The Whiskey Baron (10 page)

He wasn’t ready to go back to their dull, cramped home, so he stopped by the church and tromped into the cemetery to look at names and imagine ghosts. His family had moved to the Bell when he was seven for reasons unknown to him. His uncle Mary Jane came first, followed by his parents soon after. He’d been born on a cattle farm his family had owned for three generations. He and Quinn had started school there, but they’d spent most of their time running around the hundred acres of land, hiding in the corn, swimming in the creek, living in the free spaces, the hills and the woods and getting lost so they’d have to walk until they came to a fence and then follow the fence around until they regained their bearings. Those spaces didn’t exist in Castle. They had the Broad River, and they often sneaked onto others’ farmland, but even then Willie couldn’t escape the tightness of the Bell. The railroad tracks, the roads, the odd car humming by, the dusty smell of the mill. He made do with the town when he played, but he always felt watched, never completely alone. He found some solace in the quiet churchyard, here among the dead. Proud water oaks and magnolias buffered him from the dust and the noise of the mill village. In the back of the cemetery, woods took over, a thick meshing of oaks and poplars, tufts of cedar limbs poking out.

Today clouds gathered where the trees met the horizon, an eerie blend of orange and gray, and a cool breeze passed across the yard and sent a chill along his back. From where he entered, the closest graves were the oldest, going back to the church’s founding in the 1880s, the eldest members the first to die off. These graves were square stones
on the ground, and often whole families piled up here—Eunice and Eulice Clark, who both died in 1898, Annabel Clark, who died in 1901, Walter and Arthur Clark, who died in 1916 and 1918. Then there were the Harrises, the Winstons, the Joneses. Willie hopped over these stones, not wanting to step on their bodies, to wake the dead. As he walked farther into the graveyard, the sun tumbled into the horizon so that the stones’ shadows were long and dark and he could no longer read the names. Heat lightning rippled through the eastern clouds, thunderless.

But here was a plot for his own family. They’d left several of their kin on the farm: his grandmother, one of his uncles who’d died in an accident with the railroad, older faces who’d moved in and out and whose connection to the family Willie was never able to place. But here there had been deaths, too: his father’s sister Maggie, who had been born dumb, two miscarried siblings, both dead before they had names, and his younger sister, Hazel, named for their grandmother, who one winter grew quiet and hot and died in the night. Willie had little memory of the miscarriages. His mother was pregnant, she was going to have a baby, and then she was not. There was no baby, she stayed quiet for a time, and then she was going to have another. Then again she was not, and the house had been quiet ever since.

“Who’s there?” called a male voice from behind him.

Willie turned and in the twilight saw his grandfather limping through the stones, not bothering to slide around them, stepping right on the ones that lay flat on the ground. He was still dressed in his Sunday clothes, the brown slacks worn thin in the knees, a white buttondown shirt, and his faded brown jacket.

“Who’s there?” he said again. He limped forward and bumped into a stone. He rested his hand on top of the granite, eased his body around, and stopped a few feet away.

“It’s Willie, sir.”

“Willie? Willie who? What are you doing here?”

“I was playing, sir.”

“I’m sure, Willie, I’m sure.” Abel’s eyes were glassy and his hair was a mess.

At that moment the leaves behind them struck up a chorus of
chirrs that sounded like locusts, though it was only wind. Still no thunder, only the fading strip of orange in the west, twilight’s bruise and the speckling of starlight. Willie shifted, looked toward the road. No lights in the church, but the houses on the hill were beginning to glow. The wonder of electricity.

“A sad enterprise, ain’t it boy. The Lord’ll smite us all.”

“I guess,” Willie said.

Abel leaned back and went to rest his hand on a stone, but he missed and stumbled and fell to his knees.

“I’m all right,” he said, and waved Willie away.

“Granddad.”

Abel looked up at him. Cleared of the long gaze, his eyeballs rolled around in his head and focused on Willie, and he said again, “I’m all right.”

Willie reached for him. “Let me help you up.”

The two walked around the church onto Pinckney Road and up the hill. Pellets of gravel on the road stuck to Willie’s shoes. He walked at the ready, in case his grandfather were to fall again. Each step a conscious beat up Harvey Lane to the house. His parents were not far from bed when Willie and his grandfather reached the porch. His mother opened the door to let them in and said, “Daddy, what were you doing out there?”

