Cricket said he knew a man here named M. O. Walsh, an itinerant railroad hack who negotiated booze trades and sales when he was sober. Three men stood smoking and leaning against the station wall, hats pulled low. Drivers. One man’s jacket gapped open to reveal a pistol stabbed in his belt with a barrel at least a foot long. They did not acknowledge Jack and Cricket. Another man sat on the cement stoop, spitting.
Cricket, the sitting man called out, and stood, smacking his thighs. He had a four-day-bender beard and eyes that burned under his watchman’s cap.
The two men exchanged greetings and Cricket introduced M. O. Walsh to Jack.
I know of ye, M.O. said, a slight Irish lilt to his voice. I’ve heard of you boys from Blackwater. Your brother’s the one who got his head cut clear off, yeah? Heard he walked it off and drank white mule through ta’ hole in his neck.
Let’s get on, Jack said, we ain’t got much time.
What you got?
We’ve got sixty, Jack said, of quality crazy apple, the best in Franklin County. And then we got another thirty of rotgut.
It ain’t so bad, Cricket said.
Hang on, then, M.O. said, lemme go talk to Floyd. M.O. went inside the station, disappearing into the murk behind the greasy windows half plastered with newspaper. Cricket and Jack lit cigarettes and stationed themselves by their cars. The other three drivers stood locked against the wall like dark totems, their faces momentarily lit by a drawn cigarette, a set of pursed lips. After a few minutes the station door banged open and a man in a three-piece suit and tight derby hat came striding out. Floyd Carter was as tall as Jack and hooked like a sickle. His suit was clearly quite new, tailored and pinstriped, though worn through at the seams and stained around the cuffs. His long horse face was clean shaven and fleshy. He stopped before Jack and Cricket and thrust his hands in his pockets with conviction, M.O. close behind.
You boys got something to unload, he said.
Yep, Jack said. M.O. says you got sixty of crazy apple and thirty of rotgut.
Yep.
I hear the commonwealth’s attorney got you boys’ nuts in a vise over in Franklin.
Shadows flickered in the station and men shuffled in the mud behind him. Jack was sweating through his shirt again, and the hanging weight of the pistol in his jacket pocket was like a lead yoke.
Damn shame, Floyd Carter said. Sheriffs escorting loads out every week, driving the price down for everyone else. I give you four for the apple. Two for that other.
Jack looked at Cricket, who was idly picking at loose threads on his coat.
Thought we agreed, Jack said, on five for the apple and three for the other.
We agreed? Carter said. Who is we?
Jack gestured at M.O., lurking at Carter’s elbow. M.O. licked his lips.
Mr. Carter, he said, I figured we could do them a sight better.
Now why in the hell, Carter said, would I want to do that?
Well…
Sorry boys, Carter said, that’s the going rate. If you don’t like it you can turn yourselves around and head on back to Franklin. I’m sure the sheriffs will give you the same price, without all the fuss.
My name is Jack Bondurant, Jack said. We come from the Blackwater station.
Without taking his eyes off Jack, Carter popped a backhand across M.O.’s chest that raised a cloud of dust. Carter’s fleshy lips rippled into a grin, revealing a mixed array of yellowed teeth.
Shit, boy, why didn’t you say so? C’mon inside, Jack.
Carter turned and led Jack into the station. Inside a gaslight wavered on one wall, a few candles puddled on a table. A few men sat around the table at the edge of the light, only their hands distinct in the gloom. An open jar sat on the table, a shaker of salt, and a plate of dried beef and hard eggs. Carter led Jack into a back room with another gaslight that revealed a rusty sink and a tall china cabinet with punched-tin panels. A fat man stood in a corner with a shotgun cradled in his arms.
Look, Carter said, drawing his arm around Jack, I figure we can work out something.
His breath stunk of eggs and the lank hair under his hat was peppered with hunks of dandruff. Jack didn’t know what to make of it, other than he was worried to be separated from his booze and to have Cricket out there alone to watch it. This man had been married to Willie Sharpe, the mountain beauty and blockading queen? The pistol in Jack’s pocket clunked against something similarly hard and metallic in Carter’s coat but Carter didn’t seem to notice. M. O. Walsh came in the room with a can in each hand, one of the crazy apple and the other rotgut. After setting both on the sink he opened the cans and slopped a bit of the liquor into jelly jars, then poured a bit of each onto a saucer.
