The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Later, he smiled as they ate supper together at Charles Lively’s little restaurant on Main Street, passing white lightning under the table in plain view of Mr Lively, who hovered.

  Sid smiled yet again that evening when he drove away from the young man he’d re-named and professioned in order to hide his newfound vigilantism. Trenchmouth watched him disappear down the hill. He said to himself, out loud, ‘Chicopee, newspaperman.’

  The sheriff had liked Trenchmouth. And what he’d shown him that day at the Lick Creek tent colony, without having to say a word, was that to keep on shooting was not a sin against any God anybody had heard of in southern West Virginia. To keep on shooting was the just and righteous thing to do.

  THIRTEEN

  They Had Grips On Them

  By May of 1920, Trenchmouth had shot to injure three more mine guards. All three had dared to trade bullets with a dead-eye. His nights remained relatively sleepless. But he rested some on account of a new, more remote hideout on Sulfur Creek Mountain and a habit of sharing whiskey and tobacco with Sid Hatfield at the Blue Goose Saloon.

  He’d met Mother Jones and hugged her. He’d listened to Bill Blizzard’s driving speeches on the rights of men, gathered past dark at the Baptist church with so many miners the pews spilled over to wall space. The union was said to be three thousand strong.

  On the 19th, the noon train carried in thirteen men in fine suits. They were Baldwin-Felts, there to do more evicting for the company, and their leaders were two of Sid’s sworn enemies, Albert and Lee Felts. It rained on and off.

  Mayor Testerman ordered up warrants for the arrest of the agents. Sid had taken offense to their illegal carrying of guns and the way they threw furniture from the home of a woman whose husband wasn’t there to stop it. By three o’clock, folks were arming up.

  Trenchmouth, along with some others, had been alerted. He stood inside Chambers Hardware, Main Street Matewan, with his Colt .38 tucked into his belt, his rifle in grabbing distance on a shelf next to a package of wood shims. He stared blank at the little, rough-cut things and thought of Frank Dallara all those years back, calmly laying his fresh-carved sling-shots onto store shelves just like these. For a moment, he wished weaponry had never moved past that ancient invention. That David and Goliath might still meet with nothing but tree branch and stone. But it was long past.

  The Baldwin-Felts men had suppered early at the Urias Hotel, where it was known that smacking whores around, whores like Ewart Smith, was overlooked by the hotel’s owner, who smacked the girls himself. Now the detectives walked with little care past the opened back doors of the hardware store, past glaring, angry men on all sides. They had grips on them, and it wasn’t only a change of clothes inside. The men were going back to the depot to catch the five o’clock to Bluefield. Trenchmouth watched the No. 16 from inside as Sid and Al Felts exchanged words about warrants, about who had the right to arrest who. Young Kump, whose voice had been permanently altered from the jaw wound suffered in McDowell, stood from where he had been rocking in a chair next to Trenchmouth. ‘A warrant for Sid?’ he said of Al Felts’s purported document. ‘Liable to have been written on gingerbread.’ His voice was no more than a confused whisper, but since being shot, he was more determined than ever to be in the thick of things. He went to fetch Mayor Testerman from his jewelry store.

  The mayor agreed that the warrant Felts produced was no good. Trenchmouth watched through the doorway as Felts, Hatfield, and Testerman talked. They were all men of law and legislation in some form, but they were as opposite in their hearts as men could be. A stubby man to Trenchmouth’s left lit a cigarette. He spit tobacco flecks and laughed a little. ‘Nothin but more talk,’ he said. It almost seemed true. But then the look on Sid’s face changed. Those eyes told it. Those hooded eyes. They went smaller, nearly disappeared to nothing.

  Most had thought it was just talk, earlier in the day, when the hardened police chief had said he’d kill every goddamned one of em without any goddamned warrants, but Trenchmouth knew the weight of words. And now, square in Albert Felts’s face, Hatfield spoke another word. It was the same one that had spurred the first real fight Trenchmouth ever saw, outside the pool hall seven years before. The same word he’d used to bury Hob Tibbs in shame inside his own church. Sid Hatfield said it soft, but he said it nonetheless: ‘You cocksucker.’

