The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Old man Nelson sat up and rubbed at his eyesockets.

  ‘This woodhick?’ Johnnie said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Johnnie took in the man before him. Tall, thin. More hair than a sheep dog. A picture of the worst the world imagined when they heard the words ‘West Virginia.’ He lowered his weapon.

  By noon, they were all full on eggs over easy and bacon and coffee black as coal sludge. With the passing of hours, they talked to the white man with less hesitation. Except Johnnie. He mostly sipped from his flask and rolled cigarettes. He smoked without the use of his hands. He also rolled up reefer. Willie would have none of it, but old Nelson partook, and so did Clarence. When it came his way, Chicky did as they had, inhaling and coughing. He began to stare at Johnnie Johnston. On Johnnie’s left shoulder, visible when he stripped to his no-sleeve undershirt, was a snake tattoo. Chicky’s skin started to crawl from the reefer, like he’d taken up serpents again himself. He thought that any minute, he’d stand up, tear his clothes off, and scream bloody hell. Somehow, he managed to sit tight and ride it out.

  He didn’t sip their drink at first, even when the sun went down and music got made. The joint had brought some feeling on him he couldn’t place. A feeling like the other men were watching him close, like he’d known them from somewhere else.

  Once, after it had grown dark out, Johnnie Johnston stood up to relieve his bladder, and Chicky saw in his gait a young Arly Jr.

  He didn’t talk much, didn’t laugh much at their jokes and memories, mostly of their time lifting and lining track to song. This was how they’d met. They laughed on how they used to introduce themselves to folks at saloons and parties. Willie would say of Nelson, ‘This is N.’ Nelson of Willie: ‘And this is W.’ N&W. A man named Otis would introduce Clarence: ‘This is C.’ Then Clarence on Otis: ‘And this is O.’ C&O. The railroad and the jobs it brought were as ingrained in these Mercer County men as the mines were in Mingo men. They’d taken to naming themselves after company initials, like they owned it. Most days, the company owned them.

  Old Nelson smiled while he ate and while he talked. And in between sips of his coffee. He fingered the frets on his banjo and told stories from his childhood. ‘Used to be they wasn’t no frets on a banjer,’ he said. ‘Used to be you’d make one from a groundhog.’

  Johnnie laughed, the scoffing kind. Nobody else said a word.

  The old man continued. ‘Trap him, take his hide, put that hide down in the ashes and leave it set there awhile. Couple days, get you a knife, slice away the hair. Carpet tack that hide on a cheese hoop, fix a oak wood neck on there, and you got a fretless banjo.’

  ‘What’d you use for strings?’ Willie asked. He turned foil-wrapped potatoes down in the red cinders with his bare hands.

  ‘Horse hair. Stretched.’

  ‘Sheee-it,’ Johnnie said. ‘Alright, country.’

  Nelson looked over at Chicky, whose beard and hair and sunken eyes were exaggerated by the fire’s dance. ‘Where you from, Chicky?’ Nelson asked.

  Chicky sat still on his stone seat. He turned to the mountain behind them and pointed up. Nobody said a word. Then, as if on cue, they laughed together. Chicky joined them.

  Johnnie stopped laughing first. ‘Yeah, you a funny woodhick,’ he said. He turned to the old man. ‘Mr Bird, let me ask you. Why you keep puttin your eyes to the white man here? Keep askin him the questions, like he the one with answers. You ain’t noticed he don’t take your whiskey when you offer?’ He turned to Chicky. The whites of Johnnie’s eyes had gone rusty. ‘You fraid to sip what a colored man done sipped on?’

  Chicky stared back at him. The other men swallowed, shifted. In their time, in their places, black men didn’t speak to white men this way. The fire’s pops got louder. ‘I brung my own whiskey,’ Chicky said. He shifted against the log he sat on, pulled the derringer flask from his pocket.

  ‘Yeah, we done heard about your whiskey,’ Johnnie said. ‘Invisible whiskey.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘That flask right there is dry as desert sand, woodhick.’

