The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Well, boys, you’ve heard that tale

  About a Mingo dead-eye shot

  Who on that 1920 day couldn’t fail

  To give Al Felts what he got

  The boy was full of rotten teeth

  But his eye was keen and sure

  He held the miners’ deep belief

  That their lives were surely pure

  Out on the hallway stairwell, Chicky’s sight went red. Everything blurred. The howling in his ears commenced and his knees gave. He dropped like a man in the midst of a stroke.

  Johnnie and Willie kneeled to him, slapped his face a little. They listened for his breath, found it, and carried him out, just as greasy Jimmy said to the radio-listening public, ‘And that was The Mingo Four with “The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart.”’

  NINETEEN

  A Piker Had No Home

  The lead singer of The Mingo Four was Miss Louise Dallara, daughter of Fred and Clarissa Dallara. She was born to the couple, a quiet housewife and her Mingo County sherriff husband, in 1928, before the Depression hit and the union’s fire burnt out completely and the coal companies reigned again. Fred Dallara had risen almost to the top of one of those companies, White Star Mining, before stepping out of the way of the Crews brothers to take a position in law enforcement. Such a post would allow him a different kind of power, one that included the right to protect his citizens and his family from any who might ever shake foundations again. Fred was cold if not civil to his wife and children. He’d remained close with Mose and Warren Crews, men who’d seen to it that Arly Scott Jr stayed locked up in Moundsville for the rest of his days, an example to those who might question the strength of their dead daddy’s business.

  Fred didn’t speak to his youngest daughter Louise any longer, not since she’d graduated high school and moved out on her own to be a musician. Her interest in music, in his estimation, was nearly as ill-advised as her admiration for unions and socialists and forgotten local heroes in the struggle.

  Folks spoke little on that long past fight. The Scotts, Arly Sr and his wife, had moved back home to Georgia. Bill Blizzard went less fiery. And in the schools, no one taught a stitch on the Matewan shootout or the Battle of Blair Mountain.

  The Urias Hotel stayed in business, as did Chambers Hardware. Matewan, Logan, and Welch had remained fairly quiet, while in Keystone, whores continued to service men from all walks. Ewart Smith did so, until she became pregnant with her third child and finally left for Tennessee. No one knew if she made it.

  In Bluefield, the man who’d shot Sid Hatfield dead, Charles Lively, lived and prospered in various business ventures. His children bore children and he was a proud grandfather, semi-retired and comfortable.

  Up Warm Hollow, the tilted pioneer house of cat-and-clay and clapboard construction still stood. And inside, the Widow Dorsett still lived. But only barely. She was seventy-seven years old. Clarissa had begged her to come live in town with herself and Fred. There was plenty of room with the kids grown. But the Widow refused. ‘I’ll be just fine,’ she said.

  Laying flat on the ridge above her house, the house he’d grown up in, Chicky Gold knew none of this. He didn’t know who’d killed Sid Hatfield, or what had become of his friends Arly or Ewart or his enemies the Crews brothers. He didn’t know if his mother was alive or dead. In Bluefield, folks weren’t concerned with their small-town Mingo neighbors. Before he’d left Bluefield to find things out for himself, he’d not asked enough questions to get people wondering about him.

  After his brain had shut down in the halls of WHIS, he’d come to in Willie’s shed with The Mingo Four’s lyrics still in his mind. He’d said to Willie’s wife, ‘Ma’am, I’ll leave here and not bother you again if you’ll allow me the use of your kitchen shears and your washtub.’ She obliged, and Chicky emerged from the steam-filled bathroom with a respectable, three-inch beard and short hair. He almost looked handsome.

  Willie didn’t think much about his departure, but Johnnie nearly shot him again. Johnnie was set on traveling to Philadelphia and Detroit and New York City, putting together some gigs and building their song catalog. ‘You ain’t nothin but a woodhick anyhow,’ he told Chicky, his back turned, as the gold-toothed smile closed up and the shakes of whiskey withdrawal set in. Standing in his newly purchased Bostonian shoes and gray felt Fedora, Chicky Gold said to his piano man, ‘Be good, Johnnie.’

