The Wettest County in the World (2 page)

Nothing
can kill us, Forrest said. We’ll
never
die.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Howard returned to the house, rumpled and surly. He had spent the night sprawled under a pile of burlap sacks behind a filling station in Boone’s Mill, sleeping off a half liter of white mule. He gulped a cold breakfast of biscuits and ham on the front porch, wiping his hands on his greasy overalls, Jack sitting quietly beside him, drinking in the sour smell of his older brother. Howard stood and gave Jack a good pop on the back of the neck before lumbering off to the barn to help Granville with feeding.

A few days later Jack’s mother, Forrest, Belva May, and Era were all stricken with the flu. The following days passed quickly. Jack felt like he was still in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness. Emmy knelt by the water pump, wringing the laundry between her red fingers as she rocked back and forth. Granville stood quietly for hours in the dim hallway like a ghost. Howard sitting awkwardly on the front step, long legs angled in front of him, hat in his hands, his slablike face blank.

On the morning his mother died, Jack stood by his father’s chair and Granville put his hand on his son’s shoulder as he gazed out the window toward the long road. Howard leaned against the stove, arms crossed over his broad chest, frowning at the floor.

Oh boys, Granville said. It’s all gone.

Howard raised his head and stared at his father.

All the goodness has gone out of the world, Granville said.

There were tears on his father’s face and Jack’s heart squeezed like a fist. Though he tried hard not to, he broke down and sobbed on his father’s shoulder.

Jack’s mother died first, then a day later Belva May, followed immediately by Era. Forrest lay in bed like a stone for a week, his face impassive and leaden, refusing to eat anything. His skin puckered and turned an impossible shade of blue for a few days, soft and hazy like a robin’s egg. Then one morning he rose from his bed. Afterward Forrest always retained the knobby aspect of illness, and in certain types of light his skin still had a blue cast to it. When he emerged after that week, his body gaunt and wasted, his eyes sunken, to join Granville, Emmy, Howard, and Jack at the breakfast table, it was as if his strength had withered and focused itself like a leather strap. Jack remembers taking a biscuit from the plate, his shaking hand.

His mother and sisters laid out on the floor, covered with a quilt.

Nobody said anything.

S
HERWOOD
A
NDERSON
crossed the Franklin County line, threading his car over a one-lane bridge that lay in a gentle saddle in the road. A few hundred yards beyond the bridge Anderson passed a filling station: a simple clapboard square and a steeply angled roof with an upper story that jutted out from the front, providing a covered pull-in spot in front of the narrow porch. A pair of petrol pumps stood in front, with hand cranks and glass spheres on top filled with fuel. Several things about the place held Anderson’s gaze: a porch, but unlike most rural filling stations this one had no chairs and no name on the building, or advertisements for anything. Four cars were in the lot, brand-new sedans with engines running, as if lined up for gas though nobody was pumping any. A group of men stood by the front door, men in long coats and hats who all turned and watched Anderson drive by. A storage shed was set slightly up the hill that rose behind the store, a squat cinder-block structure with an open door like a key slot and as Anderson passed a tall, gangly man in his shirtsleeves and hat emerged from the building with a wooden crate in his arms. It seemed like his eyes locked directly onto Anderson’s face. Then a blur of green-gold trees and the tires humming on the road and Anderson hunched over the wheel, humming up the backside of Grassy Hill and into Rocky Mount, the seat of Franklin County. Have to remember that spot, Anderson thought to himself, will have to run by on the way back to Roanoke and see what it’s all about. Though even at that moment he knew that the look on the faces of the men waiting at the station and the eyes of the tall man in the storage shed would make that difficult. Anderson had lived in rural Virginia long enough to know that look, the simple, insolent expression that said:
Mind your own goddamn business.

Anderson picked up speed down the empty road, blasting through whirling vortexes of leaves. Route 33 bisected Franklin County north-south in a jagged stroke, winding through the steep hillsides and deep hollows. It was the longest paved road in the county: Most roads were still hard-packed gravel, a soil-sand-clay mix, or merely weedy ruts that disappeared into field or forest. Driving through the hills of southern Virginia was reminiscent of some favorable sensations for Anderson, and he thought of the old restlessness. It was a good feeling to be on the move again.

