The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart Read online

  The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

  M. Glenn Taylor

  This one is for Margaret

  I have gulled the pith from a sumac limb To play a tune that my blood remembers.

  Louise McNeill

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE 1903-1921

  Dedication

  ONE The Woman Could Cure Ailments

  TWO Here Came a Man

  THREE Climbing And Digging Came Natural

  FOUR Frank Dallara Fashioned A Tool

  FIVE Beast Eye And Something Else

  SIX Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish

  SEVEN Folks Could Fall Hard

  EIGHT Who Among Us Has Read The Signs

  NINE Women Shook And Shivered

  TEN The Powerful And The Ones Beneath

  ELEVEN Folks Will Dust You Quick As Look At You

  TWELVE Here Came A War Or Two

  THIRTEEN They Had Grips On Them

  FOURTEEN Strange Days And More Of The Same

  FIFTEEN Who Has Worn And Who Has Broken?

  BOOK TWO 1946-1961

  Dedication

  SIXTEEN It was Regimented Living

  SEVENTEEN They Would Stare

  EIGHTEEN Radio Saturday Night

  NINETEEN A Piker Had No Home

  TWENTY You Carried What You Could

  TWENTY-ONE Wide Vision Running

  TWENTY-TWO Writing Came Natural

  TWENTY-THREE Kennedy Had A Way

  TWENTY-FOUR Discovery Had Its Way

  BOOK THREE 1989-1993

  Dedication

  TWENTY-FIVE The Tri-State Dump

  TWENTY-SIX Man Attacked, Man Robbed

  TWENTY-SEVEN Goddamn Son Of A Bitch

  TWENTY-EIGHT Boys Should Have Gotten Their Educations

  TWENTY-NINE Ewart Smith Spoke In A Dream

  THIRTY A Man Took It All To The Stage

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  On December 3rd, 2010, the old man sewed his mouth shut with saltwater-rated fishing line. The sores and the throbbing were back. It was his 108th birthday, and it was the day Time magazine sent a reporter to his home in Warm Hollow, West Virginia. This was on account of the old man’s reputation, and on account of Pearl Thackery. Pearl Thackery was the oldest living West Virginian and had died the week prior, leaving the old man, a one time inventor, snake handler, cunnilinguist, sniper, woodsman, harmonica man, and newspaperman, as the oldest living Homo sapiens in the state.

  He’d left a small, pinto bean-sized hole unsewn, so that he could ingest chicory coffee and spruce needle tea through a straw. So he could speak if he needed to. And so he could smoke his Chesterfields.

  When the Time magazine reporter sat down across the kitchen table from him, the old man broke his vow of silence and mastered, in minutes, smoking and speaking simultaneously. It was a speech difficult to discern, but it was talking nonetheless. The reporter pushed the record button on his miniature, steel voice recorder. A red light the size of a tick lit up. The old man marveled at this invention. He stared at the little red circle until it went blurry there on the kitchen table. It entranced him. He spun a blown-glass ashtray with his plump-veined, purple-blotched hands. His skin was thin. A full white head of hair. His eyes and ears, though drooped and wrinkled, were still keen. He farted freely.

  The reporter got down to business. ‘I’d like to ask you about your life, if I may,’ he said.

  The old man leaned back in his split wood chair, then forward again. ‘You want me to bend your ear?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. But the bend I put on it won’t never heal. You’re liable to go deaf.’ He pronounced ‘deaf’ like ‘deef.’ It was a lot of voice from a little hole. He said, ‘I feel like that big small fella the Jewish actor played. Hoffman. Small Big Man. You seen it?’ He lit a cigarette and stuck it in the hole. Pulled white paper red. ‘Was a time I had but two talents,’ he said. ‘Back then it was speaking in tongues and pleasin women by way of their nether-regions.’

  The reporter cleared his throat.

  ‘I come up with the phrase, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”’ This was a bald-faced lie. He said, ‘You may have heard along the way somewhere that I killed men.’ He considered the younger man, his hands and the way he held them on the table. His eyes. Then the old man bent his ear.

