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sacks full. Then they’d take them over to the Blind Ghost Bar and Grill and sell them to Mr. and Mrs. Bocean, who knew the process for making the liquor and kept the recipe in a little safe with a combination lock. The recipe had been given to our town forefathers as a gift by the natives, who, two years after giving it, with no provocation and having gotten along peacefully with the settlers for more than a decade, vanished without a trace, leaving behind an empty village on an island out in the swamp…or so the story goes.
    The annual celebration that involved this drink took place at the Blind Ghost on the last Saturday night in September. It was usually for adults only, and so the first chance I ever got to witness it was the year I was made an apprentice to old man Witzer. The only two younger people at the event that year were Lester II and me. Bildab’s boy had been attending since he was ten, and some speculated that having witnessed the thing and been around the berries so long were what had turned him simple, but I knew young Lester in school before that and he was no ball of fire then either. Of the adults who participated, only eight actually partook of the Night Whiskey. Reed and Samantha Bocean took turns each year, one joining in the drinking while the other watched the bar, and seven others, picked by lottery, got to taste the sweetest thing on earth. Sheriff Jolle did the honors picking the names of the winners from a hat at the event and was barred from participating by a town ordinance that went way back. Those who didn’t get to drinkthe Night Whiskey made do with conventional alcohol. Local musicians supplied the entertainment and there was dancing. From the snatches of conversation I’d caught over the years, I gathered it was a raucous time.
    This native drink, black as a crow wing and slow to pour as cough syrup, had some strange properties. A year’s batch was enough to fill only half of an old quart gin bottle that Samantha Bocean had tricked out with a handmade label showing a deer skull with berries for eyes, and so it was portioned out sparingly. Each participant got no more than about three quarters of a shot glass of it, but that was enough. Even with just these few sips it was wildly intoxicating, so that the drinkers became immediately drunk, their inebriation growing as the night went on although they’d finish off their allotted pittance within the first hour of the celebration. “Blind drunk” was the phrase used to describe how the drinkers of the Night Whiskey would end the night. Then came the weird part, for usually around two a.m. all eight of them, all at once, got to their feet, stumbled out the door, lurched down the front steps of the bar, and meandered off into the dark, groping and weaving like namesakes of the establishment they had just left. It was a peculiar phenomenon of the drink that it made those who imbibed it search for a resting place in the lower branches of a tree. Even though they were pie-eyed drunk, somehow, and no one knew why, they’d manage to shimmy up a trunk and settle themselves down across a few choice branches. It was a law in Gatchfield that if you tried to stop them or disturb them it would be cause for arrest. So when the drinkers of the Night Whiskey left the bar, no one followed. The next day, they’d be found fast asleep in midair, only a few precarious branches between them and gravity. That’s where old man Witzer and I came in. At first light, we were to make our rounds in his truck with the poles bungeed on top, to perform what was known as the Drunk Harvest.
    Dangerous? You bet, but there was a reason for it. I told you about the weird part, but even though this next part gives a justification of sorts, it’s even weirder. When the natives gave the deathberry and the recipe for the Night Whiskey to our forefathers, they considered it a gift of a most divine nature, because after the dark drink