1929
IN THE SPRING Jack Bondurant saw Bertha Minnix playing the mandolin for the first time at a corn shucking at the Mitchell place in Snow Creek. She held her head cocked low, eyes concentrating on the frets of her mandolin, made in the old teardrop style, the rounded bell of the instrument like a wooden scoop nestled against her narrow waist, the tight lace Dunkard bonnet on her crown and the long black dress to the wrist and ankle. Jack stood against the wall, Howard at his side in his shirtsleeves, both men gazing at the players with half-lidded eyes.
It seemed the two men from Shootin’ Creek who cut Forrest had melted away. Forrest put his energy into his sawmill operation and the Blackwater station. Jack was surprised that Forrest didn’t seem too interested in finding the men who cut him; it was unlike his brother not to wreak vengeance, but then there was much about Forrest that Jack wasn’t privy to, and this was the arrangement they’d had since birth.
Jack watched Bertha Minnix’s fingers ply the strings, the fret hand moving in quick jumps, her plucking a blur of twitching knuckle strokes, working through “Billy in the New Ground” while people slapped their hands in time. The two men beside her played guitar and fiddle, local men from Burnt Chimney whom Jack had seen before. It seemed an odd thing to Jack, as Dunkards didn’t usually allow instrumental music of any kind, instead relying only on their careful harmonic singing. But Howard said they were “new order” Dunkard, and therefore more lenient about such devilry. Strands of Bertha’s dark hair fell in her face and at the end of each song she raised her head and cast her eyes over the crowd, a slight smile, a nod of embarrassment. After the second such movement of her head Jack felt a momentary breathlessness, surprised by beauty and split to his core.
JACK AND HOWARD 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 at the tree-mottled night sky, his face reddened by the sun and his eyes shining, and tell Howard what he was going to do once he got some money together, the new boots he would buy, the automobile, how he would blast out of the county and head west or maybe north, to the open country. When Jack drank he grew expansive and good-natured, continually convinced of the infinite possibility of the world. He told vivid tales of fantastic dreams, of the spaces beneath the mountains he visited in his sleep. He gazed at the faces of people around him and clumsily attempted to describe just what amazing creatures they all were. Afterward people would lie in their racks at night staring at the dusty timbers of a ceiling and wonder just what that boy was all about anyway?
Aw hell, Jack would say, there ain’t no real way to say it.
Go on, Howard said.
Jack peeled off his boots and vigorously rubbed his blistered and raw feet.
Go on.
AT THE CORN SHUCKING Jack grit his teeth and passed the jar with Howard and kicked at stray corn husks in the barn while the others ate. Jack surveyed the greedy faces at the supper table, sopping their biscuits in souse-meat drippings, dirt farmers who would never have a spot of good clothing on them, and thought how sad and ridiculous and hypocritical their lives seemed and how unaware they were of it. It was a bitter sense of righteousness; standing now alongside those men against the wall, Jack felt strangely cold in their company. He somehow envisioned that the other side carried its own sun, its own source of heat. Instead it was as frozen and remote as the principles of machinery, as the first star of winter. And they were broke besides.
No ’count.
He looked at Howard’s heavy, passive face, standing there in the barn, his throat working slowly. None of it mattered to him, Jack thought. Howard didn’t give a fig and never would.
THE NEXT HURT is always coming, always close by, Forrest had said, lying in the hospital. Jack stood by the bed and stared at the ragged stitching under his brother’s chin, the black, bristling threads against his white-blue neck. The only way through is to bury it deep in your gut and let the hot juices work on it for a while. Soon enough you forget whatever it was that pained you to begin with.
HE THOUGHT OF the old men clustered in general stores, on the front porches of the filling stations, the haggard old crabs at the quilting bee, the thin spittle of bitterness bubbling on their lips, their razor eyes, the angry shaking of their bobbing skulls; they relive an echoing path of past transgressions, careless insults, lost animals, a horse cart disappearing over the hill, crying in the tall corn of summer with a dress around their neck, desperate curses, starlight on an open wound. They only chew on the cud of their past. That’ll never happen to me, Jack thought as he watched the shuckers. Not to me.
THERE WAS A VOLLEY of shouts and a man named Wingfield was holding up the sport, the red-colored ear that he’d shucked. It was the only one of the night, and it meant he could kiss any one of the young women he wanted. Wingfield was about Jack’s age and they sometimes played together as kids down in Snow Creek. He had grown into a blustery young man who talked with his hands, sported starched collars and snap-brim hats. He had gone all the way through high school and on to the University of Virginia. Wingfield’s family was originally from the Tidewater area, plantation owners who now had stately townhomes in the exclusive sections of Charlottesville, and despite the fact that his own father was mucking it out in Franklin County, Wingfield acted like he was merely visiting this backwater before assuming his rightful place among the first families of Virginia.
