The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  Shit, Abshire said, c’mon, Charley. Bring it by the office, Forrest. We are willing to forget a few months, but we’ll need at least sixty to start, as you got back pay.

  The deputies turned and walked to their car. Jack stepped back to let them get in. Abshire glanced at Jack and shook his head and climbed in the car. Rakes stood there for a moment, looking at Jack like he couldn’t place him.

  Hey boy, he said. Your face healed up?

  Jack said nothing. He stared at Rakes’s fat, sweating face, trying to bore into his pig eyes.

  You sure can squeal, boy, Rakes said. Ought to do some fine hog calling.

  Rakes glanced back at Forrest, still standing under the shed. Howard’s hulking shadow stood next to him.

  Get in the car, Charley, Abshire said.

  You gonna let your brothers get you into some things you can’t handle, Rakes said.

  I’ll handle things fine, Jack said. Don’t you worry.

  Rakes chuckled again.

  Lotta threats around here, he said. Lotta talk and nothin’ doin’.

  After their car drew off down the road the other men came back to their places on the saws, spat on their hands and took up the handles. Jack joined his brothers under the shed. One of the men was talking loudly, a skinny fellow with a drooping mustache named Whit Boitnott.

  Don’t need this foolishness, he said. All these guns and what the hell a man supposed to do about that?

  He lit up a cigarette with shaking hands.

  Goin’ get us all kilt if he don’t watch out. Man can’t work in this kind of—

  Forrest grimaced and stretched out and picked up the rebar pole and whipped it at him in one quick movement. Whit flinched, hunching down and bringing up his arms and screamed as the pole flipped just over his head. The pole sailed on out into the yard and stuck end up in the dirt, quivering, and the men began to laugh. Whit scrambled up and started running for the wood, clutching his neck.

  Ed, Tyler, Forrest said, you boys get this boiler fitted out and ready and hook it to the saw.

  The men set about setting up the old boiler, others moving to stack cordwood for fuel, emptying the ash pit. The brothers drew off apace.

  Cundiff, Jamison, the rest of ’em, Jack said, they paying?

  Not Cundiff, Howard said. He won’t. Think we the only other ones left.

  Look, Jack said, we gotta do something. We gotta get that piece of cowshit Rakes.

  We don’t gotta do anything at all, Forrest said.

  Well damn, Jack said, I already done it. We run a hundred gallons to Burning Bag a few weeks ago. Floyd Carter up there told us to bring it anytime.

  Forrest turned to Howard with a look of disbelief, genuinely surprised. Howard stared at a spot on his brother’s chest, hands on his hips.

  He’s got places, Jack said, all over to drop, and we gon’ do it again soon as Howard gets another batch up. I’m a part of his syndicate now, the Midnight Coal Company.

  That so? Forrest said.

  Yeah.

  You don’t know a thing about Carter or his Midnight Coal Company.

  I know they’ll take our liquor for a good price. I know they makin’ money. Unlike us.

  Forrest put his finger into Jack’s collarbone.

  You don’t know a damn thing, Forrest said. Floyd Carter jus’ as soon as plug you as shine his shoes. There ain’t no kind of guarantee with them.

  I can look out for myself, Jack said.

  Can ye now? Forrest said.

  Look, Jack said, you got that Sharpe woman running more through the county than anyone and they haven’t caught her. I mean, goddamn, if we gotta pay to make it and then pay again per load for someone else to move it, it seems like we oughta cut them out. We cleared near four hundred between us. Me and Cricket did the driving. Easy as falling off a log backwards, ’specially now that I got my own car.

  Forrest clapped the sawdust off his hat and seemed to measure a voice that came rising out of the trees.

  Howard’s got good stills, Jack said, and we’ve got some vehicles and we could get some more. I know you know where we can get our hands on some materials. We could put together a set of big submarine stills, do three, four hundred gallons at a time. Floyd Carter’s people will take all we got. Once we get through a few times the others will quit paying and the whole thing will give. I’ll drive the pilot car myself. And if Rakes and Abshire try to stop us I swear to God I’ll shoot Rakes myself.

