The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Tonight, he etched another line on the tree next to his fire. It was June 1st, 1946. He looked up at all the little notches. The fire made the time-marks wobble and dance. ‘Please don’t be fearful,’ the mountain man said aloud to the tree. ‘My name is Chicopee.’

  Then, as he sometimes did, he got out the derringer flask. He practiced, again and again, the fluid, complicated motions of retrieving the gun inside. The trip latch was greased with milkweed oil. He could draw the hidden weapon in four seconds.

  That night, he checked his supply of .22 shells. Still two boxes. He loaded the gun and did what he needed to stay sharp-eyed.

  The acorn didn’t have a chance. Even at night, even thrown twenty feet into the air, he could line up his shot and put a hole through it. Magnified. Microscopic.

  SEVENTEEN

  They Would Stare

  By mid-June, it was hot enough to wash in the mountain stream. Chicopee stripped naked, shoved an acorn up each nosehole, and laid down in the clear, moving water. He held a tree root in his fist to keep himself steady against the current. His feet pointed upstream, his head down, so that his beard washed back over his face. He raked through it with the fingers of his free hand. When he stood up afterwards, he wrung out his hair and beard. Then he did a little drip-dry dance, still naked, to help along the sun streaks hitting him through tree cover.

  In the storage space of the upper hut, he dug out a pair of slacks and a shirt that had remained intact. The shirt was a yellowed white and the slacks were black. Tucked in, bearded, and barefoot, he looked like an actor in a stage play, a caricature of the Hatfields and McCoys.

  He put the harmonica in his shirtfront pocket, the derringer flask in his pants.

  He started down the mountain with the aid of a walking stick, one he’d cut and carved himself. It was twisted sassafras, stripped and dried. Head high, the staff allowed him to maneuver on the most drastic of inclines. Over the years, he’d speared fourteen copperheads with its sharpened end.

  Chicopee approached the ridge drop-off where he’d first watched Clarence Dickason a month prior. This time, for fear of messing his clothes, he did not lie down on his belly. He raised and lowered his bare feet methodically, careful not to stir sound. From behind a hickory tree, he watched the bald below. There was movement inside the little clapboard house. It reminded him of one he’d once known.

  A white woman walked out the front door to shake a rug. She was younger than the black man who’d built the outhouse. Maybe by ten or twenty years. Her hair was yellow in streaks, brown in others, pulled back and held by a lash so that her neck showed thin and curved. The sun held above. Half the homestead caught its light, half lay in shadow. It was approaching six o’clock. Suppertime. Chicopee could smell beans, fatback. Cornbread.

  A child ran from the opened doorway to the pretty woman shaking the rug. She paid the little boy no mind. He was waist-high on her, maybe four or five years old, and he was a handsome, sturdy boy. His hair was thick and black. His skin was darker than his mama’s. To Chicopee, he looked colored and white at the same time. And so he was, and so it became evident what was going on in the little house with the little outhouse next to it. He’d heard of it before, but never seen it up close. The words flooded his head. Other folks’ words: race mixing. Mongrel Virginians. The WIN tribe. Such words shook him and he looked down at his feet, the toenails he’d cut that afternoon with his Bowie knife. WIN tribe. It was another of the suddenly recalled confusions he’d been facing with more frequency since seeing Clarence Dickason and hearing his song. They were confusions of the dream world and the waking. Memory and past.

  He looked up again to see the woman and the boy returning to the house. Clarence Dickason brushed past them on his way out. He kissed the pretty woman and stepped out into the yard holding a sleeping baby in his arms.

  Chicopee looked at the small blanket, the small thing it held. He smiled. Then he took his first step from behind the tree, not so careful against rustling. He stepped foot over foot down the hillside toward the family who’d come here to get away from onlookers and those who would judge them and threaten their lives and stare. Always they would stare.

  When Clarence Dickason saw the bearded mountain figure stairstepping the hillside with a staff in hand, he took the baby back inside to his woman. He picked up his Winchester and walked out again to meet the man. When he got back to the yard, Chicopee was twenty yards off.

  ‘How can I help you?’ Dickason hollered. His rifle was at his side, pointed at the dirt.

