Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [122]
Kahr scooped the potato-peel pulp into a wooden bowl, where he ground away at it with a stone shaped like a pestle, crushing out the liquid. Then he poured pulp and fluid into a bucket along the shed's back wall. He had nine buckets of various sizes, most used at one time for chicken feed or to carry scraps to the pigs. He had spotted two of the buckets among ruined houses on his walks from the city. Now they all contained fermenting mash. Three with potato peels, three with apple parts, and two with citrus rinds. Kahr had no idea how the Chancellery found oranges and lemons with the Allies now occupying the citrus orchards in Italy. The last bucket held assorted berries and jams he had scavenged, and whatever else he could find to throw in, including half a pomegranate. He called this the surprise bucket, because he never knew quite what the result would taste like.
He sat on an upturned nail barrel near his boiler, then brought kindling from the wood rack and carefully placed it on the fire. It wasn't a boiler, really, just a ten-gallon hot-water heater, but it worked well enough. The heater was held over the fire by an angle-iron contraption Kahr had fashioned using the vise on his bench. A pipe ran from the top of the heater to an automobile radiator, which sat in a barrel of cold water. Vapor from the boiling mash traveled through the pipe to condense in the radiator. Kahr had learned how to make a still when be worked at the mustard gas plant near Cologne during the Great War. He and the crew maintained a still at one end of the plant, and were careful not to confuse the two products.
With the tip of his boot, Kahr pushed a few embers back into the fire. On the workbench were bottles and a bag of corks. Kahr drank much of his output, but he also traded it for food, something other than army food. Half a kilometer down the road, Widow Wenner would swap a bottle of apple spirits for a platter of doughnuts, which were at least edible, unlike the Wehrmacht variety, called "sinkers."
Kahr didn't know which gave him more comfort, the whiskey or tending the fire. It was a small fire, just enough to warm his corner of the shed and bring the mash to a boil. The fire demanded just enough attention to dull his misery. With his family gone—all his sons—he spent more time in the shed than in the house a hundred meters away. Every piece of furniture and every corner of the house brought back memories, so he preferred the goat shed. The place was lit by five oil lamps. It smelled of sour mash, old leather harnesses, and a hundred years of goats. The boiler gurgled in a satisfying way. Though he could not see the steam, Kahr could picture it drifting along the pipe toward the radiator. Slits of night could be seen through the walls, and Kahr sat there with his coat on.
The farm had been his father's, and his father's father before that. The tools along the wall—the pitchfork and shovels and harnesses and scythes—were older than Kahr. The farm no longer had any animals. They'd all been sold off or eaten, even the goats who once lived in this shed. Nothing to tend anymore on his farm, except the still. He lifted a handful of straw to toss onto the blaze. Kahr liked the spurt of fire that resulted.
His head came up. He knew the sounds of this place, and he'd just heard a noise that wasn't of the shed. He pivoted on the barrel to face the door. Its hinges were as old as the farm, and couldn't even be looked at without squeaking. Had it been the hinges? No, something else, a wood sound. Someone stepping on wood, or tripping on it. Maybe out at the stack of firewood. Kahr listened, wishing for once the fire and boiler didn't make so much noise. He looked at the bottle near the barrel he was sitting on, wondering if he'd drunk too much. Then the noise came again. Closer.