The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

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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, she’d 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 he’d 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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, he’d been taken hold of by Typhoid Fever.

That’s 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 he’d 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 (#ulink_b84c8766-61e6-5bbf-814b-a84ff182d0de)

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. He’d 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 she’d not allow it near her own. He’d 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. He’d 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 Wilson’s New Freedom didn’t 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, he’d have told them all that he could do fifty-nine push-ups. That his hunter’s 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 woman’s 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 Trenchmouth’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t trust Trenchmouth, didn’t like boys of that age. And he certainly didn’t allow converts to his church in the form of his daughter’s 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 hadn’t breathed a word either. So, though he was permitted to court her a little and come by the house, the Lord’s 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 mother’s 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 sun’s 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. Smith’s eyes met Trenchmouth’s 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 wasn’t 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 he’d 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 he’d 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 Ewart’s home, under the thunder of the Preacherman’s 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 wasn’t hard to do, for they slid toward his outstretched arms as if they were tree branches promising home.

They made their way to his head and wrapped around it, leaving openings here and there so that the boy could look out upon the congregation, who thump-thumped the floorboards with increasing force and timing. Some went silent as one snake entered his opened, rotten mouth, others screeched their neck chords to higher pitch and impossible syllable.

Trenchmouth didn’t dance. He didn’t move much at all as J.B. Smith stepped from behind his place of instruction and circled his daughter’s suitor, regarded him as if a piece of art. Preacher Smith almost yelled ‘Hallelujah,’ but didn’t. He waited instead. It didn’t take long for Trenchmouth to tug gently on the tail of the copperhead, and all of the others followed suit. They retreated down his arms as uniformly as they had come to him. He shut them up in their box. When Trenchmouth stood again, J.B. Smith embraced him, planted upon him the Holy Kiss of the Church of God with Signs Following, a lip to lip practice between those of the same sex, signifying membership.

It was the closest another’s mouth had been to his own.

Later, for some of them, would come the oil anointing, the poison drinking. The testing of the flesh with fire. But for that morning, the sight of the mouth-diseased boy and the swirling serpents had been enough. Folks in attendance felt they’d witnessed a miraculous occurrence, though they weren’t sure what it was. They grew quiet as J.B. Smith took his pulpit again to read from the Book of Luke, chapter ten, verse nineteen. Trenchmouth took a seat between Ewart and the curvy one. Each took a hand and held it. One with something like love, the other with something like lechery.

To the left of them, the skinny man slumped and his hand turned blackish-gray. He hoped he would not die from his punctures, but the medical doctor did not enter his mind. Such a thought would banish him from his current house of worship, because such a thought equaled a lack of faith in God.

Trenchmouth wondered at the slow rubbing pinky of the woman with his right hand and tried to think down the slow growth in his trousers. Preacher Smith went on about treading on scorpions and the power of the enemy, and it was almost as quiet as it had been with bread-stuffed ears. Only now the quiet was a peaceful sort, maybe the one folks expect in their houses of the Lord but rarely attain for all the hot air circulating and suffocating. The man-boy sensed God, and she was a woman.

If Trenchmouth thought he’d finally had a religious experience that morning, he would re-evaluate his criteria that night. The curvy woman’s name was Anne Sharples, and she had a slight penchant for bedding men of the cloth, a bigger penchant for moonshine. By outward appearances, she was a formerly devout member of the Baptist congregation in Kermit, a current devout member of the Church of God with Signs Following in Sprigg. On the sly, she was the type of young miner’s widow who faked mourning when her husband was caved in, who had visions of laying down with the holy man delivering her husband’s eulogy even as he spoke the casket-lowering words. Anne Sharples had few scruples.

She’d pulled Trenchmouth away from the Independence Day picnic outside the little church that afternoon. He’d already slipped her a shot or four from his flask under cover of tablecloth. They ended up in the woods, then inside his hideout, which had recently ceased production as an inventor’s asylum and awaited a new purpose. It would soon find one.

Anne lay down on the dry dirt floor like it was nothing. Above her, narrow shoots of moonlight found their way through the tree cover and then the slats of the hideout trapdoor. Such lighting made it dark enough to imagine the almost-thirteen-year-old-with-mouth-disease as a grown man. But as Trenchmouth undid his belt and felt as if his groin might explode from the pressure, she played on the few scruples she had. ‘I won’t kiss a little boy,’ she said. ‘And I sure won’t let him dip his wick in me. They’re liable to throw me in the chokey for that.’

‘I don’t see any little boys around here,’ Trenchmouth answered, shivering though it was night-hot.

‘You old enough to fight or vote?’

‘Old enough to drink,’ he said and pulled the flask again from his pants pocket, which was bunched around his knees. She pulled from it and coughed. He pulled and smiled. The moonlight showed her those gums again, those teeth and their ulcerated in-betweens. She’d not put that to her mouth. A different idea brewed.

