The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Then Ace took off his hat and held it with two hands at his waist. ‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘Your man pulled him off driving that black Cutlass Supreme, ain’t that right?’ Behind him, Zizi let a note hold. She waved her arms like a perched bird, pulled a vibrato out of herself and her machine.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Listen.’ It was a wholly independent organ by then, his toothless mouth. St Clair stared at it, watched it go. ‘I’m going to tell you somethin important,’ Ace said. Just then, Zizi finished the oddest ‘Amazing Grace’ rendition on record and leaned against the wooden mountain backdrop sweating while the audience clapped confused. Ace spoke the words, ‘I put it in the glove box. My .38.’

  St Clair shook his head and held his mouth open. ‘But,’ he said. ‘But you don’t ride in cars.’

  ‘Started a couple weeks ago.’

  ‘At your age? Without a license?’

  ‘Been up to the state police’s last Monday. Showed em my eyes are good. I got what you call “wide vision.”’ Sometimes in life lies were required, and sometimes real change. St Clair laughed a little and shook his head some more. Then, Ace took a seat beside him in the cruiser and rode in an automobile for the first time since 1952 when he’d awakened stuck to the floor, half dead.

  On the way to the police station, where Albert sat in a holding cell with black-inked fingertips, the lie grew bigger and more believable. The gun was for protection, he told St Clair. He’d been planning to drive the Cutlass to Camden Park that evening. A man named Crews had threatened to kill him there, he said.

  At the station, the Cutlass was still parked out front, yet to be impounded. Inside, Ace walked straight to the holding cell. He gripped the bars and told Albert to stand up and come to him. Eye to eye, he said, ‘It’s going to be alright. But you’ve got to right your ship, you hear me?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Albert said.

  ‘Ace, come on away from him,’ Officer St Clair said from behind the desk. He was trying to locate Hodge, who’d gone for McDonald’s.

  The little office smelled like mildew. It had flooded in April and the surveillance system was still down. The camera in the corner collected dust. White paint chipped off the brick wall in pieces the size of half dollars.

  It sat all wrong with Ace, seeing the boy in a cage. He’d not allow it to proceed.

  A female officer who’d been watching Albert asked St Clair what was what. She’d never spoken to Ace when he’d come around for the arrest reports, but he’d always noticed her yellow hair, the way it stood up stiff, thick with all that spray.

  ‘Ol Ace here says it was his .38 in the glove box.’

  ‘Can prove it too,’ Ace said. ‘I etched my mark in it with a raccoon penis bone.’

  ‘What?’ The female officer laughed from the belly up. ‘Raccoon what?’ she said. Her seated posture was poor.

  ‘Ace, I’m going to get the firearm out of evidence for you. See about this mark. You sit tight right here.’ St Clair walked down the hall, pulled a key from his spring-loaded rollaway, and unlocked the evidence room. When he was in, Ace turned toward Albert and winked.

  There were flies humming around the place. Some butted their heads against the windows, the lights.

  Ace walked over to the coffee pot and poured himself one in styrofoam. He took a fistful of sugarcubes from the glass bowl beside the creamer and kept them in his hand. At the female officer’s desk, he said, ‘Miss, you ever seen the magical world of the fly and the three sugarcubes?’

  ‘Boy you are full of em, aren’t you?’ She had a condescending way toward old folks that resulted from a poor self worth.

  Albert watched from his cell while Ace lined up the cubes right to left on yellow hair’s desk. Before he set down the third one, he licked it without her seeing. ‘Now watch those close,’ he said. She did so. ‘The fly will land on the far left one if you concentrate on it hard enough.’ Ace pointed to it and stepped back from her desk. Then, he stepped back again. Albert watched him move out of her sight range and down the hall to the evidence room.

  She never took her eye off that cube. When the fly landed on it, she said, ‘Well, I’ll be a—’

  The phrase did not finish. St Clair hollered something unintelligible from the evidence room and the yellow-haired lady officer stood up scared.

