Blind Tiger by Sandra Brown

In addition to the pressing financial necessity propelling her was a personal goal: As long as she was embarking on an illicit business, she wanted to excel at it.

Under pain of death, Ernie confided in her his family’s recipe for the mash: unsprouted corn kernels, malted barley, water, sugar, yeast, and pot-tail.

“But,” he warned, “you gotta know how much of each ingredient to add. You gotta know what stage to add it, and it has to be the right temperature. You gotta know when the mash has reached the perfect stage of fermentation. If your mash ain’t good, your whiskey ain’t gonna be.”

“How do you know when it’s fermented long enough?”

“When it gets foamy on top. But I dip my finger in and taste it just to be sure.”

Many of his instructions went that way. “What’s pot-tail?”

“Also called slop. It’s what’s left in the cooker at the end of the run.”

“And when is the run at an end?”

“When the liquor breaks at the worm and won’t hold a bead. After that it’s distilling less than a hunerd proof liquor. You stop cookin’ and pour out the pot-tail right then so it won’t burn. Hogs love it if you want to use it for feed. Chickens, too. But save some to start another batch of mash.”

“Oh. Like sourdough bread.”

“I reckon. Never heard of that. Is it like cornbread?”

She had a lot to learn, beginning with Ernie’s vast glossary of moonshining terminology. Thumper. Backings. Goose eye. Popskull. “That’s low-quality ’shine that gives you headaches for days on end,” Ernie explained.

A swab-stick was what he’d been using to stir the mash as it had begun to cook. It was different from a stir-stick, which had a forked end with a wire strung between the points. That was used to stir the mash as it was fermenting, which usually took four to five days. “Longer when the weather’s cooler.”

The referred-to “worm,” she learned, was slang for the copper tubing coiled inside the wooden barrel she’d noticed the night before. The hot vapor created by the cooking mash rose up to the cap and made its way through the cap arm into the worm, where the steam was cooled by circulating water inside the barrel. The condensed result that funneled out of the worm into the container outside the bottom of the barrel was corn liquor.

Because of his down-home way of speaking, Laurel’s first impression of Ernie was that he was simple. Most would still have that impression of him. In actuality, Earnest Sawyer was a chemist, who prided himself on the quality of his product.

“You only gotta poison one or two customers and your business is did for.” To guard against contaminants or toxins, he held to a rigid standard of filtering their moonshine three times before bottling it. Grinning widely, he’d told her, “I sample each run my ownself just to be sure.”

He walked and talked her through their next run, letting her observe the entire process. She asked a lot of questions. She even took one sip of the white lightning. Ernie and Irv laughed at the face she made. Eyes watering, coughing, she said she would leave them in charge of testing their whiskey’s quality.

Although she had no intention of taking over the distilling process, she’d wanted to have a rudimentary understanding of the science behind it.

Of course, it was also essential to learn how not to get caught. That was a science she must master.

One evening when Irv skipped going out to the still, she brought up her fear of being found out. The two of them were seated at the kitchen table enjoying a coconut meringue pie she had baked earlier that day.

Around a bite of pie, he said, “You don’t have to be fearful, just careful. There’s dyed-in-the-wool abstainers, sure. But a lot of folks around here turn a blind eye to moonshining because they understand the farmer’s plight brought on by the boll weevil. They switched from cotton to corn because corn is a boon market. And that’s because of whiskey-making. It’s basic economics.”

“It’s basic crime.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to a sod buster trying to keep his kids from going hungry. These people aren’t outlaws, Laurel. They’re hardworking, poor folk striking while the iron is hot.”

“I don’t think you take the potential dangers seriously enough, Irv.”

“All right, I’ll admit that things have clamped down since Prohibition. Before it, many lawmen ignored the illegal whiskey trade. Others adhered to ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ They lined their pockets with bribes. Now, though, they’re getting squeezed by federal revenue officers and the Texas Rangers.”

He raised his fork for emphasis. “That bunch is serious about upholding the law, no matter how unpopular it is. They can muscle their way past local and county officials, clean or crooked.

“Rumor is,” he continued, “the Rangers and other agencies are recruiting men to snitch, and typically these snitches are former moonshiners and bootleggers who know the business inside out. They swapped sides in exchange for clemency. Or maybe they found religion and reformed. Who knows? What I do know is that it’s happening.

“Which is why I was leery of that Hutton when he showed up at the shack, what with our whiskey still being just over the hill. He raised the hair on the back of my neck.”

“You still suspect him of being one of those snitches?”