The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  The plan was to be in and out of Dr Warble’s chair by ten a.m., gold-toothed and swollen and costumed. Moonshine and mouthrinse replenished. He’d be able to watch Sid Hatfield go into court from the cover of the inevitable crowds. Watching wouldn’t do much for Sid, Trenchmouth reckoned, but he felt it was right somehow. Not that he owed Sid or anybody else, but he’d feel better being there. It wasn’t right to let it all go just yet.

  Dr Warble was standing in the dark street at four. The two of them went in the back door to his office without a word. They only nodded. Inside, Trenchmouth took a seat in the chair. He took out a small wad of all that money he’d saved from the hideout ladies, but Dr Warble shook his head. ‘It’s not necessary,’ he said. ‘Your mother has been good to me. I owe her right plenty. But I do have something for you.’ He pulled four jars of moonshine and one of mouthrinse from the top shelf of a locked cabinet. He did not say another word about the Widow, just smiled as he set them down next to Trenchmouth’s pack.

  It was dark in there save one glaring light in the center of the room, just above the chair. It stunk of medicinals, burned the nostrils to breathe. Dr Warble was readying things. ‘I’m going to give you some nitrous oxide through this mask,’ he said. Then, pointing to another one, he said, ‘and through this one, I’ll drop something called diethyl ether.’ It was a gauze contraption that would fit over Trenchmouth’s face. ‘I can drop as much or as little as I need to keep you asleep and not feeling a thing. Understand?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Trenchmouth said.

  ‘Good.’

  Sid Hatfield had two gold teeth. Trenchmouth would be getting eight. Four top, four bottom. The molars would stay as is, but folks couldn’t see those. No one would ever have to look at his old teeth again.

  The gas came, and Trenchmouth went.

  In his dream, everything was tomato red. He stood in the hollow by his boyhood home, by the outhouse. By Beechnut the mule and the well. All of it was clear but hazed over somehow, smeared the color of iodine. He looked around him at the mountains. They shook at the tops almost unnoticeably. Quick shivers, like a man in a seizure that passes fast. But the quiver in these mountains wasn’t passing. It kept up, became accompanied by a howl. It was high-pitched and wobbly, like a woman wailing, a whistle electrified. Then, as he watched through the red glow, the mountains came down. They crumbled as nothing he’d ever seen, as if someone had pulled the ground out from under them and they had no other recourse but to fold in on themselves. It was horrifying. The mountains were no more. And then it was over.

  When he woke up, his cheeks were stuffed with bloody gauze and Dr Warble was nowhere to be found. He felt for his pocket watch. His head was hard to lift and his face felt like it was no longer there. It was past noon.

  Trenchmouth stood and fell back down against the chair. It was quiet and the window blinds told him it was overcast outside. He picked up his moonshine-loaded backpack, breathed in deep and stood again, stumbled to the door.

  Coming out of the alley, he saw the police, state and otherwise, congregating around the courthouse steps. He stepped back into the alley and heard the footfalls of a man approaching. Trenchmouth put his hand on the derringer flask tucked into his belt and turned to face the man. It was Mr Bern, the New York Times reporter. He was dressed in a gray suit and fedora hat. His pants were cut too long.

  ‘Hey fella,’ he said. ‘You don’t look so good.’ Bern did not recognize the man he knew as reporter Ben Chicopee.

  Trenchmouth managed to say, ‘What happened?’ through the gauze and swelling.

  ‘You mean at the courthouse? What’d you just walk out the forest, friend?’

  Mr Bern got a stare that seemed familiar to him, frightened him, and impelled him to answer all at once. He frowned and said, ‘Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were shot down going up the steps to trial. Five, maybe eight bullets apiece by all counts. Right in front of the Mrs Missuses? How do you write that plural?’ For him, the world was words. He took a pencil from behind his ear and a pad from his jacket pocket. He never got to writing. Trenchmouth knocked both from his grip and kicked the man in the groin. He didn’t wait to see him drop and moan, just peered around the brick building again to look at the courthouse. At what he couldn’t approach, what he’d missed altogether.