When the musicians took a break there was a shout and Wingfield held the sport aloft like a torch and marched about, a short troop of men following him. Jack’s sister Emmy stood in a corner with some other girls, giggling and pushing back her hair and Jack saw his sister lit with some kind of momentary happiness, a rare sight. He realized that since the death of their mother and sisters, Emmy so often seemed merely a shadow that flitted across the walls of their father’s home, a set of hands that set food in front of you. As Wingfield came toward Emmy, Jack felt a flare of rage, but the troop of singing men passed her by and Jack was relieved until he saw the small quiver in Emmy’s cheeks, the way she took a breath and thrust out her chin for just a moment as Wingfield passed, the sight of something in her eyes that he hadn’t ever seen before. He knew so little about her and her life. Oh Lord, Emmy, Jack thought, and the slender trunk of his heart buckled for the second time that night.
Jack started over toward her and there was a roar from Wingfield’s group; he had chosen a girl to kiss and the young people crowded around in a circle to watch. Jack said hello but the girls were too interested in whom Wingfield was kissing, up on their toes to see, and Emmy just put her hand lightly on his shoulder. Jack, taller than anyone there, could see into the circle where Wingfield held the arms of the Dunkard girl.
Why that’s Bertha Minnix, one of the girls said. That Dunkard girl from Burnt Chimney, the one playing the mandolin.
Jack watched as Wingfield made a great display of it, gripping the girl by her elbows and ducking in a few times, making feints, drawing shouts from the crowd. Bertha Minnix brought her chin nearly to her chest as Wingfield whooped and the crowd laughed. That damn fool, Jack thought. Then Bertha Minnix raised her face, a tight smile on her lips, tilted her chin up toward Wingfield, who paused, seemingly baffled by her sudden insolence. There was an awkward moment and the crowd grew quiet. Wingfield recovered and winking at the men standing next to him he tucked his head in and kissed her firmly. When he backed away Bertha’s eyes blazed and Wingfield let go of her arms, stepping back, uncertain, Jack could tell, but determined to make a good show.
Then the men bore Wingfield away and the girls clapped loudly, briefly crowding around Bertha who ducked her head again before heading back to the other musicians who waited with their instruments. The back of her neck under her bonnet was mottled pink and she touched her ear lightly and Jack knew it must be burning.
Back by the wall Jack drank from the jar that Howard handed to him, then stretched himself to his full height to find her eyes but the guitar player plucked a string and Bertha Minnix set her mouth again, cradling the mandolin to her belly, picking out the chords for “Old Dan Tucker,” and the younger men and women standing there swayed and sang along.
Get out’a th’ way for old Dan Tucker
He’s too late t’ get his supper
Supper is over an’ breakfast fry’n
Old Dan Tucker stand’n an’ cry’n
Washed his face in the fry’n pan
Combed his head on a wagon wheel
An’ died with a toothache in his heel
Jack arranged himself along the wall in her line of sight, his cap adroitly positioned, the brim pulled to his eyebrow, letting his cigarette dangle out of the corner of his mouth. Next to him Howard drained the last of the corn liquor, his throat knobbing twice, three times, the quart jar like a water glass in his massive fist. It was an astonishing feat, even for Howard. Sweet Jesus, Jack thought, the man can drink. Howard nudged him with the empty jar and Jack turned and went out into the night.
The barn lay in a sloping hollow of open pastures with a narrow creek running down the seam. Jack took another quart jar from the box on the floorboard of Cricket Pate’s muddy Pierce-Arrow coupe that they had borrowed. Cars and trucks filled the western quarter of the pasture, with a few Dunkard horse carts. Women leaned against fenders with their arms crossed and looked at men who stood in front of them, hands in pockets, rocking in place slightly. Other men perched on the hoods of cars or the tailgates of horse carts and passed a jar and laughed and slapped at each other with dusty hats. The night was warm and no moon out but plenty of starlight to see.
Jack had an expansive sensation that comes with the onset of certain evenings; the feeling that, in the end, he would be as free and clear as the air over the mountains. He heard the song build to a crescendo and end abruptly, the harsh chord of the mandolin coming through the air in the field and somewhere in the dark a woman laughed.
Jack opened the jar and raising it to his lips he thought of that sound again, the picked strings, the quick movement of her hands. Standing there in the freshly mown grass, tasting the hot liquor on his lips he felt the sky open up and the world come pouring in on him.