  Trenchmouth plucked his rifle from the shelf and sighted the detective’s head. He kept his off eye open long enough to see Felts pull his sidearm. The two shots were almost simultaneous, Trenchmouth’s first, sunk deep into the brain folds of Albert Felts, who must’ve willed his finger to squeeze after his stance had been altered, for his bullet, no doubt meant for Sid, instead hit Mayor Testerman in the stomach.

  Then Sid had both guns out, firing as he pleased at the others, who fired back and were fired upon by others still from inside the hardware store, across the tracks, and from open windows a story up. It was deafening. But with the eardrum damage came calm for Trenchmouth, and he moved forward as a trained soldier might have, out the open doors, his rifle still in the crook of his shoulder, his cheek still pressed to the stock.

  The detectives had turned and run, shooting over their shoulders like desperate men do when they know they’ve misjudged their place among things. Their locomotion set them apart from those with planted feet. They were the hunted, whether they knew it or not. And the crack shot had stepped into the middle, swiveling at the hips with four shots left in the magazine.

  He was the Widow’s boy, and as it had been for her, a scurrying animal was the easiest somehow to hit.

  One man ran faster than the others and made a foolish attempt to return fire. He was sighted first and promptly dropped. Three rounds left.

  Everywhere men used short guns without result. The revolvers emptied themselves, hip originated and wobbly, bullets cutting through sky until they lost inertia somewhere. Albert Felts’s brother Lee had emptied his as soon as it started, and had himself been the target of another man’s .32 pistol from ten yards off, but neither fell. Out of ammunition in one gun, pulling out his other, the younger Felts ran. This only set him apart in the scanning eyes of the young riflery champion. He exhaled and squeezed and Lee Felts crumpled just as his brother before him.

  Two rounds.

  The next found its way into the chest of a detective who’d just shot an unarmed miner. Somehow, the detective kept breathing. In fact, he ran, tried to open the front door of the bank. He never got inside. The man fell, then struggled to pull himself up. Art Williams, a miner who’d taken the second, still-loaded pistol from Lee Felts’s dead hand, walked up behind the struggling man and used his own comrade’s weapon to end his life. The shot was taken so close that Lee Felts’s gun, and William’s hand that gripped it, were blood spattered.

  One round in the magazine.

  But it was nearly over already. What detectives still breathed were either on their way to safety or shot nearly in half by small packs of miners quick to pull a trigger. Trenchmouth lowered his weapon and sat down in the street. The warring had moved away to the edges by then. A man whose left hand had been shot off tried to climb an alley fence one-handed. They back shot him before he reached the top. Another lay with half his head gone right outside Chambers Hardware, no one sure who’d killed him because so many had fired.

  On all sides of him, close-quartered, Trenchmouth felt the palpable smack of life’s end. It was in the hummingbird whir of passing bullets, the clumsy footfalls of those trying to scrape and claw their way out of it all. It was in the high-pitched shrieks of more than one of the Baldwin-Felts men, able-bodied former police officers who had known not what they walked into that day. They found themselves praying to God to be anywhere else but here.

  One of them made it to the river where he waded, then swam across to Kentucky. Two others, one shoulder-shot, made it to a passing train and rode off gripping the steel caboose ladder. Another, who was off buying cigarettes when the shots started, hid and tore u
p his detective’s papers and waited it all out, escaping, like his buddies, on the next train through.

  A couple of them managed to drop a miner each before meeting their ugly end. Lee Felts had somehow killed an unarmed miner with one shot to the forehead, and another unarmed miner was dropped mid-run. ‘Oh Lord, I’m shot,’ were his ending words.

  The quiet afterwards was unholy. Men didn’t know what to speak to one another having seen what they had. Some joked, but none really laughed. Most smoked, and one or two, off by themselves, tried not to cry. Trenchmouth stood and watched as the dead were lined up in the street. Dragged by the armpits, their boots cut ridges in the mud. Rain came in the form that taps your hat brim every few seconds, then not at all.

  Mayor Testerman was dying slowly, his wife at his side. Others were tended to as they sat in storefronts stopping blood with rags.

