The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  The American Worker trudges on.

  At his boardinghouse there was a note for him slipped under his door.

  Mr. Anderson—

  You wish to speak with me. Tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock.

  Respectfully—

  C. Lee

  C.A. Franklin County

  HIS OFFICE was dominated by a trophy buck, eight points, mounted on the wall behind his massive desk. Carter Lee wore a light linen suit of faint blue; his gray fedora sat on the corner of the desk.

  This is solid butternut hickory, Carter Lee said, rapping his knuckles on the desk. Nice, ain’t it?

  Anderson nodded and smiled.

  Did you shoot that deer?

  Sure did.

  Carter Lee beamed, his cheeks ruddy with pleasure.

  Out in the valley, near Staunton? My brother has some land out there with some nice game.

  Ever do any hunting around here?

  Shoot, Carter Lee said, there ain’t been a deer in Franklin County for forty years. Other than drought years. The need to drink is stronger than the fear of death.

  Why’s that?

  No real way of knowing, Carter Lee said. This has always been tobacco land around here. Not like they was hunted out. I read your book Dark Laughter, you know. Interesting piece of work. You working on a new book?

  Anderson was taken aback by the first mention of his work by anyone in Franklin.

  No, Anderson said. I’m just here for the story. I have some papers over in Marion and—

  I know all about your papers, Carter Lee said, waving his hand. That Buck Fever bit is a real stitch. You ought to put that in a book.

  I might, Anderson said. But I’m here to talk about other things.

  Carter Lee seemed genuinely saddened by this, his brows dropping in concern.

  We sure got some stories in these parts.

  That is true, Anderson said. Particularly this conspiracy trial, eh?

  Carter Lee scowled and leaned back in his chair. Anderson took a cigarette from the pack that lay on the table and shook one out. Steady, he thought, this fella wants to strong-arm this thing with smiles and cheer. Direct action will kill that. He lit the cigarette and Carter Lee pushed the heavy glass ashtray toward him.

  There is an alleged conspiracy, Carter Lee said, if that’s what you mean. But you know I can’t talk about that.

  I understand, Anderson said.

  Ain’t nothin’ to be done about that. I’d hate to think we just wasting our time?

  You have Willie Carter Sharpe here in custody?

  Carter Lee smiled good-naturedly.

  Yep. Though not much doin’ of ours. They caught up with her in Saint Louis, hiding out in the garage apartment of a blockader’s mansion. We hauled her back here to Rocky Mount a few days ago.

  Can I talk to her?

  Nope. You have to wait for the trial like everyone else.

  What about the murder of Jeff Richards?

  We have some leads, the investigation is under way.

  That’s it? He was shot twenty times.

  Yep.

  Charley Rakes?

  Well, poor Charlie was just unlucky. Pneumonia is no way to die.

  I see. Then I wonder if we could talk about the shooting of the Bondurant boys at Maggodee Creek.

  Carter Lee nodded his head and rifled through a drawer.

  That was near five years ago.

  I know, Anderson said.

  It’s been all over the papers, Carter Lee said. You can read all about it there.

  But there was never an official investigation, Anderson said, from your office.

  Wasn’t no need for it, Carter Lee said. It was a clear situation. An agreement was reached.

  What kind of agreement?

  Carter Lee fished out some papers and flipped through them. He’s not really looking at those things, Anderson thought.

  You need to understand somethin’, Carter Lee said, about those boys. They ain’t the churchgoing type, you know what I’m sayin’? Ain’t exactly choirboys. They been up to their eyeballs in it since they was in short pants.

  Seemed like that deputy wanted them dead, Anderson said.

  Carter Lee leaned over the desk, his eyes creasing to slits. His skin was smooth and unblemished, as if he used expensive creams or salves. His nails were shining, the crescent moons of the cuticles stark white. Two heavy gold rings, a wedding band. Clearly there was more money to be made in enforcement than in actually making illicit liquor, Anderson thought. The law came out ahead in the end.

