In one way or another, everyone in International Falls was a rumrunner. Only a few people planned and organized the smuggling operations, oversaw the logistics, and sold the booze to distributors in St. Paul and Chicago, but there was a massive operation. And in order for this operation to function, people who worked on the railroads, in the ports, and on the highways had to either cooperate or turn a blind eye. The paper mills found themselves packing crates full of hooch disguised as paper goods. Fishermen brought the goods down from Canada across Rainy Lake, stashed bottles amongst their catch, and kept an eye out for law enforcement. Even hunters and skiers were called upon to sneak crates of Canadian whiskey through the vast wet wildlands of the borderland in an ever-evolving game of evading the few border and customs agents who were not being paid to cultivate a certain imprecision.
The citizens of International Falls drank neither more nor less than the folk of any other Midwestern small town, but the traffic across the border was enormous, constant, and highly collaborative. Because the Great Lakes funneled overland border traffic in the region to a handful of places, and because it was obvious to everyone that immense quantities of alcohol were flowing south from Canada at all times, there were strangers in International Falls throughout the year. And because of these outsiders, even though everyone was a rumrunner, nobody talked about rumrunning except around their kitchen tables or out in the wilderness.
Ed and Mabel Jensen lived on a farm south of town, just outside Ericsburg, in a house that Mabel’s parents had built just around the time International Falls had been platted 30 years earlier. Both Ed and Mabel worked hard during the seasons for plowing, planting, and harvesting, but the rest of the year Ed worked at one of the paper mills in town and Mabel maintained the crops and took care of the animals, with the help of their children before they all grew up and went away. The oldest, Buck, had gone to France in the war and now lived in Cincinnati, talking all the time about coming back to help with, and eventually inherit, the farm.
Ed did make a lot of paper at the mill, but they also concealed a lot of bottles of whiskey inside cases of paper to be shipped all around the Midwest. It came in mostly on ships bringing cargo across Rainy Lake. In the winter, the lake would freeze over, and trucks would drive across the ice to deliver whiskey and, as any customs agent would testify, diverse other goods including maple syrup, wheat, flour, and cheese. If too many feds were nosing around, these large-scale whiskey shipments would disperse to small rowboats, canoes, skis, and sleds. The rumrunning operation was nimble: it could strike like a hammer or spread out like the seeds of a dandelion, but it could not stop.
Ed didn’t know much about the mill’s part in the operation, and had no power in it. This was for the best, according to Mabel; if there were to be a raid, Ed would be able to say honestly that he knew neither where the whiskey came from nor where it was going, except in general terms. But he did backbreaking work for precious little pay, and he heard stories about the lavish palaces and showgirl companions of the bootlegger kings to the south, and he started to resent the whole setup. This resentment grew a little more with every new backache, every new tale told at a speakeasy about some goon who decided to get into the business and now lived like a Roman emperor. Why should the whole North Country work so hard and stay so silent so a few men could get stinking rich, while saps like him still had nothing? He would complain about this to Mabel, and she would sigh that rich folks were always putting one over on regular, honest folks like them. But what could they do? Injustice was like the Minnesota cold. It was one of the many things that one just had to endure.
In the summer of 1924, Buck came for a visit. He and Ed spent a lot of time doing work around the place, relieving Mabel of some of her farm duties, working on their Model TT farm truck, mending the fences, fixing up the roof in the barn. When Mabel approached them with refreshments, they would grow quiet, as though dropping their secret discussion when she appeared.
“Turns out this whiskey baron down there in Cincinnati, George Remus, is going to prison,” Ed informed her after their son had gone. “Buck’s looking to move in on the whiskey trade down there. Seems a lot of small timers are thinking about stepping into the gaps Remus is leaving behind.”
It was July, but Mabel felt a sudden chill. She began to stammer. “So Buck thinks he’ll just turn into a gangster overnight? But he’s too decent! Our son isn’t a killer. These other men—they’ll try to push him out—he’ll be killed!”
