The Whiskey Baron (12 page)

“What time did you get in last night?” Joe asked.

“Not too late,” Quinn said.

“Got them raccoon eyes.”

“I’m all right.”

They scraped at their plates a few minutes, their father clearly warming up for whatever lesson he wanted to impart. A man took on responsibilities, their father believed, and the boys needed to learn. Their father prided himself on setting that example. He’d had his hell-raising youth, which his sons had only heard tell of from their uncle Mary Jane, but in the years after the war, Joe’s future was much less certain. Willie was not yet born, but the whispered tales suggested his father was bad to drink and hit the bottle with more fury than Mary Jane ever did. Whatever those monsters were, Prohibition was his salvation—that or the birth of his second son. “It’s going to be a hot shift,” he finally said.

“I said I was all right.”

“Long day.”

“Joe,” Susannah said.

“The boy was out half the night and now he’s going to work a long shift tired. He won’t last long with that kind of lifestyle, and we can’t afford for him to get hurt or lose his job.”

“Ah, leave the boy alone.”

“You stay out of this, Abel.”

“Joe,” Susannah said again.

“What? Y’all want to let this boy tromp all over the county? He can’t concentrate, he’ll get his arm sucked into a loom. Then where will we be?”

“It’s a long life, son.”

“Hell, I know it’s a long life. I’m trying to make something here, so when I’m your age these boys won’t have to be worrying about me. Maybe they can think about doing something else with their lives.”

Abel said, “If my being here’s a burden, you let me know. I can move along any time.”

“And where you going to go?”

“Joe,” Susannah said again.

“What happened to you last night?” Joe continued. “Who’s going to take care of you, something bad happens out there?”

Abel shook his head. The rest of the family studied their food.

When the whistle sounded, the three men and Willie stood and put their plates in the sink. As they were leaving Susannah hugged her father and whispered, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“It don’t matter anyway,” he said.

They walked down the hill toward the mill. Mist clung to the earth, but once the sun broke above the horizon and the dawn-pink sky caught fire, the mist would burn away and the oppressive day’s heat would settle in, right as the machines inside the mill warmed to full force. They trudged through the iron gates where the mill waited for them like a prison, looming square and brick and tall, the fortress of Castle. Men trickled in and by six the rooms had filled for the day’s labor. The clack and clank of the machines, the stale concrete, the smell of oil and sweat. Looms bobbed and battery fillers refilled bobbins of thread. A slight breeze from the fans blew hot air into the morning. Remnants of spit tobacco were sticky and wet and sour on the floor. As the machines heated throughout the day, the men sweated and stank, and lint fogged the rooms.

It was this life their father wanted to keep them away from. Scrimping. Looking at your budget and wondering how people got along. Freeing yourself from the company store. Your only options the mill or the military. The whole country was in bad shape. Land
that a family had owned for generations suddenly became worthless. Their grandfather told the story over and again. “We borrowed against the farm if the crops had a bad season, but one year the credit just dried up. Bank said our farm wasn’t worth what we owed on it.” Abel found himself an old widower who couldn’t pay his mortgage, forced to come live with his daughter’s family. Joe and Abel had always had an uneasy time around each other, going back before the war, when Joe and Susannah were both farm kids. Then there wasn’t a lot to do out in the country but ride around drinking, sneak off, and try to spark.

Joe and Susannah’s courtship was the stuff of legend in the Hopewell household. Willie knew the story the same as he knew the stories in Genesis, how one evening Joe brought a bottle over to her farm, how the two of them sipped whiskey in the barn loft, giggled, and lay down together. It was just that one time, a first for the both of them, but she later had to go to her parents and tell them what was what. Abel rode over to the Hopewells’ farm, his fedora low over his eyes, and a few weeks later Joe and Susannah were married. They lived in her childhood bedroom for two years. Quinn slept in a crib in the corner, and Joe worked for Abel for the same wage Abel paid every other farmhand.

