The Whiskey Baron (28 page)

As darkness settled on this weary September night, it found Tull on his loading dock with a bottle of his own brew, and then he was gone, the factory shuttered for the night. Depot cruising through the streets of Charlotte, Tull God knows where, his daughter tied to the post in her upstairs bedroom, and somewhere Quinn Hopewell waited for his ladylove. And somewhere, perhaps, his younger brother was falling into a fitful slumber, sweat streaking down his face. The end is coming for all those here, this town, this world, this life one leaf in time’s great history, and the autumn would soon arrive. The leaf would flare in one bright and beautiful last gasp before withering to its dry remains and falling to the earth. Despite new buds, new leaves in the years to come, this world would decompose into a roux of old matter long forgotten, waiting for a new beginning.

F
riday. Nearly two weeks on the run and a permanent shift in his soul like water bubbling over the lip of a pot, Mary Jane lay in bed at the boardinghouse and watched a shelf cloud float across the sky. The anvil of a thunderhead in the distance. Heat lightning. A storm that would gather mass but perhaps only bring the promise of rain, a few drops as if to tease the dry earth. Mary Jane knew those worries well, the son of a farmer, and he worried still because you needed corn for liquor. No matter your business, you couldn’t escape the tyranny of nature. Many years it seemed as though the blaze of summer had through its own will a determination to ruin a year of crops through drought.

At midday church bells tolled and in the early afternoon a herd of shoats passed under his window. Fatigued yet sober, finally, he swung his legs out of bed and got dressed. He gingerly fastened his
suspenders, even though his shoulder was no longer raw meat. The wound had scabbed over and a blue bruise had spread across his shoulder and into his chest, which made him look like he’d come down with the plague.

The boardinghouse’s proprietor, a war widow who never could seem to slow down and have a decent conversation, surprised him when he came downstairs, for she sat alone in the dining room with a jar of what Mary Jane suspected was Larthan Tull’s whiskey. Her eyes lolled a bit as he came in, but she made no move to hide her drink, nor did she flinch when he sat across from her.

“You’re welcome to some of this.”

“Much obliged,” he said, already bringing the jar to his lips.

“There’s no occasion, in case you was wondering. I just sometimes need a break from being responsible.”

“Don’t we all.” He raised the glass and took another long drink.

“Oh, you’re a wild one all right. I can see it now. You never did quit carousing around like a young buck, did you?”

“No, ma’am, I guess I didn’t.”

“Plenty of men like you out there.”

“None of them quite like me.”

“That’s what you can tell yourself, but you’re old enough to know there are only so many kinds of people out there.”

“Most of them decent, God-fearing folks.”

“Maybe, though you might be surprised,” she said. “Lot of folk pass through here, and what comes out ain’t always fit to tell. Maybe because they’re on the road—or out of work or out of luck, one—but a side comes out that I’m sure they wouldn’t show their mommas. You can learn a lot about a man by the way he travels.”

She hardly paused as she spoke these words, and when she finished she upended the jar of whiskey and licked her lips like a predator before a wounded prey.

He said, “And what does that tell you about me?”

“You believe you’re carrying some burden, and that by behaving yourself, staying up in your room when you’re sick with the drink, that you’re making up for whatever it is you think you’ve done.”

“And have I?”

“Have you what? Made up for it? I can’t tell you without knowing the how and why, but I can tell you it’s nothing more than any other man that comes through here. Take me, for instance. I got a brother on a chain gang, out in Gastonia. Thought I’d take a day off and bring him and the guys some sandwiches, have a right nice break with them, but instead I’ve drunk too much to drive myself anywhere, so maybe it’ll be next Friday when I can get out there to see him.”

“It’s only another week.”

“How many weeks are there? Not that many.”

“I appreciate the drink,” he said.

“You take care of yourself.”

When he left his head was woozy. He wasn’t due to meet Aunt Lou for a few hours, but he would need to be careful to sharpen up before nightfall. Shouldn’t be too difficult. He’d spent half his money and was robbed of the rest of it, so he couldn’t scare up a wild time even if he had a notion. Which he didn’t.

