Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

Trenchmouth tore off a piece of newspaper and scrawled on it move hideout for safety? He put it in his pocket.

A page in, she had written Think I’ll ever get me one of these? above an ad for a cooking oven. It read Every woman who wants a steel range will certainly buy The Peninsular if they can only get a view of it . They could do so if they got themselves to A.H. Beal Hardware in Williamson. The power of steel. It was everywhere to behold. Trenchmouth looked at the beat up Acme cook stove against the wall. It had seen better days.

The door opened and Clarissa walked in with Fred Dallara in tow. Trenchmouth nodded and looked back to his paper.

‘Hi,’ Clarissa said. She’d blossomed full to beautiful.

‘Afternoon, little T.T.,’ Fred said. His voice had gone suddenly low that winter, his torso thicker. He had a mustache that looked like somebody had smudged two fingers across his lip and halfway wiped it off. Fred enjoyed pointing out their age differential.

The two lovebirds climbed the ladder to the loft and went quiet.

Trenchmouth knew that Fred and Clarissa kissed up there. The soft sounds echoed in his ears. He knew that they knew the Widow was at work on her still again, moving and hiding and covering up, and that she wouldn’t be back to catch them in the act. He broke off two miniature pieces of cornbread, shoved them in each earhole, and got back to reading.

See here? she had written above another story. Turns out you just got more brains than the rest of us, in more places, more stubborn . It was another new finding from the scientists who were always finding. Throat Brain Is Latest Discovery the title read, and under that Scientists Say Gray Matter is in Fingers and Cells are in Toes. Numerous Thinking Organs Distributed Throughout Whole Body . According to the columnist, the fingertips of the blind contained brain tissue, and so did the throat. If a throat surgeon slipped up during his operation, the throat brain would react by refusing to cooperate.

The boy couldn’t help but wonder what had been done to his mouth brain to make it so uncooperative.

He thought he heard a giggle from the loft, so he pushed the bread further into his ears and read on. Above Railroad Progress Moving Forward , she’d written You could see the world if you wanted to by the time they finish this . The big men of the N&W and the C&O were barreling through hills and valleys, blasting tunnels and building homes for workers. The word tonnage was used again and again to describe the coal that was bringing the railroad to West Virginia. The tonnage was here, so they were coming to secure it. To move it out to everybody else.

Trenchmouth thought of the tipples he’d seen being built from solid wood. He wondered how somebody could figure a kitchen range ought to be fashioned from steel but not a coal tipple. He ripped off another piece of paper and scrawled a new design. The power of steel. It was everywhere.

Another giggle. It made him sick. He gave the bread plugs another push and started reading out loud. Almost a holler. ‘Millions of dollars are being invested in coal properties, which will within a year furnish tonnage for the railroads, which are being built at a cost of more than millions of dollars.’ A shoe boomeranged down at him from above and caught his collarbone, hard. He didn’t look up, just rubbed at his injury. Had he looked to the loft, had he pulled the bread from his ears, he would have heard Fred Dallara say, ‘Pipe down little boy,’ and he would have seen Clarissa, up on her elbows with her neck stretched to check on him, a mix of worry and sadness and defeat in her eyes.

But he didn’t look up at them. He kept on reading.

He read that the druggist at the pharmacy had been confined to his bed. Like others in the county, he’d been taken hold of by Typhoid Fever.

That’s when Trenchmouth saw the toy advertisement. Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder the banner read.

The boy could scarcely take it in.

Under this heading was a picture nearly identical to the scrap metal tipple on his drawing table at the hideout. The picture showed skinny steel strips, holes punched and connected to other holes. It was a steel construction toy, an erector set, and some fellow by the name of A.C. Gilbert was taking credit for having invented it.

Without knowing, Trenchmouth had made a toy, and now somebody else was getting paid for it. What he’d thought was an idea toward protecting the progress of civilization was nothing more than adolescent entertainment.

He sighed and sat and stared.

His ears were plugged up while his sister broke his heart within whisper distance, and he came to understand that ideas could be stolen before they were even ideas. But no tears would smear the newsprint that day or any other, as far as Trenchmouth was concerned. He was not yet twelve and had lost nearly everything he loved. But he knew this on that day: like toys, tears were for boys, and it was time to leave all that behind. It was time to become a man.

The hideout lay in ruin and the kitchen moonshine was running low. Trenchmouth the man-boy had laid waste to his inventions 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.