The Whiskey Baron (3 page)

When he arrived at her farm, east dawn was finally peeking through, the sky a blue wall with a streak of pink like a curtain rising for the day’s drama. The farm was a good plot of rolling land by the river. A rutted logging road cut through the fields and disappeared into a distant line of trees, down toward the water. The broom sedge was near waist high, overdue for baling, and blushed wine-red in the eastern light. Heads of blackjack popped up over the sedge. Behind the house was a good garden of corn and beans and tomatoes and squash, the leaves of the squash wilted like tobacco in the heat.
Chambers parked in front of the farmhouse, approached the front door, knocked.

The widow came to the door, a phantom-pale figure with straight brown hair dusted gray, a high forehead and a flat, narrow face, the bulbs of her eyes behind vein-blush lids.

“He ain’t here,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“I don’t know who you’re looking for, but he ain’t here.”

“How you know I’m looking for someone?”

“Sheriff, you haven’t come by in years, and both of us know why. There’s only one reason you’d come here, and that’s because you’re looking for some troublemaker. Lord knows enough of them hang around here. Ernest and Mary Jane and the rest of them. I don’t know which one you’re aiming to find, but you won’t find any of them here. I haven’t seen a one of them since sometime yesterday.”

Chambers took off his hat. “Ma’am, you’re partly right,” he said. “I am looking for Mary Jane. I’ve also got some bad news. Ernest and Lee Evans were shot in front of the Hillside a few hours ago. Depot Murphy tells me it was Mary Jane who shot em.”

The widow’s eyes didn’t waver. She leaned against the doorjamb and stared at the sheriff for long enough to make him uneasy.

“I’m sorry to bring you the news about Ernest.”

“Where’s he at now?”

“My deputy drove him to the funeral home.”

She stared off beyond him at the rising sun. She pressed her tongue into her upper lip, ran it along her teeth. Finally, she looked him right in the eye and, without flinching, said, “It’s funny. When the army told me about my husband, I was sad, but mostly I was relieved that I still had my boy, and that he was too young for the army to take him. When I heard what happened to Jimmy, it was like the world shifted into black and white, and it’s been that way ever since.”

Chambers kneaded the brim of his hat with both hands and shifted from one foot to the other until he said, “Any idea where I might find Mary Jane?”

She looked away from him, off to the sunrise again, and shook her head.

“Or any idea why he might have shot Ernest and Lee?”

“Sheriff, you know as well as I do what all goes on in this town. Half the farmers around here sell Tull their corn. He sells some of it back to us, but a lot of it goes up to Charlotte. Aunt Lou, you know her?”

Chambers had heard of her, but he kept out of that business. He had his beat, and the boys up in Charlotte had theirs.

“Any violence that happens here, your best bet is to look at the liquor. Larthan Tull, Aunt Lou. I don’t know what Mary Jane might be mixed up in, but as long as there’s a liquor trade, there’s bound to be trouble.”

“I know about Tull,” Chambers said, “but I also know what goes on along the river here.”

“I didn’t say I was innocent.”

“Well, what are you saying?”

“I don’t know, Furman. You just told me my friend Mary Jane shot that youngun I took in. I don’t know what to make of anything right now.”

Her eyes welled up, and he wanted to reach over and comfort her, but he held back. She blinked her eyes clear and squared her jaw. After a pause for her to recover he said, “I’ll leave you be. You call if there’s anything I can do.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Would you mind if I have a look around out here? I’m not here to bust up a still, but I do want to find Mary Jane.”

“Help yourself.”

She closed the door in his face, left him on the porch with his hat in his hand.

As he stepped off the porch, he slipped and grabbed hold of the railing, and a fire shot up his left arm like a charley horse stretching back fifty-one years. He couldn’t grasp anything with that hand anymore, but no matter how much he told himself that, his reflexes worked in some other part of his mind. He caught his breath and waited for the pain to subside. Then he kicked at the pavement, smelled the air once more.

Though not a cloud was left in the sky, rain was coming. He could feel it in the bones of his busted arm, the way his collarbone ached
so that he felt the pain behind his shoulder and on down his back. Yesterday’s heat had not burned away in the night, so it was ninety already and only looking to get hotter. The humidity was oppressive yet, but he trusted his body more than the clear skies, because who knew what kind of weather lay over the horizon, what invisible matter hung in the very air he breathed? He had a half-century of accurate soothsaying that would be enough to convert even the most skeptical. His body hadn’t lied to him since the horse smashed his arm, his internal barometer the only benefit of that long-ago accident.

