The Wettest County in the World (13 page)

Is this the same Richards, Anderson said, that was here, that night, when that woman was killed up the street?

The counterman, working at the grill, nodded his pointy head.

Anderson looked around the restaurant at the men forking eggs and hash into their faces. Killed in the night while transporting a prisoner. Somebody, Anderson thought, wanted to be sure Richards was dead. The counterman served up his food and topped off his coffee.

T
HAT EVENING
back at the rooming house Anderson stood before the mirror. First the two men in the hospital get discharged and disappear. A miracle they lived. One would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, the other…well, Anderson had seen what he would go through the world without. In the evenings it seemed to Anderson that his face looked like a workingman’s, the face of a man who had seen and done much. The pouches under his eyes, the grim line of his mouth, the darkened complexion. Though maybe that was just the drink, he thought. It wasn’t fooling anybody here, that’s for sure.

Anderson regarded the jar of whiskey on his night table, a few inches of clear shimmering liquid. Perhaps a bit of that was what he needed. The real strength, the true gift of the stuff was its ability to strip away healthy illusions: It allowed a man to consider the hard realities of necessity, the thing that hung from his neck like an iron collar. The true, clear, unfettered logic.
The White Logic.

Anderson smoothed a blank piece of paper on the desk with his forearm.

W
HEN
J
ACK
got back to his father’s place in Snow Creek the next morning his face was spotted with yellow-black bruises, his left ear split and swollen and a tight stitch in his side. He had an angry welt on his upper lip, a thin half circle the rough circumference of a twelve-gauge barrel. When Granville came in from the barn Jack could tell that he had been up for most of the night. His father gazed at him solemnly from across the breakfast table, his thick beard flecked with chaff and dirt. Emmy served him hot biscuits and Jack gripped his knife and fork, chewing slowly, trying not to grimace from the pain.

I’ll need you this morning, Granville said.

Jack nodded and spooned the buttery eggs into his aching face.

J
ACK WALKED
the rutted clay road to the cattle barn. Smoke was rising from the fire pit outside and his father stood in the doorway. Jack was surprised how bent and awkward his father looked; just a few years ago he’d seen him clamber up the side of a tobacco barn and haul sheet metal up with his bare hands to patch the roof. Now his father looked frail and his shoulders slumped forward and his hair just a fringe over his ears, gone gray white and his neck was mottled and scarred from exposure. He looked more and more like the brief and dim memory Jack had of his grandfather.

A veteran of the War between the States, Jack’s grandfather had married and become a widower at a relatively young age and never seemed interested in women or marrying again. He lived to be ninety-four years old, and until the last few months he regularly walked the fields in the dead of summer with his sons and took the lead in winter hog killings, muscling the great slabs of bristly pork into the scalding trough. He died when Jack was six years old, and Jack’s memories of the old man consisted mostly of his grandfather sitting on the edge of his bed in the back room of the Snow Creek house whittling small figures out of hunks of chestnut that he turned round in his gnarled hands. Jack remembered that their grandfather sometimes held Forrest in his lap as he worked, the young boy enraptured by the flashing blade and the forms that took shape before his eyes.

In the end Jack’s grandfather died riddled with age and the horrors of the Civil War. At the onset of fighting he had enlisted in the 57th Virginia, a company called the Franklin Fire Eaters, made up of men from the county who joined up together. The 57th Virginia was the only regiment to break the Union lines at Gettysburg during Pickett’s charge, that ill-fated attempt across a half mile of open uphill ground to Grant’s center dug in behind a stone wall. The Union soldiers poured grapeshot and canister down the slope as the Virginians came on and the torrent of lead cut men down in great swaths of blood and bone. It was pure slaughter in that field and still the 57th came screaming on like some Viking dream. The Franklin Fire Eaters breached the wall at the Union center, but reinforcements were slow and the moment was squandered, the vanguard butchered at close range, and as the few survivors withdrew the back of the Confederacy was broken for good.

One summer day soon after he passed, Forrest rooted around in the back room and found the rough box where the old man kept his finished wood figures. He brought the box out into the yard and began to play with them in the grass; when Jack approached Forrest sent him bruised and bawling back to the house.

