The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  ‘Every time I see you, I shouldn’t be seein you,’ Arly Sr said without standing up. He acted as if it was no surprise that the boy would appear out of the woods nearly two weeks after the shootout, a shootout Arly Sr had not been a part of. His nephew Benjamin Belcher had decided to move back to Georgia and had picked the morning of May 19th to leave. Arlys Sr and Jr had heard about the bloodshed in the tent colony as they shoved bedding into a trunk. By the time they arrived, the dead were lined up, their blood had soured black, and Trenchmouth was off and running.

  ‘I’m on my way to disappear,’ Trenchmouth said. Mrs Scott turned from him without acknowledgment when he nodded to her. She went inside shaking her head.

  ‘You want some coffee?’ Arly Jr asked. Trenchmouth nodded that he would and Arly Jr followed his mother through the screen door.

  Arly Sr struck a kitchen match against his thumbnail and lit a skinny cigar slow and even. ‘I ain’t going to ask you about how many you shot,’ he said. Both looked down and neither spoke for a full minute. There was a bullfrog calling from the grass within spitting distance. ‘I see you got you a backpack. Going to be gone for a while.’ It was the kind of small talk that meant something. ‘Don’t forget your push-ups. Sit-ups and jumping-jacks too now.’ Arly Sr turned his head quickly toward the front of the house. He extinguished the cigar on his boot heel and stood up. Automobile engine. ‘Our guns is hid,’ he said to Trenchmouth. ‘You got another one?’ The Colt Cop & Thug was where it always was, where it had worn two small sores next to his spine. He pulled it from his waist and handed it to Arly Sr.

  ‘It’s Sid and Kump,’ Arly Jr hollered from inside.

  Everybody eased up.

  The five men met in front of the house. Sid Hatfield had taken to stopping by the Scott’s more and more. Some thought it was because he knew Trenchmouth would turn up there. Other folks said he wanted to enlist the Arlys for dirty work, as they’d stayed clean on the 19th. As they were colored and therefore more expendable somehow. Either way, they all stood together that early summer morning, Sid lazily leaning against Kump’s Model T, Kump fidgeting and looking generally malformed about the face and neck. The other three were guarded, uncomfortable even. Trenchmouth couldn’t look at Kump since he’d seen him shoot men who were already dead.

  ‘More trouble comin down,’ Sid said. He looked Trenchmouth in the eyes like he was mad the young man had taken his advice and found a hideout he couldn’t locate.

  ‘Anse Pilcher going to testify against Sid,’ Kump said. He was too excited for anybody’s taste, and he was only there because he had an automobile. ‘Anse been runnin his mouth, claims he seed Sid blow up the tipple at Tomahawk way back.’ But they all knew that had been Trenchmouth’s doing. He’d lit that fuse.

  The message was there: Do away with Anse Pilcher, proprietor of the Urias Hotel, friend to the Baldwin-Felts men, quick-handed smiter of the women he employed to please them, Ewart included. Anse Pilcher, the soft-boned cripple who’d let Frank Dallara burn. Trenchmouth’s neckhairs stood up at the mention of his name.

  Sid said nothing, just kept staring at Trenchmouth. Then, without unlocking his stare, he said to Arly Sr, ‘You reckon I might get at one of them cigars you roll?’

  ‘Come on in the house,’ Arly Sr said. They went up the porch steps. Below them, Kump climbed into the driver’s seat and shifted two rifles to make room in the backseat. Halfway inside the door to his house, Arly Sr turned and watched his boy climb into the beat-up Model T, Trenchmouth following him. The look on Sr’s face was unfamiliar to those who knew him, for rarely did he display fear or uncertainty. Inside, Sid Hatfield spoke to Mrs Scott, who held her hands tight against one another to stop them from shaking. She did not return the sheriff’s greeting, for had she parted the lips set against a worry with no end, she surely could not stifle the cry caught in her throat.

  At one a.m., from the roof of the dead Testerman’s jewelry store, Kump, Arly Jr, and Trenchmouth lay prone and alert as they had done on strikebreaker duty in McDowell so long before. Kump and Arly were getting anxious. They knew Trenchmouth had long since lined up a clean shot through the second story window of the Urias Café. It was just across the street, an easy distance for the crack shot. Kump, always oblivious, kept saying, ‘Blow his brains out, T.T.’ Arly bit his tongue, assuming that his friend, having had to kill just days before, might now find killing an undoable act. And, on any other night, with any other target, he may have been right. Trenchmouth had thought long and hard in his hideout on never again taking another man’s life. But what he saw through the frosted glass of the Urias Hotel ended such thoughts of reform in a hurry.

