The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  ‘These Baldwin-Felts boys has gotten too big for their britches,’ Blizzard said, and he set his glass on the table hard, so that it nearly shattered. The Baldwin-Felts men were detectives hired by mine operators as little more than glorified thugs, a foreman’s armed big brother. They stood behind and in front of company whims, and like the companies, they had little care that four-hundred men had died in the past year down those holes, unlucky inheritors of explosion and cave-in.

  ‘What we’ve got to do is get to these scab trains before they reach town,’ Arly Sr said. The mine operators had taken to bringing in hordes of men to work for those who no longer would or could. The week before, Little Arly and Trenchmouth had thrown rocks at one such load of men, and Trenchmouth, for the fun of it, had even lined up a shot on one scab, his Winchester empty of ammo, his finger off the trigger.

  Walking toward the men in the kitchen that day, having just been hit in the face and wearing his outlaw scowl, Trenchmouth chose to reveal this. ‘I had one of em in my sights last week,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to shoot him, a’course. But I sure could nick him if I wanted.’

  They all went quiet, and both Arlys shook their heads, as they often did when the strange white boy spoke. But everybody knew Trenchmouth’s skills as a marksman, and a skinny miner said, ‘That ain’t a bad idea now. Shootin to hobble but not to kill.’ The men looked confused. The skinny miner clarified. ‘Not the scabs, mind you, but them thugs who pistol-whipped little Jerry last week. They could have a leg shot comin.’

  They almost laughed at the idea then. Almost brushed it away and moved on. But the memory of that unlucky miner’s face emerged in all their minds simultaneously. The purple, cracked impressions the gun butt had left. And the loss of their livelihoods was omnipresent, along with loss of scrip at the company store, and the threat of losing their homes, also company-owned. All this stirred into the base instincts that had risen to the surface, and the result was the inclusion of the two seventeen-year-olds to the circle. One of them suspected he was about to get used yet again, but he didn’t care, because this time he’d have a gun in his hand. All he had to do was shut one eye and bend a finger.

  The boy who had once fashioned miniature coal tipples from scrap metal now found himself toppling giant ones with dynamite. He and Arly Sr and Arly Jr and the others laid the explosives down by night, and by day there was nothing left but black holes where coal was to be loaded. They dynamited the tipple at Red Jacket and the one at Tomahawk too.

  Scab workers were run off from reopened mines by way of rifle fire. It was just scare tactics, never more, until the day somebody fired back.

  Trenchmouth was on strikebreaker duty in McDowell County, along with Arly Jr and a young miner named Kump. Kump was only there because he’d inherited an automobile and could provide transport. They laid on their stomachs behind a downed maple tree and ate bologna sandwiches. When the time came, they lit up the slow, single-file line of scabs with the unmistakable echo of the high-powered rifle report. They strafed the mine’s entrance, careful not to hit anyone. But the mine operators had sent along some Baldwin-Felts boys that day, and they located the source of echoes, raised their own small arms up to return what they were getting.

  The first round to come close caught the young men’s attention. It kicked tree bark into the open mouth of Arly Jr, who promptly hit the deck. The next one caught the young miner Kump in the jaw and tore open his face. His blood had been tapped, and it issued down his pale white neck in wide red lengths, gathering in his shirt collar until the fabric could hold no more. Kump went broadside crimson then, and he fell forward, alive but silent as the dead.

  Trenchmouth had not seen such ugliness envelop a man before, only deer and bear. Even then, there was never such contrast of skin and blood, such streaming horror to behold. But he quickly turned away from the sight of it, and lined his true sights on the Baldwin-Felts detectives. Two of them. Three rounds left in the magazine. First, the tall one in the bowler hat. One shot, shin bone. No doubt shattered. The man was one moment upright and aiming, the next crippled, in the time it took Trenchmouth to close that eye and squeeze that finger he’d closed and squeezed so many thousands of times before. Without thought, he shifted his position leftward, and the squat detective sat in the notch of his barrel. This time it was the thigh, a meaty target, and the man buckled as his friend had before him. They’d both dropped their guns and lost their hats. There was something pathetic in the way a man moved when he’d taken a bullet.