‘Just do like I show you and we’ll both come up happy,’ Anne Sharples said to him. Then she brought him to her and pushed his shoulders down, away from her own. He stopped at her chest, newly aware of further curvature. But she kept pushing him down, and when he got to her waist, she arched her back, pulled up her white muslin underskirt, pushed down her undergarments, and guided that man-boy’s oft-ridiculed orifice to another, hidden one of her own, one that he’d spent whole months of nights imagining. It took him aback for a moment, and he stopped short. He couldn’t see much, but he felt the tickle of hair on his nose, and he smelled something unlike any scent he’d ever picked up. It was in every way opposite to what he’d followed to the outhouse burial ground all those years earlier. Unlike death, this was life’s smell, like tree sap and sweat and culinary aromas undiscovered and ancient. Trenchmouth lowered himself to it.

At first, he fumbled, and she almost let her conscience tear through the moonshine haze of comfort to stop him. But then something changed. Trenchmouth, enchanted almost to nausea, began to feel something he never had in church, Methodist or Snake-handler. What had seemed false faith in the bitten skinny man that morning, what had rung untrue in all of them as they mumbled nonsense, suddenly arose in him so palpably that he could not hold it back. From his pressurized groin something seeped upward like fire through the tendons. It warmed his stomach and tickled his vocal chords. It came right up through his mouth and out the end of his tongue, which began moving itself in circles and latitudes of an unknown geometry, fast and patterned like a snake never could. As Anne Sharples began to buck and heave air, Trenchmouth let loose a string of words not unlike those of the pillars of the Church of God with Signs Following. ‘Harla harla la da hey hoo woo adeyanamana harla da da da,’ he said. The hum of it all from his tongue fibers and taste buds infected her, but not with his disease.

Trenchmouth had got religion there in the woman’s nether regions, and for the woman, spent and shocked beyond words, a preacher had found his calling.

TEN The Powerful And The Ones Beneath (#ulink_763883e3-ba86-5ac5-b4ff-4f6497210ffb)

They’d left him out of Mumblety Peg for as far back as he could remember. It was a young boy’s game, really. As soon as he was old enough to open and close a jack-knife without bleeding to death, a boy found games of Mumblety Peg in which to compete. After school, or on summer days when the earth was soft and the blade would stick deep – these were times for bringing practice to fruition. In the fall of 1916, at nearly fourteen years old, Trenchmouth was too old to play, at least in the estimation of most boys. But the group of four littler ones had seen him walking past, and had liked his tall frame, his crack-proof, rolled sole boots, the way he spat tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. So they’d called him over to the small mountain bald, a field backdropped by trees that bled leaves of red and orange and yellow. Only one of them, a boy named Crews whose brother Trenchmouth knew well, whose mother he knew even better, expressed objection to consorting with T.T. Stinky.

But any objection was soon forgotten when Trenchmouth, in the first inning, progressed through twenty-two feats without a mistake. He opened his Cattle King pen knife with precision. The buffalo-horn handle reflected light as he flipped it from every position: fist, fingers, cross-chested ears, nose, eyes, knees, top of the head. Each time it stuck point down, plenty deep. The boys watched wide-eyed and grunted noises of impress. Their narrow lines of sight on the abilities of orphaned, malformed youngsters such as Trenchmouth had been blown wide apart. They knew their own ignorance now to be fear, maybe even envy.

Each of them progressed through, fumbling and mumbling, until the last was beaten, and Trenchmouth, the victor, drove the peg into the ground using his knife handle. Six blows landed solid and flat as a carpenter’s hammer. He’d sunk the peg, so that the loser boy, Warren Crews, was forced to do the deed. Warren was the one who had objected to calling Trenchmouth over. He was youngest brother of Mose Crews, Fred Dallara’s best buddy. Mose was tailback on the ball team, and the meanest of the nastiest of the T.T. Stinky crew.

‘Root, Root!’ the boys hollered, shoving little, fat, Warren Crews to his knees. He couldn’t even see the top of the peg, none of them could. Trenchmouth had driven it deep. Hands behind his back, the Crews boy dove in for it with his teeth, as the rules clearly dictated. Again and again he came up for air, the silty black mud covering more and more of his face. They stood around him and laughed. It was friendly teasing, even from Trenchmouth, who harbored no ill will toward the boy on account of his bad luck in sibling, but Warren Crews didn’t like losing. As he came up empty again and again, and as the boys’ insistence on playing out the game became ever more apparent, Warren Crews looked around in desperation. He nearly forgot his age and called out for T.T. Stinky to get down there and finish, seeing as his mouth was already dirty, his teeth full of muck. Warren thought his big brother would have done just that. But Warren Crews thought wrong, and was, for a brief moment, lucky.

First, he wasn’t aware that even football Mose would no longer call out Trenchmouth to his face. In private, Mose and the others still spoke of the orally-ailed one without censor. They even made up crude drawings and songs. But they’d long ago given up insulting Trenchmouth face to face, much less making eye contact. Ever since he’d attacked Fred Dallara like a mountain cat, and even more so since he’d sprouted wide shoulders and a fine mustache and won every riflery contest the county sponsored, boys only poked fun at T.T. Stinky behind his back. Had they known that in a year’s time, Trenchmouth had vocalized into the unmentionable anatomies of nine women, they’d have no doubt fainted from shock. But Trenchmouth had a whole stockpile of secrets, and this one he would not spill.

