Shiner Read online

  Also by Amy Jo Burns

  Cinderland: A Memoir

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy Jo Burns

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burns, Amy Jo, 1981– author.

  Title: Shiner / Amy Jo Burns.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019001595 (print) | LCCN 2019002996 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525533641 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533665 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U76486 S55 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.U76486 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001595

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  Cover image: Colormos / The Image Bank / Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For my parents, who gave me everything they never had

  The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

  —MURIEL RUKEYSER, “THE SPEED OF DARKNESS”

  CONTENTS

  True Story

  I.

  SNAKE HANDLER’S DAUGHTER

  II.

  MOONSHINER’S LOVE SONG

  III.

  DEAD WOMAN’S CONFESSION

  IV.

  LEGEND’S END

  Acknowledgments

  TRUE STORY

  Making good moonshine isn’t that different from telling a good story, and no one tells a story like a woman. She knows that legends and liquor are best spun from the back of a pickup truck after nightfall, just as she knows to tell a story slowly, the way whiskey drips through a sieve. Moonshine earned its name from spending its life concealed in the dark, and no one understands that fate more than I do.

  Beyond these hills my people are known for the kick in their liquor and the poverty in their hearts. Overdoses, opioids, unemployment. Folks prefer us this way—dumb-mouthed with yellow teeth and cigarettes, dumb-minded with carboys of whiskey and broken-backed Bibles. But that’s not the real story. Here’s what hides behind the beauty line along West Virginia’s highways: a fear that God has forgotten us. We live in the wasteland that coal has built, where trains eat miles of track. Our men slip serpents through their fingers on Sunday mornings and pray for God to show Himself while our wives wash their husbands’ underpants. Here’s what hides behind my beauty line: My father wasn’t just one of these men. He was the best.

  Since word of his sins spilled down the mountain, folks have split from the highway, hoping to catch a glimpse of a fallen hero. They believe that this miners’ outpost, shriveled since the coal barons claimed it forty years ago in the 1970s, still holds the key to my father’s miracles. WELCOME TO TRAP, the new sign outside the city limits says. What it doesn’t: COME HERE TO FALL IN LOVE. COME HERE TO FEAR FOR YOUR LIFE. Strangers ask what I can tell them about the snake handler and his wife. They want myths and legends. They aren’t tempted by the truth.

  “It’s a true story,” I begin, roosting in the back of an old truck. “I swear it.”

  Then I tell them that these woods can turn eerie or romantic, depending on the company you keep.

  It’s an autumn night, and the fire is lit. Moonshiners sneak in their final runs of whiskey while young women like me tell old tales. The sun sets early. Along the outskirts of Trap, you’ll find me standing in a constellation of four-wheel-drive trucks in the woods behind the old Saw-Whet Motel. The mountains hover at my back.

  The story of the snake handler’s daughter began when I’d just turned fifteen. I knew little then of the outside world my father kept from me. Ours is an oral civilization, I used to hear him say, and it’s dying. He blamed coal, he blamed heroin. He never blamed himself. He thought he had the only tales worth telling, and he never understood what my mother had run from all her life because she’d been born a woman—

  The truth turns sour if it idles too long in our mouths. Stories, like bottles of shine, are meant to be given away.

  I.

  SNAKE HANDLER’S DAUGHTER

  BREAD AND IVY

  It started with a burn, just like the stories of Moses my father used to tell. Moses, he said, was nothing more than a shepherd hiding in the hills until he scaled a mountain and found a flaming bush. Then he was never the same. My father had a tale just as magical, a story of his own origins as a man of God. He loved to tell it as much as my mother wished she hadn’t ever believed it.

  For as long as she was alive, she never told me her own story. I used to hear her whisper to her best friend, Ivy, that she wished she’d been known as anything other than Briar Bird’s wife. I hated this about our life in the hills—mountain men steered their own stories, and women were their oars. I asked once if my mother had seen what lay beyond the bluffs, and she led me to the peak of our fields that overlooked the ravine behind my father’s snake shed. In the distance I could see two razorback stone ridges rise from the trees. All my life these mountains had watched over me. My mother knelt beside me, put her arm around my waist.

  “There are two ways to see a mountain,” she said as she shielded her hazel eyes from the sun. “The view from the top and the view of the top.”

  Ivy came behind her, three of her boys at her back. “From the top of our mountain, the hills of West Virginia bow at your feet,” she said. “But from the bottom, you bow at theirs.”

  My mother caught a wisp of her dark hair as it danced in the wind. Her braid fell past the waistband of her skirt, where she tucked the pearl-handled switchblade that Ivy had given her long before I was born. Ivy pressed a hand to my mother’s shoulder. Their accord was unspoken, haunted by promises they’d sworn to keep.

  * * *

  Everything changed when Ivy caught fire. That morning, not long after my fifteenth birthday, I had spied my first summer fox from my bedroom window. The fox pranced in the morning sun as I waited for Ivy’s scowl to appear on the horizon, her blond hair trembling against her shoulder.

