The Whiskey Baron (4 page)

While she went out to pump some water from the well, he returned upstairs and took the jar of whiskey she’d brought out to help clean his shoulder last night and he drank from it. The white liquor was their own, not from Tull. It warmed his throat and he could already feel his mind cool. There were some things a body could get wrapped up in. It starts small, a still set up on the creek to save some money. Brew your own whiskey rather than paying dues to Larthan Tull. Pretty soon you’ve got a good recipe together and start to sell a little, a jar here or a jar there. Pure corn liquor, no additives, no problem. You come up with a plan for yourself, bring in a couple of partners, and soon you’ve got a business going. Wasn’t planned. Just happened. And it just happened that someone didn’t like your business, accused you of a plan, and took a shotgun to you all.

Luck ran in Mary Jane’s family. He believed that. When the farm failed, they’d been able to find work together, and Joe and Susannah were living a good life out in the Bell. Had two good boys, a steady paycheck. No problems. Some of that luck had spilled over to Mary Jane, but sometimes the luck ran out and you found yourself scrambling through the woods, shotgun blasts at your back. Briars hooked your shirt and brambles cut into your pants, and you tripped on a root and got a mouthful of dirt. There you lay, dark all around and your business partners dead, and you knew you shouldn’t have made it out of there alive. What did you do next?

His father had been a sharecropper. He’d worked other folks’ land, but at least he was off his own family’s dole, each man in every generation somehow carving out his own self as different from his father. Mary Jane had been named Wesley Jr. after his father, but, being a younger sibling, he was the sensitive type growing up and his mother kept him in dresses all the way to grammar school, long after the rest of the boys had quit. The first time someone called
him Mary Jane, the name stuck so firm it might as well have been etched in his birth certificate. Lately, he hoped people might start calling him Slim on account of how tall and lanky he was, and that his best friend since high school was so short and stocky. He liked that name: Slim Hopewell had a tough ring to it, Slim Hopewell could go into business against Larthan Tull, but the fact that he had a bullet hole in his shoulder and was about to go on the lam probably meant he was still Mary Jane at heart.

He’d been raised on Wes Ancrum’s farm, over in Union County. He’d gone to school in town with kids from all backgrounds, kids whose fathers owned farms, kids whose fathers worked in the mills, kids whose fathers owned businesses. And kids judged each other, the farm kids hanging out with farm kids, the mill kids hanging out with mill kids, the town kids with town kids. Mary Jane and his siblings were muscular, developed quickly. Farm-fed and farm-raised, almost like livestock, they were all expected to work the farm after school, and, though it was a struggle, their father wouldn’t let them drop out of high school. He seemed to know, even before his body wore out, that this was no life for their generation, that the world was heading toward some great change like a locomotive bringing in progress.

When the war began, Mary Jane was a wasted drunk, same as now only younger, and after one too many fights out on Main Street, the local judge gently suggested he might want to serve his country in battle. In Europe, he’d been prepared for the conditions. The mud and the smoke, the endless march and march and march, followed by all the sitting around. Then came the offensive, which began in the spring of 1918. British and American troops held the lines against the German onslaught. They dug into trenches and aimed their carbine rifles out across No Man’s Land at a line of Germans in olive green uniforms, who in turn fired back at the Americans and the British. The pop-pop-pop of the carbines created a steady drone, but it was the roar of the Howitzers spattering shells across the plain that Mary Jane would remember. They left a hollow ring in his ear, tinnitus that would forever haunt him, as if even his eardrums were cursed with the aftershock memories of that battle. Then the advance, where men charged from both sides, out of their trenches and
into the plain, where bullets whizzed and sucked into meat, and men fell over and lay bleeding and calling for Christ to kill them. A shell burst nearby, dislodged something in his brain so that he lost time and woke back in the trench alongside the other wounded. Still the patter of riflefire and the guttural moans of men in agony. As dusk settled in, the lines retreated back to their fronts, the plain between them once again No Man’s Land, a land solely for dead or dying.

