The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  Forrest leaned against the wall, searching for the edges of the cut with his numb fingers, the ground a world of white in front of him. He gripped the edges of his cut throat and thought to himself that this would be one of the times where one ought to consider the balance of his life; but all that came to mind was that these men had wanted a beating and he had given it to them and so what was all this about?

  A part of me is missing, he thought. There was only one whole being in the universe and it was the one who rose in the morning, who stepped over the mountains and reaching down with massive, blunt fingers plucked men’s souls like weeds in the furrow. When Forrest looked up the roof of the sky was gone, just a ragged hole, the stars gone out and light coming down in slow glistening streams. The hole in the sky rotated and he felt his weight shift and it seemed like the earth and all the people in it were in a box that was being tipped over, to be dumped out into the black. Not yet, he thought. More shouting and breaking glass from inside. A woman screaming, a strange, high, desperate scream that burrowed into Forrest’s heart and twisted something in him, hard, but he couldn’t focus on why it was happening or who it was. Forrest looked at his legs splayed out before him, trousers sticky with blood, and knew that they wouldn’t respond.

  Later it was quiet and Forrest watched the ragged wisps of snow, like falling clouds settling in a white layer on his legs and the lot and the trees beyond the road. He let his heartbeat settle; his breath coming regularly in short puffs. His muscles began to relax.

  It wasn’t so bad, he thought.

  The soft pat of falling snow. Faint music from the radio coming through the window above him. He turned his mind to the music that slowly faded, then a voice saying:

  This is for our sick and shut-ins.

  Then a chorus of voices singing a hymn, slow and deliberate, the words unclear.

  Forrest jerked his eyes open. Somewhere across the road and at the edge of the wood there was a smear of movement. He couldn’t tell what it was. If it was God then he would have him. He would reach out and break his head and kick him to pieces in the road like a clod of dirt. It wasn’t so bad, in fact it all made perfect sense. Then his face was down in the snow, the ice on his cheek, fingers still holding the edges of his throat as he fell into darkness.

  HOWARD BONDURANT AWOKE lying on his side on the front seat, the steering wheel pressed against his bared teeth. He sat upright and stared out the windshield. A whiteness enveloped the world as if the ground were lit up from underneath. He lay back down on the seat for a while, pulling his legs up into a fetal position, kicking his toes against the dashboard to regain feeling, groping at his armpits with his burning fingers. His gut ached and he shuddered and wished desperately to slip back into unconsciousness.

  Later Howard wrenched the truck door open, breaking a crust of ice and nearly a foot of snow from the roof that fell into the cab, covering his pants and shoulders as he swung his legs off the seat, some of the cold powder going down his neck. Sky and ground were the same, luminous white and rolling and for a moment he didn’t understand if the truck was straight or crooked or floating in the air. To his left the snow undulated up a hill then across, evenly spaced bumps of white suggested a fence line. To the right a stand of pines stood in a line as far as he could see, their tops bent with weight, each drooping in different directions like a crowd of people sitting in chairs asleep. The truck lay half-buried at a steep angle and Howard figured he must have put it in a gulley. He watched the trees for a while until the thin breeze ruffled their bent tops, sending sprays of snow drifting off like banks of rolling mist. The mountains began to separate from the air, and putting a frozen elbow awkwardly against his knee he bent and retched into the snow.

  Forrest.

  Using the muffled fence line and the pines as a guide Howard started off down the road, heading east, toward the pale disk of the sun.

  Chapter 4

  THE NEXT MORNING Emmy Bondurant stood in the kitchen in her housecoat with a book of matches in her hand, the air in the house spiked with cold and the damp chill of morning. Jack watched his sister light the stove and make coffee for their father who was sleeping later now than he ever did during the first fifty years of his life. Emmy was tall and bird-stooped like Jack and his brothers, the narrow blades of her shoulders like fins as she craned over the stove. She cut off a hunk of fatback and tossed it into the skillet. She kept her hair short and pushed to the side with a nervous finger as she stirred the sizzling fat. Her hair was once blond-white, almost like glass, but had developed streaks of steely gray even though she was only sixteen, two years younger than Jack.

