The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Each of them progressed through, fumbling and mumbling, until the last was beaten, and Trenchmouth, the victor, drove the peg into the ground using his knife handle. Six blows landed solid and flat as a carpenter’s hammer. He’d sunk the peg, so that the loser boy, Warren Crews, was forced to do the deed. Warren was the one who had objected to calling Trenchmouth over. He was youngest brother of Mose Crews, Fred Dallara’s best buddy. Mose was tailback on the ball team, and the meanest of the nastiest of the T.T. Stinky crew.

  ‘Root, Root!’ the boys hollered, shoving little, fat, Warren Crews to his knees. He couldn’t even see the top of the peg, none of them could. Trenchmouth had driven it deep. Hands behind his back, the Crews boy dove in for it with his teeth, as the rules clearly dictated. Again and again he came up for air, the silty black mud covering more and more of his face. They stood around him and laughed. It was friendly teasing, even from Trenchmouth, who harbored no ill will toward the boy on account of his bad luck in sibling, but Warren Crews didn’t like losing. As he came up empty again and again, and as the boys’ insistence on playing out the game became ever more apparent, Warren Crews looked around in desperation. He nearly forgot his age and called out for T.T. Stinky to get down there and finish, seeing as his mouth was already dirty, his teeth full of muck. Warren thought his big brother would have done just that. But Warren Crews thought wrong, and was, for a brief moment, lucky.

  First, he wasn’t aware that even football Mose would no longer call out Trenchmouth to his face. In private, Mose and the others still spoke of the orally-ailed one without censor. They even made up crude drawings and songs. But they’d long ago given up insulting Trenchmouth face to face, much less making eye contact. Ever since he’d attacked Fred Dallara like a mountain cat, and even more so since he’d sprouted wide shoulders and a fine mustache and won every riflery contest the county sponsored, boys only poked fun at T.T. Stinky behind his back. Had they known that in a year’s time, Trenchmouth had vocalized into the unmentionable anatomies of nine women, they’d have no doubt fainted from shock. But Trenchmouth had a whole stockpile of secrets, and this one he would not spill.

  So Warren was lucky, in that not knowing any of this, he didn’t slander Trenchmouth and pay the price. What stopped him was the sight of Arly Scott Jr walking by.

  Good luck, bad luck. They interchange so quickly.

  Arly Scott Jr was, like Trenchmouth, nearly fourteen. And, like Trenchmouth, he was bigger than the four other boys. But Arly was black, and this meant that even a pack of puny ten-year-olds could order him around if they felt like it.

  ‘Hey,’ Warren Crews shouted at the boy in the distance, who was going foot over foot along the railroad track, testing balance. ‘Hey nigger!’

  Arly stopped and dropped his feet on either side of his balance beam. He turned and faced them.

  ‘Why don’t you come on over here?’ Warren spit dirt, scraped grass off his tongue and lips using his teeth and fingernails.

  Arly looked at them for a while, then began walking toward them. Trenchmouth didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around. Like every other black family in Mingo County, Arly’s had come from down South for the mines. His father was in the number one at Red Jacket. And like every other black family in Mingo, he lived in Mitchell Branch and went about his business in an all-black world of school and church. Arly was almost identical to Trenchmouth in height and weight, and his sprouting muscles were just as hard and determined.

  When he walked upon them, the littler ones got uncomfortable and began to fidget. They’d heard their fathers and mothers and uncles and brothers use the term Warren Crews had used, but they were still young enough to be pierced by it when shouted in the presence of one to whom it was meant to describe.

  ‘You play Mumblety Peg down there in Texas?’ Warren Crews said. Oddly, he’d stayed on his knees with his hands locked behind him throughout all this, as if to break the pose would be sin.

  ‘Georgia,’ Arly said.

  ‘Georgia then. Niggers play Mumblety Peg in Georgia?’

  Arly just stared down at the boy. The other ones fidgeted more plainly. One laughed a little, tried to act tough. Another gripped his thighs against his privates, tried not to piss himself as he often did when trouble arose.

