The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

Why’d you leave?

  My daddy died.

  I’m sorry.

  Weren’t nothing.

  Maggie’s dark eyes remained on him, or just over his shoulder, he couldn’t tell, and Anderson felt as if something was bearing down on him. His stool creaked. He heard voices, two men talking; it was the radio. This is like pulling teeth out of a dead mule, Anderson thought.

  How’d you get up here?

  Hitched a ride.

  From Carolina?

  Yeah.

  You done a lot of hitchhiking?

  Sure. Got my own car now, though.

  Anderson glanced outside and noticed the young man had finished filling up his car. Some kind of operation, he thought. This was the center of the liquor trade in Franklin County? He sipped his sweet pop. Every woman he had met from Franklin County so far was this way. What about Willie Carter Sharpe? Sharpe was still out there on the loose, the whole state looking for her, ATU men combing the hills. If he didn’t act quick the Liberty article would be shot; Anderson had seen other newspapermen around Rocky Mount, nosing around, ferreting out information on the trial.

  So, Anderson said, trying to warm up the conversation again, who’s the proprietor of this place?

  Forrest Bondurant.

  The same who was shot back in ’30? With his brothers?

  Yep.

  That happened around here, right?

  Just up the road on that bridge.

  Anderson found himself listening, intently, for extra movement around the station. Through the window the young man stood by the pumps, gazing down the road. Maggie drew on her cigarette. Nothing else moved.

  He around? Anderson asked.

  Nope.

  Know when he might be back?

  Doesn’t have regular hours.

  If you had to guess.

  I’d guess he’d be here any time now, she said.

  Maybe I’ll stick around then.

  Maggie shrugged.

  Anderson stepped outside and squinted down the dusty road. He gave Everett money for the gas and the young man disappeared around the corner of the building. A pair of boys in a rusty DeSoto pulled up and bought fifty cents’ worth of gas and bounded inside. He leaned on the hood of his car and tried to figure whether to wait there for a man whom he was warned not to talk to by two different people. A man whose liquor trade seemed like a load of foolish talk. After a moment Anderson walked around the corner of the station and found Everett Dillon squatting on a tire, reading a newspaper.

  Any news? Anderson asked.

  Everett didn’t look up, only rattled the paper a bit.

  Says here that Roosevelt gots cuff links for every day of the month.

  I’ve heard that, Anderson said. Whadya think that means?

  Don’t think it means anything, Everett said, ’cept maybe I’m sitting here on this old tire thinking about all them cuff links.

  The boys came out with soda and nabs and piled into their car and as the sound of their engine disappeared around the bend it grew quiet again.

  ANDERSON SAT in his room and thought about Willie Carter Sharpe, out there in the night, at that very moment plowing through the dark at the helm of an overpowered coupe, coming down the mountain like a bobsled on ice, the trunk jostling with liquor as she rounded a steep curve on two wheels, a furious woman with a head of fire that streamed out the windows, a funnel of brimstone in her wake. The road leading into a muddy pit where men with guns in black hats waited with suitcases of cash. It all seemed so absurd. Even if it was real, what was the point? A human-interest piece, of course, but not the kind that was most compelling here. These other people, Anderson thought, the common folk here who dragged themselves through the days in the face of such bleak prospects, that’s the story that he was interested in. And Maggie. That was a woman to launch a story, Anderson thought, sketched into the void of her scant details and silence. This is what he had always been able to do, after all.

  Bill Faulkner said the very thing to him, at his house in New Orleans, the two of them going down Chartres, Faulkner limping from his “war wound” that turned out to be a fake. Another lie. The two of them talking about writing, America, Negroes, women. Anderson had felt at the time that their talks were of great import, and when the smaller man limped beside him down Canal he had looked up at the older writer with unabashed love and respect, those dark eyes shining. Why he would lie to him, Anderson didn’t know. Maybe it was the drink. But then in 1926 Faulkner did the preface of Sherwood Anderson and Other Creoles, a caricature of Anderson as a saggy old busker. When Faulkner moved out of his one-room apartment in New Orleans he left behind an old card table and a bunch of empty half-gallon corn liquor jars. He told Anderson he had to drink to get to sleep at night; it was impossible otherwise.