  Through the notch and groove on his rifle, everything, as usual, was magnified. But his target had grown more complicated. For most in the throes of the mine wars, Trenchmouth didn’t need much more reason to shoot Anse Pilcher than he already had. But the hotel owner had made killing even easier. As Anse sipped from a bottle hidden under the serving counter, he pretended not to notice one of his customers, the only man in the place at that late, closed-for-business hour. The man groped at one of the young ladies who worked the hotel. The lady was Ewart Smith. The customer giving the unwanted attention was Hob Tibbs.

  Trenchmouth wondered if one more squeeze of his trigger would end his service to the union. And if the recipient of that squeeze was Anse Pilcher, friend of the enemy, murderer of Frank Dallara, and abuser of his one-time girl, then he could surely bring himself to do it. Now two targets had given themselves over to him, but he’d already decided he only owed one shot. He could reconcile this problem.

  Most folks would never believe he planned what happened next, but most folks never truly knew Trenchmouth Taggart. In the end, the reason he was stalling on taking the shot had nothing to do with his conscience or nerves. It had everything to do with compass points, geometry lines. Trenchmouth was waiting for a pattern to take shape, and when it did, he squeezed his one allotted squeeze.

  He had aimed the shot so that it hit Anse Pilcher in the chest, where soft bone and cartilage could not slow it down as it passed in and out of a chamber of his heart, between two flaccid ribs in his back, across the small room and into the left cheek of Hob Tibbs, where it lodged and burned like hell’s blue tips and caused him to release his grip on Ewart Smith’s bosom, fall from his wobbly parlor chair, and scramble for the coat closet where he prayed to his God and pissed his cotton drawers.

  Arly Jr and Kump looked at one another with open mouths as Trenchmouth stood from his position and jumped off the roof onto the lower one next door. From there, he dropped himself to the street and ran to the Urias. He scrambled upstairs, grabbed Ewart by the forearm, and ran back down again. When he shoved her into the car in front of him, Kump already had the engine idling, and the three of them, Kump, Arly Jr, and Ewart, were incapable of speech. Throttle was all that was managed. And it was almost enough. They’d made it a quarter mile out of town and onto an unnamed road when the grade became too steep. The Model T quit again. ‘Son of a bitch,’ Arly Jr said, finally breaking the silence. Ewart tried to dab Hob Tibbs’s blood off her summer corset. ‘You didn’t fill the tank again?’ Arly hollered.

  The veins on Kump’s neck swelled. ‘Don’t no nigger talk to me like that,’ he said.

  Ewart and Trenchmouth watched the two men from the back seat. Kump looked straight ahead and put the vehicle in neutral. Arly looked hard at Kump. ‘What did you say?’ They were drifting back down the hill now, fast. Ewart kept at the stains and tried not to cry. Arly said again, ‘What did you say?’

  Kump managed to get the thing turned around, same as Arly had done the first time in McDowell. But now his hands were on the wheel, and he ignored the repeated question from the comrade to his right. They started to climb the hill backwards. But it was too steep a grade, steeper than the one in McDowell, and they kept stalling out in reverse.

  Halfway up, another Model T turned onto the unnamed hill. This one was a 1920, a coupe, and its gas
tank was lower to the ground. It came up the incline quick, and before Kump could manage another go in reverse, the smaller, faster automobile was within any man’s range. It stopped.

  ‘Get out,’ Trenchmouth said to the two up front, as he slowly opened his door and took hold of Ewart’s forearm again.

  A man stepped from either side of the coupe. Neither spoke a word and each raised a pistol.

  Trenchmouth reached back for the Colt tucked into his pants and found nothing. He’d given it to Arly Sr that morning. He grabbed his backpack from between his feet. ‘Get out now,’ Trenchmouth said, and he did so himself, pulling Ewart to the ground next to the car.

