Free The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant Page A

convene in a few weeks, though the location had yet to be set; the papers proposed the trial would likely be outside the county to prevent jury tampering. Several key county law-enforcement officials would be indicted on charges of racketeering and conspiracy, though the coconspirators wouldn’t be named until the actual indictment. In spite of this the blockade runs went on, seemingly unimpeded. Anderson had learned that if he came into certain filling stations and slipped a five on the counter without a word, then stepped outside and waited by his car, in a few minutes a dirty-necked boy would jog around from behind the store and hand him a half-gallon jar of corn whiskey in a paper sack. At one station he handed a slatternly teenage girl a fiver and she turned and scampered up a hill into the bramble and disappeared into the forest. Anderson waited an hour by the road until he figured he’d been hoodwinked in the simplest way, but soon enough a mule came ambling down a trail, a saddlebag bulging with fruit jars of booze. It wasn’t exactly raining from the sky but they were right that the county was full of it. His mistake before was to actually ask for the damned stuff; he found that such transactions were done in the same manner as most in Franklin County, a wordless combination of timing, simple gesture, and mutual assumption. Anderson had six different half-gallon jars in his room at the boardinghouse, lined up along the dresser. It was research of a kind. He had sampled them all and determined that in fact there were some real differences, and he had to admit that some of the stuff was excellent, a layered, complex taste with several discernable characteristics.
    Anderson watched the darkly clad figures in the Little Hub Restaurant. A few farmers sat drinking coffee. Temperance folk obviously, Anderson thought, as everyone else in the county surely must be out gallivanting around a bonfire somewhere in the mountains drinking illegal liquor. The counterman folded his arms over his bulbous midsection and smoked thoughtfully. Another man read the paper at a booth with a stub of pencil in hand, hair neatly parted and oiled. He was dressed in a tight suit and bow tie: a salesman passing through. Anderson looked at his own hands and knew that their delicate fineness would immediately indicate an outsider to anyone who bothered to look. The thought that he would need a translator, an introduction into the world of the working class, made him burn with shame and anger. And now the mythical Willie Carter Sharpe: The only man or woman alive who could hold a Ford wide open down Grassy Hill! as they said on the front porches and around the stove.
    I could give it right back to them, Anderson thought, give them the character they wanted. Nights at the boardinghouse Anderson sat scribbling at a battered old sideboard table, trying to think of all the things he had seen that day, trying to remember the hands of the men in the fields, the boys in the curing shed, the grim farmwives in the cookhouse, the lines of their faces, the cut of their work shirts, the seams of their shoes. But in all these things he saw very little. It was as if the character of these people encouraged a sort of blank anonymity, so unlike the peoples of the Midwest and their quaint charms and frustrated lives, who seemed to open up like a flower for Anderson when they talked. He could read everything in their flashing eyes, their blurring hands. The wide-open spaces of the Midwest allowed a man’s mind to stretch and think. But the strange confines of Franklin, its long skylines, rolling hills, left him with a feeling of enclosure and confinement, as if something dangerous was contained there and the minds of the citizens had to focus on not letting it out. The way the men slouched in their walk, hips forward, legs kicking out in front of them, slew-footed, shoulders rounded, hands buried deep in the pockets of their coveralls. The way they wore their hats