Sid Hatfield cleared his throat. The reporter turned and stood up. In his eyes was the look of someone unfinished, someone wanting more misery to make into type so people with heat could sigh and shake their heads. Men like Hatfield and Arly Sr welcomed men like Mr Bern, the esteemed journalist. They even set up interviews and meeting times and gave advice on transportation to such city types. All of it brought attention to their people, and attention brought change, hopefully for the better. But, while they extended courtesies, they did so with a quiet air of shame and mistrust. A knowledge that Mr Bern and his colleagues would never get it right because they could never get it right.
Trenchmouth watched the girl walk away. She stopped and turned back to them again and again, waiting on something to happen. Then she made her way to the tent where her mother lay prone on a thrown out piece of rug, infected with a disease unnameable to a doctor of medicine.
Sid motioned to Trenchmouth. Mr Bern, Id like you to meet Ben Chicopee, local newspaperman. Hed made up the name on the spot from a combination of another man and the place he came from. Trenchmouth was confused, but he trusted the skinny lawman whod found his hideout. He shook Mr Berns hand.
Who do you write for? Mr Bern asked. His eyebrows had been recently trimmed, a grooming practice reserved for women, Trenchmouth thought.
Why didnt you give that girl a nickel for her trouble? Trenchmouth said.
I beg your pardon? Mr Bern angled his eyes for a closer look at the gums and teeth.
The girl. She looked back at you five times, waiting on a little something without wantin to outright ask for it. Why didnt you slip her two bits at least?
Im not in the habit of tipping young girls for their
And Im not in the habit of trimming hair what dont need it, but I know a hungry child when I see one.
Sid Hatfield laughed out loud. He sidestepped so that he could clap both men on their backs. Alright, he said. Thats just alright how you word types have at it, but lets get to it, what say? He smiled again at Trenchmouth before he handed Mr Bern a list of infractions upon the rights of good working people by those that sought to control them.
Later, he smiled as they ate supper together at Charles Livelys 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 hed 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 hed 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.
Hed met Mother Jones and hugged her. Hed listened to Bill Blizzards 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 Sids 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 wasnt there to stop it. By three oclock, 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 hotels 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 wasnt only a change of clothes inside. The men were going back to the depot to catch the five oclock 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 Feltss 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 Trenchmouths 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 Sids 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 hed kill every goddamned one of em without any goddamned warrants, but Trenchmouth knew the weight of words. And now, square in Albert Feltss 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 hed 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 detectives head. He kept his off eye open long enough to see Felts pull his sidearm. The two shots were almost simultaneous, Trenchmouths first, sunk deep into the brain folds of Albert Felts, who mustve 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 theyve 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 Widows 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 Feltss brother Lee had emptied his as soon as it started, and had himself been the target of another mans.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 whod 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 whod taken the second, still-loaded pistol from Lee Feltss dead hand, walked up behind the struggling man and used his own comrades weapon to end his life. The shot was taken so close that Lee Feltss gun, and Williams 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 whod killed him because so many had fired.
On all sides of him, close-quartered, Trenchmouth felt the palpable smack of lifes 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 up his detectives 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, Im shot, were his ending words.