The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor

       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 unhewn 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.