The Wettest County in the World (29 page)

G
RANVILLE
B
ONDURANT STOOD
behind the counter of his store working over the day’s receipts. A half-dozen old-timers from Snow Creek loitered about the stove, having a chew and griping about the weather. Granville had swept the floor and covered the flour and grain bins with sackcloth, the stove fire banked to a dull glow. The day had grown cold as evening fell, the ground damp from sporadic rains, and there was talk among the men of an early frost that night. The main topic of discussion was the murder of Deputy Jefferson Richards the night before, shot to death in gruesome fashion on the road near Antioch Brethren Church, just a week before he was due to testify.

Carter Lee cleanin’ up the mess, a bearded fellow said, scratching his neck.

Loose ends, said another. Lotta lead for one man.

A car in the lot crunching in the gravel, and Granville raised his head, wiping the receipts with his hand to clear the pencil dust. A moment later a broad man in an overcoat lurched through the lot. The door was flung open, bringing a damp draft whistling along the floor of the shop; the men murmured and looked at Charley Rakes stepping through the doorway. His coat was open at the front and his tie askew, his fedora pulled low. Rakes stopped and surveyed the store quickly before marching up to the stove and throwing back his coat and holding out his hands. He stunk of whiskey and sweat and the old men around the stove hummed and shifted in their slouched poses.

Need a few sticks here, Rakes said. This damn thing is cold!

We shuttin’ down, Granville said. Can I get you somethin’, son?

Rakes glared at him, his eyes wild under the brim of his hat.

Need fuel.

Pumps’re shut down.

Turn ’em on then!

Granville pushed his receipts into a stack on the counter and rested his hands on either side. He looked at Rakes, who swayed slightly, his coat hanging open.

What do you want, Charley?

Rakes looked wildly about, then turned back to Granville. He reached behind his back, pulled a pistol from the waistband of his pants, and pointed it at Granville’s chest.

I want you to know something, Rakes said.

He turned and waved his gun around the room.

All of you. All of you need to know something.

Now take it easy, Charley, one of the old men said. We know that things are a bit—

You don’t know a damn thing! Rakes roared. Everybody thinks they know somethin’ but they don’t!

Rakes turned back to Granville, his arm halfway up, the pistol gripped savagely in his hand. He seemed to tire suddenly, his round, red face going slack and he took a step back and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coat. A light rain pattered on the roof and window, and the men at the stove shuffled their feet. Rakes hung his head for a moment.

You oughta go home, Charley, Granville said.

Rakes wiped his face and regripped his pistol, bringing his arm up so it pointed at Granville’s throat.

Why? You think I oughta be hidin’ somewheres, that it?

He turned and addressed the other men.

What about you? he demanded.

The men tucked their chins into their collars and looked to the stove as if it still provided some heat.

Rakes kicked over a stool. Not satisfied with this, he grabbed the rim of a grain barrel and pulled it over. A fog of flour dust quickly rose, billowing like smoke and the men around the stove began to mumble. Rakes looked at his pants, one leg covered in flour, and cursed with a sincere vengeance. The pistol still in his hand he stepped to the counter and seized the receipts and books and swept them all to the floor. Granville stepped back from the counter and stood quietly, his face impassive. Rakes then cleared the rest of the counter, sweeping his arms across and pushing canned goods, chewing gum, tobacco onto the floor with a clatter.

I ain’t afraid, Rakes roared at the room. I ain’t afraid of got-damned Carter Lee!

He whirled and pointed his gun once more at Granville.

And I ain’t afraid of your got-damned no ’count boys, neither!

Rakes was breathing hard and he wiped at his face.

To hell with all you!

He clamped down his hat and waving his hands through the flour-filled air banged through the door. The men coughed and slapped at their coats and pants.

Howard stepped from the storeroom doorway and passed silently through the white cloud. Granville stood behind the counter, his eyes on the floor as his son passed. If the other men in the room saw Howard follow Rakes out, they made no indication.