“Oh, I was just out for a walk and ran across my grandson.”

Susannah eyed him before turning to Willie.

“Go on, get ready for bed, boy,” Abel said. He turned to Susannah, shook his head.

Willie’s father sat at the table, and when Willie walked in he lifted his eyes as if the lids weighed as heavy as steel. “Where’s Quinn?”

“He went off with the guys. Said he’d be home soon.”

“He’s not off with that gal, is he?”

“No sir.”

His father eyed him a moment, and Willie was glad his shorts were wrinkled, obviously having been wet from the river. He didn’t want to get caught in more lies than he could keep track of. He thought of his mother and grandfather in the other room, what they hid from his father.

The whistle would sound at five-thirty, so they went to bed at dusk, every day, same as the farmers. Joe rose and said goodnight, and Susannah trailed him. When Willie returned to the front room his grandfather had taken off his shirt and shoes and sat on his bed.

“Your brother coming home?”

“He told me he’d be in soon.”

Abel grunted. “He better get in before the storm gets here.”

“He’ll be all right,” Willie said as he crawled into bed. “Are you?”

“I’m all right. Go to sleep, boy.”

Abel blew out the candle and was soon snoring.

The night was hot. Willie tossed on his small, creaking mattress for a long while, thought of Quinn and Evelyn and what they might be doing. The window was open, yet their house didn’t catch a breeze. Noise from the street drowned out some of the noise inside. A dog barked. One of the neighbors cursed. A bottle smashed. The houses were too close together, and Willie tried to drown out the sounds of the night by burying his head in his pillow, but it was the same every night. Music, fights, sex, talk. He always heard too much, the creak of a board in the stairs next door when Caroline Mahoney came home too late after carousing around with some older neighborhood boy—Willie’s mother whispering, “That girl, such a shame, it’s like no one has any decency anymore”—and Willie wondered what she’d say about Quinn tonight. Or Jimmy Clark would get in a fight with his wife after he’d had too much to drink—“Goddammit, woman, goddammit”—followed by a shattering.

His grandfather slept soundly in the other bed, a scratchy and muted snore, the most peaceful he would be until next Sunday, his next night off. A car drove down the road, kicked up dust and cinders from the mill. Crickets, the river. When the storm arrived cool air would blow in and the hiss of rain on the dusty streets would eventually lull Willie to sleep. For now, boards creaked next door, the neighbor man coming home to his wife, coughing and slurring his words and coughing some more. He’d been off somewhere private, drinking shine at a neighboring house or on someone’s farm. Men did that, even on a Sunday, that thirst, that need, too powerful to wait.

Willie listened to the coughing and the drone of the wife’s voice,
and then the coughing slowed and her voice changed. Both noises grew louder and that was followed by the rhythmic squeaking of the mattress. Although Willie’s head ached from the constant noises, a new sensation muffled the headache. He thought of Evelyn, of what she and his brother were doing at the river. Evelyn, with her porcelain skin shimmering in the moonlight, the fabric of her cotton dress sleek along her body, perhaps damp with sweat in the night’s swelter. He thought of her lips, which surely tasted of peaches, thought of running his hands through her hair, and of the smooth white skin where her neck curved into her shoulder. He pulled his head out from under the pillow where he’d been suffocating and took himself into his hand, and he tried to breathe softly so that his family wouldn’t hear him. He wiped his hand on the sheet, rolled over onto his stomach, and buried his head in the pillow once again, and once again he tried to dream away the fervor and commotion of night on the mill hill.

T
ull had to carry the load himself this week. Time was he carried the load every week, when he was first getting his business started and only had Depot and the black man working for him in town. Back then he and Mr. Watkins, his business partner and investor, eventually made some connections up in Charlotte, a way to sell more than Castle would ever need. Keep the demand high, keep prices up and money coming in. Those connections led to back street deals brokered under cover of starlight, or midnight meetings in the corn, crates of liquor unloaded west of the city. Then there was the occasional run-in with the law—he drove Watkins’s Cadillac V8, sped through the country with sirens wailing behind him, ever more in the distance. In the mid-twenties, around the time Watkins passed on, Tull hired young runners, good customers looking for a discount. Mary Jane Hopewell had run for him in the old days, though for the
past few years he was nothing but a drunk, more interested in that widow woman than in matters of business. Lee Evans and Ernest Jones had been with him going on two years now. They made a good pair and he was sad to see them gone. Not least because it meant running all the loads on his own until he found a replacement.

