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The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
Glenn Taylor


There’s little room in this world for a moral manMeet Early “Trenchmouth“ Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and survive the taunts of others. In the hills of southern West Virginia, a boy grows up fast. Trenchmouth sips moonshine, handles snakes, pleasures women, and masters the rifle - a skill that lands him in the middle of the West Virginia coal wars. A teenaged union sniper, Trenchmouth is exiled to the backwoods of Appalachia’s foothills, where he spends his years running from the past. But trouble will sniff a man down, and an outlaw will eventually run home. Here, Trenchmouth Taggart’s story, like the best ballads, etches its mark deep upon the memory.









The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

M. Glenn Taylor












This one is for Margaret


I have gulled the pith from a sumac limb To play a tune that my blood remembers.

Louise McNeill




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#uaa93c553-aaac-5a94-8d65-93cf5d55237c)

Title Page (#ue35c25ef-aba5-5e15-b4f7-417a8069aeb7)

Dedication (#uf8029371-0a70-5610-972f-7c25e9500e65)

Epigraph (#uf592c083-12f0-534a-9abb-e98e65de5e99)

Prologue (#u60bc7a46-57bf-5a7d-8a89-800fd806950d)

BOOK ONE 1903-1921 (#u9f7602f8-d308-5ca0-bc17-c6c8c36e29c7)

Dedication (#u44d28ff3-eae6-53df-a1eb-d946af8ab836)

ONE The Woman Could Cure Ailments (#u99a908d1-479a-55f8-b02f-89141806f4e3)

TWO Here Came a Man (#udd8c6154-8120-5f3f-9736-629a44df7590)

THREE Climbing And Digging Came Natural (#uc11d44c7-699c-592f-a70b-41a8ba429872)

FOUR Frank Dallara Fashioned A Tool (#u8ae0dd6b-46b7-580c-8134-861b54c8fe29)

FIVE Beast Eye And Something Else (#ue364bcde-f01a-5fd4-93d9-5f1a5d7521a9)

SIX Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish (#u483b686b-4a24-504a-a0f4-10f3a1a17123)

SEVEN Folks Could Fall Hard (#u03d36ab7-3e3b-57ca-a76b-50f1e62bb4b4)

EIGHT Who Among Us Has Read The Signs (#u4c29e522-b928-51eb-ac90-249aecc42b8d)

NINE Women Shook And Shivered (#u2cf2f3ec-47b2-5932-a1e7-7847bf0ee264)

TEN The Powerful And The Ones Beneath (#u6be781ae-3404-544b-8ea6-c887f3018812)

ELEVEN Folks Will Dust You Quick As Look At You (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE Here Came A War Or Two (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN They Had Grips On Them (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN Strange Days And More Of The Same (#litres_trial_promo)

FIFTEEN Who Has Worn And Who Has Broken? (#litres_trial_promo)

BOOK TWO 1946-1961 (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)

SIXTEEN It was Regimented Living (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTEEN They Would Stare (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHTEEN Radio Saturday Night (#litres_trial_promo)

NINETEEN A Piker Had No Home (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY You Carried What You Could (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-ONE Wide Vision Running (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-TWO Writing Came Natural (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-THREE Kennedy Had A Way (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-FOUR Discovery Had Its Way (#litres_trial_promo)

BOOK THREE 1989-1993 (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-FIVE The Tri-State Dump (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-SIX Man Attacked, Man Robbed (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-SEVEN Goddamn Son Of A Bitch (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-EIGHT Boys Should Have Gotten Their Educations (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-NINE Ewart Smith Spoke In A Dream (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTY A Man Took It All To The Stage (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About The Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#ulink_64913b17-cbb0-5bb2-aa08-564d6dbfc8b6)


On December 3rd, 2010, the old man sewed his mouth shut with saltwater-rated fishing line. The sores and the throbbing were back. It was his 108th birthday, and it was the day Time magazine sent a reporter to his home in Warm Hollow, West Virginia. This was on account of the old man’s reputation, and on account of Pearl Thackery. Pearl Thackery was the oldest living West Virginian and had died the week prior, leaving the old man, a one time inventor, snake handler, cunnilinguist, sniper, woodsman, harmonica man, and newspaperman, as the oldest living Homo sapiens in the state.

He’d left a small, pinto bean-sized hole unsewn, so that he could ingest chicory coffee and spruce needle tea through a straw. So he could speak if he needed to. And so he could smoke his Chesterfields.

When the Time magazine reporter sat down across the kitchen table from him, the old man broke his vow of silence and mastered, in minutes, smoking and speaking simultaneously. It was a speech difficult to discern, but it was talking nonetheless. The reporter pushed the record button on his miniature, steel voice recorder. A red light the size of a tick lit up. The old man marveled at this invention. He stared at the little red circle until it went blurry there on the kitchen table. It entranced him. He spun a blown-glass ashtray with his plump-veined, purple-blotched hands. His skin was thin. A full white head of hair. His eyes and ears, though drooped and wrinkled, were still keen. He farted freely.

The reporter got down to business. ‘I’d like to ask you about your life, if I may,’ he said.

The old man leaned back in his split wood chair, then forward again. ‘You want me to bend your ear?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. But the bend I put on it won’t never heal. You’re liable to go deaf.’ He pronounced ‘deaf’ like ‘deef.’ It was a lot of voice from a little hole. He said, ‘I feel like that big small fella the Jewish actor played. Hoffman. Small Big Man. You seen it?’ He lit a cigarette and stuck it in the hole. Pulled white paper red. ‘Was a time I had but two talents,’ he said. ‘Back then it was speaking in tongues and pleasin women by way of their nether-regions.’

The reporter cleared his throat.

‘I come up with the phrase, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”’ This was a bald-faced lie. He said, ‘You may have heard along the way somewhere that I killed men.’ He considered the younger man, his hands and the way he held them on the table. His eyes. Then the old man bent his ear.



BOOK ONE 1903-1921 (#ulink_97e92a7a-6c6f-5199-a647-429ec70db91b)


Let any man shoot me with cannon or gun.

—Cap Hatfield




ONE The Woman Could Cure Ailments (#ulink_b9e4d07b-0039-5a71-a426-9cf83546e2ac)


When Early Taggart was baptized in the Tug River in 1903, he was two months old. His mother, whose husband had left her a week earlier, had got religion. She believed it right to bring lambs to the fold before they could crawl or sit up on their own. Before Satan could fill their little blood vessels with the seven deadly sins. It was these sins that had caused her husband to run off, that she now preached on to her twelve pound boy while he breastfed.

But it was February when she decided to baptize him, and no preacher would agree to it. ‘You’d have to break through the ice down there,’ the Methodist man said, ‘and that boy ain’t old enough to get wet in the head anyhow.’ So Mittie Ann Taggart did it herself. She punched through the inchthick ice with her shoe heel and held her baby boy by his thighs. She dunked his head like wash. He came up screaming.

She claimed he spoke to her then, spit water at her cheek. ‘Pretty as you please, pretty as you please,’ is what he said, according to Mittie Ann. Then he said, ‘Devil’s got a hold on God.’

She dropped him on the ice. He cracked through, went under and rode the current for a quarter mile. Then he kicked out onto the banks where a woman had melted through the ice washing a cast iron pot. This woman, Ona Dorsett, picked the boy up and blew her air in his mouth. She smacked his back until he colored up again, until he spit out the gray water through his nose holes. She wrapped him tight against her breastplate under a bearskin coat and took him home.

Mittie Ann Taggart went to the mayor. She demanded he call on all the preachers in the county to renounce Satan with a single cry of ‘Down with Beelzebub.’ When the mayor surmised she had dumped her newborn child in the river, he ordered her confined. The boy was at first presumed dead. There was talk of lynching Mittie Ann in public for what she’d done, hard talk considering she was a woman, and a white one at that. Then somebody said the widow Dorsett had the boy, was healthifying him like she had the other young one who lived with her up back of Warm Hollow. This was enough to calm the lynching talk, and Mittie Ann Taggart was transferred by horse and buggy to the Home for Incurables in Huntington. When she walked from the jail to the buggy, folks spat on her.

The widow Dorsett was thirty-one years old. A tall, dark-haired woman, strong-boned and plain. She had a three-year-old girl living with her. Girl’s name was Clarissa, and she had come to Ona Dorsett by way of a raped teenager who could not handle her situation and was running off to Charleston to get citified. Ona Dorsett had lost her husband in a mine cave-in in 1899. She’d never been able to reproduce. She’d spent her days tutoring children on how to read and write. That, and she helped her husband tend his moonshine still. When he was gone, she did less tutoring, more moonshining, and baby Clarissa was a welcome presence in her home.

The home was modest if not hazardous. A pioneer farmer had built it without the advantages of a permanent settler’s dwelling. This was a cabin of unhewn logs. Its mass of cracks was filled and refilled with grass and mud. The roof was clapboard. The cookstove kept the space warm, and the fireplace sent smoke up and out through a cat-and-clay chimney hand-laid with stones.

It was here that Early Taggart would grow into a boy and then into a man. Here with Ona Dorsett, a woman who could do most anything, it seemed. A woman whose livelihood was the sale of moonshine, though she used a middleman on a small commission since woman moonshiners were not taken seriously. As far as she knew, she was the only woman shiner in the state. And she was certainly the only woman able to ride her dead husband’s gelding of seventeen hands as if she’d been born equestrian. Ona Dorsett had once loped across uneven hill terrain and dropped a black bear on the move as it watched her, unaware that such a sight was possible. She’d lined up her Winchester rifle and sunk a shell in the beating heart of a three hundred pound animal, all while posting bareback and calculating trees, distance, the movement of the horse below her. She skinned and filleted the animal, cured his meat. With this, and the meat of deer, turkeys, pheasants, and squirrels, she was able to feed her two adopted children. Though she did not particularly enjoy it, she hunted regularly for them and took pride in her efficiency.

The woman could also cure ailments. She made fever-killer drinks from dogwood bark. If rheumatism visited her children, she bathed them in water she collected every year from a stream before sun-up on Ash Wednesday. For double rheumatism insurance, she’d turn their shoes upside down before bedtime. For coughs, she had procured a respectable stockpile of Virginia snakeroot. Hacking coughs meant swallowing the unmistakably bitter bears-foot tea. Inflammation of the chest required horseradish and mustard poultices to aid in breathing, and she could wrap these in such a way as to provide instant mother-comfort.

Ona Dorsett took care of the two children given to her by chance. She fed and clothed them and fixed all their ailments, save one. The boy was afflicted with a mouth disease so early on and so strongly, that the Widow could do nothing for him. A week after she found him in the river, now fully recovered and wrapped tight in heavy cotton blankets and the skin of a deer, Early Taggart began to scream through the night. He worked tirelessly at busting through his heavy wrap. The Widow couldn’t figure it out until his gums were caught momentarily in the light of her lantern. The gums were bloody red, swollen and full of holes like anthills made of skin. She had the doctor come in, a man who had known her husband well, a man who drank a good bit of her moonshine. Doctor Warble said the boy had calcium overloads, that he was actually sprouting teeth at two and a half months, five ahead of schedule. But this was not all. The doctor surmised that the gums had already split, that the boy had already been teething, at the time of his attempted drowning. He further surmised that coal sludge in the water had infected the openings. This infection had somehow evolved into what resembled an incurable oral disease in older folks, a disease that left gums eternally rotten and bloody, teeth decaying and odorous. Such a sight reminded Doctor Warble, who had been a medic with the Rough Riders at the battle of San Juan Hill only five years prior, of the mouth disease he’d encountered among Spanish soldiers, dead and agape in their trenches. It was beyond explanation that this disease could occur in an infant, but it had. The boy had Trenchmouth.




