By the age of seventeen, Trenchmouth had given up on school.
When Ewart Smiths father, J.B., died from a snakebite, he used her vulnerable state to finally dip his pecker into that honeypot hed so often been denied. For her, it was outright painful. For him, disappointing. Over in no time and plain awkward. So, he took to avoiding Ewart at all costs.
He also avoided Clarissa and Hob Tibbs and Anne Sharples, the latter of whom had started up a makeshift whorehouse in the Urias Hotel on Main Street. One of her earliest working-girl recruits was the sad, abandoned Ewart Smith.
If any of these folks from the past got in Trenchmouths line of sight, he changed direction. He drank alone in his hideout. The teenage years had made him morose, and as the paper told of the wars end, another one, closer to home, began to brew. It was an odd time, and the paper told of that too. Its pages were marked by public notices of application for pistol license. Trenchmouth wasnt the only one itchy.
The Daily Mail told of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, a German whod invented the gas of the dead, an asphyxiating yellow-green nightmare. Ethics, it seemed, were out the window. The power of invention mattered most. And in the face of power, good working people found themselves capable of enlisting the basest of their instincts.
The men were already mumbling and organizing, already listening to Mr John L. Lewis and his thundering pronouncements, when the headquarters of Superior-Thacker blew up. The coal companys main building exploded to ring in the new year of 1920, and for a two mile stretch, folks windowpanes and storefronts paid the price in shatter. As usual, the company took no onus.
Coal trucks rumbled everywhere, rough shot across crooked streets, cracking them up like iced-over streams, and still no culpability was claimed. North of Matewan, in Kermit, Gray Eagle Coal Company labeled those public roads private and lined them with gun-strapped, shadowy men to back their claim.
All of this was talked over between miners. All of it silently ingested and turned to burning rage. The rage was powerful enough that it made unlikely comrades out of otherwise separate and supposedly unequal men. Black and white men who would normally never set foot in one anothers homes. Men like Arly Scott Sr and Bill Blizzard spoke on the situation over coffee and sometimes whiskey, early in the morning and late at night. And, increasingly so, they talked about it in front of the wife, the kids. They had more time to do so, having been fired on the spot for wearing their District 17 Union credentials after an organizing drive moved through the hills like salvation.
This was how Trenchmouth came to know firsthand that the union, like the railroad before it, had come fast and hard. And with it came his day to make a name for himself.
It came on a Sunday afternoon. At the Scotts, Trenchmouth and Arly were sparring with a couple pairs of Arly Srs beat up old gloves. Arly Sr encouraged daily sparring, along with jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups. Such a regimen had paid off for Arly Jr, who was undefeated in four amateur fights. Quiet and wise for his years, he looked to be going places.
In the kitchen, the boys heard Bill Blizzard stand up and say, Its high time we did something other than talk, by God. Trenchmouth stopped slipping punches to look in that direction and caught a straight right from his friend. He ended up on his tailbone, a little sore in the nose but listening. Arly did the same. Arly Sr looked over at them briefly. The two boys read in his eyes the command to go on about their business. They started in on their push-ups, to be followed by sit-ups.
Sid will back us, a friendly man named Ed Chambers said. The Sid they spoke on was Sid Hatfield, Matewans pistol-packing chief of police, newly appointed by Mayor Testerman and friend to miners troubles. Hatfield was a rough man, young and with eyes that cut like a shiv. He had ridden those cars into their deep holes at one time, right alongside the others, and he knew how the company regarded their laborers, how they dealt bad hands. He could toss up a spud and air it out with his sidearm, and hed used that same weapon to kill a mine foreman five years prior during a scuffle. Self-defense is what hed called it. So had the courts.
These Baldwin-Felts boys has gotten too big for their britches, Blizzard said, and he set his glass on the table hard, so that it nearly shattered. The Baldwin-Felts men were detectives hired by mine operators as little more than glorified thugs, a foremans armed big brother. They stood behind and in front of company whims, and like the companies, they had little care that four-hundred men had died in the past year down those holes, unlucky inheritors of explosion and cave-in.
What weve got to do is get to these scab trains before they reach town, Arly Sr said. The mine operators had taken to bringing in hordes of men to work for those who no longer would or could. The week before, Little Arly and Trenchmouth had thrown rocks at one such load of men, and Trenchmouth, for the fun of it, had even lined up a shot on one scab, his Winchester empty of ammo, his finger off the trigger.
