The Whiskey Baron (8 page)

But with a double murder happening outside his tavern, that was more serious than brewing a little whiskey on the side. From what Depot had told him, the good old boys out drinking on the widow’s farm had come up with the idea that Mary Jane could give Aunt Lou a better product for less. Let’s go to the distributor! That’s easy money! Like that was all there was to it. Tull wasn’t about to let some no-count bootleggers cut in on his business, and he’d indicated to Depot that the boys would have to be dealt with, swiftly and harshly. Still, he’d thought his right-hand man more competent than to rouse half the county with gunshots and a puddle of blood on Highway 9. One drunken squabble, it seemed, and now two were dead and Mary Jane was on the run. The least Depot could’ve done was take out all three in a single swoop.

“It was the damnedest thing,” Depot had said before the sheriff had arrived. “Mary Jane just up and shot those boys in the street. I never did see a man so out of control.”

“Business will do that to you,” Tull had said, his mind already churning ahead to deal with Mary Jane. “You take on too much too fast and you get wrung out.”

“Most businessmen I know don’t wind up shooting no one.”

“Everybody’s different.”

“What you aim to do?”

Tull aimed to put a stop to any nonsense between Mary Jane and Aunt Lou, and he aimed to charge Mary Jane a tax for the inconvenience of it all. The way Tull figured it, the man owed him about five thousand dollars. Call it a whiskey tax. He’d earned more over the years, and maybe Tull shouldn’t have let it go on so long, but there you go. The five thousand was a rough number Tull calculated after looking into Mary Jane’s expenses and spending. Helped to be in good with the town banker. Based on the numbers the banker and Tull came up with, Mary Jane had at least that much sitting around in a mattress somewhere, and Tull intended to collect it. Didn’t really care about Mary Jane’s life. Mary Jane had watched Ernest and Lee die for their part in the transgression, and he’d run off scared. He could keep running, far as Tull cared, but that five thousand, that was a chunk of change.

He parked the Studebaker and stood smoking beside it and took in the scene: the slope of the garden down toward the woods, the logging trail to the bottoms, the crest of trees across the way where the land rose again from its trough. Though it was only the end of August, the tulip poplars had already yellowed from the heat and the late-summer thirst. In the garden by the house, beans and squash had browned on the vine, the peppers had been scorched red, and the tomato vines were bent over so that the fruit wasted away in the dirt. And they thought they could run a whiskey empire.

She stepped onto the porch, shouted, “What you want?”

“Mary Jane around?”

“Hell no he ain’t. What you want?”

“I want to find Mary Jane.”

“He ain’t here, so go on away.”

“Maybe you can help me,” he said. He walked up to the porch where she stood, still holding the screen open. “I believe he had some money for me. I just came to get it, and then I’ll leave you be.”

“We don’t have no money.”

She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun and squinted at him. Tull could see she might have once been pretty. Didn’t have the weary, worn-out look most of these farm wives had. Lord knew her life had been hard enough, especially now that she was in an affair
with a bumbling entrepreneur like Mary Jane Hopewell, but Tull had come to believe there was a strength to some people, and you either had it or you didn’t. Something you were born with, like integrity, the ability to endure. In rough times, some folks picked themselves up while others wallowed in their failures until the day they died. He’d known plenty of both, couldn’t say where it came from, only that if you were one of the latter, you couldn’t just up and decide to endure one day, as much as some philosophers liked to believe. People didn’t change, and there was nothing you could do for them except take their money in exchange for a drink.

There was also the question of how much she knew of Mary Jane’s actions. Hell, she lived here, she had to know what was going on. Tull smiled at her and said, “My name’s Larthan Tull. You wouldn’t happen to have any coffee on, would you?”

“I know who you are.”

He waited. Then he stepped onto the porch, and she retreated to the house.

“If he comes by, I’ll tell him you were looking for him,” she said.

Tull reached for the screen. When she tried to slam the door in his face, he kicked it open and followed her inside. She cowered against a wall, eyed him with trepidation but not quite fear. The outside of the house hadn’t looked like much—needed paint, some shutters were loose—but the inside was downright homey. Warm wood paneling, daguerreotype portraits along one wall, each room clean if not spacious.

The widow backed into the kitchen. “You and the sheriff both come by looking for him, but I’ve not seen him since last night. He left and didn’t come home.”

“You heard what he did?”

She looked away and nodded.