  Anderson sat on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes. It hurt him to be not working; it channeled his mind into funny things. He was angry at the salesmen, all the goddamn silent locals, about his work. The groundwater was lowered and he was swinging a dusty bucket. Dark Laughter had done well, selling more than anything else he ever wrote. He thought of Ulysses, and how when he read it he felt the cadence of the sentences beat in his heart and how he felt, yes, this is the new place of fiction; it is in our hearts and minds at the same time. He had felt that he could work that kind of incantation into a distinctly American style, his style. Now that bastard Hemingway was running around Paris, Anderson thought, reeling into cafés with his arm around a tall, heavily painted woman (not a woman at all, some said) and reading aloud to the Americans there something he called The Torrents of Spring. Anderson knew it was a parody of Dark Laughter, and he felt that this was one of the more cruel things that had ever been done to him.

  I’m the one who told that son of a bitch to move to Paris in the first place!

  Gertrude Stein wrote to say that she had advised Hemingway not to publish it, and that it had sundered their friendship, but that was little comfort. Anderson thought of Hemingway barreling up the stairs of his New Orleans place, broad-shouldered and shouting, carrying a large paper sack of goat cheese, hard sausage, pickles, wine, fresh rolls for them to eat. It seemed he was always bursting into some room or another, his arms full of plenty, the spoils of his good fortune and charm. He changed every scene he entered. He brought Hemingway to meet Liverwright in New York and got him started in writing. Just a few years ago his words were on the back jacket of In Our Time: “Mr. Hemingway is young, strong, full of laughter, and he can write.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, October 13, 1934, Sherwood Anderson walked from his boardinghouse to the Little Hub for a late breakfast. A crisp, sunny fall day and the streets seemed a bit more lively than usual. The restaurant was fairly buzzing, clumps of men gathered in booths and standing in the aisles, talking excitedly in hushed tones. In one corner a man was thumping the Formica table: You know damn well who done it!

  Anderson ordered coffee, eggs, and bacon from the counterman. The restaurant quieted as he came in, the talking men returning to their food.

  Say, pal, Anderson said to the counterman. What’s goin’ on?

  The counterman in his smeared apron and paper cap regarded Anderson for a moment, then reached over and grabbed a newspaper and slapped it down. The Roanoke Times. Headline: DEPUTY AND PRISONER GUNNED DOWN IN FRANKLIN.

  Deputy Jefferson Richards was murdered last night around 9:30 P.M. on the road between Rocky Mount and Callaway, near the Antioch Brethren Church. Also killed was prisoner Jim Smith. Both men were found in the road with multiple gunshot wounds.

  Is this the same Richards, Anderson said, that was here, that night, when that woman was killed up the street?

  The counterman, working at the grill, nodded his pointy head.

  Every part of the automobile in which the men were traveling, a 1931 model Ford roadster, was riddled with bullets, most of which, so far as can be told, were buckshot fired from a shotgun. There are 13 dents made by the shot in the rear part of the car body, 12 hole
s through the top, and 24 holes in the windshield. Richards had at least fifteen wounds, from shotgun and pistol slugs.

  Anderson looked around the restaurant at the men forking eggs and hash into their faces. Killed in the night while transporting a prisoner. Somebody, Anderson thought, wanted to be sure Richards was dead. The counterman served up his food and topped off his coffee.

  THAT EVENING back at the rooming house Anderson stood before the mirror. First the two men in the hospital get discharged and disappear. A miracle they lived. One would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, the other…well, Anderson had seen what he would go through the world without. In the evenings it seemed to Anderson that his face looked like a workingman’s, the face of a man who had seen and done much. The pouches under his eyes, the grim line of his mouth, the darkened complexion. Though maybe that was just the drink, he thought. It wasn’t fooling anybody here, that’s for sure.

  Anderson regarded the jar of whiskey on his night table, a few inches of clear shimmering liquid. Perhaps a bit of that was what he needed. The real strength, the true gift of the stuff was its ability to strip away healthy illusions: It allowed a man to consider the hard realities of necessity, the thing that hung from his neck like an iron collar. The true, clear, unfettered logic. The White Logic.