  ‘No. I damn near got it. Let me just—’ Kump’s mouth exploded before he finished. The same place he’d been shot before, only worse, and they kept coming. One split the middle of his nosebridge. His feet ceased to work as the rest of him did too, and the vehicle careened forward, down the hill toward the men unloading all they could. Arly Jr bailed out of the moving mess with a bullet in his left shoulder. He hit the ground fifteen yards down from Trenchmouth and Ewart. Trenchmouth pulled Ewart across the ground into the brush beside the road. When they got there, the shooting ceased as the two men had to crouch and shield themselves with their hands as a car piloted by a dead man smashed into their own, grill against grill. Glass broke up and spread out everywhere, but the coupe had stopped the heavier touring car, and Kump had come through the windshield to rest face down on the hood, dead as the car below him.

  Arly Jr tried to get up from the road, but he’d hit the ground hard, and he had a bullet in him. The men stood back upright, their pistols reloaded. Trenchmouth, with no weapon other than the flask derringer tucked deep in his pack, did not go to his friend. A voice ordered Arly to raise his hands up and he did so. Convinced they weren’t going to shoot Arly, Trenchmouth whispered to Ewart to stay quiet and they began crawling into the woods.

  The voice called out, ‘You remember me, nigger?’ Then, ‘Mose, get after the one that run off up there.’ Trenchmouth and Ewart crawled faster, then stood up and ran. But Trenchmouth could still hear the voice as they went, and though it was faint, he recognized it somehow. ‘You think you can whoop me again for callin you what you are? I growed a little, ain’t I?’ They were just out of earshot, all-out clambering up the hillside thick with trees when he knew for certain: Warren Crews.

  FIFTEEN

  Who Has Worn And Who Has Broken?

  There was a battalion of the 19th infantry regiment deployed to Mingo County, after pleas from the governor for help to stop the killing. Coal operators were pleased. Martial law had been declared, meetings and demonstrations banned, the carrying of firearms outlawed. The green fisted could stop looking over their shoulders. Mr Bern reported all of it in the New York Times, and people all over, just like people in Matewan and Red Jacket and Williamson, split on who was right and who was wrong. Newly appointed mine guards like Warren and Mose Crews walked a little taller with the army backing them. Behind closed doors, they pistol-whipped Arly Scott Jr and asked him again and again, ‘Who else was in the vehicle?’ He never spoke a word.

  Anne Sharples saw the butt end of a gun herself. Anse Pilcher had been a friend to those with influence, and when Anne Sharples answered their whereabouts questions with words like, ‘Ewart’s gone back to Tennessee,’ and ‘I never heard of no Trenchmouth,’ they hit her, hard, because it was easy for them to do it. Whores were used to catching beatings.

  It was George Crews’s men who did most of it. Warren and Mose’s father had risen to the rank of president of the White Star Mining Company in Merrimack. His wife, a former customer of Trenchmouth’s, had died of typhoid fever, though some folks claimed syphilis, and George was less concerned with his public image. He was set on breaking those that defied him.

  Arly Sr, angry that his boy was being held on murder charges without any proof he’d pulled the trigger, organized men in secret and consoled his wife who wished they’d left for Georgia with the Belchers on May 19th. She didn’t get out of bed much.

  Sid Hatfield beat his murder rap. He and twenty-two other defendants were acquitted of all murder charges stemming from the May 19th shootout. It was a circus of smiles and back-patting for all except those kin and friend to Al and Lee Felts. They just stood and swore revenge to themselves. Some Felts sympathizers grumbled that one defendant wasn’t even present in order to get acquitted. ‘The tooth boy,’ one man said to a reporter. ‘He done shot up most of the law men that day, all on his own.’ Some said the tooth boy had shot Anse Pilcher and skipped town back in summer. Others said that was wrong, that the killer in that incident was already in custody. It was the colored boy they said. The one with too much pride for a colored boy.

  So Sid walked free unlike young Arly, and folks just accepted this as proper. Sid was a man of the law. In this manner it became clear that to most folks, Arly Jr was nothing more than what Warren Crews had said he was, a nigger.

  But men will fight together though their reasons be different. So it was that after martial law was gone, on a May Thursday, almost a year to the day since the shootout, the steady flow of scabs returning to the coalfields would think twice yet again. George Crews’s town of Merrimack was laid bare. Striking miners hacked away the telephone and telegraph lines strung across tree-covered hills. A cow horn signaled the start of the shooting, which lasted three days. Homes and businesses, mine property and scabs, officers of the law, all felt the destruction of 10,000 bullets.