  Trenchmouth studied Arly Scott’s eyes, the heavy lids, the wiry brows. The small scar that said he could take a punch. He knew that Warren Crews had called on the wrong black boy.

  ‘Well?’ Warren said. ‘Is that all you know how to say? “Georgia?” They just teach you one word down there? State name?’ He laughed and turned back to the other boys to make sure they did the same. But he never found out they didn’t. Before Warren Crews could notice the cringing expressions of impending impact the little boys uniformly wore, he’d been cold-cocked. It was a sweeping right hook, a suckerfree sucker punch delivered from high to low and with the inertia of planted feet and swiveled hips. Arly Scott Jr was a trained fighter.

  Some stood scarecrow still, some ran. Either way, they were thoroughly discombobulated by the sight of a black boy hitting a white one for insulting his race. It didn’t happen in Georgia, they were pretty sure, and it didn’t happen in southern West Virginia either. But it had happened, and Warren Crews lay asleep on the ground, thick blood, chunked by dirt, running from nose and mouth.

  Eventually, they all left their ten-year-old comrade where he lay, only one of them with the wherewithal to shout a promise of revenge. Arly and Trenchmouth remained. They looked down at Warren together, the black boy rubbing his throbbing knuckles, the white boy rubbing his head. This would take some figuring.

  Trenchmouth decided he didn’t feel all too sorry for the littlest Crews. At eleven, he was old enough to know better than to treat somebody that way, address somebody with those kind of words. The Widow had taught Trenchmouth, along with Clarissa, from a young age, to never engage in the game of white superiority. ‘We are all made from God’s clay,’ she’d said, ‘no matter its stain.’ Besides, Trenchmouth had always been less white than the whites, especially in summer, a fact the other kids falsely attributed to a stubbornly thick buildup of dirt on his skin. And had he seen more of his father than the dusty, dug up variety, he’d have known there was Indian in that bloodline, or maybe even colored. Still, by outward appearance, he was a white boy.

  ‘I’m Trenchmouth Taggart,’ he said and held out his hand.

  Arly turned those eyes on him. He didn’t speak back or change the stare, which had the kind of calm to it that can precede a snot-knocker as easily as a handshake.

  It was nice to see it in another, that ‘something else’ look of the eye. He’d been embarrassed for revealing his own after Fred Dallara kissed Clarissa. It came from someplace less knowable than a steady diet of moonshine and ridicule. This particular something was there before all that.

  Trenchmouth almost told the other boy how he once bit someone for kissing his sister, but it seemed anxious, foolish. Instead, he said, ‘I reckon your daddy’ll have your hide for this here.’ He pointed at Warren Crews, who whimpered and tried to get up on his elbows.

  Arly’s hands re-fisted, and he turned his stare back to the boy on the ground then, as if he might have another go. But the whimper turned to a cry and Arly’s whole being eased up. He answered Trenchmouth without looking at him. ‘You’d reckon wrong then. My Daddy told me, when they look down at you, start em to lookin up.’ His voice was a pitch deeper than Trenchmouth’s, his accent big and round.

  Before Arly Scott walked away, he snorted twice, gathered up what he could in his throat, and spat on the ground before Warren Crews, who was, by that point, all-out crying the kind of cry reserved for mamas, the kind he’d have to be rid of in a year or two if he hoped to get anywhere in life.

  Trenchmouth didn’t forget about Arly Scott Jr. He knew somehow that the handshake he’d offered would someday be returned. And the fallout he’d worried over, the revenge on the Scott family for one of their own having struck down a whit
e boy, never came to pass. This was on account of various abnormalities brewing in the hills. First, Arly Scott Sr, little Arly’s father, was a quiet yet commanding miner who everyone knew had been a prizefighter in his youth, and they all respected that. Arly Sr had single-handedly integrated the late night meetings that were slowly building toward a certified coal miner’s union, and though some hated him for this integration, most recognized their enemy not as one with black skin, but one with green hands.

