The Whiskey Baron (17 page)

“No word from Mary Jane, I suppose?”

“Not a thing.”

“Mm. What a mess. State police are combing the county, got people set up in Columbia and Charlotte, but no one’s seen him yet. You heard about that cop that was murdered up in York County?”

Depot set the pint in front of him.

“You have a good evening, Sheriff,” Joe said.

“You do the same. Take care of your boy back there. He don’t look so good.”

“He’s not my boy. Just some kid off the farm.”

“Whoever he is, he ought to be careful what he says and when. I had fewer things on my mind, I’d likely walk over and see for myself what he’s up to.”

“I’ll pass the word along.”

Joe took another swig as he walked back to where Lester and the kid were racking up another game.

“Took you long enough.” The kid grabbed the bottle out of Joe’s hand. “Goddamn, what’d you do? You done drank half the bottle between here and the bar.”

The kid guzzled from the jar and Joe sat back, accepted a cigarette from Lester. As smoke fogged up the bar, Joe closed his eyes and hoped his brother was safe. State police might not be as sympathetic as Chambers if they caught him first. Chambers at least knew the kind of man Mary Jane was. Troublemaker, yes. Killer, no. That gene didn’t run in the family. He’d been in and out of work his whole life, and he made and kept the wrong friends from school, but there was a difference between drinking bootleg and playing bluegrass long hours on the porch, and killing folks to build your own whiskey empire. That was bad business, and Mary Jane didn’t have a head for business, good or bad. One time when they were kids, Joe sold him a penny for five cents because the head faced the wrong direction. Head’s supposed to face this way, Joe said, pointing to his right with the coin facing him. He turned the coin to face Mary Jane and said, “Lookit: It’s pointing the other way,” and Mary Jane handed over a nickel for it. Their father made him give it back and let Mary Jane keep the penny for the trouble. Joe hung his head and apologized, and later stole the nickel and penny both after Mary Jane went to sleep that night. By the next Saturday when his brother went to look for the change to buy some candy at the store building, he’d already forgotten Joe’s hustle and never did mention to anybody why he didn’t buy six cents’ worth of candy like he’d planned on. Just turned red and said he didn’t want anything, assumed he’d lost the money or maybe never had it to begin with. Joe didn’t know.

It was after midnight now, and the three of them had a third of the bottle left. His breath smelled like rotgut, axle grease, a radiator. The whistle would be wailing in a few hours, and he had a twenty-minute stumble to get home. The kid slumped on a stool and nodded his chin to his chest, and Lester was shooting in all the balls, stripes and solids alike. Joe held the whiskey, the bottle warm in his hands, and felt a weight pressing down on him that not even these last drops of liquor would lift.

He slunk out of the Hillside and shuffled into the street, headed west toward the Bell. The night grew cooler by the minute, which helped clear his head. He kicked up rocks in the road as he walked, the crunch of his feet sounding out into the still night. Roadside trees gave way to cornfields, and stalks bumped together in the breeze. The familiar buzz of the night unnerved him in his stupor. The rattling of Satan’s army coming to destroy his soul. Trench warfare, the cough of Howitzers, the hiss and whistle of bullets and canisters of gas. Fire and men screaming and clouds of dirt and dust spattering through the air. And when a battle was over, the eerie silence as the dead were counted, the wounded helped. Groans and coughs, a chorus of whimpers that seemed to emanate from the lot of them, one uniform cry of anguish. No one shouted in those still hours, the echo of the guns still ringing in their ears. The silence that was not silence.

A figure approached on the road, and a moment later Evelyn Tull emerged from the darkness. Her blue dress was stained black by the night, her skin like porcelain beneath the stars. When she reached him she kept her head down, her eyes on the road.

“Where are you coming from?” he said.

“Out for a walk,” she said.

“A walk.”

