The Bourbon Thief, Page 32

  and animal on earth to save my daughter from what I went through... Instead, I handed you over to it.”

  Tamara twined her finger in her hair, a red coil. Her mother took another coil of her hair and caressed it between her finger and thumb.

  “You and I have the same color hair,” her mother said. “Under this dye. But I’ve been dyeing it so long you don’t even remember I’m a redhead, too. Or maybe I’m not—it might be gray under here. I don’t even know what I look like it’s been so long since I’ve seen myself.”

  “You really didn’t sell me to Granddaddy?”

  “No, baby.” Her mother shook her head. “I would have killed him myself had I known what he’d planned to do. I would have killed him with my bare hands.”

  “I did it for you,” Tamara said.

  “I should have thanked you.”

  Tamara leaned forward and into her mother’s arms. All this time they could have been allies. One more sin on George Maddox’s head. He not only took her father away from her, he took her mother, too.

  “You hit me,” Tamara said.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” her mother said, pulling back and holding Tamara by the shoulders. “I was so upset seeing you and Levi together. But, Tamara, I swear to God I never sold you out. I told George we were running out of time. I told him to talk to you. I told him to tell you the truth. I told him to beat sense into you if it came to that, but I never ever told him he could have you. If he didn’t tell you the truth, you’d be carrying Levi Shelby’s baby anytime now.”

  “I’m carrying it now.”

  Her mother bent over, her face in her hands.

  “Momma?”

  Abruptly her mother sat up.

  “I’ll take you to a doctor tomorrow. I know one.”

  “No,” Tamara said.

  “He’s your brother. You can’t have his baby.”

  “I’m having it.” Tamara made the decision as she said the words.

  “Surely he wouldn’t want you to.”

  “He’s gone,” Tamara said. “He left me. It’s not his decision.”

  “He’s your brother,” her mother said again. “You have the same blood. It’s not natural for you to have his child. It’s against everything. It’s against God’s will.”

  “If God wants the baby back, God can take it back. I don’t care if it’s a sin. I want it.” She did want it, this child. Vera had been forced to have a child she didn’t want. Tamara would not lay down the cross Vera had had no choice but to carry.

  “This sin is mine,” her mother said. “This is on me. You can’t blame yourself. Neither of you—not you or Levi—can blame yourself for this.” She grabbed Tamara by her upper arms and looked her in the eyes. “Do you hear me? I did this. You had no idea who you were and he had no idea who you were. And I knew. I knew who you both were and I never told you because I didn’t want you to hate me. And you loved your daddy so much. I couldn’t take him away from you by telling you the truth. He didn’t want me to tell you. I didn’t want to, either. And now we’re paying for how selfish we were. We’re both paying.”

  Tamara slowly came to her feet. She put her hand on her mother’s head, soft, like a benediction.

  “It’s not your fault,” Tamara said.

  Her mother looked up, her face stricken as a new widow’s.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Tamara said. She’d go back to Bride Island and back to their house. And she’d wait there until Levi could look at her again, and if he couldn’t, it didn’t matter. She would see him in their child’s face every day.

  “This is your home.”

  “This wasn’t ever my home.”

  Tamara walked out of the room and into the gloom of the hallway and toward the front doors so grand and silent. And there was her suitcase sitting by the door, where she’d left it. Except she’d closed it up and now it sat open on the floor.

  Kneeling, Tamara dug through her clothes, calmly at first and then frantically searching and searching for something she knew wasn’t there anymore.

  “Baby?”

  “It’s gone,” Tamara said.

  “What’s gone?”

  “My gun. Granddaddy’s gun.”

  “Levi took it?”

  Slowly Tamara nodded. So Granddaddy was right, after all. Perfection was for heaven, and when you tried to bring perfection to earth, you paid a heavy price. A perfect face withered with age. A perfect love died from neglect. Bourbon was a perfect spirit, which was why the angels took so much of it while it aged. She and Levi had been perfectly happy there for a while. No wonder the debt collector had come knocking on their door.

  And this was the price Tamara had to pay. She would never see Levi in this life again.

  She rose from the floor.

  “I have to go,” Tamara said, turning to her mother. She kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was smooth and cool and smelled of roses.

  “Don’t.” Her mother grabbed her by the arms. “Don’t leave me. I’m sick, Tamara. My doctors gave me less than a year. At least you can stay with me until I’m gone. I can see the baby. And you and I, we can make it better between us. We can find a way.”

  Tamara almost laughed at her. She did laugh at her. Did she laugh the way Nash laughed when her mother told him the baby was Daniel Headley’s? Now her mother was dying? She appreciated the lie. She took it as a sign her mother loved her enough to try anything to get her to stay. But Tamara couldn’t stay, not in this house. In this house she was a Maddox and her child would be a Maddox. She’d go back to Bride Island, where she’d been a Shelby and her child would be a Shelby.

