Free The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant

facial expression was placidly neutral above the puckered wound on his neck, purple scabbed and heavily stitched with black thread. A glass of tepid water stood on the bedside table. In the hallway a patient was pleading hoarsely with a nurse for the use of a phone. Forrest’s eyes gazed at some spot beyond the ceiling, and Jack felt moved by the sudden plaintive sight of his brother struck low. His visage reminded Jack of their grandfather, a haggard veteran of the Civil War. In his dim memories the old man sat stiffly on the edge of his bed and whittled small knots of wood.
    I’ll hold them down myself, Jack said. I want to be there.
    Forrest smiled, lips parted over bare teeth, the corners of his bristling scar drawing up like some kind of second mouth, a ghastly double smile.
    I’ll call on you, Jack, Forrest said. And they’ll wish they were dead before we’re done.
    Jack felt in a nauseous rush how his brother’s life would be eventually hacked off at the root like an old stump, and how until then Forrest would live in violence and pain and never rise from it.
    Nothing can kill us.

Chapter 6
1934
    S HERWOOD A NDERSON sat in the Little Hub Restaurant in Rocky Mount in the late evening, nursing a cup of coffee and watching two bearded men wearing the plain dark clothes of the Dunkard Church eating ham steaks and buttered toast. The Little Hub seemed to Anderson a good spot to lurk and perhaps pick up a whiff of something as the sheriff and most of the deputies frequented the spot, as did the commonwealth’s attorney, Carter Lee, whom Anderson had been unable to gain audience with. He’d been in Franklin County for three months and had accomplished little more than a few notes, his desk at the rooming house littered with scraps of paper, jottings about scenery or people. He had spread nickels and dimes all over the county, most to small boys lurking about the filling stations or lunch counters.
    Willie Carter Sharpe? Yeah, I know of her. Never seen her though.
    You don’t know? Where you from anyhow?
    Anderson did learn that no one around Franklin County called the thing “bootlegging.” That might as well have been a foreign word. You mean blockadin’, sir? What blockades? Nobody ever said “moonshine” either. White Lightning. White Mule. Moon. Stump Whiskey. Mountain Dew. Squirrel Whiskey. Fire Water. He had seen plenty of it over the years in Marion. When building Ripshin his foreman, a seventy-year-old man named Ball, a bear of a man with an outsized belief in his abilities, would take a lark every month. He would hire a car and driver, fill the car with booze and drive around the county stopping off at friends’ places and inviting them to join his roving bender. Once Anderson arrived at Ripshin to find all the workmen drunk, falling from the scaffolding, covered in the white muck of plaster. Most of his friends drank liberally; Faulkner in particular had a true penchant for the stuff and they drank plenty of whiskey together in New Orleans. So what was different about it here? Every other night lines of cars raced through Rocky Mount, the whine of engines working through the walls of his room at the boardinghouse.
    Anderson’s connection at The Roanoke Times got him a copy of the preliminary report, issued in July, submitted to the Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Alcohol Tax Unit, which provided the basis for the grand jury investigation “United States vs. Charles Carter Lee.”
    In the fall of 1928, Charles Carter Lee, The Commonwealth’s Attorney for Franklin County, Virginia, and Sheriff Pete Hodges called the various deputy sheriffs of Franklin County into the office of Pete Hodges, singly and in pairs, making them a proposition to divide the County up into districts for the purpose of assessing illicit distillers and bootleggers a certain amount (from ten dollars to 25 dollars) per month for the privilege of operating with the protection of County officers.
    The grand jury was set to