“Sunsphere”—an empty relic of the 1982 World’s Fair that looked like a seventy-foot golden golf ball balanced on two-hundred-foot structural-steel tee. But once we cleared downtown, traffic thinned and the buildings dropped behind us, replaced by the rolling foothills and the sharp spine of the Great Smoky Mountains, backbone of the Appalachians. The Appalachians defined the entire eastern border of Tennessee. And Cooke County, Tennessee, defined—or at least personified—Appalachia at its most rugged. Officially, the man who had sent Deputy Williams to fetch me, Tom Kitchings, was Cooke County’s sheriff. In reality, though, he was its sovereign. The title
“Lord High Sheriff” had never been used in Tennessee, as far as I knew, but that term seemed to sum up Kitchings’s position in his mountain stronghold. With its forested hills and tumbling streams, Cooke County was one of Tennessee’s most beautiful places. It was also one of the wildest, in every sense of the word. Buttressed by the rugged border of North Carolina to the east and Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south, Cooke County was a legendary refuge for moonshiners, bootleggers, and other sundry scofflaws. Its rugged topography, tight-knit clans, and serpentine roads had kept the law at bay long after most of Appalachia had acquiesced in its own taming. Well into the era of television, the Internet, and mountaintop condos, Cooke County had hung onto a frontier mentality—the Wild South, I guess you might say—where rough, redneck justice was the only sort of justice whose arm was long enough or strong enough to reach back into the hollows and up to the mountaintops. But all that seemed to change when Tom Kitchings took over. Kitchings himself was a product of Cooke County—there was no way an outsider could ever get himself elected sheriff of the most clannish, insular enclave in a clannish, insular part of the state. There had probably been a Kitchings in Cooke County for as long as there had been a Cooke County, maybe longer. But Tom Kitchings was not your stereotypical hillbilly. He’d played high school football, though that part wasn’t surprising; the school was so small, every able-bodied boy was drafted to play, and they played with a vengeance. Other East Tennessee schools dreaded playing away games in Cooke County. Members of the visiting team—including my son, Jeff—invariably limped home with sprained ankles and bloody noses; some returned sporting fewer teeth than they’d gone up there with. Kitchings, though, was not just a thug in pads; he was a gifted athlete. He ran tailback for Cooke County High, and he was good enough to win a scholarship to UT during a period when UT had its pick of the best athletes in the Southeast. He looked to be on the fast track to the NFL—he rushed for a thousand yards his sophomore year and twelve hundred the next. But his college career and his football career ended seven minutes into the first game of his senior year in front of 90,000 fans in Neyland Stadium, when an Alabama linebacker slammed into his left knee and shredded the ligaments. Kitchings had hobbled home to Cooke County and dropped from sight. My son—who tracks UT players the way daytime TV fans track soap opera stars—
said Kitchings was rumored to be drinking a lot, but that was all he was able to tell me. Then, six or eight years later, Jeff showed me a story in the sports section reporting that Kitchings was alive and well and had found his life’s calling as a lawman, helping tame the wild denizens of Cooke County. The taming didn’t always go smoothly. Some years after Kitchings joined the force, his boss, the sheriff, was killed in a moonlit shootout on the edge of a two-acre marijuana patch. Pot, outsiders seem surprised to learn, is the numberone cash crop in Cooke County, followed quite distantly by tobacco. Marijuana grows tall in the cool and moist mountain air; in fact, Cooke County pot supposedly packs more punch than the crops from Mexico or Colombia, say my law enforcement colleagues. It doesn’t take a big patch to bring in good money, and the county’s roadless ridges and hollows give farmers the kind of privacy once prized by moonshiners. But every now and then, somebody’s pot patch gets busted, and sometimes somebody gets shot, though it’s not usually the sheriff.
In a special election held to fill the post, Kitchings outran his opponent—a local undertaker—as easily as he’d once outrun would-be tacklers. Since then, he’d spent a decade bringing the sheriff’s office into the modern era. With the money seized in a spate of drug busts, he bought a fleet of new vehicles: SUVs that could handle the rutted roads threading the county’s hollows; off-road ATVs that could cross swollen streams and reach hillside pot patches; even a helicopter from which he could survey his mountain kingdom from on high, with his brother, Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings, a former army chopper pilot, at the controls.
Despite his success, and despite the passage of nearly twenty years, Tom Kitchings had never fully gotten over his football injury. He still carried a slight hitch in his step and a fair-sized chip on his shoulder. He’d gone about as far as he could go in Cooke County, but that was leagues away, literally, from NFL