The Whiskey Baron (9 page)

This afternoon, while she soaked beans and chopped vegetables in the kitchen, he went in and treaded lightly, his shoes plodding on the wood floor, and he took off his hat, kicked off his boots, and rolled up his sleeves. He eased out the squeaking back door and stood barefoot in the yard, the grass brittle and brown, a few hanks of green all that was left in the yard. Dust stuck to his feet, the ground cool beneath him. By the house, he sat on a makeshift bench he’d made last year out of two slabs of granite and some scrap wood he had lying around. Beneath it was a rusted tin pail turned upside down, and beneath that he kept a jar of whiskey. He pulled out the jar and took a sip, stared at the blue sky, the wisps above him, a bank of dark clouds in the west. He took another swig and returned the jar to the pail and wedged a pinch of chaw in his lip.

He unbuckled his holster and pulled his gun out. He carried a standard issue Smith & Wesson revolver, a six-shooter with a rosewood stock. He kept the gun polished and loaded, fired off two dozen rounds once a week to keep his aim sharp, though he’d not
had to fire it in the line of service in a long time. The Hillside murder was just the beginning, he feared. Even before Prohibition the town had had its share of bootleggers, and they’d made their share of busts, but the big runners were elsewhere—Charlotte or Asheville or East Tennessee. Castle was a sleepy town, and like much of the state it hadn’t seen action since 1865. The mill villages were segregated, but in town there was trouble every so often. Jim Crow, the KKK, plenty of public whippings. But folks didn’t lock their doors. A man didn’t just walk into a place of business—no matter what business it was—and unload on two boys with his shotgun. Chambers returned his gun to his holster and laid the holster on the ground at his feet. He leaned back against the house to watch the cloudbank roll in until Alma called him for dinner.

T
he day was long already when Mary Jane came out of the woods from his afternoon at the river. His clothes had near dried, but his shirt was dark with sweat on his back. His shoulder and arm ached down to the bone, and he thought maybe it would be safe to stay another night with the widow. He found her sitting on the porch swing, gazing off at the sunset as he came up and sat beside her. When she didn’t look at him for a moment, he asked, “What is it?”

“Go inside.”

She stared ahead and held her lips tight together in that way she did whenever he or the boys were acting up, the way that always left him feeling like a heel. He rose and opened the front door and stopped. The inside of her house was wrecked—holes in walls, ripped up furniture, toppled over shelves, and scattered debris.

“The hell?” he said. He walked inside and took in the damage and
knew at once who had been here. He hurried to the kitchen and saw with relief the fruit jars were untouched. To be sure, he pulled a few away and saw the three money-stuffed jars in the back where he’d left them. He returned to the porch.

Abigail crossed her legs and looked at him fiercely, which filled him with longing. Her hair was fading an elegant shade of silver, but her eyes burned like twin fires, clear and reflecting the sinking sun today. In them he saw what must have been a formidable woman in her youth, nail-tough and stoic, so that you never knew what she might be inclined to do. Those had always been the dangerous ones when he’d been young enough to go off sparking gals, and he wondered for a moment if this was what it was like to wind up married to one. He’d dated a few, but found them harder to break than horses. Case in point was his single, failed marriage, a six-week relationship from courtship to abandonment. Never again, he’d sworn, would he edge near love, yet here he was, a toe away from the abyss. He and Abigail had taken up a few months ago, their mutual need sparked by some nameless force. He and Shorty Bagwell had always drunk down by the river where he’d met his nephews, and one night Shorty had driven off and left Mary Jane by himself, and Mary Jane took it upon himself to sleep on the widow’s front porch. She’d woken him up with a broom in his face, and the two had become lovers soon after. Funny how fate operated.

“The money’s still there,” she said.

“I saw it.”

“Larthan.”

“I figured. I can’t stay here tonight. I got to get that money hid better and hit the road.”

She stared back off at the plummeting sun. “You do what you need to do.”

“I told you I’ve got a plan here.”

“You all had a plan. What happened to the plan with Ernest and Lee?”

“Things have changed.”

She cut her eyes to him. “And will things change again?”