When the war broke out, Joe joined the army and spent a year in a trench in France. Mostly days of boredom, the pop-pop of gunfire over No Man’s Land far off or absent altogether, but the lines shifted and for a time Joe found himself shooting at muzzle flashes in the distance. He returned to South Carolina with memories he never planned to revisit, and the first thing he did when he arrived was go out with Mary Jane and get drunk. A regular occurrence until the beginning of 1920. Susannah was pregnant with Willie then, and the farm was failing. They’d moved from Susannah’s childhood bedroom to a sharecropper’s shack out of the main house, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d have to leave Abel and the farm altogether for the mills. Joe had one last drink on January 16, 1920, the day before the Eighteenth Amendment kicked in, and he hadn’t touched the bottle since.

Willie was born, then Hazel, and crops failed during two years of
drought. Five mouths to feed, the children too young to do much. Susannah’s mother was ailing, and Abel wanted to sell off part of the farm. Joe and Susannah followed Mary Jane to the Bell, left Abel and his dying wife to what was left of the farm. Days blurred, time measured only by the quick sprouting of the children. Susannah lost a baby, and then they moved into the house on Harvey Lane. Their daughter, Hazel, died of scarlet fever one winter after weeks of a strep infection. Susannah lost another baby, during childbirth, and this would be her last. The doctor tore up her insides trying to save her life. Ether that was supposed to go over her nose spilled into her eye and burned like hot grease. A smell Willie would remember every time the doctors came to the Bell to perform tonsillectomies, and the smell of ether emanated up and down the village. Then came days of coldness, days of fire. His parents argued and Joe worked longer hours, began saving, pennies here, pennies there. They scrimped on meat. Joe was in line for a promotion when Susannah’s mother died of typhoid fever and Abel came to live with them. Although they hadn’t been saving much for the past few months, they were OK for now, so long as everyone worked. Otherwise, well.

As the day wore on, rumor of murder out by the Hillside spread through the mill. In weave room #6, Joe and Abel sat at looms and watched a shuttle pass back and forth while their neighbor Mink Skelton repeated the tale again and again, same as he’d done after church yesterday. The men bickered over what was the truth, Mary Jane with his side business, the viciousness of Larthan Tull.

“You seen the sheriff yet, Joe?”

“He came to the house yesterday afternoon. Looking for Mary Jane.”

“I hope your brother’s long gone to Alabama by now.”

“Knowing him, he could be anywhere.”

Mink grew quiet, said, “Rumor has it Larthan’s on the hunt for him as well.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Joe said. “Also wouldn’t surprise me if Larthan was the one that did the shooting.”

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

Joe spat. “He won’t be closing down. Benefits too many people.”

For a few moments the men worked the rows of looms in silence, so all you heard was the hum of the shuttlecocks. Then Mink cleared his throat and said to a weaver named Leuico King, “Did you see Larthan when you were at the Hillside?”

“Naw, he wasn’t there. Never is, when I drop by.”

“He must work at night.”

“Maybe so.”

Half the men in the mill bought whiskey off Tull, and although most had seen him around, few knew him well enough to call him Larthan to his face. For all the sins he brought into town, he kept them behind closed doors, as whispers in the night ever since the start of Prohibition. The story of how Tull and Watkins had gone into business, how they used the steam and sugar in the soda factory as a front for producing libations beyond Watkins Cola. Spenser Watkins was a local man and kept them all in good supply, be it soda pop, beer, or whiskey, but no one seemed to know what to make of Larthan Tull. Everyone heard tell of murders, a man on the run from federal agents, all manner of seedy connections in Tennessee. There were rumors of the mean streets and the Memphis underworld, and of the rain that carried rubbers and wastepaper as it sluiced through the winesoaked gutters of Knoxville. Men in dark suits and with heavy eyelids, Colt revolvers under their coats, even Italian thugs from Chicago. Who was this man who ran the bootlegging trade in the sleepy back alleys of the Carolina piedmont? A town now split between mint juleps in rockers on the front porch and slugs of rotgut in junkyards, between nine o’clock bedtimes after prayers of repentance and joy, and card games above the diner, the curses and whores and carrying on.

The men quieted as Willie came through with the broom, sweeping up lint and dust and tobacco spit on the floors.

Mink spat where Willie had just swept and said, “Boy, you must be getting to be a short timer around here.”

“School starts in three weeks.”

“Mmm,” Mink said. “Hey, Joe, when was the last time you saw Mary Jane anyway?”

“Not since he plowed into that woman’s flowerbeds.”

