IF PEOPLE HEREABOUTS recollect Election Day of 1880 as the day my sister Roseanna ran off with Johnse Hatfield, they will always mark Election Day of 1882 as the time of the Big Trouble. The day commenced with a heavy morning mist that everybody said would burn off and become heat. They were right. The heat lay on us all. So did the bugs and the mood of trouble. Because the Hatfields were coming.
The past summer had been quiet, with nobody fussing at anybody, but underneath you could sense that everybody was just a-waitin’ for some trouble they couldn’t put a name to. If we get through Election Day we’ll be right as rain, they were a-sayin’. Everybody knew Devil Anse and his kin were coming. That put the hex on Election Day, of course, and made everybody nervous as an ugly girl at a box-supper auction.
I was nine then and old enough to get a purchase on the feeling. The end of August is a bad time anyways. People are tuckered out from the summer farm work, the harvest is still not yet in, and they’re strung tighter than a fiddle string about to break for too much pluckin’. My brother Floyd was the first to alert me.
I was up at his cabin because I was to help him bring his whiskey and toys. Right off I saw he was loading no whiskey into the wagon, but I didn’t ask why. Instead I asked why Devil Anse and his people were even allowed to come to our elections.
“Don’t they have their own elections in West Virginny?”
It was then that Floyd told me why they’d always come. “Old Devil Anse tries to run things in Pike County elections. Why you think one of the officers in our sheriff’s department is a Hatfield? Devil Anse buys votes. And this year he’s boating his own whiskey across the Tug. Warned me not to bring mine. If that don’t rile me, I don’t know what.”
“Did you tell Pa?”
“’Course not. Ain’t we had enough trouble? What trouble comes this year won’t be on my account.”
Everybody turned out. Everybody excepting Johnse and Nancy Hatfield and my sister Ro, of course. I missed Ro something awful. And I stayed on my lone most of the time, not joining in the kid games. After all, I was nine now, tall for my age, and I’d toted a lot of miseries. I was nobody’s toady to be told to run a sack race or play toss and catch.
Watching the little kids play their games, I thought about my sister Ro. She was an oddment, that was a given. There was Adelaide still studying to be a granny lady and Alifair still going to meetings to heal people, and without any of their foolishment, Ro was going around regular-like now and taking care of sick people, wherever they were. She was so busy, I scarce saw her these days.
Elections went on normal enough that day, with Hatfields at one end of the field and McCoys at the other. In the middle was the dance platform. My brother Bill commenced to play “Sourwood Mountain,” and right off Tolbert started in a-dancin’. Nobody could dance like Tolbert. Everybody clapped for him and told him to dance some more. Right then Black Elias Hatfield, brother of Devil Anse, stepped onto the platform and started running his mouth. They called him Black Elias because he always dressed all in black.
“Ain’t there room for a Hatfield on this dance floor?” he asked.
“Soon’s you pay me the five bucks you owe me, Lias,” Tolbert said.
Lias got all stiff then, like he had a bone in his throat. “What money’s that?” he asked my brother. And right off you could tell they weren’t talking about money, that money was the last thing they were talking about. But Tolbert went on to remind him about the debt. Lias just laughed, of course, and said how Tolbert should try to come and get it from him, which around these parts is spoiling for a fight even if you aren’t a Hatfield or a McCoy. Everybody backed off, the music stopped, and mamas started grabbing their children.
Tolbert and Lias went at each other like a coon dog and a possum. Men in back of the crowd were taking bets. Lias was bigger than my brother, but he was drunk on Hatfield whiskey, and soon he was laid out on the dance platform. The Hatfields didn’t cotton to this at all, naturally, and soon Elias’s brother Ellison stepped onto the platform, and more insults were traded as these two had at it. Some women screamed as blood was drawn on both sides.
I got afeared for Tolbert. He was all wore out. Finally Ellison got a hold on him, one of those holds that could break a person’s neck. Everybody in the crowd gasped. But then, quicker than a June bug, Tolbert got a knife from somewhere on his person and started slashing at Ellison, who would have killed him then and there if he could.
My brother Bill rushed onto the platform and started slashing Ellison, too. There was blood all over the place. I saw my brother Jim standing there watching, but he made no move to stop it.
From somewhere way behind me I heard Ma’s voice praying.
Even though he was cut up like a hog on butchering day, Ellison landed Tolbert a blow on the head that knocked him flat. Tolbert lay still. Then Ellison grabbed up a piece of log from the end of the platform and raised it to dash Tolbert’s brains out, but Pharmer stepped up with his Smith and Wesson and fired.
The shot echoed like the sound of God’s fist. Everybody screamed, then got real quietlike. Tolbert bestirred himself, got up, and stood, real wobbly. Then Mary came and took him off the platform, just before Devil Anse Hatfield stepped up and bent over his wounded brother. Devil Anse near went crazy then. He started shaking like he had the palsy, reached for his gun, and fired at Pharmer. He missed, and that made him even crazier. He cussed up a storm and grabbed Pharmer. But afore you know it, John Hatfield, who was a sheriff’s officer just like Jim, grabbed Pharmer and arrested him.
“I’m a-takin’ ye to the jail in Pikeville,” he said.
Next thing you know, Tolbert broke away from Mary and came to stand with Pharmer.
“Where’s t’other one?” John Hatfield asked. He directed his question at the crowd, but nobody answered.
My brother Jim then decided it was time to act. “I’m senior officer,” he told Hatfield, “and I’ll take ’em in hand.”
But the Hatfield sheriff’s man would have none of it. “Do ye think, Jim, that I’ll turn McCoys over to you? Now where’s t’other one?”
Then somebody was dragging my brother Bud over. “I didn’t do anything,” he was saying.
Bill came forward. “T’weren’t Bud, it was me,” he said. By now that Hatfield officer was so confused he couldn’t have told a bear from a bobcat. He started in asking the crowd who did the knifing, Bill or Bud, while Jim stood there, grim and waiting.
But nobody knew. Bill and Bud looked too much alike. Some people allowed that it was Bud, so Officer Hatfield took Bud and left Bill standing there with his mouth open.
“I’m a-goin’ along with you all,” Jim said. Then my brothers Sam and Floyd said they were going, too. Officer Hatfield looked like he had all he could handle. He didn’t object.
“Pa McCoy, don’t let them take them,” Mary begged.
“No need to worry, Mary,” he said. “No Kentucky jury will convict a McCoy for killing a Hatfield. And I’m a-ridin’ into Pikeville now to get a lawyer.”
He rode off. The crowd separated, mumbling and carrying pieces of the fight home with them, like the ham and chicken in their baskets. They would feed on it for a long time.
“It’s not a jury or lawyers I’m worried about,” Mary told me. “It’s those darned fool Hatfields. They’ll kill those three. Doesn’t anybody know it?”
“Jim’s with them,” I reminded her.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “How would you like to come home with me tonight, Fanny?” she asked. “Keep me company, please.”
I asked Ma and she said yes, so I went along with Mary. The sun was setting, but in the woods it was already dark with shadows as we hurried along with baby Cora. Mary wrung her hands and worried, and I comforted her. It would be all right, I said over and over, Jim was with them. But I knew it wasn’t all right. I knew it true before we got to Mary’s house.
’Cause there in the darkened woods, rushing around and hissing, I saw Yeller Thing.