The Wettest County in the World (7 page)

Easy boys, Richards was saying. We can take care of this.

Elmore, one of the men yelled, go check the door.

Easy now, Richards said.

Elmore peered into the smashed window and then yanked open the passenger door. A body slumped out, loose and flaccid and bending in unnatural ways. Anderson quickly looked away, then back again. The face was badly crushed, but they could all see it was a woman. The driver’s door was pulled open and then they were dragging out another body and laying it on the grass. It was also a woman; she had on stockings, and her crushed hat had a large daisy pinned to it. She appeared to be all right and she covered her face with her hands, her body heaving with sobs, her dress wadded up around her waist. Richards was bending over the dead woman and muttering to himself. Anderson stepped closer, trying to get a better look at her.

Who’s this?

One of the four men, the one called Elmore, was gesturing with his pistol toward Anderson.

Well, Richards said, who are you?

Name’s Anderson. I…thought I knew this woman. Is that Willie Carter Sharpe?

No, Elmore said. What’s your business here?

Another man approached them.

We got to git this here lady to the hospital.

Okay, Elmore said, take Wilkins with you.

Elmore turned to Richards.

The damn woman was throwing full cans at us. Near smashed up several times. Sheriff, you gonna get your boys out here?

Yes, yes, Richards said, we’ll get it taken care of.

I need to ask you to back up, sir, Elmore said to Anderson.

You are federal agents? Alcohol Tax Unit? Anderson asked, slowly backing up.

Richards pulled out his pistol and leveled it at Anderson’s head.

You
better git
on back down that road. Ain’t nothin’ here for you to worry about.

A
NDERSON WALKED BACK
down the road to where a can lay half crushed in the gutter. A square five-gallon can with a simple twist cap. He could smell it before he got within ten feet: the rich, heady aroma of rotten corn mixed with a trace of burnt sugar. Anderson pushed it with the toe of his boot. It was the same kind of can he had seen scattered along the roadsides, piled in the gullies all through Franklin County. Once he saw a group of children playing with a pile of them, kicking the cans about an alley in Rocky Mount. Anderson stood on the sidewalk behind a tree and watched the men at the crime scene; it seemed that Richards just wanted the ATU agents to leave and let him handle it, but they were insisting on something.

A few minutes later the Dunkards from the diner came down the road in an old Ford Model T truck. They pulled up short by Anderson and the older man who sat in the front passenger seat leaned out.

Is they all right?

No, I’m afraid not, Anderson said. One of them’s dead, the other is gone to the hospital.

Who is it?

Not sure, Anderson said. Two women.

The driver spoke up.

That’s Pearl Hoover’s car. I’d seen her in it yesterday.

The old man fixed Anderson with a steely gaze. His unshaven upper lip was full and wet, a trace of gravy in his beard.

White lightnin’, he grunted.

What’s that? Anderson asked.

Whiskey trade, the driver answered.

The old man stared hard at Anderson’s face, his gray eyes milky with cataracts and Anderson figured he couldn’t see him too well in the fading evening light.

My name’s Sherwood Anderson.

Tazwell Minnix, the driver said. This is my father R. L. Minnix.

Be not conformed to this world, the old man mumbled, fingering his beard.

What’s that, sir?

His vague pupils gazed up at Anderson.

Blackwater station,
he hissed.

The driver put his hand out and placed it on the old man’s shoulder. The old man spit the words at Anderson.

Them boys there. Them Bondurant boys. The worst bunch to ever hit Franklin!

Another car motored down the hill from downtown, swerving around the Dunkards and pulling up just behind the wreck. Three men got out, including a stocky middle-aged man in a gray suit who emerged from the back of the car and strode over to the ATU men with the others in his wake.

Who’s that fellow? Anderson asked.

We better be gettin’ on, the driver said. Have a good day, sir.

And with that Tazwell Minnix threw the old truck into gear and they pulled away.

The man in the gray suit had pulled Jefferson Richards aside and had him by one of his lapels. They argued in hushed tones, Richards gesturing down the road, the man in the gray suit close to his face. Liquor from the smashed car had seeped into the road and now ran down the gutter by Anderson’s feet in a rippling stream. The ATU men were covering the dead woman’s body with a coat.

A
NDERSON WALKED BACK
up the hill to the Little Hub Restaurant and paid his bill. Describing the man in the gray suit to the counterman he learned that it was likely Carter Lee, the commonwealth’s attorney. He made a note that he must speak with Mr. Lee as well as with the sheriff, a man named Pete Hodges. And this Jefferson Richards fellow? Anderson also got directions to the Blackwater station in Burnt Chimney. The counterman, a small paper cap perched on his pointed head, eyed him warily. Then in a very sincere voice suggested that Anderson stay away from that place.

