The Wettest County in the World (30 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
Anderson published his last novel,
Kit Brandon,
the story of a mysterious and beautiful Appalachian woman who loves fine clothes. She works in various mills, hitchhiking around the country, before becoming involved with a bootlegger and becoming a pilot-car driver for a moonshine syndicate. The book had moderate sales and was a critical failure.

On February 28, 1941, Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Eleanor, set sail for a tour of South America. Aboard ship one evening Anderson accidentally swallowed a toothpick while eating an hors d’oeuvre. He developed severe abdominal congestion and peritonitis, and eight days later in a hospital in Panama, Sherwood Anderson was dead.

T
HE
D
ULING BROTHERS
, Hubbard and Paul, heads of the largest West Virginia moonshine syndicate, were eventually convicted for the murder of Jefferson Richards. On the morning of December 23, 1933, Jeff Richards had engaged their brother Frank Duling in a high-speed chase as Frank was hauling a load of Franklin County moonshine to the brothers’ West Virginia markets. The chase resulted in the death of Frank Duling, and it was well known that the Dulings sought revenge. This conviction has remained in doubt, particularly after in later years other men claimed responsibility for the death of Richards, including Hallie Bowles, who claimed to several people and in his suicide note that he and another man were paid to commit the murder, presumably at the behest of Carter Lee.

F
ORREST CONTINUED
to run the Blackwater station, with Maggie at the counter and Everett Dillon at the pumps. No one ever saw a display of affection between them. He continued to help his father and brothers with their tobacco crops, and liquor continued to run through his station, though never in the same quantity.

Howard moved to Martinsville and found work in the textile mills there. Throughout the years he kept a still up on Turkeycock, and each summer he and his brothers would gather on the mountain and make a small run. Lucy eventually bore four healthy children.

Emmy Bondurant graduated from high school and moved to New Jersey, where she worked in a typing pool and shared an apartment in Newark with two other women. She eventually married and divorced later in life.

J
ACK
B
ONDURANT
went on to run his father’s store and to raise beef cattle and tobacco in Snow Creek. Occasionally he had Forrest over for dinner, and Jack’s oldest son always marveled at the lump that developed in Forrest’s midsection after he ate, where the food was leaking through the lining of his stomach. The country hack that sewed him up after the shooting neglected to sew up the interior lining of his stomach, and a few minutes after eating, a bulge the size of a grapefruit would push out his shirt at the belly button. The boy would poke the mass with one finger, Forrest grinning even though it clearly pained him greatly.

O
NE EVENING IN
1941, after helping his father with a cattle sale, Forrest was crossing through the bottomland that separated Jack’s property from Granville’s when he stepped through the icy crust of Snow Creek and was wet through to his armpits in the icy water. He walked up the hill in the dark to Jack’s house, arriving late, when everyone was already in bed. He refused Jack’s offer of some hot food and drink and dry clothes, electing instead to go to bed in the back room. Forrest said he would be up and out in the morning before they woke. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing.

In the morning Jack’s oldest son, now ten years old, woke with a start. His sisters Lee and Betty Louise and his brother Bobby Joe slept soundlessly. His youngest brother, Granville Thomas Jr., would be born the following year.

The room was cold and black and nothing moved, but the boy could sense that someone or something was down the hall. It was as if there were something pulsing through the walls, a wave of vibrating cold, and he got up without waking his siblings and chucked on his clothes quietly. The back-room door was slightly ajar, the air significantly colder there as it was the room farthest from the stove.

Inside the boy saw a shape lying on the narrow cot in one corner, next to an old pie safe his grandfather had built, and boxes of paintings by his mother, simple oil landscapes. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the light, then moved forward. The boy touched the edge of a boot, hanging over the edge of the cot. It was cold and faintly wet. As the boy stepped closer, treading lightly on the boards so as not to wake the house, Forrest’s face came out of the dark, a mask of blue stone, his eyes open, his mouth set in a hard frown, a grimace of inconvenience. His fingers on the sheet, held to his neck, the nails gone purple, covered with a thin sheen of ice.

Y
EARS LATER
, when Maggie passed away, records revealed that she and Forrest had been secretly married for more than ten years.

T
HE BOY STOOD
in the dark room, the only sound his own breathing and thumping heart. He was frightened and alone. He looked over his shoulder, white-blond hair, widely spaced eyes, the nose of his father and uncles. You could tell by the stretch of his legs that he would be a tall man, as tall as his uncle Howard.

The boy looks over his shoulder at me, at us.

He is scared to move, unsure of what to do.

He is the only one who knows we are here, that we are watching.

This boy is my father, Andrew Jackson Bondurant Jr.

W
HEN
I
WAS YOUNG
, a few times a year my family would make the drive down to Snow Creek, four hours from Alexandria, to visit my grandparents. My father’s brothers and sisters all lived in the area as well, so the gatherings usually bloomed into full-scale Bondurant family reunions each time we came to visit; all the uncles, aunts, cousins, and others crowding into my grandfather’s old farmhouse for giant breakfasts and long, slow talks before the woodstove where little was ever actually said. I spent most of the time wrestling in hay-filled barns with my giant cousins, riding tractors in the early morning along muddy creek beds, and grabbing electric cattle fences because they dared me to. My grandfather died in his late eighties; he had just bought a new truck the day before and was building a new house.

