror running the length of the living room.

The five boys slept in a single room—previously the front porch—on straw-stuffed mattresses, the two girls on the living room sofa.

Their soft-spoken, balding father worked in town as a machinist and the older boys did seasonal farm labor to help make ends meet.

It was their youthful mother, Mabel, married and pregnant at fifteen, who solidified and brightened the home with her endless good cheer and high spirits.

She’d organized her brood into a well-oiled domestic homemaking machine, with all the kids cleaning, cooking, washing, gardening, and keeping the rickety home standing.

And it was Mabel who arranged softball games for the neighborhood kids on the adjacent vacant lot, wiener and marshmallow roasts on the lakeshore come fall evenings, and backyard watermelon feasts in summer.

It was a real family, and she was its glue.

Mabel even had A.J. pitch in on the chores whenever he was about, which made him feel part of the litter.

He rowed the flat-end boat on past the Sullivans’ home under a sun high in a cloudless sky, barely a breath of wind swirling the aroma of burning leaves in the warming air.

He hardly needed the sweater that he had pulled on over the flannel shirt Aunt Helen had sewn for him.

Along the shore, maples had turned gold and crimson, cottonwoods and sycamores orange, weeping willows yellow, and oaks auburn, all reflecting on the glass-smooth water, which dripped cool on his hands when the oars tilted up.

A belted kingfisher’s rattle drew his gaze east to the dirt lake bank of the Conyers farm, where the bird disappeared. Ahead a silver-green bass broke water, leaping into the air as if in pure joy. A.J. could not imagine living elsewhere—say, in the desert or a city—nowhere except on the water.

Soon the lake curved right and he rowed past Sis’s Tavern. Then it bent left and right and continued south. He encountered no other boats despite it being a Saturday, but the serious fishermen would have been out at first light and back in before midday.

After a while he reached for a rusty coffee can under the boat seat and bailed out lake water that had seeped in and accumulated beneath the slats where his black high-top sneakers rested.

Across the lake on his right lay a cow pasture with two heifers standing on a rise in the shade of a cottonwood.

He wondered whether it was an Indian mound where they stood, like the ones behind Mitchell School.

Cahokians were the mound builders. He had read that their metropolis near Long Lake numbered 40,000 people by the year 1300 rivaling the populations of Paris and London then, though neither people knew the other existed.

They disappeared before Europeans arrived yet left behind these testaments to their civilization, both here and across the river in St. Louis, once known as The Mound City.

Most there had now been leveled. He thought of his father’s grave somewhere in France and wondered if it were a small mound.

He wiped wet hands on his jeans and again grasped the oars.

After a mile he let the rustic homemade vessel glide toward the west shore and dock at his mother’s home.

His home. His family’s home once. He tethered the boat, crept up the lake bank, and peered over the top to find his mother’s Buick sitting alone on the grassy gravel drive.

Only then, figuring she too was alone, did he retreat and mount the stairs rising from the dock and boathouse.

Ever since A.J. had bloodied Wayne Thurman the previous year, he’d heard no more talk about his mother fucking other men.

It didn’t mean folks had suddenly stopped gossiping.

But at least they knew to keep their mouths shut around A.J.

None of their goddamn business. Maybe none of his business either.

Nonetheless the thought of it and the images of it that he carried with him at all times saddened and sickened him and led him to keep to himself much as he could.

He pretended like he was The Invisible Man.

If he didn’t talk to anyone it was like he wasn’t there.

A.J. crossed the backyard. To his left near the sandbox where he used to play, the vegetable garden now yielded only a tangle of weeds. At the back door he knocked, pushed through it, and called, “It’s me, Mom.”

As usual library books piled everywhere—on the fireplace hearth, the coffee table, even the floor.

The stacks were neat and the books dusted, which meant the cleaning lady had been in the day before.

He found his mother at the kitchen table with a newspaper—the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat —cigarette, and coffee cup, still in her pajamas and bathrobe. She held out her arms toward him.

“Come to your mother, my baby boy.”

