The Whiskey Baron (31 page)

“The train station.”

“Tull purchased a ticket for St. Louis last night. Leaves at eight o’clock.”

“Murphy made a midnight run to Charlotte last night,” O’Connor added. “One of em’s planning to get on a train.”

Chambers sniffed, rubbed his eyes. “You fellas want a cup of coffee?”

“We’ve had some,” O’Connor said.

“But if you’re making a pot, we’ll gladly take a cup,” Jeffreys added.

“Come on in.”

They went into the precinct, and he turned on the lights, put on coffee. Today was Saturday, so no one would be coming into the office unless he called them in. How bad things always seemed to happen when he had no backup, Chambers didn’t know. The law of the land, he supposed. He went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face, stared at himself in the mirror. A scruffy gray beard coming in, loose flesh under his jaw, his neck thin. He didn’t look old so much as frail. Where had the tough man from years ago gone? How did the transition happen so quickly?

He stepped into his office and called Alma.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Down at the station. Some federal agents are here to arrest Larthan today.”

“What happened to you last night?”

“I got called away. Everything’s going down at once. How are you?”

She didn’t answer him.

“I’m hoping this business today won’t take too long, and that I should be done by noon. Once it’s over, I can take a few days off.”

“OK,” she said, though he could tell she didn’t believe him. He wondered why he’d even called her at all, because now that he had her on the line, only a weak dam held back a flood of everything they’d not said to each other in the past two weeks. Now was not the time for the dam to burst.

“I’ll see you,” he said, and hung up before she could answer. “Let’s go fellas,” he said to the agents. “I’ll follow you.”

He put his car in gear and spun the steering wheel with the palm of one hand, a thermos of coffee sloshing around between his legs.

The train station was a few blocks away. The tracks threaded through town from the west, and the depot was north of the town square, halfway between the Bell in the west and the Eureka village over to the east. They parked on a ridge beyond the station and Chambers got into the back of the Ford, where the three of them watched through a line of trees the action at the station. Not much at first, a quiet country stop, ordinary, uninteresting. It all seemed too easy to Chambers, that after weeks of drifting around, wondering about Mary Jane Hopewell and Larthan Tull, the liquor business and the federal agents and what folks in town thought of him, here it was, a quiet Saturday morning and everything was about to be resolved. Mary Jane was dead, and the federal agents were going to walk down and arrest Larthan, shut down the soda factory, so that by Monday morning it would all be over. They could get back to business as usual in town. He would have to go out and see Widow Coleman and then Evelyn Tull, tie up paperwork at the precinct, but then he was free to relax with Alma, try to straighten out what was left of their lives. He believed he’d somehow managed to make it through these last weeks unscathed. He waited.

As dawn exploded on the morning, the three of them watched Larthan Tull came up, looking like a wild man with his hair in knots and his eyes sunken in his face, like he hadn’t slept since the beginning of Prohibition and had offered himself up for the long rest, had risen to the pearly gates only to be struck back to earth by the sword of Saint Peter. Perhaps God Himself had given the order: no more forgiveness for the likes of such men. Prepare for last days, end times.

Through binoculars Chambers saw Tull walked with a limp, and then he saw the bloodstains on the platform, each step a new smear. Tull was hurt, and hurt bad. He leaned against a pillar and drooped his head as if in supplication. The sun fired over the horizon, full circle now, risen from dawn to day. Dew clung to the grass and mist still hovered in the shade, but the day’s heat would burn all that away soon.

The three men got out of the Ford and walked toward the station, but Tull didn’t seem to notice their approach. Chambers checked his revolver, cleaned and oiled and unused. He thought of Jimmy Boy Coleman and the card game, how one bullet in the boy’s leg had killed him, the only time Chambers had ever killed a man.

A passenger train rumbled toward the station from the south. On either side the engineers leaned from the cab and peered out at the rolling countryside. The whistle wailed as the train snaked along, slowed as it clattered closer to the station.

Just then a gray coupe pulled up. Depot Murphy got out, his hair slicked back like he was some buck, and Tull stood and waited for him.

The train ground to a halt with a low rumble and the chug of black soot and steam from its engine. The squeal of rails, steel against steel, a moan like some wounded animal.

The four closed in on Tull—the two agents and Chambers from the hillside, Depot from the car—and they crowded in on the whiskey baron at once. Their boots clopping against the wood planks of the platform, the lawmen walked with purpose.

Depot slowed, but before he could turn and run off, Jeffreys called out, “Whoa there.” The barkeep watched them like a chess pawn stuck on the wrong square. No hand to guide him to safety now.

A look of panic flickered into Tull’s eyes, but he blinked it away so fast it might never have been there. Even still, when Chambers saw the bloodsoaked side of Tull’s shirt and jacket, the drain of it along his leg, he stopped. This man was beyond the edge, his skin pale and damp with sweat. He would be lucky to live past noon. No need for some dramatic confrontation.

But the agents never slowed with their approach, as if to say let’s get this over with. Jeffreys pulled Depot aside to cuff him, and O’Connor moved in on Tull, who for his part seemed not to care that whatever plan he’d made had been disrupted, that somewhere he’d crossed a bridge with no return ticket.

When O’Connor reached for his arm, Tull snatched himself away and pulled a revolver from his coat and shot O’Connor in the head.

Blood and brain matter sprayed onto the platform, and everyone
else stared in shock as O’Connor’s lifeless body dropped to its knees and fell onto its back.

As Chambers reached for his own gun, Tull turned to Jeffreys and Depot and shot each in rapid succession, two guncracks with only enough time for Tull’s arm to realign itself after the pulse of the previous.