  Those boys, Carter Lee said, woke up that morning with guns in their hands. They directly threatened officers of the law.

  How was it that Jack Bondurant was shot with his hands up?

  Well, Carter Lee chuckled, sometimes people do funny things when they got a gun pointed at them.

  He leaned back in his chair and knotted his hands behind his head.

  Some folks, he said, seem to want to seek out the things that destroy them. Called an achimist, a fancy word, but a true one. Seems like they’s plenty around here in Franklin like that. Those boys seem to seek out the worst, that’s all there is to it.

  Carter Lee droned on for a bit about the history of Franklin County and other matters and Anderson found his attention wandering. He examined the deer head and smoked another cigarette. He wouldn’t get anything from this man. A spinner of half truths. If you are a born liar, a man of the fancy, why not be what you are?

  He shook hands with Carter Lee and walked back across the court square to his boardinghouse. The fresh breeze on the streets brought the scent of the surrounding countryside and Anderson thought again of his time among the corn. Many hours he walked through the stalks, lying between the rows at night, watching the fronds wipe away the stars, the hum of insects in his ears, the deep smell of growth. The smell of life. He realized this when he wrote Tar, the story of his youth, in that narrow room in the farmhouse in Troutdale, surrounded by a sea of corn. In those days Anderson felt he was a mystic of the corn, at once its acolyte and priest. He read most of Tar aloud in that cornfield, to the insects and crows, and had declared that year to his wife that a book should be written so that it could be read aloud in a cornfield; only then would it be American and true. Hell, Anderson thought, I couldn’t get a thing down until I created Tar in my mind and allowed myself to live through him. The same with George Willard. A man of fancy who tries to keep his toes in reality, the world of work, of real men with quiet minds. Could Dark Laughter be read aloud in a cornfield? Perhaps Women? How had he strayed from that essential feeling?

  In his room at the rooming house Anderson tried to compose a letter to Eleanor. He sipped a short glass of some peach brandy he picked up at a station in Sontag and tried to conjure up the image of Eleanor that he could cast his love to. Instead he thought of the angular form of Maggie in her flashy dresses, smoking behind the counter at the Blackwater station. Something like his first wife, Tennessee, in her carriage. The brandy was sweet but tasty. Anderson smoothed a piece of paper on his desk.

  Eleanor,

  In many ways this place is like any other. The old love of craft has been strangled by the hands of industry here, too, and everyone here walks about the hot night like it is their last.

  Yet the land here seems to rise up in formations. There is so much complication in such a simple land. I feel old and lonely. It is what makes beauty possible, of course, all this complexity and texture to the landscape. If the land were featureless, the world smooth and all the people in it, then we would see it all in an instant. Its flat, hideous, blankness.

  In the hills of Franklin and on the streets here I know there remains the features of beauty. So why is it then that when I close my eyes I see the smooth blankness, this horrifying sameness that engulfs all?

  In my bed at night I swear something is swinging out in the dark, some vast shape that looms and comes ever closer. It presses upon me like a deep weight.

  The
story will come along, I suppose, but I have another idea for something working here, perhaps a new book. I think it will be my final work and my best. If I can just move before the great swinging thing comes all will be well. I just don’t know if I can.

  Was the promise of Winesburg, that cursed little book, ever realized?

  Chapter 23

  1930

  BERTHA MINNIX stood at the end of the drive wearing a set of men’s overalls with a dark wool cardigan, her hair tucked under a floppy engineer’s cap. Jack swung the car around and she was in before the car stopped moving. A raw November day, the sky slate gray, the wind relentless and the trees gone from broad rushes of scarlet and gold to spindled wire. Bertha was flushed with excitement and Jack couldn’t help but grin as he hammered the Dodge down the hard-rutted washboard roads toward Snow Creek and Turkeycock Mountain.

  So Daddy did the milking this morning, Bertha said, and Mother watchin’ him bringing the cows up the hill to the house, and he milks them right there outside the back door, four pails’ worth, then leads them back down.

