The Bourbon Thief

  “Two for one,” the man says. “If it lives.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Missus says. “Unfortunately.”

  The man looks at Missus, raises his eyebrow. She’s not an ugly woman, Missus, but not a beauty, either. Master’s handsome, but they said he was out of money when he married her. Missus knows why he married her, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

  “How much?” Missus asks.

  “Nine hundred.”

  “Not for her. Pretty girl like that? Two for one?”

  “Thousand. Take it or leave it cuz it’s all I brought with me.”

  “Go on, then. Leave the money. Take the girl.”

  “Where you taking me?” Veritas asks.

  “To catch a boat,” the man says.

  “But I—”

  “Hush up, girl,” Missus says. “You did this to yourself.”

  The man puts irons on her wrists. They have a heavy rope through a hoop and he pulls her like a dog on a leash out of the kitchen.

  “He did this to me.” Veritas looks down at her belly. “He did. Not me. I didn’t want him.”

  “Shut your mouth, or I’ll cut out your tongue.” The man tosses his cash on the counter on his way out the door. Veritas digs in her feet and pulls back on the rope.

  “Don’t do this,” she says to Missus, her face wet with her fears. “Please don’t do this, Missus. I didn’t want him. He took me and I didn’t want him. I never wanted that. Don’t make me go. Don’t make me—”

  Missus slaps her hard. Then she does it again. A third time. Then the man stops her.

  “Hey, she’s mine now. I paid for her,” he says.

  She ignores the man and grabs Veritas by the hair.

  “You will die in chains,” Missus says. “You were born in chains and you will die in chains.”

  Veritas cries out as Missus rips the red ribbon from her head and takes a hank of hair and skin with it. It is the only thing she has of her mother’s and Missus has it in her hand.

  Veritas hears a sound like a river rising, bursting through mountains, washing away the world. But Veritas is on top of the mountain and she smiles as it’s washed away. The river is speaking and it speaks through Veritas.

  “You will have a son, and he will die of a fever. And you will die giving birth to your next child. And your husband will be happy to see you dead and buried,” Veritas says. “Oh, he will dance on your grave, you ugly old hag.”

  “What did you say to me?” Missus hisses.

  “I said you will die and your husband will smile at your graveside. And someday I will smile over his. I will come back and cut this family down to the roots. Then I will tear out the roots and everything you had and everything you are will burn, and not even all the rivers of the world will put out the fire I start in your house. My child will be a girl and I will name her Paris after my mother, and when Paris comes knocking on your door, you will let her in, and she will bring my vengeance in her blood and your death in her hands. There will be no more Maddoxes because of me. I curse you all from the branches to the roots. Veritas will rule your house.”

  Veritas punctuates her sentence by spitting in Missus’s face. Missus raises her hand again to Veritas, with a fist this time, and the second they touch, Tamara is awake again.

  * * *

  Tamara recoils as she feels the touch of hands on her body.

  “No—”

  “Come on now. Let’s get back to the house.”

  Arms lifted Tamara off the dock, and Tamara whimpered in protest. She didn’t want to leave the river, not while she lived. But she didn’t have the strength to pull away, to wade into the water. She could barely walk. How long had she slept? How long had it been since she ate? How long since Levi had left her?

  “I don’t want to go...” was all she could get out between breaths.

  In the house she was placed on a sofa. The sofa was a new antique, purchased after the flood. It wasn’t even September, but someone had started a fire and it glowed like a grinning demon behind the gate. Tamara’s eyes opened and shut in slow, dazed blinks.

  “I can’t be here,” she said to herself, but someone heard her.

  “You’re sick. You need to rest.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “You always said that, baby.”

  “Don’t call me baby,” Tamara said.

  “But you are my baby.”

  Tamara opened her eyes.

  “Momma?”

  31

  Her mother bathed her skin with wet washcloths and helped her into clean clothes. Tamara didn’t speak the entire time as her mother raised her arms to put the shirt on her, tapped her feet to help her into her favorite old jeans. She was a child again in her mother’s care. Tamara wished she could hate it, but she’d missed it. Her mother half dragged, half carried her into the living room and sat her down on the sofa.

  “What are you doing here, Momma?” Tamara asked as she stretched out on her back. She had no more strength to sit up straight.

  Her mother held out a cup of water, but Tamara only looked at it.

  “It’s just water,” her mother said, taking a sip of it to show her it was safe. “Drink it.”

  Tamara’s hand shook as she took the cup from her mother’s hand. Her mother helped her up enough to drink. Once it was to her lips, she drank every drop down in a few quick swallows.

  “I thought you were someone else,” Tamara said, clutching the cup of water. “I wanted you to be someone else.”

  “Levi.”

  Tamara lay back down again but didn’t close her eyes. If she closed them, she would see Levi behind her eyes.

