Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

Ona Dorsett took care of the two children given to her by chance. She fed and clothed them and fixed all their ailments, save one. The boy was afflicted with a mouth disease so early on and so strongly, that the Widow could do nothing for him. A week after she found him in the river, now fully recovered and wrapped tight in heavy cotton blankets and the skin of a deer, Early Taggart began to scream through the night. He worked tirelessly at busting through his heavy wrap. The Widow couldn’t figure it out until his gums were caught momentarily in the light of her lantern. The gums were bloody red, swollen and full of holes like anthills made of skin. She had the doctor come in, a man who had known her husband well, a man who drank a good bit of her moonshine. Doctor Warble said the boy had calcium overloads, that he was actually sprouting teeth at two and a half months, five ahead of schedule. But this was not all. The doctor surmised that the gums had already split, that the boy had already been teething, at the time of his attempted drowning. He further surmised that coal sludge in the water had infected the openings. This infection had somehow evolved into what resembled an incurable oral disease in older folks, a disease that left gums eternally rotten and bloody, teeth decaying and odorous. Such a sight reminded Doctor Warble, who had been a medic with the Rough Riders at the battle of San Juan Hill only five years prior, of the mouth disease he’d encountered among Spanish soldiers, dead and agape in their trenches. It was beyond explanation that this disease could occur in an infant, but it had. The boy had Trenchmouth.

The mouth was a curious orifice. When it ailed a body, its throb was merciless as a hammer in the hands of John Henry. Headaches were mere discomforts — nagging, small pain otherwise ignored. But this disease of the tooth and gum that had afflicted the baby boy, this was oral torment. It was evident to Ona Dorsett that Doctor Warble’s pain powder would not do. She took to singing to the baby boy, calling him by the word Doctor Warble had used: Trenchmouth. She decided he’d keep his given surname. She also took to dipping a finger in the house moonshine jug, rubbing that finger across the little one’s gums and fanged teeth. When she did it each night, his agonized wails subsided. He was quiet. He was asleep. This became ritual.

Dorsett’s moonshine was of no ordinary hill recipe. The dead Dorsett man had cultivated a process begun by his father before him. Ona had further enhanced the still, its capabilities. She had thrown in some new ingredients. The results were what some would call miraculous. Men paid top dollar for that shine, though they knew not where it originated. The middleman who sold it to them had taken an oath of holy secrecy to the dead Dorsett’s widow, and he intended to keep it. It was said a drop of the stuff could spin your brain like a top, feather-tickle your pecker hard. This mule-kick possessed no odor.

Ona took it herself, once at Trenchmouth and Clarissa’s bedtime, once at her own. She’d long since realized her blend had none of the unfortunate effects other blends had. On the contrary, Dorsett shine caused her to read at night, fortified her vocabulary. It made things clear as the new glass windowpanes town folks had. Headaches and slurred speech were not part of the bargain. The only physical change an observer would take note of occurred in the eyeball. Pupils, upon first swig and for a minute thereafter, spread wide to the edge of the iris. Exploded like perfect black planets. This gave the drinker a look of animal capability. It was beast-eye.

Ona Dorsett sat at her kitchen table on a Saturday night in May of 1903, her pupils gradually rescinding to normal. By lantern light, she read a book called Following the Equator by Mr Samuel Clemens. It was near eleven o’clock when a knock came at the door. She looked up to the loft where the little ones slept sound, then rose to answer. On her way to the door, she took her Remington Double Derringer out of a big empty flour tin. She held it behind her back when she answered.

A man stood before her. He was dirty, his clothes nearly worn past their life expectancy, all tears and patches. Ona’s dress and the fabrics she put on her children were not without flaw, nor were they contemporary, but this man was something else. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. When he smiled there were cigar-wrap pieces the size of cockroaches in his yellow teeth. ‘How do missus,’ he said.

‘What can I do for you?’ Ona said softly.

The man looked behind her into the house. His eyes rolled left, right, up, and down like he wanted to gain his bearings but would never remember them. A habit of the sharp-eyed gone sour. ‘You got your youngins up there in the loft, I reckon?’ From where he stood outside, he looked up where he couldn’t see.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘You can drop whatever pea shooter you got tucked in your spine bone there.’ His smile widened. There was sweat under the brim of his brown slouch hat though it was cold outside. ‘Just put it off on yonder floor there. I ain’t lookin to take it from you,’ he said.

Ona pulled the gun out to her side, feigned dropping it for a second before she swung it around to his neck. He caught her wrist with his left hand before she reached his shoulder. She did not fire. The man reared back and slammed his forehead against the bridge of her nose. Bone crunched like thin cornstalk. Ona hit the floorboards.

While the man regarded the pistol and rubbed at his forehead, she fought blackness and the little popping stars that broke through it. He was re-positioning his hat when she got most of her sight back and pulled a stag-handle knife from her felt-button boots. She came up off the floor like the serpent’s strike and had the eight-inch blade buried in his neck before he could discern the occurrence. She was silent as she pulled and pushed the handle made of deer antler, maneuvered it so that it nearly went in one side and came out the other.

His knees never gave. He stood there, gun dropped to the floor, one arm limp at his side and the other touching his neck and the thing piercing it like a kabob. He gurgled a little. Said something to her that she couldn’t quite get. He was only one foot inside the door when she put her boot sole against his stomach and forced him backwards onto the dirt. She put the pistol back in the flour container, took a belt off the house jar, and went outside. She stood over the man, dead now, a wide stream of blood traversing down the incline beneath his head. She said nothing, though she had an unexplainable urge to spit in his eyes. Instead, she went around back and got the shovel.

Ona lashed heavy rope around the mule she had to smack to make move. The other end wrapped the base of the outhouse. The mule, called Beechnut, strained his old, nicked haunches and pulled the outhouse a good six feet away from its designation over the hole. Ona told him good boy. The hole was half-filled. Two months worth of shit and piss. The Widow had her work cut out. Widen it by four feet, deepen it by three. She began digging the man’s grave.

It was just the time of spring when the earth was finally diggable.

Before she rolled him into the hole three hours later, she went through his pockets. A half dollar and a mouth harp, silver and worn, but well-made. Cheap cigar and kitchen matches, loose, no package. A folded photograph of a woman in a lace-fringed dress and fur hat. She tossed the photograph of the woman into the grave, then rolled the man in on top of it. He went still at the bottom, belly up. There was loose dirt on the end of her shovel. She held it above his face, dropped half on one open eye, half on the other. ‘I know you,’ she said. The man looked like he had on straight temple spectacles, the glass lenses tinted mud black.