The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor
ones for high-arced momentum. Dallara was a miner and a carpenter by trade, but he should have been a physicist the way he tutored Trenchmouth on velocity, gravity, and inertia.
He’d put his arm around the boy after a particularly good shot, as if Trenchmouth were his own. Like most, he called him ‘T,’ but it sounded better somehow. It didn’t seem like much to Frank Dallara, but to the eight year old, it was everything.
The boy was taught on guns too. The Widow taught him safety first, everything else second. She schooled him on a hammerless 10 gauge that had been her husband’s. Frank Dallara let him get used to a .22 rifle belonging to his boy Frederick. The three of them went squirrel hunting on Sundays, and afterwards, each and every time, Clarissa and Frederick, by then almost twelve, made eyes at one another. Talked by themselves on the porch for a while.
This made Trenchmouth a little mad. There were three reasons why. The first was a natural propensity for protecting his sister, younger or older did not factor. The second was a distaste for the bland nature of Frederick Dallara. He had no fire in him. Was good in school, but never hopped a moving train. When other boys caught and skinned blacksnakes or threw bullfrogs at the Model Ts in town from hidden launching spots, Fred Dallara always got quiet and went home to study. He was a bore, and Trenchmouth didn’t like bores. He wanted to be in it anytime and everywhere, and he had the scars to prove it. The third reason Trenchmouth was bothered by his non-blood sister’s flirtations with the other boy was simple: she was non-blood, and this meant he could be there for her the way Fred Dallara wanted to be. Trenchmouth was a little bit in love with Clarissa, as much as an eight-year-old can be.
One Sunday evening in winter, standing by lantern light on the Widow’s front lawn, Trenchmouth, Frank, and Fred cleaned the four fox squirrels they’d bagged that afternoon. They cut them around the middle and peeled back the skins. Inside, Ona heated up some bacon drippings on top of the black Acme cook stove. Clarissa watched from a window until the squirrels were halved and quartered and so on, then she came outside. It was the kind of cold out that creeps into you, takes you by surprise. ‘Y’all need help?’ she said.
‘We’ve got her just about done,’ Frank Dallara said.
The almost twelve-year-olds made eyes. Trenchmouth watched them.
When he and Frank Dallara took the little legs and abdomens inside to rinse and remove buckshot, Fred and Clarissa stayed put in front of the house. From inside the kitchen, the boy could see them. They kissed.
Trenchmouth was up and toward the door like he’d sat on a tack. He didn’t slow once outside. He took the bigger boy down by driving his right shoulder into the hips. Once on the ground, while a confused Clarissa looked down at them with her hands to her mouth, Trenchmouth straddled Fred and commenced to fist pumping. He was like an out of control oil drill, swinging away, up and down, and when Fred Dallara finally grasped what was happening and threw the younger boy off, his nose and lips were split and leaking crimson fast. They both sat on their butts. Clarissa was about to lean down and check on the boy whose lips she’d just kissed, and Fred was about to lurch at his attacker, when Trenchmouth, squatting now like he might come back for more, squinted his eyes to almost nothing, pulled back his forever-covering lips to reveal the mess of sores and bulges and sharp crooked calcium, and hissed. In the low light of the lantern, he made a sound reserved for mountain cats with their backs against a rock wall. Then he shot forward like one and sunk his diseased teeth into the left cheek of Fred Dallara. The boy wailed something awful.
Trenchmouth ran for the woods.
He didn’t come back until they were gone. Until the Widow had made a wet snuff poultice wrap for Frederick’s face. She and Frank Dallara didn’t speak a word while they tended to him. Fred choked back a confused cry. And Clarissa went to her bed in the loft and stared up at the wood beams.
Frank Dallara did speak one thing before he left that night, and from his hiding spot behind the outhouse, Trenchmouth heard him. ‘Your boy ought not to have done what he did,’ Frank told Ona Dorsett. ‘I like him, treat him like my own, but what he done here is something else.’ The something else he spoke on was more than protecting a sister from puppy love.
The Widow said nothing. Trenchmouth could hear the disappointment in his mother’s silence, in the voice of the man he regarded as his Daddy, and it got to him.
They all read the newspaper. The Widow had made sure her two little ones were plenty literate by six years. A man called Orb brought the Williamson Daily News to them every Thursday. He was seventy-four years old and he liked to climb mountains and descend into hollows, but only if he had a destination, a nickel coming his way for delivering goods. On an early January Thursday, they’d heard most of what was coming to them already from folks walking by, looking to gossip about death. But, when old Orb rapped at their door that evening, none of them, not Ona, Clarissa, or Trenchmouth, expected those words on the page.
Trenchmouth’s reading needed the most practice, so he read aloud to the other two while they strung half-runners. The first two stories weren’t much more than the tragedy that had come their way in breezy gossip the day before. ‘Eight killed,’ Trenchmouth recited. ‘Thacker. Eight miners are dead – two Americans and six Italians – as the result of the derailing of a mine car in the Lick Fork mine of the Red Jacket Coal Company.’ The derailing had knocked mine props loose and unleashed a precipitation of heavy slate on the men. The article ended by giving the mine owner’s name, and lamenting that the mine itself was ‘badly wrecked.’
Clarissa stood up, holding her dress in her fingertips like a satchel, weighted down with the throwaway ends of beans. She walked gingerly like this to the pail used for hog slop, dumped them in. Trenchmouth read the next one. ‘Cables Broke. Bluefield. Eight men were killed and two seriously injured on an incline in a mine near here. The men were…’ he’d come upon a word he couldn’t sound out, but he was a determined boy…‘ascending the incline in a coal car when the cable broke allowing cars loaded with coal to shoot down the plane and crash into the ten men. Eight of the victims were buried beneath tons of coal and instantly killed.’
‘Eight men in two separate accidents. That’s something,’ Clarissa said.
The Widow did not look up from her stringing. ‘Don’t make something out of nothing, Clarissa. There isn’t no plan in such filth.’
‘Moonshine charge,’ Trenchmouth read. His mother looked up at him. ‘Huntington. Mrs Caroline Carpenter, 50, of Burdette, Putnam County, said to be the only woman distiller in West Virginia, was arrested and lodged in jail to await the action of the next federal jury. It is alleged by federal officers that Mrs Carpenter operated on a place at her home that was the only oasis in the Putnam County district, and from her illicit sales of liquor netted a large sum during the past few months.’
The Widow stood and dumped her bean heads as her daughter had done. She wiped her hands together. ‘Some folks don’t keep their money close to their skin, I reckon,’ she said. ‘But children, we’ve got to be more careful than ever now. Got to let them keep on thinking there’s but one woman shinin in the state.’ She told them to look at her and they did. ‘It’s time to tombstone it again for a while.’ This meant whiskey headstones. It meant hiding moonshine in a hollowed marker of the dead at the Methodist Church cemetery where the bootlegger would pick it up.
Trenchmouth looked down at his paper and read silently. When his mother told him to look back up at her, he didn’t. She hadn’t spoken her full mind on the seriousness of the change coming down on her livelihood. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘you’d be smart to listen.’
Still, he read the ink. ‘Disastrous fire at Matewan,’ he said. ‘One man dead.’ Tears were coming up now. It was hard to read, but he did. ‘Soon after passenger train number 2 left Matewan about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, fire was discovered in the Urias Hotel, inside the saloon building owned by Anse Pilcher, just across the street from where the recently burned Belmont Hotel stood, under reconstruction. Frank Dallara (Italian), forty, was burned to death after entering the Urias Hotel from across the street, where he was working as a builder. George Bowens, another worker burned considerably about the arms, said Dallara was attempting