The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  The boy ran out the front door.

  When the Widow found him, he was under a birch tree, shaking from the kind of cry that has no sound. She’d brought with her a small luggage bag filled with jars of moonshine. A woman sat in jail for this juice. It was time to clear the house stash. From the bag she pulled a small canning jar. It was half full of the strongest moonshine she had. For a moment, she just stood over him. He couldn’t look up at her, knew it wasn’t for boys to cry like this. She bent and brushed at the hair on his forehead, her fingertips working in such a way as only a mother’s fingertips can. ‘Tonight you’ll sip a little extra for your pain,’ she said, unscrewing the lid.

  Through his shaky inhales and exhales, he managed to swallow a little, and it calmed him. The Widow kept at rubbing his face, his cheeks, his neck, until he nearly fell asleep on the spot. She took back the jar, nipped it herself, and pulled him up by the hand. ‘Let’s get to the cemetery before nine,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go to school tomorrow.’

  Once there, they worked. There was no time for crying. You had to look out for the law, for folks visiting their dead. You had to find the four foot tombstone marked with the name Mary Blood, dig under it a little, and unearth the hollow metal casing awaiting its delivery. It was paranoid work, the best kind to put a mind off sorrow.

  But sorrow always came back. That night, long past midnight, long past the pain-numbing effect of the shine, Trenchmouth stirred in his bed. It seemed to the boy that the world was burning, that men were being pulled to its center to die, and that he somehow was responsible. It also seemed that the air inside the house was unbreathable. So he descended the ladder and went outside. He wore nothing but his nightclothes and socks.

  It didn’t take long for another scent to embed itself in his nose. It was the same one he’d gotten hold of that day knocking bugs in the garden so many years before. On this night, with the miners dead and Mr Dallara burned alive, he almost recognized it. The smell of rot and regret. Of meeting the maker unnaturally.

  He tracked it liked the Widow had taught him to night track deer. The aroma of shit and functioning glands. But this was something else. His nose led him to the outhouse, then to the mound next to it, then to a third mound further down. Trenchmouth bent to one knee and inhaled hard. It wasn’t bowel movements his nose had followed.

  Out there, it was bone cold.

  A boy his size could work a shovel just fine. He didn’t possess much weight to bury its edge, but he jumped up and down on the thing, bruising the bare arches of his feet, enough to make headway in an hour’s time. Somehow, despite the frozen crust of earth, Trenchmouth broke through. He always had been able to dig what others couldn’t. He got below the petrified mess of eight-year-old human waste, deep below it after a couple more hours. It was then that he noticed something small and gray in the half light of his lantern. He bent to it, held it up to his eye. It was a man’s thumb.

  Trenchmouth didn’t scream or throw the thing back. He bent again and unearthed the hand from which his shovel had severed the digit. It was the color of nothing, and the skin was full of holes, tunnels for unknown breeds of burrowing insects and filth bugs long since full. The clothes were intact if not brittle. And once Trenchmouth used his fingers to dig and brush away the remaining dirt, a face looked back at him, sunken and scared. Hollow and clay red. He stared at the face, and as he put his hand to his nose again, the hills around him seemed to shift at their foundations and the trees and the sky went red. Then all of it, everything, almost fell away to nothing.

  The boy had an unexplainable urge to spit in the dead man’s empty eyes.

  He sat next to the buried man until sunrise. When Ona Dorsett walked out to the barn clutching her bearskin wrap around her chest, she did not act surprised to see him there. She went back in for his twilled wool coat and boots, handed them to the boy in silence. His fingers, nearly numb, pulled the warmth on slow and awkward. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘You know who he is?’ she said.

  ‘No ma’am.’

  ‘How he come to be buried here?’

  ‘No ma’am.’

  ‘I kilt him.’

  In those times, in those parts, everybody, no matter what their upbringing or education, used the word ‘kilt.’ ‘He got kilt cause some folks need killin,’ was a phrase heard once or twice annually, and hearing the Widow speak something like it was less monstrous than a child might expect.

  Trenchmouth stared at his boot laces.