  The mountain man stopped fifteen yards away. He laid down his walking stick so as not to appear threatening. He raised his left hand in a sort of hello gesture. Then he raised his right so that he appeared to be putting his hands over his head. A surrender. A target. A man up against the firing squad.

  Inside, the woman and the boy watched.

  ‘No need for all that,’ Dickason said. He stood his ground and watched Chicopee through squinted eyes that had seen what white men were capable of. He had faith and he had experience, and the two together left him with waiting, just waiting. Finally, Chicopee lowered his hands. Still ten feet off and stepping slow, he reached one of them outward, toward Dickason. It was a handshake offering, something he remembered offering thirty years earlier to another whose skin color made such gestures mean more. This time, as he reached and inched closer, he aimed to say the words he’d been rehearsing for a month. But all he could think of was his name, and even that clenched up and came out wrong when he opened his mouth. As he got within five feet, he managed, in a near whisper, to say, ‘Chicky.’

  ‘Well,’ Dickason answered. ‘Well, I suppose that’s your name? Chicky?’ He still hadn’t moved from his stance. Carefully, he swung the rifle behind his back into his left hand and reached out his right in greeting. They shook, then stepped back from one another a half pace. ‘Clarence Dickason,’ the older man said. He up-and-downed the beard and the matted hair, the skin like an animal’s somehow. The clothes so oddly hung on the man’s scrappy frame. He surmised things. He said, ‘I reckon you live out this way?’

  A nod to the affirmative.

  ‘Well, Mr Chicky, I’ve got me some small children here, a woman just done with carryin one of em, so I thank you very kindly for stoppin, but I can’t offer you supper just now.’ He knew a man such as this one might have more like himself waiting to come down the hill, waiting for a signal to come get whatever it was they were after. He knew that for some, just the sight of a black man and a white woman, their children somewhere in between…for some, this was enough to shed blood. ‘So, I’m pleased to meet you sir, and I thank you kindly for stoppin,’ Dickason said.

  Another nod, this time an exaggerated one to signal he got the picture. He opened his mouth to bid Mr Dickason goodbye, but again, the words choked off. So, Chicopee, or Mr Chicky, as the man had called him, turned and scurried back to the ridgeline. He picked up his walking stick on the move, used his leg and feet and toe muscles to scamper back up to where he’d come from.

  Dickason marveled at his movements, his speed. Then his woman came up behind him. ‘Clarence,’ she said, ‘don’t run him off on account of the way he looks.’ She yelled out, ‘Hey. Mr Chicky.’ He turned, crouched in mid-climb, nearly on all fours against the slope. His beard reached the uneven ground below. Seeing him like this, Rose Kozma reconsidered. But she was a born-again Christian, the daughter of Catholic Hungarian immigrants who had, in recent years, embraced the Pentecostal. She looked at the mountain man and waved him back to the house to join them for supper.

  They ate. The baby, a girl named Zizi, Hungarian for ‘dedicated to God,’ cried from the blessing to the clearing of plates. This was good and bad. It agitated the nerves, but it helped cover the fact that Chicopee, for the duration, did not speak a single word.

  Clarence stood in the makeshift kitchen, sinking plates into a washtub of water heated on the cook stove. He made sure not to keep his back turned on their guest. Rose stood from
the table. She was tired and the baby was hungry. ‘Doctor calls it colic, all this here fussin,’ she said over the child’s screams. ‘I’m going to nurse her in the bedroom, Clare,’ she hollered. Clarence nodded and scrubbed. Chicopee was left seated and alone with Albert, the boy. As he’d done all through supper, Albert stared at the mountain man’s mouth.

  ‘You got gold teeth?’ he asked.

  A nod yes.

  ‘How many?’

  With one hand Chicopee held up five fingers, the other, three. He watched the boy count them up.

  ‘Eight,’ he said.

  Another nod. Smart boy for four years. Behind him, on the wall, hung pictures Rose had painted. Ocean surfs crashing down on sand and seagulls flying high. Big, exaggerated flowers, so heavy they bent almost double. Yellow and red oil paints mixed into orange. These were thick, caked paintings. Chunky, some might call them. To a man who called wilderness home, they were beautiful.

