The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  On that particular October night, he did what he always did to keep from going crazy. He pulled out those newspaper clippings the Widow had saved for him. He’d read those stories until they fell apart. He licked his thumbs and patched them back together. The words blurred, disappeared in spots. He’d memorized their every word so it didn’t matter much. He read of coal mine wars and world wars. On the backsides, there were parts of fluff stories with no real purpose, like the one from 1932 about a zoo animal: $6000 hippopotamus in the Cincinnati, Ohio Zoo chokes on an indoor baseball and dies. Police Blotters told of folks loitering in houses of ill fame, driving while drunk, assaulting, and, of course, possessing un-taxpaid whiskey.

  There were two stories that he’d read most often, both from a newspaper out of Richwood called the News-Leader, both written by a man named Jim Comstock. This man rose easily above the others. He could write a bluestreak, and his subjects were real there on the page. Mountain people who’d kept the ways of old. Or their children, who were used up by World War II and coal mines and sent home minus limbs. These stories got Chicky to writing his own. He put down the ways of the Widow. The cure-alls for ailments, the hunting knowledge, and the philosophies on how to live right. At first, he’d used the charred black ends of kindling to write on scrap pieces of tanned hide. But this was impractical. Soon, he’d again found a use for the raccoon penis bone, of which he possessed a multitude. Sharpened and dipped in a mixture of ash water and animal blood, Chicky carved his stories indelibly on the stripped and soaked basswood and black cherry skins he procured daily. It was beautiful paper, thick but pliable. Able to be rolled into a scroll and quick to soak in stain. He marked his homemade paper with frequency. One story was titled, The Woman Could Cure Ailments. Another: Frank Dallara Fashioned a Tool. He’d become a sort of warped, lonely version of the newspaperman the Widow had wanted him to be. And he never felt as good as when he wrote.

  In April 1958, they came up the hill in a team. Most of them were city-footed. A geologist, a government man in charge of zoning, an engineer. Experts from the university in topography, cartography, and economics. There was a state man for land rights and another from the U.S. Forest Reserve. They spoke on surface mining. Underground was a thing of the past. Stripping a mountain top to bottom was cheaper and easier and required less men. Some in the group had ideas on taking the whole mountain top off to get to the seam.

  They stopped to eat lunch and looked upwards at the incline that eventually led to Chicky’s hidden home on high. All they saw was bituminous gold.

  He heard them when they were still a half mile off. At first he moved quick in the sound’s direction. Wide-vision running toward the only human echo he’d encountered in five years. Then he slowed, stalked the men from above. In thick red, they painted symbols on trees. They set up tripods and pressed small buttons on small machines. They laughed while they worked. It was easy to laugh when the earth could yield so many dollars.

  Chicky was packed by midnight. He burned his thatched hut. Inside the hides of raccoons and foxes, he rolled up dried meat and plants and the stories he’d written. All of these he bound with sinew cordage and strapped to his belt.

  He was northeast-bound by three a.m. Richwood was the place he had in mind.

  He’d stayed inside the Appalachian’s upper range folds for the most part. As best he could figure, he’d hiked north of Hinton, then south of Oak Hill, on up into Nicholas County, a part of the state he’d never ventured before. To a tourist, the terrain might have seemed the same as the highlands above Bluefield. But to Chicky, it was like a new world. Mid-May, he found himself on jutted rock, 4,000 feet in the air, stairstepping with his arms out like a trapeze artist. An hour later, his footing was moss-covered. Birch and hemlock trees abounded, and he’d never seen so many deer. On a single day, he counted three turkeys. He descended into a valley and came upon pasture after pasture. Then, a spongy type of earth unlike any he’d felt before. He was convinced he’d come across swampland in West Virginia, though he knew this to be impossible.

  Twice he heard human voices, and twice he hid.

  When he heard the unmistakable sound of water running, he followed it. These rivers and streams were clearer than any in southern West Virginia. The trout were quicker. They tested his speed and accuracy with the trident spear he’d strapped to his back.

  On a particularly sunny mid-morning descent toward where he imagined Richwood to be, he picked up the sound of water running hard. He tracked it. It was further than it first called out, and as he got closer, its volume confused him. When he finally came upon the source, he understood. Standing atop the smooth rock edge, he grew dizzy looking down. Forty feet below, the water hit the churning pool and kept going. It was the only waterfall he’d ever seen.