They had been breaking the horses, he and his older brother James. Chambers sixteen at the time, the horse a copper Arabian that hadn’t been properly broken as a colt. She reared up on him, and he lacked the maturity or patience to break a horse as it should be done. He did everything wide open, and for it Whiskey toppled over on him that spring afternoon, crushed his arm from the shoulder down. Grace of God it wasn’t his legs or skull, folks said. Lot of men broke their hips with a horse. He just broke his arm, and not his writing arm, either. Kept him out of work, but he could get around enough to do light chores and develop a lifelong habit of reading. Novels, mostly, history. Although his arm healed nicely, he would feel a tightness in inclement weather for the rest of his life.

And late at night, tossing and turning in bed, he couldn’t lie in some positions. He was a stomach sleeper, and liked to keep his arm under the pillow, but it would cramp up on him and he’d have to shift onto his back, where he could never settle into a deep sleep. This was especially noticeable after he crept into his thirties, married to Alma and sharing a bed every night. After he turned sixty, it seemed like the bone dried up altogether so that the motion of his shoulder rotating around the clavicle felt like filing wood down to shavings of dust. He could no longer reach above his head, so at Alma’s urging, he went to the doctor, who told him there wasn’t anything anyone could do. A pain he would carry for the rest of his days. Unknown to most of the county, he was prone to buy a bottle of Larthan’s whiskey once every few months, and he would take a nip some evenings when the pain was bad enough.

When he thought of that spring afternoon with James, he remembered the way the cut hay smelled like dust. The jimsonweed by the barn choked him. The short fur of the horses, their meaty flanks. His brother now lived way out in the country. Chambers couldn’t see anything but the old man he’d become—the old men they’d all become—but the smell of a farm today was the same as in his youth. He recognized it on the widow’s land as he neared the barn. The door open, a horse in its stable. Morning light ribbed the dusty floor, the smell of ripe plants and dirt and old leather, the way a barn was supposed to smell. Tools hung from the wall to the left, all sharp angles like some contraption for torture. Chambers inspected them, the shovel and the rake and the hoe, and they were all rusted and dry and in fine order.

He patted the horse and walked out to stare at the field, the woods in the distance. He squinted at the trees, saw the family plot at the forest’s edge, and began walking. As he crossed the field he broke a deep sweat. Six stones, spread out over four generations of Colemans, the husband and his parents and a grandfather, an uncle, and at the very end the widow’s son, Jimmy Boy, the only man Chambers had ever killed. Back in 1926, the sixteen-year-old had gotten liquored up one night and caused a commotion in a card game out on the mill hill. By the time Chambers arrived, Jimmy Boy was waving a Luger around, firing random shots at the room. All the other card players had cleared out, leaving him alone in the house. An oil lamp had exploded, blowing bits of glass across the room, an oil slick across the floor, darkness. Jimmy Boy a silhouette against light from the kitchen.

“Hey, Shurf,” Jimmy Boy said.

“Hey, Jimmy Boy, how you?”

“I had four queens here.”

“That’s quite a hand.”

“I had four queens and they took my granddaddy’s saber with a straight flush.”

“Some bad luck there, Jimmy Boy.”

“Cheating, is what it was. They took my granddaddy’s saber. He carried that with him to Cold Harbor and back. I had four queens.”

“Let’s talk about this. I’m sure no one out there wants to take your granddaddy’s saber.”

As Chambers took a step into the room, Jimmy Boy yelled “No!” and opened fire. A window burst behind him, and Chambers dropped to one knee, drew his gun and shot the boy in the leg. He’d only been aiming to wound him, but he’d hit the femoral artery. The boy bled to death before they could even rouse a doctor out of bed.

A senseless death. Jimmy Boy had been drunk and bet his prized possession because he’d believed with four queens he couldn’t lose. He’d lost. Sounded like he’d lost fair and square in a run of bad luck. It happened sometimes. Odds were against it, but sometimes you ran out of luck and had to live with the consequences. No sure thing in this world, a lesson the boy had never had the chance to learn. Bad luck against Jimmy Boy and his four queens, bad luck against Chambers when he hit that artery. The extinguishing of that boy’s soul had left an indelible mark on the sheriff’s own soul. Even now, at Jimmy Boy’s gravestone six years later, he couldn’t help but remember that first sleepless night, when he’d come home and told Alma he’d killed a man. The only darker night of his soul had been when he received word of his first son’s death in France. News of the second son had followed so quickly that he was still numb from the first and felt nothing, as when a shock victim feels not the surgeon’s scalpel until the day after, when the pain is twice as great.