  “Why are you here?” Tamara asked again. The room was dark but for the fireplace burning. Her mother must have lit it to warm her chilled skin. Tamara looked down at her arms and saw bumps on them—mosquito bites. Had she lain there on the dock all night long? But it was still night.

  “I’m your mother. Why wouldn’t I be here?”

  “Why are you here?” Tamara asked again and heard the knife’s edge in her voice, serrated and gleaming.

  “I thought you should know the truth.”

  “A little late for that, Momma.”

  Tamara turned her head. Her mother looked tired, but almost pretty again. She wore very little makeup and had her dyed blond hair caught in a low bun at the nape of her neck. She was in a black short-sleeved sweater and slacks. A good look for her. Classy almost.

  “I’m sorry about the letter,” her mother said at last. “You and Levi disappeared and I didn’t know how or where to find you. I had to wait until you came back.”

  “We wondered why you gave up the suit.”

  “It seemed the only way to get you two to come back from wherever you’d run off to. I left a dozen messages with Daniel’s secretary. None of them got through?”

  “Levi brought me a letter. I threw it in the ocean. He told the judge’s secretary not to send anything from you to us. You can’t blame him. You sent the cops to kill him.”

  Her mother raised her hand in protest. “I did no such thing. I told them to bring you home. That’s all I told them.”

  “They would have killed him if I hadn’t stopped them.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her mother’s voice sounded hollow as a reed, but Tamara believed she was sorry. So was Tamara. “I didn’t tell them to do that. I got your note, and I didn’t know what else to do. Your grandfather—”

  “You mean my father?”

  “George,” her mother said definitively. “George was supposed to tell you the night of the flood. He was supposed to tell you who he was and who Levi was so you’d know why you two couldn’t be together. I guess he didn’t get around to telling you, did he?” Her mother looked at her finally.

  “No,” Tamara said. “He did not.” She sighed and stared back at the ceiling, waiting, her hand resting lightly on her stomach, wanting to be close to what little bit of Levi she had inside her.

  “I was in love
with Eric,” her mother began speaking again. “So in love. But he treated me like a baby sister. I threw myself at him and he threw me off. I was only seventeen, so I thought I could make him love me. I went after Nash then, hoping to make Eric jealous. Nash and I got along real well, but he treated me like a sister, too, although for different reasons. When I tried to be with him, he pushed me away just like Eric had. Eric liked older women, wild women. Not dumb little girls. I didn’t want to be a dumb girl anymore. I was here at the house one day, nosing around for Eric or Nash. Neither of them were home. But George was. I poured my heart out to him and he poured his heart out to me. He wanted a divorce from his wife. Doctors told her she couldn’t have more kids after Nash, but George wanted more than two sons. Especially once he figured out Nash had no interest in getting married, no interest in women at all. But your grandmother was old-fashioned. She wouldn’t give him a divorce for anything. Not for love or money. I found out later my sweet mother-in-law wasn’t so old-fashioned, after all. What she was was very, very angry with George. That’s why she wouldn’t divorce him. She was punishing him.”

  “Because of Levi?”

  Her mother nodded. “I didn’t know about that then. I just knew I was lonely. George said if he were a younger man and single, he’d marry me himself. I said if he were single, I would marry him, and I didn’t care he was older. So he took me to bed that day and a hundred times after. When I found out I was pregnant, I hoped he’d get divorced and marry me. He didn’t. He had a different idea. He tried to force Eric to marry me, but Eric wouldn’t do it. Eric would rather join the army and get himself killed than bow to his father and marry some dumb girl like me. And Nash...you know about him now. But George talked him into it. I lied to Nash and said the baby was Daniel Headley’s. I thought if he knew it was his own father’s, he wouldn’t have anything to do with me or the baby. But he knew. He knew all along.”

  “Daddy loved me,” Tamara said.

  “Of course he did,” her mother said. “You were his half sister.”

  Tears leaked out of Tamara’s eyes. She wanted to be sick. She was sick. But she kept it inside, swallowing her bile.

  “Go on,” Tamara said, hoarse with anguish.

  “Nash and I got married. I don’t know why he finally caved to his father, but he did. Maybe he knew he had to get married anyway, or people would start to wonder about him even more than they already did. Six months later you were born. A girl. George was disappointed, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Eric was still alive in Vietnam. Nash was alive. Then Eric was killed. So George demanded Nash do his duty as a husband and give him a grandson. Nash only laughed at him. So George took it on himself to do the job for him.”

  “Daddy caught you two together, didn’t he? That’s what Levi heard. That’s why Daddy killed himself. If you hadn’t slept with Granddaddy, Daddy might still be alive.”

  Daddy would be alive and Tamara would have been with him down on Bride Island. She would have slept in that pink room on her strawberry sheets and been happy. She would never have even met Levi. If her mother hadn’t killed Daddy.

