The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  This branch of Blackwater Creek was called Maggodee Creek, a local term that once referred to the profusion of maggots that inhabited its waters. Like the main trunks of Blackwater Creek, the water carried a dark, maroon tint caused by the many chestnut trees that grew along the banks and dropped their spiny seed husks into the water which bled out their color over time. The bridge over Maggodee Creek was a simple four-post affair, planked boards laid crosswise, the width of a single car. Deep woods of chestnut, gum, and pine spread on either side.

  About two hundred yards south of the bridge toward Rocky Mount, a small filling station stood in a niche in the wood just off the road. That winter when Forrest left the hospital he bought the station from Lou Webb and took up residence in the upstairs rooms. Forrest’s suppliers and contacts followed and within days cars were lining up and he was running his operation out of the filling station. The blockaders could blaze through Rocky Mount, over Grassy Hill, stop at the station and pick up and drop off and make the run to Roanoke, crossing over the county line in mere minutes. The demand for liquor was steadily increasing and at night the still fires winked across the mountainsides like fireflies. In the winter the heat trails sent plumes of still vapor rising in thin strings from every hollow and hill.

  There was no sign on the station, but from then on, even long after Forrest’s eventual death, it was known as either the Blackwater Station, Burnt Chimney station, or the Bondurant station.

  When he got out of the hospital Forrest removed his stake from the County Line, selling the restaurant cheap to Hal Childress. Forrest also bought a mobile sawmill setup: donkey-engine-powered band saw, a long portable cutting shed, blades, tools, and hand-cutting supplies. After hiring local hands he began to operate a contract sawmilling operation, moving around the county and processing stands of hardwood and pine, his days and nights split between the sawmill camp and the Blackwater station. Behind the station the mountain swelled up and a dozen yards up this hill Forrest built a stone storage shed with a heavy chestnut door bound with iron with a large padlock on the handle. He kept the key on a short chain around his neck, the key hanging in the bony hollow just below his Adam’s apple.

  A few weeks after the incident at the County Line, Maggie appeared at the Blackwater station, manning the small grill there. The upstairs apartment had three rooms and a narrow water closet with plumbing. Forrest set it up with some old furniture, castoffs mostly. When Maggie arrived with her valise, wearing a scarlet dress with ribbons of gold, Forrest turned without a word and led her upstairs. He put the iron-framed single bed in one room with most of the decent furniture and put a straw tick for himself in the other room. Maggie’s room had an oval gilt-edged mirror mounted on the back of a chest of drawers made of stained black walnut that Forrest’s grandfather built. In the sitting room there was a lumpy old couch covered with a sheet that faced the front window looking out over the road and down toward Maggodee Creek, the cracked and chipped castoffs of his mother’s old china stacked on the kitchen shelves.

  Forrest hired a young man from Boone’s Mill named Everett Dillon to run the petrol pumps. Everett was a quiet man in his twenties, dark-faced with a thick shock of black hair who kept his head down, worked hard, and never asked a question about anything. He had a girl up on the mountain having a baby and he needed the steady money. Maggie worked the counter grill like she did at the County Line, though no one bought food at the Blackwater station, so mostly she leaned against the grill, smoking and watching the road through the window. There were regular card games at the station, mostly after hours, and the fuel business was steady, but mostly men wandered in from all over the county and from areas to the north, seeking liquor.

  In the mornings Forrest made breakfast and coffee downstairs while Maggie sat on the edge of the bed and brushed her long hair in front of the mirror. Forrest had the radio from the County Line and in the evenings they sat on the couch looking over the road and smoked cigarettes, listening to the broadcasts from Wheeling or Richmond. When Forrest was sleeping at the sawmill camp Maggie sat on the couch and listened to the radio by herself. Later she would sit in her bed smoking and flipping through the Sears catalog. Sometimes Forrest would come home late when she was already asleep, and when she woke in the morning to the smell of bacon and coffee she knew that he was there.

  Maggie hadn’t said a word to anyone about leaving the County Line, what happened that night, or anything about moving in with Forrest at the Blackwater station. Forrest never once mentioned her to anyone, and nobody ever brought it up, even his brothers.