“If he’s smart, he’s somewhere in Alabama by now.” He watched her with a careful manner. She pressed herself against the wall, slid through the doorway and back into the kitchen. He followed, said, “I’m sorry for all your losses, Mrs. Coleman. Believe me, if I’d known what Mary Jane was up to before he got into it, none of this would have gotten so far. Him and the boy Ernest might both still be here.
But as it is he’s in some serious trouble. I’m not sure he’ll ever be able to come back to Castle. The law wants justice for that murder, whether it was justified or not.”

“Did you kill those boys?”

“No ma’am.”

“But you do feel like those boys cheated you?”

“They took it upon themselves to come up with a business scheme. Way I hear it, it involved selling some of your special liquor to Aunt Lou. Of course I’d cut their throats for that, but it seems I’m late to the party.”

“They weren’t after Aunt Lou,” she said. “They never thought twice about Aunt Lou. There was no call for them to be killed.”

Tull squinted, flexed his jaw. “I’m a businessman, Mrs. Coleman, not a killer. I was never looking to take anyone’s son from them. Lord knows this country’s lost enough for a generation.”

He moved forward, into the kitchen, and she cowered against the counter. On the shelf behind her were rows of glass mason jars full of fruit already canned for winter.

“Mr. Tull,” she said, “there’s nothing I can do for you. I’ve lost everything, my husband, my son. They left me with nothing. No money, nothing but the house you’re standing in, and I aim to stay here till the end. Mary Jane does come back, whatever was between you and him will get settled before he sets foot back in this house.”

“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s already settled. There’s just a matter of some money, and then I’ll never see either of you again.”

He reached for a knife by the sink, and she whimpered. “Please,” she said. “You have a daughter. What would you do if she were left to fend for herself?”

He stopped.

“I have nothing,” she said.

Without answering, he carried the knife out of the kitchen. “You stay there,” he said. He studied the living room, knife in hand, and finally he walked to the couch and stabbed at the cushions. He pulled out cotton stuffing, and he stabbed into the back of the couch, searching, searching. Then he moved to the wall and pulled down the portraits, one at a time, but behind each was the bare untouched
wall. There was a grandfather clock in a corner, and he knocked it to the floor. Bells clanged. Glass shattered. He kicked at the wood on the back of the clock until it splintered and his foot went through. Nothing. No trap door, no box of money.

“Save yourself a mess, Mrs. Coleman,” he yelled. “Tell me where it’s at.”

“I don’t know,” she screamed. “You leave me alone.”

He moved to the bedroom and took the knife to the mattress.

“I have nothing! Nothing!”

He ignored her as he methodically set to the house. He’d burn it down if he thought that would get him his money faster. But nothing. No hoard, no cache, not in this house. Mary Jane could have brought the money with him. Could have scrambled from the Hillside, come here, packed a bag, and hit the trail. Hounds at his back, the police, Larthan Tull. What would he do, show up on Aunt Lou’s doorstep and expect to be welcomed in with open arms? He couldn’t go there. He couldn’t go home. As long as Tull was alive, Mary Jane Hopewell couldn’t keep his liquor business, and it seemed a foolhardy plan indeed to take his money and run with it. Then where would he go? What would he do?

When Tull finally gave up and left, the sun was sinking fast out of the sky like a meteor caught in gravity’s grasp. He turned onto Highway 9 and chased the sun back toward the Hillside. He passed a dirty boy walking along the roadside. When the boy turned to stare at him, his eyes seemed to widen, but Tull passed him by.

A
fter leaving the mill hill, Chambers gave up on his day and drove down Main, past the courthouse and the Hendricks brothers’ filling station. He lived at the base of a hill south of town, in a single-story bungalow with pillars on the porch and a gabled roof. His children were gone—both of them buried in Europe—and he and Alma had lived here upward of twenty years, had the lot paid for in full, and could probably afford to live elsewhere. Perhaps in one of the Queen Anne or Colonial Revival homes on York Street, with their ornate columns and porticoes. Sometimes he did think it would be nice to sell all of this, move out there, and spend his weekends playing the banjo in a swing underneath a willow tree, but he wouldn’t do it until he’d finished his stint as sheriff. Although he’d lived in the county all his life, some of those old farmers off in the country—Wilkesburg or Jonesville or out toward Union—wouldn’t
trust a man who lived in a house bigger than his family needed. Sometimes it was bad enough connecting to them when you didn’t have societal airs. No good could come from moving up to York Street. Old Confederate money bought the world in town, but all it meant to a farmer was that the owner hadn’t ever woken up at four to go spend a hot August day milking cows or out picking cotton.