Ain’t the kind of place for a city gentleman.

I grew up on a farm, sir, Anderson said. I’m no city slicker.

I’ll tell you what, the counterman said, they ain’t gonna ask you about your family history at the Blackwater station.

B
ACK IN HIS ROOM
that night Anderson took a couple bolts of mountain whiskey and lay on his bed. The whiskey made him feel safely constrained, like he was curling into himself. I can understand how men might favor it, he thought. A bit hot on the throat, and it kept burning in the gut like a ball of coals. But the warmth and flush was immediate and his muscles relaxed for the first time in days.
White lightning.

Anderson knew that many people in this part of the world still believed there were two kinds of lightning, one being blue-red and the other white. The difference was that a fire started by white lightning couldn’t ever be put out: It would burn until it ran out of things to consume. This was the lightning of the great sweeping summer forest fires, the roaring demons that consumed everything. White lightning was the kind of drink that brought your hand to your pounding heart after each swallow, as if to hold it in your chest, because you knew that fire couldn’t be put out.

As the liquor warmed his body and brain Anderson thought that the situation here was familiar: the rising tide of industrial greed that pushed men away from their workbenches and their craft to become part of the machine. Progress. It turned them into simple parts, expendable, replaceable, cheaply made as if their hearts were constructed of tin with shears and paste.

Hell, Anderson thought, that seems to be an appropriate thing to drink to, and he raised the glass to his lips and downed the last sip. When he closed his eyes for a moment he saw a great shape in a dark field, above him in the indeterminate emptiness. Its force and mass were terrifying, its slow, descending sway. By the time he got his shoes off and lay back down the whiskey crept up his brain stem and took him, dead asleep before he laid his head down.

I
N THE SPRING
Jack Bondurant saw Bertha Minnix playing the mandolin for the first time at a corn shucking at the Mitchell place in Snow Creek. She held her head cocked low, eyes concentrating on the frets of her mandolin, made in the old teardrop style, the rounded bell of the instrument like a wooden scoop nestled against her narrow waist, the tight lace Dunkard bonnet on her crown and the long black dress to the wrist and ankle. Jack stood against the wall, Howard at his side in his shirtsleeves, both men gazing at the players with half-lidded eyes.

It seemed the two men from Shootin’ Creek who cut Forrest had melted away. Forrest put his energy into his sawmill operation and the Blackwater station. Jack was surprised that Forrest didn’t seem too interested in finding the men who cut him; it was unlike his brother not to wreak vengeance, but then there was much about Forrest that Jack wasn’t privy to, and this was the arrangement they’d had since birth.

Jack watched Bertha Minnix’s fingers ply the strings, the fret hand moving in quick jumps, her plucking a blur of twitching knuckle strokes, working through “Billy in the New Ground” while people slapped their hands in time. The two men beside her played guitar and fiddle, local men from Burnt Chimney whom Jack had seen before. It seemed an odd thing to Jack, as Dunkards didn’t usually allow instrumental music of any kind, instead relying only on their careful harmonic singing. But Howard said they were “new order” Dunkard, and therefore more lenient about such devilry. Strands of Bertha’s dark hair fell in her face and at the end of each song she raised her head and cast her eyes over the crowd, a slight smile, a nod of embarrassment. After the second such movement of her head Jack felt a momentary breathlessness, surprised by beauty and split to his core.

J
ACK AND
H
OWARD
arrived as the sun was going pink on the horizon and the shucking nearly complete. Men stood at a long table of sawhorses and planks and ripped through the corn, tossing it into the temporary cribs hammered together out of birch logs and old sheet metal. The afternoon was cool and the air sweet with the smell of this knobby fruit of the earth, and the men laughed and slapped bare arms as they shucked at top speed. The younger men in the group stamped their heavy boots in the dirt and sang “Old Phoebe,” shouting the cadenced words in the direction of the house where the women were preparing supper.

Just a year ago Jack would have been among them, arm in arm, heaving their chests out, snorting like mules, fired with a little corn whiskey, singing in his rough voice. If there was dancing he’d dance every song with any girl that would, his thin lips curled and his dark eyes wet with excitement. Local girls used to call him Injun Jack or Chief because of his prominent nose and thin face, darkened like he was kin to a lost race. The younger girls rarely spoke to Jack anymore, and never kidded him in the lighthearted tone that used to make him smirk and cock his cap. Just a few years before he had watched his brothers Howard and Forrest and wished he could join that shady fraternity. They wore their hats low and
nobody
ever tried to make a fool of them; only the old men could hiss
no ’count
when they weren’t around. Men like Talmedge Jamison, Tom C. Cundiff, his brothers; everyone respected them, even if that respect was steeped in fear and awe that at almost any time these men might have a pistol and a hundred dollars wadded in their pockets.