Now git, Carter said.
Walsh bowed slightly to Jack and lumbered out the door. The man with the shotgun shifted slightly, stretching his neck.
Always got to check, Carter said. You unnerstan’.
Carter struck a match and tossed it into one of the saucers. A blue flame rippled, wavered, sparkling. The sugar in that rotgut, Jack thought. Carter popped another match into the second saucer. The crazy apple burned with a more orange flame, weaker, because the alcohol was lower, but a more pure burn. Carter then shook each jar and raised it to the oil lamp and appraised the bead with a practiced eye. He winked at Jack.
Just ’tween us, Carter whispered, square?
He bent to Jack’s ear.
Them other boys, he said, ain’t getting but four.
Carter opened the china cabinet, taking out a strongbox. He lit a tallow candle on the table and proceeded to count out some bills from a wad that could choke a mule. The man with the shotgun hung in the shadows like an old coat, the shotgun a frozen halberd across his form.
Here you go, Carter said, sixty gallons at five is three hundred, and thirty at three is ninety. He handed Jack the two stacks of bills.
Carter clapped his arm around Jack again.
Welcome to the Midnight Coal Company! Carter said. Let’s get it unloaded, what say?
When they finished transferring the cans Carter stuck his head in Jack’s window.
Say, you tell ol’ Forrest that Floyd Carter says hello. They say the goddamn sheriff’s running things in Franklin but I figured ol’ Forrest and that big ox Howard wouldn’t bend over for no fat cat! You tell ’em I said so!
JACK COASTED the Model A up the drive and drew it up to where his father had parked it the night before. It was still before five, and Emmy wouldn’t be up, so he leaned on the hood for a moment and watched the stars wink out over the hills. The tobacco fields began to take shape, the withered stubs casting star-shadow and the night was so quiet that Jack could hear Snow Creek gurgling at the bottom of the hill. He had a cigarette and counted out the money again. Two hundred thirty dollars and change. One week’s work. The future rose up like the coming dawn before him and he grinned and kicked his heels in the grass before turning to the house and shrugging off his father’s suit.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON Jack was in Slone’s Haberdashery, working his blistered feet into those burgundy calfskin boots. The creamy inside was as soft as he dreamed it would be and the two dollars seemed like a mere pittance. He also picked up a long camel-hair coat, a sharp Dunlap cap to match, leather driving gloves with pearl snaps, two shirts with collars, a paisley bow tie, and a wool three-piece suit made in England with pinstripes. He tried them on in back and came out with his old clothes in a bundle and handed it to Slone.
I’ll wear it out, he says to Slone. You can burn those other things.
At the counter he picked up a handful of nickel cigars and slapped down the cash for his purchases. Slone never looked at him straight, not once, but Jack didn’t care, admiring himself in the shop mirror as Slone rang out his change. A cluster of men in the back murmured around a newspaper, shaking their heads.
What’s that about? Jack said, jerking his chin.
Slone reached over and tossed a copy of the Roanoke paper on the counter. The headline was
in four-inch bold type: NEW WALL STREET PANIC!
Give me one of them Brownie cameras as well, Jack said. May want to get a picture of myself with my new car.
Slone got the camera and rang it up.
I’ll be back soon, Jack said.
I hope so, sir, Slone said, bowing his oiled head.