  Hodge, aged 20, came in the back door carrying a cardboard coffee holder balancing two full McDonald’s bags. It took both hands. ‘McRibs,’ he said. Then he looked around himself and froze.

  Ace was walking back from the evidence room. He held St Clair from behind by the wrist. With his other hand, he pressed the .38 to the man’s head.

  ‘Hodge,’ St Clair was saying. ‘Hodge. All you have to tell me is that you emptied it before you checked it in. Understand?’ They’d been short-handed since budget cuts. No double-checkers on staff when every able body works Saturday patrol.

  Hodge was a statue with that stack of fast food, balanced and unmoving. Albert was to his left, yellow hair to his right. She had yet to draw her gun, but she’d undone the button.

  ‘Hodge?’ St Clair said.

  ‘Everybody easy now,’ Ace said. He kept the pistol pushed hard to St Clair’s temple. Let him know it wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Hodge?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Hodge said.

  A look swept St Clair’s face. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

  Albert’s mouth had gone dry and he licked and swallowed and tried to breathe normal.

  Ace said, ‘Now I am saying right here to all of you that this weapon is mine. I own it, not the boy. I put it in the glove box this morning.’

  Hodge still did not move. Yellow hair still did not draw her sidearm.

  ‘Lean over and get the keys off the desk,’ Ace said. St Clair did so, the .38 sticking to him. ‘Drop em in.’ St Clair reached his free arm back and felt for Ace’s pants pocket, dropped in the Oldsmobile keys. ‘Now,’ Ace said. ‘Listen all of you. I am going to leave here with my gun. You ain’t going to give chase, hear? Albert is going to walk out a free man because you got nothin to hold him on. Albert?’

  ‘Yessir?’ Albert straightened his posture, chest out, behind in.

  ‘You get you a public defender if it calls for it. They can’t convict you on a single charge without evidence. Hear me?’

  ‘I hear you Grandpa.’

  Of all the names he’d ever been called, this one he liked the most.

  ‘Now St Clair knows me to be a fair man. I’m askin you all not to give chase, not to make any more of this here tonight. When I leave, I’m going to Mexico to die in the sun. Don’t want no trouble along the way. Once I’m gone, that’s the end of all this here. Are you willin to do that?’

  Nobody spoke and Ace pressed the barrel harder.

  ‘Yes,’ St Clair spit out. ‘Ace has been an acquaintance of mine for years now,’ he said. ‘I give my word on this being the end of it.’

  It was quiet again for a moment. ‘You called me acquaintance, I noticed. Not friend.’ Ace smiled and the two officers who could see the open mouth shrunk back into themselves for fear. ‘I like that. Ain’t never known but one officer of the law to be a friend. You all don’t mix too well with outlaws.’ He backed down the hallway with the gun trained on St Clair for the length of the place. Then he was out the door and on the road.

  There were six in the cylinder. Hodge had never unloaded the weapon.

  They kept their word. There would be no chase. Albert walked out, free and easy.

  Ace drove fast to Mingo, so fast he couldn’t believe it himself. As it turned out, driving an automobile was easy. He put ninety miles of dogleg behind him in two hours.

  He bought groceries, a backpack, a plastic tarp, and a shovel at an all-night super store in Williamson. Then, he tracked Warren Crews and put a bullet between the old man’s eyes while he slept alone on a bare box spring. He dragged him to the car and hefted him into the tarp-lined trunk.

/>   He drove to his boyhood home. Next to where the outhouse had stood, he dug a grave. He rolled Warren Crews down into it, spit in his eyes for Arly Jr, and covered him up with dirt.

  He drove the car to Sulfur Creek Mountain, pulled to the top of what Larry Blevins had called ‘the wrecking hill.’ He left it perched on the drop off in the dark, a present for a lucky worshipper of automotive invention. He was not one of their kind.

  It took Ace an hour and a half to hike back to the house up Warm Hollow. The backpack’s weight caused him to feel his age.