  He wondered for a moment if this was real or if he was still in Warble’s chair. Inside his dream where everything buckled and howled and rocked to the ground. But the only thing buckled here was Mr Bern, and Trenchmouth walked slowly over to him, knelt down and lifted the man’s wallet, complete with press credentials. He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed right.

  Then he moved on past Bern toward the edge of town, his face beginning to throb, the four fresh jars of mountain magic beginning to call to him like they hadn’t since the dark days of the previous May. He stopped. In his ether stupor, he’d not asked Mr Bern the question now echoing in his mind: who pulled the trigger? But he stood there only a moment or so before walking on. It was a question whose answer required more shooting. More killing and running and hiding, without end. He’d not ask it. He’d not do anything but walk away.

  Sid Hatfield was dead and gone, and the Trenchmouth who came back from Welch that day was not the one who left. He drank. Hard. He was unable to speak to or look at the woman who’d lost his unborn child. He considered the last two years of his life, let himself think too much on what he’d done. They were thoughts so powerful that even the moonshine couldn’t keep them at bay. When a man has killed another, one way or the other, he has to think on what he’s done. And when he does, when he really thinks about taking away a life that could have been lived, he’ll break. And that’s what Trenchmouth did.

  He left Ewart in the middle of the night. There was a note that said he was sorry. Some money. Enough food to hold her a little while.

  This time he went deep enough that no one would find him. He walked straight into the hills of Mercer County, bordering the Blue Ridge. These were big hills. Big enough so that when a man let himself be swallowed by them, he couldn’t walk a few miles for a newspaper or some dried goods. He couldn’t know what would come to be in his absence down below.

  He couldn’t know that his woman, on her way to her grandmother’s in Tennessee, only made it as far as Keystone, McDowell County. Keystone was a street of taverns. Whorehouse row. Come one, come all, they said, and men listened. A writer from neighboring Virginia wrote of the place. The Sodom and Gomorrah of Today he called it. Ewart said she’d stay a couple nights. Then a week. Then six months.

  Trenchmouth couldn’t know that Arly Jr had his day in court. That he received a sentence of life imprisonment in the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville. Guilty, they called the young boxer who’d hoped to be a middleweight contender. Guilty of the murder of Anse Pilcher. Trenchmouth’s last trigger squeeze through the Urias Hotel window had ruined the life of his only friend.

  He couldn’t know that Charles Lively, the Baldwin-Felts spy who’d posed as a union-friendly Matewan restaurant owner, had been the one who pulled the trigger in Welch and then planted guns on Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers. Self-defense is what Lively had called it. So had the courts.

  Trenchmouth couldn’t know that two thousand people lined the streets of Matewan for Sid Hatfield’s funeral procession. They walked, some shouting sorrow, across the Tug on a bridge that swayed under their masses. Workers put down their shovels and picks and hammers for an hour of the working day, state-wide. The New York Times gave the funeral front page.

  It all added up to more striking and more bloodshed. And, finally, it built to the amassing of ten thousand armed men, miners and otherwise, from all over the state. They rode in on outlaw trains and walked ridges on foot. They would meet their enemy at Blair Mountain, in Logan County, and it would be a war to end all wars. Bill Blizzard fired them up, and few failed to march. The infantry was brought in to hold them back, as was a squadron of army planes, dispatched from Langley. Men were to be raine
d upon by the airborne machine guns and gas bombs of their own nation’s military. But it did not come to pass. Instead, President Harding dropped from his planes an order to lay down arms. The order was followed by the miners, but only after they’d seen more die, covered and carried to the awaiting train cars.

  There were those who wished the rotten-toothed teenager with the dead-eye aim had been among them in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Or that he’d been at Sid Hatfield’s side on the Welch Courthouse steps. ‘He’d have dropped em all,’ some said. But mostly that boy was forgotten in the sorrows of those years. His mother, the Widow Dorsett, did not forget. She thought of him while she tended her still, dreamed of him when she slept. Clarissa did not forget. She thought of him as she bore Fred Dallara a second child and cooked and cleaned and changed diapers and stopped talking a streak like she used to. Nor did her husband forget the boy who had once attacked him like an animal. Fred Dallara was a suit, an executive with the White Star Coal Company. Two of his fellow suits, Mose and Warren Crews, spoke daily to him on their belief that Trenchmouth Taggart was somewhere close-by, maybe on high with his cheek to a rifle. They called him a murderer. They said he’d show himself someday, that they’d get him if it took five years, and they asked folks questions, watched them close. Like Hob Tibbs, these men came to spend their days and nights back-looking over shoulders and sniffing the air like dogs. It was the only way to be ready for Trenchmouth Taggart.

