Trenchmouth never put his head down. He stared straight ahead at something no one else could see.
It was fall 1913 that a new girl came to sit beside Trenchmouth in that schoolroom, and she alone had the energy to break his stare. She even had the energy to take his thoughts off Clarissa, who’d been ignoring him since the kiss on the train.
Ewart Smith was her name. She came from Tennessee with her daddy, who was taking work in the mines. Ewart was tan. More tan than Trenchmouth even, who, after a summer of bareback climbing and digging outdarked all the kids in the segregated schoolhouse. But Ewart had yellow hair and green eyes, and her teeth were as white as Ms Varney’s chalk. The day she came in, she was introduced to the sound of laughter and confusion at such a given name. She responded by crossing her feet and bowing, one hand across her hips, the other extended to her side. Though there were a few empty seats, she picked the one next to Trenchmouth Taggart, T.T. Stinky.
By winter break, she held his hand after school, and he nearly parted his lips when he smiled at her.
EIGHT Who Among Us Has Read The Signs
It was a simple idea really. Steel not wood. If folks would just realize that timber construction was a thing of the past, steel the future, maybe whole towns wouldn’t burn. Maybe good men wouldn’t die. And maybe, if the self-made railroad men laying track like match-sticks across the hill terrain of southern West Virginia, if they’d just realize that coal tipples could be fashioned heartier from the very product being mined in these hills, namely the bituminous coke, maybe the wealth would spread to the little folks. This is how Trenchmouth’s brain worked. The boy climbed Sulfur Creek Mountain daily to his secret spot, a dug out, one room, underground bunker complete with homemade drawing table, ruler, drafter’s compass, and school-stolen pencils. There he drew up plans. Inventions really. There he devised an outline for steel cities and suspension bridges and coal tipples. He’d never let anyone in until Ewart Smith came along. Only she knew the hideout’s location, and she’d been sworn to secrecy.
Things were thawing on a particular March afternoon when Ewart knocked on the bunker’s hatch door. He let her in. The hatch was on a fishing line pulley, so that when you re-closed it, a scoop net tossed ground cover across its surface.
Inside, he was trying not to stare at the harmonica he’d laid on the drawing table, the harmonica of his dead daddy. He still hadn’t put it to his lips, for fear that since that particular part of him was so susceptible to disease, he might well be infected with whatever drove his father down the road to hell. He got back to business: fashioning a miniature coal tipple and a crane from scrap metal he’d collected at the mine dumps. Structure-smart, he’d used a hammer and a punch to knock out holes in the skinny tin. Slots for connecting and building upwards. Ewart stared at what would surely become a tiny city there on the table.
‘Your momma’s going to come after you for spending all your time away,’ she said.
‘She ain’t home.’ Trenchmouth didn’t say where the Widow was, but ever since the Huntington woman had gone down on moonshine charges, his mother had been hard at work moving product here to there, covering tracks, fashioning cover. In the time since the train trip to Huntington, their home had been family-scarce. ‘Your daddy’s liable to come after you, you keep comin here.’
‘He ain’t home,’ Ewart said.
Trenchmouth wasn’t sure she even had a home. All she’d say was that they lived up in Sprigg, a mile off the Tug. ‘I can’t figure what shift he’s workin then.’ He looked up at her from his growing construct.
She bit her lip. Had a look of thinking hard. ‘How many secrets can you keep?’
‘I reckon about two hundred.’
‘How many you got piled right now?’
‘Ninety maybe.’
She wasn’t laughing at his odd ways like usual. ‘My Daddy ain’t a miner,’ she said.
‘What is he then?’
‘Preacher.’
His stomach tightened. He looked back to his drawing, took up the pencil again.
‘You don’t care for preachers?’
He shrugged.
‘Listen, T. This ain’t preacher like you’re thinking. My Daddy was best friends of a fella named Hensley down in Cleveland, Tennessee. They fell out cause Daddy was better and everybody knew it. Mr Hensley though, he started up this church…’ Ewart bit her lip again. This caused Trenchmouth to shift in his seat and lock eyes. ‘This promise might fill up all those hundred empty ones you got,’ she said. He nodded. ‘Mr Hensley picked up a serpent.’
‘What?’
‘It ain’t like church you know of. Folks pick up serpents. Roll around with em sometimes even.’
‘Snakes?’
‘Snakes.’ She almost laughed for having finally told someone. ‘Folks get bit even.’ Trenchmouth stared. ‘A couple folks died.’
You could call it a box, maybe a wood cage. Copperheads and rattlesnakes knocked around inside it, their dark, translucent sides thumping at the holes.
‘Who built the box?’ Trenchmouth asked her.
‘Daddy.’ They were standing inside a small backroom of Ewart’s farmhouse. She’d finally let him see where she lived. The walls were stained and halfway papered, like somebody had quit on the whole place mid-job. From the second story came sounds of the adult world. Above the two children, furniture scraped floorboards and the low tones of a man and a woman echoed untranslatable. ‘He’s up there preaching to somebody new,’ Ewart said. ‘Convertin somebody.’ She bent down and put her fingers next to one of the little round holes. The snakes were quiet.
‘You ever pick one up?’ Trenchmouth hadn’t taken his eyes off the box. Its construction could’ve been improved upon.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t care for snakes.’
That’s when he bent down next to her and got the feeling he’d had on the train that night with Clarissa. His knee touched Ewart’s, and through the thick wool fabric both sets of skin seemed to heat up. Trenchmouth put his hand out to touch her, but for reasons unknown he changed destinations. With thumb and finger he undid the little brass latch and opened the snake hatch. He reached into the slowly slithering mound and brought back a hand covered in copperhead. The snake might as well have been asleep, but Ewart hopped up anyway, pressed her back against the far wall. Brittle wallpaper fell to the floor behind her.
The snake moved up Trenchmouth’s arm slow and methodical. Had it decided to bite him, the going would be tough through coat and shirt and undergarment, but it gave no indication that it meant the boy harm. He stared at its undersized head, the geometric shape of it and every perfect scale lining its being. He stared and the snake looked back at him until the gaze went blurry between them, until that snake had made it up his forearm, biceps, shoulder, and collarbone. It stopped.
Though he knew she was watching and he knew he’d never shown her his affliction, the boy opened up wide because it seemed the only thing he could do at that moment. And, as if it was an act they’d practiced together before bug-eyed kids at county fairs, the copperhead, without hesitation, slid into the open mouth like it’d found home. It rested its head on his tongue.
Ewart’s hands had come up to her own mouth, holding in and keeping out simultaneously. She breathed heavy without having exercised. The breathing picked up more as she watched her friend slowly close his ragged gums and chapped lips around the serpent. He didn’t bite down, just closed up slowly so that it appeared to her he was ingesting the thing.
From upstairs, the low tones got louder, the furniture scraping and floorboard creaking more imposing,