  Hal often thought of Maggie as he stood in the County Line Restaurant during business hours, pouring drinks and wiping down the bar, a new woman working the grill. The old man for many years afterward found himself wishing to see her out of the corner of his eye, her long form leaning against the grill. Sometimes at the restaurant Hal and other men would talk about the night when Forrest got cut. Hal told them how Forrest laid that man out with the iron knuckles and then nearly kicked the other man to death in the snow, and how Forrest gave him a five spot and told him to go on home, how Hal, Maggie, and Jefferson all left, and Forrest was alone when the men attacked him in the lot and left him for dead in the snow. Over time Hal began to embellish certain things, adding details that seemed to fit the conclusion: a flashed knife, Hal and Jefferson wading into a fray of struggling bodies, Forrest knocking men comatose with clubbing blows, more men waiting in the parking lot, long coats and fancy cars, Northerners perhaps. Forrest standing in the dark doorway, empty-handed and blood smeared on his face, daring them all to come on. The story grew and changed and after some time nobody believed the old man and the story remained shrouded in speculation.

  Forrest also never told anyone about what happened to him that night. There was no police investigation. Men eventually got around to it in the presence of Jack and Howard: How in the hell that man get twelve miles through the mountains, in a foot of snow, to the hospital in Rocky Mount, with his goddamn throat slit wide open? The brothers merely shrugged as there was no way to know such a thing.

  DID YOU GET’ EM? Jack asked his brother as he lay in the hospital.

  No, Forrest said.

  What you gonna do?

  Forrest’s facial expression was placidly neutral above the puckered wound on his neck, purple scabbed and heavily stitched with black thread. A glass of tepid water stood on the bedside table. In the hallway a patient was pleading hoarsely with a nurse for the use of a phone. Forrest’s eyes gazed at some spot beyond the ceiling, and Jack felt moved by the sudden plaintive sight of his brother struck low. His visage reminded Jack of their grandfather, a haggard veteran of the Civil War. In his dim memories the old man sat stiffly on the edge of his bed and whittled small knots of wood.

  I’ll hold them down myself, Jack said. I want to be there.

  Forrest smiled, lips parted over bare teeth, the corners of his bristling scar drawing up like some kind of second mouth, a ghastly double smile.

  I’ll call on you, Jack, Forrest said. And they’ll wish they were dead before we’re done.

  Jack felt in a nauseous rush how his brother’s life would be eventually hacked off at the root like an old stump, and how until then Forrest would live in violence and pain and never rise from it.

  Nothing can kill us.

  Chapter 6

  1934

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON sat in the Little Hub Restaurant in Rocky Mount in the late evening, nursing a cup of coffee and watching two bearded men wearing the plain dark clothes of the Dunkard Church eating ham steaks and buttered toast. The Little Hub seemed to Anderson a good spot to lurk and perhaps pick up a whiff of something as the sheriff and most of the deputies frequented the spot, as did the commonwealth’s attorney, Carter Lee, whom Anderson had been unable to gain audience with. He’d been in Franklin County for three months and had accomplished little more than a few notes, his desk at the rooming house littered with scraps of paper, jottings about scenery or people. H
e had spread nickels and dimes all over the county, most to small boys lurking about the filling stations or lunch counters.

  Willie Carter Sharpe? Yeah, I know of her. Never seen her though.

  You don’t know? Where you from anyhow?

  Anderson did learn that no one around Franklin County called the thing “bootlegging.” That might as well have been a foreign word. You mean blockadin’, sir? What blockades? Nobody ever said “moonshine” either. White Lightning. White Mule. Moon. Stump Whiskey. Mountain Dew. Squirrel Whiskey. Fire Water. He had seen plenty of it over the years in Marion. When building Ripshin his foreman, a seventy-year-old man named Ball, a bear of a man with an outsized belief in his abilities, would take a lark every month. He would hire a car and driver, fill the car with booze and drive around the county stopping off at friends’ places and inviting them to join his roving bender. Once Anderson arrived at Ripshin to find all the workmen drunk, falling from the scaffolding, covered in the white muck of plaster. Most of his friends drank liberally; Faulkner in particular had a true penchant for the stuff and they drank plenty of whiskey together in New Orleans. So what was different about it here? Every other night lines of cars raced through Rocky Mount, the whine of engines working through the walls of his room at the boardinghouse.