  On his way out of Bluefield, he’d stopped in at WHIS and learned from greasy Jimmy the name of the young singer, Louise Dallara. When it was spoken aloud, he’d nearly dropped to the floor again.

  He’d been on the ridge above the cabin of unhewn logs for two days since. He slept in short intervals. He’d not seen any movement inside. The outhouse still stood, though it looked to be unused. The tomato garden was gone. The little barn in shambles.

  Up there looking down, Chicky Gold cried and sipped just enough whiskey to hold off the worst of the shakes.

  Clarissa came on a Thursday morning. As soon as she’d stepped inside the door, Chicky came down the hill.

  He opened the door without knocking.

  Clarissa was leaning over the Widow, who lay on her side in a double bed where the kitchen table used to be. Clarissa straightened and looked at him. Time had been kind to her; skin, eyes, hair and all. She met his gaze with her own and frowned.

  ‘Clarissa,’ Chicky said, taking off his hat and nodding.

  The Widow had not yet looked up. ‘Fred come along to dance on my grave?’ she said. Her voice had gone higher and a little shaky.

  No one answered her. She raised her head up and looked at her boy. Then she laid it back down again. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I know I done lost my mind now.’

  Clarissa sat down on the bed and brushed through her mother’s hair with her fingers. Something the size of a plum had caught in her throat and she thought she might pass out for lack of air or throw it up, one or the other. Speaking was beyond her.

  ‘Those straps I see across your arms? That old Civil War pack still hangin on?’ The Widow’s eyes were still sharp.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Chicky managed.

  ‘What do you call yourself?’

  ‘Chicky Gold.’

  ‘Let me see you smile,’ the old woman said, and she lifted her head again.

  He did what she told him to. Clarissa began to cry. The Widow laughed and said, ‘Old Dr Warble can fix up a set a teeth, can’t he?’ She put her head back down on the pillow and sighed like she might be as overcome as Clarissa had been. Instead, she patted her girl’s hands with her own, thin-skinned and rippling with veins that were night-crawler thick and purple. ‘I knew God was hangin me on for this,’ she said. ‘Knew it was for somethin like this.’ She waved him over and he put the backpack on the floor, sat down on the bed opposite Clarissa, the Widow in between. ‘You know I’ll be goin right quick now that you’re here.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Chicky said. Clarissa swallowed the plum and straightened up and wiped at her eyes. Her stomach burned but she smiled at her mother and went back to stroking her hair. She could not look at the man, his shining teeth. He studied her only for a moment, then looked down at the Widow. She had fallen asleep. She wore a nightgown sewn by her own hands, white cotton. A sheet covered most of her, but he watched the blood beat through the veins on her neck, followed the deep wrinkles from there to her chin and on up past the mouth and nose to the closed eyes, the forehead. The hair was white as the unwashed gown. While the rest of her had shrunk, her ears looked to have grown somehow. He put his fingers to her cheek and left them there, moving them up and down a little, so that they touched the fingers of Clarissa. Again, the electricity came immediately. But they did not look at one another.

  Before she died the following evening, the Widow told her boy to open up the chest in the loft, bring down the locked box inside. He did so. She told him where to find the key, a flour container on the cook stove. She’d never gotten a steel range.

  Inside the box were newspaper clipp
ings she’d saved for him since he’d left home, each marked with her penned notes. There were stories of families dried up in the depression, gnawing on the chicken bones of the rich folks’ wastebaskets. Another World War, described in high-toned, vulgar terms. In the margins, she’d written, And men just go on, back to the ways they did each other before they knew to talk.

  There were stories from a newly formed newspaper out of Richwood called the News-Leader. Under these and a mess of others, at the bottom of the box and wrapped in twine, were faded clippings, near to tearing. They were from the Williamson Daily News and they told of the aftermath of the mine wars. Sid Hatfield’s funeral merited photographs, grayed now from age. There were a few stories speculating as to the whereabouts of the rotten-toothed Taggart boy, alleged to have shot more than a few in those days.

  ‘If they hadn’t used you up in the union,’ the Widow said, ‘you’d have made a right fine newspaperman.’ Her breathing had slowed to almost nothing.

