Tanglefoot: Book one of the 'Suncookers series

By B. W. Edwards

Set in the Northwoods of Maine in an isolated logging community, Tanglefoot follows fourteen-year-old Charlie King as he learns the ropes of making, transporting and selling moonshine during the summer of 1920 right after prohibition begins. Charlie works for his controlling father, Caleb, and his kind Uncle Amos, and learns t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suncookers
• Release date: Jun 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733915311

B. W. Edwards

Having spent summers in Northern Maine for over 65 years, the author is well acquainted with the tales of the North woods on which this story is based. Searching for Native American artifacts brought him closer to the makers of arrowheads and stone knives. He watched the large boats tow five thousand cords of pulpwood down a narrow lake. He knew "the last old guy," and remembers their stories.

Book preview

Chapter 1

When I turned 14, I became a smuggler. After thirty-five years, I’ve made a lot of money, and I’m still at it, but can’t shake the memories of the tragic costs that are always part of an illegal business.

It was 1920, and I went to work for my father who ran a boat carrying Company woodsmen, mostly immigrants and supplies, mostly the Company’s. I was expected to step up and shoulder my share of this new family business, making and running whiskey down river in the face of the new Prohibition laws. I was old enough, Father told me, to work beside him and his brother, my Uncle Amos. I was his only son since my older brothers Will and Sam went to fight in the Great War but remained in France. Their gravestones are here in our little cemetery; their bodies are somewhere under the grass in a farmer’s field in Verdun.

Hey, Charlie, Uncle Amos greeted me as I came into the barn. He was, among other things, our village blacksmith, and this morning he was getting ready to re-shoe our pair of oxen, Lightning and Thunder.

Hi, Uncle Amos. Father said I should come out to help. Father was always instructing me to do one thing or another, but I really liked working in the barn. The scent of the hay, the animals, and this morning the smell of iron being heated up in the forge had greeted me as I walked between the big sliding doors.

Built by Bob Cunningham in 1860, our giant barn loomed over the lake. You could see the cupola and eagle-topped weather vane half way to the Dam, some miles away. It was a landmark we strained to see on those foggy, rainy boat rides while ferrying cargo and woodsmen up and down the lake. On the lake shore and surrounded on three sides by vast fields, the barn was home to dozens of horses, our oxen Thunder and Lightning, some sheep, a sty full of pigs and a dozen laying hens. It was the heart of our village. Neighbors would stop by for blacksmith work, help with a lame horse, or just to visit with Mother, Uncle Amos or Father.

You can bring Thunder over here. Just tie him up to that post. Uncle Amos motioned to a huge beam that looked like it could hold up the whole barn by itself. I headed over to the pen the boys shared, clipped a lead to Thunder and persuaded the one-ton critter to walk closer to the forge area. I kept a careful watch on my feet.

Are you putting on summer shoes now? I asked.

It’s time, Uncle Amos replied. The ice has been gone for a couple of weeks, and they’ll need the right shoes for spring ploughing and stump pulling. Unlike horses, oxen had split hooves meaning they had two halves of a shoe on each foot. They could out-pull horses and would thrive on the poorest growing field without expensive grains. Uncle Amos had raised them from month-old bulls. We had the only pair in our little village, a remote logging community at the north end of Chesuncook Lake.

Calling ourselves ’Suncookers, there were seventy-five of us, and we lived in some forty cabins and houses sited around the fields and lake shore at the north end of the lake. Our village wasn’t easy to get to. It took a boat ride up the lake, a canoe trip down the river, or a day long hike over a winter’s logging trace to get here. Whichever route the traveler chose, the distance was the same: twenty miles.

In back of our hotel, there was a little building used for a community store. We had regular mail delivery (twice a week in the winters by sleigh, three times in the summers by boat), and our own school, church and town hall all stuffed into one building.

A bare, galvanized coated copper wire connected each home that had a Western Electric hand crank wall phone. We were linked to all the logging camps and the outside world through the switchboard at the Grant Farm. Trucks and cars were brought in on the ice. Sometimes whole camps and a house or two were hauled here on the frozen lake. I remember seeing Thunder and Lightning drag the old town hall away from the lakeshore over the field to its new location up the little hill beside the church. It took four days to ice down the road, but it took only two hours for the boys to relocate the building. Mt. Katahdin, the mile-high peak in the center of a large range, filled the southern horizon. The local Indians believed their Great Spirit of the same name lived there in the clouds.