TWO Here Came a Man (#ulink_f04fdcb3-472d-5a36-a94f-e2e513aa802a)


The mouth was a curious orifice. When it ailed a body, its throb was merciless as a hammer in the hands of John Henry. Headaches were mere discomforts – nagging, small pain otherwise ignored. But this disease of the tooth and gum that had afflicted the baby boy, this was oral torment. It was evident to Ona Dorsett that Doctor Warble’s pain powder would not do. She took to singing to the baby boy, calling him by the word Doctor Warble had used: Trenchmouth. She decided he’d keep his given surname. She also took to dipping a finger in the house moonshine jug, rubbing that finger across the little one’s gums and fanged teeth. When she did it each night, his agonized wails subsided. He was quiet. He was asleep. This became ritual.

Dorsett’s moonshine was of no ordinary hill recipe. The dead Dorsett man had cultivated a process begun by his father before him. Ona had further enhanced the still, its capabilities. She had thrown in some new ingredients. The results were what some would call miraculous. Men paid top dollar for that shine, though they knew not where it originated. The middleman who sold it to them had taken an oath of holy secrecy to the dead Dorsett’s widow, and he intended to keep it. It was said a drop of the stuff could spin your brain like a top, feather-tickle your pecker hard. This mule-kick possessed no odor.

Ona took it herself, once at Trenchmouth and Clarissa’s bedtime, once at her own. She’d long since realized her blend had none of the unfortunate effects other blends had. On the contrary, Dorsett shine caused her to read at night, fortified her vocabulary. It made things clear as the new glass windowpanes town folks had. Headaches and slurred speech were not part of the bargain. The only physical change an observer would take note of occurred in the eyeball. Pupils, upon first swig and for a minute thereafter, spread wide to the edge of the iris. Exploded like perfect black planets. This gave the drinker a look of animal capability. It was beast-eye.

Ona Dorsett sat at her kitchen table on a Saturday night in May of 1903, her pupils gradually rescinding to normal. By lantern light, she read a book called Following the Equator by Mr Samuel Clemens. It was near eleven o’clock when a knock came at the door. She looked up to the loft where the little ones slept sound, then rose to answer. On her way to the door, she took her Remington Double Derringer out of a big empty flour tin. She held it behind her back when she answered.

A man stood before her. He was dirty, his clothes nearly worn past their life expectancy, all tears and patches. Ona’s dress and the fabrics she put on her children were not without flaw, nor were they contemporary, but this man was something else. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. When he smiled there were cigar-wrap pieces the size of cockroaches in his yellow teeth. ‘How do missus,’ he said.

‘What can I do for you?’ Ona said softly.

The man looked behind her into the house. His eyes rolled left, right, up, and down like he wanted to gain his bearings but would never remember them. A habit of the sharp-eyed gone sour. ‘You got your youngins up there in the loft, I reckon?’ From where he stood outside, he looked up where he couldn’t see.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘You can drop whatever pea shooter you got tucked in your spine bone there.’ His smile widened. There was sweat under the brim of his brown slouch hat though it was cold outside. ‘Just put it off on yonder floor there. I ain’t lookin to take it from you,’ he said.

Ona pulled the gun out to her side, feigned dropping it for a second before she swung it around to his neck. He caught her wrist with his left hand before she reached his shoulder. She did not fire. The man reared back and slammed his forehead against the bridge of her nose. Bone crunched like thin cornstalk. Ona hit the floorboards.

While the man regarded the pistol and rubbed at his forehead, she fought blackness and the little popping stars that broke through it. He was re-positioning his hat when she got most of her sight back and pulled a stag-handle knife from her felt-button boots. She came up off the floor like the serpent’s strike and had the eight-inch blade buried in his neck before he could discern the occurrence. She was silent as she pulled and pushed the handle made of deer antler, maneuvered it so that it nearly went in one side and came out the other.

His knees never gave. He stood there, gun dropped to the floor, one arm limp at his side and the other touching his neck and the thing piercing it like a kabob. He gurgled a little. Said something to her that she couldn’t quite get. He was only one foot inside the door when she put her boot sole against his stomach and forced him backwards onto the dirt. She put the pistol back in the flour container, took a belt off the house jar, and went outside. She stood over the man, dead now, a wide stream of blood traversing down the incline beneath his head. She said nothing, though she had an unexplainable urge to spit in his eyes. Instead, she went around back and got the shovel.

Ona lashed heavy rope around the mule she had to smack to make move. The other end wrapped the base of the outhouse. The mule, called Beechnut, strained his old, nicked haunches and pulled the outhouse a good six feet away from its designation over the hole. Ona told him good boy. The hole was half-filled. Two months worth of shit and piss. The Widow had her work cut out. Widen it by four feet, deepen it by three. She began digging the man’s grave.

It was just the time of spring when the earth was finally diggable.

Before she rolled him into the hole three hours later, she went through his pockets. A half dollar and a mouth harp, silver and worn, but well-made. Cheap cigar and kitchen matches, loose, no package. A folded photograph of a woman in a lace-fringed dress and fur hat. She tossed the photograph of the woman into the grave, then rolled the man in on top of it. He went still at the bottom, belly up. There was loose dirt on the end of her shovel. She held it above his face, dropped half on one open eye, half on the other. ‘I know you,’ she said. The man looked like he had on straight temple spectacles, the glass lenses tinted mud black.

He’d rolled easy into his new home five feet below the outhouse basin. The earth went smoothly back to where it originated, patted down without much trouble like it had never moved. Ona re-dug the waste-hole and Beechnut hefted the outhouse to its original location. She gave him an apple which he ate with finick.

Inside, Ona climbed the ladder to the loft before washing her hands. The two of them were there, the baby boy in his wicker bassinet, the three-year-old girl on the horsehair mattress. The Widow stared at them for ten solid minutes before she descended the stairs and washed up with cold well-water over the tub. She put on a sleeping gown that had been her mother-in-law’s, ascended the ladder again and slept between her two children, marking the patterns of their sleep breathing in her mind, smiling when the inhales and exhales matched up. Matching her own to theirs.




THREE Climbing And Digging Came Natural (#ulink_67645886-d5a9-5d84-b544-4a9048ffd520)


By the spring of 1906, it was evident that three things separated Trenchmouth from the ordinary two-year-old. There was of course his oral ailment, which required higher doses of nightly moonshine as his weight swelled. But the other two things were remarkable in an entirely different manner. The boy could climb and dig in such a way that only boys thrice his age had mastered. He scampered up hillsides like a Tibetan antelope, and his hands dove into mud like a posthole digger. ‘Climbin and diggin is what comes natural to boys,’ the Widow Dorsett would say, ‘and this one here is more natural than any.’

Trenchmouth buried things. Found things too. An 1859 Indian Head penny. The skeletal structure of a barn cat with a .22 hole in its skull. Seventeen clay marbles.

On a warm, overcast day in early May, the boy did what he often did while he was supposed to nap. He pulled himself up and out of the crib the Widow had made, and he descended the ladder from the loft to the main floor. Two-year-olds shouldn’t – and most couldn’t – do these things, but such was the boy’s stock, determined. His mother and sister were out knocking tomato worms off newly sprouted yellow Hillbillies. Trenchmouth reached up for the front door latch, opened, and ran for it.

He was a big boy at two years and four months. Long since off the diaper and expertly outhouse-trained. On this day, he felt the morning’s oatmeal churning so he headed for the backhouse, as Ona called it. The half quarter moon cut-out was lined with cobweb. Inside, the seat was two-holed, big for the Widow, small for Trenchmouth and Clarissa. He perched himself. Afterwards, like he was taught, the boy reached in the scoop bag and dropped lime down the hole, on top of his business. Something always caused him to run out of there afterwards, some stench he could not place.

He could heave rocks. While Ona and Clarissa tended plants, Trenchmouth stood in the barn and threw rocks and dirt clods at Beechnut the mule. The animal swished his tail and rocked his head side to side. He generally didn’t care for being hit with such things, but he took it. Blinked his eyes. Snorted. The boy laughed and clomped his way to the tack room. He knew the Widow kept a paper sack of sugar cubes in a saddle bag high up. That climbing came in handy.

Out back of the barn, the boy sucked on a cube, then set it down and watched the flies come to it. The flies only landed on licked sugar cubes, never dry. Little Trenchmouth could already figure such things as useful somehow. He buried more clay marbles in a quick-dug hole next to another hiding the jawbone of a fox. He’d come back for all these in time. They’d all have their uses.

When he walked up to them, they were bent at the waist, Ona strong and middle-aged and wiry, Clarissa a miniature version of all these things. It was as if they were blood kin. Their dresses were made from old window curtains.

‘Get to bug knockin,’ the Widow told Trenchmouth. She’d long since stopped scolding for naptime escapes.

‘Get to bug knockin,’ Clarissa said directly. She liked to mimic her mother. She was tall and thin, not quite grade school aged, but already taller than the first and second graders, girls and boys both.

Trenchmouth made a noise at them not unlike a cat’s call before a fight. Deep and verging on howl. The boy was gifted physically, and he could figure the way things worked quick, but he could not, or did not, speak a lick. Just moaned and howled and grunted, and, when he really got bothered, smacked his own head on both sides with little open palms.

He began knocking worms and bugs with his little squared-off fingernails. He bent at the knees. Concentrated. Licked his rotten gums and teeth and stared wide-eyed. But something bad got in the wind again and he stood up, sniffed. The smell made his lip quiver. It was too much for his olfactory to take, something awful he’d not caught wind of so strong before. The Hillbilly tomato in front of him went blurry, filled his vision with red, and his ears went to ringing. Terror took him, sudden and unexplained. He spat and grunted and ran for his mother, clinging to her rough-stitched muslin skirt until the gray hem ripped and she shook him loose like a wet dog does water.




FOUR Frank Dallara Fashioned A Tool (#ulink_883a145b-8632-56a6-a6a3-c66f8a2c9ffc)


Once every three months, Ona Dorsett took her children to the Wholesale Grocers in Williamson for evaporated milk, navy beans, sardines, table salt, and toilet soaps, among other things. Once, she’d bought them a nibble of Mungers Fancy Chocolate because the shine business was especially good in winter months.

Just before Thanksgiving 1909, the three of them made a trip. Some folks had Model Ts by then, but the Widow and her two children rode in a canopy-top horse wagon.

Trenchmouth was nearly six, his sister nine, and they couldn’t have been more different. She was in school, he wasn’t yet. She was brave of speech to adults and peers alike, while he spoke as little as possible. This was due not to any lack of intellect, but instead a desire not to show folks the inside of his mouth. So it came to be that when he spoke, he did so with his lips curled over the swelled gums and crooked teeth. A mumbler, some would say. An otherwise good, handsome, brown-haired boy who spoke like someone had soldered his jawbones in such a way as to prohibit full opening.

