The Whiskey Baron (5 page)

An elbow to his ribs drew Willie’s eyes away from Evelyn, his mind away from the line where the skin of her neck met the folds of her cotton dress. Quinn hissed into his ear, “I’m making my move whenever he finishes the sermon.”

Willie turned to their parents, caught his mother’s eye. She pursed her lips and looked back up to the preacher.

“Distract them when everyone’s letting out.”

Willie shifted, but his brother took his arm and nodded, his eyes searching Willie’s for a sign that he was in it with him, on his side, brothers for life. Would he really do it? Quinn had flirted with girls before, Willie knew, but Evelyn was in a different class altogether, and Willie thought his brother might be trying something new. The preacher’d talked about sin enough that Willie knew his brother’s guilt would be his own. Over Quinn’s shoulder, Evelyn shifted her head, just enough to glance at the brothers out of the corner of her eye, and once again Willie saw the glaze of her peachwhite lip and imagined her mouth against his.

Quinn eyed him still, waiting for a nod, and Willie gave it as the preacher finished his sermon.

“I make the same appeal to you today,” said the preacher, “as Paul to the Romans:
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God
. The word of the Lord, amen.”

More words for the millhands. When the preacher finally gave the benediction and the organist began the notes that meant it was time to go home, Willie shot off the pew as his family slowly rose beside him. While the congregation shuffled into the aisle, his brother nudged him again before hanging back. Willie waited for his parents and grandfather to get into the aisle and led them out toward the door before him. They didn’t notice as Quinn slipped to the side corner with Evelyn.

Outside, the sun blasted against them so that only his mother’s face beneath her bonnet was protected. They stood by the door like an uncertain herd of cattle. Willie led them off the walk into the grass, and to distract his mother from searching for his brother, he said, “Momma, Mr. Jefferson said he might have some work for me. Chopping wood this fall.”

“That’s good, Willie. Where’s Quinn?”

“I saw him making eyes at that Tull girl,” Joe said. “He’s probably off trying to catch her away from her father.”

Willie imagined his brother sweet-talking Evelyn, and for a moment a shot of jealousy rose up in him at the thought of Quinn with the girl, but he fought the feeling away. He could go up to a girl if he wanted, but he didn’t know what he would do if he did. He wasn’t big like Quinn, as sure and as headstrong. He said, “Daddy, with the money I get chopping wood and the money I’m getting for sweeping, I’ll be helping out.”

Joe looked at him. “Son, you’re not staying on at the mill once school starts.”

“Why not?”

“Because we can afford for you not to.”

“But Daddy—”

“You know,” his grandfather said. “I’m surprised with the preacher talking sin and the lake of fire, he didn’t bring up Larthan’s business.”

Joe scoffed. “What’s he going to say about it?”

Willie’s grandfather was a lean old man with big ears and a big nose and a permanent droop to his face, like a basset hound. The mill workers called him Happy, though his real name was Abel Washington, and he’d come off the farm in the spring to live and work in the mill with the rest of them. He scowled and looked up the hill,
where the twin smokestacks of the Bell mill loomed over the village. Standing there, you could tell he was silently cursing Larthan Tull’s iniquity. Ruining half the town with his bootlegging and his gambling den, he wasn’t good Christian folk, and the preacher ought to say something. There they were, waiting on the New Jerusalem, and Tull had turned the county into a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah. Signs and wonders, indeed.

“Someone go find Quinn,” Susannah said.

“I’m here,” he said from behind them.

“You get lost?”

Joe sucked his teeth. “Let’s go.”

A light breeze carried the thick air across their skin, and Willie wanted to hang back and ask Quinn what had happened with Evelyn, but his brother swayed close to their parents. Their grandfather, their mother’s father, limped in the rear. Nearing seventy years old, he still worked full time in weave room #6, a welcome addition to the family’s pooled finances but perhaps an unwelcome strain on their already cramped living situation. Willie’s job this summer had been to go through the weave rooms and sweep up lint and dust that sprinkled onto the ground from the machines. The whir and clack of bobbins and spinners all but drowned out the koosh-koosh of the broom. Dirty rags to wipe down machines, men spitting snuff on the floor, hot lint sticking to his clothes, his hair. He worked half days, thirty hours a week, and when he made it to weave room #6 his grandfather would always give him a wink, appeared happy even though he would come home coughing and sullen and would hack away all night. Everyone worked a half-day Saturday, and the mill gave them Sundays off, so by this time every week his grandfather had coughed all the lint out and could talk.

