Hendricks looked startled for a moment and then registered that Karp had made a light remark. A slow grin spread across his face. “No, except maybe indirectly. The governor thought you might like to see what a strip mine looks like from the air, and also get an idea of the geography of the place. You being from away. You don’t mind?”
“Oh, not at all. This is pretty exciting for me anyway. I don’t get to fly much in private planes.”
“No? Heck, most of the folks I see getting in the private jets and all look like lawyers.”
“You might be right,” Karp said. “I guess I’m not that kind of lawyer.”
The engines roared, the plane sped down the runway and lifted into the air. Hendricks expounded on the virtues of the King Air 350, its comfort, its safety, its economy, its usefulness to the governor of a medium-sized state. Karp was not much interested in this palaver, but found the man worth study. Not the kind of face you saw much of in New York, but oddly familiar nonetheless. Karp recalled faces like that from the Saturday-matinee movies of his child-hood—ten cartoons and two westerns—the faces on the people who hung around with Randolph Scott and Hoot Gibson, lean cowboys, the classic American stock, as alien as Martians to the little Italians and Jews yelling on the plush seats. He had the pale eyes, the small, straight nose, the lipless mouth, the strawlike hair. Karp saw him in a white hat. And a six-gun.
In fact, as he saw when Hendricks released his seat belt and stretched, there was a six-gun.
“You’re a cop?” Karp asked, indicating the weapon.
Hendricks glanced down at his waist, as if he had forgotten it was there.
“Yeah, captain, state police. I should have said. Fact is, I’ll be going down to Robbens with you.”
“If I get the job.”
“As far as I know, that’s a formality, unless you call the governor a son of a bitch and piss on the carpets.”
“I’ll try to remember that. How did you get picked for this?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” Hendricks said with a soft grin. “I was in charge of the security detail during the campaign, and we found we got along, and when he won it, well, he told me to stay on. Besides security, he’s asked me to do a couple of chores for him the past year or so in the criminal justice line, and when this came up, he said I was it.” Hendricks paused. “I’m from there originally. He thought it could help.”
“You’re from Robbens County?”
“Yes, sir. Coal-patch kid. When I was ten, my daddy sat me on his knee and made me swear on the Bible I’d never go down in the mines.”
“And you kept your word.”
“I did, too. When I was seventeen, I joined the Marine Corps. I did a hitch in the embassy guards and then my next hitch I got into the military police. Daddy was sick by then with the black lung, so I got out of the service and joined the staties, so’s I could watch over him. After he passed, I stayed on. I liked the work, although, between you and me, I don’t much care for the political end of it, which you have to if you’re rising up. I’d rather just cop.”
“A man after my own heart,” said Karp. “But there’s politics involved in this thing, isn’t there? Or your governor wouldn’t have reached out to a complete stranger.”
Hendricks dropped his eyes, a shadow of unease crossing his face. “Well, I guess you’ll have to discuss that with Governor Orne.” With that, he reached under his seat and pulled out a fat, blue plastic portfolio with the state seal printed on it in gold. Handing it across to Karp, he said, “Here’s all the information we have on the Heeney murder to date, plus we got some background material in there about Robbens you might be interested in. Why don’t you read through it, and after you’re done we’ll talk.” He stood up and dropped a large folding table down in front of Karp, then nodded and went to the rear of the plane, where he talked quietly to Trooper Blake while Karp examined the contents of the portfolio.
This comprised two three-inch loose-leaf binders, one containing all the documents relevant to the state’s case against Moses Welch, and the other labeled “Robbens County: Historical Analysis and Situation Report.” This latter had a governor’s office seal on the cover, but no attribution or author. The Heeney case binder, neatly tabbed, began with a letter from the state’s attorney, Hawes, to the attorney general, summarizing his case. Karp was particularly interested in the bloody sneaker, the finding of which he already knew about from Marlene. The lab had made a good DNA match on it and found that the stain on its sole was Rose Heeney’s blood. Hawes had tried to put the best face on this discovery by postulating that the sneakers had actually been worn by the defendant while committing the crime. The boots must have been in the Heeneys’ bedroom during the time of the murders, been splattered there, and stolen by the defendant. Karp snorted and paged through the data, trying to find any indication that Hawes had determined, whether through a search for receipts or checking records, whether anyone in the family had purchased such boots, or even some indication of what all the Heeneys’ shoe sizes were. Nothing; nor had Hawes seemingly made any effort to determine the provenance of those boots, the only piece of evidence he had linking his suspect to the crime. Karp couldn’t wait to meet Mr. Hawes.
