The Wettest County in the World (19 page)

B
Y THE END
of May the stills up on Turkeycock were steaming out two hundred gallons a week with Jack and Cricket making the night runs to Burning Bag without incident. Jack bought a few more suits, a watch fob, a brand-new Dodge Sport Coupe, and began to sock away money for a big Packard or some other chariot. He had four hundred dollars wrapped in a rag tucked under a loose board in his old bedroom and he perused the wares in town like a man without claim or notion of anything that was not himself. It was a splendid time and in between his father’s tobacco fields, the stills, and the midnight drives, he began his courting machinations.

Jack managed to lurk at the ag-feed store when Tazwell Minnix made his regular run, and when the man had gone inside he strode by his truck in the lot, Bertha in the cab sucking on a bottle of pop or flipping the pages of a catalog, windows rolled down to feel the breeze. She would squint up through the speckled windshield to catch this swaying apparition coming down the planked walk, bow tied and suited, boots gleaming and strapped tight, a cigarillo streaming off his lip, face content as if there was nothing like a jaunt on a spring’s day. Jack would turn and tip his cap to her as Bertha sat in the front seat, the catalog on her lap, wondering just what this fool was up to. After a few weeks he steeled his will and came to the car, knowing that he would have about six minutes before the old man came out with his sacks of feed.

Bertha regarded him with a disinterested eye and set mouth. She wore a dark shirt buttoned high. She instinctively moved her hands to her collar and then back to her lap. Jack propped a foot on the running board and flicked away his cigarillo.

Fine day, she said.

How’d you like to come for a ride with me sometime, Jack said, nodding toward his car parked across the street.

I’m waiting for my father, she said. But I guess you know that.

Huh. I wouldn’t. I was just thinking you might want to take a ride.

Why would I want to do that? I don’t need to go nowheres.

We wouldn’t have to
go
anywhere, just for a ride.

Jack cranked his head around as the feed-store door slapped open. Some other old man shuffled out with a bulging sack over his shoulder and headed down the street.

You ought to be worried if my father catches you here. Talking to me.

Why’s that?

You know. Coming to a meeting like that. Then busting out like a crazy person. Are you affected in the head?

This was not how Jack had pictured this thing going. He straightened his coat and checked his watch, squinting in the sunlight to read the hands.

It’s all right if you are, Bertha said. I got a cousin who don’t ever leave the house.

There’s nothin’ wrong with me, Jack said. Does a crazy person wear a suit like this? Does a crazy person have a car like this? This my second one besides. And me only twenty?

Bertha gazed over at Jack’s car for a moment. Jack thought she seemed duly impressed. It was swinging back his way.

I suppose not, she said. But that don’t explain why you acted like a crazy person. Daddy says you were drunk but I’d never seen a drunk like that.

I just didn’t want my feet washed is all.

Bertha tsked and sucked in her cheeks.

Funny way of showin’ it. I see you got some new boots.

All this is new, Jack said. This here is a tailored suit, from Richmond.

Hmmmm.

Jack dragged a toe in the dirt and eyed the feed-store window.

Look, I got nothin’ to say about that, he said. ’Cept to say I wished I hadn’t done it.

Well, that’s something.

So how ’bout that ride.

You know I’m waiting for my father.

Later then.

Bertha seemed to consider this for a moment. She flipped through the catalog on her knees.

You ain’t the kind of man a girl should be ridin’ with, she said. I know who you are.

Oh yeah? Who’s that?

Jack could not help but grin, and he put his hand up to feign scratching his lip.

One of them Bondurant boys, and that’s enough. There aren’t many that have a good word in for you.

That so.

Yep. My granddaddy says you boys the worst ever to hit Franklin.

Jack scanned the storefront for movement. Bertha draped her arm over the door and a short section of white skin scooted from under the cuffs, ending in her tapered hands like porcelain. Jack realized he was balling his fists and he jammed them in his pockets. A dampness spread across his lower back.

You know where my daddy’s place is? Bertha said.

Yeah.

I get done with my chores around two, she said. Your watch will tell you when that is. If you came round to the end of the road I might take a ride.

Jack nearly choked, his mouth gone cotton.

Tomorrow then?

Bertha laughed, a bright musical laugh. It warmed them both and they suddenly felt silly in light of this charade. Jack was about to burst inside and run down the street like an inflamed preacher.

Sure is a funny way of courtin’, Jack Bondurant, Bertha said. This is courtin’, ain’t it?