  Jack stood by the window as he buttoned his shirt, watching the snow-covered road for signs of his brother. Forrest made a delivery on the first Friday of each month around the county and sometimes he took Jack along to run the cans. Jack had to watch the road because Forrest would never come up the drive to the house with a carful of liquor, and he would stop on the road only for a few minutes. If Jack wasn’t sharp he would be left behind.

  On these mornings Jack would spy Forrest’s car nosing the end of the drive and he would gulp the rest of his coffee and bolt out the door and down the driveway with a cold greasy biscuit in his mouth and another in his pocket. Running toward his brother’s car Jack felt the urge to whinny like a colt and he would bound down the dirt path past the livestock barn, passing through the long rows of peas, beans, and cabbage, summer vines rotting in their furrows. In the car the silhouette of Forrest’s hooked nose and fedora lined down the road, the flared fenders of the car squatting over the tires, weighed low by sixty gallons of liquor. Making local deliveries with Forrest meant dollars in his pocket, and being seen in Rocky Mount with his brother always made Jack fill out his jacket a bit more.

  Jack would hop into the back of the car, nestling tight in a niche left in the stacked five-gallon metal cans and crates of half-gallon jars, his forearms across the sloshing liquor, holding it steady as Forrest pushed the stocky four-cylinder Ford up the hard road. Along the way they stopped off at various farmhouses, Jack scooting up and around to the back of the house to drop the cans on the back porch. In Rocky Mount they hit nearly half of the houses and business locations, Jack running through spattered alleys to leave jars on the back windowsill of an office; stamping up flights of stairs and knocking on doors in cramped, slanted apartment buildings, the residents answering the door to find a jar sitting on the floor in the echoing hallway; deliveries around the courthouse, the police station; they delivered to church parsonages, to lawyers, to judges, to city-council members.

  Then they would head north up Grassy Hill and go westward into Burnt Chimney and Boone’s Mill, stopping at a little crossroads where a cross-eyed man at a filling station stood under the porch, a rifle leaning against the wall, a car idling in the lot, unloading thirty gallons without a word. Then east to Smith Mountain Lake and dropping off the rest at a filling station run by a man named Hatcher, a group of men waiting in cars and trucks, the squared Nash Victoria Six, long Studebakers, supercharged Packards, the ubiquitous Model A’s, the hubs riding high over the wheels, the springs tuned tall and tight to handle the weight. Men standing quietly, some with pistols sticking out of their beltbands or casually thrust in pockets. In a car idling in the parking lot Sheriff Hodges and his son Henry, a deputy, sat sipping hot coffee out of a metal thermos.

  Sometimes there would be a small paper packet on the back stoop when Jack dropped off a can and he would bring this to Forrest who would put it in his shirt pocket. In all the times he went out with Forrest he never saw anyone handling money. The open rush of it worked in Jack’s blood; waiting at the corner in downtown Rocky Mount, men and women out on the morning streets and Jack in his brushed boots, cap at a sly angle, a five-gallon can in each hand, his long arms knotty and taut with the weight. He enjoyed the way people glanced over him without seeing him, how all kinds of people struggled unnaturally to avert their gaze. How young women’s eyes widened for a mo
ment just before they looked to their hands folded on cotton smocks and pleated shirtfronts. Jack could tell that they felt his presence like a dark field, an invisible weight moving through them like charged wind. He relished each moment and relived them in his dreams.

  THAT MORNING Forrest never came. The road was a smooth white drift; no one had traveled down it since the snowfall and Jack figured his brother was unable to leave the restaurant. After standing by the window for an hour he gave up and sat down to a sullen breakfast. Emmy served Granville his biscuits and apple butter, then brought hot coffee, fried eggs, and a steaming bowl of hominy with cracklings. By the time she joined them, Granville and Jack were nearly finished bolting the grub. Jack saw Emmy smirking in her coffee and he wondered if she was glad that Forrest failed to show. Why the hell would she be so happy about Forrest leaving him out once again? Granville poured his coffee into a saucer and sipped like a whiskered penitent. When he finished he scratched his beard with both hands and looked out the window.

