Читать книгу Singing From the Gallows: The Story of "Bad Tom" Smith - Wayne Combs - Страница 6

In the spring, summer, and fall, southeastern Kentucky, the proud home of the Cumberland Mountain Range, is one of the most beautiful places on the earth. However, those Appalachian Mountains look bland and bleak in the winter. The numerous trees that cover the not very tall—but quite steep—mountains show us a breathtaking green from spring to autumn. In the fall, the leaves magically change to various shades of brown, gold, red, and yellow. For a week or so, the hills come alive with breathtaking beauty. Then the landscape looks barren and disrobed throughout the winter, with only a few pine trees and some scrub brush growing out of the snow, making the environment look depressing to many people in the cold winter. But with spring just around the corner, there is always hope for Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountain people.

Hazard is the county seat of Perry County. In the Appalachian chain, Hazard is located in the middle of the Cumberlands. Because Hazard and Perry County number among the few “wet” places in southeastern Kentucky—meaning that liquor is sold legally there—Perry is one of the most prosperous mountain counties in the state. However, that affluence has come at a great price. Sometimes a great deal of violence takes place in the taverns and bars. “First Chance” and “Last Chance” beer joints seem to dot every county line crossing.

Perry County was formed in 1821 from portions of Floyd and Clay Counties thirty years after Kentucky, which had been called Kentucky County, Virginia, was taken away from the Old Dominion and admitted to the Union as the fifteenth state. Before Kentucky County became a state, it consisted of three Virginia counties—Jefferson, Fayette, and Lincoln. In 1824, Elijah Combs and his seven brothers established a post office in the small community on the banks of the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Mail carriers and others traveling from Prestonsburg in Floyd County to Manchester in Clay County found Hazard a good rest stop. Then, a subsequent county courthouse was named Perry Courthouse.

Some people think Hazard got its name from being a violent and “hazardous” place to live. Actually, the town and county were named for American naval hero Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who helped defeat the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, then became an Admiral. A group of eastern Kentucky mountaineers traveled north to fight against the British with Perry. Perry died in 1819, before the town and county were named in his honor. In 1821, Perry County became Kentucky’s 68th county. However, it was not until June 20, 1854 that the legislative record regularly referred to the site as Hazard. Prior to that date the county seat was referred to as Perry Courthouse. The county name was sometimes spelled Hazzard.

I was born in Hazard, just twenty-three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. When five or six years old, I realized there was a relative that my parents were interested in knowing more about. They did not wish to discuss the matter in front of me, however, one day my father bought a local newspaper with a historical article entitled “The Hanging of Bad Tom Smith.” Only then did I learn that this man, who had confessed to numerous homicides and hanged for murder, was my great-grandfather. Thomas Smith was the father of my father’s mother, Matilda Smith Combs. All of the adults called her “Tildy.” I simply called her Grandma. She married Robert “Blue Bob” Combs, and they had twelve children. There were so many Combs men named Bob that colors were added to their names to identify them. I lived with my grandparents, Matilda and Blue Bob Combs, for about six months when I was a teenager in the late 1950s, shortly after my mother died of cancer.

A few years earlier, I remember playing cowboys and Indians with my cousin, Paul Jones of Lotts Creek, at my grandmother’s house. Several of the Combs families had come for Sunday dinner. Paul walked into the kitchen and asked, “Grandma, was your daddy, Bad Tom Smith, a good shot?”

Grandma looked startled. She walked from the coal cook stove to the table with a huge cast iron skillet without saying a word. That question had conjured up a bad memory. Being a very quiet woman, Grandma didn’t want to talk about her father. She quickly gained composure. “Paul, get out of my way, I wouldn’t want to spill this good gravy on you and the floor.”

One of the few times my grandmother broke her silence about her father was with her daughter—and my aunt—Nancy. Aunt Nancy liked to sing. She was singing some old-time songs around the house one day when my grandmother admonished her to quit singing because it would only lead to trouble. Nancy could end up like her grandfather, who also had liked singing. Tom Smith, I learned, did not only like to sing, but is said to have written several songs. Tom sang the last song he wrote for a group of reporters on the day before his execution.

Bad Tom had six children. My grandmother was thirteen years old, and the baby, Edgar, a little less than a year and a half in 1895, when their father was executed. The other children were Bud, Maggie, John, and Cody.

Sometimes family members of people who have been executed feel ashamed. There’s a story about a woman who was very prominent in her town’s society. One day she decided to trace family roots. The woman hired a genealogy expert to put together the family tree. After much research, the expert told her he had disturbing news. The woman’s great-uncle had been hanged for murder. The lady talked to the genealogy expert privately. The expert issued a written report that stated a great-uncle had died “when a platform he was standing on suddenly collapsed.”

I don’t believe that shame accounted for Bad Tom Smith’s children’s reluctance to discuss him. Certainly they were not proud of the fact. But more important, I believe, is that the emotional trauma they suffered from this event, as children, never left them.

So, who was this man named Bad Tom Smith, who rode on horseback and led an outlaw gang through the hills and hollows of southeastern Kentucky, and ended up at the end of a noose? My purpose in writing this book is to answer that question by examining not just his death, but the events that shaped his life up to that fateful day.