The First Life Of Old Benny Reed

     "Lottie girl, don't you go getting attached to those pups," Benny warns as he pours flaked maize into heated creek water in a copper mash pot.  She lays upwind of the fire pit and is curled around four wriggling balls of black and tan, each latched onto a nipple. The little clearing beside the gurgling stream is edged by deciduous trees just beginning to turn in late September.   "Those pure-breds will be ready to trade for twenty barrels in the time it takes this mash to mature," he explains while stirring in the barley malt.  The coonhound looks up and whines as Benny completes his soliloquy: "We'll just give it a whirl every now and then before mixing in the yeast."      The breed was a recent cross between a bloodhound and a Virginia foxhound. It's large size, tracker's nose, and imperturbability made it ideal for scaring up bears, wolves, and cougars in the early Appalachian settlements. It just so happened that the cooper's s...

        "Sorry your majesty, the next batch is spoken for." So says Benny to a diminutive and foppishly dressed man under the arching branches and browning leaves of the Tradail Oak, his escort of two redcoats watering their horses at a nearby hollowed out log. "Well Mister Benjamin Reed, that delivery had better not be to any of the Virginia militias. My master is called Bloody Ban for a reason, and I'm just his valet so your obsequiousness won't work with me." "Tell you what mister footman, you can have one cask for a bit of female advice."       After accidentally witnessing the menarche ritual, Benny had been obsessed with the Cherokee woman. Ever since his mother had departed from the Tazewell settlement seven years before, he'd been so focused on keeping his deceased father's copper forge running that he'd skipped the usual teen rites of passage. He'd completely missed the occasional square dance, having finished schooling  in...

       After a moment of silence following the raven's call, Charlotte gives a soft whine and looks up at Benny. He tilts his head and, hearing that she senses no danger ahead, waves his hand forward. She trots up the rocky trail and he follows soundlessly, feeling each boot fall before placing weight on it.       He skirts the log lean-to he'd hewn into the hillside of the narrow hollow five years before, his hatchet at the ready on his right shoulder. Beyond a little clearing along his still race, he creeps up a last rocky ledge and peers over a boulder at a spring-fed pool below a tiny waterfall.       At first there are only feint rippling reflections on the water.  Benny whistles a short tweet in mimicry of the parakeet that flits in these Appalachian forests. A movement by the pool lifts his hatchet to the ready, but then tan pumpkin-seed spots approach through the dark and the tall dog comes back with tongue wagging...

       "You bet, General Preston," grins Benjamin Reed to the impatient militia leader prancing on his white horse in the waning September sunlight. "I'll weld that worm to the pot and get it flowing before you can say Jack Robinson." "Then go to it! My men are mustering at Draper's Meadow and we'll need that recipe when done with Ferguson and his redcoats. And by the by, I'm just a Colonel for my hunters and farmers."      Twenty-year-old Benny just shakes his blackened face, red hair waving in the gloaming as he glances at the silvery flash of Bald Knob catching the last light atop the evergreen ridge of Clinch Mountain. "The clear or the char, Private?" William Preston stills his horse and stares down at the wiry brownsmith beneath the spreading oak tree, dark eyes hidden in the shadow of a faded tricorn, pursed lips lost in a bushy beard. "Make that the clear, and your loyalties, young man, had better be just as impurity ...