The Wettest County in the World (22 page)

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.

B
ERTHA
M
INNIX
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.

T
HEY 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.

Oh God, Jack, what d’we do? Bertha said.

She was bouncing from side to side like an animal ready to bolt. Jack grabbed her hand.

We run, he said. Stay with me.

He pushed Cricket in the back, into the woods.

Go, dammit!

Cricket took off and Jack and Bertha sprinted after.

O
N A ROCKY
outcropping about forty yards above the still site Howard Bondurant crouched like some kind of ruined gargoyle, watching the sheriffs coming up the mountain. He had his collar turned up against the chill wind and a wool cap pulled down to his eyes. An empty quart jar balanced on a small thrust of limestone. He had watched his brother come up with the girl, seen them traipse about the camp, Bertha exploring the elements with the acute eye of a woman who wanted a piece of a world that was not her own. He felt oddly unconcerned about the approaching danger, the sheriffs who would be in the camp in a few minutes and who would destroy the stills before his eyes. Howard was thinking about how his little brother had led a pack of revenuers right to the still, practically blazing a trail.

The sheriffs came jogging into the clearing, guns out and calling to one another. Howard watched Charley Rakes dip a hand into the still beer. He thought about Jack getting beat at the hands of this man and winced. Abshire leaning thoughtfully on his ax, lighting a cigarette. Jefferson Richards laughing and tapping the blackened still with his knuckles. The spread of the valley rippled before Howard like water, the knobs of the neighboring mountains bobbing like ships on the sea. Howard stood and lacing his fingers together stretched his arms over his head, the vertebrae cracking up his spine as he arched. He sighed and picked up the jar and dangled it over his open mouth, catching the last few strands of syrupy liquid. He weighed the heavy glass in hand for a moment, looking out over the valley, resplendent with faint tracings of golden fire, the small snake of Snow Creek, the hills of Rocky Mount. A thick bank of clouds was rolling in from the east. It would storm.

Too bad about the tobacco, he thought. Might have changed things. Maybe none of this would have happened.

Then Howard hurled the jar at the oval head of Charley Rakes.

T
HEY MADE A LINE
across the face of the mountain, following the stream. They could hear the sheriffs in the camp as they scrambled through heavy brush, the ground littered with windfall and deadwood, Bertha working her way like a seasoned mountain girl, and Jack had to marvel at her athletic grace as they galloped along, high-footing it over logs and brambles. They were a few hundred yards away, working around the bend of the mountain, and Jack was feeling they were safe; there was no pursuit and they couldn’t be caught with that head start, not by any man.

Cricket, Jack hissed.

Cricket slowed and crouched in the leaves, waiting for Jack and Bertha to catch up. When they reached him Bertha leaned her arms against a tree, breathing hard, and Jack put his hands on his knees and spit dryly several times.

Was that Howard? That yell?

Cricket nodded, blinking.

Hold on, Bertha said, what happened back there?

We better move on, Jack, Cricket said. They’ll be on our trail here shortly.

Bertha pushed the sweaty strands of hair out of her face, her white blouse streaked with bark and bush grease. She wiped her palms on the legs of her overalls. Thick clouds were rolling over the mountain and under the trees the darkness settled heavy and close. Jack was about to reply when the distinct
thum…thum…pock…pock pock
of gunfire came echoing across the face of the mountain, coming from the camp. Two shotgun blasts, then pistol fire.