The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor
wounds were dressed at the Y.M.C.A. hospital, the entire town burned to the ground, and so forth. But Trenchmouth had read the words about the man who’d taken him in, looked at him real, and been disappointed by his savagery just four nights prior. And now he was dead.
The boy ran out the front door.
When the Widow found him, he was under a birch tree, shaking from the kind of cry that has no sound. She’d brought with her a small luggage bag filled with jars of moonshine. A woman sat in jail for this juice. It was time to clear the house stash. From the bag she pulled a small canning jar. It was half full of the strongest moonshine she had. For a moment, she just stood over him. He couldn’t look up at her, knew it wasn’t for boys to cry like this. She bent and brushed at the hair on his forehead, her fingertips working in such a way as only a mother’s fingertips can. ‘Tonight you’ll sip a little extra for your pain,’ she said, unscrewing the lid.
Through his shaky inhales and exhales, he managed to swallow a little, and it calmed him. The Widow kept at rubbing his face, his cheeks, his neck, until he nearly fell asleep on the spot. She took back the jar, nipped it herself, and pulled him up by the hand. ‘Let’s get to the cemetery before nine,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go to school tomorrow.’
Once there, they worked. There was no time for crying. You had to look out for the law, for folks visiting their dead. You had to find the four foot tombstone marked with the name Mary Blood, dig under it a little, and unearth the hollow metal casing awaiting its delivery. It was paranoid work, the best kind to put a mind off sorrow.
But sorrow always came back. That night, long past midnight, long past the pain-numbing effect of the shine, Trenchmouth stirred in his bed. It seemed to the boy that the world was burning, that men were being pulled to its center to die, and that he somehow was responsible. It also seemed that the air inside the house was unbreathable. So he descended the ladder and went outside. He wore nothing but his nightclothes and socks.
It didn’t take long for another scent to embed itself in his nose. It was the same one he’d gotten hold of that day knocking bugs in the garden so many years before. On this night, with the miners dead and Mr Dallara burned alive, he almost recognized it. The smell of rot and regret. Of meeting the maker unnaturally.
He tracked it liked the Widow had taught him to night track deer. The aroma of shit and functioning glands. But this was something else. His nose led him to the outhouse, then to the mound next to it, then to a third mound further down. Trenchmouth bent to one knee and inhaled hard. It wasn’t bowel movements his nose had followed.
Out there, it was bone cold.
A boy his size could work a shovel just fine. He didn’t possess much weight to bury its edge, but he jumped up and down on the thing, bruising the bare arches of his feet, enough to make headway in an hour’s time. Somehow, despite the frozen crust of earth, Trenchmouth broke through. He always had been able to dig what others couldn’t. He got below the petrified mess of eight-year-old human waste, deep below it after a couple more hours. It was then that he noticed something small and gray in the half light of his lantern. He bent to it, held it up to his eye. It was a man’s thumb.
Trenchmouth didn’t scream or throw the thing back. He bent again and unearthed the hand from which his shovel had severed the digit. It was the color of nothing, and the skin was full of holes, tunnels for unknown breeds of burrowing insects and filth bugs long since full. The clothes were intact if not brittle. And once Trenchmouth used his fingers to dig and brush away the remaining dirt, a face looked back at him, sunken and scared. Hollow and clay red. He stared at the face, and as he put his hand to his nose again, the hills around him seemed to shift at their foundations and the trees and the sky went red. Then all of it, everything, almost fell away to nothing.
The boy had an unexplainable urge to spit in the dead man’s empty eyes.
He sat next to the buried man until sunrise. When Ona Dorsett walked out to the barn clutching her bearskin wrap around her chest, she did not act surprised to see him there. She went back in for his twilled wool coat and boots, handed them to the boy in silence. His fingers, nearly numb, pulled the warmth on slow and awkward. He didn’t look at her.
‘You know who he is?’ she said.
‘No ma’am.’
‘How he come to be buried here?’
‘No ma’am.’
‘I kilt him.’
In those times, in those parts, everybody, no matter what their upbringing or education, used the word ‘kilt.’ ‘He got kilt cause some folks need killin,’ was a phrase heard once or twice annually, and hearing the Widow speak something like it was less monstrous than a child might expect.
Trenchmouth stared at his boot laces.
‘Ain’t you going to ask if I had good reason?’ She scanned the foothills circular, pivoting in her stance.
He waited, then spoke, ‘I reckon you wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t.’
‘That man there is your daddy,’ she said.
The boy rolled those lips over his teeth in such a way that they might break through. He sneezed, a fit of them really, for no good reason.
‘He come to take you when you wasn’t but a baby, a little baby,’ the Widow said. ‘He come drunk and wild and unfit to father anything breathing. Your father was a bad man.’ The condensation of her speech hung heavy in the air.
Trenchmouth stood. ‘He would have taken me from you,’ he said. He looked at her like a son looks at his mother when he needs more than words.
‘He would have.’
‘He would have kilt you to do it.’
‘He would have.’ She pulled the dead man’s mouth harmonica from her shirt pocket, gave it to the boy. ‘His,’ she said. ‘You’re liable to make somethin good of it.’ The boy looked at the little silver and wood instrument and felt sick at the thought of putting it to his mouth. She pulled him to her so that he hugged her around the hips, his face in her belly. An eight-year-old can know a great many things, and at the same time very few. That morning, at an outhouse burying ground, Trenchmouth Taggart knew he had been raised up right by the only woman who could’ve done the raising. He knew he’d most likely be dead or starved were it not for her. And he knew, that since the time of his last linen diaper some six years earlier, for every day of his young life, he’d been pissing and shitting on his very own daddy. That sat just fine with him, he decided.
That evening, the Widow sat down with her children and told them things she never had before. The time was right. Due.
She told Clarissa, among other things: ‘Your mother was too young, and most likely had got herself where she was by way of a drunk man’s forceful hand.’ The Widow knew things about the young mother, things like her name, Cleona Brook. Her whereabouts, Huntington by way of Charleston. Her profession, actress. The Widow even knew that Cleona was starring in a current production of Girl of the Golden West at the Huntington Theatre, less than a hundred miles of track away.
It wasn’t coincidence that she turned to Trenchmouth that evening and spoke of similar knowledge, similar geography. While Clarissa whimpered next to the washtub in the kitchen, confused by discovery, and while the sunlight through the windows died and the room went orange and soft, the boy’s practicing mother told him of his birth mother. ‘She is in a room alone at the Home for Incurables in Huntington,’ she said.‘She pulls off her own fingernails. Thinks Satan is among us.’ Her name was spoken aloud with less sympathy than the girl’s mother. ‘Mittie Ann Taggart.’
The Norfolk & Western ran a 1:50 p.m. daily out of Williamson. Columbus and Cincinnati, all points west and northwest. But the train stopped in Kenova and Huntington, and Ona Dorsett trusted it would be good for her children, aged eight and twelve, to strike out on their own for an overnighter. Children were babied too much, that was her thinking.
Moonshine sales bankrolled the excursion of