In the grocers, Clarissa handed her mother items for the sack while Trenchmouth sprinted the aisles, his boots leaving marks when he turned corners. He wasn’t looking where he was headed on one such turn and ended up with a face full of pantleg. From his seat on the tiled floor, he looked up to see who he’d plowed into. ‘I’m sorry sir,’ he mumbled.

The man said nothing. He was tall and thin, and though not yet thirty years old, his face housed wrinkles rivaling a bulldog’s. He stood stooped. His hands carried the permanent black residue of an undergrounder, a miner, just as his father’s had before him. His father had been born in Italy, and it would be another generation before the last name morphed pronunciation, quit carrying the unpleasant ring of an outsider. When he smiled at Trenchmouth, his teeth looked nearly as bad off as the boy’s, and this was comforting. ‘You’re liable to outrun a coal train ain’t you son?’ he said. He was pulling pieces of smooth carved wood from a sugar sack. The wood pieces were lashed with rubber.

Trenchmouth watched him place his wares on the store’s shelf, one by one, lined up.

‘Slingshots,’ the man told him. He looked at the sling shot in his hand for a moment, thought, then handed it to the boy, who had stood back up. ‘Go knock Goliath on his behind,’ he said. Trenchmouth wanted to take the weapon, but he didn’t. Until the man took the boy’s hand in his own and placed it there. Then the man, whose name was Frank Dallara, finished putting his goods on the shelf. ‘They bring in a nickel from most boys. You got a deal on that there.’

‘Thank you sir,’ Trenchmouth said.

Frank Dallara stared at the awkward mouth, the way it hid its own parts. Then he looked the boy in the eye and said, ‘I’d bet my last dollar you’ll be a dead-eye with that weapon in one week. I can see it in you.’

The Widow came up behind him, Clarissa beside her. ‘Frank,’ she said.

‘Missus Dorsett,’ he said and tipped his hat. Something or someone had taken a bite out of the brim. ‘I reckoned this one was yours. Grow like weeds, don’t they?’

‘They do.’

Dallara turned his attention to Clarissa. ‘My boy Frederick is in your class isn’t he young lady?’

‘Yessir he is,’ Clarissa said. ‘He doesn’t say much, but when he does it’s not mean like some other boys.’

‘Well, glad to hear it. He speaks highly of you.’

For once, Clarissa had no response. Her cheeks went a little pink.

‘You’re selling goods Frank?’ Ona said.

‘I’m out of the mines, done for good with it. Too many gettin killed for one contraption foul up or another.’ He looked at her and then at the floor, like he shouldn’t have said such a thing in the presence of a mine widow. ‘I sell these for a little extra, but I’m framing construction over at the Urias Hotel in Matewan.’

‘Well, good. I reckon that’s safer.’

Trenchmouth pulled back on the rubber and extended his arm. He squinted one eye like he’d lined up this shot a hundred times before. He didn’t let the rubber snap back, just stood there still as a statue.

‘I told him I could see it plain as daybreak,’ Dallara said. ‘This boy’s a dead-eye. A crackshot if I’ve ever seen one.’




FIVE Beast Eye And Something Else (#ulink_5c062d52-0424-502f-857d-8761335bf57b)


1911 was to be a bad year for the isolated, hill-spiked terrain of southern West Virginia. Death and discovery of the unpleasant would visit more than one family in the coalfields, and Trenchmouth, aged eight years, would be shaped by all of it.

A third talent had gotten in his bones, natural as the digging and climbing, which he still practiced daily. Frank Dallara’s words had come to fruition, and Trenchmouth could knock a crow off a sugar maple branch from sixty feet using nothing but his eyes and that little wooden wrist rocket he’d picked up at the grocers.

Frank Dallara took the boy out on weekends for practice. ‘Ancient man couldn’t always carry a bow and arrow or a spear,’ he said. ‘They needed something lightweight.’ Accuracy was studied through repetition. ‘David protected his sheep with the same contraption you got in your hand, except Mr Goodyear give us cooked rubber to work with,’ Frank Dallara liked to say. ‘Old David slew a giant with it too.’ You could find stones anywhere, in any size. Small, smooth ones for line drive precision. Big, heavy ones for high-arced momentum. Dallara was a miner and a carpenter by trade, but he should have been a physicist the way he tutored Trenchmouth on velocity, gravity, and inertia.

He’d put his arm around the boy after a particularly good shot, as if Trenchmouth were his own. Like most, he called him ‘T,’ but it sounded better somehow. It didn’t seem like much to Frank Dallara, but to the eight year old, it was everything.

The boy was taught on guns too. The Widow taught him safety first, everything else second. She schooled him on a hammerless 10 gauge that had been her husband’s. Frank Dallara let him get used to a .22 rifle belonging to his boy Frederick. The three of them went squirrel hunting on Sundays, and afterwards, each and every time, Clarissa and Frederick, by then almost twelve, made eyes at one another. Talked by themselves on the porch for a while.

This made Trenchmouth a little mad. There were three reasons why. The first was a natural propensity for protecting his sister, younger or older did not factor. The second was a distaste for the bland nature of Frederick Dallara. He had no fire in him. Was good in school, but never hopped a moving train. When other boys caught and skinned blacksnakes or threw bullfrogs at the Model Ts in town from hidden launching spots, Fred Dallara always got quiet and went home to study. He was a bore, and Trenchmouth didn’t like bores. He wanted to be in it anytime and everywhere, and he had the scars to prove it. The third reason Trenchmouth was bothered by his non-blood sister’s flirtations with the other boy was simple: she was non-blood, and this meant he could be there for her the way Fred Dallara wanted to be. Trenchmouth was a little bit in love with Clarissa, as much as an eight-year-old can be.

One Sunday evening in winter, standing by lantern light on the Widow’s front lawn, Trenchmouth, Frank, and Fred cleaned the four fox squirrels they’d bagged that afternoon. They cut them around the middle and peeled back the skins. Inside, Ona heated up some bacon drippings on top of the black Acme cook stove. Clarissa watched from a window until the squirrels were halved and quartered and so on, then she came outside. It was the kind of cold out that creeps into you, takes you by surprise. ‘Y’all need help?’ she said.

‘We’ve got her just about done,’ Frank Dallara said.

The almost twelve-year-olds made eyes. Trenchmouth watched them.

When he and Frank Dallara took the little legs and abdomens inside to rinse and remove buckshot, Fred and Clarissa stayed put in front of the house. From inside the kitchen, the boy could see them. They kissed.

Trenchmouth was up and toward the door like he’d sat on a tack. He didn’t slow once outside. He took the bigger boy down by driving his right shoulder into the hips. Once on the ground, while a confused Clarissa looked down at them with her hands to her mouth, Trenchmouth straddled Fred and commenced to fist pumping. He was like an out of control oil drill, swinging away, up and down, and when Fred Dallara finally grasped what was happening and threw the younger boy off, his nose and lips were split and leaking crimson fast. They both sat on their butts. Clarissa was about to lean down and check on the boy whose lips she’d just kissed, and Fred was about to lurch at his attacker, when Trenchmouth, squatting now like he might come back for more, squinted his eyes to almost nothing, pulled back his forever-covering lips to reveal the mess of sores and bulges and sharp crooked calcium, and hissed. In the low light of the lantern, he made a sound reserved for mountain cats with their backs against a rock wall. Then he shot forward like one and sunk his diseased teeth into the left cheek of Fred Dallara. The boy wailed something awful.

Trenchmouth ran for the woods.

He didn’t come back until they were gone. Until the Widow had made a wet snuff poultice wrap for Frederick’s face. She and Frank Dallara didn’t speak a word while they tended to him. Fred choked back a confused cry. And Clarissa went to her bed in the loft and stared up at the wood beams.

Frank Dallara did speak one thing before he left that night, and from his hiding spot behind the outhouse, Trenchmouth heard him. ‘Your boy ought not to have done what he did,’ Frank told Ona Dorsett. ‘I like him, treat him like my own, but what he done here is something else.’ The something else he spoke on was more than protecting a sister from puppy love.

The Widow said nothing. Trenchmouth could hear the disappointment in his mother’s silence, in the voice of the man he regarded as his Daddy, and it got to him.

They all read the newspaper. The Widow had made sure her two little ones were plenty literate by six years. A man called Orb brought the Williamson Daily News to them every Thursday. He was seventy-four years old and he liked to climb mountains and descend into hollows, but only if he had a destination, a nickel coming his way for delivering goods. On an early January Thursday, they’d heard most of what was coming to them already from folks walking by, looking to gossip about death. But, when old Orb rapped at their door that evening, none of them, not Ona, Clarissa, or Trenchmouth, expected those words on the page.

Trenchmouth’s reading needed the most practice, so he read aloud to the other two while they strung half-runners. The first two stories weren’t much more than the tragedy that had come their way in breezy gossip the day before. ‘Eight killed,’ Trenchmouth recited. ‘Thacker. Eight miners are dead – two Americans and six Italians – as the result of the derailing of a mine car in the Lick Fork mine of the Red Jacket Coal Company.’ The derailing had knocked mine props loose and unleashed a precipitation of heavy slate on the men. The article ended by giving the mine owner’s name, and lamenting that the mine itself was ‘badly wrecked.’

Clarissa stood up, holding her dress in her fingertips like a satchel, weighted down with the throwaway ends of beans. She walked gingerly like this to the pail used for hog slop, dumped them in. Trenchmouth read the next one. ‘Cables Broke. Bluefield. Eight men were killed and two seriously injured on an incline in a mine near here. The men were…’ he’d come upon a word he couldn’t sound out, but he was a determined boy…‘ascending the incline in a coal car when the cable broke allowing cars loaded with coal to shoot down the plane and crash into the ten men. Eight of the victims were buried beneath tons of coal and instantly killed.’

‘Eight men in two separate accidents. That’s something,’ Clarissa said.

The Widow did not look up from her stringing. ‘Don’t make something out of nothing, Clarissa. There isn’t no plan in such filth.’

‘Moonshine charge,’ Trenchmouth read. His mother looked up at him. ‘Huntington. Mrs Caroline Carpenter, 50, of Burdette, Putnam County, said to be the only woman distiller in West Virginia, was arrested and lodged in jail to await the action of the next federal jury. It is alleged by federal officers that Mrs Carpenter operated on a place at her home that was the only oasis in the Putnam County district, and from her illicit sales of liquor netted a large sum during the past few months.’

The Widow stood and dumped her bean heads as her daughter had done. She wiped her hands together. ‘Some folks don’t keep their money close to their skin, I reckon,’ she said. ‘But children, we’ve got to be more careful than ever now. Got to let them keep on thinking there’s but one woman shinin in the state.’ She told them to look at her and they did. ‘It’s time to tombstone it again for a while.’ This meant whiskey headstones. It meant hiding moonshine in a hollowed marker of the dead at the Methodist Church cemetery where the bootlegger would pick it up.

Trenchmouth looked down at his paper and read silently. When his mother told him to look back up at her, he didn’t. She hadn’t spoken her full mind on the seriousness of the change coming down on her livelihood. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘you’d be smart to listen.’