  After the Three Days’ Battle, folks were used to sleeping in their cellars for fear of stray shells. Strikebreakers quit scabbing, lucky to draw breath, as their buddies had been carried from the woods without any left. The governor pleaded with the new president, Warren Harding, for more troops. He was not heard.

  Sid Hatfield continued to walk his streets, now as an elected constable, with men at his back and pistols on his side. But a new charge arose, one which linked him and Ed Chambers to the dynamiting of a coal tipple at Red Jacket. Trenchmouth had been the one to blow up that tipple, his knowledge of its construction a handy skill in knocking down such a beast. But Sid was arrested and would be tried alongside Ed in Welch, McDowell County. The site was four miles down the mountain from where Trenchmouth now hid with Ewart, under cover of the steepest terrain the Southern Appalachians offered. Surviving on what most never could.

  He’d built them a little shelter, camouflaged of course. There was trip wire and a noisemaker to warn of potential intruders. They ate okay. The Widow’s provisions lasted a while, and Trenchmouth laid traps for squirrels and rabbits, even fished some in a nearby stream. Winter had been tough, but they managed. They lived like a young couple might have in the pioneer days. They laid down together and the awkwardness of their first attempt faded. Kisses on the mouth accompanied such routines, but Trenchmouth never opened his lips.

  The moonshine was rationed into nightly portions, with Ewart permitted to sample only on Saturday. The Widow’s mouthrinse concoction also threatened to run out, and when it did, his condition would start to require more moonshine. This was a problem. He scratched at his thin, forming beard and read again and again the note he’d found from the Widow inside the pack. Get to Dr Warble in Welch when you can. He’s a fine dentist, and one of my best customers. I reckon he’s one of the few who truly knows the source of his supply, as he and Richard were good friends. Warble knows how to put in the gold crowns, and if you plan to be gone from here for a while, those teeth will need to be fixed for fear of more infection and pain. It was nearing time to visit the good doctor who had given him his name.

  Trenchmouth knew things. Current events, folks called them. He even knew of the impending August 1st trial of his two-gun buddy. This was all because Ewart walked into Welch now and again for the paper, careful to keep her face down, to not draw attention. It was on one of these visits that she met Dr Warble at his office and told him of Trenchmouth’s oral situation. She made an appointment for her man on Augu
st 1st at four a.m., as he’d asked her to. She also told the good doctor what she hadn’t told Trenchmouth yet. She was fairly certain that she carried a child.

  She left Welch that morning feeling good for having told someone. Now, she supposed, she could tell her man. She didn’t even keep her head tucked as she walked back toward the hills, didn’t keep to the alleys. By this point, more than a year had passed since the shootout, and no one much cared what had become of the crazy, dead preacher’s whore of a daughter. Trenchmouth, on the other hand, was a man, who, as a juvenile, could be linked to more than one murder, though some would call it self-defense.

  Ewart told him of her pregnancy and he was happy. But he didn’t say much on it. In those days, he didn’t say much of anything. Mostly, he thought. He thought about giving up the gun. There were nights when he pledged to himself to never raise a firearm to another man again, and there were nights when this seemed impossible. He thought about how he couldn’t remember things. Things from childhood and things from yesterday. Things from moments when he supposedly took men’s lives or handled snakes or dug up a dead man who was his father. The quiet of the woods made memories turn to dreams. He wondered if he could not remember things because of all the moonshine he’d drunk over the years. While he wondered, he sipped moonshine. It was, and had always been, the only way to get to sleep.

  Ewart lost the baby in late July. There was so much blood that Trenchmouth thought about picking her up and running to town, giving up on hiding altogether. But she told him it would stop soon enough. That it happened some. That it was early enough along where she’d be fine. Coming from her line of work, Ewart had experience with such realities.

  He rubbed her back and stomach where she ached. He blew on her hot forehead while she slept.

  When he left at two-thirty on the dark morning of August 1st, he carried his derringer flask. He wore plain clothes, a set the Widow had packed him. On his head, a found golfer’s hat, something he’d not be caught dead in were he a free man. His beard was patchy, but it was enough to cover his youth.