Lum and the Deadly Brew
By Rick Olivo, aka Strange Brewer
Lum was an old guy I knew when I was a sailor and a beginning homebrewer at the Naval Air Station in Meridian Mississippi.
This was several years before Jimmy Carter made homebrewing legal, a fact which troubled neither Lum nor myself.
“Damn-fool laws were meant to be broken,” was Lum’s observation.
Lum was old and bent by a lifetime of manual labor and misfortune, which seemed to trail him like a small, black cloud. In a long and checkered career, he had worked himself through hundreds of enterprises that hadn’t quite panned out. At various times, he had been a cook, a truckdriver, an oilfield roughneck, a cowpuncher and a mortician’s assistant. He had adopted this last line of work during the depression when he could no longer support himself as a cowboy. He figured though folks could no longer afford hamburger, they were still dying and somebody had to bury them. Lum, being the philosophical type, figured prettying up corpses for their final presentation was no worse than branding and castrating calves, and the clients certainly complained less.
Now Lum had been dabbling in homebrewing for some time. It was a practice he picked up as a cowboy, to make the long, lonesome nights on the wide prairie a bit more bearable. When he went to work for the mortician, a dour humorless character, Lum was shocked to find that his employer was a non-drinking Baptist of the devoutly dry persuasion. Almost the first thing he told Lum was that he didn’t hold with strong drink, and if Lum wanted to stay long in his employ, he would eschew the pleasures of the bottle. For a man of Lum’s thirst, such a thing could have proven to be a sore trial indeed. But, Lum, as usual had an angle.
“I did have one thing going for me, that man had absolutely no sense of smell.”
It seems that a childhood bout with diphtheria had deprived the mortician of his sense of smell, and this, no doubt, accounted for his glum disposition. Of course one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity as the saying goes. For Lum, his boss’s lack of olfactory powers meant Lum had a free ticket to brew beer in his tiny apartment over the funeral chapel, free of any worry that his prohibitionist boss would detect his clandestine brewing activities through the odor of fermenting beer.
“She worked out pretty good,” Lum allowed. “I could even have a beer or two with lunch and not worry that old man was gonna smell it on my breath.”
It was a good thing from Lum’s point of view. Brewing beer was a major comfort to him. For, let’s face it, working in a funeral parlour was a pretty depressing business, and after a long day with the stiffs, a working man was entitled to a beer or two of an evening.
Be that as it may, Lum said he would have considered becoming a teetotaler if he had only known the horror that were about to transpire.
After a while Lum got pretty good at making homemade beer. In his circle of prohibition-detesting friends, he got a certain reputation as a brewmaster of quality. Some of his buddies took to paying him a few of their hard-earned dollars to brew up some beer for them. He was fairly discreet about his budding enterprise, paying off the town sheriff in beer to keep his cottage industry free from legal entanglements. Because there weren’t all that many funerals in the small West Texas town, he had plenty of time to engage in his avocation. He brewed mostly with hopped cans of blue ribbon syrup, and although by current standards the product must have been pretty awful, considering all the cane sugar that he used to extend the brew (Bud, Millers and Coors had nothing on Lum for profit-oriented marketing) for the thirsty crowd in that wind-blown dry Texas county, it was like Munich at Oktoberfest time. In no time flat, Lum was well on his way to becoming a minor-league bootlegger of note. He soon began making more from his brewing activities than the niggardly wage he got from his parsimonious employer.
One day, Lum brewed up a big batch, 12 cases, which was a lot of work, but being as it was intended for the wedding reception of the Sheriff’s daughter, he didn’t mind. He had been sampling some of his own work during the process of bottling, and he kind of forgot if he had primed the beer or not, so being a careful man he primed it again, drunkenly figuring that beer that was a bit too fizzy was better than flat beer any day. He might have even gotten away with it had not the fickle Texas weather suddenly taken a turn from April-cold-and-nasty to hotter-than-hell-90-degrees-on-the-first-of May.
The stage was set for the greatest debacle in Texas history since A&M beat Tech 64-3 in ’22.
It was the day of the funeral of the town’s Baptist minister. The mortician, an upstanding deacon in the church himself, naturally viewed it as one of the high points of his undertaking career. He made sure Lum's black suit pants and frock coat were cleaned and pressed specially for the services, and instructed him to get a haircut, take a bath even though it wasn’t even close to Saturday, and polish his dusty cowboy boots. Poor Lum could not have known that circumstances were conspiring for the wildest funeral in that part of West Texas since Judge Roy Bean had shuffled off the mortal coil.
