Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

hour. He had a little sugar, though. And he had plenty of whiskey, fifteen bottles of the stuff. Store-bought, he would have called it, implying that it was not good. And he would have been right; it was terrible stuff, as cheap as dirt and as harsh as kerosene, but it had alcohol in it and it would taste all right mixed with sugar and water. It would taste a lot better than nothing.
    I mixed two toddies, using the recipe he had taught me: four fingers of whiskey, and if you have no honey, three thumbloads of sugar, and when the water boils, pour it slow till the fumes rise and make your mouth water. That had been on a winter night, when the winds had brought wet, sleety rain, and I had arrived on his doorstep soaked and shivering. He had instructed me to take off my clothes, had hung them close to the stove, and by the time the toddy was ready the aroma of wet, steamy clothes had pervaded the air. I had grown to really love the taste of whiskey that night, while he had spun some improbable tale into the fetid air. Standing there waiting for the water to boil, I tried to remember what the story had been about.
    But I couldn’t. There had been too many stories, told over too many years, too many years ago; they all blurred together in my mind. I wondered if they would be blurred in his. And then I began to think about what a man’s dying really means: his story is lost. Bits and pieces of it remain, but they are all secondhand tales and hearsay, or cold official records that preserve the facts and spoil the truth; the sum is like a writer’s complete works with crucial numbers missing: the works of Macaulay minus the essay on Milton; the Complete Henry Hallam without The Constitutional History. The missing volumes are often not the most important, but they are the stuff of background, the material of understanding, the real power of history. The gaps in the stories of the famous are filled eventually; overfilled. Funeral eulogies become laudatory biography, which becomes critical biography, which becomes history, which means everyone will know the facts even if no one knows the truth. But the gaps in the stories of the unknown are never filled, never can be filled, for they are larger than data, larger than deduction, larger than induction. Sometimes an attempt is made to fill them; some poor unimaginative fool, calling himself a historian but really only a frustrated novelist, comes along and tries to put it all together. And fails. And so, like a poor cook trying to salvage a culinary disaster, he peppers his report with deceptive phrases—“it appears” and “it would seem” when he is fairly sure but has no evidence, “clearly” and “almost certainly” when he has no idea at all, and salts it with obscure references and then he pretends (to no one in particular because no one in particular usually cares) that the seasoned mess is Chateaubriand instead of turkey hash.
    The water boiled then, and I filled his cup and set the kettle on the back of the stove. I stirred his toddy and carried it to him.
    “Jack?” I said. I waited. His breathing changed ever so slightly. I leaned over and waved the cup under his nose. He stirred.
    “Johnny?” he said, without opening his eyes.
    “It ain’t George Washington.”
    He smiled, opened his eyes. “I dreamed you was here.”
    “Wasn’t dreamin’,” I said. “I got here at just after daybreak.”
    He nodded, seemingly exhausted by the effort of moving his head.
    “I’ll be all right now,” he said. “It’s mornin’. I’ll be all right till midnight. It’s them small hours I can’t abide no more.”
    “You ain’t been eatin’ right,” I said. “That’s all. You can’t hardly expect to go runnin’ around half the night if you ain’t eatin’ right.”
    “Hell, Johnny, I ain’t been doin’ nothin’ right. I got this cough an’ the bastard won’t let go. Started coughin’ blood, losin’ weight, got so I could hardly stand up long enough to