  One round left in the magazine. Trenchmouth back-and-forthed the detectives, sighted one hobbled man then the other as they attempted to pull themselves to cover. Trenchmouth lined up their heads, so perfectly round and slicked, sunlight striping the hair tonic and the sweat beads gathered in mustaches. It was always like this when he hunted. Magnified. Microscopic.

  He sighted their breast pockets, shoulder seams, hearts, gut, and kneecaps. Then the lifeblood of all men – the recess between their legs. But he did not fire. Trenchmouth may have been many things, but murderer was not one of them.

  The ‘Oh Lords’ emanating from Arly forced a change in focus. Trenchmouth dropped behind the log and looked. ‘Oh Lord Jesus,’ Arly said again and again with the raw desperation of a funeral goer. His hands hovered over the downed man, but they knew not what to do.

  Trenchmouth shouldered his rifle and crouched beside his friend. Together, they stripped themselves of their coats, cut lengths of wool using Arly’s pocketknife. They wrapped and re-wrapped the lower face of the young man they knew by last name only. Steam came off his wound and disappeared in the chill March air, indistinguishable from their own breath.

  When the blood slowed, they hoisted him and ran. Arly clutched wrists, Trenchmouth ankles. They footed through the woods to Kump’s awaiting automobile, a semi-reliable 1914 Model T Touring Type.

  Arly at the wheel, they picked up downhill speed just about the time the mine guards reached the road on foot, out of range as soon as they raised their rifles. But, as was always the case in southern West Virginia, when one hill ended, another began. The mine guards stood winded with their hands on their knees and watched the automobile move out of sight. But before it did, the Model T sputtered as it climbed. Kump quickly spoke through the blood threatening to choke him. ‘Gas tank,’ he said. ‘Gravity feed.’

  ‘What?’ Arly hollered.

  Trenchmouth had heard something about it. The tank was under the seat, and on a steep enough incline, no gas could get to the motor unless the vehicle faced downhill. As he spoke on this to Arly and they got the car turned around, one of the mine guards noticed the trouble, and, along with the others, got to moving again. By the time the car was in position and climbing in reverse, with great difficulty, up the incline, the men were within range again. Bullets zipped past the windshield every three or four seconds. One lodged in the grill with a heavy sound. Arly got the trap moving enough so that at the top of the hill, turned around yet again, they were able to put distance between themselves and their pursuers.

  They’d cheated death, gotten free, then cheated it again when automotive invention nearly failed them. They’d almost perished in a hail of bullets inside the contraption, rolling backwards up a hill. It was comical. When it seemed okay to do so, Trenchmouth started to laugh. He open-mouthed whooped it up there in the fast-moving Model T, and so did Arly Jr, who’d only ever piloted a car once, on flat land. The wind carried their calls to the spaces they left behind, so that they almost forgot a man lay in the backseat, bleeding near to death.

  Knocks at the hideout door had always and only come from two folks. In the old days, it was Ewart. More recent, Arly Jr. But on a mid-March morning, sunlight streaming through the groundcover and the cracks in the trapdoor, an unfamiliar rap sounded. Trenchmouth had been on edge since the shooting in McDowell, and though he wasn’t sure whether or not the Widow had officially kicked him out, he’d taken to sleeping most nights at the hideout, winter having died off. He�
��d spent a small portion of his savings on a revolver, a beat up Colt Cop & Thug .38, and he trained it on the trap door from where he lay under the heavy hide of his prized bear.

  Above him, a voice said, ‘I heard you pull back that hammer, son. Why don’t you ease it down now. I got my hands on two of em, and I reckon you know as well as any that two is better’n one.’ He’d left little doubt to his identity, and Trenchmouth did as he was told. ‘Your weapon put up?’ the voice said.

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Good boy. Now open sesame.’

  Again, he did as he was told, pulling the chain and squinting up at the thin silhouette above. Two Gun Sid lived up to his name even before he’d acquired the moniker, which would come later. On that morning, he holstered his sidearms and slid down inside the five by seven foot room. He pulled the door shut. ‘Whew,’ he said. ‘Stinks in here. Like assholes and oregano.’