I’ll see you tomorrow then, Jack said, and spun away and across the street just as Tazwell came out of the store, feed sacks in a wheelbarrow, his daughter in the truck idly picking at strands of her hair.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Jack tried to concentrate on his driving. Bertha unwound her head scarf and placed it on the seat between them. The Dodge hummed up the hill, the frame screeching as it seesawed over ruts in the road. It hadn’t rained in weeks, but when he picked her up it was drizzling lightly and she stood beneath a stooped elm at the end of her drive wearing a long black sweater and knickers with deep-red kneesocks. Jack was desperately working to come up with a way to entertain Bertha now that he had her in his car. As he made his way south he was well aware that he had no plan as to where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything else at the moment other than the road and the scent of the girl sitting next to him. It struck him as something he knew well: On summer afternoons by the creek, an overgrown fence line, or sometimes inside the house by an open window, after a rain and when the wind was right, there would suddenly be a gentle wave of flowering honeysuckle in the air, the smell of deep summer, honey mixed with earth and water and sky. Jack couldn’t be sure if this was her natural scent or if it was some kind of perfume, but on this raw day in May it seemed like a glimpse of summer, a moment in the sun.

I’ll be leaving soon, Jack said. Getting out of this county.

Oh yeah?

Maybe Texas, out west or somethin’. Or maybe some city.

What’ll you do? Bertha asked.

Shoot. Anything. Everything. Get myself set up.

The cab warmed as they talked, condensation forming on the windshield. Jack could now smell mostly the damp must of her sweater drying out.

What about you? Jack said.

Oh, I’m fine right here.

Really?

Yeah. I’d like to finish up at school. Didja hear they might close up the Co-Cola plant?

Yeah? What for?

Don’t you read the papers? The country’s in real trouble.

Not me.

Well, people are out of work all over. Daddy says Hoover’s to blame. Cursed him up one side of the street and down the other.

That so?

I reckon I’ll stick around, Bertha said. Stay close to my family.

Can’t see why ya wanna do that.

Bertha furrowed her brow, and Jack knew that he had stepped in it. There was no way out but forward. He gave the coupe a bit more gas.

Well, Jack said, I mean, they always trying to…keep you from doing things. I know plenty a Dunkards.

Bertha lowered her head and Jack was afraid that he had gone too far.

It may seem like that, Bertha said, but it ain’t. We like to be around each other. We have a lot of fun together.

Can’t right imagine that, Jack said.

He wrestled the wheel around a particularly gaping pothole and then overcorrected, making the car slide in the mud for a moment. Bertha was staring at him with a bemused look on her face.

What do you know? she said. You show up at our church and then run out like a lunatic, and you think somehow you know my family? You don’t see what we do, what it’s like at home.

Yeah, Jack said, I know it.

So don’t say things like that.

Okay. Jack said. Sorry I said it.

Oh, never mind, Bertha said.

But don’t you want, Jack said, just to…get out on your own?

Sure, but that don’t mean I’ve got to go far away. On your own has nothing to do with distance.

Damn, Jack thought to himself, she’s making me look right foolish. She don’t believe any of it.

Well, then, he said, when I go maybe I’ll take you with me.

Bertha gazed out the window, looking at the withered tobacco fields, a stretch of puny alfalfa that ran over the hill. The dread thought hit his heart: The woman was bored to tears already and they had only been driving for five minutes. At least the rain had tapered off and the sun struck through the clouds. He steadied the wheel with one hand and reached inside his coat pocket.

Got you a li’l somethin’.

She looked over at him askance like he’d just claimed he could make the car fly. He extended the Brownie camera to her between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the road. He was afraid to see her expression. She took it from his fingers and turned it over in her hands, examining each side of it.

I can’t take this.

It ain’t nothin’.

This is one of them cameras.

Yep.

I ain’t never had a camera before.

Well now you do.

I don’t know how to operate it.

Shoot, Jack said. All you do is look through the little window and push the button. Ain’t nothin’ to it.

What will I take a picture of?

Jack turned down a side road near the foot of Fork Mountain, not too far from his father’s place in Snow Creek. He realized that he had been heading steadily in that direction for unknown reasons. Perhaps it was familiar territory he sought.

Here, he said. I’ll take a picture of you and then you can take one of me. How’s that?

He jerked the Dodge to a halt at a small side cut off the road near a field of limp fescue flattened by the brief rain. The ground was already drinking the moisture deep, the road ruts hardening. They clambered out of the car and into the sunshine.

You got your car all muddy, she said.

Here, Jack said, stand up there by that crab-apple tree and I’ll take your picture.

