Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

‘I don’t see any little boys around here,’ Trenchmouth answered, shivering though it was night-hot.

‘You old enough to fight or vote?’

‘Old enough to drink,’ he said and pulled the flask again from his pants pocket, which was bunched around his knees. She pulled from it and coughed. He pulled and smiled. The moonlight showed her those gums again, those teeth and their ulcerated in-betweens. She’d not put that to her mouth. A different idea brewed.

‘Just do like I show you and we’ll both come up happy,’ Anne Sharples said to him. Then she brought him to her and pushed his shoulders down, away from her own. He stopped at her chest, newly aware of further curvature. But she kept pushing him down, and when he got to her waist, she arched her back, pulled up her white muslin underskirt, pushed down her undergarments, and guided that man-boy’s oft-ridiculed orifice to another, hidden one of her own, one that he’d spent whole months of nights imagining. It took him aback for a moment, and he stopped short. He couldn’t see much, but he felt the tickle of hair on his nose, and he smelled something unlike any scent he’d ever picked up. It was in every way opposite to what he’d followed to the outhouse burial ground all those years earlier. Unlike death, this was life’s smell, like tree sap and sweat and culinary aromas undiscovered and ancient. Trenchmouth lowered himself to it.

At first, he fumbled, and she almost let her conscience tear through the moonshine haze of comfort to stop him. But then something changed. Trenchmouth, enchanted almost to nausea, began to feel something he never had in church, Methodist or Snake-handler. What had seemed false faith in the bitten skinny man that morning, what had rung untrue in all of them as they mumbled nonsense, suddenly arose in him so palpably that he could not hold it back. From his pressurized groin something seeped upward like fire through the tendons. It warmed his stomach and tickled his vocal chords. It came right up through his mouth and out the end of his tongue, which began moving itself in circles and latitudes of an unknown geometry, fast and patterned like a snake never could. As Anne Sharples began to buck and heave air, Trenchmouth let loose a string of words not unlike those of the pillars of the Church of God with Signs Following. ‘Harla harla la da hey hoo woo adeyanamana harla da da da,’ he said. The hum of it all from his tongue fibers and taste buds infected her, but not with his disease.

Trenchmouth had got religion there in the woman’s nether regions, and for the woman, spent and shocked beyond words, a preacher had found his calling.

They’d left him out of Mumblety Peg for as far back as he could remember. It was a young boy’s game, really. As soon as he was old enough to open and close a jack-knife without bleeding to death, a boy found games of Mumblety Peg in which to compete. After school, or on summer days when the earth was soft and the blade would stick deep — these were times for bringing practice to fruition. In the fall of 1916, at nearly fourteen years old, Trenchmouth was too old to play, at least in the estimation of most boys. But the group of four littler ones had seen him walking past, and had liked his tall frame, his crack-proof, rolled sole boots, the way he spat tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. So they’d called him over to the small mountain bald, a field backdropped by trees that bled leaves of red and orange and yellow. Only one of them, a boy named Crews whose brother Trenchmouth knew well, whose mother he knew even better, expressed objection to consorting with T.T. Stinky.

But any objection was soon forgotten when Trenchmouth, in the first inning, progressed through twenty-two feats without a mistake. He opened his Cattle King pen knife with precision. The buffalo-horn handle reflected light as he flipped it from every position: fist, fingers, cross-chested ears, nose, eyes, knees, top of the head. Each time it stuck point down, plenty deep. The boys watched wide-eyed and grunted noises of impress. Their narrow lines of sight on the abilities of orphaned, malformed youngsters such as Trenchmouth had been blown wide apart. They knew their own ignorance now to be fear, maybe even envy.

Each of them progressed through, fumbling and mumbling, until the last was beaten, and Trenchmouth, the victor, drove the peg into the ground using his knife handle. Six blows landed solid and flat as a carpenter’s hammer. He’d sunk the peg, so that the loser boy, Warren Crews, was forced to do the deed. Warren was the one who had objected to calling Trenchmouth over. He was youngest brother of Mose Crews, Fred Dallara’s best buddy. Mose was tailback on the ball team, and the meanest of the nastiest of the T.T. Stinky crew.

‘Root, Root!’ the boys hollered, shoving little, fat, Warren Crews to his knees. He couldn’t even see the top of the peg, none of them could. Trenchmouth had driven it deep. Hands behind his back, the Crews boy dove in for it with his teeth, as the rules clearly dictated. Again and again he came up for air, the silty black mud covering more and more of his face. They stood around him and laughed. It was friendly teasing, even from Trenchmouth, who harbored no ill will toward the boy on account of his bad luck in sibling, but Warren Crews didn’t like losing. As he came up empty again and again, and as the boys’ insistence on playing out the game became ever more apparent, Warren Crews looked around in desperation. He nearly forgot his age and called out for T.T. Stinky to get down there and finish, seeing as his mouth was already dirty, his teeth full of muck. Warren thought his big brother would have done just that. But Warren Crews thought wrong, and was, for a brief moment, lucky.

First, he wasn’t aware that even football Mose would no longer call out Trenchmouth to his face. In private, Mose and the others still spoke of the orally-ailed one without censor. They even made up crude drawings and songs. But they’d long ago given up insulting Trenchmouth face to face, much less making eye contact. Ever since he’d attacked Fred Dallara like a mountain cat, and even more so since he’d sprouted wide shoulders and a fine mustache and won every riflery contest the county sponsored, boys only poked fun at T.T. Stinky behind his back. Had they known that in a year’s time, Trenchmouth had vocalized into the unmentionable anatomies of nine women, they’d have no doubt fainted from shock. But Trenchmouth had a whole stockpile of secrets, and this one he would not spill.

So Warren was lucky, in that not knowing any of this, he didn’t slander Trenchmouth and pay the price. What stopped him was the sight of Arly Scott Jr walking by.

Good luck, bad luck. They interchange so quickly.

Arly Scott Jr was, like Trenchmouth, nearly fourteen. And, like Trenchmouth, he was bigger than the four other boys. But Arly was black, and this meant that even a pack of puny ten-year-olds could order him around if they felt like it.

‘Hey,’ Warren Crews shouted at the boy in the distance, who was going foot over foot along the railroad track, testing balance. ‘Hey nigger!’

Arly stopped and dropped his feet on either side of his balance beam. He turned and faced them.

‘Why don’t you come on over here?’ Warren spit dirt, scraped grass off his tongue and lips using his teeth and fingernails.

Arly looked at them for a while, then began walking toward them. Trenchmouth didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around. Like every other black family in Mingo County, Arly’s had come from down South for the mines. His father was in the number one at Red Jacket. And like every other black family in Mingo, he lived in Mitchell Branch and went about his business in an all-black world of school and church. Arly was almost identical to Trenchmouth in height and weight, and his sprouting muscles were just as hard and determined.