JACK HEADED straight to the car lot and ended up plunking down two hundred dollars on a 1928 Model A Sport Business Coupe, midnight blue and with a cargo trunk rather than a rumble seat. The two-hundred-cubic-inch engine would do forty horsepower, with three-speed transmission and four-wheel brakes. The speedometer, a wheel rolling back and forth through a small window, topped out at eighty miles an hour. The trunk would hold sixty gallons easy; he would tighten the springs up to take the extra weight and Cricket claimed he could put on a downdraft carburetor to up the horsepower; maybe they could even bore out the cylinders to increase displacement if they could get the right tools. Either way, to Jack it was the first step in his new business, the start of an empire. He had every expectation that in a few months he would head to Martinsville for the V8 Lincoln, maybe the Packard 8 Phaeton or Club Sedan. He drove the Model A off the lot, puffing a cigarillo, cap pulled rakishly to one side, the top down even though the day was cool with the onset of autumn. Twenty bucks in his pocket making a nice knot against his thigh. Now Forrest would have to support his plan; it was too easy and he had practically a guarantee from Floyd Carter in Burning Bag.
He thought of the look on Bertha Minnix’s face when he’d step off the running boards in his new pinstripes, camel-hair coat, boots gleaming. He would make a present of the Brownie camera; he realized now that he was planning that all along. She seemed like the type who would like to take pictures. He saw the light in her face, her thin lips smirking at the corners in embarrassment, fingering the downy hair around her neck. Jack pushed the four cylinder till the valves pinged, shifting into high gear and drifting through turns, the fresh tires biting gravel and spinning hunks of clay and dirt into the wayside. There weren’t many roads in Franklin County that you could get up past thirty except the hard road 33 and a few other stretches, but Jack figured he’d get his chance soon enough.
Have to make a serious impression, he thought, after that mess at the Dunkard church. A completely different man. An upstanding man of promise, an entrepreneur, a man who made things happen and did it with his own wiles. The world was changing, evolving, and the man who didn’t jump would be left behind in the muddy hole. Yes, Jack thought to himself, it’s time I did some courting. It’s high time I begin to separate myself from the rabble.
Chapter 17
1929
THE FORD BANGED down a gravel road just south of Penhook near the Pittsylvania County line. The car swung into a dirt drive that carried over a rise and into a small hollow, the temporary sawmill camp, a clearing between two stands of pitch pine and black spruce. In the clearing a long covered shed made of logs and discarded sheet metal stood in the sunshine, a few smaller outbuildings flanking it. At the rear of the shed, nearest the circle of trees, a tall double boiler sat rusting in the grass, its smokestacks nearly twenty feet high and blackened with creosote and canted to one side. A truck sat under one end of the shed near a tall stack of uncut pine logs, an old Model T without wheels up on blocks, coughing out great gouts of black smoke. A belt was hooked up to the rear axle that looped around a set of cogs to a large-toothed table saw. Wood in various states of milling stood about in stacks and piles, the ground ankle deep in rich-smelling sawdust. In the clearing pairs of men plied long crosscut saws to enormous logs propped on sawhorses, wrestling the saws back and forth with a ragged, desperate motion; others hitched teams of mules to the logs to drag them to the shed. Other men under the shed worked the belt saw and still more were engaged in planing the logs and stacking them into piles.
Forrest stood at one end of the table wrestling the end of a pine log into the table-saw chute. His dungarees were dusted with wood chips, the sleeves of his sweat-soaked undershirt rolled up high. He was hatless, his hair matted with sweat and sawdust. Jack worked at a table under the shed with a bulky wooden block planer, shaving the edges off planks in long strips. At the other end of the clearing at the edge of the forest Howard pulled a crosscut saw with another man. A team of mules hitched to a wagon stood in the sunlight, nosing at crabgrass and thistles that lay trampled in the dirt.
When the roadster pulled up to the shed Forrest flicked an eye in that direction and continued to manhandle the log on the table. The men plying crosscut saws paused, releasing their handles and standing up from their feral crouches, wiping their brows with their shirtsleeves. Howard glanced at the car and then nodding to the man opposite tore into the log again, his heavy torso shuddering with each stroke. Jack dropped his block plane onto the table as two men climbed out of the car. Both wore short, fat ties, low hats, muddy boots, and belted slacks. Charley Rakes’s sour, doughy face was scrunched in the sunshine. Abshire the smaller man, finely built with a delicate mouth. They walked past the pairs of crosscut men and continued on under the shed.
