The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant

breathlessness, surprised by beauty and split to his core.
     
    J ACK AND H OWARD arrived as the sun was going pink on the horizon and the shucking nearly complete. Men stood at a long table of sawhorses and planks and ripped through the corn, tossing it into the temporary cribs hammered together out of birch logs and old sheet metal. The afternoon was cool and the air sweet with the smell of this knobby fruit of the earth, and the men laughed and slapped bare arms as they shucked at top speed. The younger men in the group stamped their heavy boots in the dirt and sang “Old Phoebe,” shouting the cadenced words in the direction of the house where the women were preparing supper.
    Just a year ago Jack would have been among them, arm in arm, heaving their chests out, snorting like mules, fired with a little corn whiskey, singing in his rough voice. If there was dancing he’d dance every song with any girl that would, his thin lips curled and his dark eyes wet with excitement. Local girls used to call him Injun Jack or Chief because of his prominent nose and thin face, darkened like he was kin to a lost race. The younger girls rarely spoke to Jack anymore, and never kidded him in the lighthearted tone that used to make him smirk and cock his cap. Just a few years before he had watched his brothers Howard and Forrest and wished he could join that shady fraternity. They wore their hats low and nobody ever tried to make a fool of them; only the old men could hiss no ’count when they weren’t around. Men like Talmedge Jamison, Tom C. Cundiff, his brothers; everyone respected them, even if that respect was steeped in fear and awe that at almost any time these men might have a pistol and a hundred dollars wadded in their pockets.
    That spring Jack found himself busting his knuckles on pine boards along with Howard at Forrest’s sawmill camp, leapfrogging around the county with a gang of roughnecks, itinerant laborers who drifted into the hills come payday and often didn’t come back. Because Forrest included a bonus for camp minders and because he had nowhere else to go, Jack slept at the camp along with Howard during the seasonal months. It was in his estimation a temporary and unfortunate setback to his arch plans. Along with Cricket Pate and a few others he managed to brew up a batch of liquor occasionally, putting a few dollars in his pocket, but it seemed he was broke again before the week was out.
    Forrest gave him work occasionally at the Blackwater station stacking cans or moving crates, or sometimes Jack and Howard merely stood to the side in the lot, pistols stuck in their waistbands, Howard’s beefy arms crossed over his chest. Several times men in long coats from points north stood smoking cigarettes with rifles cradled, watching him and Howard load liquor and each time Jack turned his back he felt the frozen spike of terror. After hundreds of dollars changed hands, and the cars roared off toward Roanoke, Jack couldn’t help panting with fear, sweating down the inseams of his dungarees, his tongue a swatch of cotton wool. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for it, he thought, as he watched his brothers’ placid faces. Once I get a ride of my own, Jack thought, a fine car to make runs, behind the wheel, that’s where I belong. Not loading crates for some city swell with a fistful of gold rings.
    Howard split his time between the sawmill camp and his wife Lucy in Penhook, though sometimes he was up on Turkeycock Mountain for days, nobody knew exactly where, working up batches of liquor. When the night grew cool at the sawmill camp Jack and Howard rolled up in blankets and lay like weary dogs around the fire. They had biscuits and pork with white beans over the embers in the morning and in the afternoon when the sawmill shut down for the day they’d have another bite and share a jar until it was dark as pitch. Howard would add a good thick chestnut stump to the fire and stir the coals for the night and Jack would gaze up