He lost consciousness again and when he awoke rain had begun. It rained through the night and by morning he’d picked up a cough, hacked up wet chunks of dust he’d inhaled in the battle. The trench had become mud, mud, and more mud, mixed together with blood. At dawn he and a man from California, a twenty-year-old sergeant named Burris, followed a scrawny kid from Nebraska over the top into No Man’s Land, where the wounded lay among the dead on both sides, English and Americans and Germans all asking for help as one people. That morning was one secret he would never tell, not even to his brother Joe, a secret he would not even allow himself to remember in his consistent, routine days after the war. Mary Jane and Burris were not good Samaritans, there to help the dying into the next life. Rather, they ignored the dying and rummaged through the dead’s pockets.

“You can’t help them,” Burris had said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

True, there was nothing they could have done, but that rationalization didn’t make anything better. This world was rotten, Mary Jane knew, and those who survived the war would not be the ones elected for heaven after. Burris would lose an arm in the next battle, and Mary Jane visited him once before he was discharged. Burris’s face swelled up, a bandage over his forehead, a nub wrapped in gauze where his left arm should have been.

“None of it matters,” Burris said.

He took another swig of the whiskey and heard the door slam shut downstairs. He lay back on the bed, leaned his head against the wall. Slats of light filtered through the blind, and motes of dust swirled in the air, moved toward the floor where the light cast its shine, as though the dust were actually particles of light that moved laterally
through the air between the blind and the floor, so that the floor seemed bombarded with light-dust from the window.

“Mary Jane?” Abigail called. “I’ve got water on the stove if you want to come down.”

When he came down, she unfastened the other strap of his overalls and cut away his shirt with a bowie knife. The cloth fell apart in her hands. She bit her lip as she worked, and hovered over him as she unfastened the bandage she’d put on last night. The meat of his shoulder was bruised blue and red, the skin cool to the touch. She took a sponge to it, gently wiped clean the dried blood that edged the holes themselves. “You’re lucky he didn’t hit you head on,” she said. She’d said this to him last night as well.

“He wasn’t aiming at me,” he said, remembering how Ernest stood in front of him, the shotgun blast that hit his jaw and sent blood and bone matter careening off into the night. Stray shot hit Mary Jane’s shoulder as he turned to run, hunkered low like a simian scurrying through a plain. Another blast kicked up dirt nearby, but he kept running, crashed into the woods and never slowed.

“You’re lucky all the same,” she said.

“I can’t stay here. Furman isn’t the only one who’s going to be out here.”

She continued to wipe his shoulder. The wound had reopened, and she dabbed it with a towel.

He said, “I don’t want to drag you in any further. I’ve got the money to get us out of this, but I have to go up to Charlotte.”

She opened a quart of moonshine, dipped the towel in, and said, “This’ll sting.” He never flinched as she rubbed his shoulder with the whiskey-wet towel and rivulets of alcohol slid down his arm. “There’s shot still in there.”

“It’ll work itself out.”

As she patted his shoulder dry, blood seeped into the towel, a flesh-burn, a muscle-ache, a bone-sore.

He said, “I’ve got a plan where I can take care of us, but I can’t do it hunkered down in your bedroom, waiting for Larthan to figure out where I’m at and come knocking.”

“I know you’re in a spot.”

“I am, and I’m sorry for bringing you into this. You and Ernest and Lee.”

“Those boys would’ve gotten into mischief with or without you.”

“But I was old enough to know better. I got greedy and thought we could get away with something.”

