The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  When the musicians took a break there was a shout and Wingfield held the sport aloft like a torch and marched about, a short troop of men following him. Jack’s sister Emmy stood in a corner with some other girls, giggling and pushing back her hair and Jack saw his sister lit with some kind of momentary happiness, a rare sight. He realized that since the death of their mother and sisters, Emmy so often seemed merely a shadow that flitted across the walls of their father’s home, a set of hands that set food in front of you. As Wingfield came toward Emmy, Jack felt a flare of rage, but the troop of singing men passed her by and Jack was relieved until he saw the small quiver in Emmy’s cheeks, the way she took a breath and thrust out her chin for just a moment as Wingfield passed, the sight of something in her eyes that he hadn’t ever seen before. He knew so little about her and her life. Oh Lord, Emmy, Jack thought, and the slender trunk of his heart buckled for the second time that night.

  Jack started over toward her and there was a roar from Wingfield’s group; he had chosen a girl to kiss and the young people crowded around in a circle to watch. Jack said hello but the girls were too interested in whom Wingfield was kissing, up on their toes to see, and Emmy just put her hand lightly on his shoulder. Jack, taller than anyone there, could see into the circle where Wingfield held the arms of the Dunkard girl.

  Why that’s Bertha Minnix, one of the girls said. That Dunkard girl from Burnt Chimney, the one playing the mandolin.

  Jack watched as Wingfield made a great display of it, gripping the girl by her elbows and ducking in a few times, making feints, drawing shouts from the crowd. Bertha Minnix brought her chin nearly to her chest as Wingfield whooped and the crowd laughed. That damn fool, Jack thought. Then Bertha Minnix raised her face, a tight smile on her lips, tilted her chin up toward Wingfield, who paused, seemingly baffled by her sudden insolence. There was an awkward moment and the crowd grew quiet. Wingfield recovered and winking at the men standing next to him he tucked his head in and kissed her firmly. When he backed away Bertha’s eyes blazed and Wingfield let go of her arms, stepping back, uncertain, Jack could tell, but determined to make a good show.

  Then the men bore Wingfield away and the girls clapped loudly, briefly crowding around Bertha who ducked her head again before heading back to the other musicians who waited with their instruments. The back of her neck under her bonnet was mottled pink and she touched her ear lightly and Jack knew it must be burning.

  Back by the wall Jack drank from the jar that Howard handed to him, then stretched himself to his full height to find her eyes but the guitar player plucked a string and Bertha Minnix set her mouth again, cradling the mandolin to her belly, picking out the chords for “Old Dan Tucker,” and the younger men and women standing there swayed and sang along.

  Get out’a th’ way for old Dan Tucker

  He’s too late t’ get his supper

  Supper is over an’ breakfast fry’n

  Old Dan Tucker stand’n an’ cry’n

  Washed his face in the fry’n pan

  Combed his head on a wagon wheel

  An’ died with a toothache in his heel

  Jack arranged himself along the wall in her line of sight, his cap adroitly positioned, the brim pulled to his eyebrow, letting his cigarette dangle out of the corner of his mouth. Next to him Howard drained the last of the corn liquor, his throat knobbing twice, three times, the quart jar like a water glass in his massive fist. It was an astonishing feat, even for Howard. Sweet Jesus, Jack thought, the man can drink. Howard nudged him with the empty jar and Jack turned and went out into the night.

  The barn lay in a sloping hollow of open pastures with a narrow creek running down the seam. Jack took another quart jar from the box on the floorboard of Cricket Pate’s muddy Pierce-Arrow coupe that they had borrowed. Cars and trucks filled the western quarter of the pasture, with a few Dunkard horse carts. Women leaned against fenders with their arms crossed and looked at men who stood in front of them, hands in pockets, rocking in place slightly. Other men perched on the hoods of cars or the tailgates of horse carts and passed a jar and laughed and slapped at each other with dusty hats. The night was warm and no moon out but plenty of starlight to see.