  Second reason no one came looking for the Scotts was that George Crews, fat Warren’s father, was rising among the ranks of the local coal operators, and a new sense of public image and city manners discouraged him from vigilante justice. Besides, George’s bulge-pocketed buddies told him, the little Scotts among us will be crushed soon enough for their attempts at rebellion.

  And third, a reason not known to most, was the fact that the Crews family patriarch needed desperately to avoid attention upon his clan if he hoped to get truly rich. It was only recently that he’d found out about his wife’s betrayal of their Methodist traditions. Only in the last few months that George had unearthed the lies. It was these lies that sent her off early on Sunday mornings to care for her unstable sister in Williamson, while in reality, as he would come to hear through the ever-burgeoning rumor mill surrounding the place, she attended the Church of God with Signs Following. She’d been sucked in by a snake handler from Tennessee, and George had only pulled her back out with threats of beatings and separation and financial ruin. Had he known that she was also one of nine women paying top dollar every Sunday evening to visit the mountain hideout of a teenager, who knows what he’d have done. Had he known that she was, like the other women, handing over increasing sums of her husband’s currency in that hideout to secure the sweet burn of expert moonshine and the heavenly exhaustion of a tongue-talking, ventriloquist-cunnilinguist, George Crews may have killed his wife. That, or maybe he’d have been reduced to nothing. To crying the pitiful, mama’s boy cry his son had cried when he made the mistake of believing what so many in power believed. That things were to stay as they were. That the powerful would stay there, in power, and that the ones beneath would stay beneath, all dark-skinned and coal-blacked and rotten-toothed. And maybe things would stay this way for a while, but change was coming as fast and reckless as the N&W lines, and if triggered, it just might fell trees and men alike.

  ELEVEN

  Folks Will Dust You Quick As Look At You

  Winter came premature that year. The long walk to and from the Church of God with Signs Following each Sunday cracked Trenchmouth’s lips, anesthetized his toes and fingers. But he got there on time, heeded the same instructions J.B. Smith gave him every week: Be sure to take up all the snakes at once. Don’t open your mouth and let any in, folks didn’t know what to make of that one. Don’t stand so stock still. Move your feet a little. Move your tongue too. If you don’t feel the Lord speaking through you, make something up.

  The boy’s act had brought more sheep to the flock, and his gig became a regular Sunday ritual. J.B. Smith knew the boy’s tongue-talking to be fraudulent, but it added flair to his natural magnetism for snakes, and flair put asses in chairs, and asses in chairs put coins in hats, and coins in hats put food on the table, liquor under the basement stairs. Coins converted whores to the Lord.

  Trenchmouth had even started to forge his tongue-talking while in a woman’s nether-regions. The genuine article, the God he’d found down there on Independence Day, had ceased to draw out holy babble. He’d had to fake it after the six or seventh time. All part of the act. What had been, at least that first time with Anne Sharples, an awakening, had transformed into a job. They never let him kiss their mouths or dip his wick. Some had even worried so heavily on the contagiousness of his disease that he’d procured a medical almanac to show them it wasn’t contagious. Ewart wouldn’t set foot in his hideout anymore, much less speak to him on account of his newfound tendency to avoid her, ignore her even. But, between the women and the small fee he charged J.B. Smith for his services in church every Sunday, Trenchmouth’s coin sack was getting heavy. He was saving up for something, he just didn’t know what.

  On a particularly cold Sunday afternoon, Trenchmouth sat at the kitchen table in silence with Clarissa and the Widow. They hardly spoke in these days of awkward adolescence. Brother and sister went so far as to avert contact of the eye. But all hands touched when the Widow said the blessing.

  ‘We give thanks O Lord for the food before us and the family beside us.’ They all said Amen. They all ate. Wet wood cracked and hissed at them from the heating stove, alongside small chips of coal and coke stolen from slag heaps and found on railroad tracks. The sheet steel pipe hadn’t stayed air tight. The Widow coughed. The windows fogged over thick and milky.

  Clarissa knew that her mother knew that Fred Dallara was after her cherry. Trenchmouth knew that his mother knew he was taking up serpents and making a fool of himself at a temple of blaspheme. But, she believed that adolescents would make their mistakes, with or without her warnings against them, so she kept quiet.

