The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  A week later, the boy and the Widow found themselves subjects of the newspaper. When word spread of the slain black bear, the photographer for the Williamson Daily News had arranged to meet them in town. Outside the bank, he set up his folding Eastman Kodak and depressed the small button. The result was published the next day: Local Fourteen Year Old, His Caretaker Bag Prize Bruin. The scales had weighed the black bear in at 460 pounds, and he’d measured over three feet tall. These were both local records as far back as anyone could remember. In the photograph, new Winchester in one hand, the bear’s mighty claw in the other, Trenchmouth had actually smiled. Had actually opened up for all who wanted news to see.

  One of those who saw was a fellow from Washington, D.C. by the name of Arthur H. Estabrook. He and his partner, Ivan E. McDougle, had been traveling through the area on their way home from the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. There, they were conducting ongoing experiments on the region’s people, poking and prodding them in hopes of explaining why such downtrodden folks continued to exist and threaten the quickwitted, racially-pure American well-bred. They had labeled these mixed-ancestry hill people ‘The WIN Tribe.’ This stood for White, Indian, and Negro. The head circumferences of the WINs, the foot and Achilles lengths, the slope of brows and propensity to dysentery and bad grammar and poor diet and interbreeding and mixed breeding especially, all these would help them figure out how such hill people came to be, and how we might all avoid becoming like them.

  Eugenics was the movement of these men, and Mr Estabrook, over his morning coffee, had trained his magnifying lens on the newsprint mouth of the dark white boy who’d slain a prize-winning bear. ‘We’ve got to find this boy and analyze him,’ he told his partner.

  The goddess Liberty on the Two Dollar Silver Certificate spread her arms wide in protection. The bill was old, wrinkled, and it was not more money than Trenchmouth had seen in a sitting. Before quitting, he’d accumulated a treasury from the women who needed his touch. But this currency caught his eye for three reasons. First, it was held out to him in offering as soon as he answered a knock at the door. Second, the man doing the holding was dressed more proper than anyone Trenchmouth had encountered, and so was his sidekick. Their cashmere Mackintoshes and tailored trousers commanded respect. The third reason the boy accepted the money and invited them in was that behind them, uncomfortable and bespectacled, stood a young woman who you simply didn’t turn away if she came calling. She was a city girl. Black velvetta hat, double-breasted jacket with fancy buttons. Under her satin-folded skirt she surely wore a winter corset, but her shape, with or without it, was something that would raise any country boy’s pup tent.

  He was home alone.

  They took a minute to acclimate, but had seen much worse. They chose to stand, turned down Trenchmouth’s offer of coffee. ‘As I said before, we’re in the employ of Dr Charles B. Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office,’ Mr Estabrook said, wiping at his nose with a handkerchief.

  ‘You want to measure my head?’ Trenchmouth said.

  Mr McDougle stopped gawking at the patchwork walls, wondering about the contents of the loft. ‘You know what eugenics is?’

  ‘I read the papers.’ Trenchmouth winked at the young woman. She looked away, wrote in her opened book.

  ‘I must say I’m impressed,’ Mr McDougle said.

  ‘Tell me, were you born in this area?’ Mr Estabrook asked.

  ‘I didn’t hear the lady’s name.’

  ‘This is our senior student assistant, Miss Margie Avon. She’s the first young lady to study sociology at William and Mary.’ Estabrook didn’t motion to her or look her direction when he spoke her name. Neither did McDougle. She wrote in her book some more.

  Trenchmouth got the impression they ignored the girl in public, did the opposite in private. ‘William and who?’

  ‘William and Mary, the oldest—’

  ‘Tell me,’ Trenchmouth said, employing the introductory statements of his guests, ‘does Miss Avon bed up in a separate room at the hotel, or do you all share a real big one?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ McDougle pretended to be insulted.

  Trenchmouth kept his eyes on her. She didn’t look up from the book, but her face went red as ripe crabapple. ‘I said, do you camp out on your study trips when there ain’t room at the inn?’

  They were baffled. Estabrook lowered his voice and stepped forward. ‘We’ve just come from Grundy, Virginia. Are you familiar with it?’ His moustache carried too much wax.

