The boy couldnt help but wonder what had been done to his mouth brain to make it so uncooperative.
He thought he heard a giggle from the loft, so he pushed the bread further into his ears and read on. Above Railroad Progress Moving Forward, shed written You could see the world if you wanted to by the time they finish this. The big men of the N&W and the C&O were barreling through hills and valleys, blasting tunnels and building homes for workers. The word tonnage was used again and again to describe the coal that was bringing the railroad to West Virginia. The tonnage was here, so they were coming to secure it. To move it out to everybody else.
Trenchmouth thought of the tipples hed seen being built from solid wood. He wondered how somebody could figure a kitchen range ought to be fashioned from steel but not a coal tipple. He ripped off another piece of paper and scrawled a new design. The power of steel. It was everywhere.
Another giggle. It made him sick. He gave the bread plugs another push and started reading out loud. Almost a holler. Millions of dollars are being invested in coal properties, which will within a year furnish tonnage for the railroads, which are being built at a cost of more than millions of dollars. A shoe boomeranged down at him from above and caught his collarbone, hard. He didnt look up, just rubbed at his injury. Had he looked to the loft, had he pulled the bread from his ears, he would have heard Fred Dallara say, Pipe down little boy, and he would have seen Clarissa, up on her elbows with her neck stretched to check on him, a mix of worry and sadness and defeat in her eyes.
But he didnt look up at them. He kept on reading.
He read that the druggist at the pharmacy had been confined to his bed. Like others in the county, hed been taken hold of by Typhoid Fever.
Thats when Trenchmouth saw the toy advertisement. Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder the banner read.
The boy could scarcely take it in.
Under this heading was a picture nearly identical to the scrap metal tipple on his drawing table at the hideout. The picture showed skinny steel strips, holes punched and connected to other holes. It was a steel construction toy, an erector set, and some fellow by the name of A.C. Gilbert was taking credit for having invented it.
Without knowing, Trenchmouth had made a toy, and now somebody else was getting paid for it. What hed thought was an idea toward protecting the progress of civilization was nothing more than adolescent entertainment.
He sighed and sat and stared.
His ears were plugged up while his sister broke his heart within whisper distance, and he came to understand that ideas could be stolen before they were even ideas. But no tears would smear the newsprint that day or any other, as far as Trenchmouth was concerned. He was not yet twelve and had lost nearly everything he loved. But he knew this on that day: like toys, tears were for boys, and it was time to leave all that behind. It was time to become a man.
NINE. Women Shook And Shivered
The hideout lay in ruin and the kitchen moonshine was running low. Trenchmouth the man-boy had laid waste to his inventions that were not his. Hed taken to kissing Ewart on the neck and cheekbones after school, whether she wanted him to or not. The girl cared for him, but his mouth frightened her just the same, and shed not allow it near her own. Hed also taken to sipping shine morning, noon, and night, and what could the Widow say when her stock came up a little light? At twelve, Trenchmouth was somehow more man than boy. His voice had changed. He walked and talked as men do. Hed built a new shelter for her shining operations. A massive timber and twine ordeal, fashioned with his own callused hands and sweating back. So what if he stayed lit on lightning. The boy was afflicted, after all. Whatever gets us by.
Besides, the world was no place for toys or childish ideas. In Europe, folks had taken to killing each other over differences in adult ideas. At home, Woodrow Wilsons New Freedom didnt strike the Widow or any other hill dwellers as particularly new or particularly free.
There were moonshine stills to hide. Wood to chop. Fowl and game and antlered, four-legged beasts to track and lay down dead and cut open and bleed. Gods to pray before for guidance.
Trenchmouth would do all of these things between the Junes of 1914 and 1915. Had the foolish, erratic boys around him cared to listen, hed have told them all that he could do fifty-nine push-ups. That his hunters eye was sharp and his taste in whiskey sharper. That his pecker had sprouted hair and was often hard as a rail spike, and that like them, he was looking to dip it in some young womans honeypot. He thought of little else.
His chance would come, of all places, among the women of the Church of God with Signs Following. Folks who professed to know no sin. No whiskey or tobacco or carnal knowledge at all. But, like it is for most of the religified, practicing and preaching are slippery handles of the hogwashed. And it would be among them that Trenchmouths manhood was shaped.
July 4th, 1915, fell on a Sunday. Among the Methodists, confusion ran high when celebrations burned out and hangovers set in. Sabbath hangovers, the most sinful of all. But for the followers of J.B. Smith, Tennessee transplant and converter to the Church of God with Signs Following, such headaches and gut checks were not an issue. This was because, presumably, these talkers-in-tongue, these snake handlers and strychnine sippers, they did not sin in drink or smoke or fornication.
