Читать книгу The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart - Glenn Taylor - Страница 18

They’d left him out of Mumblety Peg for as far back as he could remember. It was a young boy’s game, really. As soon as he was old enough to open and close a jack-knife without bleeding to death, a boy found games of Mumblety Peg in which to compete. After school, or on summer days when the earth was soft and the blade would stick deep – these were times for bringing practice to fruition. In the fall of 1916, at nearly fourteen years old, Trenchmouth was too old to play, at least in the estimation of most boys. But the group of four littler ones had seen him walking past, and had liked his tall frame, his crack-proof, rolled sole boots, the way he spat tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. So they’d called him over to the small mountain bald, a field backdropped by trees that bled leaves of red and orange and yellow. Only one of them, a boy named Crews whose brother Trenchmouth knew well, whose mother he knew even better, expressed objection to consorting with T.T. Stinky.

But any objection was soon forgotten when Trenchmouth, in the first inning, progressed through twenty-two feats without a mistake. He opened his Cattle King pen knife with precision. The buffalo-horn handle reflected light as he flipped it from every position: fist, fingers, cross-chested ears, nose, eyes, knees, top of the head. Each time it stuck point down, plenty deep. The boys watched wide-eyed and grunted noises of impress. Their narrow lines of sight on the abilities of orphaned, malformed youngsters such as Trenchmouth had been blown wide apart. They knew their own ignorance now to be fear, maybe even envy.

Each of them progressed through, fumbling and mumbling, until the last was beaten, and Trenchmouth, the victor, drove the peg into the ground using his knife handle. Six blows landed solid and flat as a carpenter’s hammer. He’d sunk the peg, so that the loser boy, Warren Crews, was forced to do the deed. Warren was the one who had objected to calling Trenchmouth over. He was youngest brother of Mose Crews, Fred Dallara’s best buddy. Mose was tailback on the ball team, and the meanest of the nastiest of the T.T. Stinky crew.

‘Root, Root!’ the boys hollered, shoving little, fat, Warren Crews to his knees. He couldn’t even see the top of the peg, none of them could. Trenchmouth had driven it deep. Hands behind his back, the Crews boy dove in for it with his teeth, as the rules clearly dictated. Again and again he came up for air, the silty black mud covering more and more of his face. They stood around him and laughed. It was friendly teasing, even from Trenchmouth, who harbored no ill will toward the boy on account of his bad luck in sibling, but Warren Crews didn’t like losing. As he came up empty again and again, and as the boys’ insistence on playing out the game became ever more apparent, Warren Crews looked around in desperation. He nearly forgot his age and called out for T.T. Stinky to get down there and finish, seeing as his mouth was already dirty, his teeth full of muck. Warren thought his big brother would have done just that. But Warren Crews thought wrong, and was, for a brief moment, lucky.

First, he wasn’t aware that even football Mose would no longer call out Trenchmouth to his face. In private, Mose and the others still spoke of the orally-ailed one without censor. They even made up crude drawings and songs. But they’d long ago given up insulting Trenchmouth face to face, much less making eye contact. Ever since he’d attacked Fred Dallara like a mountain cat, and even more so since he’d sprouted wide shoulders and a fine mustache and won every riflery contest the county sponsored, boys only poked fun at T.T. Stinky behind his back. Had they known that in a year’s time, Trenchmouth had vocalized into the unmentionable anatomies of nine women, they’d have no doubt fainted from shock. But Trenchmouth had a whole stockpile of secrets, and this one he would not spill.

So Warren was lucky, in that not knowing any of this, he didn’t slander Trenchmouth and pay the price. What stopped him was the sight of Arly Scott Jr walking by.

Good luck, bad luck. They interchange so quickly.

Arly Scott Jr was, like Trenchmouth, nearly fourteen. And, like Trenchmouth, he was bigger than the four other boys. But Arly was black, and this meant that even a pack of puny ten-year-olds could order him around if they felt like it.

‘Hey,’ Warren Crews shouted at the boy in the distance, who was going foot over foot along the railroad track, testing balance. ‘Hey nigger!’

Arly stopped and dropped his feet on either side of his balance beam. He turned and faced them.

‘Why don’t you come on over here?’ Warren spit dirt, scraped grass off his tongue and lips using his teeth and fingernails.