Willie paused to wait for him as the family neared the crest of the hill and turned up Harvey Lane. He said, “Did you hear me telling Daddy about splitting kindling?”

“Yeah, I did. That’s good, boy. My daddy had me chopping wood when I was your age.”

“Really?”

“Back on the farm, I started work when I was five years old. It was
my job to get up and start milking the cows. In the afternoons all summer, Daddy paid me an allowance to pick up sweetgum balls out of the yard. He always liked to walk around the yard barefoot at dusk, and didn’t want one of them balls biting his foot. Paid me a penny a bag, starting when I was younger’n than you.”

“That’s all?” Willie said. A penny a bag was hard to believe. The mill paid him two dollars a week, and he knew that math added up to more than a penny for the trouble it would take to gather a bagful of gumballs.

“Yes sir, when I was your age I was saving up to buy me a rifle, but ended up spending a few years’ worth of allowance on a clean suit and a tin of pomade so I could go to town and start chasing gals around.”

“Daddy,” Susannah said from in front of them.

“It’s true. Boy, wait till you get a few years older. You’re going to find some pretty gal that gets you so flustered you won’t know whether to thank God or the devil.”

“Daddy. That’s enough.”

Susannah slowed and patted Willie on the back and led him onward, shaking her head. But he’d heard it before. Abel had been with them several months now, long enough for Willie to figure out his stories were on a cycle and he repeated himself every few weeks, one endless loop of how times were different way back when, how on the farm money went straight to the bank to pay off loans, and how a bad year for crops meant another loan to pay off the first. By that accounting, life in the Bell village was a dream, for there was always credit at the store, always work to be had. Yet the old man was forever dissatisfied.

Years later, Willie would think that it wasn’t a bad life, that although they were poor, they didn’t know it because everyone was poor. The houses in the village were all the same design—small off-white vernacular bungalows with gabled roofs—and had small, fenced-in backyards with clotheslines and tiny gardens for corn, tomatoes, squash, and bell peppers. As many as three generations of a family crammed into each of these houses, everyone white—blacks were not allowed to work in the upstate mills here—and many of
these families had come down from mountain farms after several years of drought and failed crops, living off borrowed money that they could no longer get an extension for. Husks of black snakes on fences, the eyes of glowering barn rats at their backs, these families packed their belongings and left that uncertain, hardscrabble life for a guaranteed weekly paycheck.

Like all their neighbors in the Bell, the Hopewells lived in a single-story Craftsman with a gabled roof that faced the street. The residence had wood siding painted beige and light green shutters, the paint chipped and cracked. A small square yard sat in front, and a two-foot stripe of crabgrass separated their house from the neighbors on either side. From the road, six stairs led up from the street to the yard, where a picket fence marked the front edge of the property, and six more stairs rose from the sidewalk to the porch. The wide porch stretched across the entire front of the house, and was partially hidden by hanging ferns and cypress trees that grew in the yard.

At the corner of Harvey Lane, their neighbor, a man named Mink Skelton, from the Cajun country, waved and caught up with them.

“Y’all hear what went on last night at the Hillside?” he asked.

“Not a thing,” Joe said.

“Shoot,” Mink said, nearly salivating with the gossip. As they walked up Harvey Lane, he recounted the night’s events, emphasized the cold-bloodedness of it all, a note of glee in his voice. “I haven’t talked to anyone that was there yet, but it sounds gruesome.”

“I’ll say,” Susannah said. She turned up the walk to the house. “Shoo, Charlie,” she said from inside. A mangy collie mix trotted up to Willie, and he knelt to scratch it, listened to the men talk.

“They found out who done it yet?” Abel asked.

