My Family Chapter 13

 Bootlegging for those of you who don't know what it is let me explain, WV is a dry state which means that you can't buy whiskey anyplace but the state store, you can go in any store or gas station and buy any alcohol beverage except for Whiskey, Dad would go to the state store and pay $1.50 a pint and sell it for  $ 3.00 a pint at home.  
 Bootlegging is a unlawful  but profitable business for a  coal miner. Since so many people were coming to the house and my parents could use the extra money, they decided to go into in the business. Remember the family who traded houses with us? They're an example of how bootlegging can mess with your mind. Remember the wife wanted to move real bad, well it wasn't because of the people - not directly. No, she wanted to get her two boys, four and six months old, away from all the people who the four-year-old could run to for help. I know this because our new next door neighbor told the story of what he saw. First, let me explain how I know what he said as he's an adult and I’m a child. He was also the biggest gossip in Macbeth and he hung out at the company store to gossip with everyone who came in. I, too, hang out there reading comic books and, as long as I was quiet, I could hear every word the adults said.

All of the mining houses sit about three feet off of the ground on cinder blocks, so a four-year-old could easily walk under them. One day, our neighbor said, he saw the wife out playing hide and seek with her oldest boy during the day. A little while later, our neighbor made the comment to the boy how well his mother and he played together. But the boy said they weren’t playing, his mother had tried to kill him. He had been hiding behind the concrete blocks under the house while she shot at him. Of course, our neighbor didn't believe him and later it was found out that the little boy had told the same story to his father. Nobody would believe him, how frighten that boy must have been. Tragedy struck one Saturday morning after we traded houses with them. The wife asked her husband to go to the store for her and while he was gone she asked the four year old to feed the baby a bottle in the front room - the baby was on a blanket on the floor. She shot both of them then herself in the doorway leading from the front room to the kitchen with a silencer on the gun. That's how her husband found them when he came home from the store, which was only about a five minute walk away from the house. The wife didn’t die right away, she lived for a little while. Everyone the little boy had told his story to wishes they had listened to him. After the tragedy, her husband left Macbeth. The wife's father (the bootlegger) had gone to live with his son when they traded homes with us. I found out many years later that her father hung himself some years after the tragedy.