  He followed the river down the mountain further and came upon another waterfall. Then another. The third was nosebleed high. Eighty feet or more, he estimated. The sun came through the canopy and lit the locomotion of water like crystal. Chicky made it to the bottom and looked up, shading his eyes with his hand. He stripped himself of packs and belt and clothes and moccasins, braced for the cold, and walked into the frigid pool. He screamed something awful when that ice water enveloped him, but he pushed on. He wanted to feel that waterfall power come down on his skin. It was to be the most memorable of his outdoor bathing experiences. He held steady under the barrage of the waterfall though it knocked him down. He stood back up and hollered, though he could hardly hear himself over the rush of it all. His skin grew red and swollen. Pounded to numb. He raked through his hair, his beard. Let the force of the water wash it all clean. Eyes closed, ears roaring, he opened his mouth and let the water cleanse his ravaged gums.

  He was like this for twenty minutes.

  When he emerged, there was a group of people watching him from the makeshift trail above. Chicky pulled himself from the small pool and stood upright, in his altogether, to face them. He twisted his hair and his long beard, wrung himself out like a wet towel. The lone woman in the group turned her back. One man laughed himself silly, another snapped photographs. The one who seemed to be leading them, a slender man with a graceful gait, told the laugher to be still. He raised a hand and waved at Chicky.

  He knew the group was not surveying for coal seams. They didn’t have that arrogance of presence. That greed about them. But they weren’t tourists either. He decided not to wave back. He stared at the slender man a little, noticed that he carried a small notebook in his shirtpocket, a pencil in his ear. Chicky put his clothes back on, relashed his gear, and climbed up the opposite incline as they watched him, before descending to the bottom of the falls themselves.

  When Chicky had disappeared up the ridge, the man bent to where he’d dripped dry. While the others in his party discussed the viability of clear-cutting a path into the falls for tourists, their organizer took out his notebook and wrote on the mountain man, his demeanor and dress. The way he scampered up a hill. He didn’t know that the same man would walk into his office two days later.

  Looking down at the lights of Richwood past dusk, Chicky had thought about a shave and a haircut. But he didn’t know Nicholas County barbershops. They may not take a man such as himself off the street for a cleanup. And he had no money to his name. His trident spear had broken, his dried food supply had run out, and the sight of human beings had changed him.

  He walked into Richwood on a Monday morning in late May. It rained, and folks stared at him from inside their cars.

  The street sign told him he was on Oakford Avenue. There was a little restaurant with a neon sign above the door reading Ritzy Rae Diner, and without thinking much, he walked in. A lone man sat at the counter chewing a toothpick. He regarded Chicky and put down the fork he was using to cut his eggs over easy. He blinked more than normal. Behind the counter, a woman stood up from where she had been unstacking supplies. She went still when she saw him, the silver napkin holders in each hand seemingly balancing her, keeping her from falling d
own. ‘Can I help you honey?’ she said. She was pretty, brunette.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Chicky said. ‘I’m looking for the offices of a publication called the News-Leader. A fella by the name of Comstock.’ He dripped where he stood, careful not to step from the welcome mat.

  ‘News-Leader?’ the man said. He frowned and looked past Chicky, through the pane glass behind his head.

  ‘Honey, that paper ain’t been around for ten years or more,’ the woman told him. ‘But Jim Comstock runs the Hillbilly out of his office over on Main Street.’ She almost smiled. ‘He expectin you?’

  ‘No ma’am,’ Chicky said.

  ‘You hungry?’

  He didn’t answer. If he hadn’t long ago perfected keeping his mouth securely tight-lipped while conversing, he might have smiled at her. To a man such as himself, she looked more beautiful than anything nature could offer. And she’d offered to feed him.

  ‘I make biscuits and red-eye gravy you wouldn’t believe,’ she said.

  ‘I appreciate your generosity. Thank you for the direction.’ He nodded to her, then to the man with the toothpick, and stepped back into the rain.

