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

low, eyes down on the red clay. Women who had apparently set their faces in a placid grimace for the rest of their lives, hollow-eyed, always in motion, working, fiddling, never sitting still. The straight, worn shifts and muddy boots, a simple cord around a wrist perhaps, a thin cross on the neck. And nobody said anything.
    Then why didn’t he go home? Eleanor? Nobody really knew exactly where Anderson was, including Eleanor, and he thought of this mysterious absence with grim pleasure. It reminded him of the time he walked away from his job in Elyria, Ohio. The Anderson Manufacturing Company, marketing an inexpensive roof coating. He was learning to play golf at the country club that year, 1912. One day he walked out of the office, with nothing but the clothes on his back.
    What’s the matter? his secretary had asked him, her face in rigid alarm. She was an intelligent woman, he thought, even more intelligent than himself. A rainstorm drummed on the windows.
    My dear young woman, Anderson said, it is all very silly, but I have decided to no longer concern myself with this buying and selling.
    You’re sick? she said.
    She was right in a sense, and Anderson knew he had to get out of there right away. He felt if he could just reach the door, then it would be okay. His feet would carry him to wherever he needed to go. Did she think he was crazy? Was he? Anderson looked at his feet.
    My feet are cold, wet, and heavy from a long wading in a river, he had said. Now I shall go walk on dry land.
    As Anderson left the office he knew that it was the words that had lifted him out, and he swore allegiance to them and he passed out of town along a railroad track.
    When he reemerged days later, penniless, dirty, and miles away, people said he must have had some kind of breakdown. Temporary insanity, perhaps, related to stress. They concocted all kinds of reasons why he did it, and when he later became a writer, many others began to ascribe his disappearance to his “artistic temperament.” He tried to explain it in A Story Teller’s Story, the rambling autobiographical piece he was paid far too much for, but it too was a failure.
    They were all wrong. That episode was about something else entirely, and something far more mundane. A hillside of freshly mown grass that overlooked a churchyard. A train platform where a man in a tuxedo stood with a bouquet of flowers, and a woman weeping in the vestibule. Shivering in the damp dirt of an apple orchard at dawn.
    What stories now?
     
    A FAINT HUM in the air of the restaurant, and the man with the paper looked up. The counterman flicked his eyes to the window, then the Dunkards, and Anderson heard it too; the low moan of motors accelerating. A run coming through town.
    Anderson stumbled out of his seat and through the front doors. Might as well see the damn thing up close, he figured, and squaring his hat he positioned himself on the front steps, looking south down Main as the engines grew louder. He picked out sets of headlights flashing then disappearing around curves as they wound their way through the southern reaches of Rocky Mount.
    The man with the bow tie stood next to him, paper tucked under his arm. Glancing back Anderson saw the Dunkard family standing by the window. Two sets of lights, then three. Then the light pock pock pock of gunfire, and Anderson and the salesman both ducked and raced back into the restaurant. Here they come, the counterman muttered, and Anderson saw through the window a long black Packard roaring up Main Street, swerving side to side, and behind it two cars, the first with a man leaning out the passenger window with his arm extended, pointing a pistol. The Packard thundered past the courthouse and through the intersection of Court and Main, then slowed suddenly, the back end rising up; the chasing cars swerved to avoid collision, one going through a short section of clapboard fence, the other going up on the sidewalk. Anderson could see the hunched forms