He wandered the rough streets in a daze. The air seemed electric, ionized before the coming night’s storm. He moved generally southwest, away from the city and into the countryside, toward nothing until he was free from the bustle. Any direction would take him somewhere eventually. Asheville or Columbia or on up to Richmond. But not on foot. It had taken more than a week to evade the dragnet spoken of by the blind man on the mountain, to wend his way from Castle to Charlotte. No, he was where he needed to be now. It was time, this last effort to get a payoff and stabilize his life.

Along about twilight he tired and stopped on the side of a dusty one-lane and stared at the sky as the stars began to awaken. In the west a bundle of clouds mopped up the last of the day’s light so that the stars in the east shined unnaturally bright. Orion, the Archer, a bright speckling lot of them up there, twinkling away like the eyes of the gods man had created. He lay down next to a cornfield and listened to the tall stalks clack and the bugs ratchet like a plague of locusts. He’d never before thought of corn that way, as an eerie unknown void. Growing up on the farm, corn was just corn, one more crop with nothing more mysterious about it than a field of grass.

Autumn meant the harvest was coming, and he could feel it now,
in the air, the early chill in the night and the musky, ripe scent of decaying leaves in the air. He planted his feet in the hard red clay of the piedmont. Rocks and mica and roots underneath him, held together by this iron-rich soil, red like the surface of Mars. Mars, a planet out there twinkling, if he knew how to look for it. He sat up on his haunches, ever the country boy, and felt the earth below him, the clay baked and lined with cracks like a roadmap, or broken glass. All variations of gray in the gloaming, the stars, the white half of the hovering moon.

He thought of No Man’s Land, the night out of the trenches, wandering among the dead. Tonight, as out on the French plain, as the night he’d come in from the Hillside with a bleeding shoulder and his friends lying dead in the street, he felt no faith in God. For so long he’d been a believer, a Baptist, a good man trying to serve the Lord, but out here in the vastness of it all he thought he might never have truly believed a word of it. What was happening to him? Why was he out here, and how would he ever come back from it?

He lay on the ground, on his stomach, and rested his head on his arm. The ground was still warm from the day’s heat, even as cool air passed over his back and ruffled his thinning hair. Goose bumps rose on his flesh, and he began to pray. The twenty-third Psalm came to him, the Lord’s Prayer, but he could get neither one right so he quit. The liquor inside him had caught up and slowed him down, and the world no longer seemed to matter the way it had even a few moments ago. All of it vanity, all of it pointless. He closed his eyes, and all he wanted to do was sleep. To lie here and sleep and figure everything out in the morning. But what he really wanted was to feel well again, to have one more day in his life where he had no obligations and felt no guilt.

On the mountain, Ephraim had told him,
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life
. But it took more than belief, Mary Jane believed, for belief was a meaningless gesture of the mind. Guilt lay in the heart and stemmed from action, or inaction, on which belief had no bearing. He had a task before him, but his hazy thoughts kept him rooted where he was for a long while. He grew drowsy and even dozed for a time.

He woke in darkness with a throbbing head and the inclination to remain where he was for the night. Aunt Lou had told him to meet her Friday evening, which meant this was his moment to sell her on his and the widow’s whiskey, to live up to all that big talk with Ernest and Lee, and to have at last a steady flow of income that would allow him to settle down with the widow and perhaps attain a normal life. He knew that even if Aunt Lou signed up for his product this evening, he would still have to deal with Larthan Tull, and that thought nauseated him.

Still, an hour later he stood in Aunt Lou’s foyer, ready and waiting to make his pitch. The house was dark and he could hear thumping from upstairs. The sentry who’d let him in had disappeared. Mary Jane crossed his arms and leaned against the wall to wait. He was hungry. It had been a long time since he’d had a full meal, his only sustenance this past week the boiled gruel from the boardinghouse. Despite his hunger, he grew calm as he waited, more sure of himself now that he was back in the city, away from God’s dark and the chattering corn.

When Aunt Lou shuffled down the stairs, she rasped, “Evening, Mary Jane. Wasn’t sure I’d see you today.”

“We had an appointment,” he said.

“Come, come.”

She ushered him into the dining room and turned on the light.