“Honey, I don’t know.”

“You better find out,” she said. “I told Larthan when he was here, when he was tearing up my house—my house—I told him you and he would get things settled before you came back. So you get things settled.”

“I’m doing the best I know how.”

“So far the best you know how has gotten two of you killed for nothing.”

She looked away from him and began to sway. The chains squeaked as the swing moved back and forth, and he glanced up at the ceiling, half expecting to see a hook come loose from the violence.

He said, “Let me get this money out of here. I’ll bury it over by the woods so if Larthan comes back he won’t find it among the fruit jars.”

She nodded.

“This is something I can do. It ain’t much, but it’s something. Probably best if you don’t know where I bury it. I don’t think he’ll come back, but…”

He waited for her to speak, but when she didn’t he grunted and left her for the kitchen. He slammed the mason jars against the counter, unscrewed one and pulled out a hundred dollars, folded the bills and left them out for her. Back on the porch, she held her fist to her mouth, and her eyes were crinkled. He stopped on the step, turned, and sat next to her again. She bit her knuckles as he put his arm around her, and she leaned into his shoulder.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said. “Trust me.”

“I can’t,” she said, and it was like another piece of shot tore into his chest. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t speak and wouldn’t know what to say if he could.

She took a breath and put her hand on his shoulder, said, “I should dress this before you go.” She rose and brushed her dress and went inside. A moment later she returned with a roll of dressing, which she wrapped around his shoulder and arm, same as she’d done this morning.

“My Clara Barton,” he said, and she laughed a watery laugh. “Thank you,” he said.

When the wound was dressed, he carried the three mason jars to the shed, picked up a shovel, and moved along to the graveyard by
the wood’s edge. He looked back at the house and couldn’t see the porch, couldn’t see Abigail, so he set to digging. She wouldn’t like what he was about to do, and he wouldn’t be able to explain why he was doing it if someone came up and asked. Perhaps: he needed this money, his only bargaining chip with Aunt Lou, and Aunt Lou was his only way out from under Larthan’s thumb. A train of events began with this money and moved in a logical sequence to a steady income and a free life with Abigail. To keep the money, he needed to hide it from Larthan Tull. Where was the last place Larthan Tull would look? Sick bastard that he was, he would have to be evil as a snake to look in the grave of the widow’s son. Therefore, that would be where Mary Jane hid the money.

Dusk found him standing at the edge of the field, sweating and shirtless, the shovel resting on the mound of soft dirt at his feet. The meat of his shoulder was ragged from the stray pellets of shot. The wound had reopened as he worked and bled through the dressing. He laid the three jars in with the boy, two thousand dollars in each, and as he filled in the grave he was uncertain if or when their contents might be recovered. If the weight of the earth might crush the glass, leaving the paper money for the worms. Unto dust.

The air held the rich smell of fertile earth, the black soil seemingly ripe along with the crops. To his right were six more graves, each marked with crumbling moss-covered stones that jutted out of the dusty clay like dominoes, and before him the ground sloped through the woods, the valley’s nadir swallowed up by the thickening pines and hardwoods now shadowblack in the gloaming. Sweat dripped from his hair and ran down his face, and water splashed on the hard ground where he had not been digging. His eyes bleary from the salt, his skin hot and wet and melting into the humid air like a drop of blood in clear water.

He watched the pink backdrop fade below the oak-hickory forest on the rise to the southwest. Firs coated the misty-covered crests to the north. Beyond the western trees soot coughed out of the mill’s smokestack, and farther back, the high point of the hill country was Castle Mountain. Rocky knob for which this town was named, and to which he was heading. He knew he did not have much time, so
he pulled the shovel out of the mound of dirt and studied the grave. He’d shoveled some dried leaves over the cut dirt so that after a rainstorm or two perhaps no one would realize the boy had recently been undug. Nothing he could do about the appearance either way now. The widow could have seen him from the house if she were looking carefully, but if she had seen where he’d buried the money she would have been over here to stop him. He started his hike back to the house.