  Clarissa stood next to them in the kitchen, ricing potatoes for their guest. Then she was outside the house, waiting.

  ‘Under them newspaper clippins is all the proof in this world that you was ever here,’ his mother told him then. A birth certificate, the only one, since fire had swept downtown Matewan. Some informal adoption documents, the sole copies. She cocked her head against the pillow to look at him straight on. ‘You take that lockbox. And you keep on doin what you got to do. You understand, Chicky?’ She’d forced the name out. Unnatural but necessary. For a moment when she asked him if he understood, her eyes were alive again, like they’d been when he was a boy. Beast eyes. All-knowing, all-seeing, fair, learned eyes. They dimmed just as quick as they’d come on.

  He said he understood.

  Her every muscle and tissue and tendon eased then, and she sunk into the bed. She said to her only boy, ‘Don’t get bamboozled.’

  These were the last words of the Widow.

  Though she’d not attended services since 1920, the Widow would have her send-off in the Methodist Church. She’d not wanted to fight arrangement-making in her last days, so Clarissa and Fred were allowed to have at it as they saw fit. This would mean proper ritual. Church-goers and business owners and a preacher talking from memorization. It was fine with the Widow. She’d not be there for it.

  It turned out that her boy would be there. After she was gone in the little kitchen bed, he’d kissed her forehead and stepped outside to smoke a Chesterfield, speak to Clarissa. She told him of the funeral plans. He scraped little tobacco pieces from between his gold teeth with his thumbnail and listened as she made small talk, talk of things to be done. A list of death’s ugly chores to make sure nothing real got spoken between them. ‘I reckon you won’t be able to come to the service?’ she’d said.

  ‘I’m able,’ he’d replied. Then he thought about telling her of the last twenty-four years of his life on the mountain. How he hadn’t even known if she was real or a dream a month prior, how he’d forgotten who he was himself just as he’d forgotten everything. Instead, he reached out and brought her to his chest and held her there. He kissed her on the cheek and walked away. There was something damming up her chest and throat then. She almost ceased to breathe.

  And so it was that he walked through the congregational doors he’d last stepped out of after kicking Hob Tibbs in the testicles so hard the man couldn’t twitch a toe. He was under the cover of his fedora and his beard and all the age that he’d acquired from living hard in the hills. Clarissa had spoken to no one of his return.

  He sat two rows back from the front pew, where Clarissa was elbow to elbow with Fred, who still wore a scar from the first time he’d dared to kiss her in sight of her brother. Next to him were two grown boys, both home from Morgan-town where they were getting the education their Italian ancestors hadn’t. Next to them was Louise Dallara, songbird and revolutionary. As he sat and stared at the back of her head, Chicky began to think of Louise as his own daughter.

  They stood and sat and kneeled and listened and spoke in unison. The preacher spoke the same words he’d spoken when Frank Dallara had been put to rest: ‘The sorrows of death compassed me.’ Hob Tibbs, wearing a facial scar himself, sat in the tall-back cherrywood chair next to the preacher. He wore highwater slacks and tried not to doze off. The sun through the stained glass showed him to be an old man, weak in his up and down movements.

  When it was time to view the open casket, folks filed past. There were more present than anyone had anticipated, for a moonshine aficionado will stay sober long enough on a Sunday morning to pay tribute to his savior the distiller.

  Chicky stood with his row, and filed past her as they did. He’d taken his hat off inside the Lord’s house, of course, and he ignored the feelings of exposure. He looked down at the Widow, who looked ashen and ridiculous in a dress that was not hers. In the makeup of an embalmer. He smiled and touched her cold hand. Then he looked up and locked eyes with Hob Tibbs, who nearly shit himself to see the boy who’d once vowed to kill him.

  Chicky Gold winked at him and moved on down the line.

  He walked out the double doors into the hazy light of a day threatened by thunder clouds. While he strode to the bridge, Hob Tibbs scurried inside the church to inform Sheriff Fred Dallara that a fugitive was among them. A murderer. The sheriff looked at his wife, who ignored him. Then he got up and walked out, Tibbs in tow.