Wait a second, Bertha said, and she shucked off her long sweater to reveal a short-sleeved white blouse, tied at the neck with a blood-colored kerchief. Jack thought that in her knickers and blouse she cut a prim and divine figure as she stood in a shallow ditch of bramble, one foot cocked on the slope and clutching a sprig of the tree. She preened and mocked for a few moments, smiling and rounding her eyes.

Hold on, Jack said, let me get it, now hold it so’s I can get it.

Bertha settled into a stony stare off to the side, away from the camera, looking out over the road and the fields beyond, her mouth in a grim line. Jack snapped the photo.

Why’d you quit cuttin’ up?

That’s how you take a picture, Jack, she said, you gotta set your face straight. That’s how the movie stars do it in California.

She snatched the camera from his hand.

Now you.

Jack set about arranging himself on the car, sitting on the hood, his feet on the bumper. The thought occurred to him that this was in fact what he was really hoping for when he bought the camera. He had had his picture taken only a handful of times before, mostly as a small chap in family gatherings and a few others, and none in his new regalia, posed on his new car.

That’s a good one, Bertha said.

Hold it, Jack said.

He fished out a fresh cigar and stuck it between his teeth, and set his hat back at a rakish angle. The sun fell directly onto his face and he squinted mightily but he figured it gave him a tough look, his boots crossed nonchalantly before him. He was going for his watch when she snapped the picture, and because she laughed and held her hand over her mouth he decided not to mention it.

E
MMY DROPPED
a dishrag that morning, so she knew that a visitor was due before sundown. She told Jack that this visitor would bring them bad news or worse. In the kitchen Jack watched his sister standing at the sink, her eyes shut, her hands clasped over her thin chest, considering the possible turning of fate.

Well, Jack said, then we’ll be expectin’ them.

The three brothers gathered for dinner after spending the morning pulling suckers in their father’s field. It was July, and the withered tobacco struggled out of the parched earth and the suckers were thin and yellow. His father and brothers seemed intent on continuing the charade of harvesting. The drought had dried out the land till it broke apart and Jack thought they should be focusing on the stills.

Granville’s store was nearly vacant and he only opened for paying customers, too tired of fending off the wretched looking for handouts. He kept the springhouse open across the street so that all could have a drink of cool water, but he couldn’t give away any more goods. The jobs for Forrest’s sawmill also began to wane as men tightened up around the county, unable to pay for his services, and the community began to revert to the old communal farming methods, relying on the available free labor. Many in the county went back to straight subsistence farming, others sending their boys out west to find work picking produce in California. The city council in Rocky Mount hired yard bulls at the train yard to keep wandering men from hopping out of boxcars, driving the flapping scarecrows back into the empty flats with clubs and locking the doors so they would be carried on to the next town.

That afternoon the three brothers watched the girl coming from a long way off, walking through the field of sorghum and red clover that ran to the north away from the house, up to the foot of Fork Mountain. She emerged from the trees a quarter mile away, a thin cloud of red dust at her feet. Sissy Deshazo walked with her head back, bobbing in a strange motion, like she was watching the sky. The day was heavy with humidity and low clouds filled every inch of the sky. She was wearing her Sunday dress, fringed with a streak of red clay on the bottom. Sissy Deshazo was crying, her chestnut-colored face, ashy from the summer sun, streaked with tears. Her grandfather had died, old Little Bean Deshazo, who had worked alongside Granville and his father in the tobacco fields. He had passed away sometime in the night, and Sissy was sent to tell the neighbors and invite them to the wake that was being held that afternoon. The Deshazos had lived in the county as long as the Bondurants, just over the first set of hills, one of a handful of black families in the Snow Creek area of Franklin County. Jefferson Deshazo, Sissy’s older brother, had worked for Forrest out at the County Line Restaurant and Sissy herself had spent ten years cooking and cleaning in the Bondurant house after their mother had died. Little Bean, his sons Willy, Benjamin, and Horace, and all their children had been to the Bondurant house for hog killings or wood choppings, and their children often played with Jack and his brothers.

So after Emmy served them dinner the brothers cleaned up, washing their faces and changing their pants out of a cedar chest in Jack’s old room as Sissy Deshazo went trudging back over the field to her grandfather’s house. Forrest walked to his car and brought out a box of half-gallon jars of peach brandy to take along, and then fired up the car and went to the store to notify their father. Jack and Howard sat on the porch and waited for Forrest to return with Granville.