JACK COULD NAME the exact moment when Forrest began to distance himself from the rest of the family: as soon as he recovered from the Spanish Lady Flu, the morning when his long blue face rejoined them at the breakfast table. Like all of the Bondurant boys Forrest was a quiet child, prone to long bouts of silence brought on by the apparent opposite of shyness; rather he seized each situation as his own and felt that there was really nothing to add. What is there to say? But after the passing of his mother and sisters Forrest withdrew even further into his own sphere.
That night Jack was roused by the rocking of the bed as Forrest climbed in at some late hour. Jack curled himself away from the burning presence in the bed, a wad of blankets in his hand. Forrest lay on his back, rigid and staring into the dark.
Forrest became a figure who passed silently through doors at night, consuming food as if it was just something to get over with. As he aged Forrest retained the stringy, wan look of influenza, his skin even when burned by the sun seeming a slight shade of blue. His eyes remained sunken, his nose more knifelike, his thin, colorless hair already receding as a teenager. But his knotted muscles lengthened, his hands knobby steeples of bone and tendon with iron strength and unflagging endurance, his fists like post mallets. At work Forrest would hammer the tool into submission, bludgeon the task into defeat; he began at a young age to force the world to bend to his will.
As a teenager Forrest would rise before dawn and top tobacco and pull suckers till dinner, then walk four miles through Snow Creek Hollow to a lumber camp and work a crosscut saw until supper. The next day he would get up and do it again, seven days a week, substituting cattle work, apples, chestnuts, hog butchering, haying, busting clods, harrowing, plowing, carpentry, depending on the season, need, and paying customers. With Howard he took loads of walnuts and apples to Roanoke in oxcarts, and tobacco to Harrisonburg, Martinsville, and Richmond, where he slept on pallets stacked high with pressed tobacco hands in the darkness of the warehouse. He began to drink occasionally, accepting the grimy jar as it was passed hand over hand, though Forrest never took any pleasure in it other than that it helped him put his head down and get his eyes screwed tight long after everyone else had gone to sleep. People moved around him as if he were a wild dog in the street.
Granville was heard to remark more than once that he was glad at least one of his boys had a solid work ethic. Forrest will never be no ’count, he murmured to the men standing around the stove at the store.
HIS BROTHER’S dynamism was mesmerizing, and Jack had sought his whole life to find that source of drive in himself. He was eighteen and had nothing to show for it. Jack stood and contemplated the open barn door, a square of light against the dark hills, the drifting music. The cicadas swelled in the trees along the edge of the pasture. He felt like he could stand out there in that field, the liquor humming in his head, and listen and watch all night. It seemed he was plagued with bouts of indolence and idle fancy; such were his gifts. He felt he knew what he wanted, but his industry amounted to little, a handful of change, a few good stories, the same old boots.
Forrest became increasingly thrifty and even miserly, never a characteristic of the Bondurant men; Howard and Jack never held a dollar for more than a day, and Granville, while conservative in his money dealings, never paid much attention to the accumulation of wealth and therefore had managed to spend a lifetime in mediocre economic conditions despite a decent business. Forrest was conspicuously accumulating and obsessing over the money he made. He ate little and wore the same outfit every day until the seams gave out. By the time he was eighteen Forrest had proven himself a man not to be trifled with; the tomfoolery of youth was clearly spent, what lay ahead was only the grinding labor of adulthood and death. Forrest met both with narrowed eyes, knotted fists, and silence.
JACK WALKED BACK to the barn and passing the jar to his older brother he stood again with his hands in his pockets and watched the mandolin player cut through “Fire in the Gum” with her white fingers.
Say, Jack said, how come Forrest ain’t gone after those sons a bitches from the County Line?
Howard flipped the lid of the fresh jar into the straw and dirt and took a draw and swallowed, his eyes staying on the musicians, a slight tremor crossing his fleshy cheeks.
Women gave them wide berth and every man dropped his gaze a bit as he passed by, nodding his head in greeting and quickly eyeing the dusty leather of his boot tops, for the presence of Howard Bondurant, especially when he was drinking, was like a bonfire at your back.
When the band finished playing Jack left his brother and stood at the edge of the small circle of people that gathered around the musicians as they put their instruments away. He watched the mandolin player speaking with various people, laughing in an easy, relaxed way. Bertha Minnix’s thin neck stretched from her shoulders when she grinned, brushing her cheek to her shoulder. She had a small, plump nose like a chestnut. Have to see her again, Jack thought, have to make sure of it.
Jack turned and walked back to Howard at the other end of the barn and without saying a word the two brothers seemed to agree that it was a fine night.