That spring Jack found himself busting his knuckles on pine boards along with Howard at Forrest’s sawmill camp, leapfrogging around the county with a gang of roughnecks, itinerant laborers who drifted into the hills come payday and often didn’t come back. Because Forrest included a bonus for camp minders and because he had nowhere else to go, Jack slept at the camp along with Howard during the seasonal months. It was in his estimation a temporary and unfortunate setback to his arch plans. Along with Cricket Pate and a few others he managed to brew up a batch of liquor occasionally, putting a few dollars in his pocket, but it seemed he was broke again before the week was out.

Forrest gave him work occasionally at the Blackwater station stacking cans or moving crates, or sometimes Jack and Howard merely stood to the side in the lot, pistols stuck in their waistbands, Howard’s beefy arms crossed over his chest. Several times men in long coats from points north stood smoking cigarettes with rifles cradled, watching him and Howard load liquor and each time Jack turned his back he felt the frozen spike of terror. After hundreds of dollars changed hands, and the cars roared off toward Roanoke, Jack couldn’t help panting with fear, sweating down the inseams of his dungarees, his tongue a swatch of cotton wool. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for it, he thought, as he watched his brothers’ placid faces. Once I get a ride of my own, Jack thought, a fine car to make runs, behind the wheel, that’s where I belong. Not loading crates for some city swell with a fistful of gold rings.

Howard split his time between the sawmill camp and his wife Lucy in Penhook, though sometimes he was up on Turkeycock Mountain for days, nobody knew exactly where, working up batches of liquor. When the night grew cool at the sawmill camp Jack and Howard rolled up in blankets and lay like weary dogs around the fire. They had biscuits and pork with white beans over the embers in the morning and in the afternoon when the sawmill shut down for the day they’d have another bite and share a jar until it was dark as pitch. Howard would add a good thick chestnut stump to the fire and stir the coals for the night and Jack would gaze up at the tree-mottled night sky, his face reddened by the sun and his eyes shining, and tell Howard what he was going to do once he got some money together, the new boots he would buy, the automobile, how he would blast out of the county and head west or maybe north, to the open country. When Jack drank he grew expansive and good-natured, continually convinced of the infinite possibility of the world. He told vivid tales of fantastic dreams, of the spaces beneath the mountains he visited in his sleep. He gazed at the faces of people around him and clumsily attempted to describe just what amazing creatures they all were. Afterward people would lie in their racks at night staring at the dusty timbers of a ceiling and wonder
just what that boy was all about anyway
?

Aw hell, Jack would say, there ain’t no real way to say it.

Go on, Howard said.

Jack peeled off his boots and vigorously rubbed his blistered and raw feet.

Go on.

A
T THE CORN SHUCKING
Jack grit his teeth and passed the jar with Howard and kicked at stray corn husks in the barn while the others ate. Jack surveyed the greedy faces at the supper table, sopping their biscuits in souse-meat drippings, dirt farmers who would never have a spot of good clothing on them, and thought how sad and ridiculous and hypocritical their lives seemed and how unaware they were of it. It was a bitter sense of righteousness; standing now alongside those men against the wall, Jack felt strangely cold in their company. He somehow envisioned that the other side carried its own sun, its own source of heat. Instead it was as frozen and remote as the principles of machinery, as the first star of winter. And they were broke besides.

No ’count.

He looked at Howard’s heavy, passive face, standing there in the barn, his throat working slowly. None of it mattered to him, Jack thought. Howard didn’t give a fig and never would.

T
HE NEXT HURT
is always coming, always close by,
Forrest had said, lying in the hospital. Jack stood by the bed and stared at the ragged stitching under his brother’s chin, the black, bristling threads against his white-blue neck.
The only way through is to bury it deep in your gut and let the hot juices work on it for a while. Soon enough you forget whatever it was that pained you to begin with.

H
E THOUGHT OF
the old men clustered in general stores, on the front porches of the filling stations, the haggard old crabs at the quilting bee, the thin spittle of bitterness bubbling on their lips, their razor eyes, the angry shaking of their bobbing skulls; they relive an echoing path of past transgressions, careless insults, lost animals, a horse cart disappearing over the hill, crying in the tall corn of summer with a dress around their neck, desperate curses, starlight on an open wound. They only chew on the cud of their past. That’ll never happen to me, Jack thought as he watched the shuckers. Not to me.