The fishing was good at the mouths of those little streams where the trout loved to swim in the cold, spring-fed water. Berries were plentiful in season, and we grew potatoes, beans, squash and corn. You could make a good living fur-trapping if you wanted. It was Eden.

We lived in the Company’s hotel, which my family ran. It was huge and painted a light yellow. A gallon of the original paint choice had to be cut by three gallons of white, it was so yellow. It took forty-eight gallons and my brother Will’s entire last summer to change the color from white. I know how many gallons it took because I helped carry the paint to the scaffold where he was painting the third floor. I really miss him, and Sam, too. They’d take me fishing for perch, and sometimes we’d catch lake trout off the village pier.

Here, help steady his leg, Uncle Amos asked me. He had Thunder’s lower leg between his, but he needed a hand keeping the upper leg still while he removed the old shoes. This was a job I remember seeing Will and Sam help with. I see them everywhere I go and during every chore I finish.

Do you think the government will ever find Will and Sam and send what’s left of them back home? I asked.

Doubt they’re even looking. The telegram your folks got mentioned something about a ‘mass grave.’

Just then, Father swaggered into the barn. His short stature and barrel chest made his profile in the bright sun unmistakable. I watched his expression change as he heard Uncle Amos’ reply to my question.

Damned government sent them off to die, he said a bit louder than necessary. It looked like we were in for another one of his tirades against Uncle Sam. Old men make the wars and then send young men away from their families to die in them. Damn them. All we got back was that telegram from the Adjutant General. I don’t think it had twenty words in it. ‘Sorry to inform you,’ my ass. It was a very short tirade for Father, but maybe it was because he had another thought he needed to share.

The still you have in the back room, Amos. Is it all set to go? Father asked.

Yup, it’s all set. Why, running low in the White Lightning department, are you?

A little, but I’ve been thinking, Father mused.

That could be dangerous, Uncle Amos quipped, placing another iron shoe in the forge’s flames.

Why don’t you keep that tongue of yours still a moment, unless you don’t want to make a pile of money real easy, Father shot back.

Money is always good. We’re going to need a pile of it after the logs we cut last winter hung up in Caucmagomic Stream. A month ago, as the rivers were opening up after a cold winter, all the wood, every single log of that winter’s labor, hung up in the river bed for lack of water to flush them down to the lake. They wouldn’t be any good now that the bugs were in them. It was a total loss. Father and Uncle Amos just left them there to rot and walked away, but there was the little matter of paying the cutting crews, the stumpage fees and the supplies they used. It seemed there was never enough money in this family.

I have a plan that will make us rich! Father exclaimed with a certain amount of pride.

Oh, like the gold mine disaster, is it? Uncle Amos taunted. Now he was in trouble. Father hated to hear that story. I know, I saw his reaction once before when Uncle Amos brought it up. Now I could see his brow furrow. Uncle Amos grabbed the tongs and began to hammer on the red-hot ox shoe.

Father and Uncle Amos were prospecting in Canada when they discovered a rich vein of gold ore. They staked the claim and took the sample to the assay office to do the analysis and the paper work to make the claim legal. When they got back to the site two days later, they found that another prospector had set up his own camp and was digging away on their claim. Father and Uncle Amos were furious. The claim jumper refused to leave, claiming the spot had been his for years. They went back to town to find a Mounty, and they managed to bring back two of them. As the conversation became heated, which didn’t take long, Father picked up a shovel and swung it at the claim jumper. The jumper ducked, but the shovel kept going, striking the side of one Mounty’s head with the flat of the blade, killing him instantly. Father narrowly escaped jail time since the judge was easily bought. He was forbidden to return to Canada under the threat of a lengthy imprisonment. That experience seemed to have taught him a valuable lesson: enough money in the right hands could make the law leave you alone.

Someday, Amos, you’re going to bring that up, and it’ll be the side of your own head that meets a shovel blade! Of course, Father didn’t mean it. He did bark pretty loud, though.

Then what’s the plan, Caleb? I’m all ears. Uncle Amos had stopped grinning.