  ‘I reckon I’d better be,’ Trenchmouth answered, looking the man of equal height in the eyes. ‘I spent a month in their pokey.’ He’d never heard of Grundy.

  ‘For what crime may I ask?’ McDougal was, for all his sociological book smarts, short on real sociology. He knew not when his leg was being pulled.

  ‘For makin love to the Fire Station mule,’ Trenchmouth said.

  Bestiality, Miss Avon wrote in her book.

  Estabrook let it go. ‘Are your ancestors from Grundy?’

  ‘Nossir.’

  There was a pause. Trenchmouth used a rag to take the dented coffeepot from the stovetop.

  ‘May I ask where your ancestors are from?’

  He poured coffee into a straight-seam cup, took it with him to sit at the table. They watched him sip one-handed while leaning back on two chair legs. Through thick steam, he watched them write in their books. ‘Where are my ancestors from? Paris France London England,’ Trenchmouth said. ‘Are you going to measure my head?’

  They asked if they might watch him eat, suggested it was close to suppertime. He opened a can of sardines and, with his pocketknife and fork, cut the little, greasy lengths into five pieces each, equal in size. Then he inhaled them off the plate, his pursed lips a slurping vacuum, an assembly line of sorts, one piece, then another, then another. He began pouring sips of coffee into his cupped palm, drinking it in the same slurping fashion. They wrote furiously.

  He said his blessing when the meal was finished rather than before. Half tongue-talking, half a list of surrounding counties, whispered. They tried to take dictation, tried to write his nonsense words on pages next to the words describing others encountered in their studies. Freed Negroes. Mixed Half Breeds. Low Down Yellows.

  They measured his head after he asked again. The girl, at his insistence. They agreed only if she was gloved. He almost fell asleep from the sheer pleasure of her touch.

  He made up and spoke on special customs for them to write about. Drinking squirrel blood to clear up foot fungus, hot poker in the ear for a stomach ache. When asked about the Widow, her source of income and earning capacities, he lied convincingly. Tobacco farmer, he said. Outhouse builder. About to strike it rich. When asked why he hadn’t taken her last name as his own, he lied again. His surname, he said, had to be kept that way to continue the family name, as his father had run off to Paris France London England.

  They wrote it all down.

  The time came when McDougal asked, ‘And your mouth ailment? I’d say persistent gingivitis? Have you seen a physician?’

  ‘Beelzebub,’ Trenchmouth said.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘The one sent down to fire. He give me this mouth.’ He took another slurp of his coffee, cold now, swashed it around inside his mouth, spat it on the floor in front of Miss Avon’s pointed boots of fine leather. ‘Dust flakes on the river air,’ Trenchmouth said, ‘just like those there.’ He pointed to the whirling specks caught in the fast-fading sunlight through the kitchen window. ‘They can infect a body, through the gums, the mouth and the throat brain. Beelzebub’s cells, don’t make em mad.’ He smiled full on. They quickly cut off their stupefied stares, looked down, wrote more.

  ‘I can see through things,’ Trenchmouth said.

  The door opened and the Widow came in with her finger on the trigger of a Derringer inside her coat pocket. She’d heard them talking from twenty feet off, got prepared for those that would sabotage her shining. ‘Who are you?’ she sai
d. Trenchmouth sat still, looked past his mother’s silhouette to his sister, holding a sack of something. She was miniature through the opened door. He’d stopped smiling.

  ‘I’m Arthur H. Estabrook of the Carnegie Institution, ma’am.’ He’d planned on continuing, but she cut him off.

  ‘Out,’ she said. Miss Avon had already slipped through the doorway.

  ‘We were hoping to speak with you as well.’

  ‘Out,’ she said louder, and the men listened, spoke no more save a few parting courtesies.

  Clarissa came in and began unloading goods from the grocers. The Widow stared at the boy until he started doing the same.

  In all the awkward comings and goings, the door had been left open too long. It would take a day or more to push out the chill.

  For as much as the Widow didn’t like strangers in her home, she held off punishing the boy for a good little while. The next day in town, she went to the hotel housing the three city sophisticates. They’d stayed at the Urias, rebuilt after the fire that killed Frank Dallara. Anse Pilcher, the proprietor, wasn’t in a hurry to talk to the Widow, nor she to engage him, for like Trenchmouth, she despised the man. Witnesses had said he’d allowed Frank Dallara to burn, could’ve pulled him out but didn’t.