  BOOK ONE

  1903-1921

  Let any man shoot me with cannon or gun.

  —Cap Hatfield

  ONE

  The Woman Could Cure Ailments

  When Early Taggart was baptized in the Tug River in 1903, he was two months old. His mother, whose husband had left her a week earlier, had got religion. She believed it right to bring lambs to the fold before they could crawl or sit up on their own. Before Satan could fill their little blood vessels with the seven deadly sins. It was these sins that had caused her husband to run off, that she now preached on to her twelve pound boy while he breastfed.

  But it was February when she decided to baptize him, and no preacher would agree to it. ‘You’d have to break through the ice down there,’ the Methodist man said, ‘and that boy ain’t old enough to get wet in the head anyhow.’ So Mittie Ann Taggart did it herself. She punched through the inchthick ice with her shoe heel and held her baby boy by his thighs. She dunked his head like wash. He came up screaming.

  She claimed he spoke to her then, spit water at her cheek. ‘Pretty as you please, pretty as you please,’ is what he said, according to Mittie Ann. Then he said, ‘Devil’s got a hold on God.’

  She dropped him on the ice. He cracked through, went under and rode the current for a quarter mile. Then he kicked out onto the banks where a woman had melted through the ice washing a cast iron pot. This woman, Ona Dorsett, picked the boy up and blew her air in his mouth. She smacked his back until he colored up again, until he spit out the gray water through his nose holes. She wrapped him tight against her breastplate under a bearskin coat and took him home.

  Mittie Ann Taggart went to the mayor. She demanded he call on all the preachers in the county to renounce Satan with a single cry of ‘Down with Beelzebub.’ When the mayor surmised she had dumped her newborn child in the river, he ordered her confined. The boy was at first presumed dead. There was talk of lynching Mittie Ann in public for what she’d done, hard talk considering she was a woman, and a white one at that. Then somebody said the widow Dorsett had the boy, was healthifying him like she had the other young one who lived with her up back of Warm Hollow. This was enough to calm the lynching talk, and Mittie Ann Taggart was transferred by horse and buggy to the Home for Incurables in Huntington. When she walked from the jail to the buggy, folks spat on her.

  The widow Dorsett was thirty-one years old. A tall, dark-haired woman, strong-boned and plain. She had a three-year-old girl living with her. Girl’s name was Clarissa, and she had come to Ona Dorsett by way of a raped teenager who could not handle her situation and was running off to Charleston to get citified. Ona Dorsett had lost her husband in a mine cave-in in 1899. She’d never been able to reproduce. She’d spent her days tutoring children on how to read and write. That, and she helped her husband tend his moonshine still. When he was gone, she did less tutoring, more moonshining, and baby Clarissa was a welcome presence in her home.

  The home was modest if not hazardous. A pioneer farmer had built it without the advantages of a permanent settler’s dwelling. This was a cabin of unhe
wn logs. Its mass of cracks was filled and refilled with grass and mud. The roof was clapboard. The cookstove kept the space warm, and the fireplace sent smoke up and out through a cat-and-clay chimney hand-laid with stones.

  It was here that Early Taggart would grow into a boy and then into a man. Here with Ona Dorsett, a woman who could do most anything, it seemed. A woman whose livelihood was the sale of moonshine, though she used a middleman on a small commission since woman moonshiners were not taken seriously. As far as she knew, she was the only woman shiner in the state. And she was certainly the only woman able to ride her dead husband’s gelding of seventeen hands as if she’d been born equestrian. Ona Dorsett had once loped across uneven hill terrain and dropped a black bear on the move as it watched her, unaware that such a sight was possible. She’d lined up her Winchester rifle and sunk a shell in the beating heart of a three hundred pound animal, all while posting bareback and calculating trees, distance, the movement of the horse below her. She skinned and filleted the animal, cured his meat. With this, and the meat of deer, turkeys, pheasants, and squirrels, she was able to feed her two adopted children. Though she did not particularly enjoy it, she hunted regularly for them and took pride in her efficiency.