  Chicky looked down at the flask. Issued a challenge, his paranoia had given way to a calm confidence. It was a sureness of hand and a disregard for danger reserved for movie outlaws. Slowly, imperceptibly, he moved his left thumb to the small catch near the rim. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wonder why it’s so heavy then.’ In a fluid, single motion, he tripped the catch, caught the falling piece with his right hand, turned it so that the gun dropped out into his now empty left, and trained the weapon on Johnnie Johnston’s head, the flask now in two pieces between Chicky’s bare feet. He remained seated on the rock all the while.

  At first, no one spoke. None of the men were strangers to guns, but this was something else, at least for the older three. A bullfrog called.

  Johnnie Johnston never moved. He lay on his side by the fire, rolling a blade of grass between his thumb and finger. He spit in the dirt. ‘You got to know who you point a gun to,’ he said. ‘I done some things so cold…’ He’d visibly lost a little of his edge. The face staring back at him had seen colder, and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop the words that had come up his throat and onto his tongue. ‘Motherfucker,’ he said. ‘I’ll hang a rope and drown a glass a water.’

  Nelson Bird sighed then.

  Chicky kept his gun on Johnnie. ‘Willie,’ Chicky said. ‘I notice you got tough hands with them taters. Why don’t you toss one off yonder, high as you can.’ Willie hesitated, and while he did, Chicky addressed Johnnie again. ‘Cocksucker,’ he said, ‘I’ll dynamite your house and put a third eye ’tween the two you got from three hundred yards.’ Then, to Willie, who’d frozen at the sound of these last words spoken: ‘How bout them spuds? You going to toss one up?’ Willie finally obliged, slinging the thing high above his head before it could burn his fingerprints off. Chicky spun on the rock and fired, twice. In three seconds time, the little over-under was spent, the silver-wrapped potato hit the dirt, and Johnnie had his own gun drawn. He kept it on Chicky as the mountain man got up and walked to the potato, several feet off but still within the fire’s light. ‘Hot potato,’ Chicky hollered, tossing it back to Willie. Willie caught it and dropped it on the ground next to the fire. They all looked down except Johnnie and Chicky, who knew already what was there. Two holes, perfect and clean, an inch apart. Chicky smiled at the man who could end him any second. The gold was distracting, exaggerated like the rest of him in the firelight. ‘Hang a rope and drown a glass a water,’ Chicky said. Then, sitting back down on the rock, he said it again. He took his harmonica from the shirt’s front pocket and blew into it. Talked into it really. The harmonica sang the words, low down dirty like: ‘I’ll hang a rope, and I’ll drown a glass a water.’ Chicky stopped playing and turned to Clarence, who sat stupefied, holding the bottle of whiskey they’d been passing all evening. ‘Clarence,’ Chicky said. ‘I believe I’ll sip off that stuff you been offerin now.’ He smiled again, looked down at the aired-out spud. He thought of a name he hadn’t in years: Sid Hatfield.

  Nelson Bird cleared his throat.

  Chicky took the bottle Clarence held out for him. He swallowed whiskey hard. It burned, and it instantly changed everything inside him and all around him, and he knew that from then on, he’d stay lit on the stuff for as much of the day, every day, as he possibly could. He looked to Old man Nelson. ‘To answer your question? Mingo. I come from Mingo.’

  Johnnie lowered his pistol, stuck it back into his belt.

  EIGHTEEN

  Radio Saturday Night

  For Chicky, the word ‘radio’ spurred thoughts and memories of electric telegraphs, tickers, and big companies with names like Westinghouse who had operations in places like Pittsburgh and Chicago. Radio was something the navy could take over if they wanted to. But the way Johnnie and Willie spoke on it, radio was entertainment for regular folks. They said there was a station called WHIS in Bluefield that had the strongest signal for a hundred miles. Such talk baffled a mountain
man, but confusion ran high all around in the four days following the potato shoot. This was on account of the sheer volume of whiskey consumed. With consumption came music, and with music, friendship. Or at least the mirage of friendship. And the two who were tightest were those who’d nearly killed one another. Chicky and Johnnie had made a song to end all songs up there on the mountain bald. The piano in back of Nelson Bird’s restaurant was calling to Johnnie Johnston. He knew that if he put it to use with the bearded man’s harmonica, and if they could get on the radio, they would have something as gold as the teeth Chicky wore.