Jack was feeling uneasy with the idea of going to a wake; the last funeral he remembered was his own mother’s, and because his brothers were all here there was something oddly reminiscent of that occasion. Jack knew that Little Bean was nearing ninety years old, an old man made of sticks who had lived a brutal life at times and by all accounts should have been dead long ago, but it still seemed to him as if some kind of injustice was done. Perhaps it was the streaked face of Sissy, normally a sullen girl whom Jack never really liked much. It upset him because he knew that Little Bean never had more than a few dollars in his pocket his whole life, and he died as poor as the day he was born, and the world seemed to be conspiring to make it so for so many others as well.

Howard lifted a jar out of the box and looking at Jack tapped the side of his nose. Jack smiled and Howard shook the jar, packed full of sliced peaches, before unscrewing the cap and flipping it off into the yard. They sipped from the jar, the brandy sweet and heady, a truly pleasurable drink, and watched the horizon soften before them. Jack had eaten two large bowls of crumbled corn bread with cracklings soaked in buttermilk, and the brandy seemed to warm the contents of his innards and relax his bobbing knees. Howard sat silently, his mouth set, lips narrowed, as they both reddened with drink.

We’ll have to step it up, Howard said. This ’bacca ain’t gonna come up.

I know it.

Howard pursed his lips and gazed at the horizon.

You hear about that fool Wingfield? Howard said.

What?

Since they were busy pulling tobacco, Howard told him, their father had hired Marshall Wingfield, home from UVA, to do some plowing with a mule and colter to set the bottomland for winter rye. Jack’s father put a bell on the mule so he could hear from the house when Wingfield was working and he could pay him accordingly. Wingfield came by first thing in the morning and ate heartily of the breakfast Emmy prepared and trotted down the hill with the colter over his shoulder, the mule in tow. The bell commenced to ring steadily. A few hours later Granville was down at the spring and he’d thought he’d check and see how Wingfield was doing; this was a fresh stretch of bottomland that hadn’t been planted in a few seasons and he’d run the harrow over it and burnt the turf the spring before. It was hard, stony ground, and Granville knew that Wingfield spent more time with his books than he did in a plow harness, so he walked across the narrow creek to the other side of the thin stretch of woods that rolled like a scarf through the valley, following the sound of the ringing bell. He found Wingfield stretched out under a fat pokeberry bush, hat pulled over his eyes, the bell in his hand in the dirt, which he twitched listlessly from side to side. The mule stood blinking in the sunlit field.

When other men kidded Wingfield about it, he denied that it ever happened and suggested that Granville Bondurant was getting senile and must have dreamed it up.

Jack was incensed, but Howard didn’t seem to mind much.

Look, Howard said, everyone around here know Wingfield is a pointy-headed fool.

Still, Jack thought, thinking of the last time he’d seen Wingfield, preening with the sport ear at the Mitchell corn shucking the year before. Kissing Bertha Minnix. The way her eyes flashed as she bent her face to him. Jack had the urge to take ahold of that fleshy white neck of Wingfield’s and squeeze it like a fryer. But liquor worked differently on Jack’s mind than most and soon that image eased. The two brothers sat quietly for a while, passing the jar and watching the sky over the field. Jack enjoyed the silence between them and concentrated on the delicious transport of midday into the afternoon. It was quality brandy and soon enough what had just an hour before seemed like a pitiable situation for the Deshazos and himself now seemed like an opportunity for Jack to experience the great movements of life and this earth together in fellowship with other people. He ruminated on his life and experiences with the Deshazos and determined they were a solid people and that he would pay his respects with the honor and humility befitting a man who had lived so long. We should all be so lucky, Jack thought. And he was glad that his brother was here with him, and Emmy, his little sister, in his mother’s old rocking chair by the window, watching the road.

I need the money, Jack, Howard said after a while. I gotta make more than what we got.

Just soon, Jack said, as this foolishness is done we will get all the stills hot and the money will flow like a goddamn river. You just wait.

Howard broke into a genuine smile.

Yeah, Howard said. That’s what we’ll do.

Forrest returned alone. Granville had some business at the store and it would be foolish to turn away good money. He would pay his respects later. Emmy didn’t want to go, and the brothers knew that the presence of death would be difficult for their sister to bear again even if it wasn’t family, so the three brothers had a good drink on the porch and then set off.