  You goin’ somewhere this morning?

  I thought I was, Jack said.

  Well, Granville said, then it looks like you can get that stack of pine out there. First break up the water in the barns and give them a bit of the silage.

  Forrest might show any time now, Jack said.

  Granville turned to Jack and squinted at him like he was looking at something far off. His father’s forehead was a tangle of creases, starburst eyes, throat mottled with spots and hanging skin puckered in three parallel lines.

  You don’t have to go anywhere, Granville said. You help your sister with what she needs and then see to them cows and that wood. Emmy stood quickly and began to gather the dishes. Jack eyed her face, looking for some indication of amusement or accomplishment.

  I’m supposed to be helping Forrest, Jack said.

  Well, get him to put you up then, he said.

  Granville got his hat and coat and went to open up the store. When he was outside Jack turned to Emmy at the sink.

  What? Why you smilin’?

  I didn’t say nothing.

  She bustled with the dishes and Jack figured there was little use trying to pry the source of amusement out of his sister. He stood and drank his coffee at the window and watched his father clearing the smooth cap of snow off the car and gingerly negotiating the driveway to the road, his snow chains tinkling as he passed up the hill.

  JACK WAS SPLITTING wood when Hal Childress came up the drive in his car. The day had warmed considerably, remnants of snow clinging miserably in the trees, and Jack was stripped down to his undershirt, his body steaming like a workhorse. Hal picked his way through the snow and Jack could tell there was something wrong because the old man’s face was drained of color and he held his clenched fists in front of him like a drunken boxer. Jack wondered why he was here instead of running the grill at the County Line.

  I don’t right know, Jack. Hal said. Think somethin’ done happened to Forrest.

  Jack looked back to the house. The windows were dark, the dim outline of curtains, his mother’s rocking chair. Hal rocked in the snow.

  Howard about?

  No, Jack said. I ain’t seen ’im.

  A car chugged up the road, snow chains rattling, and both men turned to watch it pass. Jack’s skin felt prickly and his feet itched in his wool socks.

  What happened? Jack asked.

  Don’t rightly know, Hal said. A deal with some boys from Shootin’ Creek went bad. Took care of it, but now this morning Forrest’s car is there but he ain’t.

  Jack thought about his father at the store, probably standing with the usual group of gassy old men around the potbellied stove, shuffling their feet in the sawdust. He wished Howard was about as his brother wouldn’t say a word but simply get in the car with Hal and Jack could then ride along and everything would be fine.

  Hold it a second, Jack said, and he walked quickly into the house.

  The heat in the house was stifling and Jack wiped a sleeve across his forehead. Emmy was sitting in their mother’s old chair, holding a book and looking at him with large eyes.

  I don’t know, Jack said. He’s sayin’ something happened at the County Line.

  Jack walked into the cold-storage room that was filled with shelves of canned goods and jars of vegetables and preserves that Emmy and Granville had put up that fall. Jack knew his father kept a rifle in the room, but he wasn’t sure where. He pawed through the shelves, looking through an old bureau in the corner. When he realized he was opening drawers that couldn’t fit a rifle he felt like a damn fool and cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to find that gun, he didn’t want to deal with this at all and this thought wedged under his organs like a sickle thorn.

  Jack stopped in the living room and rubbed his hands together for a moment. He could tell his sister was pretending to read, watching him.

  Look, he said, don’t say nothing to Daddy about this.

  Emmy nodded, wide-eyed.

  Jack walked back out into the yard, slinging on his coat.

  Well, he said, let’s go see.

  The air was clear and the snow melting fast. During the drive Hal explained to Jack the nature of the altercation they had at closing time with the men from Shootin’ Creek, how Maggie had sliced the man’s hand with the carving knife and how Forrest had finally subdued them. As they drove the snow chains made a racket on the hard road and Hal had to shout.