  Ivy was the only woman who knew how to reach my father’s hideaway beyond the pines. We lived on the mountain’s western ridge, just below the razorbacks and the highest knolls for miles, a stretch of meadow called Violet’s Run. Ivy hiked the snarled hill to our cabin every day, because she and my mother could not survive without each other.

  It had been that way since they were girls. Theirs was the same life lived twice over, though Ivy had four boys and a husband, Ricky—who was whiskey-sick and dope-drunk, my father liked to say. Ivy and my mother had grown up together, gone to school together, fallen in love together. This bond was the only thing my mother had that I envied. I wanted an Ivy of my own. My father envied it, too.

  “Bread and Ivy,” he said with his preacher’s smile. “That’s all your mama needs to survive.”

  My father buried himself in the things he loved—his snakes, his woods, his wife. Every time Ivy visited with her boys, he
retreated to his snake shed by the cliff. He couldn’t bear to share my mother with anyone—not with Ivy, not even with me.

  * * *

  Ivy came early enough the morning of the burning that she had to walk by faith to find the cabin through the fog. We lived at the top of a slick dirt path, and our gray roof faded into the dying trees above it. No outsider had ever found our road, hidden behind a swamp and a stand of balsams. My father liked it that way—being half there, half not. The cabin tilted on its beams, ready to be raptured. Even without a breeze, the house’s bones moaned.

  It was June, and I waited for Ivy at the window as I always did. When she and her three youngest boys crested the hill, I ran outside to greet them. Yesterday they hadn’t come. My mother and I waited all morning before we ate the corn bread and molasses we’d prepared and folded up the picnic quilts we’d laid for the six of us to sit on in the tall grass. I wanted to know why they’d left us alone, but Ivy looked in no mood to be asked. Her skin glistened with sweat, and she made no sound as she headed toward the back of the house, where my mother stirred a drum of soap.

  My mother liked to keep her hands busy. She made soap, made dresses, made waves in the creek water. Those hands calmed only at dawn, when she’d stand in our field and stare at the horizon as if she expected Jesus himself to cross it. My mother was restless, and Ivy was the only person who could still her.

  At the front of the cabin, Ivy’s boys stared at me.

  “Where did you go yesterday?” I asked. “We waited till noon.”

  Henry, Ivy’s second-oldest, shrugged.

  “Nowhere,” he answered as he looked past the house toward the lean-to my father had built at the edge of the ravine. “Can we go in the snake shed today?”

  “They ain’t playthings,” I said. “You know that.”

  “You’ve taken one up, haven’t you?”

  I shook my head. “Not once.”

  Ivy’s third son, Job, turned toward me. “You scared?”

  “I don’t get scared.”

  “Liar.” Henry touched the rattail at the back of his neck. “You’re scared of gettin’ bit.”

  “Henry.” I straightened his collar as Pony, Ivy’s youngest, toyed with the end of my braid. “If you’re so brave, go knock on that snake shed and look my father in the eye.”

  Folks hated looking at my father. A bad storm during his boyhood had blighted one of his blue irises. He’d gone legally blind in his left eye, but folks still believed he could see. He didn’t care what other people thought. He kept his serpents in boxes. They stank and needed to eat the living in order to survive. We had five of them.

  “People at school down the mountain say you’re strange,” Job said. “That your daddy keeps you locked up with the snakes.”

  “I ain’t so strange,” I said, even though I was.

  On the first Monday of the month, my mother and I went to town for groceries with the tithe money my father earned from preaching. Our shopping list never changed—flour and cornmeal for bread, beans, milk, and canned oranges and peaches. Chicken legs and sugar when we could afford it.

  Every trip into Trap was a catapult through time. My father obeyed the rituals of snake-handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet and all the things people did on their cell phones that I couldn’t understand. Back then, George Went Hensley had convinced mountain folk that taking up serpents was the one true way to worship God. Daily, my father lifted his serpents to the sky and uttered a prayer in tongues that no one could interpret. His face looked euphoric and eerie as he babbled. He did it at Sunday gatherings with twenty people watching, and he did it alone in his shed, where I spied him from the scant window. He didn’t need an audience with money to worship his God, but we did need that money to live. More than a half century had passed since snake-handling fever had swept through our hills, and now fewer than a hundred snake handlers remained across the country. No one believed in the power of taking up serpents anymore. Bitterly, my father claimed they believed in the power of prescription pills instead. The offering he collected on Sundays amounted to a fistful of quarters and a bare spread of dollar bills. It was never enough.

  Once a month Ivy drove us to Trap in her old Pontiac. I sat in the back with Pony on my lap for forty minutes of twists and turns.

