The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
There’s little room in this world for a moral manMeet Early “Trenchmouth“ Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and survive the taunts of others. In the hills of southern West Virginia, a boy grows up fast. Trenchmouth sips moonshine, handles snakes, pleasures women, and masters the rifle - a skill that lands him in the middle of the West Virginia coal wars. A teenaged union sniper, Trenchmouth is exiled to the backwoods of Appalachia’s foothills, where he spends his years running from the past. But trouble will sniff a man down, and an outlaw will eventually run home. Here, Trenchmouth Taggart’s story, like the best ballads, etches its mark deep upon the memory.
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The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
M. Glenn Taylor
This one is for Margaret
I have gulled the pith from a sumac limb To play a tune that my blood remembers.
Louise McNeill
Table of Contents
ONE The Woman Could Cure Ailments
THREE Climbing And Digging Came Natural
FOUR Frank Dallara Fashioned A Tool
FIVE Beast Eye And Something Else
SIX Then Came More of Sorrow and Anguish
EIGHT Who Among Us Has Read The Signs
TEN The Powerful And The Ones Beneath
ELEVEN Folks Will Dust You Quick As Look At You
THIRTEEN They Had Grips On Them
FOURTEEN Strange Days And More Of The Same
FIFTEEN Who Has Worn And Who Has Broken?
SIXTEEN It was Regimented Living
TWENTY You Carried What You Could
TWENTY-ONE Wide Vision Running
TWENTY-TWO Writing Came Natural
TWENTY-THREE Kennedy Had A Way
TWENTY-FOUR Discovery Had Its Way
TWENTY-FIVE The Tri-State Dump
TWENTY-SIX Man Attacked, Man Robbed
TWENTY-SEVEN Goddamn Son Of A Bitch
TWENTY-EIGHT Boys Should Have Gotten Their Educations
TWENTY-NINE Ewart Smith Spoke In A Dream
On December 3rd, 2010, the old man sewed his mouth shut with saltwater-rated fishing line. The sores and the throbbing were back. It was his 108th birthday, and it was the day Time magazine sent a reporter to his home in Warm Hollow, West Virginia. This was on account of the old man’s reputation, and on account of Pearl Thackery. Pearl Thackery was the oldest living West Virginian and had died the week prior, leaving the old man, a one time inventor, snake handler, cunnilinguist, sniper, woodsman, harmonica man, and newspaperman, as the oldest living Homo sapiens in the state.
He’d left a small, pinto bean-sized hole unsewn, so that he could ingest chicory coffee and spruce needle tea through a straw. So he could speak if he needed to. And so he could smoke his Chesterfields.
When the Time magazine reporter sat down across the kitchen table from him, the old man broke his vow of silence and mastered, in minutes, smoking and speaking simultaneously. It was a speech difficult to discern, but it was talking nonetheless. The reporter pushed the record button on his miniature, steel voice recorder. A red light the size of a tick lit up. The old man marveled at this invention. He stared at the little red circle until it went blurry there on the kitchen table. It entranced him. He spun a blown-glass ashtray with his plump-veined, purple-blotched hands. His skin was thin. A full white head of hair. His eyes and ears, though drooped and wrinkled, were still keen. He farted freely.
The reporter got down to business. ‘I’d like to ask you about your life, if I may,’ he said.
The old man leaned back in his split wood chair, then forward again. ‘You want me to bend your ear?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. But the bend I put on it won’t never heal. You’re liable to go deaf.’ He pronounced ‘deaf’ like ‘deef.’ It was a lot of voice from a little hole. He said, ‘I feel like that big small fella the Jewish actor played. Hoffman. Small Big Man. You seen it?’ He lit a cigarette and stuck it in the hole. Pulled white paper red. ‘Was a time I had but two talents,’ he said. ‘Back then it was speaking in tongues and pleasin women by way of their nether-regions.’
The reporter cleared his throat.
‘I come up with the phrase, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”’ This was a bald-faced lie. He said, ‘You may have heard along the way somewhere that I killed men.’ He considered the younger man, his hands and the way he held them on the table. His eyes. Then the old man bent his ear.
Let any man shoot me with cannon or gun.
—Cap Hatfield
When Early Taggart was baptized in the Tug River in 1903, he was two months old. His mother, whose husband had left her a week earlier, had got religion. She believed it right to bring lambs to the fold before they could crawl or sit up on their own. Before Satan could fill their little blood vessels with the seven deadly sins. It was these sins that had caused her husband to run off, that she now preached on to her twelve pound boy while he breastfed.
But it was February when she decided to baptize him, and no preacher would agree to it. ‘You’d have to break through the ice down there,’ the Methodist man said, ‘and that boy ain’t old enough to get wet in the head anyhow.’ So Mittie Ann Taggart did it herself. She punched through the inchthick ice with her shoe heel and held her baby boy by his thighs. She dunked his head like wash. He came up screaming.
She claimed he spoke to her then, spit water at her cheek. ‘Pretty as you please, pretty as you please,’ is what he said, according to Mittie Ann. Then he said, ‘Devil’s got a hold on God.’