  Trenchmouth had met Sid Hatfield before, in passing. But in his close-quartered presence, he’d lost the ability to talk, much less laugh at the unique phrasings of a lawman.

  Hatfield wore a three piece suit. His shirt collar was high and wide like his cheekbones, and those eyelids weighted down way past his years. He sensed the younger man’s hesitation and got down to it. ‘I hear you had some troubles in McDowell,’ he said.

  For a moment, Trenchmouth considered that the sheriff was there to uphold the law, that the stories of Sid’s involvement with the miners were exaggerated, that maybe he should pick up his Colt from where it lay beside him before he was handcuffed and led to a cage. But he sat stone still.

  ‘What you got to understand is two words,’ Hatfield went on. ‘Two words that I’ve said over and over and will keep on sayin over and over until my bones is roadway for moles and beetles.’ He looked at Trenchmouth with something like respect, something like savagery. ‘Self-defense,’ he said. ‘Two words. As long as another man has picked up a gun and used it to try and end your life, you got no cause for worry in ending his. End of story.’ Trenchmouth hadn’t ended anyone’s life, but Sid had come to reassure the boy just the same. Ease his mind. Still, he’d come for more than that. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said, standing from his crouch to re-open the hatch. ‘I’ll let you put on your britches. And if I was you, I’d think on where to move this here hideout while you do.’ He lifted himself into the light and shuffled to a nearby tree. He leaned on it and looked up, directly into the sun.

  Sid Hatfield had known that morning that the sun wasn’t long to stay, and he was right. By ten a.m., the sky spoke somehow of dusk, and a cold front was coming, quick. The wind and the purple-gray character of the air would have warned other folks of a tornado, but not here. Here, there were hills to knock down such foolishness from mother nature.

  They’d driven through it, Trenchmouth and Sid, hoping the rain wouldn’t hit. Neither spoke as they rode. After a while, Sid pulled Mayor Testerman’s Ford Phaeton right into the Lick Creek tent colony. Trenchmouth had seen it before, at the start of winter, but now it was crowded, overflowing with evicted miners and their families. The price of striking was coming in higher, and this was more evident at Lick Creek than anywhere else. It took him a minute to even get out of the car. ‘Well. C’mon boy,’ Hatfield said, already walking into it all.

  Trenchmouth followed. The makeshift streets of the place were mostly quiet. Everybody huddled around small fires in front of their tents, or slept against each other inside them. He had to step around a dog laid out on its side. It was bug-bitten all over, pus and skin and little hair from ears to tail and back. It could have been dead. It could have been sleeping.

  A child ran from a tent on the eastern side of the camp. He couldn’t have been older than three. His mother hollered after him in Italian, no doubt decrying the fact that he wore no shoes. Everywhere was coughing, the kind that hurts just to hear, and everywhere was wretchedness, wet dirt trampled rotten and paper tumbling on end.

  Sid Hatfield walked over to a black family, whose matriarch cooked pinto beans over cinders kept hot by rocks the size of baseballs. ‘Mrs Belcher,’ he said to her and nodded.

  ‘Benjamin,’ she hollered at the heavy canvas tent behind her. A black man came out followed by another one. The first was unfamiliar to Trenchmouth, but the second was Arly Scott Sr. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care that Trenchmouth was standing behind the chief of police.

  ‘Sid,’ Arly Sr said, and he held out his hand. They shook. The man named Benjamin looked at his boots, knocked off dried mud.

  ‘You seen the New York fella around?’ Sid asked.

  ‘Spoke with him this morning. He’s around,’ Arly Sr said.

  ‘Good.’ The lawman looked all about, as if for enemies. ‘Arly, you know young T.,’ he said. It was strange to hear the single initial used this way. No affectation, no meanness.

  Arly Sr nodded at Trenchmouth and frowned. ‘You supposed to be out of eyeshot for a little while, isn’t that right?’

  ‘He’s broken no law,’ Sid said.

  ‘This here’s Benjamin Belcher, my nephew from Chicopee, Georgia. He come up October last year for the mines.’

  Benjamin Belcher had already made Hatfield’s acquaintance, but he stepped forward and shook Trenchmouth’s hand, still looking at his boots or the ground around them. Under his breath, he said, ‘October and already I got no work to speak of.’