The minister had been a poor man, whose faith had sustained him when his tiny salary as spiritual leader of the town had not. What little money had been available had been used up on a nice, hand rubbed pine casket that looked a bit like oak, if viewed from a distance.
|
Embalming, even among the more financially well to do clients, had always been viewed as something of a luxury, and seeing as the minister was going to be potted quickly, Lum’s boss saw no particular reason why he should donate the service. In lieu of chemical preservation, and in order to prevent any unfortunate reflex actions on the part of the deceased, he laid a heavy logging chain across the chest of the departed, low enough so it wouldn’t be visible to the congregation. The Undertaker figured this would be sufficient to prevent the body from suddenly sitting up. This kind of thing had been known to happen in unembalmed bodies, but it’s the kind of thing that undertakers tend to view as undignified (not to mention unnerving). Satisfied that all was ready, the mortician greeted the mourners, and began the service, Lum playing sadly on the foot-pedal organ. (He’d played round house piano in his youth at a whorehouse in New Orleans.)
All was apparently going well until just about the high point in the eulogy. In Stentorian tones, the mortician invoked the blessings of the almighty on his departed servant, assuring the rapt audience that their departed minister was already in heaven with his lord. At this point he raised his hands to the heavens in a burst of religious ecstasy and in a voice like a biblical prophet cried out “We beseech thee for a sign O Lord!” Immediately, a series of muffled popping sounds began to emit from Lum’s room. Thunderstruck, the congregation sat in utter silence as the barrage continued and indeed, began to quicken.
A brown liquid began to seep down the wall, tricking to the floor to collect in small, foaming pools. A smell began to insinuate itself into the close room. A pungent odor, sweet and heady, an odor suspiciously like… Beer. A few knowing eyes turned directly towards Lum, who was wishing fervently he was back on the wide open prairies, instead of in a chapel with a room full of dry Baptists who were soon going to be thinking in terms of tar and feathers.
The funeral director, meanwhile was still completely befuddled. Alone of all the people in the room, he could not smell the beer. He could see though, that he was quickly losing his flock. Some of them were beginning to titter in amusement, some of whom were scowling in disapproval. Quickly he cast a glance at Lum who was in the process of attempting to will himself into becoming invisible.
He strode over to the wall, touched the offending liquid in amazement, listened to further explosions from above and turned to the man seated next to him with a quizzical expression.
“Beer.” The man said, desperately trying to keep a straight face.
In an instant all the scales fell away from the old man’s eyes and with crystal clarity his confusion was swept away. With a face as filled with wrath as an angry Moses bent on chastising the wayward children of Israel, he turned to face Lum.
He sputtered, he fumed, daggers of lightning flew from his eyes. A few faint puffs of smoke seemed to eminate from his ears.
“YOU!” was all he could sputter out…
It was beginning to look real bad for Lum, get a rope bad, in fact. However, in the way fate will sometimes intervene to save a condemned man, a couple of things no one could have anticipated occurred. First, all that leaking beer got to the electric wires.
With a bright blue flash, all the lights went out.
Just then, the unembalmed corpse, which had begun its own fermentation in the 90 degree heat abruptly sat up, accompanied by a loud clattering as the logging chain fell away.
“You never saw a room empty so fast in all your life,” Lum sardonically recalled.
Now Lum was as startled as the rest of the crowd by the sudden animation from the deceased, but being a man who had gotten out of any number of hard places by keeping his head, he recognized a golden opportunity when it knocked. In the confusion, he quietly slipped out the back door, leaving all his scant worldly possessions in the room with the exploding beer. He was last seen hightailing it in the general direction of New Mexico, running as fast as he could get his skinny shanks to move, sprinting down the road in his freshly pressed undertaker’s suit.
He never looked back, and his final memory of that place was the muffled sound of beer bottles exploding in the distance.
POSTSCRIPT
Lum was a bit of a philosopher, and he had been through many narrow scrapes in his life. He tried to take a lesson from each personal disaster, so as to turn each reverse into a lesson in life. As he trudged down the road in his now dusty black suit, he pondered on his most recent misadventure and tried to divine what it all meant. After several miles he came up with a firm conclusion:
“On a hot Texas summer day, both bodies and beer are best kept on ice.”
-Finis-
|