He drove into Charlotte’s east end before midnight, through neighborhoods with shaded houses behind wrought iron gates, and he pulled up to number 102 and paused. A black man came and opened the gate and Tull drove up a gravel drive, parked under a hickory tree. The night was clear yet, but had the cool acid scent of rain on its way before morning. No moon that he could see, only the faint patter of the stars above the limbs of the hickory. He walked up the brick steps to the front door, rang the bell, and waited.

As near as he could tell, Aunt Lou had been living in this house forever, and Prohibition had made her the woman to go to if you had more than a passing interest in the liquor trade. Her father had been some sort of railroad tycoon, back when Charlotte was little more than a sleepy mill town like Castle, before the industrial boom of big businesses. Banks and stockbrokers in the 1910s and ’20s, a resurgence of gold mining now that the banks had failed. But before all that were the railroads, the boom and clank of steel, the chug and smoke of the engines. While tracks passed through every hamlet and outpost in the piedmont, Charlotte was the central hub of the South. Knoxville, Atlanta, Richmond—they all connected here, and Aunt Lou’s money came from her father recognizing what the trains meant for commerce and distribution. Rumors lingered even now that he’d had ties to the great J.P. Morgan himself, financier of the Southern Railway. Like Larthan Tull, like Spencer Watkins, Aunt Lou’s father had been a man with connections, a man who always got his way.

Like a lone puppeteer behind the scenes of an elaborate show, the man dealt everything from rugs and jewels to opium and liquor. While her siblings moved on, went to college or married, Aunt Lou stayed home with her father, a widower who seemed uninterested in remarriage or incapable of falling in love again. Some folks thought the relationship between father and daughter unnaturally close, but
Aunt Lou—so named for a mess of nephews and nieces who had scattered throughout the Carolinas like Roman soldiers cast to far-flung outposts, Brittany, Romania, Judea—remained with her father until the end and then rose up and took over his operations. What Tull would have given to have been there when she met with her father’s distributors and told them what was what, that she was reorganizing the operation to focus on only the most profitable arms of her father’s business.

Here was this woman who looked like your spinster aunt, the kind of churchgoing lady who would offer you tea and pinch your cheek, in charge of shipping black market goods alongside the textiles coming in and out of the city. She didn’t know the first thing about making decent shine, but she knew how to get it into the hands of customers anywhere east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon. She stayed out of Florida, and she kept away from the Chicago boys. Otherwise, she was the man, and she was the one who reached out to Tull, sent a man down from Charlotte to Castle with a letter:
Dear Mr. Tull, Through some acquaintances of mine I have procured some of your soda plant brew and have a business proposition for you
. Not so much a proposition as a procedural explanation. What choice did he have? Anyone who went his own way wound up at the bottom of the Broad River, blocks of concrete around his feet.

The bolt clicked in the lock, and another man opened the door to let Tull into the foyer without making eye contact. The house had a musty opulence to it, as though someone with money adorned the walls and then shuttered out the light. Walnut-colored walls darkened the entryway, and a red Persian rug led down the hall. On the walls were violent paintings. A ship at sea being tossed by a storm, green waves lapping up into the bows and wind rocking the sails. A close-up of an old man staggering on a sidewalk, pitched forward and leaning one hand against a fence rail. A rat scurrying across a burnt wasteland riddled with the shadows of corpses and pocked with bullet holes and bomb fragments.

Tull followed the man down the hall to a yellow-lit dining room, where sat an elderly woman with a cup of tea. She smiled as he came in and took off his hat. Petite, gracious looking, you would never
peg her for the largest supplier of liquor in the Carolinas. She had close-cropped gray hair, but her bright blue eyes shined like those of a comely farm girl without a care in the world. Her cheeks were red and rounded so that she somewhat resembled Herbert Hoover, if Hoover ever had a sense of humor. When she stood, she was no taller than five feet, and she spoke with the gritty voice of a woman accustomed to work.