Still, he read the ink. ‘Disastrous fire at Matewan,’ he said. ‘One man dead.’ Tears were coming up now. It was hard to read, but he did. ‘Soon after passenger train number 2 left Matewan about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, fire was discovered in the Urias Hotel, inside the saloon building owned by Anse Pilcher, just across the street from where the recently burned Belmont Hotel stood, under reconstruction. Frank Dallara (Italian), forty, was burned to death after entering the Urias Hotel from across the street, where he was working as a builder. George Bowens, another worker burned considerably about the arms, said Dallara was attempting to save a child that was unaccounted for.’ The boy did not read on aloud. Only to himself. None of it mattered from there anyway; the child wasn’t in the building, folks’ wounds were dressed at the Y.M.C.A. hospital, the entire town burned to the ground, and so forth. But Trenchmouth had read the words about the man who’d taken him in, looked at him real, and been disappointed by his savagery just four nights prior. And now he was dead.

The boy ran out the front door.

When the Widow found him, he was under a birch tree, shaking from the kind of cry that has no sound. She’d brought with her a small luggage bag filled with jars of moonshine. A woman sat in jail for this juice. It was time to clear the house stash. From the bag she pulled a small canning jar. It was half full of the strongest moonshine she had. For a moment, she just stood over him. He couldn’t look up at her, knew it wasn’t for boys to cry like this. She bent and brushed at the hair on his forehead, her fingertips working in such a way as only a mother’s fingertips can. ‘Tonight you’ll sip a little extra for your pain,’ she said, unscrewing the lid.

Through his shaky inhales and exhales, he managed to swallow a little, and it calmed him. The Widow kept at rubbing his face, his cheeks, his neck, until he nearly fell asleep on the spot. She took back the jar, nipped it herself, and pulled him up by the hand. ‘Let’s get to the cemetery before nine,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go to school tomorrow.’

Once there, they worked. There was no time for crying. You had to look out for the law, for folks visiting their dead. You had to find the four foot tombstone marked with the name Mary Blood, dig under it a little, and unearth the hollow metal casing awaiting its delivery. It was paranoid work, the best kind to put a mind off sorrow.

But sorrow always came back. That night, long past midnight, long past the pain-numbing effect of the shine, Trenchmouth stirred in his bed. It seemed to the boy that the world was burning, that men were being pulled to its center to die, and that he somehow was responsible. It also seemed that the air inside the house was unbreathable. So he descended the ladder and went outside. He wore nothing but his nightclothes and socks.

It didn’t take long for another scent to embed itself in his nose. It was the same one he’d gotten hold of that day knocking bugs in the garden so many years before. On this night, with the miners dead and Mr Dallara burned alive, he almost recognized it. The smell of rot and regret. Of meeting the maker unnaturally.

He tracked it liked the Widow had taught him to night track deer. The aroma of shit and functioning glands. But this was something else. His nose led him to the outhouse, then to the mound next to it, then to a third mound further down. Trenchmouth bent to one knee and inhaled hard. It wasn’t bowel movements his nose had followed.

Out there, it was bone cold.

A boy his size could work a shovel just fine. He didn’t possess much weight to bury its edge, but he jumped up and down on the thing, bruising the bare arches of his feet, enough to make headway in an hour’s time. Somehow, despite the frozen crust of earth, Trenchmouth broke through. He always had been able to dig what others couldn’t. He got below the petrified mess of eight-year-old human waste, deep below it after a couple more hours. It was then that he noticed something small and gray in the half light of his lantern. He bent to it, held it up to his eye. It was a man’s thumb.

Trenchmouth didn’t scream or throw the thing back. He bent again and unearthed the hand from which his shovel had severed the digit. It was the color of nothing, and the skin was full of holes, tunnels for unknown breeds of burrowing insects and filth bugs long since full. The clothes were intact if not brittle. And once Trenchmouth used his fingers to dig and brush away the remaining dirt, a face looked back at him, sunken and scared. Hollow and clay red. He stared at the face, and as he put his hand to his nose again, the hills around him seemed to shift at their foundations and the trees and the sky went red. Then all of it, everything, almost fell away to nothing.

The boy had an unexplainable urge to spit in the dead man’s empty eyes.

He sat next to the buried man until sunrise. When Ona Dorsett walked out to the barn clutching her bearskin wrap around her chest, she did not act surprised to see him there. She went back in for his twilled wool coat and boots, handed them to the boy in silence. His fingers, nearly numb, pulled the warmth on slow and awkward. He didn’t look at her.

‘You know who he is?’ she said.

‘No ma’am.’

‘How he come to be buried here?’

‘No ma’am.’

‘I kilt him.’

In those times, in those parts, everybody, no matter what their upbringing or education, used the word ‘kilt.’ ‘He got kilt cause some folks need killin,’ was a phrase heard once or twice annually, and hearing the Widow speak something like it was less monstrous than a child might expect.

Trenchmouth stared at his boot laces.

‘Ain’t you going to ask if I had good reason?’ She scanned the foothills circular, pivoting in her stance.

He waited, then spoke, ‘I reckon you wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t.’

‘That man there is your daddy,’ she said.

The boy rolled those lips over his teeth in such a way that they might break through. He sneezed, a fit of them really, for no good reason.

‘He come to take you when you wasn’t but a baby, a little baby,’ the Widow said. ‘He come drunk and wild and unfit to father anything breathing. Your father was a bad man.’ The condensation of her speech hung heavy in the air.

Trenchmouth stood. ‘He would have taken me from you,’ he said. He looked at her like a son looks at his mother when he needs more than words.

‘He would have.’

‘He would have kilt you to do it.’

‘He would have.’ She pulled the dead man’s mouth harmonica from her shirt pocket, gave it to the boy. ‘His,’ she said. ‘You’re liable to make somethin good of it.’ The boy looked at the little silver and wood instrument and felt sick at the thought of putting it to his mouth. She pulled him to her so that he hugged her around the hips, his face in her belly. An eight-year-old can know a great many things, and at the same time very few. That morning, at an outhouse burying ground, Trenchmouth Taggart knew he had been raised up right by the only woman who could’ve done the raising. He knew he’d most likely be dead or starved were it not for her. And he knew, that since the time of his last linen diaper some six years earlier, for every day of his young life, he’d been pissing and shitting on his very own daddy. That sat just fine with him, he decided.

That evening, the Widow sat down with her children and told them things she never had before. The time was right. Due.

She told Clarissa, among other things: ‘Your mother was too young, and most likely had got herself where she was by way of a drunk man’s forceful hand.’ The Widow knew things about the young mother, things like her name, Cleona Brook. Her whereabouts, Huntington by way of Charleston. Her profession, actress. The Widow even knew that Cleona was starring in a current production of Girl of the Golden West at the Huntington Theatre, less than a hundred miles of track away.

It wasn’t coincidence that she turned to Trenchmouth that evening and spoke of similar knowledge, similar geography. While Clarissa whimpered next to the washtub in the kitchen, confused by discovery, and while the sunlight through the windows died and the room went orange and soft, the boy’s practicing mother told him of his birth mother. ‘She is in a room alone at the Home for Incurables in Huntington,’ she said.‘She pulls off her own fingernails. Thinks Satan is among us.’ Her name was spoken aloud with less sympathy than the girl’s mother. ‘Mittie Ann Taggart.’

The Norfolk & Western ran a 1:50 p.m. daily out of Williamson. Columbus and Cincinnati, all points west and northwest. But the train stopped in Kenova and Huntington, and Ona Dorsett trusted it would be good for her children, aged eight and twelve, to strike out on their own for an overnighter. Children were babied too much, that was her thinking.

Moonshine sales bankrolled the excursion of course, and the finger sandwiches in the café car were unlike anything Trenchmouth had tasted before. While he chewed, he almost let his teeth show.

All of this, the fancy train car, the fancy finger food, would take the boy’s mind off Frank Dallara.

Huntington was the big city. A train conductor had taken pity on the two, drawn them up maps on paper napkins. ‘The Theatre and the Asylum?’ he’d said. ‘Not your most visited sites for out-of-towners, but easy to git to anyhow.’

The two split up at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 20th Street, Trenchmouth heading north to the nut bin on the hill, Clarissa east to the theatre. It was cold out, and she’d held her little brother’s hand since getting off the train, something he’d never let her do at home. Walking alone and looking back at one another, it seemed like they’d always clasped hands till now.

The Huntington Theatre was of good size, all intricately carved maple, painted gold and red and blue. The red velvet curtain was stained and the hem needed repair. Clarissa asked a woman with a cigarette where she might find Cleona Brook.

‘How old are you?’ the woman answered. She spoke through her nose, wore a chicken feather in her silvery hair, and spat specks of cigarette tobacco between her tongue and top teeth.

‘Twelve,’ Clarissa said.

‘Too young to be told the truth, too old to lie to.’ The woman pointed to a door beside the stage and walked away.

Clarissa walked down a hallway lit by a single gaslight on the wall. Behind one closed door she heard moans. A woman or a man’s, she couldn’t tell. The next door was open, and inside, a young lady with thin wrists smacked color into her cheeks in front of a mirror. Her hair was pulled back with an elaborate assortment of pins. ‘Excuse me,’ Clarissa said.

The woman turned in her chair and looked Clarissa up and down. She sat with her legs spread, wearing nothing but a brassiere, stockings, and a pair of men’s shortpants. ‘Do you have something for a cough?’ she said to Clarissa. ‘I’ve got a terrible cough.’ She faked a hacking sound.

‘No ma’am.’ Clarissa thought about moving on down the hall. ‘Are you Cleona Brook?’

‘Cleopatra Brook. Who told you Cleona? You from the apothecary’s?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m Clarissa. My adoptive mother is Missus Ona Dorsett from Mingo County. She—’

‘Ona Dorsett. I know that name. Was she the one that died from gonorrhea up at Detroit? The Shakespearean?’ She looked around herself wildly, presumably for a production poster on the brown walls littered in newsprint and cheap fliers and dried up flowers pierced by nails.

‘No ma’am, Missus Dorsett raised me after you dropped me off to her. I was just a baby, you were young yourself.’ Clarissa was finding it difficult to speak with her normal level of confidence.

‘Puddin, I wasn’t ever young,’ the woman said. She turned back to the mirror and snorted. Spat what came up into a trash bin next to her foot. ‘I was Cleona Brook, that’s for certain, but I wasn’t never young. I didn’t have no babies in Mingo County. No, no, no babies in Mingo.’ She smiled then, cocked her head so that she could see her daughter in the mirror’s reflection. ‘Got me some babies now though. One named Jack, one named Phillip, and another Bill. All of em babies even though they’re grown men. Do what I tell em to, cry when I yell at em. You know, I smack those three and they call me mama, kiss my feet? It’s a real dream.’ She opened the drawer at her chest and put in a dip of snuff. ‘Let me see your teeth, girl.’

Clarissa pulled back her lips. She tried to make it look like a smile.

‘White as white can be I guess. Hold on to that,’ Cleona said.

‘You’re my mother,’ Clarissa said.

‘Like hell I am.’

The show was in two hours. Clarissa watched her mother shut the door with her toes. She had to step back to keep it from hitting her in the face. A fat man swept the hall on his hands and knees. His broomstick had broken off to a height of eight inches, and he swept the dust side to side, breathing it in down low on the floor and coughing it right back out.

