Stories · Easy Boozy Libation
Dew Dropper
A young man who slept all day and worked never.
Sour-plum-infused gin, starfruit, makgeolli.
The summer Eamon Carrick was nineteen, the light came through the muslin curtains of his mother’s back room and lay across his bare arm like a hand laid in benediction, and he did not move. He slept past noon. He slept past the calling of the rooster and the calling of his mother and the slamming of the screen door when his father went out to the fields. He slept through the heat that gathered under the tin roof and beaded on his forehead and ran into his hair. He slept the way the dead sleep, only warmer.
His father had warned him. His father was a man who had lost two fingers to a thresher at twenty-two and had not stopped working a day in the forty years since, and he had no language for a son who would not rise. He stood in the doorway some mornings and looked at the boy and said nothing, because there was nothing in him that knew how to say it. He went out to the fields.
His mother pleaded. She brought tea to the bedside and set it on the floor and it cooled there. She prayed over him on Sundays in the pew while he was at home in his bed. She told him about the boys in the village who had gone north to the mines and were sending money home, and he listened with his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open and did not answer.
His brother Daniel had gone north in the spring. Daniel was two years older and built like their father and quieter than either of them, and he had walked out of the house one Tuesday with a canvas bag and a letter of introduction and had not come back. He sent money. He sent a photograph of himself at the pithead with a lamp on his cap. The photograph stood on the mantel in the front room and Eamon walked past it twice a day, going to the privy and coming back, and he did not look at it.
He drank, when he drank, before breakfast. He did not have breakfast. He kept a bottle of plum spirit under the floorboard by the bed, sour and pale and slightly green, and he would tip it into his mouth before his feet touched the floor. There was a starfruit tree in the yard and he ate the fruit raw when he was hungry, which was not often. The juice ran down his wrist and he licked it off and slept again. He thought he was free. He thought the others were the captives — his father in the field, his brother in the dark — and that he, who had refused, was the one who had understood.
In October the rains came early and the seam at the mine ran wet, and on a Thursday the timbering gave out and the roof came down on the day shift. Twenty-two men. Daniel was one of them. They brought what they could find of him back to the village in a sealed box and his mother would not open it and his father would not look at it and Eamon, in his only clean shirt, stood at the graveside and felt for the first time the actual weight of a body, which was not his own.
He did not sleep that night. He lay in the back room with his eyes open and watched the muslin curtain shift in the dark and listened to the house breathe around him. He did not sleep the next night either. He did not sleep, in any way that the word means, for the rest of that year. When the light came through the curtains in the morning, he was already standing in it, fully dressed, with his hands hanging empty at his sides, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.