The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor
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