I have many important memories of my time there, and of my grandfather; his quiet, hawklike face, early rides in the pickup to feed the cattle, the staggering stoicism of this man. I also remembered the back utility room where he had a gun rack up on the wall. This wasn’t so unusual; in those days in Franklin County shotguns and rifles hung from nearly any flat surface, and in many houses they still do. What struck me about this particular gun rack was the pair of rusty brass knuckles hanging from a nail just below the gun rack. As a young boy the idea of a man putting on the heavy metal implement, purely designed to crush another man’s face, was a thrilling prospect and I spent long periods of time gazing at those brass knuckles. To me they represented something remarkably primal, hanging there below the guns, as if to say:
If you are still alive when I run out of bullets I will pull this hunk of metal off the wall and pummel you into unconsciousness.
Back at the dinner table my grandfather’s heavy, placid face would take on a whole new light. I was terrified of him and fascinated about the life he had led.

I didn’t know of his true past and involvement in the events of the early 1930s until much later. My father didn’t even know he had been shot until a few years before my grandfather’s death, when as part of his genealogical research he came across a series of newspaper articles documenting the events at Maggodee Creek in December 1930. When asked about the shooting my grandfather merely said: Oh yeah, shot me through here, and raised his shirt to show my father the entry wound under his arm. Not much more was said about it after that, which is the way my father’s family communicated about such things.

I must add here that my grandfather, after a few more run-ins with the law, went on to be a respectable, law-abiding, and even revered member of the Snow Creek community for many years until his death. His children and their children, including myself, have all basically faded into the gentle obscurity of decent citizens. It seems that perhaps that part of our blood that prompted such dramatic and dangerous behavior as committed by my grandfather and his brothers in those desperate times, has faded as well.

The basics of this story are drawn from various family stories and anecdotes, newspaper headlines and articles, and court transcripts, particularly from T. Keister Greer’s compilation of grand-jury testimony, titled
The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935.
Greer’s book also provides testimony from the other major players in the conspiracy, as well as background and biographical information. However, this historical information does not help us fully understand the central players in this story, at least in terms of their situation or what their thoughts were; all involved are now deceased and little record exists. There are no letters, and my grandfather and his brothers did not keep diaries. My task in writing this book was to fill in the blank spaces of the known record. There are the family stories, and for this we must rely on the recollection of relatives, like my father, who was alive during the trial though as a very young boy, as well as other local people and friends who knew my grandfather and these other men. These memories and stories are vague and often specious at best, mixed with several decades of rumor, gossip, and myth. These were people who lived and died in real and dramatic ways, but due to the passage of time and circumstance it is difficult to render their lives with complete accuracy or fidelity to actuality.

In order to get at that truth, I created characters based on these people, some who are combinations of the original figures, some quite close to the historical record as we know it, and others who are almost wholly fabricated. Anyone who is a surviving relative of any of the involved parties should not assume that certain characters in this fictionalization are somehow meant to portray someone distinct. It was not my intent to flatter or slander anyone involved with this tragic story, least of all anyone in my own family. I suppose you can consider this a parallel history. I have imagined a number of things for which there is no record, and I have presumed upon the actual historical figures with the liberty that is granted a novelist. My intention was to reach that truth that lies beyond the poorly recorded and understood world of actualities.

There are the facts: The drought of 1930 was severely damaging to the already poor county, and moonshine activity exploded. The “Bondurant filling station” was known to be a hub for moonshining, drinking, fighting, and general mischief. My grandfather and his brothers Forrest and Howard were known around the county and in the papers as “the Bondurant Boys.” My granduncle Forrest Bondurant had his throat cut and somehow survived. He was then gut-shot at Maggodee Creek and later nearly his whole body was crushed by a load of lumber that was dropped on him. He survived all of this, finally succumbing when he fell through the ice in a shallow creek. Maggie was a real woman who stayed with my great-uncle under mysterious circumstances, and their relationship is a matter of family lore. Jack was also shot at Maggodee Creek, and a few years later he married Bertha Minnix, my grandmother, who was a skilled mandolin player who played on the radio and whose parents were members of the Dunkard Church, or Old German Baptist church as it was alternately called back then.

We know that the writer Sherwood Anderson did spend some time in the area seeking out the famous female bootlegger Willie Carter Sharpe, and he did attend the trial where my grandfather and grand-uncles testified. He spent several years in the area, working on his house in Marion and traveling the countryside. Anderson contributed a story to
Liberty
magazine in 1935 about the “Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy.” His last novel,
Kit Brandon,
is commonly understood to have been greatly influenced by his experiences in rural Virginia, the legend of Willie Carter Sharpe, and the Great Moonshine Conspiracy trial.

The shooting of “the Bondurant Boys” at Maggodee Creek by Rakes and Abshire is well documented in court transcripts and newspaper articles, as is the horrific murder of Jefferson Richards and the curious death of Charley Rakes.

Everything else, as Sherwood Anderson would say, is “transmuted by fancy.”

I
AM INDEBTED TO
T. Keister Greer’s exhaustive account of the events of the 1935 trial taken from grand-jury testimony, titled
The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935.
His book provided not only an overview of the often complex and confusing conspiracy, but also court transcripts of my grandfather and his brothers. The works of Sherwood Anderson obviously played a large role in my research, particularly
Kit Brandon; Dark Laughter; Winesburg, Ohio;
and his collected memoirs and letters. Probably the best book ever written on the topic of illegal liquor is Jess Carr’s
The Second Oldest Profession: An Informal History of Moonshining in America.
Another invaluable resource was the Franklin County Historical Society and all of its generous and helpful volunteers. Their exhibits, photos, and records were a great aid, and I encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to visit this museum, situated in downtown Rocky Mount, the epicenter of the moonshine trade.

I would like to thank all of the early-draft readers of this book, including Seth Tucker, Mike Mannon, and K.S. I would also like to thank the various writers who have assisted me in some way with this, including Tony Early and Margot Livesey.

I would like to thank my agent, Alex Glass of Trident Media Group; my editor, Alexis Gargagliano; and all the fine folks at Scribner who made this process a pleasure.

I thank my family for their continued support and love.

And my wife, Stacy, my dearest friend and companion.