Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

‘Thank you sir,’ Trenchmouth said.

Frank Dallara stared at the awkward mouth, the way it hid its own parts. Then he looked the boy in the eye and said, ‘I’d bet my last dollar you’ll be a dead-eye with that weapon in one week. I can see it in you.’

The Widow came up behind him, Clarissa beside her. ‘Frank,’ she said.

‘Missus Dorsett,’ he said and tipped his hat. Something or someone had taken a bite out of the brim. ‘I reckoned this one was yours. Grow like weeds, don’t they?’

‘They do.’

Dallara turned his attention to Clarissa. ‘My boy Frederick is in your class isn’t he young lady?’

‘Yessir he is,’ Clarissa said. ‘He doesn’t say much, but when he does it’s not mean like some other boys.’

‘Well, glad to hear it. He speaks highly of you.’

For once, Clarissa had no response. Her cheeks went a little pink.

‘You’re selling goods Frank?’ Ona said.

‘I’m out of the mines, done for good with it. Too many gettin killed for one contraption foul up or another.’ He looked at her and then at the floor, like he shouldn’t have said such a thing in the presence of a mine widow. ‘I sell these for a little extra, but I’m framing construction over at the Urias Hotel in Matewan.’

‘Well, good. I reckon that’s safer.’

Trenchmouth pulled back on the rubber and extended his arm. He squinted one eye like he’d lined up this shot a hundred times before. He didn’t let the rubber snap back, just stood there still as a statue.

‘I told him I could see it plain as daybreak,’ Dallara said. ‘This boy’s a dead-eye. A crackshot if I’ve ever seen one.’

1911 was to be a bad year for the isolated, hill-spiked terrain of southern West Virginia. Death and discovery of the unpleasant would visit more than one family in the coalfields, and Trenchmouth, aged eight years, would be shaped by all of it.

A third talent had gotten in his bones, natural as the digging and climbing, which he still practiced daily. Frank Dallara’s words had come to fruition, and Trenchmouth could knock a crow off a sugar maple branch from sixty feet using nothing but his eyes and that little wooden wrist rocket he’d picked up at the grocers.

Frank Dallara took the boy out on weekends for practice. ‘Ancient man couldn’t always carry a bow and arrow or a spear,’ he said. ‘They needed something lightweight.’ Accuracy was studied through repetition. ‘David protected his sheep with the same contraption you got in your hand, except Mr Goodyear give us cooked rubber to work with,’ Frank Dallara liked to say. ‘Old David slew a giant with it too.’ You could find stones anywhere, in any size. Small, smooth ones for line drive precision. Big, heavy ones for high-arced momentum. Dallara was a miner and a carpenter by trade, but he should have been a physicist the way he tutored Trenchmouth on velocity, gravity, and inertia.

He’d put his arm around the boy after a particularly good shot, as if Trenchmouth were his own. Like most, he called him ‘T,’ but it sounded better somehow. It didn’t seem like much to Frank Dallara, but to the eight year old, it was everything.

The boy was taught on guns too. The Widow taught him safety first, everything else second. She schooled him on a hammerless 10 gauge that had been her husband’s. Frank Dallara let him get used to a.22 rifle belonging to his boy Frederick. The three of them went squirrel hunting on Sundays, and afterwards, each and every time, Clarissa and Frederick, by then almost twelve, made eyes at one another. Talked by themselves on the porch for a while.

This made Trenchmouth a little mad. There were three reasons why. The first was a natural propensity for protecting his sister, younger or older did not factor. The second was a distaste for the bland nature of Frederick Dallara. He had no fire in him. Was good in school, but never hopped a moving train. When other boys caught and skinned blacksnakes or threw bullfrogs at the Model Ts in town from hidden launching spots, Fred Dallara always got quiet and went home to study. He was a bore, and Trenchmouth didn’t like bores. He wanted to be in it anytime and everywhere, and he had the scars to prove it. The third reason Trenchmouth was bothered by his non-blood sister’s flirtations with the other boy was simple: she was non-blood, and this meant he could be there for her the way Fred Dallara wanted to be. Trenchmouth was a little bit in love with Clarissa, as much as an eight-year-old can be.

One Sunday evening in winter, standing by lantern light on the Widow’s front lawn, Trenchmouth, Frank, and Fred cleaned the four fox squirrels they’d bagged that afternoon. They cut them around the middle and peeled back the skins. Inside, Ona heated up some bacon drippings on top of the black Acme cook stove. Clarissa watched from a window until the squirrels were halved and quartered and so on, then she came outside. It was the kind of cold out that creeps into you, takes you by surprise. ‘Y’all need help?’ she said.

‘We’ve got her just about done,’ Frank Dallara said.

The almost twelve-year-olds made eyes. Trenchmouth watched them.

When he and Frank Dallara took the little legs and abdomens inside to rinse and remove buckshot, Fred and Clarissa stayed put in front of the house. From inside the kitchen, the boy could see them. They kissed.

Trenchmouth was up and toward the door like he’d sat on a tack. He didn’t slow once outside. He took the bigger boy down by driving his right shoulder into the hips. Once on the ground, while a confused Clarissa looked down at them with her hands to her mouth, Trenchmouth straddled Fred and commenced to fist pumping. He was like an out of control oil drill, swinging away, up and down, and when Fred Dallara finally grasped what was happening and threw the younger boy off, his nose and lips were split and leaking crimson fast. They both sat on their butts. Clarissa was about to lean down and check on the boy whose lips she’d just kissed, and Fred was about to lurch at his attacker, when Trenchmouth, squatting now like he might come back for more, squinted his eyes to almost nothing, pulled back his forever-covering lips to reveal the mess of sores and bulges and sharp crooked calcium, and hissed. In the low light of the lantern, he made a sound reserved for mountain cats with their backs against a rock wall. Then he shot forward like one and sunk his diseased teeth into the left cheek of Fred Dallara. The boy wailed something awful.

Trenchmouth ran for the woods.

He didn’t come back until they were gone. Until the Widow had made a wet snuff poultice wrap for Frederick’s face. She and Frank Dallara didn’t speak a word while they tended to him. Fred choked back a confused cry. And Clarissa went to her bed in the loft and stared up at the wood beams.

Frank Dallara did speak one thing before he left that night, and from his hiding spot behind the outhouse, Trenchmouth heard him. ‘Your boy ought not to have done what he did,’ Frank told Ona Dorsett. ‘I like him, treat him like my own, but what he done here is something else.’ The something else he spoke on was more than protecting a sister from puppy love.

The Widow said nothing. Trenchmouth could hear the disappointment in his mother’s silence, in the voice of the man he regarded as his Daddy, and it got to him.

They all read the newspaper. The Widow had made sure her two little ones were plenty literate by six years. A man called Orb brought the Williamson Daily News to them every Thursday. He was seventy-four years old and he liked to climb mountains and descend into hollows, but only if he had a destination, a nickel coming his way for delivering goods. On an early January Thursday, they’d heard most of what was coming to them already from folks walking by, looking to gossip about death. But, when old Orb rapped at their door that evening, none of them, not Ona, Clarissa, or Trenchmouth, expected those words on the page.