  You’ll shoot him? Forrest said.

  I swear it, Jack said.

  Once something like that gets started, Forrest said, something else will have to stop it.

  Then we just keep it close, Jack said. We stop it ourselves.

  Forrest fixed him with his eyes.

  What makes you think, Forrest said, that after it gets going you will want it to end?

  AS THEY BROKE DOWN the camp for the night Jack was working out the logistics of the plan in his mind. Forrest agreed to look for suppliers of heavy-gauge copper for some new, larger stills. If Jack and Howard could get it built they’d start making large runs in the early spring, when the weather thawed. Jack had no doubt that there was plenty of money to be made; his cut of it would be enough to put something down on a little place somewhere, maybe in Roanoke, and get out of the sawmill camp and his father’s place for good. Forrest had done it before, Jack thought, that’s how he got the money to buy into the County Line to begin with. A little stake to start something of my own, take my rightful place, fingers on the switch. To hell with breaking my back at the sawmill and picking tobacco for nothing but chips and whetstones.

  THAT AFTERNOON Howard came through the woods and into a large field. The sun was low over Fork Mountain to the west and shone over the matted grass and broom straw. A dozen red-and-white Herefords stood spaced over the hillside, down into the hollow and up the other side of the valley, broad swaths of green and exposed rock, the cows nosing for tufts of alfalfa and clover. The cattle turned to watch the man emerge from the forest.

  Howard stepped over a three-strand barbed fence and strode down the hill toward a tobacco barn that stood up on a knob in the field like an island. The Herefords parted before him, some breaking into a heavy run, wild-eyed and snorting. The tobacco barn was built in the standard style of tobacco barns of the day and for fifty more years after, so common in that part of the county: tall and narrow, maybe thirty by twenty-five feet, chinked chestnut logs that would last forever, cross-tied and sealed with red-mud paste and a ribbed metal roof that quickly tarnished and took on a deep rust color. The barn was built upon a base of field rocks stacked tight with a fire pit in the back and two separate rock flues under the floor to circulate the smoke and heat to dry the hanging tobacco. The pine-board door was closed with a loop of wire and a stick, a broad fieldstone laid to provide a step. Inside the empty barn the smell of tobacco was penetrating, a keening, dry smell that went straight to your brain.

  Howard stood for a moment in the dusty barn, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. The wind sang on the metal roof and a few cattle complained outside. His overalls were blasted with sawdust and his long boots muddy from crossing the creek. He was tired and his arms sore to the bone; he’d been chaining logs to the mule teams and working a crosscut saw all day. In another few weeks the camp would shut down for the winter and Howard knew he would be up on the mountain, with or without his brothers. He hadn’t been home in over a week now. At quitting time he set down the heavy saw, wiped his hands on his overalls, and walked away from the camp while the rest of the men were having supper and came straight through the valley, walking the three miles along the creek and skirting the lake, to this field. Just beyond the next hill lay his house, his wife and daughter.

  Holding his hands out in the dark Howard walked to the opposite wall of the tobacco barn. He found the pile of burlap bags and brittle piles of tobacco leaves and shifting around in them for a bit he found a two-quart jar with a metal lid. By the weight of it he could tell it was n
early full, and holding it up close to his face he could almost see the beads on the edge of the glass as he swirled it around, the clear liquid sloshing quietly. The pungent, sweet smell of rotten corn rose over his face. Howard stood there in the dark barn, holding the jar in his hand to his chest, breathing, listening to the wind against the roof, thinking about the pistol he had seen this morning pointed at his brother and the way the gunshot rang out in the clearing. The lurching panic in his throat and the familiar rage building in his arms. His youngest brother staring at him, waiting for him to do something. Standing in the open sunlight with a line of other men, watching the pointed gun barrel.

  Howard opened the jar and took a deep swallow, then put his face in the crook of his arm and sobbed briefly.

  Outside the cattle sighed, giving up the afternoon to the long grass field and the eye of the smooth lake.

