Glenn Taylor - The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

He’d rolled easy into his new home five feet below the outhouse basin. The earth went smoothly back to where it originated, patted down without much trouble like it had never moved. Ona re-dug the waste-hole and Beechnut hefted the outhouse to its original location. She gave him an apple which he ate with finick.

Inside, Ona climbed the ladder to the loft before washing her hands. The two of them were there, the baby boy in his wicker bassinet, the three-year-old girl on the horsehair mattress. The Widow stared at them for ten solid minutes before she descended the stairs and washed up with cold well-water over the tub. She put on a sleeping gown that had been her mother-in-law’s, ascended the ladder again and slept between her two children, marking the patterns of their sleep breathing in her mind, smiling when the inhales and exhales matched up. Matching her own to theirs.

By the spring of 1906, it was evident that three things separated Trenchmouth from the ordinary two-year-old. There was of course his oral ailment, which required higher doses of nightly moonshine as his weight swelled. But the other two things were remarkable in an entirely different manner. The boy could climb and dig in such a way that only boys thrice his age had mastered. He scampered up hillsides like a Tibetan antelope, and his hands dove into mud like a posthole digger. ‘Climbin and diggin is what comes natural to boys,’ the Widow Dorsett would say, ‘and this one here is more natural than any.’

Trenchmouth buried things. Found things too. An 1859 Indian Head penny. The skeletal structure of a barn cat with a.22 hole in its skull. Seventeen clay marbles.

On a warm, overcast day in early May, the boy did what he often did while he was supposed to nap. He pulled himself up and out of the crib the Widow had made, and he descended the ladder from the loft to the main floor. Two-year-olds shouldn’t — and most couldn’t — do these things, but such was the boy’s stock, determined. His mother and sister were out knocking tomato worms off newly sprouted yellow Hillbillies. Trenchmouth reached up for the front door latch, opened, and ran for it.

He was a big boy at two years and four months. Long since off the diaper and expertly outhouse-trained. On this day, he felt the morning’s oatmeal churning so he headed for the backhouse, as Ona called it. The half quarter moon cut-out was lined with cobweb. Inside, the seat was two-holed, big for the Widow, small for Trenchmouth and Clarissa. He perched himself. Afterwards, like he was taught, the boy reached in the scoop bag and dropped lime down the hole, on top of his business. Something always caused him to run out of there afterwards, some stench he could not place.

He could heave rocks. While Ona and Clarissa tended plants, Trenchmouth stood in the barn and threw rocks and dirt clods at Beechnut the mule. The animal swished his tail and rocked his head side to side. He generally didn’t care for being hit with such things, but he took it. Blinked his eyes. Snorted. The boy laughed and clomped his way to the tack room. He knew the Widow kept a paper sack of sugar cubes in a saddle bag high up. That climbing came in handy.

Out back of the barn, the boy sucked on a cube, then set it down and watched the flies come to it. The flies only landed on licked sugar cubes, never dry. Little Trenchmouth could already figure such things as useful somehow. He buried more clay marbles in a quick-dug hole next to another hiding the jawbone of a fox. He’d come back for all these in time. They’d all have their uses.

When he walked up to them, they were bent at the waist, Ona strong and middle-aged and wiry, Clarissa a miniature version of all these things. It was as if they were blood kin. Their dresses were made from old window curtains.

‘Get to bug knockin,’ the Widow told Trenchmouth. She’d long since stopped scolding for naptime escapes.

‘Get to bug knockin,’ Clarissa said directly. She liked to mimic her mother. She was tall and thin, not quite grade school aged, but already taller than the first and second graders, girls and boys both.

Trenchmouth made a noise at them not unlike a cat’s call before a fight. Deep and verging on howl. The boy was gifted physically, and he could figure the way things worked quick, but he could not, or did not, speak a lick. Just moaned and howled and grunted, and, when he really got bothered, smacked his own head on both sides with little open palms.

He began knocking worms and bugs with his little squared-off fingernails. He bent at the knees. Concentrated. Licked his rotten gums and teeth and stared wide-eyed. But something bad got in the wind again and he stood up, sniffed. The smell made his lip quiver. It was too much for his olfactory to take, something awful he’d not caught wind of so strong before. The Hillbilly tomato in front of him went blurry, filled his vision with red, and his ears went to ringing. Terror took him, sudden and unexplained. He spat and grunted and ran for his mother, clinging to her rough-stitched muslin skirt until the gray hem ripped and she shook him loose like a wet dog does water.

Once every three months, Ona Dorsett took her children to the Wholesale Grocers in Williamson for evaporated milk, navy beans, sardines, table salt, and toilet soaps, among other things. Once, she’d bought them a nibble of Mungers Fancy Chocolate because the shine business was especially good in winter months.

Just before Thanksgiving 1909, the three of them made a trip. Some folks had Model Ts by then, but the Widow and her two children rode in a canopy-top horse wagon.

Trenchmouth was nearly six, his sister nine, and they couldn’t have been more different. She was in school, he wasn’t yet. She was brave of speech to adults and peers alike, while he spoke as little as possible. This was due not to any lack of intellect, but instead a desire not to show folks the inside of his mouth. So it came to be that when he spoke, he did so with his lips curled over the swelled gums and crooked teeth. A mumbler, some would say. An otherwise good, handsome, brown-haired boy who spoke like someone had soldered his jawbones in such a way as to prohibit full opening.

In the grocers, Clarissa handed her mother items for the sack while Trenchmouth sprinted the aisles, his boots leaving marks when he turned corners. He wasn’t looking where he was headed on one such turn and ended up with a face full of pantleg. From his seat on the tiled floor, he looked up to see who he’d plowed into. ‘I’m sorry sir,’ he mumbled.

The man said nothing. He was tall and thin, and though not yet thirty years old, his face housed wrinkles rivaling a bulldog’s. He stood stooped. His hands carried the permanent black residue of an undergrounder, a miner, just as his father’s had before him. His father had been born in Italy, and it would be another generation before the last name morphed pronunciation, quit carrying the unpleasant ring of an outsider. When he smiled at Trenchmouth, his teeth looked nearly as bad off as the boy’s, and this was comforting. ‘You’re liable to outrun a coal train ain’t you son?’ he said. He was pulling pieces of smooth carved wood from a sugar sack. The wood pieces were lashed with rubber.

Trenchmouth watched him place his wares on the store’s shelf, one by one, lined up.

‘Slingshots,’ the man told him. He looked at the sling shot in his hand for a moment, thought, then handed it to the boy, who had stood back up. ‘Go knock Goliath on his behind,’ he said. Trenchmouth wanted to take the weapon, but he didn’t. Until the man took the boy’s hand in his own and placed it there. Then the man, whose name was Frank Dallara, finished putting his goods on the shelf. ‘They bring in a nickel from most boys. You got a deal on that there.’