Coming this winter: a sprawling story of romance, mystery and danger. An isolated North Carolina community is haunted by the massacre of ten prominent families in 1930. Were they vicious bootleggers or the victims of one man’s vengeful greed? A brilliant textile engineer and a disgraced ex-NFL football player must pick up the pieces of a dramatic legacy and defend it against a new generation of revenge.
Excerpt
Caillin Anna MacBride and Sean Liam Gallagher
Eire County, North Carolina
February 1930
The terrible fate about to befall my family and the others of Eire County was woven from a skein of pride as fragile as the mountain skies but as strong as steel chain. For nearly two centuries the ten founding families of our Appalachian paradise had worked, died, loved and lost, celebrated and mourned and, most of all, prospered. Eire County Scots-Irish fought and died as heroes in the Revolutionary War. They built a town, a community, and a proud way of life based on sheep and whiskey.
They were dirt poor when they walked off a ship in Philadelphia in 1735, bringing with them little besides their Presbyterian stubbornness and their heirloom skills from the old country: herding, weaving, needlework, and the making of fine liquor. They journeyed south, into the Southern highlands. They fell in love with the mountains of the colony that would become North Carolina. They established a county and named it Eire, for Ireland.
By the mid-eighteen hundreds Eire County was known for two things: the Little Finn River Whiskey Distillery and fine woven goods from our imported Irish sheep. The distillery sold our libations all over the Southern states. The bottles were beautiful, made of amber glass and stoppered with hand-carved corks. The labels were gloriously ornate, and the names poetic: Old Irish, Ram’s Head, Proud Chief.
Our women supervised vast herds of sheep, ran two wool mills to prepare the fleeces, and imported Peruvian cotton and Asian silk. They employed a network of mountain women who knitted, crocheted and wove Eire County fiber into everything from linens and lace to rugs to socks.
We carried on ancient celtic traditions through their woven patterns—the symbols handed down for generations. Birds, deer, sheep, celtic circles, celtic crosses; each family had its motif. Among our next-door neighbors, the Gallaghers, the heirloom symbol was a bound sheaf of grains; the ribbon around them swirled into itself, unbroken and eternal.
Among my family, the MacBrides, the favorite symbol was the dair, the oak, grand and sheltering, a stylized tree whose pattern took enormous skill to create. Oaks were not just sentimental choices; in the life of a whiskey clan the handmade oak barrels, usually charred just-so on the inside, meant the difference between harsh grain alcohol and bourbon whiskey. The oaks’ charred essence seeped into the new-born liquor and transformed it. A smooth drink needs two years in the oak, our elders said.
We drank from the soul of the oaks. Yes, we timbered them, and harvested their bountiful acorns to feed our sheep and pigs, but we also planted groves of new trees.
In the valley of the Little Finn, where the cold, sweet water flowed across our front pastures like a moat, broad fields of corn grew higher than a man’s head every summer. The corn was milled into flour and grits, but also for stewing as sour mash. On the banks of that pretty mountain river, the Little Finn Distillery spired a handsome bell tower into the sky; it was a grand brick-and-stone structure. When the mash was cooking in the big copper pot stills, a delicious roasted-corn aroma sifted through the valley along with the river’s silver mists.
But now the distillery was empty and shuttered. Our stand against Prohibition had edged us toward a horrifying label as lawbreakers. We hid our handsome stills in the sheep barns and the deep creek hollows. We found lucrative markets for our liquor in the gangsters’ speakeasys—many of them owned by our kin, since we often sent our young men and women to the cities for college, and they often came home with husbands and wives as well as degrees. We partnered with the Spanish mob in Florida to export our whiskey and import their rum. We married into it to seal the deal. My aunt, Maureen MacBride, was now Maureen Esperanza, married to Emil Esperanza, a kingpin of bootlegging in Tampa.
We prospered mightily. Under the houses of the ten founding families of Eire County were buried enough gold coins to run a small country. My grandfather had a personal showpiece collection begun by his great-grandfather in the seventeen hundreds. Even in nineteen thirty there were rare coins in it worth a small fortune each.
Prohibition did not ruin us. In fact, it turned us from modestly rich to very rich. We concluded that doing business with corrupt men was an act of civic rebellion, and would bear no permanent consequences, and that the smooth liquor of ambition was a righteous balm for righteous people. We continued to make liquor, and to weave wool, as if nothing would change.
We forgot that wool does not weep for injustices and bourbon does not mourn for lost souls.