So Warren was lucky, in that not knowing any of this, he didn’t slander Trenchmouth and pay the price. What stopped him was the sight of Arly Scott Jr walking by.

Good luck, bad luck. They interchange so quickly.

Arly Scott Jr was, like Trenchmouth, nearly fourteen. And, like Trenchmouth, he was bigger than the four other boys. But Arly was black, and this meant that even a pack of puny ten-year-olds could order him around if they felt like it.

‘Hey,’ Warren Crews shouted at the boy in the distance, who was going foot over foot along the railroad track, testing balance. ‘Hey nigger!’

Arly stopped and dropped his feet on either side of his balance beam. He turned and faced them.

‘Why don’t you come on over here?’ Warren spit dirt, scraped grass off his tongue and lips using his teeth and fingernails.

Arly looked at them for a while, then began walking toward them. Trenchmouth didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around. Like every other black family in Mingo County, Arly’s had come from down South for the mines. His father was in the number one at Red Jacket. And like every other black family in Mingo, he lived in Mitchell Branch and went about his business in an all-black world of school and church. Arly was almost identical to Trenchmouth in height and weight, and his sprouting muscles were just as hard and determined.

When he walked upon them, the littler ones got uncomfortable and began to fidget. They’d heard their fathers and mothers and uncles and brothers use the term Warren Crews had used, but they were still young enough to be pierced by it when shouted in the presence of one to whom it was meant to describe.

‘You play Mumblety Peg down there in Texas?’ Warren Crews said. Oddly, he’d stayed on his knees with his hands locked behind him throughout all this, as if to break the pose would be sin.

‘Georgia,’ Arly said.

‘Georgia then. Niggers play Mumblety Peg in Georgia?’

Arly just stared down at the boy. The other ones fidgeted more plainly. One laughed a little, tried to act tough. Another gripped his thighs against his privates, tried not to piss himself as he often did when trouble arose.

Trenchmouth studied Arly Scott’s eyes, the heavy lids, the wiry brows. The small scar that said he could take a punch. He knew that Warren Crews had called on the wrong black boy.

‘Well?’ Warren said. ‘Is that all you know how to say? “Georgia?” They just teach you one word down there? State name?’ He laughed and turned back to the other boys to make sure they did the same. But he never found out they didn’t. Before Warren Crews could notice the cringing expressions of impending impact the little boys uniformly wore, he’d been cold-cocked. It was a sweeping right hook, a suckerfree sucker punch delivered from high to low and with the inertia of planted feet and swiveled hips. Arly Scott Jr was a trained fighter.

Some stood scarecrow still, some ran. Either way, they were thoroughly discombobulated by the sight of a black boy hitting a white one for insulting his race. It didn’t happen in Georgia, they were pretty sure, and it didn’t happen in southern West Virginia either. But it had happened, and Warren Crews lay asleep on the ground, thick blood, chunked by dirt, running from nose and mouth.

Eventually, they all left their ten-year-old comrade where he lay, only one of them with the wherewithal to shout a promise of revenge. Arly and Trenchmouth remained. They looked down at Warren together, the black boy rubbing his throbbing knuckles, the white boy rubbing his head. This would take some figuring.

Trenchmouth decided he didn’t feel all too sorry for the littlest Crews. At eleven, he was old enough to know better than to treat somebody that way, address somebody with those kind of words. The Widow had taught Trenchmouth, along with Clarissa, from a young age, to never engage in the game of white superiority. ‘We are all made from God’s clay,’ she’d said, ‘no matter its stain.’ Besides, Trenchmouth had always been less white than the whites, especially in summer, a fact the other kids falsely attributed to a stubbornly thick buildup of dirt on his skin. And had he seen more of his father than the dusty, dug up variety, he’d have known there was Indian in that bloodline, or maybe even colored. Still, by outward appearance, he was a white boy.

‘I’m Trenchmouth Taggart,’ he said and held out his hand.

Arly turned those eyes on him. He didn’t speak back or change the stare, which had the kind of calm to it that can precede a snot-knocker as easily as a handshake.

It was nice to see it in another, that ‘something else’ look of the eye. He’d been embarrassed for revealing his own after Fred Dallara kissed Clarissa. It came from someplace less knowable than a steady diet of moonshine and ridicule. This particular something was there before all that.

Trenchmouth almost told the other boy how he once bit someone for kissing his sister, but it seemed anxious, foolish. Instead, he said, ‘I reckon your daddy’ll have your hide for this here.’ He pointed at Warren Crews, who whimpered and tried to get up on his elbows.

Arly’s hands re-fisted, and he turned his stare back to the boy on the ground then, as if he might have another go. But the whimper turned to a cry and Arly’s whole being eased up. He answered Trenchmouth without looking at him. ‘You’d reckon wrong then. My Daddy told me, when they look down at you, start em to lookin up.’ His voice was a pitch deeper than Trenchmouth’s, his accent big and round.

Before Arly Scott walked away, he snorted twice, gathered up what he could in his throat, and spat on the ground before Warren Crews, who was, by that point, all-out crying the kind of cry reserved for mamas, the kind he’d have to be rid of in a year or two if he hoped to get anywhere in life.