  Anderson’s connection at The Roanoke Times got him a copy of the preliminary report, issued in July, submitted to the Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Alcohol Tax Unit, which provided the basis for the grand jury investigation “United States vs. Charles Carter Lee.”

  In the fall of 1928, Charles Carter Lee, The Commonwealth’s Attorney for Franklin County, Virginia, and Sheriff Pete Hodges called the various deputy sheriffs of Franklin County into the office of Pete Hodges, singly and in pairs, making them a proposition to divide the County up into districts for the purpose of assessing illicit distillers and bootleggers a certain amount (from ten dollars to 25 dollars) per month for the privilege of operating with the protection of County officers.

  The grand jury was set to convene in a few weeks, though the location had yet to be set; the papers proposed the trial would likely be outside the county to prevent jury tampering. Several key county law-enforcement officials would be indicted on charges of racketeering and conspiracy, though the coconspirators wouldn’t be named until the actual indictment. In spite of this the blockade runs went on, seemingly unimpeded. Anderson had learned that if he came into certain filling stations and slipped a five on the counter without a word, then stepped outside and waited by his car, in a few minutes a dirty-necked boy would jog around from behind the store and hand him a half-gallon jar of corn whiskey in a paper sack. At one station he handed a slatternly teenage girl a fiver and she turned and scampered up a hill into the bramble and disappeared into the forest. Anderson waited an hour by the road until he figured he’d been hoodwinked in the simplest way, but soon enough a mule came ambling down a trail, a saddlebag bulging with fruit jars of booze. It wasn’t exactly raining from the sky but they were right that the county was full of it. His mistake before was to actually ask for the damned stuff; he found that such transactions were done in the same manner as most in Franklin County, a wordless combination of timing, simple gesture, and mutual assumption. Anderson had six different half-gallon jars in his room at the boardinghouse, lined up along the dresser. It was research of a kind. He had sampled them all and determined that in fact there were some real differences, and he had to admit that some of the stuff was excellent, a layered, complex taste with several discernable characteristics.

  Anderson watched the darkly clad figures in the Little Hub Restaurant. A few farmers sat drinking coffee. Temperance folk obviously, Anderson thought, as everyone else in the county surely must be out gallivanting around a bonfire somewhere in the mountains drinking illegal liquor. The counterman folded his arms over his bulbous midsection and smoked thoughtfully. Another man read the paper at a booth with a stub of pencil in hand, hair neatly parted and oiled. He was dressed in a tight suit and bow tie: a salesman passing through. Anderson looked at his own hands and knew that their delicate fineness would immediately indicate an outsider to anyone who bothered to look. The thought that he would need a translator, an introduction into the world of the working class, made him burn with shame and anger. And now the mythical Willie Carter Sharpe: The only man or woman alive who could hold a Ford wide open down Grassy Hill! as they said on the front porches and around the stove.

  I could give it right back to them, Anderson thought, give them the character they wanted. Nights at the boardinghouse Anderson sat scribbling at a battered old sideboard table, trying to think of all the things he had seen that day, trying to remember the hands of the men in the fields, the boys in the curing shed, the grim farmwives in the cookhouse, the lines of their faces, the cut of their work shirts, the seams of their shoes. But in all these things he saw very little. It was as if the character of these people encouraged a sort of blank anonymity, so unlike the peoples of the Midwest and their quaint charms and frustrated lives, who seemed to open up like a flower for Anderson when they talked. He could read everything in their flashing eyes, their blurring hands. The wide-open spaces of the Midwest allowed a man’s mind to stretch and think. But the strange confines of Franklin, its long skylines, rolling hills, left him with a feeling of enclosure and confinement, as if something dangerous was contained there and the minds of the citizens had to focus on not letting it out. The way the men slouched in their walk, hips forward, legs kicking out in front of them, slew-footed, shoulders rounded, hands buried deep in the pockets of their coveralls. The way they wore their hats low, eyes down on the red clay. Women who had apparently set their faces in a placid grimace for the rest of their lives, hollow-eyed, always in motion, working, fiddling, never sitting still. The straight, worn shifts and muddy boots, a simple cord around a wrist perhaps, a thin cross on the neck. And nobody said anything.