Arly looked at them for a while, then began walking toward them. Trenchmouth didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around. Like every other black family in Mingo County, Arly’s had come from down South for the mines. His father was in the number one at Red Jacket. And like every other black family in Mingo, he lived in Mitchell Branch and went about his business in an all-black world of school and church. Arly was almost identical to Trenchmouth in height and weight, and his sprouting muscles were just as hard and determined.

When he walked upon them, the littler ones got uncomfortable and began to fidget. They’d heard their fathers and mothers and uncles and brothers use the term Warren Crews had used, but they were still young enough to be pierced by it when shouted in the presence of one to whom it was meant to describe.

‘You play Mumblety Peg down there in Texas?’ Warren Crews said. Oddly, he’d stayed on his knees with his hands locked behind him throughout all this, as if to break the pose would be sin.

‘Georgia,’ Arly said.

‘Georgia then. Niggers play Mumblety Peg in Georgia?’

Arly just stared down at the boy. The other ones fidgeted more plainly. One laughed a little, tried to act tough. Another gripped his thighs against his privates, tried not to piss himself as he often did when trouble arose.

Trenchmouth studied Arly Scott’s eyes, the heavy lids, the wiry brows. The small scar that said he could take a punch. He knew that Warren Crews had called on the wrong black boy.

‘Well?’ Warren said. ‘Is that all you know how to say? “Georgia?” They just teach you one word down there? State name?’ He laughed and turned back to the other boys to make sure they did the same. But he never found out they didn’t. Before Warren Crews could notice the cringing expressions of impending impact the little boys uniformly wore, he’d been cold-cocked. It was a sweeping right hook, a suckerfree sucker punch delivered from high to low and with the inertia of planted feet and swiveled hips. Arly Scott Jr was a trained fighter.

Some stood scarecrow still, some ran. Either way, they were thoroughly discombobulated by the sight of a black boy hitting a white one for insulting his race. It didn’t happen in Georgia, they were pretty sure, and it didn’t happen in southern West Virginia either. But it had happened, and Warren Crews lay asleep on the ground, thick blood, chunked by dirt, running from nose and mouth.

Eventually, they all left their ten-year-old comrade where he lay, only one of them with the wherewithal to shout a promise of revenge. Arly and Trenchmouth remained. They looked down at Warren together, the black boy rubbing his throbbing knuckles, the white boy rubbing his head. This would take some figuring.

Trenchmouth decided he didn’t feel all too sorry for the littlest Crews. At eleven, he was old enough to know better than to treat somebody that way, address somebody with those kind of words. The Widow had taught Trenchmouth, along with Clarissa, from a young age, to never engage in the game of white superiority. ‘We are all made from God’s clay,’ she’d said, ‘no matter its stain.’ Besides, Trenchmouth had always been less white than the whites, especially in summer, a fact the other kids falsely attributed to a stubbornly thick buildup of dirt on his skin. And had he seen more of his father than the dusty, dug up variety, he’d have known there was Indian in that bloodline, or maybe even colored. Still, by outward appearance, he was a white boy.

‘I’m Trenchmouth Taggart,’ he said and held out his hand.

Arly turned those eyes on him. He didn’t speak back or change the stare, which had the kind of calm to it that can precede a snot-knocker as easily as a handshake.

It was nice to see it in another, that ‘something else’ look of the eye. He’d been embarrassed for revealing his own after Fred Dallara kissed Clarissa. It came from someplace less knowable than a steady diet of moonshine and ridicule. This particular something was there before all that.

Trenchmouth almost told the other boy how he once bit someone for kissing his sister, but it seemed anxious, foolish. Instead, he said, ‘I reckon your daddy’ll have your hide for this here.’ He pointed at Warren Crews, who whimpered and tried to get up on his elbows.

Arly’s hands re-fisted, and he turned his stare back to the boy on the ground then, as if he might have another go. But the whimper turned to a cry and Arly’s whole being eased up. He answered Trenchmouth without looking at him. ‘You’d reckon wrong then. My Daddy told me, when they look down at you, start em to lookin up.’ His voice was a pitch deeper than Trenchmouth’s, his accent big and round.

Before Arly Scott walked away, he snorted twice, gathered up what he could in his throat, and spat on the ground before Warren Crews, who was, by that point, all-out crying the kind of cry reserved for mamas, the kind he’d have to be rid of in a year or two if he hoped to get anywhere in life.