The Bourbon Thief

There wasn’t a word to express Tamara’s shock.

“But how—”

“His daddy was white,” Granddaddy said with a shrug. “Happens sometimes. And you never know which way the baby will go—light or dark or a mix of both.”

“But he’s got blue eyes. That’s a recessive trait. We learned about it in biology. I had to do a Mendel chart on eye color. He’d have to be white on both sides to have blue eyes.”

Granddaddy chuckled again and she didn’t know what he found so funny. She didn’t find this a bit funny at all. Her mother hated Levi because his mother was black? That was the worst thing she’d ever heard in her life.

The worst thing.

Ever.

In her life.

“Most of them have a little white way back. Our doing, of course. That doesn’t make him white, though. My parents were both right-handed and here I am, a lefty. You think my momma was stepping out with the milkman?”

Tamara ignored the question. Her mother had called Levi “boy” and Levi had seemed to take more offense at that than Tamara thought made sense. She got called “girl” all the time, but even she knew there was a big difference between calling a white boy “boy” and a black boy “boy.”

“That’s why Momma hates Levi?”

“She is not very happy about his parentage, we’ll say that.”

“I don’t care if he’s part black or part red or part green. I don’t care who his mother was, or his father. If his father was Hitler and his mother was Diana Ross, I wouldn’t care at all.”

She might care, but only because she really liked Diana Ross.

“But I care who your mother is. And who your father is.”

“I don’t.”

“You do and you know you do. You’re a Maddox and that means something. You’re special, Tamara.”

“I don’t see why. Not like I had any choice in it.”

“Doesn’t matter. The Queen of England was born the Queen of England. She can’t change being queen, but she can decide what kind of queen she’s going to be—a good queen or a bad queen. And you have the same choice.”

“Okay, I’ll be the Queen of England, then.”

“You’ll be something better than that. You’ll be my queen. And you will run the whole kingdom of Red Thread. You and me, Tamara, we’re special. We’re the only two people on this earth with Jacob Maddox’s blood in our veins. Did you know that?”

“I know,” she said, but she still didn’t see that it made them very special. She’d never met Jacob Maddox, the man who’d founded the Red Thread Bourbon Distillery. He’d been dead forever. And apart from starting the family business, she didn’t know anything about him.

“I wish there were more of us. But your grandmother was fragile up here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “And her health wasn’t too good, either. After two sons, we had to stop. Then she had her stroke and I can’t remarry, not that I’d want to,” he said, although she sensed he did want to, wanted to very much. She would if she were him anyway, and God knew half the single ladies in the county were counting the seconds until Granddaddy was back on the market. “Your uncle Eric died over in Vietnam before he could get married and start his family. And your daddy, of course...”

“Right. Daddy.” Daddy was dead and had been dead for three years, five months and sixteen days. But who was counting?

“We’d hoped he and your mother would have a big family, but that wasn’t to be, either.”

“I don’t think they liked each other too much,” Tamara said, which was both true and wasn’t. Granddaddy had liked to tease her mother sometimes about the babies she hadn’t contributed to the Maddox family tree and Daddy would tell him to back off and leave her alone, which Granddaddy would counter with “If you didn’t leave her alone, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” She’d never figured her mother and father out. They were friendly and yet they seemed like the last two people on earth who should have been married to each other. “He must not have liked me much, either, since he killed himself.”

“He loved you,” he said, although Tamara wondered. Did men who really loved their daughters shoot themselves in the head and leave them to fend for themselves with a crazy mother?

“I loved him, too. I miss him.” She clutched her pink pillow even tighter to her chest.

“I know you do. We all do. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought about how good it was to hold him in my arms after he was born. And Eric, too. My boys. My beautiful boys. I’d give anything to have that again—a new son of my own. Anything at all. Do you feel like that about something? That you’d give anything to have it?”

“I’d give anything to have Daddy back.”

That answer seemed to surprise him.

“Well, yes. You and me both, sweetheart.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him and she felt bad about that. Granddaddy talked about her uncle Eric all the time—handsome, strong, smart, the son of any man’s dreams. But Nash? Her father? Granddaddy almost never talked about him unless someone else brought him up.

“I wish Momma would come back, too,” she said. But from the looks of the dark and the wet and the new rain coming down, it didn’t appear her mother was coming back anytime soon. She found her grandfather looking at her, studying her. He’d been doing that more lately, watching her. Sometimes it didn’t feel like his gaze was on her so much as his hands. She liked it when Levi looked at her. But not even he looked at her like this.

“Angel, I know it’s not easy being a Maddox. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Your grandmother wanted to go to college instead of getting married. But her family had money trouble, so she got married. You do what you have to do for your family. Like Jacob Maddox.”

“What about him?”

“My grandfather Jacob Maddox got married for money, too. Married a lady named Henrietta Arden. That’s why this house is called Arden, because we wouldn’t have it but for her.”

“Did we get all our money from his wife?”

“No, ma’am. She got ole Jacob out of debt, but the real money? He made that all by himself. Back before Red Thread existed, Jacob had a hemp and tobacco plantation. That was the original Arden. Jacob, as it sometimes happened in those days, fell in with one of the slave girls. Her name was Veritas, but they called her Vera for short. They did love to give out fancy names to their slaves, and she was a fancy girl. Her mother had worked in the kitchens before she died and Vera had taken over her work. The house girls had to dress nice and look nice and act nice. Vera always wore a red ribbon in her hair. One morning Jacob decided he’d rather have Vera for breakfast than steak and eggs.”

Her grandfather chuckled again over the rim of his glass before taking another sip. Tamara was getting real tired of that chuckle.

“But Henrietta was not especially pleased when Vera’s belly started getting real big and it wasn’t because they were overfeeding the girl. One day Jacob went out of town on business, and while he was gone, what did Henrietta do? She sold little Vera. Sold her for a good price. The man who bought her got a good deal—two for the price of one.”

Tamara only stared at the bourbon in her glass. She didn’t want to drink it anymore.

“You can’t sell people,” Tamara said quietly.

“Oh, but you could back then. They say Jacob saw every shade of red when he came home to find nothing left of his favorite girl and his baby but the red ribbon she always wore in her hair and a thousand dollars he hadn’t had before. But he didn’t cry long. You know what he did with that money?”

“Started Red Thread?”

“That’s right. He started Red Thread. He bought a still, bought some corn and got to work making this family the wealthiest family in the state. But you know what? He must have loved that girl Vera, because when he started the bourbon distillery, he put a red ribbon around the neck of every bottle in her memory. Put her red ribbon on the very first bottle. We still have that bottle locked up in my office.”

“Can I see it?”

“Maybe later,” he said. She wasn’t allowed in Granddaddy’s office upstairs. No one was. “It’s been handed down from one Maddox son to the next. It’ll be your son’s someday.”

“We still have the ribbon?” Tamara asked, wanting to see it for some reason, wanting to have it. She should have it, and her granddaddy shouldn’t.

“We do. That red ribbon is what made us our money. Wives would tell their husbands, ‘Honey, go and buy some of that Red Thread bourbon because I want that pretty ribbon.’ Jacob Maddox was a smart man. Must have been a romantic, too. Red ribbon on every bottle? He must have loved that girl.”