  Jack stuck a cigarillo in his teeth and popped a match on the dashboard. He was wearing a knee-length camel-hair coat and leather driving gloves embossed with his initials.

  Anyway, Bertha said, so Mother says to him: Why’d you walk them cows all the way up the hill here to milk? Why don’t you just milk them down there? And Daddy says: Well, I figure them cows can get the milk up the hill easier than I can!

  That father of yours is a real cutup, Jack said.

  Watch it, Bertha said, and aimed a sharp elbow at his ribs.

  THEY STOPPED the car along an old lumber road a few miles along the western base of the mountain. Jack pulled the car into a shadowy thicket of birch and maples. They set out at an angle to the mountain slope, and as they walked through the carpet of dry leaves Bertha reached out and took Jack’s hand.

  When I was a girl, Bertha said, we used to kick through leaves like this and pretend the sound was our silk petticoats.

  She shuffled a bit and smiled sideways at Jack.

  On the way to parties, she said, a trail of us girls, we’d shuffle our feet and pretend we were wearing gowns and on our way to a party. Crossing a stream over a log was a sidewalk in the city. More than anything I wanted to go to a big fancy ball. And here I am.

  She pulled at her oversized overalls.

  You just wait, Jack said.

  After a while they split up, Jack pointing out their guidepost and telling her to meander through the trees, not in a straight line, and at least fifty feet from him.

  Walk lightly, he said, stop kickin’ up leaves and don’t break limbs if you can help it. Remember, the sign is a single shout: Somebody! Don’t go back to the car.

  She popped him an exaggerated salute.

  I’m serious, he said.

  I know it.

  Bertha stayed far off to Jack’s left on the downhill side, slightly behind. He led them around the bend of the mountain and across a plateau of high grass, then back into heavy woods studded with limestone that erupted from the earth.

  Bertha had been hearing about the exploits of Willie Carter Sharpe and started peppering Jack with questions.

  She’s got diamonds set in her teeth, Bertha said. Ain’t that somethin’? They say she has cars all over the state, hidden in various places, just for her to use, and nobody can catch her.

  I wouldn’t believe all that, Jack said.

  You’re just sore, Bertha said. She’s the richest and most famous blockader around and you don’t like it.

  It ain’t that.

  I read she’s a real beauty too. You ever meet her?

  I’ve seen her around, Jack said.

  Yeah?

  I’m just saying it ain’t like they say in the papers.

  Jack had never clapped eyes on Willie Carter Sharpe himself, though others, including Forrest, had seen her. The Mitchell twins said they saw her at a station in Shootin’ Creek, heading up a caravan of big cars. They told Jack she looked like a film star in a long men’s coat, smoking cigars and laughing with the boys. They said she was as tall as any man there, with long dark hair, high-heel shoes, and diamond jewelry dangling from her wrists. Talmedge Jamison told Jack that he had seen her in Roanoke. He described her as short and built like a mash barrel, a crooked mouth and tiny pig eyes: She had a face that could pull a stump, Jamison said. She had picked up caravans at the Blackwater station to pilot out of the county, but all Forrest said was that you couldn’t believe what you read in the papers. Jack had read some of the stories and grimaced at the sensationalism. He had learned too well in recent months the grinding boredom, stomach-fear, exhaustion, and panic of blockading. Bertha didn’t believe him when he tried to describe it. Well, he thought, I’ll show her a bit of the real thing. It won’t harm nothin’ and maybe she’ll see that he was the real deal; Sharpe was just a fantasy of the newspapers. Jack wished he could tell her the truth, that he thought it would be like that too, that he bought the same story, and how ashamed he was that he still believed that it might materialize, that romantic vision, his life transformed.

  We done some business with Floyd Carter, Jack said.

  Really? Her ex-husband?

  Yep. Up in Burning Bag. Just lately.

  People say that place is like rum alley, Bertha said, men shooting each other every day.

  Well, it ain’t all like that.

