bed every morning, go down to the store, and start a pot of coffee perking, and farmers would drop by on their way to the cattle auction or the feed store, and warm their behinds at the woodstove, and drink Calla’s coffee.
Calla had a way with the customers. She was an ample, comfortable woman, with capable hands, and people liked dealing with her. She didn’t really need John, not in the store. As a matter of fact, he got underfoot.
Now, John liked to drink. For thirty years, he’d laced his coffee with whiskey every morning before he headed out to the milk barn. That was to keep off the chill, in the winter. In the summertime, it was to brace him for the day. He no longer went to milk at dawn, but he still laced his coffee. He’d sit there in Calla’s store and visit with the regulars, and by the time they were on their way to take care of the day’s business, John was usually on his way to being ripped. None of this sat well with Calla. She was used to her husband staying busy, and she told him, finally, that he needed an interest.
“I’ve got an interest, woman,” he told her. Calla was bent over, stoking the fire in the woodstove at the moment, so she presented a mighty tempting target. John aimed himself in her direction, and wobbled over behind her, and slipped his arms around her middle. Calla was caught so off guard that she burned her hand on the poker. She shrugged her husband off and sucked on her hand.
“I mean, one that’ll keep you out of my hair,” she snapped.
“You never wanted me out of your hair before.”
He was wounded. She hadn’t intended to wound him, but after all, wounds heal over. Most of them.
“I never had time to notice before if you was in my hair or not. Isn’t there anything you like to do anymore, besides roll around in bed?” Not that she minded rolling around in bed with her husband. She liked it now, maybe even more than she had in all the years they’d been together. But you couldn’t do that all day long just because a man had nothing else to occupy his time. Not when you had customers dropping by every few minutes.
John went to the counter where he’d been drinking his coffee. He poured himself another cup, and laced it good.
“There is,” he announced stiffly. “There most damn certainly is something else I like to do. And I’m about to do it.”
The thing he was talking about was getting drunk. Not just ripped. Blind drunk. Beyond thinking and reasoning drunk. He took his coffee and his bottle, and a couple more bottles he had stashed behind the counter, plus a package of doughnuts and two tins of Prince Albert. Then he went out to the barn, and he stayed for three days. When he’d been drunk enough long enough, and there was no further purpose to be served by staying drunk any longer, he came back to the house and took a hot bath and had a shave. That was the day he walled in the back porch of the house and started painting another sign.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Calla demanded, hands on hips, the way a woman stands when She Expects an Answer.
“I’m cultivating an interest,” John Moses said. “From now on, you’ve got a business, and I’ve got a business, and we don’t either one stick our noses in the other one’s business. You open at dawn and close at dusk, I’ll open at dusk and close at dawn. You won’t have to roll around with me anymore, because we won’t be keeping the same hours.”
“I never said I didn’t want to roll around with you.”
“The hell you never,” said John.
He took his sign, with the paint still wet, and he climbed up on his stepladder and nailed that sign above the back door. The paint was smudged, but the message was readable enough. It said, NEVER CLOSES.
Never Closes sold beer and wine and hard liquor seven nights a week, all night long. Since Columbia County was dry, it was illegal to sell alcohol to the public, so John didn’t call it selling. He was just serving drinks to his friends, that’s all. Sort of like gifts he gave them. Then, when they were ready to call it a night, his “friends” would each give John a gift of some sort. Five dollars, or ten dollars, or whatever his little ragged notebook indicated the gift should be.
The county sheriff and several deputies got into the habit of dropping by after their shifts, and John really didn’t sell to them, just poured them anything they wanted, on the house. Those fellows never saw so much free liquor, so it just stood to reason that there would be a lot of other things they didn’t see. But they were used to not seeing, under certain circumstances, so it all felt pretty right.
Before long, John got his own share of regulars who would drop by to play dominoes or shoot pool. They’d talk religion and politics, and tell filthy stories, and spit tobacco juice in the coffee cans John had set around, and they’d smoke until the air was thick enough to cut into cubes.
John took bitter pride in his new venture. He’d have dropped the whole thing in a heartbeat, would have torn down his walls and burned his sign and told his regulars to go to hell, if Calla would have apologized, but she had her own pride. There was a wedge between them, and she couldn’t see that she’d been the one to drive it.
After a while, Calla took to staying open seven days a week, too. Sometimes her last customers of the day would walk right out the front door and go around the house to the back door and drink up whatever money they had left over from buying groceries. Sometimes, it was the other way around. John’s customers would stagger out the back door at dawn and come around to the front (there was a well-worn path). They’d sober up on Calla’s coffee, then spend the rest of their money on food for their families.
You could go to the Moses place, any time of the day or night, and buy what you needed, provided your needs were simple. And you never had to leave until you were ready, because neither Calla nor John had the heart to run anybody off, even when they ran out of money. Nate Ramsey had stayed once for almost a week when his wife, Shirley, took to throwing things at home.
And that’s the way things went along, right up until the day John Moses died. Moses Never Closes was something folks counted on. It was a certain place in an uncertain world. Folks wanted it to stay the way it was, because once you change one part of a thing, all the other parts begin to shift, and pretty soon, you just don’t know what’s what anymore.
Chapter 2
This is the way it happened.
Samuel dropped Willadee and the kids off on Saturday, and Willadee spent the rest of the day helping her mother with the cooking and cleaning. The kids weren’t going to be any help, so they were banished from the house and had to endure such punishments as romping in the hayloft, fishing for crawdads in the creek, and playing War Spies all over the hundred acres.
Noble was twelve years old, all arms and legs and freckles. He had his daddy’s eyes, but you didn’t really notice them because of his glasses, which were so thick and heavy they continually slid down his nose. He wanted, more than anything, to be formidable, so he walked with a swagger and talked in low, menacing tones. Problem was, his voice was changing and would take the high road when he least expected it. Just when he might say something sinister like “You make a move, and I’ll cut your heart out,” his voice would jump to falsetto and spoil the effect completely.
Swan was eleven. A gray-eyed, compact bit of a girl who could pass for a boy, dressed in her younger brother, Bienville’s, clothes, as she was now. Samuel would have had a fit if he’d known that Willadee allowed such things. The Bible clearly said that women were not to dress as men, and Samuel Lake always tried to follow the Bible to the letter. But then, Willadee had