Here we go, Jack thought, this could be it so get your yellow ass ready. No way Forrest would let them get away with what they’d done to him, and with Howard there too it ought to be some fun. I’ll be ready, Jack thought, and I’ll get my shots in.
As the men approached, Forrest kicked a heavy switch on the floor and the big saw spun to life with a raspy whir. He pulled his hat low and pushed the log along the groove that led to the blade. Rakes and Abshire stepped back as the blade met the log with a scream, sending funnels of sawdust in several directions. For a few minutes they all watched the log inch down the chute into the blade that split it in a clean line, Forrest hunched over the far end, using an iron hook to pull the log along, leaning into it. Then Rakes pulled out a revolver from under his coat and pointed it at Forrest’s head.
Jack took a step forward and then looked to Howard, still sawing at the edge of the clearing. The circular blade started to smoke as it churned into the log and a small boy sprang from behind a woodpile with an oilcan and lubricated the blade with a practiced eye, then turned and ran back to his spot in the woodpile, where he hunched over a small block of wood that he whittled earnestly with a jackknife, an eye on Charley Rakes’s gun. Forrest leaned into the log again and Rakes swung his arm over to the Model T and put a round through the engine block, the pock sound barely coming through the whine of the saw. Without looking up Forrest backed the log off and kicked the kill switch. He watched the motor, oil sputtering from the bullet hole, beginning to burn off and smoke, then rattling to a stop. Then in the clearing it was just the sound of Howard’s lone saw groaning for a few more strokes, and then that sound stopped too. A few of the mules shook in their harnesses, the quiet settling.
Forrest spat dryly into the sawdust.
Dammit Charley, Abshire said. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his shirtsleeve.
Other men working at the mill dropped their saws and wood planes and began walking away from the shed toward the shade of the trees. Jack could tell that the spectators worried Abshire. Charley Rakes walked over to the large boiler. He kicked the fire door open and rapped the pipe with his knuckles. Forrest touched a finger to the hot bullet hole in the engine.
Listen, Abshire said, we need your payment if you gonna run liquor. You and your brothers.
Rakes walked back to the two men, his thumbs hooked in his straining belt.
I’ll tell you what, Rakes said, you boys get this boiler goin’ and you could fire a dozen teakettles at once. Run the whole thing right here. Gotta be better than whatever you draggin’ out o’ the mountains at night.
Forrest looked out to the men standing in the shade. They all stood watching, hands on their hips, Howard wiping his hands on his overalls, his head hanging down. What the hell is the matter with him? Jack thought. Rakes was poking around the table saw, pushing a track of sawdust along the chute with a fat finger. He was only a few feet fr
om the giant blade. Jack saw Forrest eyeing an old rebar pole they used to stoke the boiler. A stack of fresh-cut fence posts nearby. Then he turned and pointed at Rakes.
You gonna pay for that bullet, Forrest said evenly.
Abshire took his hand from his pockets. Howard put on his hat and began to stride across the clearing, his face set. Here we go, Jack thought. He started to sidle around the shed along the opposite side, to come at them from the back.
You threatenin’ me, boy? Rakes said, coming around the table and putting his hand on his revolver.
Easy, Charley, Abshire said.
Rakes eased his gun halfway out, forefinger lying across the guard.
You think you a real hard-boiled son of a bitch, don’t ya?
Real simple Forrest, Abshire said. Either we get our payment or we cut up the stills. All of them.
Hell, Rakes said, we’ll dynamite the goddamn things. Then your station’ll be next, unnerstand?
Charley Rakes stood in front of Forrest, lifted out his revolver, and lay it across his chest.
We ain’t afraid of you and your brothers, Rakes said, like some is. Ask Jack what he did last time I caught him at a still. Ask him about how he blubbered like a little girl.
The cicadas sang high in the trees, and the men in the shade stood shoulder to shoulder watching. Howard had come quietly across the clearing and came up to the shed and stopped a few paces behind the two men, his hands hanging at his sides, his head still down so you couldn’t see his face under his hat. Jack was now standing by the deputies’ car, thirty feet behind them, coming slowly to their back. Abshire eyed the group of staring men.
The Wettest County in the World Page 16