After making some notes on the blank sheets thoughtfully provided at the back of the binder, he turned to the Robbens County report. He had expected the usual dry bureaucratic prose. Instead he found a fluidly written and absorbing history of what seemed to be a remarkable, if grim, piece of the nation. The county had been settled in the late eighteenth century, by Scotch-Irish farmers on the run from poverty or worse. They were feisty, independent, clannish people, the original pioneer stock that produced people like Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson.
Those of them who might have been a little too feisty and clannish to invent great nations settled in the hills and hollows of the Appalachians and stuck. There they cut down the ancient forests of hickory, oak, and chestnut and built little farms and sawmills and fought the Cherokees and, on occasion, the agents of the United States, who tried to collect taxes on the corn liquor that was their principal source of income. The fields were small, rocky, and steep—not a prosperous sort of farmland, but at least they did not have to chop wood to keep warm. Great boulders of coal stood out from the hillsides, and many people started to mine it in a small way, for local use. In 1787, a vein of hematite was found near Ponowon in the western part of the county, and they started a furnace at Furnace Cove, nearby. They began making nails and ploughs, knives and fowling pieces. Around this nascent industry, small towns sprang up. Donald McCullen deeded land to the settlement that bore his name in 1793, and a few years afterward it became the county seat of Robbens County, that named for an otherwise forgotten legislator. For the next fifty years, the nation flowed around them westward, leaving the people to their strictly local concerns. Though poor, the people were nearly self-sufficient. Bartering was the rule in that economy. What little cash arrived in the place came from the stills. Corn liquor was the only product worth carrying over the rough trails that connected Robbens to the country of which it was nominally a part.
Among the people who arrived in the county during this period were Josiah Cade (b. 1810) and Ephraim Jonson (b. 1815). Cade settled on Burnt Peak, Jonson on Belo Knob to the east. Both married locally and raised families and attracted kin from other states and the old country. Cade had five sons and two daughters, and Jonson had four sons and one daughter. Somewhere around 1856, the two men fell into a dispute about a boundary between two adjoining fields. They went to law, and Jonson won his case. Cade was ordered to move his boundary markers. This he refused to do and ordered his sons Lemuel and Ransome to drive a herd of cattle to pasture on the disputed land. When this action was challenged by James and Peter Jonson, Ephraim’s eldest sons, shooting broke out. In the affray, Peter Jonson was badly wounded, and Lem Cade was killed.
This was the origin of the Cade-Jonson feud, or war, as the report called it. In the next four years, two Cades and four Jonsons were shot fr
om ambush. Barns were burned. Cattle were poisoned. Dogs were hung from trees. Shortly thereafter, actual war came to the region, when Virginia seceded from the Union and West Virginia seceded from its mother state. Although there were no formal contests of uniformed troops in Robbens during the Civil War, nearly the entire able-bodied male population of the town engaged in hostilities at some level. The report made it clear that the War Between the States was considered an excuse to escalate the War Between the Cades and the Jonsons. The surviving Jonson boys went to Harpers Ferry to enlist with the Union. Immediately thereafter, the surviving Cade boys trooped to Knoxville to sign up with the rebels. In the county, guerrilla warfare was continual for the duration of the conflict. Both sides easily obtained arms from the belligerents. By war’s end only one son survived in each family—Moses Jonson and Ransome Cade.