  Jack longed for some new way to impress the woman who now held his heart in the crook of her elbow like a package from the grocery. He had some sense that the larger spaces that he intended to inhabit would require her assured hand. As he walked through the trees Jack removed his hat and smoothed his thin hair, slick with lemon-scented pomade, smiling to himself.

  The final leg after the clearing was up a steep section and through a spiny hedge of black huckleberry and ragweed. Jack began to whistle about a hundred yards out, and when they stepped in the clearing Cricket Pate was squatting by a still furnace with a pail of cement. The six copper submarine stills were already charred coal black after just one season of use. Mash boxes stood lined up in rows of ten, and in several the contents roiled and scented the air with the heady smell of fermentation. Cricket blinked a few times and stared at the apparition of Bertha Minnix.

  Cricket, Jack said. This here is Miss Minnix.

  Jack showed Bertha the mash boxes and explained the process. She dipped her fingers into the bubbling brew, pushing aside the snowballs, but wouldn’t taste the still beer. Cricket stirred the mash with a plank while Bertha poked around the still, kicking around in the piles of debris that littered the site: sugar bags, scraps of lumber, crates of five-gallon cans. Jack showed her their water source, a gurgling aquifer coming from a cracked wall of limestone just up the hill, channeled with rocks into small collecting pools, then run through pipes into the camp.

  We can put out a thousand gallons a week, Jack said. Hard in the cold weather without a whole team of still hands, but Cricket here manages all right. When it warms up we’ll get ’em all hot an’ flood the damn valley with Snow Creek white!

  Bertha seemed wholly focused on the workings of the stills and watched closely as Cricket and Jack charged one with fresh mash from the boxes as the sun set behind the mountain. Once the correct temperature was reached the doubler keg began knocking woodenly, and Bertha bent to the condenser pipe to watch the first singling emerge, smoking from the barrel. In her baggy outfit she looked like a narrow-shouldered hobo, but when she turned she smashed Jack with her grin and slate-colored eyes. Oh my, he thought, I’m gonna feel this for a long, long time.

  Say, Jack said, you got your camera?

  She dug intently in her pockets for a moment, fishing out the Brownie.

  Here, Jack said, let me get one of you. Cricket, get on away from that.

  Cricket crouched by the cooling barrel.

  Don’t, Bertha said. Your brothers will get mad.

  Don’t worry ’bout that, Jack said. Look, just
stand there for a moment. It’ll be fine.

  Ain’t it too dark? Bertha said. It sure is getting dark quick.

  Umm, Cricket said, storm rolling in I’d say.

  He fingered the dirt.

  Maybe we oughta clear out, he said. Jack, what say?

  Bertha was standing by one corner of the hot still and when she looked at Cricket, hunched down in his overalls and crusty jacket, his knees above his ears like some kind of vagabond grasshopper, she shook her head and laughed and took a step forward, intending to step away from the still when Jack snapped the picture.

  Got it.

  A high-pitched whistle broke from the woods, once, twice, three times. Jack froze, holding the camera out. Cricket stood and began searching frantically through piles of burlap bags. Jack cocked an ear; there was a faint, steady rustle. Bertha clutched at Jack’s arm.

  What? What is it?

  A voice bellowed from above them, high among the rocks: Somebody!

  Who else is here? Jack said. Who’s up the hill?

  Jack heard the echoing snap of underbrush coming from down the mountain, the same way they had come. The brambles provided excellent cover but provided almost no lookout down the mountain. He would have to get higher to get a decent view. Jack leaped onto the still and, stepping on the cap, made the short jump into the branches of a nearby elm. He went just high enough to see down to the widely spaced section of the hillside to the grassy plateau. The tall grass rippled and four men emerged from the trees on the far side dressed in suits and ties, two of them carrying axes on their shoulders, the other two cradling shotguns. He scrambled down the tree and dropped to the ground.

  Sheriffs, Jack said. Which way?

  Cricket motioned up the hill.

  Break up till you hit the hollow, Cricket said, then east along the stream.