  They didn’t know that the wilderness had taken him.

  BOOK TWO

  1946-1961

  The blues is our antidote, and Long Tongue, The Blues Merchant, is our doctor.

  —Jerome Washington

  SIXTEEN

  It was Regimented Living

  The jack-in-the-pulpit had yet to fully flower. Its middle, a straight column through a leafy tunnel, gave the small plant the look of a butter churn. A gnat landed on the leaf’s hooded arc and went still. The wind swayed the flower, and the gnat stayed put, until, for reasons unknown, it flew down into the striped column and waited there, trapped and dying slowly.

  The canopy above was thick, not unusual for May. Fifty foot trees gave shade and relief from the sun. Below, a box turtle with a reddish head stepped deliberate past the jack-in-the-pulpit, paying the flower’s capture no mind. The turtle’s shell was smooth as a bowling ball, evidencing its antiquity. Behind the turtle, the ridge fell off into a short but steep slope, and at the bottom of the slope lay a grass bald. It was small, the size of a football field, halved. At the far end of it, a man hung a door on his newly constructed outhouse. He held nails in his teeth and his hands said he’d wielded a hammer plenty.

  The man’s name was Clarence Dickason, originally from Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He was a fifty-two year old with skin as black as his grandmother’s, a woman born into Virginia slavery. Like her, he sang while he worked. He’d been doing a good deal of it in recent weeks, raising a small house before he framed the two-seater latrine quarters. On this May evening, he was expecting his wife and children to join him from down the mountain, in Bluefield, after some time of living apart. He put his hammer in a toolbox sitting atop a rough-cut sawhorse. Through the nails still in his teeth, he sang, ‘Well, lovers is you right? Oh, yes we right. Bluefield women read and write, Keystone women bite and fight, carry to the mountain boys, carry to the mountain.’

  Clarence Dickason was sharp-eyed still, despite his years of hard-living. But he did not detect the man above him, flat-bellied on the ridge’s edge. The figure was thin and long. He wore nothing on his callused feet. The man’s beard mixed with ground cover as if he had grown into it. Had he been standing upright, the beard would reach his belly. His hair was to his shoulders. Matted. The wrinkles surrounding his eyes were many and deep. Like those on his forehead, they recessed and housed the kind of dirt that cannot be washed away.

  As the sun dropped behind the poplar trees circling the bald, it shone on the mountain man’s face. Lit him up. He squinted, the only movement he’d made in an hour’s time, and as he breathed in the evening air through his mouth, the sunlight reflected momentarily off the gold inside.

  The thatched hut was on a mountain stairstep. It was the lee side of a steep ridge, three-thousand feet in the air. Weather tended to move west to east, and this kept the whole place relatively free from the worst storms could offer. The hut’s doorway faced southeast to let in morning sun. It didn’t take long to heat. There was enough room to stand or lie down inside, little else. Insulation was thick, half a foot of leaves, ferns, and mosses packed and mortar-solid. A bedding of cattail and grass took up most of the floor, while the pointed ceiling housed a storage space. In it was a rolled-up thatched blanket for winter, alongside a rotting backpack full of a man’s tools for sustenance. A door plug constructed of bark slabs leaned against a wall.

  The fire pit was six paces from the door, the mountain stream fifty.

  Between them, feet braced under a thick, hillside root, the mountain man counted out his sit-ups. ‘Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven.’ He’d taken to inclined sit-ups when flat became too easy. Each morning he completed a hundred. Then the same for push-ups. Then jumping jacks. Best he could figure, he averaged seven miles daily of running in temperate months, all on incline, all barefoot until the cold came.

