Or maybe you think of the Great Smoky Mountains, of fresh air and hiking, of majestic sights and long weekends in cabins. Maybe you can close your eyes and see the tips of those mountains capped in white, can hear the call of the Tennessee Warbler, can smell the fresh pine and oak.
Maybe, when you think of Tennessee, all of this and more comes to mind.
But for me, it only conjured up one, two-syllable word.
Whiskey.
I saw the amber liquid gold every time I closed my eyes. I smelled its oaky finish with each breath I took. My taste buds were trained at a young age to detect every slight note within the bottle, and my heart was trained to love whiskey long before it ever learned how to love a woman.
Tennessee whiskey was a part of me. It was in my blood. I was born and raised on it, and at twenty-eight, it was no surprise to me that I was now part of the team that bred and raised the most famous Tennessee whiskey in the world.
It was always in the cards for me. And it was all I ever wanted.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Until the day Ruby Grace came back into town.
My ears were plugged with bright, neon orange sponges, but I could still hear Chris Stapleton’s raspy voice crooning behind the loud clamor of machines. I wiped sweat from my brow as I clamped the metal ring down on another whiskey barrel, sending it on down the line before beginning on the next one. Summer was just weeks away, and the distillery swelled with the Tennessee heat.
Being a barrel raiser at the Scooter Whiskey Distillery was a privilege. There were only four of us, a close-knit team, and we were paid well for doing a job they hadn’t figured out how to train machines to do yet. Each barrel was hand-crafted, and I raised hundreds of them every single day. Our barrels were part of what made our whiskey so recognizable, part of what made our process so unique, and part of what made Scooter a household name.
My grandfather had started as a barrel raiser, too, when he was just fourteen years old. He’d been the one to set the standard, to hammer down the process and make it what it is today. It was how the founder, Robert J. Scooter, first noticed him. It was the beginning of their friendship, of their partnership, of their legacy.
But that legacy had been cut short for my grandfather, for my family. Even if I had moved away from this town, from the distillery that was as much a blessing to my family as it was a curse, I’d never forget that.
“Hey, Noah,” Marty called over the sharp cutting of another barrel top. Sparks flew up around his protective goggles, his eyes on me instead of the wood, but his hands moved in a steady, knowledgeable rhythm. “Heard you made the walk of shame into work this morning.”
The rest of the crew snickered, a few cat calls and whistles ringing out as I suppressed a grin.
“What’s it to ya?”
Marty shrugged, running a hand over his burly beard. It was thick and dark, the tips peppered with gray just like his long hair that framed his large face. “I’m just saying, maybe you could at least shower next time. It’s smelled like sex since five a.m.”
“That’s what that is?” PJ asked, pausing to adjust his real glasses underneath the protective ones. His face screwed up, thick black frames rising on his crinkled nose as he shook his head. “I thought they were serving us fish sticks again in the cafeteria.”
That earned a guffaw from the guys, and I slugged our youngest crew member on the arm. At twenty-one, PJ was the rookie, the young buck, and he was the smallest of us by far, too. His arms weren’t toned from raising barrels day in and day out for years, though his hands were finally starting to callous under his work gloves.
“Nah, that’s just your mama’s panties, PJ. She gave them to me as a souvenir. Here,” I said, right hand diving into my pocket. I pulled out my handkerchief, flinging it up under his nose before he could pull away. “Get a better whiff.”
“Fuck you, Noah.” He shoved me away with a grimace as the guys burst into another fit of laughter.
I shook the handkerchief over his head again before tucking it away, hands moving for more staves of wood to build the next barrel. It took anywhere from thirty-one to thirty-three planks of wood to bring one to life, and I had it down to a science — mixing and matching the sizes, the width, until the perfect barrel was built. I hadn’t had a barrel with a leak in more than seven years, since I first started making them when I was twenty-one. It only took me six months to get my process down, and by my twenty-second birthday, I was the fastest raiser on our team, even though I was the youngest at the time.