  The sun rose about the same time he laid down in the loft, the property deed in his shoe with the remaining five hundred dollars. He closed his eyes as folks all over the tri-state opened theirs to the Sunday edition of the Advertiser. They called each other and read in wonder the words of the Police Blotter:

  Outlaw rides off, leaves city dwellers for sunny Mexico

  An outlaw left town yesterday after residing in the city for more than a decade. Any other crimes committed were deemed unworthy of punishment, and prisoners were let free from their cages.

  The Outlaw recognized the uselessness of most things considered useful today, and the demise of most things once considered grand. He’ll miss little of your fair towns, only the friends and family left behind. To them, to you, he shouts from on horseback:

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

  Somehow, in the days, months, and years following, the people in those hills knew to leave be the man in the old log house. Men, women, and children stayed clear of him. The coal company found another fill for their uprooted earth.

  The old man worked on the house, patched its drafty sills and seams and populated it with furniture built from trees.

  One day, he found a rusted tin box under a rotten floorboard in the loft. Inside were the letters of young Clarissa, letters addressed to a boy named Trenchmouth but never sent because he lived in the same house. These yellowed, cracking papers marked in longhand spoke of love never tried, because in this life, trying was always met with heartache. The old man read the letters with a joy and a sorrow more palpable than any he’d ever felt reading newspaper stories. Afterwards, he rested. He closed his weary eyes and pictured Clarissa, writing all those letters to him in secret. The floorboards warmed. He could hear her breathing beside him. He matched his own to hers and nearly let the music of such breathing lull him into the sleep of the dead.

  He sat upright instead. Then he did his push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks. He decided to live a while longer, to go into town every now and again, procure things like chipped beef and Chesterfields. He decided he’d no longer speak. The rotten hole in his head between his nose and his chin no longer had words to utter.

  Epilogue

  The old man finished telling his story to the reporter from Time magazine. He rested. Worried that the saltwater-rated fishing line hadn’t held through all the talking, he put his fingers to his lips. There was nothing there. No fishing line at all. Just the old, cracked lips circled in beard stubble, the empty, rotten gums inside. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. He looked to the reporter for answers.

  The man across the kitchen table from him was someone he’d never seen before. A sort of blank man, no particular features at all. He moved his hand across the table to the voice recorder and pressed his thumb to a button on the tiny, steel machine. The red light went out.

  The old man grabbed at his ears, for a ringing had overtaken then, sudden and loud. ‘Put your light back on,’ he said.

  ‘Take your makeup off,’ the reporter said back over the howl. Then he stood up. The sound ceased. He said to the old man, ‘I don’t know what name to call you by.’

  It was safe to take his hands away from his ears. He spoke through the confusion. ‘Call me as the first ones did. Call me Trenchmouth,’ he said.

  ‘Alright, Trenchmouth.’ The man’s voice had changed somehow, become recognizable. ‘What do you say to those who claim your story is fabricated, not real?’ His body seemed to wobble while he talked, the pitch of his voice along with it. ‘That it is stolen from a history book published twelve years ago by a Marshall University scholar in the field of Appalachian mythology?’

  ‘Come again?’ the old man said.

  ‘Sir,’ the reporter went on. He looked at some papers he held. ‘What do you say to this record of the infanticide death of an Early Taggart in February of 1903 in Mingo County, West Virginia?’ His mouth opening grew smaller and smaller as he spoke, until he was talking only from a small, pursed hole.

  ‘Why are you speaking like that?’ the old man asked.

  ‘In tongues?’ The reporter did a little dance then. A twitch jig. While he shook, he sang, ‘Newborn baby born in town, Devil talkin, mama got to drown.’ It was the song of the birth mother in the voice of the birth mother. The song went on in the voice of Hob Tibbs and Arthur H. Estabrook and J.B. Smith: ‘Devil’s got a hold on God, boy. Pretty as you please, boy. You seen red, heard that howlin sound? That’s steel invention, diggin you underground.’

  It occurred to the old man then that he had no memories and may have never lived at all. That he may have been sitting in silence for days, watching a red glow on a tiny steel machine. Listening to its gears howl electric.

