Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe

tonight?’ asked Haggerd.
    â€˜We’ll get back to the highway and find ourselves a room. Then on down towards the Cumberland Gap in the morning.’
    Earl shook his head.
    â€˜You don’t want to be goin’ anywhere in that rain,’ he said, and it was true. A wall of water was falling from the sky and the road outside the store had turned into a muddy stream. It was motorcycle mayhem out there.
    â€˜You could leave the bikes with Haggerd an’ stay at our place,’ offered Shannon, but Mrs Haggerd was a jump ahead in her hospitality.
    â€˜I think we’d all like to have you visit for a few days till the weather clears up,’ she announced. ‘The weatherman says this’ll run the whole weekend. Haggerd’s ma’s house is empty now she’s taken up with Fred. It’s right up the back here. No one else needs it. You can even put your bikes under cover. Stay there till you’re ready to move on out.’
    And so Hurricane Bertha did us one of the great favours of the journey. She had led us into the arms of a family untouched in its structure by the TV dinner, the universal divorce and the video store. None of them were regular church-goers, though we were now firmly in the Bible Belt. Haggerd told me he’d never been inside a place of worship since the preacher stole his whiskey and his morning paper, but kindness to people on the road was as natural to them as sunshine after rain. Visiting was the main recreation, with yarns that were like the best tales of the sea and must have grown just as much with the telling. This was true oral tradition, a form of literature hard to find in Britain and in the cities of the US, but it flourished here in the hollow.
    We unloaded the bikes in the clamouring darkness of the storm. The spare house was built on a slope opposite the store. It must have been just as his mother left it, walking out on her two strong legs to marry a childhood sweetheart. Fred had made good in a nearby town and, like Ma, was in his nineties. The photographs on the wooden walls could have been from folk history books, with tall, rangy, second-generation mountain farmers standing self-consciously for the camera, uncomfortable in Sunday-go-to-meeting outfits. The parents of those people had come here, many from England, Scotland and Ulster, in search of an improvement over impossibly hard times at home. They lived first by trapping, hunting and gathering what they could, only later planting crops near their simple cabins. On a sideboard under one of these images was Ma’s television set, early 1960s with a tiny screen, mute witness to the changes she had seen. Creeping into the adjoining room, we found an ancient bed beneath a wondrous quilted counterpane. In the back kitchen the staple, dried food cupboards were full, but the wardrobe stood empty. Ma had gone for good.
    We unpacked our gear then scurried through the downpour down to Haggerd’s place for dinner. The men were sitting in the shelter of the porch enjoying the air, now cool and washed clean of bugs. Shannon and Dolly were inside cooking. Roz went to join them and Earl poured me a generous shot of what looked like whiskey, out of an unmarked bottle.
    â€˜This here is finest mountain dew,’ he announced. ‘Distilled right up in the woods.’
    Haggerd offered me some lemonade to dilute the spirit, but I took a drop of water as I do with my Scotch. The taste was much like a branded sour mash whiskey, but the illegal nature of its origin gave it a savour of its own.
    â€˜I didn’t think people did their own distilling nowadays,’ I said, and that was the trigger for a flood of moonshining stories.
    Making whiskey ran in Haggerd’s family but, as always, Earl led off by recalling his own father being hauled up before the judge by a new town deputy for being drunk in public. The judge fined Pa ten dollars and sent him out of court. An hour later, he was picked