The Home for Incurables was a big stone building with over two hundred rooms. A hair-lipped nurse with calves the size of cantaloupes took to Trenchmouth, and though it was not customary to get his type of visitor, his type of story, she led him to Mittie Ann Taggart’s room anyway. His obvious mouth problem reminded her of her own, and she decided to let the boy see his mother, provided she could supervise them. ‘She’s especially active today,’ the nurse said. ‘Woke up hollerin something even louder than usual. Even took a swing at Betty.’ She explained to Trenchmouth that Mittie Ann would be in restraints on her bed, that it was for her own good, and that she might say some unpleasantries in his company.

‘Yes ma’am,’ he said.

They could hear her from the end of the corridor. Speaking in tongues, no doubt. When the nurse led the boy in, Mittie Ann went silent. She stared at the ceiling, which was covered in dried-up peanut butter balls. Trenchmouth looked at them, then at the nurse. ‘Dessert,’ she told him. ‘Mittie Ann don’t believe in dessert.’ The window shade was drawn. His mother was sweaty and unwrinkled and green under the eyes and cheekbones.

‘I knowed you was comin, so I baked you a shit cake,’ she said, still staring up. Despite her arm and leg restraints, she was able to turn her hips to the side, revealing a brown stain in her white gown.

‘That’s no way to talk or act in front of a boy,’ the nurse said. She pulled a towel from the bedside table and hid the woman’s midsection with it. Trenchmouth covered his nose and tried not to cry.

‘He’s no boy,’ Mittie Ann said. ‘He’s Beelzebub’s offspring. Child of the one sent down to fire.’

‘That’s just the nonsense you woke up hollerin, Missus Taggart. It’s got nothin to do with him.’

‘It is him. I woke up hollerin on him cause I knowed he was comin. You figure pretty slow, don’t you lips?’

The nurse looked at her shoes.

Trenchmouth started to say something, but couldn’t.

‘I once knew a boy like you,’ his mother said. Then she turned and looked at the drawn window shade. Dust floated in the crack of sunlight. ‘I can see through things, like this window shade.’ It was quiet then on the third floor of the mental hospital. ‘I tried not to see through a little baby boy when he was plain as day an abomination, but he spat at me and spoke to me in the English tongue, but it wasn’t English, just sounded like it on the river’s air. Can you imagine, a baby talkin at two months?’ The nurse’s hands shook, and she stuck them in her armpits to stop it.

‘I got mouth disease on account of river water,’ Trenchmouth said. It wasn’t much louder than a whisper, dry throated and cracking.

‘I watched that boy die under the ice,’ his mother said. ‘That boy is dead.’

They had found out what the Widow had guessed they would find out. What part of her wanted them to find. There are mothers in this world, who, for reasons of experience or malfunction, cannot care for their children. And those children need to see it for themselves before they can truly live. Clarissa and Trenchmouth had seen it.

They held hands in the empty passenger car of the night train home. Folks traveling from Cincinnati and Columbus rocked unaware in their sleepers, but the brother and sister not bound by blood couldn’t sleep. The girl because she had a mind that raced, and the boy because he had no moonshine.

She did not mind his breath when he told her of the tied-down woman at the asylum. She’d grown used to its smell. And he breathed hers in as she told of the foul woman at the theatre. He’d have listened forever if she’d let him.

It was in this way that their bony shoulders banged with the train’s turns. Their knees touched, and their lot in life as children without roots caused them to move closer to one another. All this ended in a kiss between them that would be their only one until the next, thirty-four years later, when Clarissa was married to a man she did not love and Trenchmouth was wanted for murder.




SIX Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish (#ulink_57ab74f7-634b-53dc-94b8-2e46edf9aa5e)


The words split the preacher’s lips asthmatic. He was small, but he preached big and airy and hoarse, like a coughing fit had ahold of him. ‘The sorrows of death compassed me,’ he shouted. ‘And the pains of hell gateheld upon me. I found trouble and sorrow.’ Frank Dallara’s body went into the ground inside a rough-cut box, wet from rain. ‘Then called I upon the name of the Lord,’ the preacher went on. ‘Oh Lord, I beseech thee deliver my soul.’

Trenchmouth stood and listened. For a time, he’d felt more anger than anguish. Folks had been talking about Anse Pilcher, the burned hotel’s owner. Anse had a condition. His bones were soft. Like cartilage. His bones could be pierced just like his flesh, and because of this, most wouldn’t speak poorly of ‘the cripple,’ as they called him. But he had enemies and Frank Dallara had been one of them. Those talking said Anse had told Frank a little girl was inside all that fiery construct, that he lied to see the man set ablaze. Trenchmouth thought on this at the funeral. His shoulders, broadening now, nearly split the shirt seams the Widow had sewn a night prior. When Frank Dallara’s coffin hit bottom and the rough men lowering it pulled back their ropes, the boy nearly lost what little composure he had left. In a week’s time, he’d lost the man closest to being a father to him and learned the vile fate of his real daddy. He’d watched his birth mother spew shit and venomous words in his direction. And he’d kissed his own sister on the mouth. It was a good deal to take in at nine years old.

The preacher preached onward. ‘I said in my haste, all men are liars.’

That’s when the boy knew that God was for the featherheaded, that religion was a salesman’s game. God’s man himself had said it: ‘liars.’ Trenchmouth turned then and walked away from all of them. Black-clad and bad-postured, they half-listened to the words, ‘deliver my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ But Trenchmouth drowned it out. He whistled while he walked away. This struck a particular funeral-goer, Frank Dallara’s ugly brother-in-law Hob Tibbs, as disrespectful beyond the pale.

He followed the boy away from the mourner’s circle. He pulled him by the arm behind a substantial tree, and he smacked him. ‘Don’t you disrespect the dead,’ he said. He smacked again. ‘Don’t you dare disrespect the Lord out here, you hear me?’

Folks handle anguish in a variety of ways. Somehow the nine year old knew this to be true, and it stopped him from striking the ugly man back. But Hob Tibbs had made a new enemy, had added to his list of many, and something in his face burned into Trenchmouth’s brain unforgettable. Tibbs said, ‘You’re going to be in church every Sunday, hear? I’m puttin you to work for God. You’ll spit shine a cross if I tell you. Polish up stained glass for walking away from a man’s burial.’

Trenchmouth said what he’d said all his life. ‘Yessir.’




SEVEN Folks Could Fall Hard (#ulink_bf0c4c78-cf1f-5820-ad2b-05e2cb583c5f)


Church and school. These were places that didn’t interest a ten-year-old boy. It wasn’t that Trenchmouth abhorred scripture or couldn’t learn his lessons. He could. It was the existence of those that sought to ridicule him on account of his oral ailment, to single him out and dig at him so as to break his spirit. There were boys at school who plotted little else. And in church, of course, there was Hob Tibbs.

As promised, he’d shackled Trenchmouth to the Methodist congregation. He put him to work spit shining brass and polishing glass. During Sunday services, the boy was forced to wait and clean up after communion. Shirts were to be tucked in, hems straight. And Trenchmouth was subject to the unrelenting criticisms of his mouth. ‘There’s men called dentists these days, boy,’ Tibbs would say. ‘Might fashion you a brush outta twig and pine needle. You ever hear of a brush? Oh,’ he’d say, squinting close at the closed mouth, ‘I reckon you haven’t.’

Trenchmouth owned a toothbrush. He pulled it back and forth when he could stand to, but the ache it induced, along with the bleeding, would make anyone wonder at the worth of such a practice. He’d long ago tried and discounted a homeopathic mouth rinse from the Sears Roebuck, and now he used a concoction the Widow had stirred up for him, a bitter, stinging rinse for the mouth whose makeup she would not reveal.

It was a summertime Sunday, just after the Methodist Man had finished giving communion, when Trenchmouth, by this point a forced duty acolyte of sorts, was helping Tibbs in the choir room. They poured the unused grape juice back in the jug. The boy spilled it on the bitter man’s shirt front.

‘You little rotten shit,’ Tibbs said, teeth grit hard. He grabbed Trenchmouth by the collar. ‘You got no sense in that head, just like you got no teeth. You can’t do a simple Lord’s chore without foulin it all up.’ He was letting loose whatever it was that ate at him without rest. ‘Got no mama to speak of except the one in the bughouse, and even that Widow can see you got the devil in you. He’s leakin out through your gums, ain’t he boy?’ A boil rose inside Trenchmouth then, one that had started at Frank Dallara’s funeral, his first encounter with Tibbs. It was about to bust and run over. The man kept up, ‘And if you think Frank Dallara was any kind of daddy to you, think on it some more. That there was pity, son. No more, no less. Pity for a cripple whose real daddy was no better’n a nigger.’ The word was ugly, even in those times. ‘Some say he was half-a-one anyhow, mixed blood.’ Tibbs let a smile inch onto his face.

Trenchmouth, without much thought, bent at the knee and hinged back his hip. He took a full-leg backswing and let fly, trailing a black-booted shoe. This was inertia. He kicked Hob Tibbs in the stones with the force of a mule, like old Beechnut when he’d not eaten. Tibbs sucked in air with great volume. He bent double. On the dark wooden floor slats of the church’s choir room, he curled into a baby’s pose and whimpered like one for lack of speech at such pain.

The boy bent over him. ‘If anybody’s kin to hell, it’s you, cocksucker.’ He’d heard a drunk man say the word to another during a fight outside the pool hall and had been waiting to use it ever since. ‘And you won’t see me in this here church again, ever. And you won’t come calling either. Cause if you do, I’ll be up in a tree behind a barrel.’ The words were such that a boy shouldn’t possess to speak, but he did, and he wasn’t finished. He leaned over Tibbs’ head and spoke. ‘You’ll fall hard as Goliath, cocksucker.’

Tibbs just whimpered and knotted up tighter. Trenchmouth let his saliva carry and gather in his lips, just ahead of the ravaged gums. When he’d pooled enough, he opened up in a grin not unlike the one Tibbs had given him that morning. The spit, rusty and thick, hung for a tick or two until its own weight broke and it smacked heavy into the left eye of Hob Tibbs.

Trenchmouth tore off his church-donated tie and walked out the heavy doors. He was through. For the rest of his life, he’d use the word ‘sir’ to address any man his senior, with the exception of Hob Tibbs. He’d taken a place in the boy’s brain and heart reserved only for a few. A few who’d spend their days and nights back-looking over shoulders and sniffing the air like dogs.

It was the same at the schoolhouse. Under a ceiling so low a miner would crouch instinctual, sat all ages, all grade levels, together. The teacher, Ms Varney, switched legbacks for crimes ranging from sass talk to bad posture. She wrote on the new blackboard formulas for understanding reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. But her two favorite subjects were hygiene and singing. Once, after Doc Taylor visited on head lice, Ms Varney said this to the class: ‘If you care for yourself so little as to let bedbugs infest your scalp, well then you’re nearly as bad as a tramp with trench-mouth in my book.’ Clarissa had put her head down.

When the students got to singing in unison at the end of every day, songs like ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,’ Ms Varney inevitably told Trenchmouth, ‘Remember to keep yours sealed shut, young man. Humming is all this little room can stand from a stink box such as yours.’

If Ms Varney left the room, Mose Crews inevitably scampered to the blackboard to draw up little diagrams of fly infestations and cow flop inside the opened orifice of young Trenchmouth. He had favorite, scribbled phrases like T.T. = Doo Doo and T.T. Stinky don’t talk, he breaks wind.