In the clearing between the woods and the house, the cornstalks clacked together in the wind. The pulse of crickets in the field sounded like a coming plague. Old Testament times. He carried the shovel to the barn and hung it on the wall where he’d found it hours ago. Blood from his shoulder had soaked everything—his arms, his pants, the shovel—but each scoop of soil had brushed off the blood until the shovel was dry dirt and rust and nothing else. The sticky black dirt on his hands clawed its way up his arms like the loose branches of a hickory in winter, so that he looked like he’d been wrestling with Satan himself. Which he might as well have been.

He grabbed his shirt from the peghook in the barn and walked—briskly, but not running, there was no need to run yet—to the front of the house, where the widow sat on the porch swing, rocking slowly, her gray eyes cast toward the shadow of the hills to the west. A lamp burned softly inside the window beside her. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and then heat lightning set fire to the sky, followed by more thunder. Cicadas hissed in the summer air. He kissed her cracked lips, took in the puffs under her eyes, her worn-out brittle hair, and said, “It’s done.”

She gazed off the porch, to the blue dusk and the ridges of the hills in the distance.

“Look at me,” he said. “Give me two weeks. Just keep telling them you don’t know where I’m at. In a few weeks you won’t have to worry about a thing. Neither of us will.”

She turned from him, and he considered saying something more, but instead walked back to the forest, past the graveyard and onto the logging road that fell to the bottoms, to the valley flatlands and the river.

Clouds moved in from the west, and with them came the occasional burst of thunder. He would follow the river south away from the town, along land he’d known all his life. He needed a frame of reference until daybreak, and then he would be able to wend his way to the mountain without doubling back into the mouths of those who would be coming. The woods swallowed him, and his feet crunched on the unyielding dirt and roots and dried leaves that had been on the ground for eight months and still had not decomposed. Leaves that would hide the boy’s exhumed crypt until Mary Jane could return. If he returned.

He could not see his hand in front of his face, but he knew this trail to the bottoms. He’d traveled it twice a day for years, the copper still set up by the creek, firing steam into the night sky, the machinations of which provided higher revenues from the corn than any legal market ever had. The river flowed through here less than a hundred yards from where the path opened to the bottoms. The sky cleared and the emerging stars lit his way through the kneehigh grass, crickets abuzz and brambles scraping his legs, the night moonlit, active, indignant.

He raged and shook with feelings with which he had no acquaintance, and he found the river and stripped out of his clothes and waded into the water, stumbled to his knees and submerged himself in these cool waters for the last time. His shoulder felt like it was being assaulted by a mess of hornets, and he could feel the water brush against his wound, rinsing it clean. He rubbed his arms, his face, and then he reached for his clothes. He rose and came out cleansed of the blood and the dirt and the sweat from the evening, but his soul still choked with dirt.

He scrambled from the creek, dressed and hurried along the river south, carrying nothing with him but the night and the approaching storm and years worth of memories that he wished he could bury in the hardscrabble land of red clay.

W
illie continued to swim for a long time, kicked against the current, rode downriver and swam back up to where they sat on the blanket, watching the sun blaze as it lowered in the sky, as afternoon slowly gave way to evening.

Not long before dusk, he got out, put on his shoes, and draped his shirt over his shoulder.

“Tell them I’ll be home before long,” Quinn said.

“They won’t care, so long as you’re up in the morning.”

“Bye, Willie,” Evelyn said. She lay on her elbows with her ankles crossed. No sign of the anger or discomfort that she’d had when Mary Jane was around. Willie’s heart leapt and his palms sweated as he nodded to her and scrambled up the banks.

Once on the tracks, his skin cooled as the beads of water dripped off and the film of water on his skin dried. The tracks were still hot
under his soles, but he could feel autumn lurking even in the summer’s peak. The heat on his back felt good. By the time he made it back to the highway, the sun was low in the sky, the hot white given way to a dying ember in the west. A car approached from town, and when he turned to look, he saw the face of Larthan Tull behind the wheel of a big black Studebaker, which made Willie’s heart skip. He wondered if the man was coming for his daughter, or just out for a drive, but whatever the case, Tull passed him by and drove on past the fire road that would have led to the river. Quinn and Evelyn were safe for now. Willie kept walking.