  The glass window front of the small building on Main Street read the West Virginia Hillbilly: A Newspaper. For the second time that morning, he almost smiled. He pulled the door open and stepped inside. The front office was unoccupied, but the phone on the desk rang loudly. From the second office, behind a half-opened door, a voice hollered, ‘Dorothea, you mind gettin that?’ The phone quit, there were some mumbles from the back office, and a toilet flushed inside a closed door to Chicky’s right. He gathered it was Dorothea in the john, Comstock in the back, and he didn’t wait for her to emerge. Instead, he shook what water he could on the mat and walked directly to the man whose writing had kept him going on so many nights when nothing else could.

  He knocked, then entered. When the swivel chair came around to face him, Chicky saw the same slender man he’d seen at the waterfall two days prior. This, for some reason, caused him finally to smile, full on. He revealed the empty spaces of his mouth, the strangely healed gums. For most, such a sight as this would be cause for alarm. Chicky was, after all, a grizzled, animal-hided, toothless man. But Jim Comstock only smiled back and said, ‘Mornin.’

  Chicky nodded.

  ‘Or maybe I ought to say “hello again.”’

  Chicky used the wide vision so expertly honed all those years to get a feel for the place. There were piles everywhere. Books, papers, more books. A mess of what some might call junk, others treasure. The man himself was well-groomed, near to handsome, and he wore a shirt and tie, semi-pressed.

  ‘Mr Jim Comstock?’ Chicky finally spoke.

  ‘That’s right. What can I do for you sir?’ He held his spectacles in between two fingers, touched the earpiece to his chin.

  ‘Well sir,’ Chicky said, ‘My name is A.C. Gilbert.’ He stepped forward and the two shook hands. ‘I think you’re a very fine writer, and I’m lookin to get into the newspaper business myself.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Writing Came Natural

  It was as it had been before. Re-entry into civilization. This time he dubbed himself A.C. Gilbert, a name he had never forgotten from childhood. The original A.C. Gilbert had invented the Erector Set, and in doing so had stolen a boy’s hidden hobby. This new A.C. figured it was fair give-and-take to use the moniker.

  His haircut and shave were professional this time, paid for by Comstock. The barber in town loved cutting hair, and A.C.’s would be a worthy challenge. ‘He’ll make a ring around your eyes and set the brush on fire,’ Comstock had said. ‘He’ll set your ears back just right.’ It was after he’d read the tree skin scrawls left for his perusal that Comstock offered the grooming and the purchase of a suit, hat, and shoes. A visit to the dentist, Dr Pinkerton, was arranged for working on those gums, though teeth were not in the budget. Comstock also agreed to staff A.C. as a feature writer. His first month’s rent for the one room space above the Hillbilly’s office was an advance on more to come. A.C. wanted cash under the table, and Comstock was happy to oblige. It wasn’t everyday that he came across such writing as the mountain man’s.

  There was a kitchen faucet and a claw-footed bathtub in the little apartment. Two-burner gas stove, electrical outlets for lamps. A.C. came to enjoy all of it. A man accustomed to wilderness survival was suspicious of modern conveniences, but he was equally drawn to their capabilities. Their boastful claim to invention.

  His first few stories for the paper were done with ink pen on yellow legal pad. Dorothea typed the copy and Comstock edited. One was an ode to the raccoon penis bone. Its uses as a toothpick, writing utensil, and sewing needle. Another story was on sassafras tea, instructing to use only the red roots. Then there were ramps. Jim Comstock had a thing for the little, garlic-like plant growing all around Richwood. He sent A.C. to gather, cook, and eat the plant in as many ways as he could, then write what he wanted about all of it. He was glad to. They kept him young.

  Comstock busied himself with the business end of things, and writing about politics, religion, literature. Folks were taking notice of the spare but sharp weekly out of West Virginia. Folks in New York and Chicago, among others. The subscription blanks in the back of each issue started coming in faster than Dorothea could handle the checks and dollar bills inside. Somehow, she found time to instruct A.C. on the art of banging Underwood typewriter keys.