  ‘Ain’t you going to ask if I had good reason?’ She scanned the foothills circular, pivoting in her stance.

  He waited, then spoke, ‘I reckon you wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t.’

  ‘That man there is your daddy,’ she said.

  The boy rolled those lips over his teeth in such a way that they might break through. He sneezed, a fit of them really, for no good reason.

  ‘He come to take you when you wasn’t but a baby, a little baby,’ the Widow said. ‘He come drunk and wild and unfit to father anything breathing. Your father was a bad man.’ The condensation of her speech hung heavy in the air.

  Trenchmouth stood. ‘He would have taken me from you,’ he said. He looked at her like a son looks at his mother when he needs more than words.

  ‘He would have.’

  ‘He would have kilt you to do it.’

  ‘He would have.’ She pulled the dead man’s mouth harmonica from her shirt pocket, gave it to the boy. ‘His,’ she said. ‘You’re liable to make somethin good of it.’ The boy looked at the little silver and wood instrument and felt sick at the thought of putting it to his mouth. She pulled him to her so that he hugged her around the hips, his face in her belly. An eight-year-old can know a great many things, and at the same time very few. That morning, at an outhouse burying ground, Trenchmouth Taggart knew he had been raised up right by the only woman who could’ve done the raising. He knew he’d most likely be dead or starved were it not for her. And he knew, that since the time of his last linen diaper some six years earlier, for every day of his young life, he’d been pissing and shitting on his very own daddy. That sat just fine with him, he decided.

  That evening, the Widow sat down with her children and told them things she never had before. The time was right. Due.

  She told Clarissa, among other things: ‘Your mother was too young, and most likely had got herself where she was by way of a drunk man’s forceful hand.’ The Widow knew things about the young mother, things like her name, Cleona Brook. Her whereabouts, Huntington by way of Charleston. Her profession, actress. The Widow even knew that Cleona was starring in a current production of Girl of the Golden West at the Huntington Theatre, less than a hundred miles of track away.

  It wasn’t coincidence that she turned to Trenchmouth that evening and spoke of similar knowledge, similar geography. While Clarissa whimpered next to the washtub in the kitchen, confused by discovery, and while the sunlight through the windows died and the room went orange and soft, the boy’s practicing mother told him of his birth mother. ‘She is in a room alone at the Home for Incurables in Huntington,’ she said.‘She pulls off her own fingernails. Thinks Satan is among us.’ Her name was spoken aloud with less sympathy than the girl’s mother. ‘Mittie Ann Taggart.’

  The Norfolk & Western ran a 1:50 p.m. daily out of Williamson. Columbus and Cincinnati, all points west and northwest. But the train stopped in Kenova and Huntington, and Ona Dorsett trusted it would be good for her children, aged eight and twelve, to strike out on their own for an overnighter. Children were babied too much, that was her thinking.

  Moonshine sales bankrolled the excursion of course, and the finger sandwiches in the café car were unlike anything Trenchmouth had tasted before. While he chewed, he almost let his teeth show.

  All of this, the fancy train car, the fancy finger food, would take the boy’s mind off Frank Dallara.

  Huntington was the big city. A train conductor had taken pity on the two, drawn them up maps
on paper napkins. ‘The Theatre and the Asylum?’ he’d said. ‘Not your most visited sites for out-of-towners, but easy to git to anyhow.’

  The two split up at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 20th Street, Trenchmouth heading north to the nut bin on the hill, Clarissa east to the theatre. It was cold out, and she’d held her little brother’s hand since getting off the train, something he’d never let her do at home. Walking alone and looking back at one another, it seemed like they’d always clasped hands till now.

  The Huntington Theatre was of good size, all intricately carved maple, painted gold and red and blue. The red velvet curtain was stained and the hem needed repair. Clarissa asked a woman with a cigarette where she might find Cleona Brook.

  ‘How old are you?’ the woman answered. She spoke through her nose, wore a chicken feather in her silvery hair, and spat specks of cigarette tobacco between her tongue and top teeth.

  ‘Twelve,’ Clarissa said.

  ‘Too young to be told the truth, too old to lie to.’ The woman pointed to a door beside the stage and walked away.