Trenchmouth never put his head down. He stared straight ahead at something no one else could see.

It was fall 1913 that a new girl came to sit beside Trenchmouth in that schoolroom, and she alone had the energy to break his stare. She even had the energy to take his thoughts off Clarissa, who’d been ignoring him since the kiss on the train.

Ewart Smith was her name. She came from Tennessee with her daddy, who was taking work in the mines. Ewart was tan. More tan than Trenchmouth even, who, after a summer of bareback climbing and digging outdarked all the kids in the segregated schoolhouse. But Ewart had yellow hair and green eyes, and her teeth were as white as Ms Varney’s chalk. The day she came in, she was introduced to the sound of laughter and confusion at such a given name. She responded by crossing her feet and bowing, one hand across her hips, the other extended to her side. Though there were a few empty seats, she picked the one next to Trenchmouth Taggart, T.T. Stinky.

By winter break, she held his hand after school, and he nearly parted his lips when he smiled at her.




EIGHT Who Among Us Has Read The Signs (#ulink_0fbfb150-4311-5a6a-ab03-c299b78d0514)


It was a simple idea really. Steel not wood. If folks would just realize that timber construction was a thing of the past, steel the future, maybe whole towns wouldn’t burn. Maybe good men wouldn’t die. And maybe, if the self-made railroad men laying track like match-sticks across the hill terrain of southern West Virginia, if they’d just realize that coal tipples could be fashioned heartier from the very product being mined in these hills, namely the bituminous coke, maybe the wealth would spread to the little folks. This is how Trenchmouth’s brain worked. The boy climbed Sulfur Creek Mountain daily to his secret spot, a dug out, one room, underground bunker complete with homemade drawing table, ruler, drafter’s compass, and school-stolen pencils. There he drew up plans. Inventions really. There he devised an outline for steel cities and suspension bridges and coal tipples. He’d never let anyone in until Ewart Smith came along. Only she knew the hideout’s location, and she’d been sworn to secrecy.

Things were thawing on a particular March afternoon when Ewart knocked on the bunker’s hatch door. He let her in. The hatch was on a fishing line pulley, so that when you re-closed it, a scoop net tossed ground cover across its surface.

Inside, he was trying not to stare at the harmonica he’d laid on the drawing table, the harmonica of his dead daddy. He still hadn’t put it to his lips, for fear that since that particular part of him was so susceptible to disease, he might well be infected with whatever drove his father down the road to hell. He got back to business: fashioning a miniature coal tipple and a crane from scrap metal he’d collected at the mine dumps. Structure-smart, he’d used a hammer and a punch to knock out holes in the skinny tin. Slots for connecting and building upwards. Ewart stared at what would surely become a tiny city there on the table.

‘Your momma’s going to come after you for spending all your time away,’ she said.

‘She ain’t home.’ Trenchmouth didn’t say where the Widow was, but ever since the Huntington woman had gone down on moonshine charges, his mother had been hard at work moving product here to there, covering tracks, fashioning cover. In the time since the train trip to Huntington, their home had been family-scarce. ‘Your daddy’s liable to come after you, you keep comin here.’

‘He ain’t home,’ Ewart said.

Trenchmouth wasn’t sure she even had a home. All she’d say was that they lived up in Sprigg, a mile off the Tug. ‘I can’t figure what shift he’s workin then.’ He looked up at her from his growing construct.

She bit her lip. Had a look of thinking hard. ‘How many secrets can you keep?’

‘I reckon about two hundred.’

‘How many you got piled right now?’

‘Ninety maybe.’

She wasn’t laughing at his odd ways like usual. ‘My Daddy ain’t a miner,’ she said.

‘What is he then?’

‘Preacher.’

His stomach tightened. He looked back to his drawing, took up the pencil again.

‘You don’t care for preachers?’

He shrugged.

‘Listen, T. This ain’t preacher like you’re thinking. My Daddy was best friends of a fella named Hensley down in Cleveland, Tennessee. They fell out cause Daddy was better and everybody knew it. Mr Hensley though, he started up this church…’ Ewart bit her lip again. This caused Trenchmouth to shift in his seat and lock eyes. ‘This promise might fill up all those hundred empty ones you got,’ she said. He nodded. ‘Mr Hensley picked up a serpent.’

‘What?’

‘It ain’t like church you know of. Folks pick up serpents. Roll around with em sometimes even.’

‘Snakes?’

‘Snakes.’ She almost laughed for having finally told someone. ‘Folks get bit even.’ Trenchmouth stared. ‘A couple folks died.’

You could call it a box, maybe a wood cage. Copperheads and rattlesnakes knocked around inside it, their dark, translucent sides thumping at the holes.

‘Who built the box?’ Trenchmouth asked her.

‘Daddy.’ They were standing inside a small backroom of Ewart’s farmhouse. She’d finally let him see where she lived. The walls were stained and halfway papered, like somebody had quit on the whole place mid-job. From the second story came sounds of the adult world. Above the two children, furniture scraped floorboards and the low tones of a man and a woman echoed untranslatable. ‘He’s up there preaching to somebody new,’ Ewart said. ‘Convertin somebody.’ She bent down and put her fingers next to one of the little round holes. The snakes were quiet.

‘You ever pick one up?’ Trenchmouth hadn’t taken his eyes off the box. Its construction could’ve been improved upon.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t care for snakes.’

That’s when he bent down next to her and got the feeling he’d had on the train that night with Clarissa. His knee touched Ewart’s, and through the thick wool fabric both sets of skin seemed to heat up. Trenchmouth put his hand out to touch her, but for reasons unknown he changed destinations. With thumb and finger he undid the little brass latch and opened the snake hatch. He reached into the slowly slithering mound and brought back a hand covered in copperhead. The snake might as well have been asleep, but Ewart hopped up anyway, pressed her back against the far wall. Brittle wallpaper fell to the floor behind her.

The snake moved up Trenchmouth’s arm slow and methodical. Had it decided to bite him, the going would be tough through coat and shirt and undergarment, but it gave no indication that it meant the boy harm. He stared at its undersized head, the geometric shape of it and every perfect scale lining its being. He stared and the snake looked back at him until the gaze went blurry between them, until that snake had made it up his forearm, biceps, shoulder, and collarbone. It stopped.

Though he knew she was watching and he knew he’d never shown her his affliction, the boy opened up wide because it seemed the only thing he could do at that moment. And, as if it was an act they’d practiced together before bug-eyed kids at county fairs, the copperhead, without hesitation, slid into the open mouth like it’d found home. It rested its head on his tongue.

Ewart’s hands had come up to her own mouth, holding in and keeping out simultaneously. She breathed heavy without having exercised. The breathing picked up more as she watched her friend slowly close his ragged gums and chapped lips around the serpent. He didn’t bite down, just closed up slowly so that it appeared to her he was ingesting the thing.

From upstairs, the low tones got louder, the furniture scraping and floorboard creaking more imposing, as if the ceiling might come down on them. But Trenchmouth paid little mind. He held his pose, eyes on Ewart, then opened that mouth of his again, just as slow and deliberate as he’d closed it. He gave the copperhead’s tail a little incentive pull and the girl watched the snake loop its head back toward her, a candy cane pose held briefly before slithering back down the arm. Then it was still.

‘How bout that?’ Trenchmouth said.

She let her hands fall from her face. ‘You’ve got to leave,’ she said.

He bent down to the open box and let the snake fall back to its brethren. ‘Did I scare you?’

‘Daddy’s done convertin. Can’t you hear how quiet it’s got?’

From the time he’d opened that box, his whole world had been more quiet than anytime he could remember. Quiet like it must be under the ground.

‘Daddy won’t like that you’re here. You’ve got to go.’

He swiveled the brass latch into place and stood up. He walked to her and kissed her on the cheek, and it was warm and dry, without the electricity of Clarissa’s. Then he slid through the open door of the little back room, his coat knocking paint chips from the molding, and walked out the back. The preacher and the convert descended the stairs inside, laughing.

It was obvious to the Widow Dorsett that for her boy, school was like being put on the rack. And she didn’t say a word when he announced he’d spent his last Sunday at the Methodist Church. She and Clarissa continued to go without him, and he continued to bow his head and hold their hands for the mealtime blessing. Little else was spoken in terms of Trenchmouth’s exile. It was simply accepted that the boy would not be accepted. What mattered was that he learned. That he kept up, surpassed even, those that would not accept. Above all, that he did not become a miner. And it was for this reason that the Widow, on most days, left the newspaper out on the kitchen table for him to read. She’d mark the articles she thought educational with black ink advice like Think on this one awhile or Ever thought of trying your hand at this?

Trenchmouth got home from school on a Tuesday to find one of these left notes on newsprint. It was warm enough out that he didn’t have to refill with coal or wood the heating stove fire, an after-school chore assigned to him during fall and winter months. He broke a piece of hard cornbread off a brick she’d left out and sat down to read. The newspaper settled him like little else could. It was almost as comforting as moonshine somehow.

The Widow had written I hope you don’t associate with these boys above an article titled Robbed Passenger Coach. Some local boys had robbed a coach car containing a stock of goods for the local newsstands. They’d been caught sleeping inside a cave they’d fashioned on top of Horsepen Mountain not far from Trenchmouth’s hideout. They slept between the open, stolen hampers and baskets of cigarettes, cigars, chewing gum, candy, popcorn, groceries, fruits, novels, and magazines, gorged no doubt on romance and sugar.

Trenchmouth tore off a piece of newspaper and scrawled on it move hideout for safety? He put it in his pocket.

A page in, she had written Think I’ll ever get me one of these? above an ad for a cooking oven. It read Every woman who wants a steel range will certainly buy The Peninsular if they can only get a view of it. They could do so if they got themselves to A.H. Beal Hardware in Williamson. The power of steel. It was everywhere to behold. Trenchmouth looked at the beat up Acme cook stove against the wall. It had seen better days.

The door opened and Clarissa walked in with Fred Dallara in tow. Trenchmouth nodded and looked back to his paper.

‘Hi,’ Clarissa said. She’d blossomed full to beautiful.

‘Afternoon, little T.T.,’ Fred said. His voice had gone suddenly low that winter, his torso thicker. He had a mustache that looked like somebody had smudged two fingers across his lip and halfway wiped it off. Fred enjoyed pointing out their age differential.

The two lovebirds climbed the ladder to the loft and went quiet.

Trenchmouth knew that Fred and Clarissa kissed up there. The soft sounds echoed in his ears. He knew that they knew the Widow was at work on her still again, moving and hiding and covering up, and that she wouldn’t be back to catch them in the act. He broke off two miniature pieces of cornbread, shoved them in each earhole, and got back to reading.

See here? she had written above another story. Turns out you just got more brains than the rest of us, in more places, more stubborn. It was another new finding from the scientists who were always finding. Throat Brain Is Latest Discovery the title read, and under that Scientists Say Gray Matter is in Fingers and Cells are in Toes. Numerous Thinking Organs Distributed Throughout Whole Body. According to the columnist, the fingertips of the blind contained brain tissue, and so did the throat. If a throat surgeon slipped up during his operation, the throat brain would react by refusing to cooperate.

The boy couldn’t help but wonder what had been done to his mouth brain to make it so uncooperative.