Mink grew quiet. “Rumor has it, Mary Jane was the one.” Willie eyed Quinn, who hunched over with his hands in his pockets. Joe waved his hand at the neighbor, who went on, “It was Ernest Jones and Lee Evans that got killed. Depot said Mary Jane walked in, dragged them to the street, and shot them.”

“Mary Jane’s not a killer,” Joe said. “Those were his friends.” He trailed off as though finally allowing himself to consider the possibility.

“That’s just what I heard,” Mink said.

“It must have been Larthan.”

“You might want to go talk to Sheriff Chambers then. He’s hunting Mary Jane right now.”

“I’ll do that.”

Abel grabbed a wooden fence stake in the front yard, wiggled it to see how sturdy it was, and said, “Anyone seen Larthan?”

“Evelyn was in church this morning,” Joe looked at Quinn. “She say anything?”

“Not to me.”

“You do know who her father is?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well. I doubt she knows more than the rest of us do.”

Abel said, “Such a shame, a father like that. At least he raised her in church.”

“Passed her off, is what he did. Those church ladies did as much to raise Evelyn Tull as Larthan ever did.”

“Strange he never brought her into one of those downtown churches,” Mink said.

“He knows his clientele. Get to know more farmers and whiskey drinkers out here in the country than he ever would at some town church.”

“You think he’ll shut down for a while? Lay low?”

Joe spat. “He won’t be closing down, long as he’s got a line of customers. So you’re trying to tell me that the sheriff is honestly considering Mary Jane to do that.”

“He’s already gone out to see Widow Coleman this morning. Paid his respects and asked for Mary Jane.”

“He didn’t do it, I’m telling you right now.”

“I know Mary Jane,” Mink said. “I know it don’t sound like him.”

“It wasn’t him.”

From the front porch, Susannah called to them, “Quit your gossiping. Come in and get your dinner.”

“All right, fellas,” Mink said, and tipped his hat.

The inside of their house was small, two rooms and a kitchen. Willie, Quinn, and Abel slept in the front room, three metal beds,
a shelf, and a dresser, and the bedroom to the right belonged to Joe and Susannah. In the kitchen, where Susannah served green bean casserole with biscuits and gravy, the men sat around the table like disciples. The mid-afternoon light slanted in from the window and the door at the back of the room, glared on the counters and floor so that the grime and dust that Susannah could never clear away seemed almost swollen with life, as though nature herself were reminding them that this house, this life they’d been living since they sold the farm, was somehow rotten, somehow wrong for them. All through the meal, Willie kept trying to make eye contact with his brother, hoping Quinn would be the one to bring up Mary Jane, but he kept his head down, focused on the clank and scrape of his fork on the plate. Maybe he was too busy thinking about Evelyn Tull to wonder about their uncle.

Willie said, “Do you believe Mink?”

His father set his fork on the plate and rubbed his tongue in his cheek to rid his mouth of food. “Your uncle’s not that kind of man. He’ll get into some mischief, but he ain’t a killer.”

“What’d Mink say?” Susannah said.

“The sheriff’s looking for Mary Jane. Thinks my brother shot those boys.”

“They Lord,” she said.

“He didn’t do it,” Joe said. “You know Mary Jane.”

“He could have,” Willie said, and everyone looked at him. “Couldn’t he?”

“Son, there’s different kinds of men out there, all of em capable of different things. I know you’ve heard us arguing about your uncle, how he drinks too much and runs with the wrong crowd. Things I don’t want you messed up in. But there’s a big difference between causing some trouble and killing someone.”

“Didn’t you kill men, in the war?”

“Willie,” his mother said.

“That was different. We were at war, for one thing, and it took something out of me. You don’t go down that road lightly because you’ll never come back from raising a gun against another man.”

C
hambers had just lit a cigar in his office when the county’s house representative called up from Columbia to discuss the murder. It had only been twelve hours since the bodies were found, but it being Sunday the gossip mill had spread like news of the second coming. What could Chambers tell him? “Yes sir, we’re working on it. I’ve got men out looking for Mary Jane Hopewell, and I’ve taken some statements.”

“I tell you, Furman, this isn’t looking good. I’ve got constituents calling me up from the other side of York County asking can’t the law do something. This is campaign season.”