  Clarissa walked down a hallway lit by a single gaslight on the wall. Behind one closed door she heard moans. A woman or a man’s, she couldn’t tell. The next door was open, and inside, a young lady with thin wrists smacked color into her cheeks in front of a mirror. Her hair was pulled back with an elaborate assortment of pins. ‘Excuse me,’ Clarissa said.

  The woman turned in her chair and looked Clarissa up and down. She sat with her legs spread, wearing nothing but a brassiere, stockings, and a pair of men’s shortpants. ‘Do you have something for a cough?’ she said to Clarissa. ‘I’ve got a terrible cough.’ She faked a hacking sound.

  ‘No ma’am.’ Clarissa thought about moving on down the hall. ‘Are you Cleona Brook?’

  ‘Cleopatra Brook. Who told you Cleona? You from the apothecary’s?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m Clarissa. My adoptive mother is Missus Ona Dorsett from Mingo County. She—’

  ‘Ona Dorsett. I know that name. Was she the one that died from gonorrhea up at Detroit? The Shakespearean?’ She looked around herself wildly, presumably for a production poster on the brown walls littered in newsprint and cheap fliers and dried up flowers pierced by nails.

  ‘No ma’am, Missus Dorsett raised me after you dropped me off to her. I was just a baby, you were young yourself.’ Clarissa was finding it difficult to speak with her normal level of confidence.

  ‘Puddin, I wasn’t ever young,’ the woman said. She turned back to the mirror and snorted. Spat what came up into a trash bin next to her foot. ‘I was Cleona Brook, that’s for certain, but I wasn’t never young. I didn’t have no babies in Mingo County. No, no, no babies in Mingo.’ She smiled then, cocked her head so that she could see her daughter in the mirror’s reflection. ‘Got me some babies now though. One named Jack, one named Phillip, and another Bill. All of em babies even though they’re grown men. Do what I tell em to, cry when I yell at em. You know, I smack those three and they call me mama, kiss my feet? It’s a real dream.’ She opened the drawer at her chest and put in a dip of snuff. ‘Let me see your teeth, girl.’

  Clarissa pulled back her lips. She tried to make it look like a smile.

  ‘White as white can be I guess. Hold on to that,’ Cleona said.

  ‘You’re my mother,’ Clarissa said.

  ‘Like hell I am.’

  The show was in two hours. Clarissa watched her mother shut the door with her toes. She had to step back to keep it from hitting her in the face. A fat man swept the hall on his hands and knees. His broomstick had broken off to a height of eight inches, and he swept the dust side to side, breathing it in down low on the floor and coughing it right back out.

  The Home for Incurables was a big stone building with over two hundred rooms. A hair-lipped nurse with calves the size of cantaloupes took to Trenchmouth, and though it was not customary to get his type of visitor, his type of story, she led him to Mittie Ann Taggart’s room anyway. His obvious mouth problem reminded her of her own, and she decided to let the boy see his mother, provided she could supervise them. ‘She’s especially active today,’ the nurse said. ‘Woke up hollerin something even louder than usual. Even took a swing at Betty.’ She explained to Trenchmouth that Mittie Ann would be in restraints on her bed, that it was for her own good, and that she might say some unpleasantries in his company.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said.

  They could hear her from the end of the corridor. Speaking in tongues, no doubt. When the nurse led the boy in, Mittie Ann went silent. She stared at the ceiling, which was covered in dried-up peanut butter balls. Trenchmouth looked at them, then at the nurse. ‘Dessert,’ she told him. ‘Mittie Ann don’t believe in dessert.’ The window shade was drawn. His mother was sweaty and unwrinkled and green under the eyes and cheekbones.

  ‘I knowed you was comin, so I baked you a shit cake,’ she said, still staring up. Despite her arm and leg restraints, she was able to turn her hips to the side, revealing a brown stain in her white gown.

  ‘That’s no way to talk or act in front of a boy,’ the nurse said. She pulled a towel from the bedside table and hid the woman’s midsection with it. Trenchmouth covered his nose and tried not to cry.