  They’d not catch him that day. They didn’t know he’d picked up his stashed backpack and walked across the Tug into Kentucky to see the hole his adopted mother was to be buried in. They couldn’t keep him from saying goodbye, from seeing her final place. The hole was square cut and even, unlike the one he’d dug up to reveal his daddy. He felt he should put something down in it, something to keep her company, but she’d not want that. For a moment, he thought of pouring out the jar of shine she’d given him before she died, pouring it right into the dirt. But that time hadn’t quite yet come for Chicky. So he stared at the hole and thought how fitting it was that we all end up in the ground, covered. Swallowed. Mixing with all the other dead and the little, unnamed bugs that eat through us and move on down the line. The Widow’s hole was twenty yards from Sid Hatfield’s tombstone, a giant black rock with the likeness of his face carved in it. Under this were the words We Will Never Forget.

  In the newspaper clippings she’d saved for him, he’d read and re-read the printed name of the man who’d killed Sid. A man who lived in Bluefield. Charles E. Lively. Chicky had plans to visit the man, but he wasn’t first on the list. That spot was reserved for another.

  The train ride to Moundsville had been uneventful. There was a bar car where Chicky had almost fallen asleep, full-stomached on bologna sandwiches and beer, rocking that perfect rock of a locomotive. He’d long ago decided never to ride in an automobile again. Not after the business with the Model T and the blood that seemed to run every time he stepped inside it. No mind that they were bigger and safer and faster now, he’d ride rails or walk. The car was a fool’s invention. A death trap.

  The day before the funeral, he’d made two phone calls from the saloon in Matewan and secured a prisoner visitation pass under an assumed name. It was truly magnificent what the telephone could do for a man.

  The depot wasn’t far from the State Penitentiary at Moundsville. When he approached it, he nearly turned around for fear he’d set his own trap. The main building was four stories, cut stone like the rest of the sprawling place. A castle of sorts. Towers were everywhere, iron latticework slicing up the sky. Chicky could see the prison wall. It was thick and he estimated its height to be forty feet. Two guards stood atop it in turrets shouldering Winchesters.

  Chicky’s press badge, no doubt an antique, got him through security. ‘Alright, Mr Bern, I’ve got you on the register here,’ one prison worker said to him. Another remarked on the merits of the New York Times, then laughed to show how he truly felt. ‘I’m just pullin your leg, Mr Bern,’ he said. ‘We got a subscription to your rag h
ere at the prison, truth be told. Warden likes to wipe his backside with it.’

  The square of glass they called a visitation window was roughly the size of a dictionary book or a Bible. It had an elbow rest, a wooden chair pulled up to it, and vent slats so you could hear who you looked at. When Arly Jr walked up and sat down, he had his hands stuffed in the pockets of his cadet grays. His face said he knew the man staring back at him, had maybe even expected him.

  ‘You Mr Bern?’ he said. His hair was cropped short and gray at the temples. He wore thick black spectacles.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Newspaperman?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Chicky became afflicted, as had happened in recent days, with a powerful and sudden instinct to cry. He’d not anticipated it here, inside a cage for men, and he quickly swallowed it away.

  Arly breathed deep and looked down. The top of his head revealed an unusual balding pattern. When he looked up again, he was shaking his head and wore a smile that was hard to read. ‘You must be crazy comin into this place,’ he said.

  Chicky thought on the words. ‘I reckon I am a little crazy. Been livin on a mountain for a good little while.’

  ‘It shows.’

  They spoke on the intricacies of living off the land, then on Mingo. Who was still there and who wasn’t. Who was dead and who was still breathing.

  They spoke on Joe Louis, television. Cars. Arly never once looked the other man in the eyes.

  Chicky caused a break in the flow they’d established when he asked, not in so many words, what it was like to live at Moundsville. He’d made the mistake of bringing up Arly’s place of residence—he’d mentioned the obvious: that they were inside a penitentiary. Arly looked down again. ‘You got to go on and do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Ask me a question like that? “How you holdin up in here, Arly?” Like we friends?’

  ‘I’m sorry Arly. I—’