Appomattox did not bring an end to the sniping and ambushes. Of the ten children, male and female, of Moses and Ransome, only two escaped murder long enough to survive into the twentieth century. Of the two, the report took particular notice of Ransome Cade (1864–1937), who brought a new level of ferocity and cunning to the feud. Devil Rance, as he was known, moved his clan away from its agricultural roots, replacing this as a source of income with a variety of criminal enterprises. He ran moonshine; he stole horses and rustled cattle; he could break a limb or a head for cash up front. He also ran a primitive protection racket among the local illicit distilleries. Most significantly, he consolidated the tribal property into a single hollow around Canker Run on Burnt Peak. This settlement was approachable only by a narrow, winding road and was surrounded on three sides by nearly impenetrable growth. From this fortress, Devil Rance fell like a robber baron upon his enemies and retreated with impunity. He held to the theory that the secession of West Virginia had been an illegal act, and that the state had no authority over him or his. Moreover, neither had the United States, since Virginia had seceded from the Union and the part of it that comprised West Virginia had never been legally reincorporated. It was not a theory that Karp would have liked arguing before a court, but Devil Rance was not all that interested in courts anyway. Courts had failed his tribe once; he was not inclined to give them another chance.
Into this parochial violence now barged the Gilded Age in the person of Thomas G. (Big Tom) Killebrew. Killebrew was a McCullensburg man whose family had been involved in small-scale coal mining for decades, all for the local market. But Killebrew was a traveling man and visionary. He had been to Knoxville on horseback and even to Pittsburgh. He had ridden on a railroad train and seen streets lit with gas. Quietly at first, and then brazenly, Killebrew began to buy up all the coal rights in Robbens County. Some people refused to sell, but Big Tom was not daunted. He soon concluded that the muscle that kept the moonshiners in line might be put to other uses. An agreement was reached with Devil Rance. Soon, after a brief terror, Killebrew had all the coal leases, save one. In gratitude, he gave his partner his very own coal patch, right up there near the Cade home place on Burnt Peak.
With the leases in hand, Big Tom ventured out to Pittsburgh again and talked with Mellons, and to New York to converse with Goulds. The result was the construction of the Huntington & Knoxville Railroad, which reached McCullensburg in the fall of 1889. Killebrew was, of course, a partner in the railroad, for the construction of which large numbers of Italian and Slovak immigrants were recruited. As soon as the railroad was finished, he began his mining operation, fittingly called the Majestic Coal Company.
Karp was distracted at the next chapter, an account of the worst labor violence in U.S. history, by a change in the motion of the plane. It was banking counterclockwise and seemed to be descending.
Hendricks was in the aisle, leaning over him. “How’s that report?”
“It’s fascinating. It reads like fiction. Is it on the level?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, here where it says fourteen revenue agents have gone missing in the county since 1900. Fourteen?”
“That’s only the federals. We lost some state boys, too, over the years. They don’t much like lawmen poking into them hollers up there. Plus, you got to consider that the county is stuck full of mines like a Swiss cheese, and you got boys up there with unlimited access to blasting compound. Stick a couple of bodies down a shaft and dump sixty tons of rock on top of ’em. What’re you gonna do? Start digging with a pick and shovel? We know they run meth, they run pot, some corn liquor, too, but not as much as they used to. It’s a bad situation. If you want to know the truth, the law wrote off Robbens County a while back.”
“What changed your minds?”
“Oh, you know, new governor, new broom. You need to put your seat belt on now.” Hendricks sat in the seat opposite and affixed his own. Karp looked out the window. They were flying at what he estimated to be fifteen hundred feet, over ground that resembled green corrugated cardboard.
“Are we landing?”
“No, but we’ll be heading over Robbens any minute now. At this altitude we sometimes have to use evasive maneuvers.”
“Evasive from what?”
“Ground fire,” replied Hendricks blandly. “We have state markings. A lot of folks down there don’t like official kinds of airplanes flying over them.” He looked at Karp innocently. “Unless it makes you nervous. I could tell the pilot to get upstairs again.”
“Not at all. I think everyone should be subjected to antiaircraft fire at least once.”