The sun had fully risen when he got back to the car. He cranked the engine and thought about the long week he had ahead of him. He wanted to go home to Alma and get some sleep, but instead he rolled back into town as the sun climbed and the day warmed.

Castle, named for medieval legends, designed to be a piedmont fortress. Out of town there was the Bell village on one side and farther out was Eureka. The county itself was divided into parishes—Wilkesburg and Leeds and Bullock Creek—with a few towns and hamlets strewn along the railroad tracks—Lockhart and Union and Blackstock. The nearest city was Rock Hill and then Charlotte to the north, though a lot of folks hadn’t ever been that far. Other folks, like Mary Jane’s family, had come east out of the mountains, trickled through Spartanburg or Gastonia until they found what they were
looking for, steady work or someone they knew, or maybe they just stopped when they got tired of traveling.

He parked the car on the north end of Main, walked around and entered the sheriff’s office, the first one there.

Today was Sunday, a day of rest. While churchbells tolled mid-morning, he lay on a couch in the office, lit a cigarette. Listened, then slept.

W
hen the sheriff left the farm, Mary Jane came downstairs and stood behind her without a word. He had blond hair, blond eyebrows, ice-blue eyes rimmed by almost invisible eyelashes. His hair and skin dusty brown so that his blue eyes were the only part of him that seemed unaffected by the night’s events. He wore the same bloody shirt he’d worn into the house last night. His overalls were undone around the injured shoulder where the shot had laid into him, and the shirt was torn and stiff with dried black blood. Abigail had bandaged his shoulder last night to stanch the wound, but even now he was afraid to move too quickly lest the bleeding begin again. He rested his chin on her shoulder and stared out the window with her, at the empty hills and far-off woods.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she finally asked.

“I heard the sheriff.”

“I took care of it. He’s gone back to town.”

He nodded, and continued to stare out the window.

“That won’t be the last visitor we get, will it?” she asked.

“I reckon not.”

She turned and met his gaze with eyes that had known more hurt than most, even in these hard times. Pregnant at eighteen, a war widow at twenty-six, childless at thirty-four, she’d learned to keep her own counsel, which Mary Jane found more endearing than anything a rosy-cheeked twenty-year-old could offer. Let the country folks say what they may about the sins of the widow and the drunk, he and Abigail made a fine couple. She put her head to his chest and said, “We’ll just have to send them away, same as we’ve done all along.”

The burn in his shoulder told him otherwise. The wound smelled like iron and something else. Rot, maybe. Pellets were still lodged inside the flesh, and he knew he wouldn’t begin to heal until they cleaned the wound. They’d need to change the bandage regularly and pour whiskey over him to stave off infection. He needed to lay low for a while. Abigail would continue to abet him, but Larthan Tull would soon come knocking, and Larthan Tull would insist on more than a few friendly words at the front door.

As if reading his thoughts, she pulled away from him and fingered the ragged edges of his shirt, stared at his shoulder and refused to look him in the eye. “I should run you a bath,” she said.

He thanked her, grateful for what she hadn’t asked. There was nothing to say about what had happened. He’d shown up at her door last night at two in the morning, woozy from loss of blood and disoriented by how quickly his world had gone south. She’d taken him in without a word.

“Ernest is dead,” he’d told her, and she’d pursed her lips.

“I figured him to be with you if he weren’t,” she’d said.

He’d drunk whiskey until he could sleep and then he crawled into bed with her with only a vague plan for the morrow. With the fateful knock from Sheriff Chambers today, he knew he owed it to Abigail to make a decision, yet the truth he couldn’t reconcile to himself was that she was stronger than he was. She’d endured the worst life had
to offer, and would fight against Chambers, Tull, the entire world, without a thought to her own safety or comfort. But he believed he still had a chance to get through this, to build a life for them beyond the law-breaking world of liquor distribution, if only he could cut a deal with Aunt Lou in Charlotte before Tull came knocking—or sent that bullet-faced associate of his out with his shotgun.