  ‘Rose is the artist of the family,’ Clarence said. He’d walked back to the table, drying his hands on his trousers. He sat down and rolled a cigarette. Then another. ‘I was born with music in my bones, but Rose? She got that paint.’

  ‘How bout you open wide, show me all eight at once?’ Albert said.

  Clarence put the cigarette in his lips. ‘Hush Al,’ he said. Al sat on his knees and rocked, looked at his daddy and then back at their guest. Clarence handed Chicopee the second cigarette, struck a match and lit both. For the two men, the one who’d not had tobacco in twenty years most especially, that smoke went down like hot heaven. Chicopee coughed. ‘I lined track most my life,’ Clarence said. ‘Coal strike laid me off the N&W five years back. I been tryin to make a go with the music ever since. Got a band, but they ain’t no real money in it.’ Albert jumped off the bench and ran out the front door. His father paid no mind. There was still light out, the kind that fades imperceptibly, orange and calm like sleep. ‘Come up here on account of all that, and the other thing.’ He looked to the back bedroom, where Zizi had finished nursing and begun crying again. ‘Where you from?’

  Chicopee pulled hard on the cigarette. He breathed it out and looked down at the table, cut from oak. The Hohner sat heavy in his shirt pocket. ‘I brung this with me,’ he said, and pulled the harmonica out.

  Clarence almost smiled. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Alright now.’ He stood and struck another match, lit the two kerosene lamps mounted on wall brackets. Then he leaned his head toward the front door and whistled high and loud, a signal for Albert, whose footfalls soon sounded, followed by his panting. He remained out front, riding a rocking chair across the grass like a horse.

  The harmonica caught the flickering light of the lamps. Chicopee put it to his lips as Clarence sat back down, humming. Rose came out from the back with Zizi, who was all-out wailing again. Rose looked as if she might cry then, and the men, set to make noise resembling song, sat upright and looked at the mother and daughter. All were helpless to end the roaring. Chicopee listened and watched. His insides ached to help that little thing quiet. He stood and held out his arms. Rose looked at Clarence, who nodded no halfheartedly. Then Rose gave their guest her youngest child.

  Zizi nuzzled against all that hanging hair. Her screams became grunts. Her grunts became sighs.

  She slept.

  ‘Well I’ll be,’ Rose said.

  Chicopee looked down at the creases in the baby’s wrists, the way her fine hair grew outward from her temple into the eyebrow. He smiled full-on then, exposed his teeth in a way he never would have before.

  ‘Well I’ll be,’ Rose said again. ‘Chicky Gold. Chicky Gold the baby man.’

  Later that evening, when they did get to music making, the guest from the mountains held the baby with one hand, the harmonica with the other. As was usual, he’d worked out a tune after hearing it only once. He blew high and low, shook short reeds and long. Clarence recognized the tune as one he’d sung so long ago. One he still sang. It was a song for laying steel and a song for building shelter. He sang along with his strange new acquaintance that night, though he did so softly, as Rose, asleep in the back, did not approve of secular music. He sang, ‘Well, lovers is you right? Oh, yes we right. Newborn baby born last night, walkin talkin fore daylight, carry to the mountain boys, carry to the mountain.’ Then he smiled at the man draped in hair, who smiled back a mouthful of mineral that men kill for and pan faraway creeks to get.

  Zizi the baby slept like she never had. Clarence Dickason shook his head. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Chicky Gold the harmonica man.’

  He came back the following Saturday. Hands were shaken and bellies were filled. Then, Rose was afforded evening-time sleep. Zizi went quiet the moment she was put in the arm crook of Chicky Gold the baby man. She slept under a beard blanket and did not stir. Not even when the little front yard on a mountain bald became a two-man show. Clarence Dickason and Chicky Gold the harmonica man, an impromptu mess of harmonica and beat-up guitar. Vocals in the style of gospel and blues and shouting mountain jug bands. Holy hell blues, folks would later call it.

  On a break, Chicky Gold looked down at the baby girl in his arms and then up at the stars in the sky. He didn’t say much in the company of his new neighbors. Clarence pulled the slag glass cover off of the small lantern in the grass between them and lit two cigarettes. After they were smoked, Chicky leaned to one side and pulled the derringer flask from his backpocket. The time was right.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Clarence said.

