THE FOLLOWING YEAR Anderson published his last novel, Kit Brandon, the story of a mysterious and beautiful Appalachian woman who loves fine clothes. She works in various mills, hitchhiking around the country, before becoming involved with a bootlegger and becoming a pilot-car driver for a moonshine syndicate. The book had moderate sales and was a critical failure.
On February 28, 1941, Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Eleanor, set sail for a tour of South America. Aboard ship one evening Anderson accidentally swallowed a toothpick while eating an hors d’oeuvre. He developed severe abdominal congestion and peritonitis, and eight days later in a hospital in Panama, Sherwood Anderson was dead.
THE DULING BROTHERS, Hubbard and Paul, heads of the largest West Virginia moonshine syndicate, were eventually convicted for the murder of Jefferson Richards. On the morning of December 23, 1933, Jeff Richards had engaged their brother Frank Duling in a high-speed chase as Frank was hauling a load of Franklin County moonshine to the brothers’ West Virginia markets. The chase resulted in the death of Frank Duling, and it was well known that the Dulings sought revenge. This conviction has remained in doubt, particularly after in later years other men claimed responsibility for the death of Richards, including Hallie Bowles, who claimed to several people and in his suicide note that he and another man were paid to commit the murder, presumably at the behest of Carter Lee.
FORREST CONTINUED to run the Blackwater station, with Maggie at the counter and Everett Dillon at the pumps. No one ever saw a display of affection between them. He continued to help his father and brothers with their tobacco crops, and liquor continued to run through his station, though never in the same quantity.
Howard moved to Martinsville and found work in the textile mills there. Throughout the years he kept a still up on Turkeycock, and each summer he and his brothers would gather on the mountain and make a small run. Lucy eventually bore four healthy children.
Emmy Bondurant graduated from high school and moved to New Jersey, where she worked in a typing pool and shared an apartment in Newark with two other women. She eventually married and divorced later in life.
JACK BONDURANT went on to run his father’s store and to raise beef cattle and tobacco in Snow Creek. Occasionally he had Forrest over for dinner, and Jack’s oldest son always marveled at the lump that developed in Forrest’s midsection after he ate, where the food was leaking through the lining of his stomach. The country hack that sewed him up after the shooting neglected to sew up the interior lining of his stomach, and a few minutes after eating, a bulge the size of a grapefruit would push out his shirt at the belly button. The boy would poke the mass with one finger, Forrest grinning even though it clearly pained him greatly.
ONE EVENING IN 1941, after helping his father with a cattle sale, Forrest was crossing through the bottomland that separated Jack’s property from Granville’s when he stepped through the icy crust of Snow Creek and was wet through to his armpits in the icy water. He walked up the hill in the dark to Jack’s house, arriving late, when everyone was already in bed. He refused Jack’s offer of some hot food and drink and dry clothes, electing instead to go to bed in the back room. Forrest said he would be up and out in the morning before they woke. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing.
In the morning Jack’s oldest son, now ten years old, woke with a start. His sisters Lee and Betty Louise and his brother Bobby Joe slept soundlessly. His youngest brother, Granville Thomas Jr., would be born the following year.
The room was cold and black and nothing moved, but the boy could sense that someone or something was down the hall. It was as if there were something pulsing through the walls, a wave of vibrating cold, and he got up without waking his siblings and chucked on his clothes quietly. The back-room door was slightly ajar, the air significantly colder there as it was the room farthest from the stove.
Inside the boy saw a shape lying on the narrow cot in one corner, next to an old pie safe his grandfather had built, and boxes of paintings by his mother, simple oil landscapes. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the light, then moved forward. The boy touched the edge of a boot, hanging over the edge of the cot. It was cold and faintly wet. As the boy stepped closer, treading lightly on the boards so as not to wake the house, Forrest’s face came out of the dark, a mask of blue stone, his eyes open, his mouth set in a hard frown, a grimace of inconvenience. His fingers on the sheet, held to his neck, the nails gone purple, covered with a thin sheen of ice.
YEARS LATER, when Maggie passed away, records revealed that she and Forrest had been secretly married for more than ten years.
THE BOY STOOD in the dark room, the only sound his own breathing and thumping heart. He was frightened and alone. He looked over his shoulder, white-blond hair, widely spaced eyes, the nose of his father and uncles. You could tell by the stretch of his legs that he would be a tall man, as tall as his uncle Howard.
The boy looks over his shoulder at me, at us.
He is scared to move, unsure of what to do.
He is the only one who knows we are here, that we are watching.
This boy is my father, Andrew Jackson Bondurant Jr.