Beam went to him and immediately smelled the fumey sweetness of alcohol.
“What kind is it?” he asked.
“Honeysuckle.” Alton handed him the bottle. “Go ahead and take a yank on it.”
Beam held the bottle under his nose. It smelled nothing like honeysuckle. It smelled like pure grain swill and it made his eyes water.
“You know I can’t have that,” he said. He tried to hand the bottle back but Alton stepped away grinning.
“Oh, go ahead. It won’t hurt to just have a taste,” he said.
Beam stared at the bottle. It wasn’t his age or even deep Protestant guilt that kept him glued to sobriety. Though Clem had taken to prayer of late and was often seen reading in the Bible, his folks were not churchy and he’d been to but a handful of services his entire life. It was his affliction, a mild form of narcolepsy, that made him leery of drink. Without warning, a sudden sleep could come upon him, and he would drop as if felled by an ax. The doctors had told him that with such a disease the right level of drunkenness could kill him, and that it might take hardly more than a shot of whisky or half a six pack of lukewarm Coors to do the job. Beam suspected this was largely bluff, though. He’d been drunk a few times and had survived.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“Don Eddy Ramsey. Makes it himself. You should see his cellar. He’s got three refrigerators full of those little bottles.”
Beam shook the container and the alcohol beaded against the glass. In one motion, he slung the bottle up and took a long healthy pull and then gasped when he finished. The liquor reached its fire far down into him and left a taste almost like warm iron on his tongue, and he felt his head steady and lighten until he could no longer hear the picnic in the glen below.
“How’s that grab you?” Alton asked. He took the bottle from Beam and grinned.
“It drinks pretty good, don’t it?”
Alton took another sip and then passed the bottle back to Beam and they spent perhaps a half hour that way, trading drinks and remarking on the bald hurt inside the liquor, the burn and scald of it tempered with only the slightest hint of honeysuckle. They talked and drank until finally Alton declared he was hungry.
“I need a wedge of cornbread to soak up all this whisky I’m drowning in,” he said.
Beam remained silent. He drank deeply again, the bottle lifted to his lips as if he were bugling a reveille to the cemetery dead, the liquor pounding loud and brassy between his ears.
“Hey, Beam,” said Alton. “Maybe you shouldn’t take so much of that stuff. It’s pretty stout.”
Beam slung the bottle from his mouth and grimaced at his cousin. He leaned against a crumbling headstone to steady himself. Then he put a finger to his lips.
“Ssshh,” he said.
Alton jerked the bottle away from Beam and stoppered it with the wad of sandpaper. He replaced it in the mound of cast away flowers and saddles, then covered it with an arrangement of red and mildewed nylon chrysanthemums.
“Look,” Alton said, turning to Beam, “you’re just going to have stay up here until you get sober enough to come back down again and that’s all there is to it.”
“I ain’t sitting up here,” Beam said, shaking his head.
“If you go down there they’ll smell the liquor on you.”
“I don’t give a goddamn. They don’t like the smell they should just hold their noses.”
Beam stood up from the headstone and walked down the row toward the potluck, but he had to stop and spell himself against another grave marker as Alton came trotting up behind.
“See, you can’t even hardly walk right,” he said. “You just need to sit here and rest a spell.”
Beam looked off through the trees and his head swam. “Maybe you’re right,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I am,” said Alton. “You wait right here and I’ll go down and get you some water and bring it up to you, okay?”
“All right. That’d be fine.”
“Now don’t move. Just stay put right there.”
Alton walked out of the cemetery, through the sunlight and on into the shady trees until the sound of his footsteps was covered by the quake and jostle of the heat.
Beam braced himself against the gravestone. It crumbled some in his hands and he wiped his fingers against his jeans and then closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The blood throttled through him. His tongue had gone dry and brittle and felt swollen, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the trash heap where Alton had hidden the bottle.
A blue jay screamed somewhere in the pines.
Beam woke to full night, not knowing where he was. The ground under him felt soft and damp with moss. He rolled onto his back and then lifted himself onto his elbows, his head wobbling loose and ugly. The drink gurgled back into his throat and he spat raw bile and then wiped his mouth and remembered.
At one corner of the cemetery burned a low campfire. Two men were seated before it on feed buckets. They smoked cigarettes and shared a bottle. Each wore a patchy beard and cradled a rifle in his lap. Far off in the darkness, a pair of foxhounds bayed. When Beam staggered into the hem of firelight, the men looked up at him.
“Where’s the homecoming?” Beam asked.
“You mean the Sheetmire homecoming?” the larger of the two men said.
Beam nodded.
The man who’d spoken scratched at his black whiskers and lit a cigarette. “You’re a mite late if that’s what you come here for.”
Beam wiped the dirt from his arms and then pressed his palms against his eyes. “I must have fell asleep.”
The larger man grunted and adjusted himself atop his feed bucket. He wore a tan hunting jacket and stone-washed blue jeans, his great belly propped on his lap, and his eyes glinted lucent and tiny like bits of feldspar. The other man seated beside him wore faded Carhartt coveralls the color of grocer’s paper. He picked up a stick of kindling and began poking at the coals in the fire.
“Are you a Sheetmire?” he asked.
Beam stroked the back of his neck. Looking through the night at the paling of trees faintly illuminated in the firelight before they faded into blank darkness, he recalled the line of faces at the potluck stretched in a cambered row beside the tables like a procession funereal and gaunt.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a Sheetmire.”
“Which one?”
“I’m Beam Sheetmire. Clem and Derna’s boy.”
Both men nodded at this. The large one threw his cigarette into the fire and leaned over and lifted a bottle of Old Grandad out of the dust and uncapped it and took two short pulls before screwing the cap on and settling the bottle in the dust again.
“I believe I know them,” he said, a bit breathless from the whisky. “There’s a lot of Sheetmires around and it’s hard to keep track of all the different bunches. I don’t even mess with keeping up no more. Now, it used to be a lot of the older folks was good at that kind of thing. Kept it all written down in the front of their Bibles. Didn’t just write it down, though. They studied on it. Got it down like an oath they had to say. My Uncle Esker could talk the name of ever half-aunt and cousin on back