  Jack had an expansive sensation that comes with the onset of certain evenings; the feeling that, in the end, he would be as free and clear as the air over the mountains. He heard the song build to a crescendo and end abruptly, the harsh chord of the mandolin coming through the air in the field and somewhere in the dark a woman laughed.

  Jack opened the jar and raising it to his lips he thought of that sound again, the picked strings, the quick movement of her hands. Standing there in the freshly mown grass, tasting the hot liquor on his lips he felt the sky open up and the world come pouring in on him.

  JACK COULD NAME the exact moment when Forrest began to distance himself from the rest of the family: as soon as he recovered from the Spanish Lady Flu, the morning when his long blue face rejoined them at the breakfast table. Like all of the Bondurant boys Forrest was a quiet child, prone to long bouts of silence brought on by the apparent opposite of shyness; rather he seized each situation as his own and felt that there was really nothing to add. What is there to say? But after the passing of his mother and sisters Forrest withdrew even further into his own sphere.

  That night Jack was roused by the rocking of the bed as Forrest climbed in at some late hour. Jack curled himself away from the burning presence in the bed, a wad of blankets in his hand. Forrest lay on his back, rigid and staring into the dark.

  Forrest became a figure who passed silently through doors at night, consuming food as if it was just something to get over with. As he aged Forrest retained the stringy, wan look of influenza, his skin even when burned by the sun seeming a slight shade of blue. His eyes remained sunken, his nose more knifelike, his thin, colorless hair already receding as a teenager. But his knotted muscles lengthened, his hands knobby steeples of bone and tendon with iron strength and unflagging endurance, his fists like post mallets. At work Forrest would hammer the tool into submission, bludgeon the task into defeat; he began at a young age to force the world to bend to his will.

  As a teenager Forrest would rise before dawn and top tobacco and pull suckers till dinner, then walk four miles through Snow Creek Hollow to a lumber camp and work a crosscut saw until supper. The next day he would get up and do it again, seven days a week, substituting cattle work, apples, chestnuts, hog butchering, haying, busting clods, harrowing, plowing, carpentry, depending on the season, need, and paying customers. With Howard he took loads of walnuts and apples to Roanoke in oxcarts, and tobacco to Harrisonburg, Martinsville, and Richmond, where he slept on pallets stacked high with pressed tobacco hands in the darkness of the warehouse. He began to drink occasionally, accepting the grimy jar as it was passed hand over hand, though Forrest never took any pleasure in it other than that it helped him put his head down and get his eyes screwed tight long after everyone else had gone to sleep. People moved around him as if he were a wild dog in the street.

  Granville was heard to remark more than once that he was glad at least one of his boys had a solid work ethic. Forrest will never be no ’count, he murmured to the men standing around the stove at the store.

  HIS BROTHER’S dynamism was mesmerizing, and Jack had sought his whole life to find that source of drive in himself. He was eighteen and had nothing to show for it. Jack stood and contemplated the open barn door, a square of light against the dark hills, the drifting music. The cicadas swelled in the trees along the edge of the pasture. He felt like he could stand out there in that field, the liquor humming in his head, and listen and watch all night. It seemed he was plagued with bouts of indolence and idle fancy; such were his gifts. He felt he knew what he wanted, but his industry amounted to little, a handful of change, a few good stories, the same old boots.

  Forrest became increasingly thrifty and even miserly, never a characteristic of the Bondurant men; Howard and Jack never held a dollar for more than a day
, and Granville, while conservative in his money dealings, never paid much attention to the accumulation of wealth and therefore had managed to spend a lifetime in mediocre economic conditions despite a decent business. Forrest was conspicuously accumulating and obsessing over the money he made. He ate little and wore the same outfit every day until the seams gave out. By the time he was eighteen Forrest had proven himself a man not to be trifled with; the tomfoolery of youth was clearly spent, what lay ahead was only the grinding labor of adulthood and death. Forrest met both with narrowed eyes, knotted fists, and silence.

  JACK WALKED BACK to the barn and passing the jar to his older brother he stood again with his hands in his pockets and watched the mandolin player cut through “Fire in the Gum” with her white fingers.