  So it was that the mountain man forgot everything he’d learned in twenty-four years time. All he knew was that he had a taste for drink again and he’d follow whoever he had to, to quench it. He returned to his thatched hut on the lee side of the mountain just long enough to camouflage it and barricade its opening. Before he did, he gathered his old Confederate pack, its contents surprisingly still useful. There were shells to replace the spent ones in the derringer. He reassembled its secrecy. There was the old tin water canteen, the compass and map, the brittle paper upon which he’d written things that made no sense until the day he sharpened his last pencil to nothing. There was money, the kind that folds and the kind that clinks, still useable after all that time. He covered up every trace of his habitation, though it was remote enough that a body would be unlikely to find it.

  Before he walked away, Chicky Gold stared at the place where he’d lived for better than two decades. The cheap booze in his bloodstream didn’t sharpen the eye like the Widow’s shine. Instead, it deadened men to their surroundings. Slow and easy, it made every place the same. Looking at his home on the hill, he felt nothing, and the turtles walked on by, and the flowers swallowed the gnats, and the mountain stream ran, and the man who had come to live among all of them put in a dip of snuff Clarence had given him, and spat on the ground.

  So it was that the mountain man came down from the mountain.

  On the way, they crossed paths with Rose and Albert and Zizi, who laid in a bundle sling across her mother’s back, crying. Three men carried supplies and sweated and spoke nothing. They nodded to Chicky because some of their people still lived like him. Chicky held the baby. She went quiet and slept. He put her back in the sling and Rose kissed his cheek. ‘You watch out down in there,’ she told him. Clarence shook his hand before returning up the mountain with his family. He turned four times to see his band disappear, minus its founding member.

  Within two weeks, Chicky had almost acclimated to the little mattress he slept on in Willie’s toolshed. Most nights, it got too soft under him, and he found himself sleeping outside, beside a dogwood tree. Willie’s wife looked at the man from the kitchen window each morning. She shook her head. ‘He’s like a animal,’ she told her husband.

  Soon, he’d nearly acclimated to the telephone poles and fat round cars. The indoor plumbing mysteries and the plywood boxes housing tiny moving pictures. Two different Bluefield saloons kept these boxes behind the bar. Television, folks called it. Big, drunk men roared as they watched a tiny, grainy black man knock out a white one inside the little box.

  ‘Did you see Joe Louis on the television?’ railroad men asked Johnnie. Then they up-and-downed the long-bearded hillbilly at his side, frowned.

  ‘This here’s Chicky Gold the harmonica man,’ Johnnie told them all. ‘We going to cut a record together, me and him. Get famous.’ They stayed good and drunk and Johnnie said the same things over and over to everyone they met. Chicky just flashed his gold teeth, which either frightened, confused, or tickled folks enough to smile back and walk away.

  Within three weeks, through Nelson Bird’s connection with the local rich he served food to, Johnnie and Chicky had landed a spot on WHIS’s Saturday night program. It was a live broadcast of local talent. Country music mostly. White country. But gospel had opened the door for black talent as well, and since the station manager was in Charleston on business, the young disc jockey nervously welcomed them in.

  The control room was dark, a single light hanging above a giant, cherrywood table covered in gadgetry. Chicky had never seen anything like it. The phonograph machine next to the table was slick and black and compact, just like the record that rode it. A tower rose on the opposite side, and stuck to it were knobs and needles, the latter dancing back and forth as the quartet of clean-cut singers on the other side of the glass sang into the microphone. It was a giant silver microphone, and it hung down in the center of the studio like a lifeline for the desperate. The disc jockey faded to himself, and into his own shining, hinged microphone said, ‘And once again folks, that was the War Eagle Four with “Wildwood Roses.” Back after this.’ He flipped through papers clipped in front of him, beside him, behind him. He flipped switches.

  It was dizzying.

  He spun on his office chair and faced them. ‘I’m a little overwhelmed this evenin,’ he said. His hair held too much pomade and his skin was pimpled. ‘And frankly, you all wouldn’t be here if that old colored restauranter didn’t kiss Mr Schott’s behind blue.’ He’d only glanced at them. ‘I have you all down here as Chicky and Johnnie?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Johnnie said. He snubbed a cigarette on his shoe heel and stuck it in his pocket.

  ‘Looks like there’s three of you.’