  He typed one phrase over and over in those days. Dorothea found it to be the best finger training for a novice newspaperman. Sitting in his apartment at night, the old Underwood on his kitchen table, A.C. typed, hundreds and hundreds of times, Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

  Everyday, A.C. had his breakfast and lunch at the Ritzy Rae Diner. He made acquaintances there, if not friends. Though Jim Comstock never did, other folks asked A.C. where he’d come from. ‘Wheeling, thereabouts,’ he’d answer. It was left at that, because here was a man for whom uncomfortable questions of the past were imposing and plain rude. His eyes and his weathered skin told would-be-conversationalists to pick a new subject. Like the weather. Or the difference between rainbow, steelhead, and brook trout.

  He’d told everybody in town he was born in 1916. That he was forty-two years of age. It seemed the truth, because despite the obviousness of having lived hard, the man had the build and the presence of a fast, young type. Like a prizefighter just past his prime. And folks around Richwood were accustomed to men and women looking older than their years. It had always been that way.

  One day at lunch, A.C. was drinking his third cup of the mud black coffee Rae served up. A man in town to hunt was at the countertop beside him, asking after where to buy wooden turkey calls of the hand-held variety.

  ‘I don’t truthfully know,’ A.C. told him. ‘Never was much on turkey. But you can use your mouth just as well, I reckon.’

  ‘Your mouth?’ the man said.

  The cowbell on the front door handle rang out. A woman in a sharp white top and gray skirt walked in, as out-of-place as out-of-place could be. People kept up their conversations, one-eyed and eared. The woman walked toward the lunch counter and stood beside A.C. The turkey hunter was bug-eyed. She was an olive-skinned, pulled-back hair, big city beauty. She carried a black leather portfolio under her arm.

  Rae asked if she could help the woman.

  ‘Yes, thank you. My name is Cynthia Webster. I’ve just come from Mr Comstock’s office. I’m a writer for the Saturday Review, here on an interview about the Hillbilly. Mr Comstock said I might find Mr Gilbert here, the local feature writer.’ It was fast speech, and very proper.

  ‘Well,’ Rae said. ‘He’s settin right here in front of you.’

  Ms Webster turned to the turkey hunter. He seemed the obvious choice. The stitching in his leather outdoorsman jacket was sophisticated in
its placement. He wore expensive spectacles. ‘Mr Gilbert,’ she said, and held out her free hand.

  ‘Nope,’ the man said. He was playing disinterested now, had learned that doing so, combined with removing his wedding ring, attracted single women.

  Rae poured more coffee. ‘Next one down the line, honey,’ she said.

  Ms Webster regarded A.C. cautiously but apologetically. It was natural to assume his unimportance. Despite the suit, he was a local with lips that told of the absence of front teeth. ‘Pleasure,’ she said. They shook hands. ‘I’m down from New York just this morning. I wondered if I might interview you briefly. Your paper has caused quite a cultural interest in this region’s unique customs.’

  A.C. nodded and thought how glorious it was to see such words emerge from perfectly-formed lips. He found that he could not carry on with a lady of this magnitude in such a claustrophobic arena. ‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ he proposed.

  They did. And Ms Webster got her interview, which ran the following month. Readers of the Saturday Review fell in love with the two-man staff of the Appalachian newspaper then, and subscriptions kept coming. A.C. had charmed Ms Webster, and she often called him at the office to talk about city customs and country ones. Flat versus hill. She even spoke on a return visit, or the other way around. On him coming to the city that never slept.

  On April Fool’s Day, 1960, A.C. sat at his wide oak desk opposite Dorothea, practicing his copywriting skills. Mostly he was preoccupied with thoughts of Cynthia Webster. For almost two years, she’d flown in every couple months, at first under the guise of professional work, later personal. She kissed him on the third visit, despite his attempts to turn cheek. She loved him, and looked past the superficial, the mouth that had plagued him all his life. On the fourth visit, she stopped booking a hotel room.

  He was proofing a piece Comstock had written called ‘How to Make Your Own Drinkin’ Likker.’ It was, as usual, pristine and devoid of grammatical error. But A.C. couldn’t help but find fault in some of the moonshining advice. The fire under the mash seemed too high by this account. The suggestion to use parsnips instead of potatoes if it came to it rang false for quality. When Comstock had asked him to proof it, he’d eyed A.C. strange. Almost like he knew the man had himself brewed up mule kick. It had been another of their moments when it was evident that the country editor suspected his new employee had seen some things. Done some things. As always, both let the moment pass.