Ed silenced her with a haymaker to her jaw. After a few moments, he said quietly, “He’s enterprising. It’s a business. It’s an opportunity. Our son is an ambitious young man. There’s a need that isn’t being met. He’s looking to fill that need. Giving the people what they want. I don’t see why you should go around stifling his dreams. You just want him to be poor so he can come back to the farm. He’s got bigger fish to fry.” He stood up, poured himself a drink, and went to sit in the parlor. Mabel went outside, pumped some cool water from the well, and held a wet corner of her apron to her face. When Ed wanted her to stop talking, this was his method. He didn’t do it often, but it worked. She lost interest in arguing every single time.
Somehow, being concerned for Buck’s safety and confident in his morality meant that she did not believe in his potential, and was possibly opposed to the tenets of capitalism. She tried to make sense of her husband’s words as she gazed out across the potato fields to the west, where the summer sun was following its long, slow course to the end of the day. Clouds cast shadows across the low green leaves, rustling in the wind, indicating the abundance beneath the surface. The sun was still high, the clouds were still white, but they promised a pretty sunset. Mabel believed in making an honest living. Like everyone else, she turned a blind eye to the rumrunning, but she could not watch her son get mixed up in this bloody business.
Sometime in August, Ed came home late from his shift at the paper mill in a gleeful mood. His supervisor had invited him to have a drink in a speakeasy after work, and notified him that the feds were watching the port at Ranier very closely. The shipping route across Rainy Lake would have to be modified until Ranier cooled off.
“They want to bring the cargo east, down into Black Bay, and then move it into smaller boats to bring it down Rat Root Lake,” he told his wife, striking a balance between sage and ebullient. “By Ericsburg cemetery, we’ll transfer it from the rowboats into wagons and bring it here. Then we can store it in the barn. We can change the timing, leave it here a few days sometimes, other times a few weeks. That way it’s harder for the cops to notice a pattern. We can hide it easily enough. Fashion a little cave out of straw bales and sacks of grain and potatoes. What do you think?” He looked eagerly at Mabel’s face. Decades ago, he had looked at her like this wanting to know what she thought, planning their life together as a team. But now, his question was not really a question. He wanted her to say she approved. Lately, with all of this bootlegging business, he had become harder than ever.
Mabel had never been directly involved in rumrunning before. “Store it here? But if we get raided——”
“I’m telling you, we won’t get raided. This is what’s best for our family. I’m making the decisions, and this what we’re going to do.” Sometimes, he would hit her with no warning. This was a warning. She supposed he thought he was being merciful, generous. She fell silent.
Throughout the fall, ships from Canada would unload in the water at the opening of Black Bay, transferring the cargo to rowboats. The rowboats would then cross Rat Root Lake, travel a little ways up Rat Root River, then wagons would bring the cargo to the Jensens’ barn, where it would hide behind bales of hay. Mabel had to admit, you couldn’t tell it was there. They were getting a bigger cut than before, and Ed purchased a new Victrola and some fine new dresses for Mabel. She didn’t wear them into town. She didn’t want to be spotted as a bootlegger’s wife, even if that was what she was now.
By late November, Rat Root Lake had already frozen solid. Rainy Lake would not be far behind. Plans were in motion to bring liquor down across the ice, first on trucks on the Rainy Lake ice road, then along Black Bay and Rat Root Lake with skis and sleds. Ed informed Mabel that the shipments would be broken up into so many little loads that no one could possibly notice, and they were perfectly safe. The feds always seemed to fade away in winter anyway.
“The government doesn’t pay them enough to spend the winter up here,” Ed chuckled. “The Volstead Act doesn’t mean enough to those guys to defend it when it’s twenty below.”
Mabel remained silent.
In December, as he did every year, Ed would break chunks of ice from the surface of Rat Root Lake to keep their icebox cool, and to chip into his old fashioneds. He spoke freely about rumrunning and his plans for the future in Mabel’s presence. Sometimes, when skiers came in with portions of a shipment, he would entertain them in the parlor. He made a big show of being a welcoming host, helping the skiers warm up, playing them records from Chicago on the Victrola. Mabel would make hot toddies for everyone, unless they wanted old fashioneds, like Ed always did. He boasted of her mixology skills to his guests.