He whipped around and turned the gun on Chambers, but the sheriff opened fire first, and with four bullets he laid Larthan Benjamin Tull out dead on the platform.

When it was over, the gun he held was hot in his hand. Smoke curled from the barrel like a smoldering cigar. Four men lay dead on the platform. The engineers and passengers on the train all gaped out the windows at the massacre. If anyone spoke or screamed, Chambers couldn’t hear them over the ring of his ears.

He leaned against the same pillar Tull had rested against moments ago. One man for another, two images that side by side were a perfect replica for future Americana: the first a lone bootlegger, hurt and waiting for a train, the second a sheriff holding his revolver, four dead bodies at his feet and a trainload of passengers staring in shock. Chambers had killed another man, and there was no one left but him to clean up the mess. He breathed in the crisp morning air and waited, as if someone would come along and tell him what to do next.

Later he would receive the news of Evelyn’s death at the river. He would ride in the ambulance with Walt Pearson to recover her body and begin a reconstruction of the night’s events. There he would find the Hopewell brothers, Quinn on his haunches with his head in his arms and Willie propped against a tree a ways off, both of them irreparably wounded, Quinn with the loss of the only woman he would ever open his heart to, Willie with something much harder to define, some abstract understanding that the world was not on your side.

Later still Chambers would get word of a botched raid against Aunt Lou, how revenuers stormed her house to find a petite old woman sipping tea, no sign of legal wrongdoing. She was out one supplier, and other revenuers would double down to snare her in the web of justice, a word that no longer held any meaning for Sheriff
Chambers. He was nearing the end of his allotted three score and ten, and he was tired.

For now, as he leaned against the pillar at the train depot, his next job was to calm the gathering crowd, round up some deputies, and begin the long process of moving on. He called down to Columbia to report the deaths of agents Jeffreys and O’Connor, left a message with a receptionist for someone there to call his office, where he would not be. He was in no mood to shuffle around like his role still mattered, so, when the passengers had been escorted away from the station and younger men had arrived to record the scene and clear the bodies, Chambers took the long walk home.

Along the road into the town of Castle, the grasses swayed in the wind. Sweat dampened his shirt, and when he reached up to wipe his brow, his arm twinged, that old familiar ache he’d been lugging around for half a century. He was a relic, here in the twentieth century, a busted-up old man who would be buried soon enough. Just a name on a stone, some etching for future generations to discover, to ponder over, to write about. New nations and new lives, a steady march forward until the end of all time.

Alma was waiting for him on the porch, shelling peanuts, a glass of tea on the railing. She quit at his approach, said, “I wondered if you were ever coming home.” Then her expression changed and she stood up, wiped the dustings from the peanut shells from her hands, and asked, “What happened?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

He took her hand and guided her into the house, to the bedroom, where they lay down in a splash of sunlight. Rather than ask for details, she squeezed his hand and lay quietly beside him, which was all he needed. After a time he dozed, and he dreamt of strange horses in a field, their coats shimmering in a golden light.

The author owes a litany of thanks for assistance with this novel, especially to Chris Arnold, Brian Beglin, Megan DeMoss, Benjamin Kolp, Bret Lott, Mark Powell, Brian and June Sealy, Emily Sealy, Emily Smith, Betsy Teter, and the wonderful people at Hub City.

For readers interested in the history of the South Carolina textile industry, the University of North Carolina Press’s
Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
and Hub City Press’s
Textile Town
are excellent resources.

An excerpt of
The Whiskey Baron
originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in
The Sun
.

HUB CITY PRESS
is an independent press in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that publishes well-crafted, high-quality works by new and established authors, with an emphasis on the Southern experience. We are committed to high-caliber novels, short stories, poetry, plays, memoir, and works emphasizing regional culture and history. We are particularly interested in books with a strong sense of place.

Hub City Press is an imprint of the non-profit Hub City Writers Project, founded in 1995 to foster a sense of community through the literary arts. Our metaphor of organization purposely looks backward to the nineteenth century when Spartanburg was known as the “hub city,” a place where railroads converged and departed.

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“
An assured work of literary suspense … Sealy’s finely drawn characters and evocative sense of place and time make this a memorable read, on par with the best of Daniel Woodrell and Ron Rash.”

—Library Journal

South Carolina, 1932. One man’s whiskey empire is on the verge of collapse following two shots from a 12-gauge
.

Late one night at the end of a scorching summer, a phone call rouses Sheriff Furman Chambers out of bed. Two men have been shot dead on Highway 9 in front of the Hillside Inn, a one-time boardinghouse that is now just a front for Larthan Tull’s liquor business. When Sheriff Chambers arrives to investigate, witnesses say a man named Mary Jane Hopewell walked into the tavern, dragged two of Tull’s runners into the street, and laid them out with a shotgun.

Sheriff Chambers’s investigation leads him into the Bell village, where Mary Jane’s family lives a quiet, hardscrabble life of working in the cotton mill. While the weary sheriff digs into the mystery and confronts the county’s underground liquor operation, the whiskey baron himself is looking for vengeance. Mary Jane has gotten in the way of his business, and you don’t do that to Larthan Tull and get away with it.

Hailed as a “grand new talent” (
Bret Lott
) and a “significant new voice in Southern fiction” (
Ron Rash
), Jon Sealy has written a haunting debut novel. With its unforgettable characters and evocative setting,
The Whiskey Baron
is a gripping drama about family ties and bad choices, about the folly of power and the limitations of the law.