He thought he heard a giggle from the loft, so he pushed the bread further into his ears and read on. Above Railroad Progress Moving Forward, she’d written You could see the world if you wanted to by the time they finish this. The big men of the N&W and the C&O were barreling through hills and valleys, blasting tunnels and building homes for workers. The word tonnage was used again and again to describe the coal that was bringing the railroad to West Virginia. The tonnage was here, so they were coming to secure it. To move it out to everybody else.

Trenchmouth thought of the tipples he’d seen being built from solid wood. He wondered how somebody could figure a kitchen range ought to be fashioned from steel but not a coal tipple. He ripped off another piece of paper and scrawled a new design. The power of steel. It was everywhere.

Another giggle. It made him sick. He gave the bread plugs another push and started reading out loud. Almost a holler. ‘Millions of dollars are being invested in coal properties, which will within a year furnish tonnage for the railroads, which are being built at a cost of more than millions of dollars.’ A shoe boomeranged down at him from above and caught his collarbone, hard. He didn’t look up, just rubbed at his injury. Had he looked to the loft, had he pulled the bread from his ears, he would have heard Fred Dallara say, ‘Pipe down little boy,’ and he would have seen Clarissa, up on her elbows with her neck stretched to check on him, a mix of worry and sadness and defeat in her eyes.

But he didn’t look up at them. He kept on reading.

He read that the druggist at the pharmacy had been confined to his bed. Like others in the county, he’d been taken hold of by Typhoid Fever.

That’s when Trenchmouth saw the toy advertisement. Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder the banner read.

The boy could scarcely take it in.

Under this heading was a picture nearly identical to the scrap metal tipple on his drawing table at the hideout. The picture showed skinny steel strips, holes punched and connected to other holes. It was a steel construction toy, an erector set, and some fellow by the name of A.C. Gilbert was taking credit for having invented it.

Without knowing, Trenchmouth had made a toy, and now somebody else was getting paid for it. What he’d thought was an idea toward protecting the progress of civilization was nothing more than adolescent entertainment.

He sighed and sat and stared.

His ears were plugged up while his sister broke his heart within whisper distance, and he came to understand that ideas could be stolen before they were even ideas. But no tears would smear the newsprint that day or any other, as far as Trenchmouth was concerned. He was not yet twelve and had lost nearly everything he loved. But he knew this on that day: like toys, tears were for boys, and it was time to leave all that behind. It was time to become a man.




NINE Women Shook And Shivered (#ulink_b84c8766-61e6-5bbf-814b-a84ff182d0de)


The hideout lay in ruin and the kitchen moonshine was running low. Trenchmouth the man-boy had laid waste to his inventions that were not his. He’d taken to kissing Ewart on the neck and cheekbones after school, whether she wanted him to or not. The girl cared for him, but his mouth frightened her just the same, and she’d not allow it near her own. He’d also taken to sipping shine morning, noon, and night, and what could the Widow say when her stock came up a little light? At twelve, Trenchmouth was somehow more man than boy. His voice had changed. He walked and talked as men do. He’d built a new shelter for her shining operations. A massive timber and twine ordeal, fashioned with his own callused hands and sweating back. So what if he stayed lit on lightning. The boy was afflicted, after all. Whatever gets us by.

Besides, the world was no place for toys or childish ideas. In Europe, folks had taken to killing each other over differences in adult ideas. At home, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom didn’t strike the Widow or any other hill dwellers as particularly new or particularly free.

There were moonshine stills to hide. Wood to chop. Fowl and game and antlered, four-legged beasts to track and lay down dead and cut open and bleed. Gods to pray before for guidance.

Trenchmouth would do all of these things between the Junes of 1914 and 1915. Had the foolish, erratic boys around him cared to listen, he’d have told them all that he could do fifty-nine push-ups. That his hunter’s eye was sharp and his taste in whiskey sharper. That his pecker had sprouted hair and was often hard as a rail spike, and that like them, he was looking to dip it in some young woman’s honeypot. He thought of little else.

His chance would come, of all places, among the women of the Church of God with Signs Following. Folks who professed to know no sin. No whiskey or tobacco or carnal knowledge at all. But, like it is for most of the religified, practicing and preaching are slippery handles of the hogwashed. And it would be among them that Trenchmouth’s manhood was shaped.

July 4th, 1915, fell on a Sunday. Among the Methodists, confusion ran high when celebrations burned out and hangovers set in. Sabbath hangovers, the most sinful of all. But for the followers of J.B. Smith, Tennessee transplant and converter to the Church of God with Signs Following, such headaches and gut checks were not an issue. This was because, presumably, these talkers-in-tongue, these snake handlers and strychnine sippers, they did not sin in drink or smoke or fornication.

On Independence Day, leaning against their ramshackle house of worship, spitting in the dirt, Trenchmouth didn’t buy it. These worshippers inside hollered nonsensically and dropped to the floor like their hearts had stopped; he could hear the thumping from outside. But it wasn’t the authentic article, as far as he was concerned. And, three inches short of six feet though not yet thirteen, Trenchmouth was almost advanced in the field of judging articles as authentic or not.

‘Harla harla harla la la la da la da hardala atta,’ somebody shouted inside the church. Another thump.

Ewart was in there. Front row. But her daddy didn’t trust Trenchmouth, didn’t like boys of that age. And he certainly didn’t allow converts to his church in the form of his daughter’s perceived poon hounds. The boy had been held at bay a year, had never told of his natural encounter with the snakes in the box that day at the Smith house. Ewart hadn’t breathed a word either. So, though he was permitted to court her a little and come by the house, the Lord’s chambers were off limits.

But on that patriotic Sunday, the man-boy decided to go in. Maybe it was tongue-talking that called to him, extra loud that day, echoing like his birth mother’s had echoed off nuthouse walls. Or maybe it was the flask of shine in his back pocket, from which he took frequent pulls. Whatever the reason, he stood from where he leaned, climbed the three, crumbling steps to the double doors of the church, and swung them open.

The sun’s rays went funny inside. They came through the three windows lining each wall of the place, but dust hung so heavy that the light split the room like beams of translucent timber, perfectly square from the panes. It stunk in there. Sweat on top of older sweat and unwashed britches. What sex sometimes smells like to those yet to have it. Mr J.B. Smith’s eyes met Trenchmouth’s from the pulpit. Smith was rocking on his heels, dressed in a plain collared shirt and brown slacks. His chest hair showed through the drenched shirt and he wiped at his forehead with a Bibled hand. He smiled.

Then he hollered ‘Hooo ooo hooo hay om in addeyayamana,’ and on into something not transcribeable with the words known to us.

It shook the boy so much so that he wasn’t a man-boy at all anymore, just a boy. For a moment, he thought maybe all this was the authentic article. He almost moved his feet and opened his mouth. Almost fell on the floor, humping the holy spirit. But he walked forward down the aisle instead. He passed home-fashioned pews of whopperjammed chairs and benches full of folks with eyes rolling in their heads. In the front, Ewart bobbed lazily on her toes and let her head shake a little. A tall man beside her bent down and came up snake-fisted and this got everybody going. He turned to face them and held the four serpents above his head in victory. One of them got restless and struck out, bit his wrist just above the shirt cuff where the skin is most tender and white. Where the blood is closest to the air.

He flinched and kept dancing.

His hair lay flat despite his jerking, oiled up with the grease of natural neglect.

Trenchmouth studied the skinny man, his facebones like flint rock under the skin, sharp and atop hollowed shadows for cheeks. It went white fast, his face, after the serpent strike, and he bent back down to return them to their box, but only after he’d held on a while to prove it was nothing to him.

Women shook and shivered, especially the curvy one on the other side of Ewart. Even in the required plain, hanging clothes, Trenchmouth made out that behind of hers, perfectly rounded with just enough quiver, just enough solid. Her black hair hung heavy on her shoulders, shining in the dust beam from the window.

This was religion. Her shape was what he’d sacrifice for.

So he did. He continued up the aisle and past the skinny, now paler man, who sat still and tried not to die. Past Ewart who swallowed hard when she noticed him and looked to her father, who smiled and stared down Trenchmouth. He went all the way to the front, before the pulpit, brushing the sleeve of the black-haired beauty as he strode by. He bent as he had that day in the back room of Ewart’s home, under the thunder of the Preacherman’s conversion above. And like that day, he came up with a copperhead. It looked to be the same one. But on this day, he took up every snake in the box, nine to be precise, and it wasn’t hard to do, for they slid toward his outstretched arms as if they were tree branches promising home.

They made their way to his head and wrapped around it, leaving openings here and there so that the boy could look out upon the congregation, who thump-thumped the floorboards with increasing force and timing. Some went silent as one snake entered his opened, rotten mouth, others screeched their neck chords to higher pitch and impossible syllable.

Trenchmouth didn’t dance. He didn’t move much at all as J.B. Smith stepped from behind his place of instruction and circled his daughter’s suitor, regarded him as if a piece of art. Preacher Smith almost yelled ‘Hallelujah,’ but didn’t. He waited instead. It didn’t take long for Trenchmouth to tug gently on the tail of the copperhead, and all of the others followed suit. They retreated down his arms as uniformly as they had come to him. He shut them up in their box. When Trenchmouth stood again, J.B. Smith embraced him, planted upon him the Holy Kiss of the Church of God with Signs Following, a lip to lip practice between those of the same sex, signifying membership.

It was the closest another’s mouth had been to his own.

Later, for some of them, would come the oil anointing, the poison drinking. The testing of the flesh with fire. But for that morning, the sight of the mouth-diseased boy and the swirling serpents had been enough. Folks in attendance felt they’d witnessed a miraculous occurrence, though they weren’t sure what it was. They grew quiet as J.B. Smith took his pulpit again to read from the Book of Luke, chapter ten, verse nineteen. Trenchmouth took a seat between Ewart and the curvy one. Each took a hand and held it. One with something like love, the other with something like lechery.

To the left of them, the skinny man slumped and his hand turned blackish-gray. He hoped he would not die from his punctures, but the medical doctor did not enter his mind. Such a thought would banish him from his current house of worship, because such a thought equaled a lack of faith in God.

Trenchmouth wondered at the slow rubbing pinky of the woman with his right hand and tried to think down the slow growth in his trousers. Preacher Smith went on about treading on scorpions and the power of the enemy, and it was almost as quiet as it had been with bread-stuffed ears. Only now the quiet was a peaceful sort, maybe the one folks expect in their houses of the Lord but rarely attain for all the hot air circulating and suffocating. The man-boy sensed God, and she was a woman.

If Trenchmouth thought he’d finally had a religious experience that morning, he would re-evaluate his criteria that night. The curvy woman’s name was Anne Sharples, and she had a slight penchant for bedding men of the cloth, a bigger penchant for moonshine. By outward appearances, she was a formerly devout member of the Baptist congregation in Kermit, a current devout member of the Church of God with Signs Following in Sprigg. On the sly, she was the type of young miner’s widow who faked mourning when her husband was caved in, who had visions of laying down with the holy man delivering her husband’s eulogy even as he spoke the casket-lowering words. Anne Sharples had few scruples.

She’d pulled Trenchmouth away from the Independence Day picnic outside the little church that afternoon. He’d already slipped her a shot or four from his flask under cover of tablecloth. They ended up in the woods, then inside his hideout, which had recently ceased production as an inventor’s asylum and awaited a new purpose. It would soon find one.