It was a set of carved military figures, some with hats, with rifles, boots, and bedrolls tied around their chests. There were more than fifty of them and nearly all seemed to be in the initial throes of death or madness. Men running, empty-handed, some looking over their shoulders at unknown pursuers. Another man curled in a fetal position clutching his stomach; various men missing limbs grappled with their stumps. A man carried a headless torso in his arms, and two men locked together in a deadly embrace, unclear if they were helping one another or struggling. Other men merely standing, holding a rifle, looking at the ground. An officer leaning on his sword, legs buckling. A flag bearer stumbling, the flag pitching forward. A man standing with his legs wide apart, arms outstretched and head back as if he were waiting to be plucked from the earth and lifted into the sky. A man on his knees covering his face with his hands, hat and rifle missing. They all appeared to be on the same side.

When his mother found Forrest that afternoon in the yard with the figures she quickly gathered them up and later Granville gave him a silent, grim-faced whipping and told him that he wasn’t to touch the figures again. But Forrest got something into his head and he stole them from the room soon after and hid them in the woods to play with when he wanted. After several whippings he still wouldn’t divulge where they were hidden so finally his parents left him alone. At the edge of the wood when no one else was around he arranged the men in formation, silently enacting the battle and moving the pieces as the melee progressed.

I
N THE CATTLE BARN
a brindled Hereford stood leaning forward on spread legs, knees askew in the muddy straw. The cow snorted with each breath, her eyes closed, her back bowed up like a bridge and her hindquarters trembling. Jack couldn’t help swearing at this plaintive sight of suffering.

How long? Jack said.

Yestiday evenin’, some ten hours maybe.

Granville walked to the cow and stroked her head; the animal strained against his hand as he ran his fingers over her ears. A stream of blood ran down the backs of her legs and pooled in the straw next to a coil of rope that led to a block and tackle on the barn’s center post. Granville’s sleeves were rolled up and his arms were greased and smeared with blood to his biceps; Jack knew that his father had already been inside the cow and that this meant the calf was breech or head up or worse and what they were going to do now was save the cow if possible. Jack’s guts began to churn and he coughed into the back of his hand. Ever since he was a boy he shied from the bloody work, castration, hog butchering, de-horning cattle, birthing. His father pressed it on him; it was necessary for a farm to work. As a boy Jack winced and cried as he stuffed his bloody hands into the carcass of a hog to pull out the ropy viscera. The blood wasn’t so bad; it was the splitting, tearing, and reaching inside another animal’s body that bothered him. And there were the sounds, the honking bray of a dying cow, a sow’s scream changing into a bubbling moan, the barking whimper of a wounded rabbit dragging its back legs across a field while Jack watched from a stone fence.

What do you want me to do? Jack said.

Granville stood with his hands on his hips watching the cow arch her back with effort, snorting sprays of foam, her head turned and watching the two men. Jack gingerly felt his torn and scabbed ear. When he woke this morning a rusty stain covered half his pillow. I wish he would just say it, Jack thought. Just come out and say it.

Granville pulled a coil off the wall, a thin cable saw, and handed Jack the saw handles. He stepped to the back of the cow, making a loop in the end of the cable.

When I get this placed, he said, you work that saw, boy. Work it quick.

Granville cinched up his sleeve and then closing the saw loop in his fist drove it into the swollen opening, working it quickly up to the elbow. He put the tips of the fingers of his other hand together in a point and slid it in as well, the cow shuffling a step, her back shuddering as Granville worked his arms in up past his elbows. Jack drew the saw cable tight and crouched with the handles, watching the side of his father’s face, his cheek pressed against the broad backside of the cow. Granville worked for a few moments, the cow shuffling, snorting, fresh blood streaming down her back legs in thin rivulets and covering the old man’s shirtfront and pants. When he nodded to Jack the young man quickly plied the handles, sawing away with the cable until his father signaled again. After each time Granville would slowly retract his arms, covered in blood and thick gray mucilage, and gripping a bony leg topped with a tiny black hoof. He tossed the leg in the straw and put his hands back in.

After a half hour Granville worked in a rope and got it around the head. Jack put a boot against the center beam and pulled the rope through the pulley, his back to the cow and his father. At first it was immobile, then more shuffling of feet and a heartbreaking bellow from the cow and the rope began to move and he pulled it hand over hand, not wanting to look back. A heavy, wet sound, and Jack heard the body of the calf flop to the floor of the barn. He dropped the rope and panted with his hands on his knees, his palms and arms aching with effort. Small fingers of sunlight ran through board chinks and across the floor. He became aware of other sounds for the first time, the noise of the waking world outside the barn. He drew his arm across his forehead, wiping at the clammy sweat that beaded on his face and stung the swollen welt on his lip.

