The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart - Glenn Taylor 19 стр.

It was dark in there save one glaring light in the center of the room, just above the chair. It stunk of medicinals, burned the nostrils to breathe. Dr Warble was readying things. Im going to give you some nitrous oxide through this mask, he said. Then, pointing to another one, he said, and through this one, Ill drop something called diethyl ether. It was a gauze contraption that would fit over Trenchmouths face. I can drop as much or as little as I need to keep you asleep and not feeling a thing. Understand?

Yessir, Trenchmouth said.

Good.

Sid Hatfield had two gold teeth. Trenchmouth would be getting eight. Four top, four bottom. The molars would stay as is, but folks couldnt see those. No one would ever have to look at his old teeth again.

The gas came, and Trenchmouth went.

In his dream, everything was tomato red. He stood in the hollow by his boyhood home, by the outhouse. By Beechnut the mule and the well. All of it was clear but hazed over somehow, smeared the color of iodine. He looked around him at the mountains. They shook at the tops almost unnoticeably. Quick shivers, like a man in a seizure that passes fast. But the quiver in these mountains wasnt passing. It kept up, became accompanied by a howl. It was high-pitched and wobbly, like a woman wailing, a whistle electrified. Then, as he watched through the red glow, the mountains came down. They crumbled as nothing hed ever seen, as if someone had pulled the ground out from under them and they had no other recourse but to fold in on themselves. It was horrifying. The mountains were no more. And then it was over.

When he woke up, his cheeks were stuffed with bloody gauze and Dr Warble was nowhere to be found. He felt for his pocket watch. His head was hard to lift and his face felt like it was no longer there. It was past noon.

Trenchmouth stood and fell back down against the chair. It was quiet and the window blinds told him it was overcast outside. He picked up his moonshine-loaded backpack, breathed in deep and stood again, stumbled to the door.

Coming out of the alley, he saw the police, state and otherwise, congregating around the courthouse steps. He stepped back into the alley and heard the footfalls of a man approaching. Trenchmouth put his hand on the derringer flask tucked into his belt and turned to face the man. It was Mr Bern, the New York Times reporter. He was dressed in a gray suit and fedora hat. His pants were cut too long.

Hey fella, he said. You dont look so good. Bern did not recognize the man he knew as reporter Ben Chicopee.

Trenchmouth managed to say, What happened? through the gauze and swelling.

You mean at the courthouse? Whatd you just walk out the forest, friend?

Mr Bern got a stare that seemed familiar to him, frightened him, and impelled him to answer all at once. He frowned and said, Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were shot down going up the steps to trial. Five, maybe eight bullets apiece by all counts. Right in front of the Mrs Missuses? How do you write that plural? For him, the world was words. He took a pencil from behind his ear and a pad from his jacket pocket. He never got to writing. Trenchmouth knocked both from his grip and kicked the man in the groin. He didnt wait to see him drop and moan, just peered around the brick building again to look at the courthouse. At what he couldnt approach, what hed missed altogether.

He wondered for a moment if this was real or if he was still in Warbles chair. Inside his dream where everything buckled and howled and rocked to the ground. But the only thing buckled here was Mr Bern, and Trenchmouth walked slowly over to him, knelt down and lifted the mans wallet, complete with press credentials. He wasnt sure why, it just seemed right.

Then he moved on past Bern toward the edge of town, his face beginning to throb, the four fresh jars of mountain magic beginning to call to him like they hadnt since the dark days of the previous May. He stopped. In his ether stupor, hed not asked Mr Bern the question now echoing in his mind: who pulled the trigger? But he stood there only a moment or so before walking on. It was a question whose answer required more shooting. More killing and running and hiding, without end. Hed not ask it. Hed not do anything but walk away.

Sid Hatfield was dead and gone, and the Trenchmouth who came back from Welch that day was not the one who left. He drank. Hard. He was unable to speak to or look at the woman whod lost his unborn child. He considered the last two years of his life, let himself think too much on what hed done. They were thoughts so powerful that even the moonshine couldnt keep them at bay. When a man has killed another, one way or the other, he has to think on what hes done. And when he does, when he really thinks about taking away a life that could have been lived, hell break. And thats what Trenchmouth did.

He left Ewart in the middle of the night. There was a note that said he was sorry. Some money. Enough food to hold her a little while.