T
HE TWO MEN
Sherwood Anderson came to see lay in a crowded public ward in the Rocky Mount Hospital, a long windowless room with a dozen beds. Men of middling age, lined faces, stubble, indeterminate. The first of the two lay motionless, tucked into the sheets like a sewing needle. He stared up at the ceiling with open, swollen eyes, his skin blanched like boiled meat, the bedding stained with a yellowish fluid around his groin area. Next to him the other man had a deep crimson scar running between his eyes and across his forehead, as if he’d been branded with a hot iron. A puffed goiter like a weathered leather bag hung under his chin. He was drenched with sweat, moaning and jerking his upper body from side to side, delirious with fever, the lower half of his body encased in thick plaster. The doctors told Anderson that a good piece of his tongue was also missing, likely due to an earlier injury. Anderson introduced himself and pulled up a chair between their beds. The man with the injured groin ran his eyes over Anderson for a moment before returning his gaze to the ceiling. His skin was tight like a sausage and he stunk of rot.

The doctors told Anderson that neither man would say what happened to them, but it was clear that one man’s legs had been meticulously shattered, from ankle to hip, and the second man had been badly mutilated in the groin area. The police didn’t get a thing either; the two men hadn’t said a word, and they’d had no visitors.
There wasn’t anything else to it,
the doctor said, shrugging. The mutilated man was hanging on by a thread and the infection would take him soon. It was a miracle he survived this long.
The blood loss was extensive,
the doctor said.
Clearly left for dead. Somebody anonymously notified us. Otherwise they’d be dead, easy.
The man with the shattered legs might pull through, but it was sure he would never stand or walk again.

S
HERWOOD
A
NDERSON
originally came to Rocky Mount to write a story for
Liberty
magazine about a woman named Willie Carter Sharpe.
Moonshine,
said the editors, the snoops up north; these hill people were living off mountain whiskey, bootlegging; it was still the cash crop. The Volstead Act of 1919, the legal enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, had created a many-headed hydra of illicit manufacture and trade in these mountains. Production didn’t end in 1933 with the repeal of Prohibition: To avoid the heavy taxes on legal distillation, people still made their own or brought it in on rumrunners off the coast, but now that Prohibition was over people wanted to hear more about that supposed frontier period. These people weaned their children on the stuff, they said. They cooked their eggs in it, put it in their morning coffee. Everyone wanted it to go on, Anderson thought, the swells making piles of money and the consumers who savored that rancid sip of illegal bathtub gin in some dirty hole in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They wanted that added flavor of illegality, and they wanted the dangerous myth, the wild notion of gunplay and desperation.
Get close,
they said.
The people, the characters, their desires, the inner lives and passions: That’s what you do best after all.

There was a big trial gearing up in Franklin County, a trial that was going to clean up the remnants of a messy, long-running battle between bootlegging syndicates including the commonwealth’s attorney, who it was rumored would be accused of racketeering and conspiracy. All the major bootleggers in the county, including Willie Carter Sharpe, if they could catch her, were being called in for grand-jury testimony. Sharpe had originally married a big-shot bootlegger and soon became the principal driver for the operation, driving pilot cars as the caravans of booze careened and smashed their way through the hills of rural towns and into the conduits of the major cities, becoming a celebrity in the process. They said Sharpe had movie-star looks and diamonds set in her teeth. New York City society women sent her passionate love letters, desperate to be with her.
Liberty
wanted Anderson to bring the story to a national audience.

Sherwood Anderson had been in the southwestern part of Virginia for most of nine years by 1934. He built a house in Marion, the seat of Smyth County, to the west of Franklin, higher up in the mountains. He purchased two local newspapers and set about life as a small-town editor. Anderson was aware that more than one literary wag had suggested he was reverting to his former life, trying to go back to some lost place of youth. But he knew he wasn’t trying to revert to George Willard and the town of Winesburg: In fact it was the thing he hoped to distance himself from.

While his house was being built, Anderson squatted in a rude shack on the hillside above. He spent his days watching the score of mountain men crawling over the frame of his house, working in their methodical, efficient way. He had a deal with his publisher, Liverwright, who would send him one hundred dollars a week plus a percentage of his sales, including those for the Modern Library reprints of
Poor White
and
Winesburg, Ohio.
Liverwright would publish whatever Anderson sent him. In those days Anderson’s writing desk was neat as a pin, and he eventually went up to New York and begged Liverwright to let him out of the deal. The house he built was called Ripshin.

A
NDERSON CAME FROM
Ripshin the day before and stayed over at a hotel in Roanoke, then met with the editor of
The Roanoke Times
in the morning. It was still early when he left, the sky moving from purple to lavender and the trees along the road dropped their leaves, and he was glad to be out on such a morning and away from his house. Anderson ground his teeth and gripped the wheel when he thought of his naïve hope that Ripshin would become a rustic literary salon. A place where the intelligentsia would gather about him in his bucolic paradise. Perhaps even his friend Gertrude Stein would come and pace the floor of his study with him, talking painters and semantics.