  ‘He’s no boy,’ Mittie Ann said. ‘He’s Beelzebub’s offspring. Child of the one sent down to fire.’

  ‘That’s just the nonsense you woke up hollerin, Missus Taggart. It’s got nothin to do with him.’

  ‘It is him. I woke up hollerin on him cause I knowed he was comin. You figure pretty slow, don’t you lips?’

  The nurse looked at her shoes.

  Trenchmouth started to say something, but couldn’t.

  ‘I once knew a boy like you,’ his mother said. Then she turned and looked at the drawn window shade. Dust floated in the crack of sunlight. ‘I can see through things, like this window shade.’ It was quiet then on the third floor of the mental hospital. ‘I tried not to see through a little baby boy when he was plain as day an abomination, but he spat at me and spoke to me in the English tongue, but it wasn’t English, just sounded like it on the river’s air. Can you imagine, a baby talkin at two months?’ The nurse’s hands shook, and she stuck them in her armpits to stop it.

  ‘I got mouth disease on account of river water,’ Trenchmouth said. It wasn’t much louder than a whisper, dry throated and cracking.

  ‘I watched that boy die under the ice,’ his mother said. ‘That boy is dead.’

  They had found out what the Widow had guessed they would find out. What part of her wanted them to find. There are mothers in this world, who, for reasons of experience or malfunction, cannot care for their children. And those children need to see it for themselves before they can truly live. Clarissa and Trenchmouth had seen it.

  They held hands in the empty passenger car of the night train home. Folks traveling from Cincinnati and Columbus rocked unaware in their sleepers, but the brother and sister not bound by blood couldn’t sleep. The girl because she had a mind that raced, and the boy because he had no moonshine.

  She did not mind his breath when he told her of the tied-down woman at the asylum. She’d grown used to its smell. And he breathed hers in as she told of the foul woman at the theatre. He’d have listened forever if she’d let him.

  It was in this way that their bony shoulders banged with the train’s turns. Their knees touched, and their lot in life as children without roots caused them to move closer to one another. All this ended in a kiss between them that would be their only one until the next, thirty-four years later, when Clarissa was married to a man she did not love and Trenchmouth was wanted for murder.

  SIX

  Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish

  The words split the preacher’s lips asthmatic. He was small, but he preached big and airy and hoarse, like a coughing fit had ahold of him. ‘The sorrows of death compassed me,’ he shouted. ‘And the pains of hell gateheld upon me. I found trouble and sorrow.’ Frank Dallara’s body went into th
e ground inside a rough-cut box, wet from rain. ‘Then called I upon the name of the Lord,’ the preacher went on. ‘Oh Lord, I beseech thee deliver my soul.’

  Trenchmouth stood and listened. For a time, he’d felt more anger than anguish. Folks had been talking about Anse Pilcher, the burned hotel’s owner. Anse had a condition. His bones were soft. Like cartilage. His bones could be pierced just like his flesh, and because of this, most wouldn’t speak poorly of ‘the cripple,’ as they called him. But he had enemies and Frank Dallara had been one of them. Those talking said Anse had told Frank a little girl was inside all that fiery construct, that he lied to see the man set ablaze. Trenchmouth thought on this at the funeral. His shoulders, broadening now, nearly split the shirt seams the Widow had sewn a night prior. When Frank Dallara’s coffin hit bottom and the rough men lowering it pulled back their ropes, the boy nearly lost what little composure he had left. In a week’s time, he’d lost the man closest to being a father to him and learned the vile fate of his real daddy. He’d watched his birth mother spew shit and venomous words in his direction. And he’d kissed his own sister on the mouth. It was a good deal to take in at nine years old.

  The preacher preached onward. ‘I said in my haste, all men are liars.’

  That’s when the boy knew that God was for the featherheaded, that religion was a salesman’s game. God’s man himself had said it: ‘liars.’ Trenchmouth turned then and walked away from all of them. Black-clad and bad-postured, they half-listened to the words, ‘deliver my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ But Trenchmouth drowned it out. He whistled while he walked away. This struck a particular funeral-goer, Frank Dallara’s ugly brother-in-law Hob Tibbs, as disrespectful beyond the pale.