The whiskey helped him keep still. One hit of Ol’ Death Whisper would drive most humans to their knees; two produced a mildly hallucinatory catatonia. The recipe produced a distillate that Jake figured was close to 97 percent pure, the condensed essence of divine vapors. He devoted himself to further refinement. Having been born during drought times in the Kentucky hill country, he was graced by heritage and sensibility to master the craft, and with that mastery came the beginning of art. In the processes of fermentation and distillation he found not only metaphors that answered his spirit, but a product that extended it.
For the next decade and a half he lived on the ranch. Between fifty-gallon batches run off in the barn and the daily chores of sufficiency, his spare time was spent sitting on the front porch sipping the fruits of his labor while letting his mind wander. He did some actual traveling, always on foot, to visit his neighbors in the surrounding hills. Originally, he’d hoped to trade his whiskey for other amenities, but his neighbors – mostly hard-working sheep ranchers – lacked both his taste and tolerance for highly-refined spirits, though most eventually found other uses for his elixir. They used it for tractor fuel, blowing stumps, and, diluted by a drop to a pint of water, as a treatment for almost anything that ailed their stock, from scours to lungworm. With a weedy garden, a few chickens, some hunting and fishing, and a fairly steady income from the Saturday night poker game he hosted each week, Jake got by. He developed a highly flexible sense of sufficiency. When he ran low on whiskey, he could always scrape up the makings for more, and whatever struck him as beyond the immediate necessity of his contentment he benignly ignored. It helped that he kept his necessities simple.
He received one letter from his daughter. She wrote to say she was pregnant and needed money. He sent a postcard in reply:
‘Dear Gabe––
Get married. My wives made out real good, and unless you’ve growed up homelier than a sackful of beets I expect you could too. Glad to hear I’m gonna be a granddaddy. Let me know how it all turns out and if it turns out bad you’re welcome here though I suspect you wouldn’t like it. Can’t help you out with money for I don’t have much. Your Father.’
It took him most of the afternoon to write the postcard. Except for signing his name on chip tabs, it was the first thing he’d written in almost 20 years. Gabriel’s letter was also the first he’d received in the same period of time, or at least the first personal letter – there were occasionally envelopes from the government, but he didn’t want anything from them and couldn’t think of anything they might want from him, so those he chucked in the fireplace.
* * *
In the winter of ’57, about the time Alice 2Parkins saw him running stark naked down McKensie Creek trying to spear a salmon with his fishing pole, most of the people in the community came to think that Jake was a little crazy. Fortunately for Jake, it was the kind of community that has almost been lost in American life, one where the neighbors are respectful and friendly, and where – as long as you are just difficult and not dangerous – people mind their own business. Jake, of course, didn’t think of himself as crazy, or even vaguely abnormal; like anyone who lets the mind wander long and far enough, it occasionally got lost. Jake, increasingly convinced of his blooming immortality, was in no hurry to find it. He figured he had plenty of time. He thought of himself as the beaver he’d seen a few years past on the Gualala, floating downstream on its back, paws folded 15 on its chest, looking up on the deep blue sky, steering with its tail, indolent and happy. Then, early the following spring, the Sheriff disturbed the easy drift of his life.
Cliff Hobson was a local boy who’d gone into law enforcement when he returned from Korea. He considered his job a public service, helping people out and stopping trouble. He’d known that Jake brewed a little whiskey long before he’d left for Korea; he’d even tried it once after he’d delivered a rick of wood to the old man. It had tasted like diesel going down, and the image he’d always remembered as it hit his stomach was the compression stroke in the cylinder of a D8 Cat. Figuring nobody could possibly want to buy the brew for human consumption, he didn’t consider it a law enforcement problem, and saw no reason to turn it into one. Cliff liked his job; he got to ride around in a new four-wheel-drive Jeep and talk on the radio. The only part of his job that he didn’t like was delivering bad news. He knew Jake wasn’t going to like it.
Jake didn’t: ‘What the fucking shit does this mean!’ he shrieked, crumpling the papers in his bony hand.
Cliff took half a step back. ‘It means proceedings have been started to sell your land for back taxes – you’ve never paid ’em once is what it says.’
‘I bought the goddamn place before there was any taxes.’
‘There’s been taxes a long time,’ Cliff mumbled, ‘and it looks to me like you either gotta pay ’em up or they’re gonna sell this place to someone who will.’
‘Well I ain’t got no $70,000, but I do got a .12 gauge scattergun and a .30/.40 Krag, and you can take word back that anybody who tries to buy my land or take it over is gonna have to kill me first, and even if they manage that, my ghost will haunt their ass hard. Hard, you hear me.’
‘There won’t be no shooting,’ Cliff said firmly.
‘Good,’ Jake barked, ‘then none of ’em will get killed.’
They left it at that.
At the end of the Sheriff’s visit four days later, he left Jake in tears. Gabriel, his only child, had drowned.
It was to be the first of two times Jake quit drinking. He quit for three days, till the funeral was over and she was buried. Most folks held that his unexpected temperance was an act of respect, and were mildly surprised at his behavior; those that knew him well understood it was a symptom of grief, and were relieved when he started drinking again. The kinder souls felt that he wanted to adopt his grandson because it was the decent thing to do, although they privately doubted that a man pushing 80 could properly raise a child – at any rate, they didn’t think it was the money. Those closer to Jake were sure it was the money: a $500,000 inheritance would pay a lot of back taxes, with plenty left over to cover his taste for highrolling action. In fact, those that played regularly in the Saturday night poker games were offering 8 to 5 that the boy would be gone within two years.
But to Jake it was more complicated than all their opinions together, so complicated that he didn’t even try to understand it. He went with his guts instead. When he’d heard about the inheritance from Gabriel’s lawyers, it had put a sparkle in his eye; but when he saw his grandson for the first time, he felt a sparkle in his blood. He saw them fishing in the late afternoon, casting the deep pool at Tottleman’s Falls, the kid yelping as a foot-long rainbow ripped the drifting worm. He saw birthdays and baseball mitts and a trip once in a while to the city to see the worthless Giants play; someone he could teach to play cards, and drink with, and tell the thousand stories of his life and the secrets of immortality. And if he saw the $430,000 in a mutual account, the other $70,000 coming off the top to cover room and board, he didn’t let it influence him unduly.
Miss Emma Gadderly, the county social worker, informed Jake she could not in good conscience recommend that he receive custody of little Johnny and, in the wake of his stunned bellow, calmly ticked off the reasons why: he was almost 80 years old, and certainly couldn’t expect to live much longer; he was a notorious drinker and gambler; there was no woman in the household; his land was being sold for tax delinquency; and, frankly, that in light of the substantial inheritance, his motives were suspect. Jake, spit flying, punctuating his rebuttal with jabs of a meat saw he flourished in his left hand, informed her in turn that 79 wasn’t shit to an immortal; that drinking and gambling made men out of boys; that there was, in fact, a female in the household, a new bluetick bitch pup named Nookie; that he fully intended to deed the ranch to his grandson as collateral on the anticipated loan; that his motives were none of her fucking business; and that he was fully prepared to go to the wall if she tried to interfere, promising that his second