Homemade

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

My brother and sister and I were watching television when our father came into the room. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?” he asked. “You should be outside.”

We left the house but stayed on the porch. I leaned against the railing, while my siblings sat on the steps.

Presently, our father came out. “I’ll give you something to do,” he said. “You can pick dandelions.”

There were many yellow blossoms poking through the dense grass in the yard. My brother and sister and I stood over the flowers, bent down, and pinched the flowers from their stems. We dropped them into a grocery bag.

“Aren’t these weeds?” my brother asked.

“They are weeds,” my sister said.

After an hour or so, our father came to check on us. We had filled only part of the bag. “This isn’t enough,” he said.

We ranged farther, leaving the yard and searching next to the town’s one road. After some time, we had filled the bag. We gave the harvest to our father.

“I’ll make dandelion wine,” he said, “I learned how to do this in Kentucky, where I was teaching – before you were born.”

In the kitchen, he showed us how to separate the petals from the stems. “Throw away the green parts,” he said.

He took the yellow petals and put them into a bucket. “I’ll need water, sugar, and yeast – and a few raisins,” he said as he added the ingredients and stirred the mixture with a large wooden spoon.

When my mother came home from work, she asked, “What’s that smell?”

“I’m making wine,” my father said. “It won’t be Chardonnay. It will be Chateau Pennsylvania.”

I looked at the bucket holding my father’s concoction. A cloth covered the top, and a sour fragrance bubbled up from the mixture.

“It smells bad,” my mother said.

“I think it smells good,” my father said. “We’re going to be self-sufficient with booze.”

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After a few days, I noticed that many yellow flowers had reappeared in the yard. The lawn was dotted with yellow flowers, and some of them had gone to seed. I could kick the gray puffs and send small clouds into the air.

There were enough flowers for another bucket of wine. However, I left the blossoms for groundhogs and rabbits to eat.

Inside, my father was in his studio. He had probably been up most of the night. When I walked past his door, I saw him sitting on a stool, with his head resting on his drafting table and his eyes closed. An empty beer bottle and a can of loose tobacco sat next to him. In the background, paintings of landscapes – farm fields and hills – were stacked on the floor.

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Later, my father poured a yellowish liquid from his fermenting bucket into a glass jug. He set the jug on the table at the start of dinner. My brother and sister and I sat silently in our chairs while he poured the wine into stemmed glasses and gave one to each of us. He also poured a glass for my mother, who was ladling food from pots on the stove. “I can’t drink,” she said. “It makes me turn red.”

We sipped from our glasses.

“Yow!” my brother said after he swallowed.

“Whoo-ee!” my sister said.

The wine was sweet, with a faint fragrance of flowers. It was the strongest drink I’d ever tasted.

My father poured some of the firewater into a large glass for himself. “Everyone should make their own wine,” he said. “We’ll take the business from the vintners and distributors. They won’t be getting rich from our money.”

“We have no money,” my mother said as she tasted the wine.

“That’s right,” my father said, “but we won’t need money when we make our own hooch.”

I looked at my mother’s face: It had turned red. She gestured toward the bowls on the counter. “Come and get your supper,” she said.

The meal she’d prepared – a stew that would feed all of us – smelled good.

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I found a mason jar and scooped some wine from the fermenting bucket. I clipped the lid shut and set the jar behind the door of my bedroom. Other valuable things were there: a pack of firecrackers, a padlock and key, a holster with a knife, a chess set. I didn’t want to drink the wine immediately; I wanted to save it for a special occasion.

Later, a parade sponsored by the volunteer Fire Department filled the one street in our town. A band with majorettes led the way. I brought my wine to the small hill outside our house and sat there among the dandelions.

But when I opened the lid, I smelled something beyond fermentation. I smelled rot. When I held the jar to the light, I saw a cloudy liquid. I took my wine to the nearest drainpipe and poured it out.

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THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI grew up in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, most recently Safe Colors, a novel-in-stories. His novel Haywire won the members’ choice award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Columbia University, and YMCA. Rutkowski received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.