Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

But that was hogwash. He lit another Chesterfield and shut his eyes tight. ‘I know what’s real,’ the old man said.

When he opened them up again, he was alone in the house. Had the reporter been there, had he not been an apparition, a sign of having lost all mental faculty, the old man would have told his guest that he’d seen and heard his kind before. The bamboozler. No more than a salesman of eugenics, a prophet for a fake God. A man such as him could no better speak on what was real than a New York newspaperman dropped in the bloody Mingo hills. ‘I’ll not be bamboozled,’ the old man said. It came out muffled.

He touched his lips again. The saltwater-rated fishing line was there. He ran his fingers over it. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. When he lowered his hands to the table, he found his old Underwood typewriter resting there, his fingers on the keys. It scared him, and he stood up quick, knocking his chair over with the backs of his knees.

‘Well,’ the old man said to himself. ‘That’s just how it goes.’ He’d finally lost his mind, he figured. Finally started seeing things and people that weren’t there.

What came next was easy to figure.

There was ice on the kitchen window, inside and out. But he did not take his wool coat from the rack. He limped to the front door and took up his sassafras walking stick from where it leaned against the jamb. With his free hand, he took the doorknob. He stopped. Didn’t turn it. Out there, all was liable to be red and crumbled, leveled forever. Out there, everything was liable to be gone.

He felt something pressing against his behind. He reached into his back pocket and pulled it out. The derringer flask. It held no scratches to mark time’s passage. Instead, it shone silver, as if spit-shined. He read the mark etched with skill on its face:

Bottomless & Never-ending

He unscrewed the cap, put it to the hole, and swallowed all he could. It warmed his bones and righted his ship.

The old man wore a smile then, as much as was possible with a sewn-shut mouth. ‘Well,’ he said, and he turned the knob, walked outside. It was cold, but he moved through it, past where the outhouse and the barn and the garden used to be. He came to the edge of the woods. He stepped into them and carried to the mountains.

That night, the 108 year-old man known by many names climbed higher, and all the crying babies who lived in those hills went still. He tossed away his walking stick and sidestepped the incline. He used his arms for balance, like a trapeze artist.

When he got to the top of Sulfur Creek Mountain, he smiled again, this time wide enough to tear that stitching from his mouth. He did not mind the discomfort. For stretching out before him, as wide as his vision would reach, he beheld it.

It was not the surface of the moon, nor the wrecking hill, nor the great colorless void, flush as a pool table. His vision did not blur to red and his ears did not howl electric. The mountains had never buckled. They were there before him, real and true.

He felt the Widow all around him. He thanked her aloud for trying. Then, he found a suitable hickory tree and lay down beneath its limbs. It was as if no war had ever bloodied the ground beneath him. As if the world was a proper place.

Everything had come back. Everything was as it had been.

I am grateful to so many books by authors who have tirelessly put down the history of a people not to be forgotten. I owe a debt of gratitude to Best of Hillbilly by Otto Whittaker, The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogun, Thunder in the Mountains by Lon Savage, Mountains of Music by John Lilly, and The Foxfire Book by Eliot Wigginton. I am also indebted to the CD Work & Pray , which reflects the work of Dr Cortez Reece. I’d like to thank the Williamson Daily News archives, Wheeling Register for its early reporting on the penitentiary at Moundsville, and the late Joe Chambers for the videotape transcript of his father’s words about May 19th, 1920. For assistance with President Kennedy’s 1960 primary campaign in West Virginia, I consulted An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek and John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O’Brien.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the first place I came across a version of the expression ‘hang a rope and drown a glass of water,’ which grew, in Trenchmouth’s world, to be an anthem of sorts. ‘Diamond Bob’ first uttered those words, and I thank Jerome Washington, a writer who knows better than me what’s real, for listening and writing.

Thank you to the folks at West Virginia University Press for all their help. Thanks also to the writing programs that assisted me financially over the years, and especially to the writers they employed to teach.

For giving me time to write, and for so much more, I wish to say thank you to my wife, Margaret, without whom I would be completely lost. And to Reece and T-Bird, I say thank you for being the boys and the best friends that you are. I am grateful to my parents, Carol and Maury Taylor, who hail from Marion and Mingo Counties, respectively. From the beginning, they have given support in all its forms. My father is particularly worthy of acknowledgment, as he inspired in me, through his own genuine interest in remembering his people and their place, a similar interest. I could never thank him enough for that, for such interests are rare these days.

M. Glenn Taylor was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. This is his first novel. His stories have been published in literary journals such as Chattahoochee Review, Mid-American Review, Meridian , and Gulf Coast , among others. He teaches English and fiction writing at Harper College in suburban Chicago, where he lives with his wife and two sons.