  His clothes were sewn-together pieces of former clothes. He’d strung belts of vine and leather. On the belts were loops for carrying knives of both the steel-forged and bone variety. Pouches held greenbrier berries and ginseng tubers and ramps, the latter of which he ate five a day, most times raw, for he was convinced of their power to keep him young. His pores sweated their stink. The man ate grasshoppers and slugs and katydids.

  When he hit one hundred, he sat, his feet still wedged under tree root. ‘Please don’t be fearful,’ he said aloud. ‘I make my home in these parts. My name is Chicopee.’ He’d forgotten some things and remembered others, like the fake name he’d once heard. ‘My name is Chicopee,’ he said again. He was rehearsing speech for a time when he might introduce himself to the new neighbors down the mountain, the first human beings he’d set eyes on in twenty-four years.

  ‘Chicopee,’ he said again. Then he pulled his feet from under the root, somersaulted backwards down the hill twice, sprung himself upright and began to run. His skin was tough, a tanned hide with muscles rolling and clenching underneath, hard as the bones they rode. While he ran, he sang, ‘Bluefield women read and write, Keystone women bite and fight, carry to the mountain boys, carry to the mountain.’

  The dug-up dead man’s harmonica had not touched lips since 1902. Chicopee had stared at the small instrument by firelight for the first two years on the mountain. But he’d never put it to his mouth in those early days. He’d read its intricate engraving aloud. Marine Band. M. Hohner. No. 1896. Tarnished brass on pearwood, a beautiful little mouth harp. It was only when he’d started having conversations aloud with himself that he played it. ‘You got gold teeth now, Chicopee,’ he’d said on a cold October night in 1925. ‘Can’t no infections bust through solid gold.’ And so he’d started playing. In a year, he cupped that harmonica to his face as if it was another extension of his hand. As if, like his teeth, it was made from the earth’s most valued currency. His tongue hit those ten holes serpent-quick. He blew hard and soft and medium, shook twenty reeds side to side until they howled and moaned almost to breaking. It became his four inch path to salvation, to avoiding hysteria nightly.

  Now he only played on occasion. When something threatened the peace he’d finally come to. A brewing storm. Two or more days of rain. Neighbors.

  He played every song he’d ever heard, in one version or another. Most oft-played were two songs. ‘Down by the Ohio,’ was one. Though he couldn’t know it through the confusion that stirred his brain, he played this song because a woman walked the earth, one who’d kissed him and sang in his ear. One named Clarissa. The other tune was ‘I Won’t Stop Praying,’ and again, though he couldn’t place i
ts origin any longer, it somehow told him that a friend might still live and breathe. A friend with a mama who sang for the sins of all men. A friend named Arly Jr.

  As May turned to June, Chicopee blew a new tune. He’d heard his new neighbor sing it, a song about women and places he’d not thought of in years. Places like Bluefield and Keystone, Mercer and McDowell. Coalfield towns like the one he came from. Railroad towns. He’d heard a human voice other than his own down in that grass bald, and it got him to thinking. Out there all those years, until he’d heard the song of Clarence Dickason, until he’d seen the man building an outhouse, he’d almost come to accept that he’d made all of it up. That all those blurry memories of a rotten-toothed childhood were the mind tricks of a man who’d lived always and only among trees and turtles and deer and mud, a man touched in the head. None of that other had ever existed, save in dreams. People and coal tipples and trains and sling-shots and rifle sights and mules and outhouses and the nether-regions of women and snakes and tongue-talkers and Model T Fords. These were made up things.

  But here was a harmonica. And here was a flask with a gun inside. And here was a memory of a woman named Widow, saying, ‘Keep this here flask on you. It’s a magical flask. A never-ending flask. As much as you sip its shine, it will refill and keep you in peace.’ And he had sipped. And it had refilled, like magic. Its contents kept him going. And on its silver surface, and on the bark-stripped sides of a shagbark hickory tree when flask space was used up, he’d notched the days and weeks and months and years since coming here to the mountaintop. Those notches totaled 9,069 days. 1,295 weeks. 298 months. After a while, he forgot what they stood for, those little etches. His pen knife dulled and the tip broke off from etching time’s passage. So, he began to sharpen the little pecker bones he cut from raccoons he’d tracked and trapped. Their hides made winter hats, their ribs wind-chimes. And their rock-sharpened peckers, the etchers of time.