Instead the two newspapers were holding him hostage; he was at the offices nearly every week, working with the printers and writing nearly the entire thing himself. To let off steam Anderson developed a character named Buck Fever in a column that dispensed humor and folksy wisdom, a sort of Will Rogers meets Mark Twain.

By 1934 Ripshin was filled with noisy, bothersome people, people who overstayed their welcome, people whom Anderson once felt were true peers and comrades but now seemed more like chattering urbanites out for a turn in the country, and he was merely the innkeeper. His only solace was Eleanor, the young woman he met in Marion during the final years of his last marriage. They were married the year before, and during his travels he wrote her long, passionate letters that shocked himself and that seemed to contain the vitality that he usually was able to produce only in his fiction. In fact the letters, the words and phrases, the sentiments and ideas, seemed to come from some shadowy character, not fully formed, that lay deep inside him.

T
HE EDITOR OF
The Roanoke Times
said it was likely some kind of payback. Sitting in his office that morning before visiting the hospital, cheap cigars in the cluttered, paper-filled room; Anderson felt sleepy and despondent.

Likely the trade, the editor said.

He had eyes like holes in a meat pie and an annoying snarl to his speech, talking out of one side of his mouth.

Those boys did something to somebody, he said. And when nobody talks, you can bet there is liquor involved.

The editor confirmed the rumors of the coming trial. Closed grand jury.

Well, the editor said, you won’t find much of a story down in Franklin County. Unless you manage to pry it out of a dead man’s jaws.

Such wit, Anderson thought. What a clod.

Sir, Anderson said, I am no greenhorn. I know these people and their plight well. I know something about moonshine liquor.

Pieface nodded, giggling, his broad frame shivering.

You spend enough time in Franklin, the editor said, you’ll start tripping over it.

The editor waved his cigar in the smoky air in front of him. Anderson’s stomach let out a whine of discomfort and he wished he’d had breakfast.

There’s a fella, the editor said, down at the Rocky Mount jail right now. A fella named Tom C. Cundiff. But you won’t get spit from him. The man’s crazy as a coon. Couple fellas in there with him, all steady shiners. I wouldn’t talk to any of them unless they was behind bars and would be there for a while. Actually I ought to tell you who
not
to try and talk to.

That’d be fine, Anderson said.

The editor dug through a file drawer next to his desk, pulled out a thick sheaf of papers. He licked a thumb and selecting a few pages of proof copy tossed it onto Anderson’s lap.

Maybe you seen this, he said, from a few years back.

I wouldn’t seek
those
boys out if I were you, the editor said.

I’m not planning on starting trouble, Anderson said.

The editor put his hands together on the desk and craned his pieface closer to Anderson, who could not help but lean away.

I’ll tell you what, the editor said. There’s only
two
things up in them Franklin County hills for those who are looking:
stump whiskey
and
free ass whippin’s.

B
EFORE GOING TO
the hospital Anderson pulled into a filling station just outside Rocky Mount to get something to eat. Three men and a young boy sat, chairs leaning back, against the clapboard station wall that was peppered with metal signs advertising Granger Rough Cut Tobacco, Mineraltone Hogs, Harrod’s Medicinal Powders. They stared at him brazenly as he came up: blank, open faces that disclosed nothing but slight contempt. Anderson said hello and received a nod from each in return, even the small boy, who, Anderson noticed, was shifting around a quid of tobacco in his tanned cheek. Inside a woman stood behind a counter in a calico-print dress. A potbellied stove stood in the middle of the store, surrounded by a moat of wood chips. Anderson walked through the few aisles of scant merchandise. Two dirty-faced young girls eyed him from where they squatted against boxes and played with dolls made of burlap. He bought a couple packs of crackers—
nabs,
they called them in this part of the state—and a bottle of birch beer. At the counter, receiving his change, Anderson could hear the faint wind singing against the metal roof, the creaking chairs on the porch.

Anderson pulled out of the lot and onto a muddy road that spooled out before him into the dark trees. He rubbed the steamed windshield with his bare hand and stamped the chill out of his boots on the floorboards. Sure, he thought, it’s everywhere; the streams are running thick with alcohol, the sky raining whiskey. He beat the steering wheel with his fists and screamed at the road.