Chapter 12: Yeast Cake

     "Here you go Pop," greets the teenager sliding a small cake wrapped in cellophane across the wooden visitation desk as a big black bird alights on the ledge of a barred window. 

"That's my boy!" beams Oil reaching for what he thinks will be the key to his prison prosperity. "Was it hard to find?"

"Nah, that Magoffin clerk had his kin meet me on the side of the road down on Cow Creek," grins the son with as much cheer as he'll ever have. 

"He's a good ol' boy when he gets a whiff of corn...," begins Oil, pausing as the corvid starts pecking on the glass.

     The guards hadn't batted an eye at the yeast cake during check-in at the new visitation hall because the pasty confection had been a fad food for more than a decade. Dried yeast packs would soon replace fresh mash patties for baking, but that change wouldn't come to eastern Kentucky until after the war. 

     The clandestine distillery was wizening right along with the year's corn. Waters out tending the fields would soon grind the dried kernels with a hammerstone behind the hanging tree. Hillbilly had an old stockpot tucked behind the dishwashing supplies in the kitchen closet. Oil would be ready to load mason jars from the basement butcher shop that doubled as the shipping bay for prison products. They just needed someone on the receiving end, and an eager eighteen-year-old would be just the ticket.

     

     "... and now I just need you to..." Oil begins again until halted by a huge hand landing on his shoulder.

"The warden wants to see you," smirks a goodly-sized guard standing over father and son and dangling a set of handcuffs.

"What's this all about?" the startled inmate pleads, offering up his wrists.

"Waters went missing."

Chapter 11: Chicken Hill

      "They's a hanging tree back a the corn field," whispers the field hand wriggling around in the slight breeze coming in from a small window above the top bunk.

"Things ain't that bad yet," titters the kitchen aid from the stifle of the bottom bed in their dorm room.

"Only ears'll be swinging in that wind," Waters chortles into the shadows of their first private room since the flood. "Takes dried corn to make that mash, don't it?"

"Yep, give 'em two weeks in this heat and we're in business," groans Oil tossing off the thin sheet in the swelter of a bluegrass Indian summer.

     The inmates had just been moved into the dormitory of the nearly completed reformatory building. The official opening date was to be 1940, but Governor Happy Chandler, in keeping with his humanitarian prisons plan, decided to get the construction crew out of the tent city before winter by moving the dedication ceremony up to October 4, 1939.  

     The new prison was Chandler's experiment in social rehabilitation.  The ten-floor main structure had staff quarters, dining hall, hospital, and vocational school besides the twelve housing wings. There would be mental health and visitation buildings beside the tower, and even a cemetery for the indigent was being scratched out back behind the chicken coops. Dorms were initially set up with common rooms for group interaction, unfettered access to outdoor space, and private rooms with self-selected bunk mates.

     It's a heady experience to be picked as a roommate for the first time. Oil and Waters were solitary men who'd made it in the world by individual entrepreneurial ingenuity. The former bus company owner hadn't known intimacy for more than ten years after being booted from his family for impregnating the oldest daughter. The ex-longshoreman had only ever known the occasional lonely hobo and had come to crave their rough treatment thrust onto him on the Covington docks.

     "Tell you what little buddy," begins Oil settling on his back beside his diminutive roommate on the narrow twin of the upper bunk. "Leave a space inside the crates they're trucking down to Louisville next week."

"Big man like you'll never fit under all that corn," Waters worries.

"It's a test run for our product, silly."

"I get caught and you might as well dig me a hole on Chicken Hill." 

"Don't fret yourself!" chides Oil sliding his big hand around Waters small one. "That crate space'll be empty this first run."

Chapter 10: Fathers And Sons

      "Whaddya know Frankie?" greets Oil from a low chair beside a small wooden desk.

"Not much Daddy," his lean eighteen-year-old son grins, sitting across from the father he hasn't seen in seven years.

"How's that Duesenberg?" the old man fairly shouts, leaning onto his forearms.

"Rebuilt the carburetor," Frank beams, proud to have kept his dad's run-car going all those years.

"Now all it needs is a new starter," Oil observes, turning his head slightly away from the canvas flap and quickly tipping a thumb into his mouth. 

     Visitation at the temporary prison was in a small army tent with an armed guard standing watch at the entry. The Beatty men weren't very communicative in the best of circumstances, but a hostile audience brought on even more beating around the bush. 

     Orville had been a successful bootlegger during Prohibition. Working out of his legitimate bus garage in Hopwood, Pennsylvania, he and his sons had helped to supply the Pittsburgh black market in moonshine. Losing the bus business to the bank after the 1929 stock market crash left the side line exposed, so clandestine operations were moved closer to suppliers in eastern Kentucky. One of them was the Magoffin County court clerk serving his third term as arbiter of business, legal or otherwise.

     "Where do ya get a starter down there?" queries the son with a tilt of his pointy chin to the southeast, knowing the car had no such need but playing right along with his father's ruse.

"Since the car's gotta be registered there anyway, you can ask the Magoffin county clerk."