Hendricks nodded, his face neutral. He pointed out the window. “Okay, you can see mining from here. We’re still over Mingo. That’s Mateawan down there. You heard of that, haven’t you?”
“Yes. That’s a coal mine?” It was a smudge of black and ocher the size of a town, intermittently veiled by greasy smoke, threaded by railways.
“Yeah, a Peabody operation, I think. In a bit, we should be coming up on . . . yeah, look there, see that big flat area?”
Karp did. It was a huge, perfectly flat oval, looking unlikely amid the rippled hills, as if God had dropped a soccer field for giants on top of the mountains.
“What is it?”
“It used to be a mountain called Thatcher. They chopped it flat and dumped the spoil in the hollers all around it, and smoothed it out and planted it with grass.”
“They can do that?”
“Oh, that’s a prize exhibit of reclamation. They fixed that one. Just wait, we’re coming up on something real interesting.”
Karp thought the interesting thing might be a controlled flight into terrain. A mountain was looming in front of them, whose top looked to be higher than the altitude of the plane. He stared at the approaching green wall; out of the corner of his eye he saw that Hendricks was watching him. A little mountain-state aviation initiation, then, he thought, and made himself yawn. When he could count individual trees on the mountainside and distinguish the very one upon which the King Air was about to impale itself, the aircraft twitched its wing up and zoomed through a break in the mountain wall. Karp thought he could see squirrels running for cover as the towering forest flew past.
“This is Conway Gap, and that’s Majestic Number One,” said Hendricks.
It looked like something had taken a huge bite out of the rear half of the mountain, leaving an orange and black earth pit that looked large enough to swallow New York City. Orange creeks ran off the sore and disappeared into the surrounding timberland.
“That’s what they look like when you don’t clean ’em up, and Majestic don’t.”
“Don’t they have to?”
“Oh, it’s the law all right, but try and make them. There’s court cases been going on for ten years on this pit alone. See, what they do is dump the spoil from the hole down into the hollers. They bury everything, homes, farms, graveyards, whole little towns. Of course, the people’ve moved out before then. The mining ruins the water first, tears up the water tables and kills the creeks. And that’s what you got left. You all have your coal, though. This here’s downtown Mc
Cullensburg.”
The plane dropped even lower and sped over a group of low buildings and a green square with a golden-domed courthouse in it.
“Not much to it at this speed,” said Hendricks. “On the other hand, there ain’t much to it on the ground neither.” The plane circled the town twice, while the trooper pointed out the hills and highways, scars of coal patches, and the coffee stream of the Guyandotte River.
“We’re passing over the murder house there.”
Karp pressed his face against the glass and looked down with interest. A yard, a roof, a red truck in the driveway. Marlene’s maybe. Then it was gone.
“One more beauty spot and then we’ll put the pedal down and get us home,” said Hendricks. The plane rose, rising with the curve of the mountain he had identified as Hampden. The top of the mountain was gone, leaving a great mustard-and-black scab upon which yellow trucks and bulldozers rolled. It looked like a sandbox occupied by a child unusually well supplied with Tonka toys. In the center was what appeared to be a white, rectangular, five-story office building.
“Majestic Number Two. There’s the dragline,” said Hendricks, answering Karp’s unspoken question about what a five-story office building was doing in the middle of a mine. “They use a Bucyrus 2570, maybe the largest shovel in the world, although I hear they got one even bigger out in Wyoming.”
“That thing moves?”
“Oh, yeah. It never stops, day and night. Every scoop is near four hundred tons. Those trucks down there? Cat 797s. Over six hundred tons fully loaded.”
“I’m impressed,” said Karp. “Every little boy’s dream.”
“Uh-huh. The reason I’m showing you this is to give you some idea. You want to bury a body around here, you don’t have to go out at night with a spade and a lantern.”
A few minutes later the plane heaved and rolled onto its side, climbing. Karp’s belly lurched and he grabbed the seat arms.
“What was that?”
“Oh, Rudy probably saw a flash. He’s real nervous when he flies over weed.”
Absolute Rage Page 21