  Willie had come with his bass. Old Nelson and his banjo had been slowly pushed out of the sound that was emerging. It was just a matter of time before the same went for Willie.

  ‘He’s bass accompaniment,’ Johnnie said.

  ‘Uh-huh. And how come you do all the talkin? What accompaniment is barefoot Outlaw here bringin to the table?’

  Nobody said a word. The young disc jockey stared for a moment at Chicky’s dirty feet. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You all need to get in there and set up on the piano and whatever else. You know the drill. We come back live in two minutes.’ The starched shirt-and-tie white boys emerged from the studio, laughing. They stared at the upcoming act with a mix of condescension and disbelief. The disc jockey tried to mediate. ‘Takes all types fellas,’ he said.

  ‘I reckon it does, Jimmy,’ one of them answered. ‘If by all types you mean two niggers and a woodsman.’ They laughed a little louder as they walked out the control room door.

  Willie was ready to go home. Johnnie laughed a little himself and memorized their faces in his mind. Chicky was flat drunk.

  They walked into the small, bright studio the other men had vacated. Jimmy the disc jockey came through on the two-way to finalize things. This confused the hell out of Chicky, who was starting to wonder about the whole deal. ‘How you want me to introduce you? Chicky and Johnnie just don’t ring right.’ the booming voice said. Chicky ducked like it might land on them somehow.

  Johnnie answered. ‘How bout “Two Niggers and a Woodsman?”’

  ‘How bout something else?’

  ‘We’re the West Virginia Shine Guzzlers,’ Chicky said. He pulled out his harmonica and blew it a little. He and Willie took their spots under the central microphone, Johnnie took his at the beat-up baby grand.

  ‘If you say so,’ Jimmy came back. ‘And I have you all down as country, gospel, and blues? I don’t know what that means, but…’ Willie slapped his bass, turned the pegs. ‘Bout thirty seconds now. Song title?’

  ‘That’s just how it goes,’ Johnnie said. He let his fingers hover over the chipped keys, eyes shut tight. He lit another cigarette.

  When greasy Jimmy introduced them and gave the signal a few seconds later, Willie dropped in a slow, low, catchy bass line. Johnnie came in second, smooth and easy. Chicky waited, then let rip a reed-splitter. They had it down. Johnnie kept his eyes shut as he started to sing:

  Well, I’ll drown a glass a water

  And I’ll hang a rope

  The devil he done come to me

  Took away my hope

  Well, I’ll put that stick a dynamite

  Right on under your nose

  Cause I done seen the worst a man
can see

  That’s just how it goes

  The voice, the whole sound, was smoke-shot vocal chords and sticky-floor toe-tapping, holes in the soles. Chicky played part of the song with his nose. It was holy hell blues all right, and the only country or gospel to be heard was not a brand greasy Jimmy the disc jockey had ever encountered. This was sin music if he’d ever heard it, and though he let them play it out, his palms sweated through their grip against his rayon slacks. He mumbled a nervous outro to commercial, flipped the switch and strung together a sadly ineffective string of curse words, ending with, ‘Now get the hell out of here.’

  This all took place in front of the on-deck act, a country group from Mingo County. They had liked what they heard and said so as they crossed paths with the West Virginia Shine Guzzlers, who smiled a smile only possible when real music gets made. Only Willie was hesitant. After all, the music they’d made over the airwaves was outlaw music, and Willie was a family man.

  ‘That was real good. Real different,’ the young lady said to them. She wore a daisy flower behind each ear. She had her eye on Chicky, who saw something in the brunette beauty that set his core to rumbling. Her band called themselves The Mingo Four. She was vocals, with fiddle, dulcimer, and banjo backup. All men, all older.

  In the hallway outside the control room, Willie, Johnnie, and Chicky laughed and patted each other’s backs and smoked their Chesterfields. They could hear Jimmy, frustrated, giving his instructions to The Mingo Four, but they couldn’t make out the song title or the specifics. Soon, the band struck up and out there in the sparse-lit hallway, the acoustics were just right. The muffled fiddle squeal, the quiet dulcimer, the old five-string, they were just discernable enough to calm the excitement. And when the young woman’s voice broke through, it was beautiful. Church solo beautiful. They could make out her words.