  LUCY SAT IN the kitchen holding the baby. An oil lamp flickered weakly on the table. A pot of collards simmered on the stove and filled the close room with the dull scent of cooking greens and fatback. Howard emptied his pockets with some things he pilfered from the lumber camp: a hunk of sausage, a butt of soft pork, a small bag of tough biscuits. Lucy watched him closely, holding the nuzzling baby to her breast, hoping to get her to nurse. Howard knew she was watching him for signs of drunkenness, but he felt so tired that he didn’t much care.

  I hear everything is closing up, Lucy said. The revenuers shuttin’ Forrest down.

  Where’d you hear that? Howard asked.

  Around.

  Lucy shifted the baby on her chest. Howard was annoyed that such a thing was being discussed, here in his home with his wife. The new system had made people bold: Wives and neighbors talked, everyone seemed to know everyone’s business now. I guess it don’t matter, Howard thought, if there’s nothing to be afraid of in knowing. When the law is running the liquor, who’s to arrest you?

  It ain’t always, Howard said, the way people say it is.

  So they ain’t shutting you down?

  Howard took the folded dollar bills from his pocket and slapped them on the table.

  This look like we shut down?

  Lucy pulled the pile of money across the table and sorted through it, counting with one hand. The baby was quiet and looked almost pink, a good change from the dark-red-faced squawling creature that had inhabited their house. She seemed to sleep contentedly on Lucy’s chest. His wife looked worse, Howard thought, peaked and washed-out, like she was draining color, like it was transferring to their daughter.

  This ain’t gonna do it, Lucy said.

  I know it.

  We need the money, Lucy said. You know it. We got a new set of due bills and the receipts from your father’s store…if he means to make us pay up.

  We’ll pay up.

  So you and your brothers got something going?

  Don’t you worry ’bout it.

  Oh, I gotta worry ’bout it, Lucy said. Someone has to around here.

  I’m going out for a bit, Howard said.

  Howard, Lucy said. There’s only so much liquor to drink.

  She rocked the baby gently.

  It’ll never be enough, she said.

  I’ve got plenty set aside, he said.

  Lucy stared at him, her eyes saucers of limpid blue, the baby nestling at her neck. Howard looked out the front window. On the porch the luna moths clustered, throwing their furry bodies against the window glass.

  One day, she said, that jar’ll be empty and nothing you can do about it.

  Not if I can help it.

  Oh, Howard, Lucy said, how much liquor is there in this county? In the world?

  Might try to find out, Howard said, and stepped out.

  Later that night Howard would stand in a bar of pale light from the window outside of his home and watch his wife feeding his daughter. He would make some money and he would give it to her and then he would be on his way; that was the arrangement they had made. When Howard looked at the wispy blond head of his daughter lying against his wife, there rose up in him a long, low note that wasn’t about tenderness or affection. He fingered the crumpled bills in the pocket of his overalls.

  Plenty times, Howard thought to himself, I had a wad of money in my pocket to choke a mule but I’ll be damned if it ever made a hint of difference anyhow.

  Chapter 18

  THAT WINTER FORREST arranged for a shipment of heavy-gauge copper and several hundred feet of copper tubing for the new submarine stills, an investment that took a significant chunk of his savings. Jack and Howard went to Rocky Mount to pick it up from the rail yard in the morning, the rails and gravel covered in a veneer of ice. After a packet of money changed hands a gritty trainman in coveralls led them to a boxcar and threw it open. Inside there were copper sheets stacked four feet high and dozens of bundles of copper tubing. Enough to build fifty stills with worms and caps.

  All this here our load? Jack said.

  The trainman wheezed into a soiled handkerchief.

  Shit, son. You think you the only boys makin’ in this county?

  The trainman threw open another boxcar that was stacked eight feet high with sacks of sugar and boxes of cake yeast.

  Seems to me, the trainman said, in a few months this here whole county’ll be floatin’ in it!

  As they unloaded the materials raggedy men sifted out of open boxcars like smoke, disappearing into the woods. At one end of the yard a dozen men squatted around a small campfire warming themselves. The trainman spat angrily, shifting his quid.