  But that was hogwash. He lit another Chesterfield and shut his eyes tight. ‘I know what’s real,’ the old man said.

  When he opened them up again, he was alone in the house. Had the reporter been there, had he not been an apparition, a sign of having lost all mental faculty, the old man would have told his guest that he’d seen and heard his kind before. The bamboozler. No more than a salesman of eugenics, a prophet for a fake God. A man such as him could no better speak on what was real than a New York newspaperman dropped in the bloody Mingo hills. ‘I’ll not be bamboozled,’ the old man said. It came out muffled.

  He touched his lips again. The saltwater-rated fishing line was there. He ran his fingers over it. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. When he lowered his hands to the table, he found his old Underwood typewriter resting there, his fingers on the keys. It scared him, and he stood up quick, knocking his chair over with the backs of his knees.

  ‘Well,’ the old man said to himself. ‘That’s just how it goes.’ He’d finally lost his mind, he figured. Finally started seeing things and people that weren’t there.

  What came next was easy to figure.

  There was ice on the kitchen window, inside and out. But he did not take his wool coat from the rack. He limped to the front door and took up his sassafras walking stick from where it leaned against the jamb. With his free hand, he took the doorknob. He stopped. Didn’t turn it. Out there, all was liable to be red and crumbled, leveled forever. Out there, everything was liable to be gone.

  He felt something pressing against his behind. He reached into his back pocket and pulled it out. The derringer flask. It held no scratches to mark time’s passage. Instead, it shone silver, as if spit-shined. He read the mark etched with skill on its face:

  Bottomless & Never-ending

  He unscrewed the cap, put it to the hole, and swallowed all he could. It warmed his bones and righted his ship.

  The old man wore a smile then, as much as was possible with a sewn-shut mouth. ‘Well,’ he said, and he turned the knob, walked outside. It was cold, but he moved through it, past where the outhouse and the barn and the garden used to be. He came to the edge of the woods. He stepped into them and carried to the mountains.

  That night, the 108 year-old man known by many names climbed higher, and all the crying babies who lived in those hills went still. He tossed away his walking stick and sidestepped the incline. He used his arms for balance, like a trapeze artist.

  When he got to the top of Sulfur Creek Mountain, he smiled again, this time wide enough to tear that stitching from his mouth. He did not mind the discomfort. For stretching out before him, as wide as his vision would reach, he beheld it.

  It was not the
surface of the moon, nor the wrecking hill, nor the great colorless void, flush as a pool table. His vision did not blur to red and his ears did not howl electric. The mountains had never buckled. They were there before him, real and true.

  He felt the Widow all around him. He thanked her aloud for trying. Then, he found a suitable hickory tree and lay down beneath its limbs. It was as if no war had ever bloodied the ground beneath him. As if the world was a proper place.

  Everything had come back. Everything was as it had been.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to so many books by authors who have tirelessly put down the history of a people not to be forgotten. I owe a debt of gratitude to Best of Hillbilly by Otto Whittaker, The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogun, Thunder in the Mountains by Lon Savage, Mountains of Music by John Lilly, and The Foxfire Book by Eliot Wigginton. I am also indebted to the CD Work & Pray, which reflects the work of Dr Cortez Reece. I’d like to thank the Williamson Daily News archives, Wheeling Register for its early reporting on the penitentiary at Moundsville, and the late Joe Chambers for the videotape transcript of his father’s words about May 19th, 1920. For assistance with President Kennedy’s 1960 primary campaign in West Virginia, I consulted An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek and John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O’Brien.

  I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the first place I came across a version of the expression ‘hang a rope and drown a glass of water,’ which grew, in Trenchmouth’s world, to be an anthem of sorts. ‘Diamond Bob’ first uttered those words, and I thank Jerome Washington, a writer who knows better than me what’s real, for listening and writing.

  Thank you to the folks at West Virginia University Press for all their help. Thanks also to the writing programs that assisted me financially over the years, and especially to the writers they employed to teach.