  Chicky would not tell his new neighbor about the magical quality of the flask, that it refilled itself endlessly. He simply handed it over. Clarence looked to the house, his tee-totaling saint of a commonlaw wife inside. Then he spun the cap off the strangely heavy thing and put it to his lips. He tilted. Then he tilted back some more. Nothing came. Clarence shut one eye and peered down the hole with the other.

  ‘It’ll fix you up just right,’ Chicky told him.

  Clarence looked at him and nodded, confused. He decided not to say anything about the flask being empty. But it was. It was dry as cremated bone and smelled like it had been for twenty years. Clarence wondered about the faculties of the man who held his youngest then. For a short time, as he had been before and would be again, he was scared as hell of the man.

  Chicky took it back when offered. He swigged its non-existing contents and said, ‘Ahhh.’ Re-screwed the cap. Then Clarence sang and fingerpicked a version of John Henry called ‘Gonna Die with a Hammer in My Hand.’ His sidekick picked it up halfway through. He accompanied with a mouth harp wail so high and so lonesome that if anyone had been in earshot, they’d swear the player held that Hohner with two hands, not one. They’d swear it was a hillbilly Sonny Boy Williamson blowing that air.

  It was in August that Clarence’s band was coming, and he’d told Chicky all about it. Told him he should come. It was to be a week-long event, one for which Rose and the children were departing. Her father was meeting her halfway down the mountain. He had friends lined up to carry supplies back a week later. Such friends were hard to come by, for they had to be willing to trek a steep incline with a heavy pack. And they had to be willing to deliver a white woman and her groceries back to a black man living in exile. But the plan came off, and on the day Rose, Albert, and Zizi left, Nelson, Willie, and Johnnie showed up.

  For two nights and two days, Chicky Gold hid on the ridge. He watched the all-black band play, off and on, in the front yard. They slept on the grass after playing past four a.m. They smoked and drank whiskey. Nelson Bird was the oldest of them at sixty-two. A gray-headed restaurant owner from Princeton who always wore a white flower in his lapel. He played a five string banjo clawhammer style. Willie Carpenter was a Bluefield baseball star turned coal miner turned railroad grader. He slapped a stand-up bass like he meant it. And then there was Willie’s nephew, Johnnie. Johnnie Johnston was only twenty-one years old. He played the hell out of a piano, had started when he was four. When no piano was available, as up on the mountain, he blew a lit
tle harp. Cupped his hands on it like he’d been raised up in the Mississippi Delta, though he’d never left Fairmont, West Virginia, until he joined the Marine Corps. The War had hardened the young man, got him to drinking heavy. He came home wild, and after short-timing jail back in Fairmont for stabbing a man in the thigh, Johnnie had moved to his Uncle Willie’s in Bluefield for work. Lifting and laying down track for the Norfolk & Western had outlined his muscles in shadow, and, much like a younger Chicky Gold, he was never without a hip flask, knife, and pistol in his pants.

  The older men found themselves wishing Johnnie hadn’t come. God-fearing and church-going, they found themselves scared, guilty by association. But when they got to playing, all that rode off. For the young man brought to the music a feeling that this could be something. This could go somewhere.

  Chicky came down on a Tuesday morning while the men slept off the night prior. The firepit in the yard still smoldered. They laid next to their instruments on burlap and bedrolls, the morning air just right for sleeping. Chicky cleared his throat to awaken them, and when he did, Johnnie Johnston pulled his piece before he opened his lids. From his back, one hand still behind his head, he trained the pistol on Chicky.

  Willie got to his knees and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold it now Johnnie.’

  Chicky smiled his golden smile and said, ‘Been a while since I looked down the hole of a pea-shooter. Tickles a little.’

  Johnnie recognized whatever it is that lets a man know he should think before he acts. ‘I can make that stop for you,’ he said.

  ‘Hold it Johnnie,’ Clarence said. ‘This here’s Chicky Gold I was tellin you all about. The harmonica man.’ He’d mentioned on the first night that a mountain man might stop in, a crazy one to be sure, but harmless. A baby soother. And he could play that harp.