  “Slept with him?” her mother said, then laughed a sad terrible little laugh. “That sounds almost romantic. I had a child to raise. I wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Not after he lied to me, got me pregnant, sold me off to marry one of his sons, sold me off like cattle. But George knew about Levi by then. And you know what he said to me? He said to me all the time, ‘Behave yourself, Virginia, or I will leave everything to Levi and you will have nothing. You will be out on the streets, and Levi will be swimming in gold.’”

  “What did you do?”

  Her mother paused and Tamara knew then what had happened. The same thing that happened to her the night the river saved her. But the river hadn’t saved her mother.

  “I behaved myself.”

  Those were the three ugliest words Tamara had ever heard in her life.

  “George hired Levi to work right here at this house. Hired him to rub him in my face, to keep me quiet, to keep me behaving. Nash was dead. So was Eric. I didn’t know why he still wanted me around. He had other women on the side. Not just me. I don’t know what he thought I was good for. Your grandmother tried to kill herself after Nash died and all she succeeded in doing was making herself a vegetable.”

  “Grandma tried to kill herself? Y’all said it was a stroke.”

  “She took every pill in the house, baby. Gave her brain damage. I think she lived as long as she did to spite George. I don’t blame her for that.”

  “Why did you never tell me this?”

  “When your daddy...” Her mother paused, corrected herself. “Nash wrote me a letter right before he died and told me not to tell you he wasn’t your father. He loved you like his own, and he didn’t want anyone taking that away from you. And truth is, I was ashamed of it all, ashamed to tell you the truth. But when I caught you and Levi kissing in the barn, I knew it was time to tell you. George was going to tell you. If you hadn’t killed him, maybe he would have.”

  “So you knew I killed him?” Tamara asked. “You knew all along? But—” Her mother had blamed her for George Maddox’s death but had never outright accused her of murder. If she’d known, why hadn’t she told the police?

  “He’s left-handed. When he put a red ribbon on his hand, he put it on his right hand because that’s the only way he could get it on. When they found him, it was on his left hand. Of course I knew you’d killed him. Who else could have?”

  “You knew and you didn’t ask me why?”

  “I was protecting you. You could have gone to jail for murder, Tamara.”

  “Why did you think I killed him? Go on, tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I imagined you’d fought with him over Levi. It didn’t matter. I just knew you did it and weren’t sorry about it.”

  “You want to know what happened? You want to know why I wasn’t sorry? You said I had to pick between my horse and Levi’s job. You’d kill my horse or you’d fire Levi. I went crying to Granddaddy and he was so sweet to me. He sent me to take a long hot bath. Then he came to my bedroom with some Red Thread bourbon. He had me drink some. And while I drank, he told me his big sob story about how much he wanted a son and how the world had taken away all his babies. Then he said he had an idea how we could help each other make everything okay again. Wanna know what that idea was, Momma?”

  “No. Tamara, no—”

  “He kissed me, Momma. He kissed me hard and dragged me to the bed—”

  “No.” Her mother shook her head.

  “And he unzipped his pants.”

  “No!”

  “And then the floodwater came into my bedroom and it was like God had heard me screaming. Granddaddy saw it, and when he took his mind off me for a second, I hit him over the head with a lamp. When that didn’t knock him out, I hit him over the head with a candlestick. And when that didn’t kill him, I pushed his head under the water and drowned him. Because I knew if he lived, he would finish what he started, and he would make me give him a son. That’s why I killed him. Not because he was going to fire Levi. Not to save my horse from the glue factory. Not because I wanted to inherit all his dirty money. Not because he told me about you and him. And when I was under him fighting for myself, I knew you had sold me to him. You’d set me up so I’d give in to him and do anything he wanted so we could stay in this house and keep his money. He said you told him to take me down a peg or two. You’re gonna tell me you didn’t do all that?”

  Her mother sighed, heavy and sad. She wiped a tear off her face, nodded.

  “I told him that,” her mother whispered, her voice hoarse, her eyes closed. “I told him to tell you about Levi. He’d been threatening to leave Red Thread and everything to Levi because he’s the last Maddox boy. I thought if you were scared we’d lose everything to Levi, you’d stay away from him. George was only supposed to scare you into behaving yourself.”

  “He scared me. But I didn’t behave myself,” Tama
ra said.

  “You really thought I’d sell your body?”

  “Hard not to believe it of a woman who’d just threatened to shoot my own horse. You really thought he wouldn’t do what he did to me after what he did to you?”

  “After?” her mother said, incredulous. “There was no after, Tamara. Of course I didn’t think he’d go after you. He was still coming after me.”

  “Momma... I didn’t know.”

  “That makes two of us, I guess. I would shoot every man, woman