Alfie and the Moonshiners
by
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"Mama. Can I...? Can me an' Junior...?" Alfie looked imploringly into Mama's face. What he saw there was her full attention to the task of pressing freshly churned butter into a wooden mold. He turned his eyes from her face and studied the wheat sheaf imprint on the cake of butter that she dumped onto the sheet of oiled paper. He tried again, this time speaking more rapidly. "Mama can I go with Junior to pick Easter Lilies?" There. He had got it out. And he had Mama's full attention now. She turned inquiring brown eyes on him. Little beads of sweat stood on her upper lip. She wiped a lock of hair from her forehead. Once coal black, Mama's hair was now streaked with grey. Alfie rubbed one bare foot on top of the other. "Pick Easter lilies! Lord! Where are you going to pick Easter lilies? They grow in the woods." "I know." Alfie always said, "I know" when Mama told him something he didn't want to hear. "Junior says the Burl Green Woods are full of 'em. Can we go an' pick some for you?'' The "for you" was what Junior had put him up to saying, and he had almost forgotten. It would have been just as well if he had forgotten because Mama was not taken by the trick. "The Burl Green Woods!" Mama said it as if the Burl Green Woods were the last place on this earth that she would consider letting Alfie and Junior go. "Why you'd get lost in the Burl Green Woods and never find your way home...It's Easter Sunday and you ought to be in Sunday School; go and get washed up." Mama wrapped the cake of butter, set it on the scales to be sure it weighed a full pound, and set it carefully in a bucket of ice. "Wash behind your ears and put on clean underwear. If something happened to you..." She didn't finish the sentence but Alfie knew what she meant. If he were hit by a car on the way to Sunday School and had to be taken to the hospital in dirty underwear she would be disgraced. She couldn't hold her head up when she went to the doctor's office to deliver the butter and flowers she sold to be able to buy clothes to keep Alfie looking decent. Junior was not present but he came in for Mama's censure anyway. "What does Junior know about the Burl Green woods?" She pressed more soft butter into the mold. "You and Junior both would get lost over there in the Burl Green Woods. More than a thousand acres and not a house on it. Not one that anybody lives in anyway. Nothing but a few old run down shacks the darkies used to live in before the roof fell in on them." Two little boys lost in the woods would be bad enough but Mama's face registered a deeper fear about the Burl Green Woods. But that was not something to talk about with a small boy bent on adventure. "You go and get ready for Sunday School. I'll ask your Papa to take you and you can hitch a ride home with Miss Florrie or somebody." Papa came stomping into the kitchen. His blue eyes were flashing impatiently as he jerked open the drawers to the kitchen cabinet. He didn't find what he was looking for and he slammed the drawers shut again. "Have you seen my shaving soap?" he demanded of Mama. She pressed more butter into the mold and bit her lower lip to keep her composure because there was something more important to talk with Papa about than his shaving soap. "It's on the shelf where you keep it." She pressed hard on the butter in the mold. ''Right beneath where the razor strap hangs." Papa turned to go and Mama added "I wish you would take the boys to Sunday School. You could leave them and come back here." In a quieter tone reflecting her deep concern, "We could talk about what happened over there."
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About the Book
THE MOONSHINERS
It is a story full of both villains and heroes. The moonshiners are the villains; Papa and Mister Charles and Willie are heroes. Sandy, the mostly collie dog, is the greatest hero of them all.
Mama and Cliff and Miss Maggie are heroic too, for they wait at home, hanging between hope and despair. And Gran'ma who prays for her babies.
And the Sheriff. Surely there has never been another like him, and yet he is the classic prototype of THE LAW.
Some of these characters are real people from the author's childhood. There is no need to shield them from their rightful place in the sun by using fictional names for them. Others are fictional characters created for the purpose of making the tale more interesting. Even they are treated as well as they deserve.
About the Author
Henry Buchanan is a native Georgian. He spent his boyhood in the very region described THE MOONSHINERS. The Burl Green Woods and Tobesofkee Creek are to him like the lines in his own writing hand. His brother Junior actually did fall into the moonshiners' barrels of mash, and the boys' Papa actually did come for them. But what's the use in telling such a tale as this unless it can be made a bit more dramatic by imagination? That's the privilege that attends the writer who has outlived most of the people who were involved in the original adventure. Buchanan is the author of AND THE GOAT CRIED, a collection of Southern Tales, THE MARRIAGE MYTH, selected tales from the most ancient of all tales, and THE TELEVANGELIST, a modern novel about a young man whose exploits can only be accounted for by the claim that "the Devil made me do it." The author lives now in Calloway County Kentucky where he collects his tales from the deep mines of memory and shares them with his old cronies at the fictional Sunrise Café.