The men laughed.

“We seen him out at the river yesterday,” Willie said.

The men all hushed, and Joe said, “Say you did.”

“Me and Quinn, when we went swimming.”

“He wasn’t brewing liquor out there, was he?” Mink said. “Getting you to run it for him?”

“Naw sir.”

“Rumrunner Willie,” Mink said, laughing.

“He say anything to you?” Joe asked.

“Naw sir. Just swam a while, put on his clothes, and left.”

Joe narrowed his eyes at his son. Something must have lodged into place, like a bullet sliding into a fresh chamber, because he sat up and yelled, “Quinn!” He got off his stool and jogged to where his elder son was gathering a fresh batch of bobbins in the spinning room. Willie followed.

“Quinn,” Joe said.

“Yes sir?”

“Did you meet Evelyn down at the river yesterday afternoon?”

Quinn glanced at Willie, who fiddled with his broom.

“Your brother didn’t say anything. I just want to know if she told you anything about the Hillside Tavern. About her father and Mary Jane?”

“Not to me. Likely she don’t know anything more than we do.”

“Willie said y’all saw Mary Jane at the river.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Quinn asked.

“Boys, what happened yesterday? I just want to know what’s going on with my brother.”

“We were swimming,” Willie said. “Mary Jane was there, that’s all.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

The brothers eyed each other, and Quinn said, “He was just Uncle Mary Jane. You know how he is.”

Joe nodded. Willie wished he could ask his father for advice. About Mary Jane and the whiskey trade. About Evelyn Tull and her father and Quinn. About why, last night, his grandfather showed up in the cemetery. Willie was caught up in a world of secrets, and though he might not know what to do about it, he knew that when
the truth eventually came out, he would be guilty along with everyone else. There were things he couldn’t say to his father, obligations he had to others, but it left him cut off from everyone. Quinn, his mother, his grandfather, Mary Jane. They all had secrets. Did you just learn to forget and let the world carry on around you? He went back to sweeping up the afternoon’s accumulated dust. He thought of his uncle, lugging those two cans of shine away from the river. He thought of his grandfather’s glazed eyes, of Quinn lying on the riverbank with Evelyn Tull. And he thought of the sheriff, his badge and his gun saying he was the law.

C
hambers spent the last day of August driving around the countryside, smoking a cigar and pondering his next move regarding the Hillside murders. When he returned to the station the sun was long past its zenith and rocketing away from the still-blue sky. A long black Ford was parked out front. In the waiting room were two men in gray suits with slicked back hair and rounded, ruddy Irish features. Chambers pegged them for the feds he’d been hearing about before they said word one.

“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” said the first. “I’m Agent Jeffreys, and this is Agent O’Connor.”

“Gentlemen,” he said.

“May we have a few words?”

“Step on back.”

He led them through the doors past the deputy to his office. A
map of the county on the wall in yellow parchment, a clutter of files on his desk beside the typewriter and a copy of Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
. A metal filing cabinet with the top drawer ajar.

“Have a seat,” he said, and sat himself behind the desk. “So let me guess. You’re here about Mary Jane Hopewell.”

“We’re here to defend the United States from evil and corruption,” said Jeffreys. “Mary Jane Hopewell is part of why we’re here.”

“And Larthan Tull.”

“That’s another part.”

They studied him, and he folded his hands and leaned back in his chair. The skin on his forehead was sticky, and he could feel a damp spot on the back of his shirt. “Well?” he said.

O’Connor crossed his arms and stared, like a limo driver or a bodyguard. Here but not here. Finally, Jeffreys spoke: “We’re stationed in Columbia. There’s a thousand murders in a thousand small towns across this great country every year, and ordinarily none of them make their way to the FBI. Our job isn’t to step on the toes of the local police, or even the state police. But the nature of the shootings last week attracted the attention of some people up north. One of our divisions is responsible for patrolling the liquor trade in the southeast. Understand, we don’t bother with small-time mountain shiners, for the most part. It’s the national distributors we’re looking to squelch out. Most of the big runners are over in the mountains—they’ve got an investigation going on in Lexington, one over in Knoxville. But O’Connor and I currently have an investigation up in Charlotte. You’ve heard the name Aunt Lou?”