T
HE RAIN STOPPED
and the skies went black. Later Charley Rakes pulled into the dirt drive of his house. A light was burning in the window of the small cabin and his dogs set to barking in the back. Rakes slammed the car door. He pulled a flat bottle from his coat pocket and took a slug, wiping his mouth and face with his coat sleeve. On one side of the house the hill sloped steeply down into woods, carved at the bottom by a narrow branch of Blackwater Creek. A light flickered along the edge of the woods. Rakes stared hard as it wavered, yellow. A candle burning on the edge of his woods.

Rakes whipped his head around, spinning in place, his house, the car, the woods, his breath steaming around him. He put the bottle in his pocket and pulled out his pistol and walked around the side of the house down the slope to the fence line. He scanned the woods but the darkness was vast and complete, save the small circle of golden light. The candle was set on a fence post, the wax piling around its base. Rakes stood there for a few moments, the pistol stretched out, listening. His dogs picked up his scent and stopped barking. The creek gurgled down below and in the woods was the tick and patter of rainwater. Rakes took out the flat bottle again and pulled the cork out with his teeth. He drained the last of the whiskey, a shudder going through his body, and he glanced around again, the lights of the house, the dark sky, the sloping hill that led around to the back of the house. He chuckled for a moment, then seemed to choke, doubling over, the back of his hand to his mouth. He gagged, spit, and coughed into the wet grass. He heaved the empty bottle into the dark woods.

After a while he leaned forward and blew out the flickering candle. In that last moment of light, before the darkness closed in, he saw Howard rise up out of the trees. He tried to scream but Howard already had him by the throat.

Howard heaved him over the fence and slammed him to the ground, pinning his gun hand under a knee. He kept a hand around Rakes’s windpipe and peeled his fingers off the pistol stock and tossed it into the woods. Rakes gurgled and his face went scarlet to purple, clutching Howard’s arm, kicking legs in the wet leaves. Howard looked at him for a moment, studying his face, before dragging him down the hill by his neck.

In the tight pit of the valley a three-foot stream ran clear and cold and Howard flung Rakes into the stream on his back. The streambed was a mix of smooth rock and clay, about a foot deep, and Rakes shrieked as his body hit the water, his face going under and then coming up, spitting and gasping. The dogs began howling again and Rakes looked wildly up at the black shape looming over him. Howard shook his head for a moment, as if clearing some memory, his breath in a steady plume like an engine fire.

Oh, God! Rakes sputtered. Oh, God no please!

Howard straddled Rakes’s midsection and using both hands on his neck pushed him under the water. Rakes clawed at Howard’s face but Howard simply turned away. His mouth tightened as he watched Rakes’s wild eyes and twisting face under the clear water. The dark seemed to close in around him and he felt a sudden blankness fall over him and he raised his head to watch the night move through the trees.

After a moment he hauled Rakes out of the stream by his shirtfront. Rakes sputtered and coughed, clutching at his throat, scrabbling in the muddy leaves. Howard stood and debated kicking the man a few times just for sport, but decided it would be better if he was left unmarked. He reached down and turned Rakes’s head to face him. Rakes shuddered and sobbed, his face slick with water, saliva, and snot. He was a bit blue, Howard thought, but he’d be all right.

Remember this, Charley, he said. You hear?

Then Howard started up the hill, leaving Rakes lying by the stream. He turned after a few steps, regarding the huddled man shivering in the wet.

You should know, Howard said, that we had nothin’ to do with Jeff Richards. He had plenty of enemies. He done himself in some other way.

The dogs began to howl again as Howard stepped off into the dark.