At the table sat Depot Murphy, with his bullet head and his lazy eye. He looked out of place in the lights of Aunt Lou’s dining room, but when Mary Jane saw he held a Colt .38 against the oak tabletop, his appearance no longer seemed to matter.

W
illie lay on the bed with his head turned to the wall and listened to the sound of his brother packing. Their mother slept in the other room, and sometime earlier this evening their father had left, no one yet acknowledging that he’d taken to drinking worse than Mary Jane ever did. Joe had merely come in from work and paced around the house a few minutes before slinking off. Willie’s grandfather, still weak from his stroke and unable to get out of bed, had said to Willie, “Boy, you’re going to have a long road in this life.”

Willie hadn’t had to ask what Abel meant. “I know,” he’d said.

The old man had closed his eyes and gone back to sleep. He slept all the time now, as though in preparation for that final rest.

Later in the day, Quinn, too, had gone out on foot and returned at twilight. Willie was still awake in the darkened room, listening to his grandfather’s wheeze and expecting each breath could be the old
man’s last. Nothing but silence in the rest of the house. Everyone was leaving, and he couldn’t understand why. They’d made a home for themselves here, and although it wasn’t perfect it was their home and they were here together.

That was important because there were genuine dangers out in the world that you needed numbers to combat. The Bell might be a small community, where everyone knew everyone’s business like a big family, but the village also had a family’s good sense to leave certain stones unturned, certain things unsaid. No one had ever talked about Mary Jane and Widow Coleman, and the rumors of the Hillside murder had quieted now with the feds in town. Sheriff Chambers still shuffling every which way to investigate. The Hopewells hadn’t started locking their doors, but more than once he’d seen his mother fingering the lock as she came in for the last time at night. A pause, her hand on the knob. Should she do it? Were they safe? Was anyone?

The Bible spoke of sin couching at the door. Jesus wouldn’t lock his door. He’d wait calmly for someone to break in and he’d offer him a glass of wine and his wallet. But that Old Testament God sure would lock His doors, were He on earth as man. Willie felt certain tonight that God would soon whip up a flood or send in a plague and wipe everyone away. An eye for an eye, bone for bone, blood for blood. Rumor had it people still lived that way in Mexico, where outlaws robbed for the pure pleasure of robbing, even gave away their loot because they had so much of it. Sport, was all, just sport. Sin hurts. His family had fractured, always one step away from another casualty: their sister, their grandmother. Mary Jane on the run and their father off with his whiskey and Quinn packing a bag.

Quinn clicked shut the clasps of his suitcase and Willie stirred and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Go on back to sleep.” Quinn put his finger to his lips, grabbed his bag, and tiptoed to the back door, where the sound of the hinge would be muffled. The hinges creaked and then he slunk into the backyard. Willie followed him.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“Nothing. Go on back to bed.” When Willie didn’t move, Quinn
said, “I’m leaving with Evelyn tonight. We’re catching a train first thing in the morning.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Not for a while. Maybe never.”

Willie hung his head and kicked at the dirt. It must be past midnight now, and the whippoorwills and tree frogs sang their night’s refrain, their atonal chorus. Wind cascaded through the tops of shade trees that guarded their lawn, and the treetops tossed, a scatter of black and gray, like the beginning of a picture show when the speakers hiss and pop and the projectionist puts the film into focus.

“You’ll be all right,” Quinn said. “A few more years, maybe you can move up north with me. We’ll start us a business or something. Until then, you got to learn to keep things close if you want to survive in this world. You can’t go telling every secret you have.”

Quinn slugged his shoulder, and Willie looked up. A pinecone thumped against the grass after falling from a tree. Limbs clapped above them, and the brothers stared at each other in the night. Willie couldn’t think of a thing to say to keep his brother here, even for another minute longer. His brother had a girl waiting on him, so what more was there to say?

“I’ll see you,” Quinn finally said, and walked away from the house. Willie watched his brother creep through the front yard in the moonlit night. Down the ashy road, under the silhouette of the water oaks, his shadow merging into the night. Whippoorwills chirred far off. A frog croaked. Without thinking about it, Willie followed his brother’s path to the road and kept going. In front of the house on Harvey Lane, he could still see Quinn’s figure, walking like a dandy, a merry jaunt.