  Anderson smoothed a blank piece of paper on the desk with his forearm.

  Dearest Eleanor,

  I hope you are well and I hope your friends and relatives in California are well and your trip restful. Work on Ripshin continues. Old Ball is ever confident. The local men continue to surprise me with their work.

  Last month an old mountain man came down and asked to do some stonework. I was wanting someone to do an arched stone fireplace. It is a difficult thing to work stone like that. This old guy was closer to a hundred than he was seventy. He was bent nearly double with some kind of stomach cancer. Ball and I laughed at him and let him do his measurements. He measured with bits of dirty string that he tied off in different lengths, muttering to himself all the while. Then off he went back home to do the actual carving. We figured we’d seen the last of him. A week later another man told us the old fellow had died.

  On a whim Ball says we should go out and see what the fool had done anyway, so we went to his house up on the mountain. In the back room he had all the stones laid out. The measurements were sure, the carving clean and smooth and exactly as I’d imagined them. They are now in the fireplace where they belong.

  I long to get back to Ripshin but mostly to you. Though I feel that I can reach you, even from here. I write to you from surely one of the darkest pits on earth. It is a place of silence.

  Chapter 12

  WHEN JACK got back to his father’s place in Snow Creek the next morning his face was spotted with yellow-black bruises, his left ear split and swollen and a tight stitch in his side. He had an angry welt on his upper lip, a thin half circle the rough circumference of a twelve-gauge barrel. When Granville came in from the barn Jack could tell that he had been up for most of the night. His father gazed at him solemnly from across the breakfast table, his thick beard flecked with chaff and dirt. Emmy served him hot biscuits and Jack gripped his knife and fork, chewing slowly, trying not to grimace from the pain.

  I’ll need you this morning, Granville said.

  Jack nodded and spooned the buttery eggs into his aching face.

  JACK WALKED the rutted clay road to the cattle barn. Smoke was rising from the fire pit outside and his father stood in the doorway. Jack was surprised how bent and awkward his father looked; just a few years ago he’d seen him clamber up the side of a tobacco barn and haul sheet metal up with his bare hands to patch the roof. Now his father looked frail and his shoulders slumped forward and his hair just a fringe over his ears, gone gray white and his neck was mottled and scarred from exposure. He looked more and more like the brief and dim memory Jack had of his grandfather.

  A veteran of the War between the States, Jack’s grandfather had married and become a widower at a relatively young age and never seemed interested in women or marrying again. He lived to be ninety-four years old, and until the last few months he regularly walked the fields in the dead of summer with his sons and took the lead in winter hog killings, muscling the great slabs of bristly pork into the scalding trough. He died when Jack was six years old, and Jack’s memories of the old man consisted mostly of his grandfather sitting on the edge of his bed in the back room of the Snow Creek house whittling small figures out of hunks of chestnut that he turned round in his gnarled hands. Jack remembered that their grandfather sometimes held Forrest in his lap as he worked, the young boy enraptured by the flashing blade and the forms that took shape before his eyes.

  In the end Jack’s grandfather died riddled with age and the horrors of the Civil War. At the onset of fighting he had enlisted in the 57th Virginia, a company called the Franklin Fire Eaters, made up of men from the county who joined up together. The 57th Virginia was the only regiment to break the Union lines at Gettysburg during Pickett’s charge, that ill-fated attempt across a half mile of open uphill ground to Grant’s center dug in behind a stone wall. The Union soldiers poured grapeshot and canister down the slope as the Virginians came on and the torrent of lead cut men down in great swaths of blood and bone. It was pure slaughter in that field and still the 57th came screaming on like some Viking dream. The Franklin Fire Eaters breached the wall at the Union center, but reinforcements were slow and the moment was squandered, the vanguard butchered at close range, and as the few survivors withdrew the back of the Confederacy was broken for good.

  One summer day soon after he passed, Forrest rooted around in the back room and found the rough box where the old man kept his finished wood figures. He brought the box out into the yard and began to play with them in the grass; when Jack approached Forrest sent him bruised and bawling back to the house.

