Bitter As Hell
by Jan F.
Drewniak and Don Drewniak
This
is the fifth excerpt from The
Junk Picker (published in
2012).
Setting:
The Berkshires in Massachusetts during
the Great Depression.
The
characters in this episode:
Pinball (Pinball
Johnny) — My father, Jan F. Drewniak, who
was nineteen-years old and was in the process of
rebuilding a large house and making a near one-mile
lane passable from the nearest road. The house
and a large barn were owned by the man for whom
he had worked in a machine shop in Brooklyn for
the two previous years.
Sparks —
The nearest neighbor who was a friendly rival and
sometimes foil.
Jack —
Pinball’s boss.
Tony – A
frequent guest.
* * * * *
By late summer,
the smell of chokeberries, or seed cherries as
the locals called them, was strong everywhere
around the property. Late one Saturday afternoon,
Tony came over and sat down on the steps leading
to my rooms.
“You
smell that, Pinball?”
“Sure do,
after awhile it gets sickening. Same thing last
year.”
“Maybe
you can make some wine out of them.”
“Heck,
the seeds are too big.”
“No
different than grapes.”
“Why tell
me about it? If you like wine that much, then you
pick them instead of sitting here on that
backside of yours.”
“You
kidding? It would be a bit too much for an old
tub of lard like me.”
“How do
you make it?”
“Easy as
pie. You get a barrel, a cider barrel is good,
and you pour the berries in until it’s three-quarters
full. Then you add a couple of gallons of water,
about five pounds of sugar and toss in some yeast.
That’s all, then you let it ferment.”
“It
sounds easy.”
“Sure is.”
The next
morning before Sparks and his family went off to
church, I went to see him. “Sparks, do you
have any cider barrels?”
“Back of
the barn. Why?”
“I want
to buy one.”
“Take
them all and leave me the keys to your car.”
I could only
laugh.
“Hell,”
he continued, “you got just about everything
else around here. One more won’t hurt. Help
yourself.”
“I haven’t
started on your junk pile yet.”
“And you’d
damn better not. Why do you want the barrel?”
“Don’t
you smell anything?”
“Not them
seed cherries? You might as well use my silo,
fill it up and maybe you get a gallon.”
“What do
you know about making wine?”
“Look,
genius, we tried it one year. Never again. It’s
a lot of work and any wine you get is bitter as
hell.”
“First
off, I’m not going to drink any of it, just
want to see if I can make it. Also, Tony is
Italian and should know more than you do. He says
you can make enough from one barrel and that’s
good enough for me.”
“Then
take the barrel and don’t come later and cry
on my shoulder.”
I waited until the gang left and then I gathered
up some baskets. Backing up the truck to a clump
of shrubs, I began to pluck the berries like
grapes. It didn’t take long for the smell to
get the best of me, so I began taking frequent
breaks. If I couldn’t reach the higher
sitting berries, I left them alone and moved to
the next bush.
Once the
picking was done, I set the barrel on its side in
back of the barn. I made a funnel out of
cardboard, took out the stopper from the side and
little by little I pressed berries into the
barrel. Quite a few of them were lost in the
process.
It turned out
that I was well short of the berries needed and,
as a result, I ended up making an additional trip
to get more. Getting the chokeberry stains off my
hands proved to be almost impossible. I
remembered having read somewhere that rubbing raw
potatoes on stained hands worked, so I gave it a
try. It didn’t take off all the staining,
but it seemed to work better than anything else I
tried.
The other
ingredients added, I plugged up the barrel. That
was it. When I checked it the next day, I found
that the stopper was off and there were a lot of
small flies around, so back on went the stopper.
The stopper was off again the following day and
there were fruit flies by the hundreds. I found a
piece of tin in the barn, put the stopper back on,
banged it in good and then tacked the tin over
the stopper. Finally, I covered it with canvas.
“Let’s
see that damn stopper pop out again,” I said,
satisfied that the problem had been solved.
Tony paid me his customary Saturday afternoon
visit. We sat down and began to talk. “Well,
Tony, you talked me into making the wine. I
filled a barrel during the week. How long do you
wait?”
“About a
week and a half. Did you follow instructions?”
“Sure did,
but the damn thing drew flies by the hundreds.
Twice I put the stopper back on and twice it came
off for some reason, so I rammed the plug in and
tacked tin over it.”
“Oh, hell!
Where is it?”
“In back
of the barn with a canvas over it. Why?”
All the blood
seemed to drain out of his face.
“We’re
in trouble,” he said.
“What do
you mean, ‘trouble?’”
“Just
what I said. You’ve got a bomb over there.
Those gases are building up. That stopper should
have been left out.”
“Well, I
better go and take it out.”
“You can’t.
The thing might kill you.”
I sat there
trying to think up a solution. The thought of
trying to find Smokey and asking him to shoot it
from a distance using a rifle briefly crossing my
mind, but that was a clear indication that I was
not even close to coming up with a plan. A few
minutes into the thinking process, the barrel let
go. Had I not known what the cause of the
explosion was, I would have sworn it was that of
a cannon shot. Both Tony and I dropped to the
ground and instinctively covered our heads with
our hands.
Seconds later,
Jack came running out of the house followed by
most of the others. “What the hell was that?”
he screamed as he followed Tony and me toward the
back of the barn. Neither one of us gave him an
answer.
What a mess!
It was a good thing that the barrel was on its
side with the top facing away from the barn as it
was the top that let go. Everything going out to
twenty feet was covered with a purple muck.
“What the
hell happened here?” yelled Jack.
Tony laughed
and told Jack what I had done.
“It’s
my fault, Jack, I should have known better. I
never made wine before,” I said sheepishly.
“And I
hope never again, Pinball.”
With that, he
began to laugh as did the rest of his crew. All
the while I felt as if I had “Idiot”
printed across my forehead.
Sparks was
there in less than five minutes. The explosion
was too powerful for him not to have heard it.
When Tony told him what happened, he all but fell
down laughing and all the while slapping his hat
against his right leg.
“Told you
and told you, Pinball, not to do it, but no, you’re
the wine making genius.”
For once, I
had no comeback and could do nothing but let
Sparks enjoy the moment.
It wasn’t
long before the whole town knew what happened. By
the time it reached the last person, the story
was that the barn had been half blown away.
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