The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor
Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish
The words split the preacher’s lips asthmatic. He was small, but he preached big and airy and hoarse, like a coughing fit had ahold of him. ‘The sorrows of death compassed me,’ he shouted. ‘And the pains of hell gateheld upon me. I found trouble and sorrow.’ Frank Dallara’s body went into the ground inside a rough-cut box, wet from rain. ‘Then called I upon the name of the Lord,’ the preacher went on. ‘Oh Lord, I beseech thee deliver my soul.’
Trenchmouth stood and listened. For a time, he’d felt more anger than anguish. Folks had been talking about Anse Pilcher, the burned hotel’s owner. Anse had a condition. His bones were soft. Like cartilage. His bones could be pierced just like his flesh, and because of this, most wouldn’t speak poorly of ‘the cripple,’ as they called him. But he had enemies and Frank Dallara had been one of them. Those talking said Anse had told Frank a little girl was inside all that fiery construct, that he lied to see the man set ablaze. Trenchmouth thought on this at the funeral. His shoulders, broadening now, nearly split the shirt seams the Widow had sewn a night prior. When Frank Dallara’s coffin hit bottom and the rough men lowering it pulled back their ropes, the boy nearly lost what little composure he had left. In a week’s time, he’d lost the man closest to being a father to him and learned the vile fate of his real daddy. He’d watched his birth mother spew shit and venomous words in his direction. And he’d kissed his own sister on the mouth. It was a good deal to take in at nine years old.
The preacher preached onward. ‘I said in my haste, all men are liars.’
That’s when the boy knew that God was for the featherheaded, that religion was a salesman’s game. God’s man himself had said it: ‘liars.’ Trenchmouth turned then and walked away from all of them. Black-clad and bad-postured, they half-listened to the words, ‘deliver my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ But Trenchmouth drowned it out. He whistled while he walked away. This struck a particular funeral-goer, Frank Dallara’s ugly brother-in-law Hob Tibbs, as disrespectful beyond the pale.
He followed the boy away from the mourner’s circle. He pulled him by the arm behind a substantial tree, and he smacked him. ‘Don’t you disrespect the dead,’ he said. He smacked again. ‘Don’t you dare disrespect the Lord out here, you hear me?’
Folks handle anguish in a variety of ways. Somehow the nine year old knew this to be true, and it stopped him from striking the ugly man back. But Hob Tibbs had made a new enemy, had added to his list of many, and something in his face burned into Trenchmouth’s brain unforgettable. Tibbs said, ‘You’re going to be in church every Sunday, hear? I’m puttin you to work for God. You’ll spit shine a cross if I tell you. Polish up stained glass for walking away from a man’s burial.’
Trenchmouth said what he’d said all his life. ‘Yessir.’
Church and school. These were places that didn’t interest a ten-year-old boy. It wasn’t that Trenchmouth abhorred scripture or couldn’t learn his lessons. He could. It was the existence of those that sought to ridicule him on account of his oral ailment, to single him out and dig at him so as to break his spirit. There were boys at school who plotted little else. And in church, of course, there was Hob Tibbs.
As promised, he’d shackled Trenchmouth to the Methodist congregation. He put him to work spit shining brass and polishing glass. During Sunday services, the boy was forced to wait and clean up after communion. Shirts were to be tucked in, hems straight. And Trenchmouth was subject to the unrelenting criticisms of his mouth. ‘There’s men called dentists these days, boy,’ Tibbs would say. ‘Might fashion you a brush outta twig and pine needle. You ever hear of a brush? Oh,’ he’d say, squinting close at the closed mouth, ‘I reckon you haven’t.’
Trenchmouth owned a toothbrush. He pulled it back and forth when he could stand to, but the ache it induced, along with the bleeding, would make anyone wonder at the worth of such a practice. He’d long ago tried and discounted a homeopathic mouth rinse from the Sears Roebuck, and now he used a concoction the Widow had stirred up for him, a bitter, stinging rinse for the mouth whose makeup she would not reveal.
It was a summertime Sunday, just after the Methodist Man had finished giving communion, when Trenchmouth, by this point a forced duty acolyte of sorts, was helping Tibbs in the choir room. They poured the unused grape juice back in the jug. The boy spilled it on the bitter man’s shirt front.
‘You little rotten shit,’ Tibbs said, teeth grit hard. He grabbed Trenchmouth by the collar. ‘You got no sense in that head, just like you got no teeth. You can’t do a simple Lord’s chore without foulin it all up.’ He was letting loose whatever it was that ate at him without rest. ‘Got no mama to speak of except the one in the bughouse, and even that Widow can see you got the devil in you. He’s leakin out through your gums, ain’t he boy?’ A boil rose inside Trenchmouth then, one that had started at Frank Dallara’s funeral, his first encounter with Tibbs. It was about to bust and run over. The man kept up, ‘And if you think Frank Dallara was any kind of daddy to you, think on it some more. That there was pity, son. No more, no less. Pity for a cripple whose real daddy was no better’n a nigger.’ The word was ugly, even in those times. ‘Some say he was half-a-one anyhow, mixed blood.’ Tibbs let a smile inch onto his face.
Trenchmouth, without much thought, bent at the knee and hinged back his hip. He took a full-leg backswing and let fly, trailing a black-booted shoe. This was inertia. He kicked Hob Tibbs in the stones with the force of a mule, like old Beechnut when he’d not eaten. Tibbs sucked in air with great volume. He bent double. On the dark wooden floor slats of the church’s choir room, he curled into a baby’s pose and whimpered like one for lack of speech at such pain.
The boy bent over him. ‘If anybody’s kin to hell, it’s you, cocksucker.’ He’d heard a drunk man say the word to another during a fight outside the pool hall and had been waiting to use it ever since. ‘And you won’t see me in this here church again, ever. And you won’t come calling either. Cause if you do, I’ll be up in a tree behind a barrel.’ The words were such that a boy shouldn’t possess to speak, but he did, and he wasn’t finished. He leaned over Tibbs’ head and spoke. ‘You’ll fall hard as Goliath, cocksucker.’
Tibbs just whimpered and knotted up tighter. Trenchmouth let his saliva carry and gather in his lips, just ahead of the ravaged gums. When he’d pooled enough, he opened up in a grin not unlike the one Tibbs had given him that morning. The spit, rusty and thick, hung for a tick or two until its own weight broke and it smacked heavy into the left eye of Hob Tibbs.
Trenchmouth tore off his church-donated tie and walked out the heavy doors. He was through. For the rest of his life, he’d use the word ‘sir’ to address any man his senior, with the exception of Hob Tibbs. He’d taken a place in the boy’s brain and heart reserved only for a few. A few who’d spend their days and nights back-looking over shoulders and sniffing the air like dogs.
It was the same at the schoolhouse. Under a ceiling so low a miner would crouch instinctual, sat all ages, all grade levels, together. The teacher, Ms Varney, switched legbacks for crimes ranging from sass talk to bad posture. She wrote on the new blackboard formulas for understanding reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. But her two favorite subjects were hygiene and singing. Once, after Doc Taylor visited on head lice, Ms Varney said this to the class: ‘If you care for yourself so little as to let bedbugs infest your scalp, well then you’re nearly as bad as a tramp with trench-mouth in my book.’ Clarissa had put her head down.
When the students got to singing in unison at the end of every day, songs like ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,’ Ms Varney inevitably told Trenchmouth, ‘Remember to keep yours sealed shut, young man. Humming is all this little room can stand from a stink box such as yours.’
If Ms Varney left the room, Mose Crews inevitably scampered to the blackboard to draw up little