  The No. 16 train arrived after all, and the passengers aboard craned their necks and stared at the row of dead men laid out for them to behold. The engineer nearly lost his handle on things as he gawked. Trenchmouth watched their faces, clicking past one after another. A mother and her three little ones. A man with an eye patch. A frail girl whose eyes couldn’t understand what they saw. He watched her watching them as the train slowed near to a stop. What ugliness for a child to see, he thought, and then he had to check himself so as not to cry. He kept his eyes on the girl until he no longer could, then looked back at the dead by his feet. One of the killed miners was closest to him, and a single drop of blood had dried on his earlobe, pale and clean otherwise. Trenchmouth stared at the red marking. It was perfectly round. Dark. It began to widen in his gaze, until it filled up and covered over the young man’s head, his body, everything around him. Dark, glowing red, like the sun had landed on the earth.

  Someone kicked a dead detective beside the miner and Trenchmouth jumped. He looked back to the train but couldn’t find the girl. A hand brushed against his back, and he turned to see uglyscar Kump holding the Colt .38 he’d had tucked in his belt. Kump had disappeared during all the shooting. ‘I’ll give it back,’ he said, smiling the way no man should in front of so many dead. Then he walked down the line of them, seven dead Baldwin-Felts, and put a bullet in each until the hammer hit hollow. No one cared to pay much mind, and Trenchmouth hoped the little girl had passed on the train. He couldn’t look up to see.

  Sid Hatfield walked over and stood above the lifeless body of Al Felts. He took the warrant he’d had issued that day from his shirt pocket, opened it and spread its creases. He slapped it on the dead man’s chest, stood up again and spat. ‘Now, you son of a bitch,’ he said, ‘now I’ll serve it on you.’

  FOURTEEN

  Strange Days And More Of The Same

  Mr Bern of the New York Times wrote about the ‘shootout,’ as folks had taken to calling it in the days following. It made the front page for a while. In the eyes of people everywhere who toiled with their hands, the Baldwin-Felts men had gotten what was coming to them. They’d burned and bulleted and evicted their way through towns and families for too long, and they’d come upon one town, one sheriff, who’d had enough. At least this is how it was spoken on by most in the days following. Trenchmouth didn’t do talking of any sort. Mostly he drank. Drank to sleep. But his slumber was ravaged with the kind of nightmares reserved for men who kill other men, and when he sat up alone in his new hideout, he thought his heart might explode from the force of blood coursing through it. More than once, he put his revolver to his head.

  At midnight on June 1st, the same day Sid was arrested in Huntington for sharing a hotel room with Mayor Testerman’s widow, Trenchmouth ran out of moonshine. It was time to leave the hideout, something he’d not done in ten days. There was only one place that called to him. Home.

  He kept to the dark insides of the ridges skirting Warm Hollow. He moved as a tracker moves, without rustling ground, without any sound, as the Widow had trained him to. When he’d circled the house twice and convinced himself no one was there that shouldn’t be, he walked through the front door.

  Both women were seated at the kitchen table. Both had nothing but their undergarments on, and they fanned themselves alternately with the Sears Roebuck. They looked at him there in the doorway like they’d expected him at that very moment. ‘I reckon we can say he’s alive then,’ the Widow said to Clarissa, who laughed so that she hog-snorted in between. It was the laugh of someone desperate not to cry. Trenchmouth took off his muddied boots and closed the door behind him. He watched Clarissa cackle. Then the Widow started in.

  The women were sweaty, and they were drunk.

  On the table between them was a lantern, and next to it, a jar of the house pull. The best blend. Trenchmouth felt his stomach lurch, his tongue swell at the sight of it. He walked to the table clumsily and reached out for the jar. When he got there, the Widow kicked him in the shin and smacked his face hard. She pulled the moonshine to her breast and held it there as if it was a child. The laughter was over with. ‘You ain’t earned the right,’ she told him. ‘Ain’t even truthfully lived here since you was a boy, not in your mind. Not in your body for damn near six months.’

  Clarissa got up and hugged him. She felt his shoulders, his back, his arms. Gripped at him to make sure he was real. For Trenchmouth, it was like the time with her on the train all over again. Electric. He rested his head on her shoulder and they stayed like this.