  The stares began as soon as we spilled out of the car into the Shop ’n Save parking lot. Mothers, children, loggers, cashiers. They squinted at the pleats in the skirts my mother had hand-sewn for me from her old dresses. Their eyes tripped over the length of the French braid running down my back.

  “It’s sad, keeping her locked away on that mountain,” I once heard a woman whisper to her grown son as he stifled a laugh and took a picture of me with his phone. I didn’t even know that a cell phone could take a photograph until I flinched at the flash.

  Now, in front of our cabin, we heard Ivy scream. Pony let the tail of my braid slip through his fingers, and I sprinted toward the sound. Until then the groans I knew were spirit-filled and Sunday-strong as men and women called out to God. But this was the sound of real affliction. It was pure, and there was no God in it.

  When I rounded the house, I saw my mother’s best friend kneeling at the fire. Smoke twirled above her as the flames caught her dress and hair. My mother’s soap pot had spilled hot lye and grease down the front of her. Ivy swayed in the still air. Her braid transformed from blond to flaring orange to black.

  “Briar!” my mother called out for my father.

  I ran to the spigot. I filled a pail of water and doused Ivy’s back. Her whole body hissed. Her scream limped to a sob as the flame surged. My mother tore her skirt and pressed it against Ivy’s front. Her face contorted, but she made no sound. Ivy fell backward, and my mother looked up. Her brown hair fell from her bun as Ivy writhed beneath her.

  My mother’s head snapped toward me. “Wren!” she yelled. “The boys!”

  It was too late to shield their eyes. Pony hung on my skirt, and I felt Job’s hand on my back. His chest whistled as he tried to catch his breath.

  Ivy started to convulse.

  “Run as fast as you can to the snake shed,” I told Henry. “Knock, but don’t open the door. Tell my daddy to come quick.”

  He stood, petrified. He was just as afraid of the shed as anyone else was.

  “Take your brothers inside the house and wait for me.” I touched his arm. “Stay away from the window.”

  I took off for the shed, about fifty paces from the cabin. On its far side, a patch of rocks guarded the ground before it pitched off the cliff. The shed presided like a dark lighthouse over the rippled hills beneath it.

  “Daddy!” I screamed.

  When I reached the lean-to, I kicked the door with my foot.

  “Daddy!”

  I hefted the latch and flung open the door before stooping to get inside. My father was fast asleep against the far wall, his legs sticking straight out in front of him. A patch of golden hair had fallen in his eyes, and it sparkled in a shaft of sunlight.

  I crouched and clapped my hands in front of his face. Startled, he came to. His bad eye was a disk of white in the dark.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Ivy,” I said. “She’s burning.”

  He stumbled to his feet, and I saw a slash of red across his cheek where it had been pressed to his shoulder. He bolted from the shed, and I meant to follow him. My eyes narrowed on the five snake boxes instead. I hadn’t entered my father’s sanctuary since I was five years old and wanted to touch a copperhead’s smooth skin. That day was the first and last time my mother whipped me. Dust particles now floated in the light, and the air was rank with musk. I leaned toward the pine snake boxes, the most lavish items my father owned. Something stirred behind me. In another cage by the door, a gaggle of field mice twittered. They were waiting to be ea
ten.

  I secured the latch after me and ran back toward the fire. Sweat trickled down my legs. My parents and Ivy sat in a lopsided circle, my father bent over Ivy’s body and my mother beside her. I searched the ground for a root that could have caused her to trip, but I saw nothing. Just the thick stripes her feet had left in the dirt, as if she’d been dragging them behind her. Ivy was never clumsy or careless. I couldn’t understand what had made her fall.

  My father hovered his hands over Ivy’s head and blew on her three times—whoo whoo whoo. With each breath he flicked his arms outward. Then he bent closer and whispered something in Ivy’s ear before he repeated the ritual along the trail of her body.

  By the time I reached them, my mother had slumped, her dress torn and lacquered with spoiled soap. My father gave Ivy a final whisper, and she exhaled and opened her eyes.

  Beside her my mother held out her own hands as an offering.

  “Ruby,” my father said. “Your arms.”

  My mother’s arms were pocked and inflamed, burned from fingertip to elbow. My father reached for them, and she drew them away.

  “Let me,” he said.

  She shook her head and rose to her feet.

  “I’m getting the salve,” she said.

  My father leaned back and sat cross-legged on the ground. “Don’t bother,” he said. “She don’t need it.”

  The creases in my mother’s forehead deepened.

  “Wren,” she said. “Take the boys home.” She held her hands at her sides.

  “We should stay,” I said.

  The boys would be better left alone by the railroad tracks than under the care of their father.

  “Go,” she said. “And be gone for a bit.”

  Her face said what her mouth did not. Run. There’s danger here. My mother’s best friend lay still at her feet. I backed into the house, called for the boys, and as we fled, the summer fox sprang from the reeds. The white of its tail flashed as it sprinted toward the ravine, and none of us looked back to see it disappear.