  On that Sunday, the quiet got to be too much. ‘In this life,’ the Widow said to them, ‘there’s folks that will force your hand.’ She picked at the chicken back on her plate, fingers shiny with grease. She did not look up at them. ‘What you need to ask yourself is why you let em. What’s your cut? There’s bamboozlers among us, and if you get dusted enough times by one of em, you forget how it is to be alive, to be free and easy.’ She was deliberate with the words then. ‘You get used to the notion that life isn’t but two things: gettin bamboozled or bamboozlin somebody yourself. And there isn’t no real living in either.’ She brought her food to her mouth with both hands, rolled the chicken back circular like a corn cob, toothing every bit of meat from the bone.

  Clarissa excused herself and went up the ladder to the loft where she’d pen another letter she never planned on delivering. She’d hide it where she hid all the others.

  Trenchmouth sat with the Widow and ate and looked occasionally at his pocketwatch.

  ‘You got somewhere to be?’ she asked him.

  ‘No ma’am,’ he said. A woman more than twice his age would be waiting at the meeting spot for him in an hour. It would be her second time, so she’d know to expect him early, to not worry when he blindfolded her and led her to his hideout somewhere on Sulfur Creek Mountain. This was how it was done, the other women had told her, ‘so we don’t know where it is exactly.’ The second-timer would wait and shiver and know that soon her shivers would be of a different variety, and that warmth would rise, toes to head, like a fire flood, all because a poor, malformed boy who took up serpents could do something no grown man ever could or would. But on this day, she’d wait forever. Her shivers would be of one variety only. Trenchmouth was not coming.

  Instead he sat in silence with his mother, then helped her with the dishes. And he looked out the fogged window glass at the woods, the tree limbs angular and black and without leaf. The branches against the sky, thin and searching, like the blood vessels he’d looked at in the medical almanac. The Widow’s words had gotten to him. He’d heard when most folks only listened. His cut in this game he’d created wasn’t worth it. He’d thought himself the bamboozler, but he’d become the bamboozled, and it was time to end it.

  Frank Dallara’s death had brought him to the dry rituals of the Methodists, and there he was used, and he’d only gotten out by chopping down Hob Tibbs. The want of Ewart Smith had brought him to the Church of God with Signs Following, brought him to the snake-handlers and the tongue-talkers and the holiest parts of a woman. But again, he was used, and he’d only get out by heeding the Widow’s words.

  He stood and stared out the window, out beyond where the tomato garden had flared in spring. At the edge of the woods stood a figure. A boy, or maybe a small man. He was gone as quick as he’d appeared.

  After a while, when the dishes were washed and dried and put away, the boy and the Widow sat agai
n at the table, and she poured them a little kitchen whiskey. Then she pulled a newspaper from her apron pocket and slid it toward him, a particular passage marked with a star. Bruin are Plentiful it read. The story was out of Huntington. With the big game season open, the lovers of the sport are flocking to the mountain region to hunt bear, which are reported very plentiful this season. The article described how folks ran bears to their caves with packs of hounds and killed them. The theory was that the mother bears returned to their caves to protect their cubs, that this accounted for the hard fight the bruin put up. It concluded, While the sport is dangerous, it is very thrilling. Trenchmouth looked up at her. She almost smiled, then spoke. ‘I reckon between the two of us, we don’t need no hound dogs.’

  ‘I reckon not,’ he said.

  His fourteenth birthday was a week off. She’d already been to Williamson for his present. It was under her mattress, wrapped in butcher’s paper. A Winchester Model 1907 she’d procured from a police officer turned pawnbroker, a man who’d give up a testicle for a drop of white lightning. It was a .351 caliber, self-loading. Five round magazine, pistol-grip walnut stock. Until that Sunday, she’d not decided whether to keep it for herself or to give it to the boy. Not until that moment at the table over moonshine and the written word and the shared love of tracking and facing down the most beastly of beasts. Boys his age could take righteous paths or wicked ones, and the Widow had steered her boy back from wander.