The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor

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.