His wife sat on the porch as he pulled up, rocking. He sat on the rocker next to her, and together they rocked in silence for a few moments. Finally she said, “How was it?”

“It’s bad this time.” He told her about the murder, but left out the more gruesome details. “The county rep called and said some federal agents are coming to shut down the liquor trade.”

“Good. Nothing good ever comes out of that part of town.”

“Most of them aren’t bad people. Most of those mill folks just want to support their families. Some just need a release every once in a while.”

“I’m talking about the Hillside, not the Bell.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” he said.

She quit rocking. “You going to be here for dinner?”

He nodded. “I’m home for the day.”

“I’ll get it started then,” she said, rising.

“It’s early yet.”

“I got to soak some beans.”

He reached for her hand, and she put her other hand on his shoulder and squeezed it softly. After a moment, she went inside and left him out there rocking alone. Even after nearly forty years of marriage, he found it tough to discuss his job with her. They’d married when he was twenty-eight. He’d worked on the railroads in Texas and Arkansas, and as a young man he came home to marry a local debutante. In her youth she’d been rebellious, attracted to this mysterious older man with plenty of brawn and no pedigree. To her he seemed wild and free, and she wanted to be with him, or thought she did for long enough to upset her parents and get married. But, in the ways of nineteen-year-old women, she up and grew more conservative on Furman before he was ready for it. She seemed content to stay on the family farm and live out their days growing corn and
milking cows. They’d bickered when he’d gotten a job in town as a deputy, and when he ran for sheriff, he thought he’d pushed their marriage to its breaking point.

If she’d ever considered leaving him, it would have been in those months of campaign where he’d had to sell himself to every roller in the county. Why was he a better choice than the previous sheriff, who was then as old as Chambers was now, a man who barnstormed and campaigned like a pugilist all the way through election day? And why had Chambers decided to make that move? What was it all for? Alma had asked him this on more than one occasion. He was a loner, and not one for self-promotion, unsuited completely for life as a politician. Yet he’d had a fire in him in his forties, a competitive soul that knew no bounds and, he’d thought, would only be satisfied by reaching the top of the local law enforcement food chain.

All he could say to his wife was, “It needs to be done.”

“What does that even mean?” she’d asked.

Looking back now, he thought that if the opportunity had come up, she might have run off on him. She was nearing forty then yet still had the vestiges of her former beauty. Nothing more formidable than a woman in her thirties. But they had two teenage sons, and a war was starting. She didn’t work, didn’t have an income, and had her standing with society to think of. Alma Ayers came from good Methodist folk, and she participated in church functions regularly. Where would she go? He never believed she had a sense of what the world was really like—had never seen a man killed, had never been hustled or hustled anybody, had never been out of the region. But she knew she was right, and more than once she refused to leave the house when he had a stump speech to make. They’d argue and slam doors and not speak. Then she’d crawl into bed and keep her back to the middle, her body as far to the edge as she could get, and she always seemed to sleep soundly, more soundly than he ever could on those nights, not that he was afraid she’d actually run off but just out of the unease for the situation. So many chambers of the human heart.

Now in his sixties, he had to admit she’d been right all along. She knew him better than he knew himself, and at times he thought himself a buffoon for ever giving up farming. His real complaint was
that the world had moved on so that a man couldn’t carry on like he once could. You had to have ambition and a cold heart to stay ahead of the bill collectors, the revenuers, the machines, the dust, the labor of life, even death itself. In this way his marriage to Alma was such a comfort to him, all the more so as he grew older and the world shifted around him. The physicality of their younger years had given way, first to stagnation and then to a tense, frustrating bleed after their sons died. But now that frustration had born something new. She was separate from his work, knew almost nothing of what it was like for him to go out there day after day, the weight of his responsibility, such as it was. And what must that have been like for her? To be in the home, tending to their domestic lives, while he left her every morning? She’d been right about him when he ran for sheriff, yet she kept silent when he was up for reelection, just let him meet and greet and speak, and she congratulated him on another year of winning unopposed. In the past twenty years, she’d never said a word to make him feel like he’d wasted his life, for which he was unspeakably grateful. When he came home to her, he rekindled a sense of himself and something that would otherwise have been lost.