  Arly Sr spoke sharply to his nephew then, ‘Union takes care of you, don’t it? That ain’t paper money you was counting in there? Ten bills a week, doctor for your boy’s condition.’ There was some anger there, between kin. Living like dogs will do it to you.

  Anger. It was in the eyes of Benjamin Belcher and his wife and the boy poking his misshapen head from the tent’s folds. They resented Arly Sr, that he’d built his own house, had known never to live on company-owned property. That he’d risen in the ranks of the union and begun fraternizing with white folks. To them, there was nothing but trouble in this, and the strange hill people around them made it all harder to bear.

  Sid eyed the men, then spat on the ground beside him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d better find this newspaperman and set him straight.’

  ‘I already got him together with Bill Blizzard,’ Arly Sr said. ‘He got an earful on the type of people we got livin here.’ The type was hard. Proud. Stubborn.

  Sid and Trenchmouth walked away from the Georgia family’s tent. As they did, Benjamin sat down on a log and played his harmonica. Trenchmouth turned to watch. It was the most beautiful sound he could remember hearing. He thought of his own, unused mouth harp. The instrument his Daddy had played. He studied the way Benjamin the southerner cupped the little thing with his hand, opening and closing it to let that sorrow out. It was the blues, the sound of a people bent but not broken, and Trenchmouth memorized it.

  They found the reporter from the New York Times crouched by a makeshift trash pile. He was talking to a girl no older than six or seven. ‘Oil cloth,’ she was saying, in response to his question as to what she slept on inside the tent. ‘But Daddy don’t have nothing but the ground, and it’s real hard.’

  The newspaperman wrote with furious speed. Trenchmouth and Sid stood behind him, waiting for the interview to cease. The man was unaware of their presence. ‘Brothers and sisters?’ the man inquired.

  ‘Two,’ she said and stopped short for a moment. ‘Three almost. Stillborn in February.’ She spoke those three words like she’d heard the older folks around her speak them so many times in the days since. Like name and rank, crops and weather. Her lips were cracked on top and bottom both. The cold had gotten in. She licked them and pulled at the dried-up skin with her teeth, dead-eyed to the man in the gray suit and spit-shined shoes.

  Sid Hatfield cleared his throat. The reporter turned and stood up. In his eyes was the look of someone unfinished, someone wanting more misery to make into type so people with heat could sigh and shake their heads. Men like Hatfield and Arly Sr welcomed men like Mr Bern, the esteemed
journalist. They even set up interviews and meeting times and gave advice on transportation to such city types. All of it brought attention to their people, and attention brought change, hopefully for the better. But, while they extended courtesies, they did so with a quiet air of shame and mistrust. A knowledge that Mr Bern and his colleagues would never get it right because they could never get it right.

  Trenchmouth watched the girl walk away. She stopped and turned back to them again and again, waiting on something to happen. Then she made her way to the tent where her mother lay prone on a thrown out piece of rug, infected with a disease unnameable to a doctor of medicine.

  Sid motioned to Trenchmouth. ‘Mr Bern, I’d like you to meet Ben Chicopee, local newspaperman.’ He’d made up the name on the spot from a combination of another man and the place he came from. Trenchmouth was confused, but he trusted the skinny lawman who’d found his hideout. He shook Mr Bern’s hand.

  ‘Who do you write for?’ Mr Bern asked. His eyebrows had been recently trimmed, a grooming practice reserved for women, Trenchmouth thought.

  ‘Why didn’t you give that girl a nickel for her trouble?’ Trenchmouth said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Mr Bern angled his eyes for a closer look at the gums and teeth.

  ‘The girl. She looked back at you five times, waiting on a little something without wantin to outright ask for it. Why didn’t you slip her two bits at least?’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of tipping young girls for their—’

  ‘And I’m not in the habit of trimming hair what don’t need it, but I know a hungry child when I see one.’

  Sid Hatfield laughed out loud. He sidestepped so that he could clap both men on their backs. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘That’s just alright how you word types have at it, but let’s get to it, what say?’ He smiled again at Trenchmouth before he handed Mr Bern a list of infractions upon the rights of good working people by those that sought to control them.