T
HERE WERE MEN
standing everywhere, leaning on long black cars, men on the sidewalks holding their hats and wiping their foreheads in the heat, men on stools along the window of Jess’s Lunch, men in the shade of the granite bank building, men in suits and hats lining the steps to the court building, several holding cameras at their sides, assistants with bulky black cases fingering spare flashbulbs in their jacket pockets. The courthouse stood like a sundial in the Harrisonburg town square, the shadow dropping first over the bank opposite, then across to the lunch counter and the Baptist church as the afternoon drew on. Around the courthouse a gentle slope of grass ran to the street, cut by a broad set of bluestone steps. It was a warm July day, the sky traced with clouds, and the Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy Trial was finally over after fifty days, longer than the previous record for Virginia, the 1807 trial of Aaron Burr. On a bench in front of the Methodist church a woman sat with a skinny towheaded boy in a white shirt and dungarees; they huddled together and talked quietly. A policeman sat in a chair by the courthouse door, cap pulled low over his eyes to shield the sun, his pistol dangling off his hip.

There was a palpable shift in the air, a murmur, or perhaps it was imagined, for no real sound came across the square. Yet the men felt that they had heard something from inside the doors. The policeman raised his head, men dropped their cigarettes in the grass, a car door opened. The woman with the little boy remained bent, talking low. Then the courthouse door opened and a man stumbled out into the sunlight. Sherwood Anderson slid a hand through his thinning hair, blinked, then clapped a hat onto his head. He saw the people in the square come to attention for a moment, looking him over, then slumping with disinterest.

It was a distinctly American tragedy, he thought. The trial had crystallized his thoughts on the matter, and the smoky form of an epic story, one that could be read aloud in a cornfield, began to form in his mind. Anderson came down a few steps and, tucking a copy of
The Roanoke Times
under his arm, checked his pocket watch.

Individuality will pass into the smoky realm of history. The day will come, Anderson knew, when we will all become soldiers in the army of the corporate age. When he was a boy there were no autos, planes, radios, chain stores, or great bloated trusts pushing their interests around the world. Men lived free lives then. Anderson tried to describe this in
Perhaps Women,
which was roundly despised even among friends. He was only trying to say that when the world is mechanized something goes out of men, something elemental is lost. The female world, on the other hand, was ascendant: the world of possessions, the material world. The female is at home among these things. Men suffered for a lack of drive, starving for the tactile world. Instead they develop the pathological obsession with obvious power. A real man doesn’t need these things, and there are so few real men left. This is why Hemingway is so obsessed with the bloody work of bullfighting, and with killing in general. This is why he felt he must crush his former mentor in the public realm.

Literature is bigger than both of us.

A
groper,
Hemingway called him, a
muddler of words.

They had that final drink together in Paris, having been there for a month, Hemingway constantly telling everyone that he would come and see Anderson. On the final day, Anderson was in his room, all his bags packed, and there was a knock on the door and there was Hemingway. How about a drink? he said. They went into a small bar across the street and ordered two beers. Hemingway raised his glass.

Well, here’s how.

Then he turned away and walked out of the bar.

The constant assertion of masculinity is always the most obvious tell of a fake. You do not constantly assert what you know you have.

I don’t give a damn about all this calling a man a groper, a muddler. We are all facing a wall, but I am throwing the words from my heart.

The party at the Greenwich restaurant to celebrate the publication of
Perhaps Women
in 1931, when Faulkner came in, unexpected, and approached somewhat sheepishly. He offered his hand and Anderson took it. Faulkner offered his congratulations. He grinned and pulled at Sherwood’s sleeve.

Sherwood, he said, what is the matter? Do you think that I am also a Hemy? You know it isn’t true what they say.

They exchanged some pleasant words before Faulkner wandered off to another part of the party. By this time his fame had grown and eventually the crowd siphoned off to Faulkner’s side of the room, leaving Anderson sitting alone at a booth, holding his hat. He knew that some might see in his expression the knowing look of a writer who understood well what was occurring, a passing of some kind of torch perhaps, and his tight grin was the look of a content elder literary statesman. He stroked his hat, a large, soft hat that he had recently purchased and never worn, watching the crowd around Faulkner, stroking the large hat in his lap as if it were some kind of animal.