T
HERE WAS A VOLLEY
of shouts and a man named Wingfield was holding up the sport, the red-colored ear that he’d shucked. It was the only one of the night, and it meant he could kiss any one of the young women he wanted. Wingfield was about Jack’s age and they sometimes played together as kids down in Snow Creek. He had grown into a blustery young man who talked with his hands, sported starched collars and snap-brim hats. He had gone all the way through high school and on to the University of Virginia. Wingfield’s family was originally from the Tidewater area, plantation owners who now had stately townhomes in the exclusive sections of Charlottesville, and despite the fact that his own father was mucking it out in Franklin County, Wingfield acted like he was merely visiting this backwater before assuming his rightful place among the first families of Virginia.

When the musicians took a break there was a shout and Wingfield held the sport aloft like a torch and marched about, a short troop of men following him. Jack’s sister Emmy stood in a corner with some other girls, giggling and pushing back her hair and Jack saw his sister lit with some kind of momentary happiness, a rare sight. He realized that since the death of their mother and sisters, Emmy so often seemed merely a shadow that flitted across the walls of their father’s home, a set of hands that set food in front of you. As Wingfield came toward Emmy, Jack felt a flare of rage, but the troop of singing men passed her by and Jack was relieved until he saw the small quiver in Emmy’s cheeks, the way she took a breath and thrust out her chin for just a moment as Wingfield passed, the sight of something in her eyes that he hadn’t ever seen before. He knew so little about her and her life. Oh Lord, Emmy, Jack thought, and the slender trunk of his heart buckled for the second time that night.

Jack started over toward her and there was a roar from Wingfield’s group; he had chosen a girl to kiss and the young people crowded around in a circle to watch. Jack said hello but the girls were too interested in whom Wingfield was kissing, up on their toes to see, and Emmy just put her hand lightly on his shoulder. Jack, taller than anyone there, could see into the circle where Wingfield held the arms of the Dunkard girl.

Why that’s Bertha Minnix, one of the girls said. That Dunkard girl from Burnt Chimney, the one playing the mandolin.

Jack watched as Wingfield made a great display of it, gripping the girl by her elbows and ducking in a few times, making feints, drawing shouts from the crowd. Bertha Minnix brought her chin nearly to her chest as Wingfield whooped and the crowd laughed. That damn fool, Jack thought. Then Bertha Minnix raised her face, a tight smile on her lips, tilted her chin up toward Wingfield, who paused, seemingly baffled by her sudden insolence. There was an awkward moment and the crowd grew quiet. Wingfield recovered and winking at the men standing next to him he tucked his head in and kissed her firmly. When he backed away Bertha’s eyes blazed and Wingfield let go of her arms, stepping back, uncertain, Jack could tell, but determined to make a good show.

Then the men bore Wingfield away and the girls clapped loudly, briefly crowding around Bertha who ducked her head again before heading back to the other musicians who waited with their instruments. The back of her neck under her bonnet was mottled pink and she touched her ear lightly and Jack knew it must be burning.

Back by the wall Jack drank from the jar that Howard handed to him, then stretched himself to his full height to find her eyes but the guitar player plucked a string and Bertha Minnix set her mouth again, cradling the mandolin to her belly, picking out the chords for “Old Dan Tucker,” and the younger men and women standing there swayed and sang along.

Jack arranged himself along the wall in her line of sight, his cap adroitly positioned, the brim pulled to his eyebrow, letting his cigarette dangle out of the corner of his mouth. Next to him Howard drained the last of the corn liquor, his throat knobbing twice, three times, the quart jar like a water glass in his massive fist. It was an astonishing feat, even for Howard. Sweet Jesus, Jack thought, the man can
drink.
Howard nudged him with the empty jar and Jack turned and went out into the night.

The barn lay in a sloping hollow of open pastures with a narrow creek running down the seam. Jack took another quart jar from the box on the floorboard of Cricket Pate’s muddy Pierce-Arrow coupe that they had borrowed. Cars and trucks filled the western quarter of the pasture, with a few Dunkard horse carts. Women leaned against fenders with their arms crossed and looked at men who stood in front of them, hands in pockets, rocking in place slightly. Other men perched on the hoods of cars or the tailgates of horse carts and passed a jar and laughed and slapped at each other with dusty hats. The night was warm and no moon out but plenty of starlight to see.