Anne lay down on the dry dirt floor like it was nothing. Above her, narrow shoots of moonlight found their way through the tree cover and then the slats of the hideout trapdoor. Such lighting made it dark enough to imagine the almost-thirteen-year-old-with-mouth-disease as a grown man. But as Trenchmouth undid his belt and felt as if his groin might explode from the pressure, she played on the few scruples she had. ‘I won’t kiss a little boy,’ she said. ‘And I sure won’t let him dip his wick in me. They’re liable to throw me in the chokey for that.’

‘I don’t see any little boys around here,’ Trenchmouth answered, shivering though it was night-hot.

‘You old enough to fight or vote?’

‘Old enough to drink,’ he said and pulled the flask again from his pants pocket, which was bunched around his knees. She pulled from it and coughed. He pulled and smiled. The moonlight showed her those gums again, those teeth and their ulcerated in-betweens. She’d not put that to her mouth. A different idea brewed.

‘Just do like I show you and we’ll both come up happy,’ Anne Sharples said to him. Then she brought him to her and pushed his shoulders down, away from her own. He stopped at her chest, newly aware of further curvature. But she kept pushing him down, and when he got to her waist, she arched her back, pulled up her white muslin underskirt, pushed down her undergarments, and guided that man-boy’s oft-ridiculed orifice to another, hidden one of her own, one that he’d spent whole months of nights imagining. It took him aback for a moment, and he stopped short. He couldn’t see much, but he felt the tickle of hair on his nose, and he smelled something unlike any scent he’d ever picked up. It was in every way opposite to what he’d followed to the outhouse burial ground all those years earlier. Unlike death, this was life’s smell, like tree sap and sweat and culinary aromas undiscovered and ancient. Trenchmouth lowered himself to it.

At first, he fumbled, and she almost let her conscience tear through the moonshine haze of comfort to stop him. But then something changed. Trenchmouth, enchanted almost to nausea, began to feel something he never had in church, Methodist or Snake-handler. What had seemed false faith in the bitten skinny man that morning, what had rung untrue in all of them as they mumbled nonsense, suddenly arose in him so palpably that he could not hold it back. From his pressurized groin something seeped upward like fire through the tendons. It warmed his stomach and tickled his vocal chords. It came right up through his mouth and out the end of his tongue, which began moving itself in circles and latitudes of an unknown geometry, fast and patterned like a snake never could. As Anne Sharples began to buck and heave air, Trenchmouth let loose a string of words not unlike those of the pillars of the Church of God with Signs Following. ‘Harla harla la da hey hoo woo adeyanamana harla da da da,’ he said. The hum of it all from his tongue fibers and taste buds infected her, but not with his disease.

Trenchmouth had got religion there in the woman’s nether regions, and for the woman, spent and shocked beyond words, a preacher had found his calling.




TEN The Powerful And The Ones Beneath (#ulink_763883e3-ba86-5ac5-b4ff-4f6497210ffb)


They’d left him out of Mumblety Peg for as far back as he could remember. It was a young boy’s game, really. As soon as he was old enough to open and close a jack-knife without bleeding to death, a boy found games of Mumblety Peg in which to compete. After school, or on summer days when the earth was soft and the blade would stick deep – these were times for bringing practice to fruition. In the fall of 1916, at nearly fourteen years old, Trenchmouth was too old to play, at least in the estimation of most boys. But the group of four littler ones had seen him walking past, and had liked his tall frame, his crack-proof, rolled sole boots, the way he spat tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. So they’d called him over to the small mountain bald, a field backdropped by trees that bled leaves of red and orange and yellow. Only one of them, a boy named Crews whose brother Trenchmouth knew well, whose mother he knew even better, expressed objection to consorting with T.T. Stinky.

But any objection was soon forgotten when Trenchmouth, in the first inning, progressed through twenty-two feats without a mistake. He opened his Cattle King pen knife with precision. The buffalo-horn handle reflected light as he flipped it from every position: fist, fingers, cross-chested ears, nose, eyes, knees, top of the head. Each time it stuck point down, plenty deep. The boys watched wide-eyed and grunted noises of impress. Their narrow lines of sight on the abilities of orphaned, malformed youngsters such as Trenchmouth had been blown wide apart. They knew their own ignorance now to be fear, maybe even envy.

Each of them progressed through, fumbling and mumbling, until the last was beaten, and Trenchmouth, the victor, drove the peg into the ground using his knife handle. Six blows landed solid and flat as a carpenter’s hammer. He’d sunk the peg, so that the loser boy, Warren Crews, was forced to do the deed. Warren was the one who had objected to calling Trenchmouth over. He was youngest brother of Mose Crews, Fred Dallara’s best buddy. Mose was tailback on the ball team, and the meanest of the nastiest of the T.T. Stinky crew.

‘Root, Root!’ the boys hollered, shoving little, fat, Warren Crews to his knees. He couldn’t even see the top of the peg, none of them could. Trenchmouth had driven it deep. Hands behind his back, the Crews boy dove in for it with his teeth, as the rules clearly dictated. Again and again he came up for air, the silty black mud covering more and more of his face. They stood around him and laughed. It was friendly teasing, even from Trenchmouth, who harbored no ill will toward the boy on account of his bad luck in sibling, but Warren Crews didn’t like losing. As he came up empty again and again, and as the boys’ insistence on playing out the game became ever more apparent, Warren Crews looked around in desperation. He nearly forgot his age and called out for T.T. Stinky to get down there and finish, seeing as his mouth was already dirty, his teeth full of muck. Warren thought his big brother would have done just that. But Warren Crews thought wrong, and was, for a brief moment, lucky.

First, he wasn’t aware that even football Mose would no longer call out Trenchmouth to his face. In private, Mose and the others still spoke of the orally-ailed one without censor. They even made up crude drawings and songs. But they’d long ago given up insulting Trenchmouth face to face, much less making eye contact. Ever since he’d attacked Fred Dallara like a mountain cat, and even more so since he’d sprouted wide shoulders and a fine mustache and won every riflery contest the county sponsored, boys only poked fun at T.T. Stinky behind his back. Had they known that in a year’s time, Trenchmouth had vocalized into the unmentionable anatomies of nine women, they’d have no doubt fainted from shock. But Trenchmouth had a whole stockpile of secrets, and this one he would not spill.

So Warren was lucky, in that not knowing any of this, he didn’t slander Trenchmouth and pay the price. What stopped him was the sight of Arly Scott Jr walking by.

Good luck, bad luck. They interchange so quickly.

Arly Scott Jr was, like Trenchmouth, nearly fourteen. And, like Trenchmouth, he was bigger than the four other boys. But Arly was black, and this meant that even a pack of puny ten-year-olds could order him around if they felt like it.

‘Hey,’ Warren Crews shouted at the boy in the distance, who was going foot over foot along the railroad track, testing balance. ‘Hey nigger!’

Arly stopped and dropped his feet on either side of his balance beam. He turned and faced them.

‘Why don’t you come on over here?’ Warren spit dirt, scraped grass off his tongue and lips using his teeth and fingernails.

Arly looked at them for a while, then began walking toward them. Trenchmouth didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around. Like every other black family in Mingo County, Arly’s had come from down South for the mines. His father was in the number one at Red Jacket. And like every other black family in Mingo, he lived in Mitchell Branch and went about his business in an all-black world of school and church. Arly was almost identical to Trenchmouth in height and weight, and his sprouting muscles were just as hard and determined.

When he walked upon them, the littler ones got uncomfortable and began to fidget. They’d heard their fathers and mothers and uncles and brothers use the term Warren Crews had used, but they were still young enough to be pierced by it when shouted in the presence of one to whom it was meant to describe.

‘You play Mumblety Peg down there in Texas?’ Warren Crews said. Oddly, he’d stayed on his knees with his hands locked behind him throughout all this, as if to break the pose would be sin.

‘Georgia,’ Arly said.

‘Georgia then. Niggers play Mumblety Peg in Georgia?’

Arly just stared down at the boy. The other ones fidgeted more plainly. One laughed a little, tried to act tough. Another gripped his thighs against his privates, tried not to piss himself as he often did when trouble arose.

Trenchmouth studied Arly Scott’s eyes, the heavy lids, the wiry brows. The small scar that said he could take a punch. He knew that Warren Crews had called on the wrong black boy.

‘Well?’ Warren said. ‘Is that all you know how to say? “Georgia?” They just teach you one word down there? State name?’ He laughed and turned back to the other boys to make sure they did the same. But he never found out they didn’t. Before Warren Crews could notice the cringing expressions of impending impact the little boys uniformly wore, he’d been cold-cocked. It was a sweeping right hook, a suckerfree sucker punch delivered from high to low and with the inertia of planted feet and swiveled hips. Arly Scott Jr was a trained fighter.

Some stood scarecrow still, some ran. Either way, they were thoroughly discombobulated by the sight of a black boy hitting a white one for insulting his race. It didn’t happen in Georgia, they were pretty sure, and it didn’t happen in southern West Virginia either. But it had happened, and Warren Crews lay asleep on the ground, thick blood, chunked by dirt, running from nose and mouth.

Eventually, they all left their ten-year-old comrade where he lay, only one of them with the wherewithal to shout a promise of revenge. Arly and Trenchmouth remained. They looked down at Warren together, the black boy rubbing his throbbing knuckles, the white boy rubbing his head. This would take some figuring.

Trenchmouth decided he didn’t feel all too sorry for the littlest Crews. At eleven, he was old enough to know better than to treat somebody that way, address somebody with those kind of words. The Widow had taught Trenchmouth, along with Clarissa, from a young age, to never engage in the game of white superiority. ‘We are all made from God’s clay,’ she’d said, ‘no matter its stain.’ Besides, Trenchmouth had always been less white than the whites, especially in summer, a fact the other kids falsely attributed to a stubbornly thick buildup of dirt on his skin. And had he seen more of his father than the dusty, dug up variety, he’d have known there was Indian in that bloodline, or maybe even colored. Still, by outward appearance, he was a white boy.

‘I’m Trenchmouth Taggart,’ he said and held out his hand.

Arly turned those eyes on him. He didn’t speak back or change the stare, which had the kind of calm to it that can precede a snot-knocker as easily as a handshake.

It was nice to see it in another, that ‘something else’ look of the eye. He’d been embarrassed for revealing his own after Fred Dallara kissed Clarissa. It came from someplace less knowable than a steady diet of moonshine and ridicule. This particular something was there before all that.

Trenchmouth almost told the other boy how he once bit someone for kissing his sister, but it seemed anxious, foolish. Instead, he said, ‘I reckon your daddy’ll have your hide for this here.’ He pointed at Warren Crews, who whimpered and tried to get up on his elbows.

Arly’s hands re-fisted, and he turned his stare back to the boy on the ground then, as if he might have another go. But the whimper turned to a cry and Arly’s whole being eased up. He answered Trenchmouth without looking at him. ‘You’d reckon wrong then. My Daddy told me, when they look down at you, start em to lookin up.’ His voice was a pitch deeper than Trenchmouth’s, his accent big and round.

Before Arly Scott walked away, he snorted twice, gathered up what he could in his throat, and spat on the ground before Warren Crews, who was, by that point, all-out crying the kind of cry reserved for mamas, the kind he’d have to be rid of in a year or two if he hoped to get anywhere in life.




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