She didn’t respond. He stood in the road, a few feet from the shoulder where she had paused, and in the starlight he looked her up and down. There was something familiar about her, the way she held herself, composed and graceful even in the middle of the night. She looked young. Not like his boys looked young, still boys. She was a grown woman, but young, her skin smooth and fresh and unlined. Unharmed by the ills of the world. He remembered Susannah in the barn loft being like that. Something whole about a woman as she
entered adulthood, something that fractured as she aged. A smile less wide, eyes with less life. He suddenly felt a deep and untenable ache for this young woman, a desire to protect her from what he knew to be just around the corner. A cloud hovering above her, waiting for just the right moment to descend.

He tried to speak, slurred, “I told my boy not to be sparking you. That you wasn’t one of us. But I can see why he might not listen to me.”

He stepped toward her, caught his balance as one sluggish foot landed in front of him, then the next.

In the faint light, he saw in her eyes a flood of fear as she sidestepped away from him and scurried along the road. He tripped and fell to his knees, cursed at his clumsiness. He watched her pick up her pace, grab her dress, and nearly break into a run.

“Stay away from my boy,” he called after her, but he was no longer certain whose sake he had in mind.

R
are was the day anymore where Chambers could sit on the porch with his wife and rock away the afternoon. It was something he’d always longed for, time when they could relax and reflect on the fruit of their lives. Not everything had come to pass that he may have planned on, that they may have planned on, but all told it had not been a bad life. She was out there now, chewing on her nails and rocking slowly. Often she enjoyed reading outside, but today she was simply staring, which struck him as faintly ominous. He watched her through the window and wondered what she was thinking about. Perhaps nothing. She had the blessing of a still mind—not an empty or a slow mind, but a tranquility he’d always envied.

This afternoon he needed to get on to the station to check in with the state police and their dragnet, to see if there was any word of Mary Jane, any chance he could soon put the awful mess behind
him. Instead, he poured two glasses of iced tea and joined Alma on the porch.

She looked at him a moment before taking the glass. She said, “I didn’t reckon you’d be staying home this afternoon.”

“I can’t join my bride at the homestead?”

“It’s been a long time since I was a bride.”

“You’ll always be my bride,” he told her, settling into a rapid rock beside her. The bones in his left arm signaled yet another storm this evening, as though once the good Lord decided the county deserved water, He would provide in abundance. Chambers pumped his fist, unable to complete the grasping motion. He said, “I do have to go back in.”

“Won’t look good if the voters catch the sheriff idling on the porch.”

“Not when younguns are getting shot in front of an illegal tavern,” he said, ignoring her sarcasm.

She sat still and waited for him to speak, which he would eventually, but for now he just wanted to rock. She had more on her mind than peace and tranquility this afternoon, and he was content to let that lie. In the early days of their marriage, he pestered and pried, but he’d learned that most of her blue moods would cure themselves with or without him. Signing the paper at the church meant you were together always, so what choice did she have but to come around?

After a while he said, “You know, I always did like Mary Jane. We’ve had our run-ins, me and him, but he’s not a bad man. He always knew when to stand back when a bar fight was brewing, and he tells a good story.”

“You’re thinking he might not be guilty of anything?” she asked.

He reached over with his aching arm and took her hand, glad to feel her sliding away from whatever shadow had passed over her this afternoon. “I remember one time, way back before Larthan Tull ever set foot in this town, I went camping with my brother James out on the river and went on a regular bender. I disremember what for, we just had us a few days off, I reckon. I think you and the boys were visiting your momma.”

As always, he grimaced inwardly at the thought of their dead sons. If Alma noticed, she didn’t show it.

He went on, “Mary Jane was probably only eighteen at the time, younger even, and he came up on us in the afternoon, trout fishing. Even though James and I were two old drunks, Mary Jane sat with us about three hours shooting the shit. Good kid. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that time a lot lately. I don’t see much of James anymore, and it makes a man nostalgic to grow older. Things are changing so much around here, I feel like all I do is pine away for something that used to be. Or maybe it never was. Maybe I’m misremembering the past. When I was young I couldn’t wait to be older, and now I’d give anything to be young for a little while again.”

When he finally quit, his wife smiled and squeezed his hand. She said, “Do you have any idea how foolish you sound? You men never can allow yourselves to be content, can you?”