  The eugenicists had checked out. She asked around. Traveling through, folks said. Professor-types. Nation’s capital.

  She waited another day to say anything to the boy. Then, after dinner, when Clarissa had gone up to hide from the only people in this world who loved her enough to die for her, the Widow stopped drying clothes at the iron-and-rubber wringer, wheeled around, and smacked Trenchmouth hard across the forehead. He’d been waiting for her to say if his chores were done.

  ‘It isn’t even that you let them people in here,’ she said. Their home, like everybody’s in those mountains, had always been open to strange travelers. ‘It’s that you sat with them and let them pick at you like a monkey in the jungle. I know what they do, how they do to people like us. And you gave em more of the same.’

  He wanted to tell her he hadn’t. That he’d thrown a purposeful wrench into their scientific machinery, one-upped their high-minded talk with talk of his own. Talk so crazy it would cause them to second guess their eugenic gibberish. But he didn’t say any of it because he knew it was time to listen, and because he didn’t know anymore if what he’d done was so revolutionary after all. In retrospect, it may have been plain stupid.

  ‘Men like those want to brand you and hang you out to dry.’ Her hands were on her hips then, and Trenchmouth, shamed, couldn’t look up much higher anyway. ‘They got to trace you back like a hound dog’s blood line, call you part Powhatan or Negro, explain to the folks riding cable cars why anybody’d want to stay in a hole between two hills like this one.’ The Widow worried that she was losing him again to bamboozlers, that just after rescuing him from wicked wander, he was back to being used. She let go her hip grip and slicked back her hair. He looked up momentarily and noticed the grey in her roots, something that hadn’t been there last time he looked. ‘They had their way,’ she said, quieter, more tired, ‘we’d all be the same.’

  ‘As them?’ he asked, genuine.

  ‘Just the same.’ She looked at the redness where she’d smacked him, wished she could rub it away. ‘Or maybe, they’d have us just not be at all.’

  TWELVE

  Here Came A War Or Two

  The reason folks like Mr Estabrook found fascination in the dispossessed always had roots in something like envy. Envy for upward bootstraps. Envy for those they didn’t focus on: those among hill folk who, despite the world against them, had an intangible drive for mastery of one thing or another. And Trenchmouth was one of those. Beyond his skills of digging and climbing and inventing and pleasing women, which only a handful of folks were aware of, lay his obvious aptitude for lining up and taking a shot. That is, he could sight and drop most any target with most any weapon. What Frank Dallara had seen all those years earlier had come to full fruition with practice. The dead-eye boy had fallen a prize bear. The crack-shot had collected trophies. And such riflery merits did not go unnoticed in trigger-happy times of impending World War. Even in the hills of southern West Virginia, folks had been itchy since the day a Sarajevo boy not much older than Trenchmouth had stuck his revolver inside the car of the Archduke and squeezed the trigger. The Black Hand had spoken and the world had to listen to its fallout. Within a year, the papers told of the Germans, their use of poison gas.

  Four short months after Trenchmouth’s fourteenth birthday, his president declared war on those gassy Germans. The man-boy wished himself older by a few calendar lengths. He wanted to knock down something other than big game.

  But June 5th, 1917, came and went. Conscription they called it. The Williamson Daily News declared No Slackers Will Be Found In Mingo, and it held true. Every man of fighting age joined up. This excluded coal miners whose duty it was to keep producing in time of war. But in Mingo, even the miners couldn’t help but go to war, and scores of them came home asleep forever. Nowhere on top of earth can be found a more fighting bunch of brave young men and every one seems ready to go when the bugle call is sounded in this county, the newspaperman went on. Twenty-one to thirty was the rule, but younger got in. Still, despite his older size and look, Trenchmouth was just too short in the tooth. So while the district attorney called on all county sheriffs to report the names of slackers – those eligible but not enlisted – Trenchmouth sat and fidgeted and twice watched The Narrow Trail, showing at the Hippodrome. On the screen, background orchestra roaring, the good Outlaw Ice Harding broke a wild horse and called it King. Together, they held up stagecoaches. Then the Outlaw rode out of town. For a boy of sixteen, there was nothing more beautiful than an Outlaw riding away free.