Walking toward the men in the kitchen that day, having just been hit in the face and wearing his outlaw scowl, Trenchmouth chose to reveal this. I had one of em in my sights last week, he said. I wasnt going to shoot him, acourse. But I sure could nick him if I wanted.
They all went quiet, and both Arlys shook their heads, as they often did when the strange white boy spoke. But everybody knew Trenchmouths skills as a marksman, and a skinny miner said, That aint a bad idea now. Shootin to hobble but not to kill. The men looked confused. The skinny miner clarified. Not the scabs, mind you, but them thugs who pistol-whipped little Jerry last week. They could have a leg shot comin.
They almost laughed at the idea then. Almost brushed it away and moved on. But the memory of that unlucky miners face emerged in all their minds simultaneously. The purple, cracked impressions the gun butt had left. And the loss of their livelihoods was omnipresent, along with loss of scrip at the company store, and the threat of losing their homes, also company-owned. All this stirred into the base instincts that had risen to the surface, and the result was the inclusion of the two seventeen-year-olds to the circle. One of them suspected he was about to get used yet again, but he didnt care, because this time hed have a gun in his hand. All he had to do was shut one eye and bend a finger.
The boy who had once fashioned miniature coal tipples from scrap metal now found himself toppling giant ones with dynamite. He and Arly Sr and Arly Jr and the others laid the explosives down by night, and by day there was nothing left but black holes where coal was to be loaded. They dynamited the tipple at Red Jacket and the one at Tomahawk too.
Scab workers were run off from reopened mines by way of rifle fire. It was just scare tactics, never more, until the day somebody fired back.
Trenchmouth was on strikebreaker duty in McDowell County, along with Arly Jr and a young miner named Kump. Kump was only there because hed inherited an automobile and could provide transport. They laid on their stomachs behind a downed maple tree and ate bologna sandwiches. When the time came, they lit up the slow, single-file line of scabs with the unmistakable echo of the high-powered rifle report. They strafed the mines entrance, careful not to hit anyone. But the mine operators had sent along some Baldwin-Felts boys that day, and they located the source of echoes, raised their own small arms up to return what they were getting.
The first round to come close caught the young mens attention. It kicked tree bark into the open mouth of Arly Jr, who promptly hit the deck. The next one caught the young miner Kump in the jaw and tore open his face. His blood had been tapped, and it issued down his pale white neck in wide red lengths, gathering in his shirt collar until the fabric could hold no more. Kump went broadside crimson then, and he fell forward, alive but silent as the dead.
Trenchmouth had not seen such ugliness envelop a man before, only deer and bear. Even then, there was never such contrast of skin and blood, such streaming horror to behold. But he quickly turned away from the sight of it, and lined his true sights on the Baldwin-Felts detectives. Two of them. Three rounds left in the magazine. First, the tall one in the bowler hat. One shot, shin bone. No doubt shattered. The man was one moment upright and aiming, the next crippled, in the time it took Trenchmouth to close that eye and squeeze that finger hed closed and squeezed so many thousands of times before. Without thought, he shifted his position leftward, and the squat detective sat in the notch of his barrel. This time it was the thigh, a meaty target, and the man buckled as his friend had before him. Theyd both dropped their guns and lost their hats. There was something pathetic in the way a man moved when hed taken a bullet.
One round left in the magazine. Trenchmouth back-and-forthed the detectives, sighted one hobbled man then the other as they attempted to pull themselves to cover. Trenchmouth lined up their heads, so perfectly round and slicked, sunlight striping the hair tonic and the sweat beads gathered in mustaches. It was always like this when he hunted. Magnified. Microscopic.
He sighted their breast pockets, shoulder seams, hearts, gut, and kneecaps. Then the lifeblood of all men the recess between their legs. But he did not fire. Trenchmouth may have been many things, but murderer was not one of them.
The Oh Lords emanating from Arly forced a change in focus. Trenchmouth dropped behind the log and looked. Oh Lord Jesus, Arly said again and again with the raw desperation of a funeral goer. His hands hovered over the downed man, but they knew not what to do.
Trenchmouth shouldered his rifle and crouched beside his friend. Together, they stripped themselves of their coats, cut lengths of wool using Arlys pocketknife. They wrapped and re-wrapped the lower face of the young man they knew by last name only. Steam came off his wound and disappeared in the chill March air, indistinguishable from their own breath.