We add more stills to the back room and go into production of the best moonshine this pitiful state has ever seen. We’ll brand it and sell it to a distributor who’ll keep his mouth shut. We’ll pay off the sheriff and his deputies to grease the way. National prohibition had been in force since the first of the year, and folks had found their way to their friendly bootlegger and speakeasy. Maine had banned the sale of alcohol for the last fifty years anyway, so there wasn’t much of a change here. In our isolated village, moonshine had always been the only alcohol, legal or not. Few could afford the ‘real’ thing. Besides the law, the Company prohibited the transportation of whiskey up the lake to the logging camps. The men who worked there were way too thirsty.

When I went to town before the lake froze last December, I got acquainted with Big Mike Matisse. He runs ‘The Bearded Lady’ on State Street. We plan to meet again to iron out the details. He’ll buy all the Tanglefoot we can make.

Sounds promising, Uncle Amos agreed. And you’re telling me you know how to make the really good stuff?

I don’t, but there’s someone on their way here who can help. Know the name Dan Call? He used to be a preacher before he got into the whiskey making business. Father offered.

Can’t say I’ve heard of him. A preacher? Who is this guy? Does he pray over the still or something?

He’s the man, Father sighed, who started Jack Daniels, that smooth Tennessee whiskey you like so much but can never afford? He’s going to help us with the recipe and the still set up. He owes me a favor for supplying him with potatoes so he could make vodka when grain was scarce years ago during a drought. I’ll be bringing him up the lake as well as the supplies we need on tomorrow’s trip.

I was hoping that Father needed a helping hand loading cargo or something, so I could go along. Boat rides to the Dam and back were a lot of fun. Father would let me steer sometimes, and when the weather was good, I could hang over the front deck and watch the lake pass by, reflections of the clouds and blue sky dissolving into the waves from the V of the bow. Time seemed to pass quickly as I stared at the water.

I know where I can get two more copper hot water tanks. Uncle Amos dunked another hot iron shoe in a bucket of water to cool it down. We’ll have the materials we need by the time you get back, and I’ll have at least one more still ready to run.

Father just nodded, spun on his heel, and walked back to the hotel on another mission. He was probably going to ask Mother for a fresh cup of coffee. That left me with Uncle Amos.

Come on, Charlie, steady Thunder’s leg, for heaven’s sake. It’s going to take all day to get this little job done if we don’t get going. If Will and Sam were with us, we’d be done by now. Father was bitter, but Uncle Amos seemed more practical when it came to my late brothers.

………………………………………………………….

The hotel that my family managed had a wrap-around screened-in porch that kept the skeeters away. On some days, it didn’t pay to go outside without being coated in bear grease. Hungry flies could suck you dry and chew you to pieces in an hour, there seemed to be so many of them some days.

Mother was the cook, and Father the master guide and transporter. They ran the place for the Company first, and then for our family, tolerating flatlanders who wanted to follow Henry David Thoreau’s trip down the West Branch from Moosehead’s Northeast Carry via Greenville and Kineo. Once, we had the soda monarch of New York, Henry Zeigler, who brought a dozen friends with him for Camp Zeigler they called it. Father had to arrange for a half-dozen guides to get them down the lake to Bangor, a five-day paddle. They wanted to see the pines, wilderness giants that had towered 150 feet over the lake shore and river banks before they were all cut to satisfy Bangor’s thirst for lumber. These Thoreau followers were about eighty years too late. That didn’t seem to have mattered, as they kept coming just the same.

I spent my days that summer working the stills Uncle Amos had cobbled together. Often, I went down the lake with Father, helping him make a delivery to some waiting trucks. On the return trip up the lake, there would be twenty cases of empty Moxie bottles that sat nearest the wheelhouse where my father kept a close eye on them as he brought the Tethys (teth.ease) back to the village. None of the passengers on board ever noticed that the bottles were empty. If they did, no one ever said. Those Moxie bottles wouldn’t be empty for long.

…………………………………………………..

The next morning, Father called up the stairs.

Charlie, get cleaned up, pack a change of clothes, and meet me outside in thirty minutes. We’re going to town. The new road to Greenville had finally dried out enough so our truck wouldn’t sink out of sight in the mud holes. I got my things together, and raced down the stairs, ducking my six-foot frame under the stairway header just in time before whacking my forehead again. I think the hotel was built for ‘wee folk.’

Father’s words were not suggestions. I never should have asked, Where are we going? on our walk to the boat, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

"Instead of asking so many questions, Charlie, you need to think more. People who ask questions all