McClung and his boys

McClung was waiting down by the store. Waiting for his boys. They had been busy, those boys, shining their buttons, the ones on their uniforms, brass or pewter, copper or tin, shining them up so that the inscriptions stood out. Initials, symbols of their respective units, secret signs and esoteric imagery. You could fit a lot on a little button. McClung knew one guy who could paint an entire landscape on a single lima bean. He was gone now, that fella, Enos was his name. He had stepped on a mine or some such thing, and now some of the boys had his portrait on their uniform buttons, a smiling face in front of a rising sun coming up behind a mountain range, hawks flying over his head kind of like gnats do on a hot summer day.

McClung and his boys could surely have been mistaken for a military brigade, what with their uniforms and hats and their semi wild mustaches and beards. Of course they had all served in the Rangers at one time or another and had done their share of fighting, but now they were in a different sort of business, one that was lucrative and that they could take pride in and didn’t have to spend time burying the bodies at the end of the day. They were moonshiners.

The Boys spent their time now collecting tin pots, beakers, and copper tubing. They had long discussions about spring water and air quality, the scent of pine and the shape of leaves. Making whiskey gives you time to sit and think and talk about things you wouldn’t be able to do if you were always in battle, plotting strategy and tracking the enemy. This was a good life and the boys took great enjoyment in it.

Furthermore, there was no law to run from. Down here in the hills, everyone was left to themselves to pretty much do as they pleased. You can’t really say that they were off the radar, because there was not even any radar to be off of. They were in a semi remote location, you might say and there was just one justice of the peace who lived all the way up on the other side of the mountain. This gentleman was called in for incidences involving certain transgressions that may occur within the daIly life of the town, such as animal theivery or property line disputes. In such a case, he would come riding down the trail and listen to each side and make a decision based on his wisdom and experience, the penalty usually being payment of a certain amount of tobacco leaves to the aggrieved party on behalf of the perpetrator.

If it was a minor dispute, you just had to pay a few bushels of leaves as penalty,  but if it was significant, you could be out a whole hogshead. And there was no disputing the decision of the Justice of the Peace, meaning no one would ever think to do that in those times. No one would ever say, “Oh yeah? Well, I aint payin!”. That would have been so preposterously unthinkable. You heard the decision and you paid, and if you didn’t have enough for payment, then you had to go and borrow to make things square, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul as they might say, only back then it was borrowing from Seth to pay Enoch, or borrowing from Breckenridge to pay Gaylord.

Another trait of McClung and his boys, and most of the townsfolk in fact, is that they never repeated anything. They said what they wanted to say and they were done. Not like today, where many people for some reason feel like they have to keep talking and keep repeating themselves, because they are afraid of the silence. They are so unsure about themselves and their own experience, that they must keep repeating themselves as a way to convince everyone that it is indeed valid and worthwhile what they are relating, which, of course, ironically, the more they talk makes it not so at all.

No one knows exactly why people started making whiskey and drinking it and wanting more of it, or pursuing it as a career and a lifestyle, but that’s what happened and they brought that life with them across the Atlantic Ocean and down the wagon trails from Hobbes Holler. What with the tobacco growing and the whiskey making, you might say there was nothing but a whole lot of smoking and drinking going on back then in those hills. Maybe there was, but there was also peace of mind. Peace of mind don’t come with no pill popping and Medicare fraud and government propaganda and greedy old bastards lined up on the ridge as far as the eye can see. Oh, give me back them old times when McClung and his boys would be posted up down outside the barber shop, sitting around just a talking and getting their things together and helping each other out, and always shining up those buttons on their uniforms. Shine em up, boys. Make em shine.