Nida dangled the kerosene lantern lower, lighting the bottom shelves in the coldroom. "See anything back there, Norval?" she asked her four-year-old who had squirmed between the boards. She jiggled the five-month-old twin balanced on her hip.

"Found an onion!" Norval chirped. It came rolling out and dropped onto the dirt floor. "Something else, too." He backed out on knees and elbows, cradling two handfuls of navy beans.

Nida brightened at the sight. Must have spilled from a sack months ago. "Put them in the pot on the table," she said. She punted the onion over the threshold into the kitchen, closed the hatch, put out the lantern flame.

Beans rattled into the pot while Nida laid the baby by its whimpering twin on a quilt near the woodstove.

Oscar set aside the axe he'd been sharpening and peered into the pot. "Good," he told Nida. "Lunch for you and the young'uns."

Phil looked up from his own axe-sharpening chore. "Am I still a young'un?" Going through a growth spurt without enough food to fuel it, the teenager could easily devour all they had and still need more.

Nida's heart wrenched at the gaunt look of his face. "You are, and you'll have breakfast, too. Flapjacks. Those two eggs you found yesterday, and the last of the flour. Lyle, rinse those beans. Don, chop that onion. Ken, find that old bacon rind we set aside. Georgia, play with the babies." She fetched the eggs and the bowl of flour.

Phil glanced in the bowl. "That wouldn't even make one loaf of bread."

"As Marie Antoinette said," Oscar drawled, "Lacking bread, let them eat cake."

Nida snorted. "As if we've seen any sugar for months. No, just plain old flapjacks."

"Who's Marie Twah-net?" Norval asked.

"Queen of folks as hungry as us," Phil told him.

"Did their banks go bust, too?"

Nida gritted her teeth. The Panic. Prohibition. The scarcity of jobs. The hunger in the large dark eyes of her children.

"Don't fret about supper," Oscar told Nida. "This truckload of firewood will earn us something or other. I'll come back from town with flour. Or potatoes."

"Corn?" Phil asked.

Oscar shook his head. "Moonshiners snap up all the corn harvest before it comes to town, when they can't get hands on enough sugar."

The twins raised a wailing that tore at Nida's heart. "Flapjacks will have to wait a moment," she said. "I'll see if the goat is any less dry than I am." She slid the latch.

As she opened the cabin door, a heavy bag leaning against it fell into the kitchen. She blinked down. "Sugar!"

Oscar said nothing. Just hoisted the bag, set it on the table.

Nida narrowed her eyes at him. "D'you know where this came from?"

"Yep. I know where it came from. And they know I won't tell what I know." *

She snorted. "I thought there was a still out there!" *

"What's still out there?" Norval asked.

Phil shushed him with a grin and whispered in his ear, "Moonshiners!"

.

* These lines appear in the old family story.

The rest of the tale, as told to his daughter.

In their spare time, my father Norval and his siblings freely roamed the countryside around their Wyoming homestead, but were under strict orders from their dad not to go into one particular stretch of woods, three quarters of a mile from the cabin. Oscar had an "understanding" with the moonshiners -- and they returned his regard in the family's time of need!

Prohibition ended in 1933, but some hard liquors were still tightly regulated.

My father remembers one long stretch when the family had nothing whatsoever to eat but bread and potatoes – and the potatoes were the flawed, unsellable rejects from their own potato fields.

Of the twins just younger than Norval, Wayne survived the hungry times but Thayne did not, dying shortly after his first birthday.

Another set of twins arrived a few years later.