Forty-three years old when
Winesburg
came out. He wanted to retch when he thought of the time spent in the grinding gears of commerce, participating in the great deceit that snapped men between its fingers every day in the new age of American industrialism. He had walked through the streets for years, thinking little of the lives that crouched behind opaque windows, what crabbed forms sat alone in the darkness, and what hungers they fed there. Oh, if only he had seen behind those doors earlier!

And now he had focused so long on the precision of the word, the utterance that was most unfettered by artful manipulation, that the thing had become mere style. Sure, it was
his
style, but the style had become the substance. There was nothing else there. It was over, but he couldn’t stop.

T
HE
M
AY
24, 1935,
Roanoke Times
headline read:
Woman Pilot of Whiskey Cars Is Placed On Stand.
Willie Carter Sharpe testified on May 23 for a half hour.

“So great was the interest with which her appearance has been awaited that it served to overshadow a full day of varied testimony…”

The experience was a disappointing one for most, including Anderson, who saw his hopes of a great mountain heroine die with her appearance on the witness stand.

“Mrs. Carter, whose name became so widely known here in the palmy [
sic
] days of the bootleggers during Prohibition, appeared minus the diamond that once gleamed in her teeth. She was dressed in a white outfit with hat and shoes to match, the dress having brown ruffled sleeves and collar gathered in front with a large cameo pin.”

To Anderson she was jowly like a bulldog and crass of language and aspect. The overall impression was more like that of a gorilla in a dress.

T
HE VERDICT
had been read and the trial was finally over. Anderson moved farther down the courthouse steps, snapping a fountain pen into his vest pocket, his brogans scuffing on the limestone block. The policeman looked into the darkened doorway for a moment, then stood back quickly as a crowd of men emerged, flowing out of the courthouse onto the steps and into the lawn, men quickly dispersing across the square as if they had an aversion to any sort of crowd, and each sought out his own space. The men standing around moved to greet some of them, and the men with the cameras raised the heavy contraptions and began to search out the faces of the emerging crowd. Sherwood Anderson sought out the shade of an old oak tree that grew at the edge of the sidewalk. He loosened his dark tie and watched the other men and some women who walked out of the courthouse. The gentle clatter of voices tumbled out over the square as men and women began to talk to one another. Men shook hands and patted each other on the back, and men in expensive summer wool suits carrying leather-sided briefcases stepped into long cars that idled at the curb. A small cordon of police joked together as they headed across the street to Jess’s.

A midnight-blue roadster parked on the curb caught Anderson’s attention. A woman was at the wheel; she cut the engine and swung her legs out of the car. Maggie wore a long, shimmering dress of brocade silk, the color of jade, her hair pulled back in a simple knot. Anderson was directly in front of her, but she seemed to look through him, gazing at the courthouse with her gypsy stare.

C
ARTER
L
EE WAS
acquitted of all charges. Twenty men were convicted, including Sheriff’s Deputy Henry Abshire and other bootleggers and moonshiners who participated in the conspiracy. His case was certainly aided by the demise of Jefferson Richards, the acknowledged first lieutenant in the scheme, and the mysterious passing of Charley Rakes from pneumonia. Also a single juror, a man named Marshall, refused to add Carter Lee to the names of the guilty and threatened to hang the jury. The Bondurant brothers were never formally charged; rather they served as material witnesses for the prosecution.

A tall man stepped out of the courthouse and into the sunlight, wearing a thin cotton jacket and dungarees. He had a thick scar that ran across his neck that was clear from forty feet away. He paused, and two other men stepped out into the light and stood at his back. They were both tall, one of them an immense figure whose jacket strained to hold his barrel chest, his tanned neck rolling over his starched collar. The other man was obviously younger, with a red face and hawklike nose.

Sherwood Anderson stepped from the shade of the tree and walked toward the three men.

The younger man thrust his hands in his pockets and smiled at his brothers for a moment before turning and walking toward the woman and the child on the bench. The towheaded boy, all legs and arms in his overalls, ran to him.