side, delirious with fever, the lower half of his body encased in thick plaster. The doctors told Anderson that a good piece of his tongue was also missing, likely due to an earlier injury. Anderson introduced himself and pulled up a chair between their beds. The man with the injured groin ran his eyes over Anderson for a moment before returning his gaze to the ceiling. His skin was tight like a sausage and he stunk of rot.
The doctors told Anderson that neither man would say what happened to them, but it was clear that one man’s legs had been meticulously shattered, from ankle to hip, and the second man had been badly mutilated in the groin area. The police didn’t get a thing either; the two men hadn’t said a word, and they’d had no visitors. There wasn’t anything else to it, the doctor said, shrugging. The mutilated man was hanging on by a thread and the infection would take him soon. It was a miracle he survived this long. The blood loss was extensive, the doctor said. Clearly left for dead. Somebody anonymously notified us. Otherwise they’d be dead, easy. The man with the shattered legs might pull through, but it was sure he would never stand or walk again.
S HERWOOD A NDERSON originally came to Rocky Mount to write a story for Liberty magazine about a woman named Willie Carter Sharpe. Moonshine, said the editors, the snoops up north; these hill people were living off mountain whiskey, bootlegging; it was still the cash crop. The Volstead Act of 1919, the legal enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, had created a many-headed hydra of illicit manufacture and trade in these mountains. Production didn’t end in 1933 with the repeal of Prohibition: To avoid the heavy taxes on legal distillation, people still made their own or brought it in on rumrunners off the coast, but now that Prohibition was over people wanted to hear more about that supposed frontier period. These people weaned their children on the stuff, they said. They cooked their eggs in it, put it in their morning coffee. Everyone wanted it to go on, Anderson thought, the swells making piles of money and the consumers who savored that rancid sip of illegal bathtub gin in some dirty hole in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They wanted that added flavor of illegality, and they wanted the dangerous myth, the wild notion of gunplay and desperation. Get close, they said. The people, the characters, their desires, the inner lives and passions: That’s what you do best after all.
There was a big trial gearing up in Franklin County, a trial that was going to clean up the remnants of a messy, long-running battle between bootlegging syndicates including the commonwealth’s attorney, who it was rumored would be accused of racketeering and conspiracy. All the major bootleggers in the county, including Willie Carter Sharpe, if they could catch her, were being called in for grand-jury testimony. Sharpe had originally married a big-shot bootlegger and soon became the principal driver for the operation, driving pilot cars as the caravans of booze careened and smashed their way through the hills of rural towns and into the conduits of the major cities, becoming a celebrity in the process. They said Sharpe had movie-star looks and diamonds set in her teeth. New York City society women sent her passionate love letters, desperate to be with her. Liberty wanted Anderson to bring the story to a national audience.
Sherwood Anderson had been in the southwestern part of Virginia for most of nine years by 1934. He built a house in Marion, the seat of Smyth County, to the west of Franklin, higher up in the mountains. He purchased two local newspapers and set about life as a small-town editor. Anderson was aware that more than one literary wag had suggested he was reverting to his former life, trying to go back to some lost place of youth. But he knew he wasn’t trying to revert to George Willard and the town of Winesburg: In fact it was the thing he hoped to
Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins