The Wettest County in the World Read Free

later Belva May, followed immediately by Era. Forrest lay in bed like a stone for a week, his face impassive and leaden, refusing to eat anything. His skin puckered and turned an impossible shade of blue for a few days, soft and hazy like a robin’s egg. Then one morning he rose from his bed. Afterward Forrest always retained the knobby aspect of illness, and in certain types of light his skin still had a blue cast to it. When he emerged after that week, his body gaunt and wasted, his eyes sunken, to join Granville, Emmy, Howard, and Jack at the breakfast table, it was as if his strength had withered and focused itself like a leather strap. Jack remembers taking a biscuit from the plate, his shaking hand.
    His mother and sisters laid out on the floor, covered with a quilt.
    Nobody said anything.

Chapter 1
1934
    S HERWOOD A NDERSON crossed the Franklin County line, threading his car over a one-lane bridge that lay in a gentle saddle in the road. A few hundred yards beyond the bridge Anderson passed a filling station: a simple clapboard square and a steeply angled roof with an upper story that jutted out from the front, providing a covered pull-in spot in front of the narrow porch. A pair of petrol pumps stood in front, with hand cranks and glass spheres on top filled with fuel. Several things about the place held Anderson’s gaze: a porch, but unlike most rural filling stations this one had no chairs and no name on the building, or advertisements for anything. Four cars were in the lot, brand-new sedans with engines running, as if lined up for gas though nobody was pumping any. A group of men stood by the front door, men in long coats and hats who all turned and watched Anderson drive by. A storage shed was set slightly up the hill that rose behind the store, a squat cinder-block structure with an open door like a key slot and as Anderson passed a tall, gangly man in his shirtsleeves and hat emerged from the building with a wooden crate in his arms. It seemed like his eyes locked directly onto Anderson’s face. Then a blur of green-gold trees and the tires humming on the road and Anderson hunched over the wheel, humming up the backside of Grassy Hill and into Rocky Mount, the seat of Franklin County. Have to remember that spot, Anderson thought to himself, will have to run by on the way back to Roanoke and see what it’s all about. Though even at that moment he knew that the look on the faces of the men waiting at the station and the eyes of the tall man in the storage shed would make that difficult. Anderson had lived in rural Virginia long enough to know that look, the simple, insolent expression that said: Mind your own goddamn business.
    Anderson picked up speed down the empty road, blasting through whirling vortexes of leaves. Route 33 bisected Franklin County north-south in a jagged stroke, winding through the steep hillsides and deep hollows. It was the longest paved road in the county: Most roads were still hard-packed gravel, a soil-sand-clay mix, or merely weedy ruts that disappeared into field or forest. Driving through the hills of southern Virginia was reminiscent of some favorable sensations for Anderson, and he thought of the old restlessness. It was a good feeling to be on the move again.
     
    T HE TWO MEN Sherwood Anderson came to see lay in a crowded public ward in the Rocky Mount Hospital, a long windowless room with a dozen beds. Men of middling age, lined faces, stubble, indeterminate. The first of the two lay motionless, tucked into the sheets like a sewing needle. He stared up at the ceiling with open, swollen eyes, his skin blanched like boiled meat, the bedding stained with a yellowish fluid around his groin area. Next to him the other man had a deep crimson scar running between his eyes and across his forehead, as if he’d been branded with a hot iron. A puffed goiter like a weathered leather bag hung under his chin. He was drenched with sweat, moaning and jerking his upper body from side to