The Wettest County in the World Read Free Page B

distance himself from.
    While his house was being built, Anderson squatted in a rude shack on the hillside above. He spent his days watching the score of mountain men crawling over the frame of his house, working in their methodical, efficient way. He had a deal with his publisher, Liverwright, who would send him one hundred dollars a week plus a percentage of his sales, including those for the Modern Library reprints of Poor White and Winesburg, Ohio. Liverwright would publish whatever Anderson sent him. In those days Anderson’s writing desk was neat as a pin, and he eventually went up to New York and begged Liverwright to let him out of the deal. The house he built was called Ripshin.
     
    A NDERSON CAME FROM Ripshin the day before and stayed over at a hotel in Roanoke, then met with the editor of The Roanoke Times in the morning. It was still early when he left, the sky moving from purple to lavender and the trees along the road dropped their leaves, and he was glad to be out on such a morning and away from his house. Anderson ground his teeth and gripped the wheel when he thought of his naïve hope that Ripshin would become a rustic literary salon. A place where the intelligentsia would gather about him in his bucolic paradise. Perhaps even his friend Gertrude Stein would come and pace the floor of his study with him, talking painters and semantics.
    Instead the two newspapers were holding him hostage; he was at the offices nearly every week, working with the printers and writing nearly the entire thing himself. To let off steam Anderson developed a character named Buck Fever in a column that dispensed humor and folksy wisdom, a sort of Will Rogers meets Mark Twain.
    By 1934 Ripshin was filled with noisy, bothersome people, people who overstayed their welcome, people whom Anderson once felt were true peers and comrades but now seemed more like chattering urbanites out for a turn in the country, and he was merely the innkeeper. His only solace was Eleanor, the young woman he met in Marion during the final years of his last marriage. They were married the year before, and during his travels he wrote her long, passionate letters that shocked himself and that seemed to contain the vitality that he usually was able to produce only in his fiction. In fact the letters, the words and phrases, the sentiments and ideas, seemed to come from some shadowy character, not fully formed, that lay deep inside him.
     
    T HE EDITOR OF The Roanoke Times said it was likely some kind of payback. Sitting in his office that morning before visiting the hospital, cheap cigars in the cluttered, paper-filled room; Anderson felt sleepy and despondent.
    Likely the trade, the editor said.
    He had eyes like holes in a meat pie and an annoying snarl to his speech, talking out of one side of his mouth.
    Those boys did something to somebody, he said. And when nobody talks, you can bet there is liquor involved.
    The editor confirmed the rumors of the coming trial. Closed grand jury.
    Well, the editor said, you won’t find much of a story down in Franklin County. Unless you manage to pry it out of a dead man’s jaws.
    Such wit, Anderson thought. What a clod.
    Sir, Anderson said, I am no greenhorn. I know these people and their plight well. I know something about moonshine liquor.
    Pieface nodded, giggling, his broad frame shivering.
    You spend enough time in Franklin, the editor said, you’ll start tripping over it.
    The editor waved his cigar in the smoky air in front of him. Anderson’s stomach let out a whine of discomfort and he wished he’d had breakfast.
    There’s a fella, the editor said, down at the Rocky Mount jail right now. A fella named Tom C. Cundiff. But you won’t get spit from him. The man’s crazy as a coon. Couple fellas in there with him, all steady shiners. I wouldn’t talk to any of them unless they was behind bars and would be there for a while. Actually I ought to tell you who not to try and talk to.
    That’d be fine,