They were serving moonshine on the back porch. This was after my cousin Henry had told me that it was often distilled using dirty car parts. That made it dangerous as well as illegal. 

I went inside, past the TV playing Fox News, the couch and coffee table, a glass case with three hunting rifles in it. The head of a buck, antlers raised, looked down indifferently from its place on the wall. When he was younger, my son, Alex, had been afraid that it was going to eat him. 

Gail cornered me on my way out of the living room, holding out a Ball jar.

“No thanks, I don’t drink,” I said. 

“Neither do I,” she retorted, moving the jar toward her lips. “I don’t drink anything else.” She raised her eyebrows.

I glanced at the liquid, which was cloudy and pearlescent, and then turned to go back outside. 

Earlier, we’d had a tasty dinner of greens, chicken, and macaroni. Sarah, Henry’s wife, and Anne, his daughter, were superb cooks. They had stood in the kitchen for hours, wearing aprons, with their hair tied back. There was a double-chocolate cake, and finally, there were plans to watch the meteor shower from the driveway.  

Everybody was drinking the moonshine, except the kids. At least no one had offered it to Alex, now age twelve. With our family history, he’d be done for, fast. 

Outside once again, my cousin Tim stepped over and began to talk about how he couldn’t imagine New York, with the overwhelming number of people and towering skyscrapers. The journey we had taken on the train, winding up and down switchbacks and through tunnels, was unfathomable. He was never going to experience any of them because within the next year, he would be killed in a coal mine on his twenty-seventh birthday. 

It was a stereotype to drink moonshine out of a jar. My mother used them for drinking rum and orange juice. I had no compunction about using a jar as a glass myself, for soft drinks since I was sober. A dubious family tradition, but it just felt right.

***

This was my mother’s family. She had moved to New York City to go to graduate school and that was where she’d met my father. She’d never gone back, not once. She’d gotten far enough away from her own family history that she passed out on the couch nightly. It took several of her favorite beverages to dim consciousness, but she made it to where she wanted to go. 

By day, she taught American Intellectual History. This had little to do with intellectuals (other than her) and everything to do with accepted ideas. Oceans of notions. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Thrift. Self-reliance. Manifest Destiny. The right to bear any kind of arms at any time. The best part of our relationship was that she actually explained all this. For an hour, her face lit up as she talked, forgetting how deficient she thought I was for bringing home poor grades, making paintings that took up too much space in my room, and writing stories full of longing that she regarded as sentimental.

At dinner, my mother, father, and I drank wine at the table. I didn’t know anyone else my age who did this and I felt privileged. “Like French children,” my mother prompted, pouring each of us another glass. I could now assume an air of sophistication. 

The wine took the edge off when my parents made sarcastic comments about my weight as well as my admiration for the Beatles and the Supremes. “Popular culture!” she exclaimed and snorted a disapproving puff of cigarette smoke. 

If she said I was bad, then I must be. How could I argue with such an accomplished individual? The numbness of drink became my salvation. She and my father could say and do anything. I would feel nothing. 

For years, I stole my parents’ liquor. Mount Gay Rum. Schenley Reserve. Boodles Gin. Even after I left home, Jose Cuervo wouldn’t stop stalking me. Jack Daniels took me by force over and over again, until the day I got sober. I was thirty-one.

***

At the party on the porch, I overheard Sarah talking about QAnon. That malignant fairy tale. No, she was not stupid and yes, she’d traveled outside of West-by-God-Virginia. We used to talk. I’d taken walks with her and read most of the detective novels she owned.

“It’s about protecting children,” she said, touching Gail on the shoulder. “Not a conspiracy theory.” 

QAnon believers thought that Democratic politicians were molesting children and eating their insides for breakfast. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, who seduced and ate his victims, couldn’t match this. Trump will save us, Sarah believed. We just had to give him the keys to the kingdom. 

A colossal New York City landlord, Trump was so far from mountain roads with hairpin turns. So far from my cousins drinking moonshine from jars. I couldn’t begin to guess.

***

Oceans of notions. How would my mother have explained QAnon? Would she have spit out scathing commentary to me in private or just helped herself to the perpetual prescription for Terpin Hydrate and Codeine? Or gin, lots of it? How about those chocolates she devoured by the boxful, never sharing them? 

She never made it that far. In 1987, she never woke up from a nap. 

***

After my cousins finished their moonshine that summer night, we all lay or stood in the driveway watching the meteor shower. Alex had brought his telescope, even though it barely fit into his suitcase. The meteors sped across the sky, unconscious of us and whatever we wanted to believe about them. The ideal, I couldn’t help thinking. Just not being aware. Not being animate. 

Our beliefs and habits determined our sense of home. The stories we made up were reassuring. But they also had an edge, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They were guidebooks that disturbed and placated as nothing else could. They could be broken apart and studied, or ultimately avoided when the conflict and drama became too much.

My mother deserved her rest. She wasn’t around to travel to West Virginia that summer with me and Alex. It’s just as well because the moonshine would appall her. “Is it safe?” she’d ask. “Is it pure?” She preferred other more sophisticated types of liquor, even if she drank from a Ball jar. 

Once she was gone, her focus on what other people thought came to an end, as did her disappointment with me, her only daughter. She believed that abstinence was for losers, people with psychological problems who were weak or uneducated. Therapy and twelve-step programs weren’t for her. Being sober and awake was just too painful. Instead, what she really craved, what she really thought would bring relief from all her restless days, was a good night’s sleep. 

***

Watching headlights flip on, I stood on the porch for a moment. The cousins were leaving.

I stepped inside and glanced at the buck’s head on the wall. The opaque eyes stared at me, steady and insensate, never knowing the fascination of others’ ideas, as well as the pain.