  The woman could also cure ailments. She made fever-killer drinks from dogwood bark. If rheumatism visited her children, she bathed them in water she collected every year from a stream before sun-up on Ash Wednesday. For double rheumatism insurance, she’d turn their shoes upside down before bedtime. For coughs, she had procured a respectable stockpile of Virginia snakeroot. Hacking coughs meant swallowing the unmistakably bitter bears-foot tea. Inflammation of the chest required horseradish and mustard poultices to aid in breathing, and she could wrap these in such a way as to provide instant mother-comfort.

  Ona Dorsett took care of the two children given to her by chance. She fed and clothed them and fixed all their ailments, save one. The boy was afflicted with a mouth disease so early on and so strongly, that the Widow could do nothing for him. A week after she found him in the river, now fully recovered and wrapped tight in heavy cotton blankets and the skin of a deer, Early Taggart began to scream through the night. He worked tirelessly at busting through his heavy wrap. The Widow couldn’t figure it out until his gums were caught momentarily in the light of her lantern. The gums were bloody red, swollen and full of holes like anthills made of skin. She had the doctor come in, a man who had known her husband well, a man who drank a good bit of her moonshine. Doctor Warble said the boy had calcium overloads, that he was actually sprouting teeth at two and a half months, five ahead of schedule. But this was not all. The doctor surmised that the gums had already split, that the boy had already been teething, at the time of his attempted drowning. He further surmised that coal sludge in the water had infected the openings. This infection had somehow evolved into what resembled an incurable oral disease in older folks, a disease that left gums eternally rotten and bloody, teeth decaying and odorous. Such a sight reminded Doctor Warble, who had been a medic with the Rough Riders at the battle of San Juan Hill only five years prior, of the mouth disease he’d encountered among Spanish soldiers, dead and agape in their trenches. It was beyond explanation that this disease could occur in an infant, but it had. The boy had Trenchmouth.

  TWO

  Here Came a Man

  The mouth was a curious orifice. When it ailed a body, its throb was merciless as a hammer in the hands of John Henry. Headaches were mere discomforts – nagging, small pain otherwise ignored. But this disease of the tooth and gum that had afflicted the baby boy, this was oral torment. It was evident to Ona Dorsett that Doctor Warble’s pain powder would not do. She took to singing to the baby boy, calling him by the word Doctor Warble had used: Trenchmouth. She decided he’d keep his given surname. She also took to dipping a finger in the house moonshine jug, rubbing that finger across the little one’s gums and fanged teeth. When she did it each night, his agonized wails subsided. He was quiet. He was asleep. This became ritual.

  Dorsett’s moonshine was of no ordinary hill recipe. The dead Dorsett man had cultivated a process begun by his father before him. Ona had further enhanced the still, its capabilities. She had thrown in some new ingredients. The results were what some would call miraculous. Men paid top dollar for that shine, though they knew not where it originated. The middleman who sold it to them had taken an oath of holy secrecy to the dead Dorsett’s widow, and he intended to keep it. It was said a drop of the stuff could spin your brain like a top, feather-tickle your pecker hard. This mule-kick possessed no odor.

  Ona took it herself, once at Trenchmouth and Clarissa’s bedtime, once at her own. She’d long since realized her blend had none of the unfortunate effects other blends had. On the contrary, Dorsett shine caused her to read at night, fortified her vocabulary. It made things clear as the new glass windowpanes town folks had. Headaches and slurred speech were not part of the bargain. The only physical change an observer would take note of occurred in the eyeball. Pupils, upon first swig and for a minute thereafter, spread wide to the edge of the iris. Exploded like perfect black planets. This gave the drinker a look of animal capability. It was beast-eye.

  Ona Dorsett sat at her kitchen table on a Saturday night in May of 1903, her pupils gradually rescinding to normal. By lantern light, she read a book called Following the Equator by Mr Samuel Clemens. It was near eleven o’clock when a knock came at the door. She looked up to the loft where the little ones slept sound, then rose to answer. On her way to the door, she took her Remington Double Derringer out of a big empty flour tin. She held it behind her back when she answered.