  While the older boys fought and died, Trenchmouth practiced his marksmanship and his Outlaw stare. Now and again, he sparred with Arly Scott Jr, who was a promising young amateur.

  By the age of seventeen, Trenchmouth had given up on school.

  When Ewart Smith’s father, J.B., died from a snakebite, he used her vulnerable state to finally dip his pecker into that honeypot he’d so often been denied. For her, it was outright painful. For him, disappointing. Over in no time and plain awkward. So, he took to avoiding Ewart at all costs.

  He also avoided Clarissa and Hob Tibbs and Anne Sharples, the latter of whom had started up a makeshift whorehouse in the Urias Hotel on Main Street. One of her earliest working-girl recruits was the sad, abandoned Ewart Smith.

  If any of these folks from the past got in Trenchmouth’s line of sight, he changed direction. He drank alone in his hideout. The teenage years had made him morose, and as the paper told of the war’s end, another one, closer to home, began to brew. It was an odd time, and the paper told of that too. Its pages were marked by public notices of application for pistol license. Trenchmouth wasn’t the only one itchy.

  The Daily Mail told of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, a German who’d invented the gas of the dead, an asphyxiating yellow-green nightmare. Ethics, it seemed, were out the window. The power of invention mattered most. And in the face of power, good working people found themselves capable of enlisting the basest of their instincts.

  The men were already mumbling and organizing, already listening to Mr John L. Lewis and his thundering pronouncements, when the headquarters of Superior-Thacker blew up. The coal company’s main building exploded to ring in the new year of 1920, and for a two mile stretch, folks’ windowpanes and storefronts paid the price in shatter. As usual, the company took no onus.

  Coal trucks rumbled everywhere, rough shot across crooked streets, cracking them up like iced-over streams, and still no culpability was claimed. North of Matewan, in Kermit, Gray Eagle Coal Company labeled those public roads private and lined them with gun-strapped, shadowy men to back their claim.

  All of this was talked over between miners. All of it silently ingested and turned to burning rage. The rage w
as powerful enough that it made unlikely comrades out of otherwise separate and supposedly unequal men. Black and white men who would normally never set foot in one another’s homes. Men like Arly Scott Sr and Bill Blizzard spoke on the situation over coffee and sometimes whiskey, early in the morning and late at night. And, increasingly so, they talked about it in front of the wife, the kids. They had more time to do so, having been fired on the spot for wearing their District 17 Union credentials after an organizing drive moved through the hills like salvation.

  This was how Trenchmouth came to know firsthand that the union, like the railroad before it, had come fast and hard. And with it came his day to make a name for himself.

  It came on a Sunday afternoon. At the Scotts’, Trenchmouth and Arly were sparring with a couple pairs of Arly Sr’s beat up old gloves. Arly Sr encouraged daily sparring, along with jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups. Such a regimen had paid off for Arly Jr, who was undefeated in four amateur fights. Quiet and wise for his years, he looked to be going places.

  In the kitchen, the boys heard Bill Blizzard stand up and say, ‘It’s high time we did something other than talk, by God.’ Trenchmouth stopped slipping punches to look in that direction and caught a straight right from his friend. He ended up on his tailbone, a little sore in the nose but listening. Arly did the same. Arly Sr looked over at them briefly. The two boys read in his eyes the command to go on about their business. They started in on their push-ups, to be followed by sit-ups.

  ‘Sid will back us,’ a friendly man named Ed Chambers said. The Sid they spoke on was Sid Hatfield, Matewan’s pistol-packing chief of police, newly appointed by Mayor Testerman and friend to miner’s troubles. Hatfield was a rough man, young and with eyes that cut like a shiv. He had ridden those cars into their deep holes at one time, right alongside the others, and he knew how the company regarded their laborers, how they dealt bad hands. He could toss up a spud and air it out with his sidearm, and he’d used that same weapon to kill a mine foreman five years prior during a scuffle. Self-defense is what he’d called it. So had the courts.