This time he went deep enough that no one would find him. He walked straight into the hills of Mercer County, bordering the Blue Ridge. These were big hills. Big enough so that when a man let himself be swallowed by them, he couldnt walk a few miles for a newspaper or some dried goods. He couldnt know what would come to be in his absence down below.

He couldnt know that his woman, on her way to her grandmothers in Tennessee, only made it as far as Keystone, McDowell County. Keystone was a street of taverns. Whorehouse row. Come one, come all, they said, and men listened. A writer from neighboring Virginia wrote of the place. The Sodom and Gomorrah of Today he called it. Ewart said shed stay a couple nights. Then a week. Then six months.

Trenchmouth couldnt know that Arly Jr had his day in court. That he received a sentence of life imprisonment in the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville. Guilty, they called the young boxer whod hoped to be a middleweight contender. Guilty of the murder of Anse Pilcher. Trenchmouths last trigger squeeze through the Urias Hotel window had ruined the life of his only friend.

He couldnt know that Charles Lively, the Baldwin-Felts spy whod posed as a union-friendly Matewan restaurant owner, had been the one who pulled the trigger in Welch and then planted guns on Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers. Self-defense is what Lively had called it. So had the courts.

Trenchmouth couldnt know that two thousand people lined the streets of Matewan for Sid Hatfields funeral procession. They walked, some shouting sorrow, across the Tug on a bridge that swayed under their masses. Workers put down their shovels and picks and hammers for an hour of the working day, state-wide. The New York Times gave the funeral front page.

It all added up to more striking and more bloodshed. And, finally, it built to the amassing of ten thousand armed men, miners and otherwise, from all over the state. They rode in on outlaw trains and walked ridges on foot. They would meet their enemy at Blair Mountain, in Logan County, and it would be a war to end all wars. Bill Blizzard fired them up, and few failed to march. The infantry was brought in to hold them back, as was a squadron of army planes, dispatched from Langley. Men were to be rained upon by the airborne machine guns and gas bombs of their own nations military. But it did not come to pass. Instead, President Harding dropped from his planes an order to lay down arms. The order was followed by the miners, but only after theyd seen more die, covered and carried to the awaiting train cars.

There were those who wished the rotten-toothed teenager with the dead-eye aim had been among them in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Or that hed been at Sid Hatfields side on the Welch Courthouse steps. Hed have dropped em all, some said. But mostly that boy was forgotten in the sorrows of those years. His mother, the Widow Dorsett, did not forget. She thought of him while she tended her still, dreamed of him when she slept. Clarissa did not forget. She thought of him as she bore Fred Dallara a second child and cooked and cleaned and changed diapers and stopped talking a streak like she used to. Nor did her husband forget the boy who had once attacked him like an animal. Fred Dallara was a suit, an executive with the White Star Coal Company. Two of his fellow suits, Mose and Warren Crews, spoke daily to him on their belief that Trenchmouth Taggart was somewhere close-by, maybe on high with his cheek to a rifle. They called him a murderer. They said hed show himself someday, that theyd get him if it took five years, and they asked folks questions, watched them close. Like Hob Tibbs, these men came to spend their days and nights back-looking over shoulders and sniffing the air like dogs. It was the only way to be ready for Trenchmouth Taggart.

They didnt know that the wilderness had taken him.

BOOK TWO 19461961

SIXTEEN. It was Regimented Living

They didnt know that the wilderness had taken him.

BOOK TWO 19461961

SIXTEEN. It was Regimented Living

The jack-in-the-pulpit had yet to fully flower. Its middle, a straight column through a leafy tunnel, gave the small plant the look of a butter churn. A gnat landed on the leafs hooded arc and went still. The wind swayed the flower, and the gnat stayed put, until, for reasons unknown, it flew down into the striped column and waited there, trapped and dying slowly.

The canopy above was thick, not unusual for May. Fifty foot trees gave shade and relief from the sun. Below, a box turtle with a reddish head stepped deliberate past the jack-in-the-pulpit, paying the flowers capture no mind. The turtles shell was smooth as a bowling ball, evidencing its antiquity. Behind the turtle, the ridge fell off into a short but steep slope, and at the bottom of the slope lay a grass bald. It was small, the size of a football field, halved. At the far end of it, a man hung a door on his newly constructed outhouse. He held nails in his teeth and his hands said hed wielded a hammer plenty.