  “There is no way.” Tamara shook her head. “Goodbye, Momma. You can live in the house.”

  “I’ll die in this house.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  32

  Tamara drove to Red Thread in her baby blue Triumph. On her way to the warehouse, Tamara stopped at the groundskeeper’s shed, where all the tools were stored. A fire ax hung on the wall and she took it down. It was exactly what she needed.

  She found a book of old matches in the shed, too. She shoved them down into her pocket and that was all she needed. Nothing else. Nothing more. Time to finish what she’d started.

  When she arrived at the warehouse, she was glad to see the parking lot all empty and abandoned. They always shut Red Thread down in August. The heat was too much for anyone or anything but the bourbon.

  With a shaking hand Tamara unlocked the warehouse door and stepped across the threshold. The scent of the bourbon hit her hard, cold bread baking, pungent, almost rotten and yet sweet. It made her head light and her eyes water. She shut the door behind her but didn’t lock it. There was no way to lock it from the inside.

  Tamara needed a plan of attack. She’d need a whole army to bust all the barrels in the warehouse. Everywhere she looked were row after row of giant fifty-three-gallon oak barrels resting on wooden ricks. The task seemed Herculean now that she faced it. The ax seemed woefully inadequate. She should have brought a machine gun.

  Tamara took a deep breath. She could do this. She just had to be smart. The warehouse had seven floors that held all the very best Red Thread bourbon. The cheaper stuff was in the warehouse right next door, with a wooden breezeway connecting the two buildings. If this warehouse burned, the one next door would catch fire, too. Fire liked to climb and eat. If she gave it enough fuel on the first few floors, it should eat its way all the way to the top.

  Tamara went up to the fourth floor and straight to the Red Thread Legacy Single-Barrel bourbons. These were the oldest bourbons, the ones hand-selected by Maddox men, who would come in once or twice a year and go on a tasting spree looking for the best of the batch. They signed their names on the barrels. Here was a row of George Maddox specials. Behind it was a row of Robert Maddox select bourbon. Her great-grandfather had been dead twenty years. One barrel sporting his signature would sell for as much as a car. Tamara picked her
first barrel. It had George Maddox’s signature scrawled on the lid. She cracked her knuckles for the fun of it, lifted her ax and slammed it into the wood. She took a good chunk out of the wood, but it required three or four more swings until the barrel cracked and the bourbon burst out of the oval slit she’d cut into it. A puddle of rust red formed on the floor.

  Every barrel that bore her grandfather’s name got the ax. Every barrel that bore her great-grandfather’s name got the ax. The fumes from the hundred-and-fifty-proof bourbon scalded her eyes and went to her head. She wondered if she could get drunk just off smelling the stuff.

  “Lizzie Borden took an ax...” she chanted while she chopped. “Gave her bourbon forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one...”

  She giggled at that. She thought it was a fine rhyme.

  When she’d finished busting up all the barrels of Red Thread Legacy, she took a rest, leaning back against the wall to catch her breath. This was hard work, swinging an ax. Already she’d formed blisters on her hands. The acrid smell of undiluted bourbon filled the air and made her want to vomit again. Or was that morning sickness? Was it morning yet? She glanced out a window and found it was still full night without even the hint of morning on the horizon. Maybe she had night sickness instead. Was that a real thing? She didn’t know anything about being pregnant. Levi would surely kill her when he found out she was chopping up barrels while carrying his child.

  Except he wouldn’t get mad at her because he wouldn’t know. Because he took her gun and drove away. Since he wasn’t there to tell her to stop, she didn’t.

  “Break over,” she said to herself. She wiped off her face using the tail of her shirt. Sweat or tears? Both. She went down to the third floor and started swinging at the barrels by the stairs. Bourbon gushed out from the ragged gashes and poured down the stairs to the second floor.

  The work was hard. She felt like she was damaging her body by doing it, breathing in all those fumes and fighting exhaustion to keep going. But she did keep going. For all the pain and the discomfort and the nausea, she took a terrible pleasure in what she did. She imagined George Maddox standing a few feet away from her, his wrists and ankles bound in Veritas’s shackles, another man holding him by an iron neck collar in place. Granddaddy would have to watch what Tamara did. He would have to stand there and do nothing while his own child, his own blood, busted open barrel after barrel of Kentucky’s finest bourbon and let it pour out onto the cold dirty ground. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  “You did this to yourself, Granddaddy,” she said. “You have only yourself to blame. You raped my mother, and you tried to rape me, and you treated Levi like a servant when he was your own son. You fucked us all...” It made her smile to say “fuck” to him. She wasn’t ever allowed to swear at home. Not a “fuck.” Not a “shit.” Not even a “damn” unless it was followed by the word Yankees.