  Say, Jack said, how come Forrest ain’t gone after those sons a bitches from the County Line?

  Howard flipped the lid of the fresh jar into the straw and dirt and took a draw and swallowed, his eyes staying on the musicians, a slight tremor crossing his fleshy cheeks.

  Women gave them wide berth and every man dropped his gaze a bit as he passed by, nodding his head in greeting and quickly eyeing the dusty leather of his boot tops, for the presence of Howard Bondurant, especially when he was drinking, was like a bonfire at your back.

  When the band finished playing Jack left his brother and stood at the edge of the small circle of people that gathered around the musicians as they put their instruments away. He watched the mandolin player speaking with various people, laughing in an easy, relaxed way. Bertha Minnix’s thin neck stretched from her shoulders when she grinned, brushing her cheek to her shoulder. She had a small, plump nose like a chestnut. Have to see her again, Jack thought, have to make sure of it.

  Jack turned and walked back to Howard at the other end of the barn and without saying a word the two brothers seemed to agree that it was a fine night.

  Chapter 8

  1929

  ONE MORNING IN early May, Forrest was in the storage shed when Everett Dillon came trotting around the corner of the station. Everett tugged at his shirt collar with his greasy hands, his face shining with sweat, motioning toward the front lot and the fuel pumps.

  Someone says they here to see you, Everett said. Sheriff Hodges and some others.

  It was early: barely light and a cool mist clung to the roadway as it wound through the valley to Maggodee Creek. Forrest was in his undershirt and hatless; he reached inside the storage-room door and took a long-barreled .38 off the shelf and crammed it into the back of his pants and followed Everett to the front of the station.

  Two long Ford Tudor Sedans, brand-new, idled at the pumps. Four men stood by the car, and another sat in the backseat, profile barely visible, looking straight ahead. One of the men was Sheriff Pete Hodges, a man Forrest had known for years and who occasionally came to Forrest to buy brandy for lodge parties. The smaller, older man was Henry Abshire, one of the local deputies; next to him his partner, Charley Rakes, a big red-faced man wearing suspenders and a fat tie. The fourth man wore a tight, ill-fitting wool suit with a bow tie and Forrest did not know him. He had his hair parted down the middle and oiled, his shoes new-looking but already worn around the toe and flecked with mud. The stranger stood with one hand in his pocket and the other on the hood of the car and he had a smile on his face that Forrest did not like. Forrest stopped by the front door and wiped his hands on a rag and the men approached him as Everett ducked back inside the station.

  Sheriff Hodges was a round fellow, jowly and generally pleasant. It was Hodges who came to Forrest some weeks back to tell him they had no leads on the men who cut him at the County Line and that the county would be officially dropping the investigation. Forrest had figured as much as soon as he woke stretched under hospital sheets. He felt unmoved by the news; he knew that they would come under his reach again. It wasn’t vengeance he sought anyway, rather something more like a reckoning, a balance. It wasn’t something you had to seek.

  Hey Forrest, Hodges said. This here is Jeff Richards.

  Pete Hodges forced a grin and pointed at the new man. Hodges and his deputies normally avoided the Blackwater station, not even acknowledging its existence, and Forrest knew this was because they did not want to disturb the dynamic machinery of illicit booze that kept Franklin County relatively solvent and livable. And because they were afraid.

  Hey there, Pete, Forrest said. Jeff.

  The men shook hands.

  New special deputy, Hodges said.

  Abshire kept his head down and kicked at the gravel. A car came winding down the hill from Roanoke, a Dodge coupe, moving very fast over Maggodee Creek and by the station to the south. All the men turned briefly to watch it pass.

  Forrest idly scratched at the ragged scar that ran under his chin, now stippled white and crosshatched with raised scar tissue.

  I ain’t seen you around before, he said.

  My father worked a piece down in Patrick County, Richards said. Woolwine.

  Who’s in the car, Pete? Forrest asked.

  Hodges winced and looked at Richards. The mist was beginning to burn off the road and the faint smell of woodsmoke drifted across the lot. Forrest rubbed the small lump of wood in his pocket with his fingers. Charley Rakes made an exasperated sound and mopped at his sweaty face with his fat tie.