  Forrest’s car was still there in the restaurant lot, the hood ajar. Man makes a near hundred dollars in a week, Jack couldn’t help but think, and he buys an eight-hundred-dollar cracker-box Ford. They pulled up to the restaurant door and cut the engine. The tire and foot tracks were clear and smoothed by another inch of snow, and it seemed clear to Jack that there was an awful lot of activity in the lot that night.

  Look here, Hal said, and gestured to the restaurant door, which was closed but was splintered around the handle, kicked in. Jack was looking at a trail of stained snow that led from the side of the building to a large crusty maroon patch, melted down to the gravel next to Forrest’s car.

  We got that one fella good, Hal said. But all this here ain’t his. Not unless he opened up a vein hisself.

  Inside the restaurant was littered with broken glass and shattered furniture. The register lay smashed on the floor, drawer gaping, every shelf behind the counter cleared of its contents. The carving knife on the bar, its blade smeared with a dark crust.

  Maggie? Jack asked.

  She normally leaves just after us, Hal said. Car’s gone, so I ’spect she made it home.

  In the kitchen Jack kicked through the pans and utensils that littered the floor.

  We done cleaned up, Hal said, Jefferson and me. It wudn’t like this.

  We better call Hodges, Jack said.

  Better check in the shed first, Hal said. Forrest wouldn’t want us to bring the sheriff around here with all that white mule on hand.

  They went out the back door of the kitchen and found a clear set of tracks that led to the storage shed and then around to the front, and the ruts of car tires indicating a series of trips. The storage shed was open, the door in splinters, hacked apart with an ax that lay in the snow. The sun blazed on the back lot and Jack put his hands on his head and tried to think, his mind like a hive.

  How much did he have in here, Jack asked.

  Near two hundred I ’spect, Hal said.

  In the dark shed there were some broken jars and a few empty five-gallon cans scattered on the floor and the air was fetid with hard corn liquor. After his eyes adjusted to the dark Jack could see the shed was otherwise empty. So many gallons; they must have had several vehicles, several men. Worth at least five hundred dollars. He stepped out of the shed. Hal clenched his hands in front of him. Jack felt like he had just woken up from a long sleep, slight traces coming off the points of things, the trees shaking even though there was no breeze and no sound except the two of them crunching through the slush. Jack knew that Forrest wouldn’t have le
t that much liquor go without a fierce scrap, and the thought struck him that the men who had taken the liquor had also taken his brother out of this world.

  JACK FIGURED the first thing would be to ring the hospital in Rocky Mount and see if they had admitted anyone matching Forrest’s description. They used the phone at the County Line, Hal sweeping the debris as Jack was connected. The next call would be to the morgue. But Forrest was there, in the ICU ward, alive, and the two men drove in to Rocky Mount. Forrest was stretched out unconscious, his throat a swath of bandages. They stitched up the ragged line across his throat, starting just under one ear and passing under his chin just an inch above his Adam’s apple and ending at his jaw on the other side. The blood loss was massive and the transfusions replaced every pint he had. The nurses said that he came into the hospital sometime in the night under his own power, staggering into the lobby, holding the edges of his throat together with his fingers. Before Forrest passed out he told the doctors that he’d had an accident. It was nearly twelve miles to Rocky Mount from the County Line Restaurant, most of that twisting through the mountains on rough roads. When asked how he arrived there, Forrest replied that he walked.

  Chapter 5

  1929

  THE ONLY ROAD NORTH from Rocky Mount slashed back and forth in a series of switchbacks across a steep mountain called Grassy Hill. Over the summit the road continued north through Burnt Chimney, running along the bottoms of the hollows, crisscrossing streams and winding on into the rugged settlement of Boone’s Mill. This small set of hills separated Franklin and Roanoke counties, the county line running along a thin branch of Blackwater Creek. Thirty miles after crossing the creek you would reach the city of Roanoke, the central hub of southern Virginia.