"Will do Pop," nods the son, standing up as the guard grunts to signal time's up.

  

Chapter 9: Inside Jobs

 

    "Course they stuck me out in the fields," Waters chortles from the top bunk soon after lights out. "What about you Hillbilly?"

"Dang dishwashing," whines Loy Patrick from the next bed over. 

"That's about perfect with me down in the butcher shop," Oil declares with his dentured grin still visible in the slow summer dusk.

     Assignments were being divvied out in preparation for the move to the recently completed main building of the new Kentucky State Reformatory. It had been over a year since the flood that finally closed down the old one. The two-hundred non-violent offenders who had been conscripted as the building crew had become accustomed to life in a tent city. The routine of wake-up call at dawn, construction work all day, mess tent in evening shifts, and bedtime at dusk had persisted year round, rain or shine, humid or frigid. Now in their second summer in the camp, it was time for the inmates to start producing their own food.

 

     "Not so great for these dishpan hands," Loy deadpans, getting a chuckle out of a few of the others in their tent.

"Looky here," Oil declares to clarify his job assessment. "Waters'll grow it, you'll make it, I'll sell it."

"Just where'll I get that yeast?" the moonshiner worries.

"I got me a visitor coming up from Paintsville," Loy concludes as a big black bird alights from the mast pole with a raucous cry.

Chapter 8: Ataxia

      "Sorry Loy," mumbles Oil from his bench in the mess tent on the night after his outburst.

"Say again?" responds the lanky prisoner swaying over with his food tray. 

"Just trying to apologize."

"Do what?" puzzles Loy not hearing a word over the dizziness as he pitches into the next bench.

"Don't want you to do nothing," Oil shouts with growing frustration as the guards and other inmates fall silent.

"Don't get mad at me for not hearing," Loy grumbles while picturing his angry father yelling for the kids to do this or that.

     Dipsomania was always a drink away in whiskey-making families, and abuse of one kind or another was one step behind that flask. The Patricks of Magoffin County were no exception, and Loy's father had made teatotalers of his thirteen children. That wouldn't stop two of them from entering the family business, but at least they didn't piss away the profits. Alcoholics Anonymous would soon sweep the nation including the prisons, but in 1938 Bill W. was still stumbling into and out of New York bars. 

     Loy's dizziness was of a different sort. The blow to the back of the head had bruised his cerebellum, causing a floating sensation called ataxia. It made him off-balance all the time, especially when moving, and that feeling of falling dominated his other senses.

     "Oh nevermind," Oil concedes as the spectators return to their own plates. "Pull up a seat and let's eat!"

"Not much appetite in these rough seas," Loy sniggers.

"This grub don't help, but we'll be tilling soon."

"Ma always said if you plant corn, you get corn." 

"That reminds me Loy, could a fellow make a batch of the recipe?"

"Might need a starter this far from the hills," ponders the moonshiner scratching his head.

Chapter 7: Emulsification

     "Mamaw always said it takes a little bee's wax to mix oil and water," howls Loy Patrick to the five other inmates laying block for the tower on the first fifty degree day of February.

"What you going on about Hillbilly?" wonders the diminutive black man placing a cinder from each hand onto a growing stack as the others pause to spectate.

"Just that we all hear you all getting on that bus," Loy retorts as he plops a trowel of mud onto a block.

"Piss on you!" streams across from the wheelbarrow along with a cartwheeling hoe.

     Oil had kept his anger at bay since the arrest, but his family had been feared for explosiveness from tribal times. They had survived for eons on the hostile borders between Scotland and England by laying low in the Galloway hills, only unleashing violence when provoked. It took the Crown's standing army a century of hangings and deportations to root out the Beattisons from those debatable lands, dispersing that familial potency to Ulster and beyond.

     A psychiatrist might name it intermittent explosive disorder or oppositional defiance, a psychologist post-traumatic stress, but any self-respecting borderer would know that a short fuse was just one means of survival.

     "You got anything else to say?" Oil scowls over the prostrate bricklayer squinting up into the midday sun as their guard turns his back. 

"Not this minute," Loy groans, clutching his head and wobbling back to work while the mortar is still wet.

Chapter 6: Come In From The Cold

     "Quit your bouncing up there!" Oil groans from the bottom bunk as darkness descends on their first December in the tent city.

Stillness is the only response so he turns on his side and curls under the scratchy wool blanket against the sudden chill.

"Dang you Waters," he growls when the squeak of coil springs starts up again. "Get on down here!"





     An issue soon emerged with the experimental dormitory model of incarceration being implemented at LaGrange even before the inmates were moved into the new prison building. Hearing a bunk mate busy at work made some men mad, others lonely, and most aroused. Even behind bars, perhaps especially so, guys would find a way to enact their most primal instinct. The only problem is that sodomy was and still is a felony sex crime in Kentucky, though it's often overlooked and was historically encouraged in the penitentiaries.





     "This ain't no tearoom," the larger man whispers, holding open his army blanket for the smaller man to spoon into.

"Don't need no drink," Waters mutters, a bulge already butting against his backside.