  Then why didn’t he go home? Eleanor? Nobody really knew exactly where Anderson was, including Eleanor, and he thought of this mysterious absence with grim pleasure. It reminded him of the time he walked away from his job in Elyria, Ohio. The Anderson Manufacturing Company, marketing an inexpensive roof coating. He was learning to play golf at the country club that year, 1912. One day he walked out of the office, with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  What’s the matter? his secretary had asked him, her face in rigid alarm. She was an intelligent woman, he thought, even more intelligent than himself. A rainstorm drummed on the windows.

  My dear young woman, Anderson said, it is all very silly, but I have decided to no longer concern myself with this buying and selling.

  You’re sick? she said.

  She was right in a sense, and Anderson knew he had to get out of there right away. He felt if he could just reach the door, then it would be okay. His feet would carry him to wherever he needed to go. Did she think he was crazy? Was he? Anderson looked at his feet.

  My feet are cold, wet, and heavy from a long wading in a river, he had said. Now I shall go walk on dry land.

  As Anderson left the office he knew that it was the words that had lifted him out, and he swore allegiance to them and he passed out of town along a railroad track.

  When he reemerged days later, penniless, dirty, and miles away, people said he must have had some kind of breakdown. Temporary insanity, perhaps, related to stress. They concocted all kinds of reasons why he did it, and when he later became a writer, many others began to ascribe his disappearance to his “artistic temperament.” He tried to explain it in A Story Teller’s Story, the rambling autobiographical piece he was paid far too much for, but it too was a failure.

  They were all wrong. That episode was about something else entirely, and something far more mundane. A hillside of freshly mown grass that overlooked a churchyard. A train platform where a man in a tuxedo stood with a bouquet of flowers, and a woman weeping in the vestibule. Shivering in the damp dirt of an apple orchard at dawn.

  Wh
at stories now?

  A FAINT HUM in the air of the restaurant, and the man with the paper looked up. The counterman flicked his eyes to the window, then the Dunkards, and Anderson heard it too; the low moan of motors accelerating. A run coming through town.

  Anderson stumbled out of his seat and through the front doors. Might as well see the damn thing up close, he figured, and squaring his hat he positioned himself on the front steps, looking south down Main as the engines grew louder. He picked out sets of headlights flashing then disappearing around curves as they wound their way through the southern reaches of Rocky Mount.

  The man with the bow tie stood next to him, paper tucked under his arm. Glancing back Anderson saw the Dunkard family standing by the window. Two sets of lights, then three. Then the light pock pock pock of gunfire, and Anderson and the salesman both ducked and raced back into the restaurant. Here they come, the counterman muttered, and Anderson saw through the window a long black Packard roaring up Main Street, swerving side to side, and behind it two cars, the first with a man leaning out the passenger window with his arm extended, pointing a pistol. The Packard thundered past the courthouse and through the intersection of Court and Main, then slowed suddenly, the back end rising up; the chasing cars swerved to avoid collision, one going through a short section of clapboard fence, the other going up on the sidewalk. Anderson could see the hunched forms of the drivers, gray flannel suits, all shoulders and elbows, as they threw their bodies into the frantic steering. At the intersection the Packard locked its brakes and the back end came around sharply in a cloud of smoke, overcorrected, and then the car shot back south on Main, the chase cars extricating themselves with clumsy three-point turns, then back in pursuit. As the Packard passed the restaurant Anderson caught a glimpse of a passenger wearing a small bowl hat, curly hair, a tight smile on dark lips. A woman.