One night, she overheard him in the parlor talking to his friend, Milton, about making off with some of the whiskey for themselves. It was only a matter of time, Mabel thought. Give a man like Ed the tiniest scrap of power, and all of a sudden he’s Mad King George. Thinks he’ll be the next George Remus, the next Johnny Torrio, the next Dapper Danny Hogan. Ed looked at men like that and only asked himself “Why not?” He didn’t get around to asking himself “How?” It didn’t occur to him that the mettle, the ruthlessness, and the smarts that these men had were not available to everyone, were not a part of him. No. He figured they did it, so why couldn’t he? And then he stopped figuring. Mabel took the icepick ferociously to the block of lake ice as she prepared their drinks.
As the bootlegging network had originally planned, the cases of booze were stashed in the Jensens’ barn for irregular intervals, to stymie attempts at prediction. Ed, Milton, and their co-conspirators had apparently decided to use this to their advantage, to steal a shipment while it was still supposedly in storage, and to set up the beginnings of their whiskey empire before Danny Hogan and Johnny Torrio noticed that it was missing. But still, they would need some kind of a screen if they were going to drive the truck out of town in the middle of winter with a load of cargo. They were in on the bootlegging scheme, but the network policed itself, watching for members who got bright ideas like this one.
Ed had apparently been working on his plan for some time before he decided to let Mabel in on it. “You heard about this eclipse coming up on the 24th?” he asked her not long after the new year in 1925. Mabel had heard about it at church. A total eclipse of the sun, which was something that followed a track across the globe. It didn’t happen everywhere, only along this track. And International Falls was right in the path.
“We’ve got a shipment coming in the night before,” Ed continued. “We’re supposed to keep it a few weeks. But instead!” He smiled, delighted with his own sneakiness. “Instead, the next morning, during the eclipse, we’ll drive out of here in the truck with the shipment on board!” Milton, Bill, and Gus, all friends and drinking buddies of Ed’s, all millworkers and farmers and fathers and rumrunners like Ed, would help to hide the shipment as the skiers brought it in, then unhide it again and load it onto the Jensens’ farm truck, concealed inside the barn. Then, just after sunup, the citizens and the cops and the other bootleggers would all be distracted by the eclipse, and they would drive away. Not to St. Paul or Chicago, but to Cincinnati, to meet up with Buck and found their hooch kingdom.
“So Buck’s involved in this?” Mabel said quietly, looking down at the floor. “Supposing Dapper Danny Hogan comes looking for you and——”
Harder than usual. Her head snapped to the side and hit the kitchen table. Ed got up and stomped away. Perhaps he had the cruelty to make it as a bootlegger after all, Mabel thought. But he did not have the brains. And he would not drag her son into his little experiment. Buck was not going to be the one to pay the price when Ed learned exactly what Johnny Torrio would do when he found out he had been double-crossed.
On Sunday, January 11, Mabel went to church in International Falls. The whole family used to go, but these days she went by herself. Afterward, she drove to Ranier and stood on the shore looking out across Rainy Lake. Frozen and covered with snow, the lake was a flat white expanse with trucks rattling across, shipping that turned to trucking and back again as the seasons changed. Snowflakes were falling softly from the low white sky. There was almost no wind, just a soft fine powder of snow that hushed everything. The clouds were so thick, she could hardly tell where the sun was. Mabel wondered if the eclipse would even be visible on the 24th. January tended to be heavily overcast just about every day.
Mabel tipped her head back and watched the fluffy snow descending from the sky. She had loved to do this as a girl, just marveling at the miracles of nature. Then she grew up and somehow got used to everything and lost that feeling of wonder. She thought that winter had always been a time for people to spend more time inside and be less active, as farming could not continue, and the days were short, and the darkness was so dangerous for so much of human history. And it had been that way when Mabel and Ed were raising their children, when the beets and potatoes they had harvested in the fall would have to last them through the winter. They would play in the snow and spend a lot of hours indoors, as a family, singing and playing games. But now Lulu and Marjorie had gotten married and moved away, they’d lost Jimmy to the Spanish flu, and then Prohibition had changed everything. Now nothing slowed down and nobody had time to rest or play. Everybody wanted alcohol all year, and the flow from Canada, from Mexico, from overseas, never stopped. Ed and his friends were planning their little stupid heist, and she had to come up with a plan of her own.