  The Widow paid the display no mind. ‘I believe those detectives reaped what they sewn. But if you had the kind of hand in it they say you did, well…’ She looked at the top of her boy’s head there on her girl’s shoulder, the two of them swaying, Clarissa because she was drunk and heard music that wasn’t there, Trenchmouth because he’d fall if he didn’t follow. ‘I’m your mother,’ the Widow said. ‘I’ll help you. But you got to get out of Mingo altogether now. That’s all there is to it.’

  Clarissa began to hum in his ear. ‘Down by the O-H-I-O’ she hummed, fast and joyful. She’d heard it on Fred Dallara’s new gramophone. They were set to be married in August.

  But at Fred’s place, on Fred’s shoulder, she’d never felt like this. This was happiness in the face of death and impending warrants for arrest. This was child’s glee in the shadows of a shitstorm waiting to break loose. Her brother was alive, she thought, and then, just as quick, she thought of Fred Dallara again. The fancy word fiancée. But Clarissa kept smiling because she was drunk and because it seemed funny to her in that little, crumbling house that her fiancée didn’t drink moonshine. That he thought those who did were mountain trash. Fred Dallara thought the union was foolish at best, dangerous and worthy of breaking at worst. So to keep her laugh from turning to a cry, she stopped thinking of the man she was to marry then. She hummed louder in Trenchmouth’s ear. Led him in a made-up procession of steps across the creaking floorboards. She hummed and sang what few words she knew: ‘put my arms around her and kiss her again, down by the Ohio, she’s just a simple little country girl I know.’ Clarissa sang loud enough so that she no longer heard the Widow, and neither did Trenchmouth, as she said to him, her boy, ‘tomorrow you’ll eat what I’ve got to fix, say what goodbyes you need to say, and be gone.’

  The next morning, Trenchmouth walked creekbeds forty pounds heavier. The Widow had pulled an infantryman’s pack from a trunk in the loft and filled it. Her uncle Homer had worn it in defense of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Her father had fought against Homer, his own brother-in-law, wearing a similar Union pack, but somebody had taken it off him while he lay holding his breath, pretending to be dead, at Kessler’s Cross Lanes. Somehow, her father had managed to hand down the enemy’s backpack to his daughter. It was a dusty monstrosity, but it had held up. Black canvas, brass mounts, it rode high up on a man’s back. The compartments were plentiful. While her boy had slept inside exhaustion’s relief, she’d filled each one with what she knew he’d need. Moonshine. Dried beef and water canteen. A jar of the mouthwash concoction she’d made for his condition. Anyt
hing that held long and packed little. In one compartment she’d packed just before he walked out the door was something he’d never seen. ‘It was my husband’s,’ she’d said, ‘Richard’s. Your Daddy had he lived to be.’ It was a big silver flask with an intricate etch. She showed him how it worked. The bottom left section released with the press of a thumbnail-sized catch at the cap. Inside the released section, completely encased, was a Double Derringer, silver like its housing. ‘Like he did before you, use what’s here with temperance,’ she told him. She meant both the shine and the pistol.

  Even with four boxes of fifty rimfire cartridges, .22 longs at that, there was room in the pack for a few of his own things. His real daddy’s harmonica. Map and compass. A pen, pocket knife, and hunting knife. Paper and pencil.

  He was almost to Arly Scott’s house when the pack grew heavy on his shoulders. He switched his rifle’s strap from his left to right shoulder and back, but it never rode comfortable next to the pack.

  They were sitting on a wide chopblock in the dirt patch behind the house, Sr and Jr, praying in song. Mrs Scott stood above them, her eyes shut and her fists half-clenched. She sang, ‘Whoa, Satan’s like a snake in the grass,’ and the two men answered, ‘That’s what Satan’s grumbling bout.’ Mrs Scott went up a pitch, ‘He going bite and conjure you,’ and again they answered her, ‘That’s what Satan’s grumbling bout.’ Then, together, they intoned, ‘And I won’t stop prayin, I won’t stop prayin, I won’t stop prayin, that’s what Satan’s grumbling bout.’ Trenchmouth stood behind a rhododendron bush and waited until they’d finished. Had they kept on, he could have listened all day. He’d lost God somewhere along the way, but in that sound, in their voices, he could almost feel him again. When he’d wiped the wet from his eyes, he approached.