On Independence Day, leaning against their ramshackle house of worship, spitting in the dirt, Trenchmouth didnt buy it. These worshippers inside hollered nonsensically and dropped to the floor like their hearts had stopped; he could hear the thumping from outside. But it wasnt the authentic article, as far as he was concerned. And, three inches short of six feet though not yet thirteen, Trenchmouth was almost advanced in the field of judging articles as authentic or not.
Harla harla harla la la la da la da hardala atta, somebody shouted inside the church. Another thump.
Ewart was in there. Front row. But her daddy didnt trust Trenchmouth, didnt like boys of that age. And he certainly didnt allow converts to his church in the form of his daughters perceived poon hounds. The boy had been held at bay a year, had never told of his natural encounter with the snakes in the box that day at the Smith house. Ewart hadnt breathed a word either. So, though he was permitted to court her a little and come by the house, the Lords chambers were off limits.
But on that patriotic Sunday, the man-boy decided to go in. Maybe it was tongue-talking that called to him, extra loud that day, echoing like his birth mothers had echoed off nuthouse walls. Or maybe it was the flask of shine in his back pocket, from which he took frequent pulls. Whatever the reason, he stood from where he leaned, climbed the three, crumbling steps to the double doors of the church, and swung them open.
The suns rays went funny inside. They came through the three windows lining each wall of the place, but dust hung so heavy that the light split the room like beams of translucent timber, perfectly square from the panes. It stunk in there. Sweat on top of older sweat and unwashed britches. What sex sometimes smells like to those yet to have it. Mr J.B. Smiths eyes met Trenchmouths from the pulpit. Smith was rocking on his heels, dressed in a plain collared shirt and brown slacks. His chest hair showed through the drenched shirt and he wiped at his forehead with a Bibled hand. He smiled.
Then he hollered Hooo ooo hooo hay om in addeyayamana, and on into something not transcribeable with the words known to us.
It shook the boy so much so that he wasnt a man-boy at all anymore, just a boy. For a moment, he thought maybe all this was the authentic article. He almost moved his feet and opened his mouth. Almost fell on the floor, humping the holy spirit. But he walked forward down the aisle instead. He passed home-fashioned pews of whopperjammed chairs and benches full of folks with eyes rolling in their heads. In the front, Ewart bobbed lazily on her toes and let her head shake a little. A tall man beside her bent down and came up snake-fisted and this got everybody going. He turned to face them and held the four serpents above his head in victory. One of them got restless and struck out, bit his wrist just above the shirt cuff where the skin is most tender and white. Where the blood is closest to the air.
He flinched and kept dancing.
His hair lay flat despite his jerking, oiled up with the grease of natural neglect.
Trenchmouth studied the skinny man, his facebones like flint rock under the skin, sharp and atop hollowed shadows for cheeks. It went white fast, his face, after the serpent strike, and he bent back down to return them to their box, but only after hed held on a while to prove it was nothing to him.
Women shook and shivered, especially the curvy one on the other side of Ewart. Even in the required plain, hanging clothes, Trenchmouth made out that behind of hers, perfectly rounded with just enough quiver, just enough solid. Her black hair hung heavy on her shoulders, shining in the dust beam from the window.
Trenchmouth studied the skinny man, his facebones like flint rock under the skin, sharp and atop hollowed shadows for cheeks. It went white fast, his face, after the serpent strike, and he bent back down to return them to their box, but only after hed held on a while to prove it was nothing to him.
Women shook and shivered, especially the curvy one on the other side of Ewart. Even in the required plain, hanging clothes, Trenchmouth made out that behind of hers, perfectly rounded with just enough quiver, just enough solid. Her black hair hung heavy on her shoulders, shining in the dust beam from the window.
This was religion. Her shape was what hed sacrifice for.
So he did. He continued up the aisle and past the skinny, now paler man, who sat still and tried not to die. Past Ewart who swallowed hard when she noticed him and looked to her father, who smiled and stared down Trenchmouth. He went all the way to the front, before the pulpit, brushing the sleeve of the black-haired beauty as he strode by. He bent as he had that day in the back room of Ewarts home, under the thunder of the Preachermans conversion above. And like that day, he came up with a copperhead. It looked to be the same one. But on this day, he took up every snake in the box, nine to be precise, and it wasnt hard to do, for they slid toward his outstretched arms as if they were tree branches promising home.