She packed another bandage on his shoulder, a little too roughly for someone who’d forgiven him. He knew it was possible she might never fully forgive him, just as it was possible she felt she had nothing to forgive. She was so tough to read on matters of the soul. For himself, he knew his responsibility for Ernest and Lee, knew he’d brought them into a whiskey operation that went directly against their employer. He also knew he should feel worse than he did. Guilt, remorse, regret. Something. But something had died in him during the war, maybe out on No Man’s Land with Burris. Death became an abstraction, a thing to reconcile with and move beyond, a thing to forget. Thus, his mind had filed last night away, into the lost thoughts with which he might one day stand in judgment, and he thought of tomorrow, of building a life for Abigail and himself. For that, he must act.

He said, “I can leave tonight. It should only take a few days to get to Charlotte, and by this time next week everything will be fine. Would you stop?” He pulled her hands away from his shoulder.

“Do you even know what you’ve gotten into?” she asked.

He held her gaze until she looked away, and when she did, he saw completely the truth about the two of them. No matter what happened to him, she would endure, so the weight was on him, his own private reckoning. As she’d said, he was in a spot, and his solution was not to run away and hide, but rather to run through it, deeper into the fire.

“I think it’s a bad idea for me to be hanging around here today,” he said. “I don’t want to leave until tonight, so I’ll head down to the river. Just act normal if anyone comes by.”

“Normal.”

“For the circumstances. I promise in another two weeks neither of us will have a thing to worry about.”

T
he cotton mill was closed on Sundays. This morning everyone from the mill hill suffered in the heat at the base of the hill, listening to the Baptist preacher quote scripture in his sermon about longing for the heavenly city.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God
.

“I’m thinking of faith,” said the preacher. “Maintaining our faith in the face of the world is a trial, for the temptations to disbelieve are many. We have tired hearts, and in times such as these we wonder, ‘Can it be real? Will we see the New Jerusalem one day?’ But
remember Paul’s words to the Corinthians:
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens
.”

While the preacher analyzed the passages he quoted, on and on through his sermon, Willie and Quinn Hopewell—Joe and Susannah’s boys—squirmed by their parents and grandfather on the fourth pew from the back. At twelve, Willie was gangly thin and seemed always to have a loose limb folded in an awkward position. His skin was freckled and lightly tanned so that he looked perpetually dusty, which was often the case because thus far in his life he’d spent more time playing in the dirt than contained indoors. When he was very young, he’d taken seriously his mother’s command that he wash all of the dirt off when he bathed, and had vigorously scrubbed at his suntan, trying to make his arms as white as his thighs. He’d confessed to his brother that he couldn’t get clean, and Quinn had played along, told him their mother would switch him good if she saw him, so he’d spent the next two days walking around with his arms crossed behind him.

Four years older than Willie, Quinn worked in the mill full time. His body was grown, his arms thick and muscular from operating the machines. This morning, he sat rigid on the end, and kept trying to make eyes at Evelyn Tull, who sat alone in a pew two rows up and one family over. The inside of the church was painted yellow and smelled closed up and musty, hot and unpleasant in the late summer heat. Everyone sweated. Many stank. No one commented. Willie crossed and recrossed his ankles and noticed every time Quinn’s head turned to look at Evelyn. He agreed she was pretty, and part of him stirred at the sight of the smooth white skin on her neck, below the tufts of black hair, and although he’d never kissed a girl he thought about kissing her. Her lower teeth were slightly crooked and her lower lip pouted out, glazed this morning in gloss. Her black hair was pinned up to reveal a neck long and white as a swan’s, and she sat with her back erect so that she looked like a proper lady from town.

She and her father, Larthan Tull, lived in a big house near York and Main, but ever since Larthan had walked into Castle fourteen years ago with his baby daughter, they’d attended the Calvary Baptist
Church out in the country between Castle and the Bell, on account, Larthan said, of he went to a church of the same name up in the mountains before. He rarely came anymore—a real sinner, a lot of folks said—but Evelyn never missed a Sunday. Today she looked so serious, so devout, bowing her head at all the right times, never a squirm or a look of agitation on her face. It was as if the spirit of the Lord really were within her as she listened to the preacher.

He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death
.