Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

The Home for Incurables was a big stone building with over two hundred rooms. A hair-lipped nurse with calves the size of cantaloupes took to Trenchmouth, and though it was not customary to get his type of visitor, his type of story, she led him to Mittie Ann Taggart’s room anyway. His obvious mouth problem reminded her of her own, and she decided to let the boy see his mother, provided she could supervise them. ‘She’s especially active today,’ the nurse said. ‘Woke up hollerin something even louder than usual. Even took a swing at Betty.’ She explained to Trenchmouth that Mittie Ann would be in restraints on her bed, that it was for her own good, and that she might say some unpleasantries in his company.

‘Yes ma’am,’ he said.

They could hear her from the end of the corridor. Speaking in tongues, no doubt. When the nurse led the boy in, Mittie Ann went silent. She stared at the ceiling, which was covered in dried-up peanut butter balls. Trenchmouth looked at them, then at the nurse. ‘Dessert,’ she told him. ‘Mittie Ann don’t believe in dessert.’ The window shade was drawn. His mother was sweaty and unwrinkled and green under the eyes and cheekbones.

‘I knowed you was comin, so I baked you a shit cake,’ she said, still staring up. Despite her arm and leg restraints, she was able to turn her hips to the side, revealing a brown stain in her white gown.

‘That’s no way to talk or act in front of a boy,’ the nurse said. She pulled a towel from the bedside table and hid the woman’s midsection with it. Trenchmouth covered his nose and tried not to cry.

‘He’s no boy,’ Mittie Ann said. ‘He’s Beelzebub’s offspring. Child of the one sent down to fire.’

‘That’s just the nonsense you woke up hollerin, Missus Taggart. It’s got nothin to do with him.’

‘It is him. I woke up hollerin on him cause I knowed he was comin. You figure pretty slow, don’t you lips?’

The nurse looked at her shoes.

Trenchmouth started to say something, but couldn’t.

‘I once knew a boy like you,’ his mother said. Then she turned and looked at the drawn window shade. Dust floated in the crack of sunlight. ‘I can see through things, like this window shade.’ It was quiet then on the third floor of the mental hospital. ‘I tried not to see through a little baby boy when he was plain as day an abomination, but he spat at me and spoke to me in the English tongue, but it wasn’t English, just sounded like it on the river’s air. Can you imagine, a baby talkin at two months?’ The nurse’s hands shook, and she stuck them in her armpits to stop it.

‘I got mouth disease on account of river water,’ Trenchmouth said. It wasn’t much louder than a whisper, dry throated and cracking.

‘I watched that boy die under the ice,’ his mother said. ‘That boy is dead.’

They had found out what the Widow had guessed they would find out. What part of her wanted them to find. There are mothers in this world, who, for reasons of experience or malfunction, cannot care for their children. And those children need to see it for themselves before they can truly live. Clarissa and Trenchmouth had seen it.

They held hands in the empty passenger car of the night train home. Folks traveling from Cincinnati and Columbus rocked unaware in their sleepers, but the brother and sister not bound by blood couldn’t sleep. The girl because she had a mind that raced, and the boy because he had no moonshine.

She did not mind his breath when he told her of the tied-down woman at the asylum. She’d grown used to its smell. And he breathed hers in as she told of the foul woman at the theatre. He’d have listened forever if she’d let him.

It was in this way that their bony shoulders banged with the train’s turns. Their knees touched, and their lot in life as children without roots caused them to move closer to one another. All this ended in a kiss between them that would be their only one until the next, thirty-four years later, when Clarissa was married to a man she did not love and Trenchmouth was wanted for murder.

The words split the preacher’s lips asthmatic. He was small, but he preached big and airy and hoarse, like a coughing fit had ahold of him. ‘The sorrows of death compassed me,’ he shouted. ‘And the pains of hell gateheld upon me. I found trouble and sorrow.’ Frank Dallara’s body went into the ground inside a rough-cut box, wet from rain. ‘Then called I upon the name of the Lord,’ the preacher went on. ‘Oh Lord, I beseech thee deliver my soul.’

Trenchmouth stood and listened. For a time, he’d felt more anger than anguish. Folks had been talking about Anse Pilcher, the burned hotel’s owner. Anse had a condition. His bones were soft. Like cartilage. His bones could be pierced just like his flesh, and because of this, most wouldn’t speak poorly of ‘the cripple,’ as they called him. But he had enemies and Frank Dallara had been one of them. Those talking said Anse had told Frank a little girl was inside all that fiery construct, that he lied to see the man set ablaze. Trenchmouth thought on this at the funeral. His shoulders, broadening now, nearly split the shirt seams the Widow had sewn a night prior. When Frank Dallara’s coffin hit bottom and the rough men lowering it pulled back their ropes, the boy nearly lost what little composure he had left. In a week’s time, he’d lost the man closest to being a father to him and learned the vile fate of his real daddy. He’d watched his birth mother spew shit and venomous words in his direction. And he’d kissed his own sister on the mouth. It was a good deal to take in at nine years old.

The preacher preached onward. ‘I said in my haste, all men are liars.’

That’s when the boy knew that God was for the featherheaded, that religion was a salesman’s game. God’s man himself had said it: ‘liars.’ Trenchmouth turned then and walked away from all of them. Black-clad and bad-postured, they half-listened to the words, ‘deliver my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ But Trenchmouth drowned it out. He whistled while he walked away. This struck a particular funeral-goer, Frank Dallara’s ugly brother-in-law Hob Tibbs, as disrespectful beyond the pale.

He followed the boy away from the mourner’s circle. He pulled him by the arm behind a substantial tree, and he smacked him. ‘Don’t you disrespect the dead,’ he said. He smacked again. ‘Don’t you dare disrespect the Lord out here, you hear me?’

Folks handle anguish in a variety of ways. Somehow the nine year old knew this to be true, and it stopped him from striking the ugly man back. But Hob Tibbs had made a new enemy, had added to his list of many, and something in his face burned into Trenchmouth’s brain unforgettable. Tibbs said, ‘You’re going to be in church every Sunday, hear? I’m puttin you to work for God. You’ll spit shine a cross if I tell you. Polish up stained glass for walking away from a man’s burial.’

Trenchmouth said what he’d said all his life. ‘Yessir.’

Church and school. These were places that didn’t interest a ten-year-old boy. It wasn’t that Trenchmouth abhorred scripture or couldn’t learn his lessons. He could. It was the existence of those that sought to ridicule him on account of his oral ailment, to single him out and dig at him so as to break his spirit. There were boys at school who plotted little else. And in church, of course, there was Hob Tibbs.

As promised, he’d shackled Trenchmouth to the Methodist congregation. He put him to work spit shining brass and polishing glass. During Sunday services, the boy was forced to wait and clean up after communion. Shirts were to be tucked in, hems straight. And Trenchmouth was subject to the unrelenting criticisms of his mouth. ‘There’s men called dentists these days, boy,’ Tibbs would say. ‘Might fashion you a brush outta twig and pine needle. You ever hear of a brush? Oh,’ he’d say, squinting close at the closed mouth, ‘I reckon you haven’t.’