The sun went down early in January. On Friday, January 23rd, the day before the eclipse, the skiers were supposed to arrive with the shipment well after dark. In the afternoon, Ed and his friends were off somewhere making preparations, and Mabel was alone at the farmhouse without much to do. She stepped out into the barnyard, shawl clasped around her head and shoulders, and gazed out across the fields, snow piled high atop the stubble left over from the harvest, smoothing everything over. It would be months before they could plow it. Now their farmland was just a bleak white emptiness for the wind to howl across, whipping the loose snow up into little flurries and throwing so many flakes around that Mabel wasn’t sure if snow was falling from the sky now, or the wind was just blowing old snow around her. The sun shone dully through the clouds, hanging low over the trees on the western horizon, a flat grayish disc, emitting no warmth at all and hardly any light. She couldn’t imagine this weak winter sun being even colder and dimmer tomorrow morning when the moon passed across its face. They said it only happened once in a lifetime. But the snow, the cold, the flat lonesome terrain, the howling wind—all of these were her whole life. They always had been. Mabel returned to the fire she had built in the parlor.
After dark, the skiers brought the whiskey, and Ed entertained them for a while. Then his three pals came over, and they worked quietly in the barn to load the whiskey shipment onto the truck. After they finished, they had a little party in the parlor as they contemplated their new horizons. Mabel mixed old fashioneds for everyone, but otherwise sat in the kitchen, keeping to herself, as they toasted their cunning and sang old tunes to the accompaniment of Milton’s banjo.
The sun came up the next day behind a dense layer of clouds. As it turned out, nobody in Minnesota could see the eclipse. Mabel stepped out into the barnyard to take a look. The moon and the sun were not directly visible, but the effects of the eclipse were. She noted that the morning had broken and then seemingly unbroken again, with the feeble winter light coming up and then falling away, like a drunk man who stumbles and falls, begins to stand up, and then falls down again.
In the parlor, the men were all sleeping soundly. She had put enough Veronal in their drinks to keep them asleep all day. Ed was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, head and torso propped against an armchair. Mabel contemplated his familiar, helpless form for a moment before walking into the kitchen and picking up her Wagner cast iron skillet from the stove. She returned to the parlor and looked at her husband again. Minnesota had abolished the death penalty. She tried to follow the Ten Commandments. He had willfully put her son in danger.
She bonked Ed once on the skull. His tenuous balance against the chair faltered, and he slumped on the floor, still snoring. Mabel carried her Wagner skillet, which had been her mother’s, out to the barn and set it down next to her in the cab of the truck.
On January 24, 1925, observers in New York City noted that only the part of Manhattan north of 96th Street was in the path of totality of the solar eclipse. It was reported that cars in Duluth briefly turned on their headlights, and that chickens across Ontario returned to their roosts. Later that day, a deputy sheriff and three members of the Ku Klux Klan killed each other in a gunfight in a hotel lobby in Herrin, Illinois. Outside his home in Chicago, Johnny Torrio was shot by gunmen from a passing car. He was expected to die, but after he pulled through he decided to give up bootlegging and hand over control of the Chicago Outfit to his protégé, Al Capone. And Mabel Jensen drove west toward Baudette in a Ford Model TT farm truck loaded with Canadian whiskey, the morning light now renewed, the skies filled with clouds and promise as the moon moved away from the sun, leaving it to follow its course alone.
Katrina Powers holds a PhD in Early Modern Spanish literature from the University of Chicago. She currently lives with two excellent felines in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where she teaches high school Spanish. Her stories have recently appeared in Hoosier Noir, The Muleskinner Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Literary Hatchet. Since her actual name is Dr. Powers, her villainous secret identity would have to be something like Sweetface Millie.