  “Fuck you,” she said and took a swing. “Fuck your father. Fuck your grandfather. Fuck his father. Fuck you, Jacob Fucking Maddox. If y’all hadn’t fucked so much, you wouldn’t be so fucking fucked.”

  Tamara raised up the ax to hit another barrel and it slipped from her hands and landed on the floor behind her with a terrible clatter. She gasped and jumped back. It had almost hit her right in the back.

  Panting and woozy, she looked at her hands. Her palms streamed with blood. She’d worn off whatever was left of her blisters and the skin on her hands. She stuck them under one of the barrels still leaking fluid and screamed at the sting as the alcohol cleansed her open wounds.

  She wept from the sheer agony of it. Not since that night with her grandfather had she known such extreme physical suffering. How could she keep going like this? But how could she stop? She wasn’t close to being finished. She’d probably broken open only a hundred barrels if that. A hundred of the maybe forty thousand in the entire warehouse? Not enough. Not nearly enough. She staggered back and turned to the window. She pressed her sweaty brow against the glass. A hundred yards away, no more than that, she saw the river. To it she whispered a prayer, a petition... You carried Veritas away. Help me bring her back.

  The river made no reply. It flowed on, silent, lovely and dark.

  Tamara lifted her head and made her appeal then to the angels gathered around.

  Please?

  No answer.

  She lowered her head and rested it on a broken barrel. Her shoulders slumped and she could hardly stand. She pushed a hand against her stomach for comfort. Alone as she felt, she wasn’t alone.

  Tamara tried standing up straight, but she was hit with another wave of nausea. She staggered backward and rested against the wall. She sank down to the floor and lay there. All she needed was a little rest. That was all.

  “Tamara?”

  Was it God calling her name?

  “Tamara?”

  Was it Daddy coming to get her and take her to Bride Island?

  “Tamara?”

  A hand touched her shoulder. Tamara’s eyes flew open.

  “Levi?”

  33

  Instinctively Tamara tried crawling away from him. She reached for the ax, but it was too far away. Levi was dead. Who was this man who’d come for her?

  “Tamara, calm down, it’s me. It’s me. It’s just me.”

  “Levi...” she breathed. A slow smile spread across her face. She closed her eyes.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Who else?”

  She forced her eyes opened again. Levi knelt on the floor in front of her.

  “You were gone. And you...you took the gun.” She gulped the words, trying to swallow them. In her panic and confusion she was breathing in reverse. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I was driving to the island.”

  “Why?”

  “Bowen. He knew.”

  “You were going to kill him?”

  “No. But I was going to kill someone. But I stopped. I couldn’t keep going. I told you I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be the man who got you pregnant and left you to face your mother alone. I came back. I had to come back.”

  “I was afraid you were already dead.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to ever see me again.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I always want to see you...”

  That was the first time it occurred to her that she didn’t care what the truth was about him and her and them. She was his wife first before she was his sister. Only a half sister at that. Surely a full wife trumped half a sister. Did one have to be greater than the other?

  All those nights together—mornings, too, and afternoons—they had sought each other’s bodies. Whenever they could, whenever they wanted, Levi found her breasts and her fingers hunted down his buttons. Once a day wasn’t enough any more than eating once a day was enough. They didn’t even try. Three times a day, sometimes four, they joined themselves together. Levi didn’t ask permission nor did she deny him anything. It was a given. Both of them were a given. When she reached for him, he took her. When he reached for her, she gave to him. The hours apart were a severed time. In the dark one night as he moved lazily inside her, in no hurry to finish and separate themselves again, Levi had told her a theory of Plato’s taken from the Symposium, of how once all humans had four legs and four arms and two faces. These creatures were powerful enough with so many eyes and so many limbs that even Zeus feared their might. He sliced them in two, Zeus did, sundered them in half. And forever since that time each half goes forth in misery seeking its other half. When Levi was inside her, she believed this fairy tale. Four legs. Four arms. Two faces. One body. Half meeting half. Half making whole. Her half brother. Her half husband. Her half. Their whole. Levi had quoted to her, “Love is simply the name of the desire and the pursuit of the whole.” They’d laughed at the joke as he slid his fingers inside her. Love, though they did love each other, had as little to do with it as it had to do with dinner. She had to eat to live. She had to be with Levi. Same reason.

  �
�I can’t stay away from you,” Levi said. “I tried and lasted one day.”

  “What will happen to us?” she asked. “What will we do?”

  Us. We. Those were the words she understood.

  “Did you know in the days of the pharaohs the royal family would often marry brothers and sisters or fathers and daughters? Did you know that?”

  “No. They never taught us anything good like that in school.”

  “The pharaohs were like gods,” Levi said. “They were