  A man stood before her. He was dirty, his clothes nearly worn past their life expectancy, all tears and patches. Ona’s dress and the fabrics she put on her children were not without flaw, nor were they contemporary, but this man was something else. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. When he smiled there were cigar-wrap pieces the size of cockroaches in his yellow teeth. ‘How do missus,’ he said.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Ona said softly.

  The man looked behind her into the house. His eyes rolled left, right, up, and down like he wanted to gain his bearings but would never remember them. A habit of the sharp-eyed gone sour. ‘You got your youngins up there in the loft, I reckon?’ From where he stood outside, he looked up where he couldn’t see.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You can drop whatever pea shooter you got tucked in your spine bone there.’ His smile widened. There was sweat under the brim of his brown slouch hat though it was cold outside. ‘Just put it off on yonder floor there. I ain’t lookin to take it from you,’ he said.

  Ona pulled the gun out to her side, feigned dropping it for a second before she swung it around to his neck. He caught her wrist with his left hand before she reached his shoulder. She did not fire. The man reared back and slammed his forehead against the bridge of her nose. Bone crunched like thin cornstalk. Ona hit the floorboards.

  While the man regarded the pistol and rubbed at his forehead, she fought blackness and the little popping stars that broke through it. He was re-positioning his hat when she got most of her sight back and pulled a stag-handle knife from her felt-button boots. She came up off the floor like the serpent’s strike and had the eight-inch blade buried in his neck before he could discern the occurrence. She was silent as she pulled and pushed the handle made of deer antler, maneuvered it so that it nearly went in one side and came out the other.

  His knees never gave. He stood there, gun dropped to the floor, one arm limp at his side and the other touching his neck and the thing piercing it like a kabob. He gurgled a little. Said something to her that she couldn’t quite get. He was only one foot inside the door when she put her boot sole against his stomach and forced him backwards onto the dirt. She put the pistol back in the flour container, took a belt off the house jar, and went outside. She stood over the man, dead now, a wide stream of blood traversing down
the incline beneath his head. She said nothing, though she had an unexplainable urge to spit in his eyes. Instead, she went around back and got the shovel.

  Ona lashed heavy rope around the mule she had to smack to make move. The other end wrapped the base of the outhouse. The mule, called Beechnut, strained his old, nicked haunches and pulled the outhouse a good six feet away from its designation over the hole. Ona told him good boy. The hole was half-filled. Two months worth of shit and piss. The Widow had her work cut out. Widen it by four feet, deepen it by three. She began digging the man’s grave.

  It was just the time of spring when the earth was finally diggable.

  Before she rolled him into the hole three hours later, she went through his pockets. A half dollar and a mouth harp, silver and worn, but well-made. Cheap cigar and kitchen matches, loose, no package. A folded photograph of a woman in a lace-fringed dress and fur hat. She tossed the photograph of the woman into the grave, then rolled the man in on top of it. He went still at the bottom, belly up. There was loose dirt on the end of her shovel. She held it above his face, dropped half on one open eye, half on the other. ‘I know you,’ she said. The man looked like he had on straight temple spectacles, the glass lenses tinted mud black.

  He’d rolled easy into his new home five feet below the outhouse basin. The earth went smoothly back to where it originated, patted down without much trouble like it had never moved. Ona re-dug the waste-hole and Beechnut hefted the outhouse to its original location. She gave him an apple which he ate with finick.

  Inside, Ona climbed the ladder to the loft before washing her hands. The two of them were there, the baby boy in his wicker bassinet, the three-year-old girl on the horsehair mattress. The Widow stared at them for ten solid minutes before she descended the stairs and washed up with cold well-water over the tub. She put on a sleeping gown that had been her mother-in-law’s, ascended the ladder again and slept between her two children, marking the patterns of their sleep breathing in her mind, smiling when the inhales and exhales matched up. Matching her own to theirs.