When they pulled up to the Deshazo house, a stocky, mud-wattled cabin built on a low rise with added bits plied about by various members of the clan over the years, it was undoubtedly clear that this was not a solemn affair. A half dozen motley cars stood in the dirt yard with several clapboard hacks and a score of knobby horses and mules. Despite the fact that it was still early afternoon and over eighty degrees, smoke poured from the chimney and a large bonfire roared in the front yard, children running in circles around it, chasing one another with sticks. All the windows and doors stood wide open and streamed with light. As they stepped out of the car they could hear the unmistakable sound of wailing women, lamentations in a seemingly unintelligible tongue, mixed with shouting, singing, a screeching fiddle, and braying laughter.

Ain’t gonna need that brandy, Howard said.

As the children ran screaming around the fire Jack saw a man in torn pants lying facedown in the dirt yard, a dog nosing at his crotch.

Guess I’ll bring it along anyhow, Forrest said.

As the three men stood in the doorway, hats in their hands, Forrest holding the boxful of liquor, an immense coal-black woman in a scarlet head scarf came to greet them. She nodded solemnly and gestured them inside the crowded front parlor.

I’m Ida Belle, she said. I’m Little Bean’s second daughter.

Pleased to meet you, Forrest said.

We are sorry to hear ’bout Little Bean, Jack said.

Jack had never heard of Ida Belle, and it occurred to him then that Little Bean had probably sired some people who did not live in Snow Creek or maybe even in Franklin County. The house was packed with people swaying along to a fiddle player who hacked out a tune, thumping time with his foot on the floorboards, a song Jack had never heard before. People stood against the wall around the room, swaying lightly, and a second circle of people inside that one moved with some serious intent, stamping their feet in time and singing. Smoke hung like curtains in the room, the heavy smell of feet and yeasty crotch, incense, tobacco, wood smoke. A series of jars were being passed hand over hand and everyone drank liberally. Ida Belle set Forrest’s box down in the center of the circle next to some other things, a few jars of liquor, bags of smoking tobacco, boxed candy, whole joints of pork in paper sacks, eggs, plates of biscuits, a hand mirror, snuffboxes, beaded necklaces, a pair of obviously used boots. The brothers were the only white people there.

I’ll be damned, Forrest muttered, and when Jack followed his gaze he saw the guest of honor in the corner, surrounded by mourners, arms around his shoulders and singing: The corpse of Little Bean was propped up in a tattered suit, his body stiff with rigor mortis, yellow staring eyes, and the skin of his face beginning to swell and bulge so it barely looked like him at all. A burning cigarette was placed between his bloated fingers and different people took turns pouring cups of corn liquor into his open mouth, dribbling down his chin and onto his shirtfront.

Several of the Deshazo men came forward to shake hands with the brothers and thank them for coming. They were plied repeatedly with alcohol of various types and an hour or so later Jack stood in the kitchen in the back to catch his breath. Howard sat at a table, idly picking at a lump of pig knuckles from a bowl and drinking from a fresh jar, Forrest leaning against the drain board with his arms crossed, frowning. The fiddle player was winding up some kind of a reel, the pitch and meter going higher and most of the people in the front room stomping their feet, raising a layer of dust that drifted into the kitchen like fog. Men and women leaned against the walls of the small kitchen, swaying with the music, some with their eyes closed as if they might already be asleep. As Jack stood there the sounds began to separate in his mind; he felt that he could pick out and listen to each individual mote of sound—the voices calling out a cadence, the whining violin, the creaking floorboards—he was able to listen to each thing individually and it seemed to him that this was the second time he had heard such a thing, the first coming at the Dunkard Love Feast. Jack felt that what he was experiencing was somehow part of something hidden, the spare realm of musicians; is this what Bertha heard when she played her mandolin? Rather than a catalog of sounds it sounded to him like the very construction of music, a powerful and beautiful feeling, like manipulating the basic elements of the world.

Then the music seemed to increase significantly in volume and for a few moments Jack looked at his brothers for some sign that they heard it as well but they seemed not to notice. There was a cigarette in his hand, an ash three inches long, and Jack threw it to the floor. When did I light a cigarette? he thought. A noise like crackling tin, then a harsh, tearing sound began to build from above him, and Jack looked up at the stained and warped ceiling, wondering what was possibly going on up there. It was like some kind of hellish carnival in the attic made up of metal-rending machines plied by devils. Howard’s broad back was heaving at the table, and he held his face in his hands; he had drunk a quart of straight corn liquor and half a jar of brandy, enough liquor to kill a bull. The ripping sound in the ceiling built into a roar, blocking out the screeching violin. It sounded like something was tearing the building in half. Some of these fools get into the attic? Jack thought. They’ll bust through the ceiling. He saw Forrest giving him an inquiring look, so he pointed to the ceiling and raised his shoulders. Forrest glanced up and shook his head, shrugging.