Ava's Man (2001)
“It even sounds like a sin.
Charlie could swing his hammer all day and not make a ten-dollar bill, but he could run off a gallon of white whiskey and make five dollars a jug. He sold it to Jack Milsap, and Ralph Crow, merchants and druggists and other respected men, because his product was clean, because it was pure, and because it was safe as Kool-Aid. Other people may have run it off from rusted truck radiators, their hooch laced with lead salts, invisible, deadly. No one ever found a dead pos...sum floating in Charlie’s mash. He never sold a sip—not one sip—that he did not test with his own liver.
Just as his daddy had taken him to the woods to learn it, he took James, then a teenager and his oldest, to help carry wood, to help keep watch. James remembers how his daddy would watch the likker drip slowly, slowly from clean copper tubing—they called that process “sweetening it in”—until it was time to taste.
Charlie carried a clear, flat half-pint bottle in the back pocket of his overalls, and he would run off a pint and shake it to check its bead—good likker had a fine bead of tiny bubbles along its surface when it was shaken.MoreLess
Charlie could swing his hammer all day and not make a ten-dollar bill, but he could run off a gallon of white whiskey and make five dollars a jug. He sold it to Jack Milsap, and Ralph Crow, merchants and druggists and other respected men, because his product was clean, because it was pure, and because it was safe as Kool-Aid. Other people may have run it off from rusted truck radiators, their hooch laced with lead salts, invisible, deadly. No one ever found a dead pos...sum floating in Charlie’s mash. He never sold a sip—not one sip—that he did not test with his own liver.
Just as his daddy had taken him to the woods to learn it, he took James, then a teenager and his oldest, to help carry wood, to help keep watch. James remembers how his daddy would watch the likker drip slowly, slowly from clean copper tubing—they called that process “sweetening it in”—until it was time to taste.
Charlie carried a clear, flat half-pint bottle in the back pocket of his overalls, and he would run off a pint and shake it to check its bead—good likker had a fine bead of tiny bubbles along its surface when it was shaken.MoreLess
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