“I’m content enough,” he said, and he understood that Alma was not out of the shadow after all, that she’d merely been biding her time, waiting for it to go away on its own. But he’d pestered her, as always. That was one piece of wisdom he’d learned: Nothing ever changed in a marriage.

She went on, “There’s no such thing as content enough. You’re either content or you’re not. You can be happy enough. You can be content and happy enough. Or you can be unhappy, but content. Or you can be discontent, happy or not, which is what you are.”

“So am I happy or not?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re discontent, Furman. Probably always will be as long as you’re off chasing those bootleggers. You know why women can be content without ever thinking of happiness?”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we’re practical. We can accept things the way they are, even if we don’t like them, and we can move on. You’re like a child, you and all those men out there. Always dreaming and scheming and mourning some part of you that you feel like you’ve lost, and you’re ignoring the world around you.”

“What am I ignoring?”

“Me, for one thing. You’ve been running all over chasing after men who don’t really matter. What are you avoiding here? Why do you stay half the night down at the station when they don’t need you?”

“I’m here now,” he said.

“Yes, but for how long? Forget your job for a while. Let Larthan and Mary Jane and the rest of them take care of themselves. Let the feds come in and burn their operation down and take them all to Columbia. Enjoy yourself while you still can.”

“Just up and quit?”

“Why not? Our land’s paid off. We can take in a tenant and do just fine for ourselves.”

“That’s tempting, but I can’t do that.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“I owe it to somebody to see this thing settled. What if Mary Jane’s innocent?”

“What if he’s not?”

“If he’s not, half the police in the state are out to find him over that murdered patrolman. He’ll be lucky to see trial if some of those fellas catch him. Lord knows what would happen if Larthan gets ahold of him. But if he is innocent, I feel like I owe it to him to see him cleared.”

She quit rocking. He held his breath while he waited for whatever she might say, whatever judgment she might pass. He knew she put up with more than her share of his grief, especially since their sons had died. Life with a badge, keeping the peace, enacting justice, all of it just a game, he knew, a way to stay busy and keep going. To feel useful in a meaningless world. Alma knew that too, which is why her opinion of him mattered so deeply. If she thought he was a fool who was wasting his life, he likely was.

But she surprised him today. Rather than suggesting he retire, she squeezed his damaged hand again and said, “You never were one to shirk your responsibility, even in a lost cause. It’s what I love about you.”

She resumed her rocking. He took a sip of tea, drained the glass to cool his parched throat. He set the glass on the porch beside him and stood to go. She gave him permission with a glance and a smile, so he said, reluctantly, “I’ve got to get on.”

T
he agents showed up at the Hillside earlier than usual, but they’d been in town long enough for someone to have tipped Tull off and for him to have gotten the building clean, so that he sat waiting for them on the porch when they arrived. This was an old routine for this pair. Stationed in Columbia, Jeffreys and O’Connor made a loop up the Broad River, through Castle and on up to Gastonia, over to Asheville and down through Seneca, along the Indian maiden Issaqueena’s trail to Ninety Six and back to Columbia, busting up stills and collecting money and information along the way.

Tull knew them well enough to know they weren’t going to bring him in. He also knew they were after Aunt Lou, which they didn’t know he knew, but which didn’t concern him much. The buck could be passed, but in his line of work, as long as someone was up or down the chain, those in the middle didn’t have to worry as much. He stood on the porch of the Hillside and sneered at the agents as they pulled into the grass on the side of the road.

Jeffreys gave O’Connor a look that said, “This is going to be fun.”

O’Connor didn’t acknowledge it, just stared at Tull relaxing on the porch, his boot kicked up on the wall, chomping an unlit cigar between his teeth. Tull spat. “I heard y’all were at the sheriff’s office. That’s new for you.”

“Just cooperating with your local law enforcement,” O’Connor said. “You know the drill.”

Tull sneered. “Come on in. Maybe I missed a can somewhere.”

The agents entered the Hillside and were met with the stench of cigar smoke, old wood, vomit. The room dank and empty other than the three men, gaunt and hollow in the dim light like lost souls ferrying across the River Styx.