Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe Page A

up again, even more drunk than before, and back to the courthouse he went. The judge now infuriated the lawman by handing out another ten buck fine and throwing him and his freed prisoner out. By this time of day the judge was well into his own cups, and as the deputy opened the door, the judge called out to him to quit bothering the court and to let the old man bring him in a couple of bottles. It was well known by everyone in town except, it seemed, the sheriff’s new representative, that the judge kept a supply of moonshine in a gallon jar that was painted white so it looked like milk. Earl’s pa gave the deputy a jaunty ‘good day’ and went home for the bottles. When he returned to the courthouse everyone had left except the judge, who had passed out on the bench.
    The next arrival on Haggerd’s porch was his son-in-law, Jim, who continued to work a still up the mountain as part of his own family tradition even though, as he observed, trade had quietened down as living standards had risen across the country. He opened a heavy banjo case and intermittently picked out tunes as the talk rambled around to building the simple apparatus needed for the job. Haggerd lamented declining standards in the automotive industry.
    â€˜Time was when you could take the radiator out of a ‘Cat’ tractor, clean her out, and set her up in the woods. They was pure copper and they made the dandiest little stills. That’s all gone to hell now, though,’ he sighed, ‘them new radiators is all steel. You can never get all the rust out.’
    I asked if people were ever caught in the act of distilling
    â€˜You still need to be careful,’ he sipped his drink, ‘but thirty years ago them revenuers was everywhere. Folks would always set their stills half-way up a hillside. If you heard the revenue men comin’ through the woods you’d have to leave it to get busted up, but they’d never catch you on account of how you’d placed yourself.
    â€˜They’d have to be on foot,’ he explained, ‘because there weren’t no four-track vehicles to get into the woods in them days. By the time they reached you, they’d already climbed a few hundred feet so they were pretty well washed up. You were fresh. So long as you ran uphill, you’d leave them standing.’
    Earl had never been a prime mover in the distilling industry, but back in his extreme youth in the 1950s he had been a runner, carrying moonshine down to Georgia and North Carolina in souped-up automobiles. It had been a sort of deadly game, like motor racing with an honest profit for the winners. These were usually the moonshiners, but there were accidents and occasional convictions as state troopers with massive V-8 motors latched on to them. There were also shoot-outs, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The truth probably was that much of the trade had been far from homely fun, but in Earl’s memory, the whole business had taken on a Robin Hood flavour.
    Earl’s favourite car had been a 1940 Ford with a three-speed on the column and a vacuum two-speed axle. This mighty motor was so hepped up that it would pull 125 mph in second gear and Earl knew there wasn’t a patrol man in three states who could catch him. Then a rumour began spreading about a ‘hemi-head’ Mercury with two four-barrel carburettors in the pay of a giant revenue man, but nobody in Earl’s circle had ever seen this rocket ship. ‘Feller who told me about it claimed it burned so much gas that you either had to switch off the engine to fuel up or find a fast pump, because even at idle it was using up the stuff quicker than you could fill that tank.’ One night, Earl had unloaded down in Georgia and was driving home to the hollow through North Carolina. The absence of speed limits in the happy days before the 1970s oil crisis meant that you couldn’t be pulled merely for driving fast, so long as you weren’t