He went to her, embraced her, and pulled away from the scents of coffee, tobacco, and of whiskey, which seemed to seep from her pores. A.J. sat next to her across the corner of the oak table.

She took his hand. “How’s my little fisherman this morning? Did you catch a nice sunfish?”

Even though he had turned twelve now and was nearly as tall as she, he was still a little boy to her.

She lived in the past. Everything had stopped the day she learned his father had died, a day that A.J.

recalled in vague images—the hot sun, family gathered on the lake shore to celebrate Independence Day, a man who came to the door.

It was as if her life had ended that day too.

A Fourth of July without sparklers and fireworks.

He knew what his father looked like from photographs on his mother’s dresser and in the family scrapbook, compiled before that day. A.J. wondered whether without the photos he could have pictured his father’s face. Nothing like A.J.’s, who favored his mother, dark-haired and olive-skinned.

“Sure, Mom. The fish are biting today,” he lied. “Thought I’d drop in to see how things were going.”

He could plainly see. Dark circles under her eyes, chocolate hair matted and knotted. Gaunt, as if she were not eating; pasty, as if she never ventured outdoors in daylight.

“Fine, just fine. You doing well at school?”

He told her that his grades were good, that he had made some new friends this term, and that he was going to try out for the basketball team.

All lies as well. What difference did it make?

If he told her the truth about his insular life—his days as The Invisible Man—and the anger that surfaced with little warning, she might start crying, feeling guilty about abandoning him psychologically all these years.

Though often she didn’t need a reason to cry.

“How’s your class, Mom?”

She reached for the Lucky Strike pack lying on the table and lit another cigarette with a gold lighter.

Sometimes she inhaled deeply and other times just took a puff and blew it out, as if a ritual of some sort.

Or maybe just creating a cloud of smoke to reassure herself of her existence, as if she was a lost soul walking the Earth without purpose.

“I’m not teaching this year, A.J. Changed my mind last minute. I thought Helen might have told you. Felt I needed more rest. They gave me some more time off.”

“You going back into the clinic?”

“No. I’m doing better everyday. Maybe you can come home again soon. Not just yet, but soon. Would you like that?”

“Yes, ma’am. I would,” he again lied. As long as Dupuis or someone like him was hanging around, it hardly felt like home. It would lead to trouble. He knew he couldn’t stop himself.

Oblivious to his further duplicity, she brushed back his hair, dark as hers though cropped short.

“You’re what keeps me going, Son. The thought that we can be together again.”

Why couldn’t or wouldn’t she keep going? He wasn’t sure, but knew others worried about it. Last year when she was in real bad shape, when Aunt Helen and Uncle Raymond took him in, he overheard them talking about collecting his father’s shotgun from her house.

“I love you, Mom,” he said. As if that admission might help deter her from any such rash act.

Her eyes glistened. “Sure you do. You’re my boy… How about I fix us some breakfast?”

He had had breakfast hours ago and just eaten lunch before taking the boat out. He nodded.

“Sure, Mom. That would be great.”

A.J. watched her move about the kitchen—from the refrigerator to the range to the sink and back again—as if sleepwalking. She seemed to live every day not in the physical world around her but in the vacuum of his father’s absence.

He remembered that after the first shock and grief she had been sort of okay.

Then with time she got sadder and sadder as her solitude sunk in.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Raymond and everyone else told her she should go back to her job teaching kids—to have purpose and something to fill her days. That lasted for a while.

By summertime, she started drinking wine during the day and crying. He didn’t know what to do or who to tell. Then she started going out to taverns. Then she brought men home. He would hear them in the night. Sometimes he would sneak down to the lake and lie on the dock until the sun woke him.

He wished she didn’t drink and go with men but tried not to judge her too much in that regard. Since he had not known his father well, he could not understand all that she had forgone with his death. A.J. couldn’t know what it was like to lose the one person God had put on Earth for you.

All he knew for sure was that God had provided him a mother to love and care for him. He wished with all his heart that she would return to him from wherever she had gone and do what she was supposed to do.