  It was a set of carved military figures, some with hats, with rifles, boots, and bedrolls tied around their chests. There were more than fifty of them and nearly all seemed to be in the initial throes of death or madness. Men running, empty-handed, some looking over their shoulders at unknown pursuers. Another man curled in a fetal position clutching his stomach; various men missing limbs grappled with their stumps. A man carried a headless torso in his arms, and two men locked together in a deadly embrace, unclear if they were helping one another or struggling. Other men merely standing, holding a rifle, looking at the ground. An officer leaning on his sword, legs buckling. A flag bearer stumbling, the flag pitching forward. A man standing with his legs wide apart, arms outstretched and head back as if he were waiting to be plucked from the earth and lifted into the sky. A man on his knees covering his face with his hands, hat and rifle missing. They all appeared to be on the same side.

  When his mother found Forrest that afternoon in the yard with the figures she quickly gathered them up and later Granville gave him a silent, grim-faced whipping and told him that he wasn’t to touch the figures again. But Forrest got something into his head and he stole them from the room soon after and hid them in the woods to play with when he wanted. After several whippings he still wouldn’t divulge where they were hidden so finally his parents left him alone. At the edge of the wood when no one else was around he arranged the men in formation, silently enacting the battle and moving the pieces as the melee progressed.

  IN THE CATTLE BARN a brindled Hereford stood leaning forward on spread legs, knees askew in the muddy straw. The cow snorted with each breath, her eyes closed, her back bowed up like a bridge and her hindquarters trembling. Jack couldn’t help swearing at this plaintive sight of suffering.

  How long? Jack said.

  Yestiday evenin’, some ten hours maybe.

  Granville walked to the cow and stroked her head; the animal strained against his hand as he ran his fingers over her ears. A stream of blood ran down the backs of her legs and pooled in the straw next to a coil of rope that led to a block and tackle on the barn’s center post
. Granville’s sleeves were rolled up and his arms were greased and smeared with blood to his biceps; Jack knew that his father had already been inside the cow and that this meant the calf was breech or head up or worse and what they were going to do now was save the cow if possible. Jack’s guts began to churn and he coughed into the back of his hand. Ever since he was a boy he shied from the bloody work, castration, hog butchering, de-horning cattle, birthing. His father pressed it on him; it was necessary for a farm to work. As a boy Jack winced and cried as he stuffed his bloody hands into the carcass of a hog to pull out the ropy viscera. The blood wasn’t so bad; it was the splitting, tearing, and reaching inside another animal’s body that bothered him. And there were the sounds, the honking bray of a dying cow, a sow’s scream changing into a bubbling moan, the barking whimper of a wounded rabbit dragging its back legs across a field while Jack watched from a stone fence.

  What do you want me to do? Jack said.

  Granville stood with his hands on his hips watching the cow arch her back with effort, snorting sprays of foam, her head turned and watching the two men. Jack gingerly felt his torn and scabbed ear. When he woke this morning a rusty stain covered half his pillow. I wish he would just say it, Jack thought. Just come out and say it.

  Granville pulled a coil off the wall, a thin cable saw, and handed Jack the saw handles. He stepped to the back of the cow, making a loop in the end of the cable.

  When I get this placed, he said, you work that saw, boy. Work it quick.

  Granville cinched up his sleeve and then closing the saw loop in his fist drove it into the swollen opening, working it quickly up to the elbow. He put the tips of the fingers of his other hand together in a point and slid it in as well, the cow shuffling a step, her back shuddering as Granville worked his arms in up past his elbows. Jack drew the saw cable tight and crouched with the handles, watching the side of his father’s face, his cheek pressed against the broad backside of the cow. Granville worked for a few moments, the cow shuffling, snorting, fresh blood streaming down her back legs in thin rivulets and covering the old man’s shirtfront and pants. When he nodded to Jack the young man quickly plied the handles, sawing away with the cable until his father signaled again. After each time Granville would slowly retract his arms, covered in blood and thick gray mucilage, and gripping a bony leg topped with a tiny black hoof. He tossed the leg in the straw and put his hands back in.