  Goin’ get something to drink, Rakes said, and walked inside the station.

  Anyone around, Hodges asked, other than Everett and the counter-woman?

  Nope.

  Richards put his hands in his vest pockets and rocked back on his heels.

  That there is the commonwealth’s attorney, Richards said. You know Mr. Carter Lee?

  I know of ’im.

  Hodges cleared his throat.

  Look here, Forrest, he said. Carter Lee wants to work it out so everyone can do a little business. We just wanted to make sure we had your cooperation.

  There was a clacking of metal on glass. Carter Lee was rapping on the car window with his ring. All four men looked toward the car.

  Henry, Hodges said, go see what Mr. Lee wants.

  Henry Abshire walked to the car and bent to the window.

  Look Forrest, Hodges said, this is the way it is. We want to help you build your business. No one will bother you across the county all the way to Roanoke. We got a place in Rocky Mount will sell you whatever you need. Grains, sugar, yeast. Worms and caps too. We got spares at the station.

  Nobody bothers me now, Forrest said, and what would I need all that shit for?

  Jeff Richards chuckled and slapped his leg. Forrest could smell the pomade on him, mixed with the smell of fried pork. He glanced back at the station window and saw Charley Rakes’s bulky form standing at the counter, gesturing with his hands, Maggie shaking her head.

  Richards cussed with a smile and spit in the dirt.

  Hell, we ain’t stupid. We know you movin’ liquor! We know you got it stored up there in that shed an’ you movin’ it from the station here.

  Easy, Jeff, Hodges said. Ain’t no reason to—

  We know ’bout all of it, Richards continued. And if you want to keep movin’ licka then we are going to need to ’ave an arrangement.

  Richards had his head cocked to the side and a smile on his face and Forrest watched his eyes and felt the heat drain to his hands. He began to build the box to hold the flickering flame in his mind.

  Pete, Forrest said evenly, just who in the hell is this son of a bitch?

  Jeff Richards’s grin wavered.

  Look here, he said, Carter Lee—

  You ain’t from around here, Forrest said, taking a step forward.

  Richards shuffled back and Hodges took his hands out of his pockets. Forrest had seen this before; once in a while someone came by the station and tried to set up some kind of racket, usually some men from Roanoke or Richmond in suits and long coats and sometimes there was trouble but after a few incidents they stopped coming. But the local sheriffs never came by to bother, and certain
ly not Carter Lee, the commonwealth’s attorney, the highest law-enforcement official in the county. The long-barreled .38 in his pants was pressed against his spine and Forrest thought about the motion required to bring it out, the angle of his hand on the handle, the flip over his shoulder and across Richards’s nose in a clean semi-circle of wood and steel. He knew that Hodges would bring him in for it and he might spend some time in the joint, but it was clear that this man needed to be hit. He needed to be hit for openly stating what one didn’t talk about in front of the law, total strangers, your family, anyone. He thought about Charley Rakes, still inside the station behind him. If he hit Richards, Rakes might likely shoot him in the back.

  Hodges stepped between them, putting his hand up.

  It’s all settled already, Hodges said. Everybody is getting on board, the whole county. I need you to talk to Howard about this.

  Why don’t you do it yourself? Forrest said.

  Hodges grimaced.

  It would be best if you did it. You unnerstan’ right? Your little brother too. He’s been running stuff, him and Cricket Pate and some others.

  Henry Abshire walked back to where the other men stood. He nodded to Hodges who turned back to Forrest. Hodges’s pupils were pin-pricks in a field of blue and Forrest saw that he was afraid.

  Look, Hodges said, we’d have to cut Howard’s still, and we’d have to take all your stock. We know where the Mitchell boys, Jamison, and Cundiff and the rest of them are makin’ and they are all gonna get on board or their stills get cut too. The entire county. That’s the way it works. We’ll send a man around every few weeks. Start at twenty dollars a month and thirty dollars a load, and that’s complete safe passage through the entire county. No one will touch you.