When Jack finally turned to the cow he saw that his father had covered the calf carcass with an old feed sack. Granville stood at the cow’s head, stroking the face of the animal, her giant eyes, black with fear, blinking slowly, her body no longer humped and straining, and Jack thought with relief that the animal would live. Lined up next to the feed sack were the limbs of the calf, wet, knobby things that looked artificial, more like empty bones or old wood than any part of a living thing. Jack stared at them in disbelief, something deep inside him twisted and he let out an involuntary groan. There were six legs there, six legs laid neatly in a row. Outside the dogs began barking in the pen.

If that ain’t something, Granville muttered, still stroking the nose of the animal gently with both hands. Damned if that ain’t something.

Someone fired up a tractor far away, must be Barbour out to push under his bean field, and the air above their heads seemed suddenly alive with insects, the whine of flies. Never seen such a thing, Granville said.

The cow shivered, then began to vibrate violently, as if it was shaking off water, and a fresh run of crimson, the brightest blood Jack had ever seen, began to pour out of the animal in steaming gouts. Granville held the cow’s face as its knees finally buckled and the creature sank to the floor, eyes languidly opening and closing, mouth slightly agape and the tip of its pink tongue showing, and kneeling down the man held it as it died.

J
ACK JOINED
Howard at the sawmill camp that week. When the two of them shared a jar around the campfire, Jack was often moved to tell the story of a day when he was a boy, twelve years old. A spring afternoon, the outhouse behind the school, the heat and sound of lightning, the strong sulfur in his nose, trying to explain the things he saw then under the earth and how the shadow of such visions had a way of inserting themselves into his life. This proved difficult for Jack, as his palette of experience was too limited, but like many young men he was convinced that his fortunes would be different from the fortunes of those who struggled around him. And like most young men, Jack’s feelings about this were crystallized by several distinct events when he was a young boy. That day in the pen with the deathless sow, the night George Brodie knocked on their door at midnight, and the day lightning struck. The world as he knew it was formed by these events, and with them he felt he would shoulder his way to the green end that was his alone.

T
HE FIRST THING
was the stillness in the air, the rocking outhouse at the bottom of the hill, the long line of dark trees, then a smoky whiff of sulfur burning Jack’s nose as he walked the stiff-legged crab of a boy with the painful need to urinate. Dark clouds rolled over the treetops, flexing like muscle and sinew. The nest of pines shook and then Jack was blinded by a terrific shattering light and thrown forward into the grass. The air crackled like wood fire and blazed with heat. Then it was dark.

The wind rattled the shutters of the schoolhouse and pushed the rain, rattling on the tin roof like gunfire and then advancing in a dancing line toward Jack’s inert body.

At the same time Mrs. Rufty in the schoolhouse was repeatedly slapping Cricket Pate with a leather strap for sleeping in class, the boy’s eyes still drooping as the plaint leather cracked across his skinny neck.

Jack lay in the grass for several minutes. He could not see or move yet he knew that he was still alive, still holding on to life, thinly tethered to it like some kind of string tied to a cloud receding into the distance. It was a sweet, luxurious feeling and Jack wished that he could stay swinging on that string forever. But instead a vision yawned under his feet and he began to dream of an island in the ocean, a place he’d never seen filled with monstrous lizards and birds that walked heavily through dense forests, searching for grubs among the rotted logs and ferns. The island was ringed by rocks, massive boulders the size of small mountains, and on those rocks strange fishlike dogs barked and dove into the blue waters, the sky filled with wheeling birds, white with bands of orange and gray, screaming at the dark shapes of the leviathans under the surface, the huge shadows that made the water rise at the rocks’ edge as they passed. Jack could see through the surface of the dark rock, forest, and water into the inner machinery that lay below. He could see the massive gears grinding out their rotations, the spinning flywheel, a muddy U joint burrowing into the coupling, the snaking belts, spitting pistons whacking in their chambers, great steel piles thumping, rising on a jointed hinge knobbed with bolts, then plunging again, discharging great gouts of sparks. Under this Jack saw the grinding plates of stone that tore channels through the earth, the viscous lava moving in underground rivers and emptying into oceans of fire.