  Shit, he said. Y’all unload. Got business to attend to.

  He slipped a fat teardrop-shaped leather sap off his belt loop and advanced on the men, who began to stand and gather their bundles.

  HOWARD BROUGHT in Cundiff and Jack brought Cricket Pate, and through the months of January and February they hammered out four three-hundred-gallon stills and fashioned solid caps and worms. They worked in a shed near Howard’s cabin with a makeshift forge and bellows, stripped to the waist, and at the end of the day the tin walls of the shed glowed with heat. Howard’s spot on Turkeycock was clearly the best location and they set about readying the camp for expansion, clearing more brush and trees and setting up a thick blind on the open side of the mountain to block light and vapor. Cundiff rigged up a set of hollow steel rings that fed a mixture of gas and air through a tire pump that he claimed would give them a more even temperature and less heat trail.

  In the late spring of 1930 Jack turned twenty years old and moved back to his father’s house temporarily to help with the tobacco crop. Howard and Forrest came by the farm during the sucker pulling and worming, and they would help with the eventual leaf picking and curing. The project was slowed while the brothers worked the fields, though some afternoons when they had time Howard and Jack went up on Turkeycock and helped Cundiff and Cricket with the stills. There was nothing to be done and Jack knew it; though it was only three acres it was the best strip of bottomland their father had and the money was vital to their father’s ability to continue to pay his notes and keep the store running. Business was down drastically this year, road traffic reduced to itinerants and the wandering jobless. Several of his suppliers of trade goods collapsed or disappeared altogether and the shelves at the store were sparsely furnished. Granville normally gave his sons a cut from the tobacco crop, enough to make up for the lost work or wages from the sawmill, but they all knew it wouldn’t be coming this year.

  Jack found it strange to lie in the old rope bed he used to share with his brother, the slow creaking of the hemp ropes, the way the wind sang on the roof, his sister Emmy cooking and cleaning and spending afternoons by the window in their mother’s old chair. It seemed to Jack as if his sister was determined to forgo youth altogether and head straight into middle age. She misses Mother, sure enough, he thought, and her sisters too. Thinking of Emmy and her misery since that time made his eyes water as he pulled suckers through the long afternoons in the field. Jack suddenly felt guilty for his return to
the world. How often had he thought of Belva May and Era in the last few years? His mother? How had he come to move along so easily while Emmy remained in mourning? He straightened up in his row of tobacco and wiped his face with his sleeve.

  One morning in the hay barn across the road from the house, Jack dug around and found a large burlap sack and set about filling it with a mixture of dirt, straw, and clay. Granville was across the yard burning trash in a barrel, fanning the murky flames with his hat. The sun worked its way over Turkeycock Mountain and flooded the yard and the road beside with light. The spring had been dry and the summer looked to be even drier. On Sunday churches across Franklin County were packed with tobacco farmers. In the kitchen Emmy rinsed her hands and arms after doing the breakfast dishes in the sink, the cold well water splashing on her white skin.

  When the bag was full enough Jack tied the end securely with some twine and tossing a length of rope over a rafter hung it level with his head, a swaying, lumpy mass of burlap, bits of straw sticking out, streaming dust. Jack assumed a boxing pose like he’d seen in pictures and poked at the bag as it swung at him. He began to hit harder, stopping the momentum of the swinging bag as it came at him. After one shot his knuckles popped and Jack swore and grabbed his hand, massaging his fingers.

  There was a crunch of gravel on the road and Howard came into the barn. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he carried a spool of baling twine under his arm. Jack stopped the swaying bag. Howard gave him a quizzical look for a moment, then stepped to the bag and poked it with his beefy fingers, prodding the worn burlap. He looked at his little brother and grinned.

  Regular Jimmy Braddock, Howard said.

  Hell.

  Let’s fix it up a bit.

  Howard untied the rope and brought the bag down. Using the spade he broke up some hard clay and filled the bag deeper until it took a cylindrical shape, the dirt packed down hard. Then he took some spare burlap and tore it into strips.