MAY 19, 1920
DOC MOO WAS UP at the coal camp above town, checking on an elderly patient of his, when the Baldwins came rattling up the road in a pair of tin lizzies, their rifles and shotguns prickling from the windows like hackles and spines. The doctor touched the small, three-barred Maronite cross at his throat.
“Al’aama,” he whispered. Blindness. The same curse he used to hear his father utter in the back of their barn, swearing over a busted plow harness or olive rake on their farm in Mount Lebanon. Doctor Domit Muhanna hadn’t seen his father since he set sail for America thirty years ago, at the age of fourteen, landing at the Port of New Orleans and traveling upriver on a Mississippi riverboat full of Kaintucks with long knives and short tempers—boatmen traveling home after blowing their pay in the taverns and flophouses of the French Quarter. Muhanna was headed for the University of Kentucky—a brilliant student, his family’s great hope to carve a life for future generations in America.
He feared he wouldn’t survive the Kaintucks and their beloved bowie knives until one of them slashed another over a galley card game and he managed to sew up the wound with catgut from one of their fiddles—suturing a skill he’d learned as a goatherd, not in any clinic, but the boatmen were well-pleased, slapping his back and pouring rotgut whiskey down his throat.
“Ought to bring ye to ever poker match so the hangman don’t string us up!”
Muhanna graduated medical school and opened a practice in the feud-hot borderlands of Kentucky and West Virginia, earning a high place in the esteem of the community despite his tobacco skin. A man willing to mount his great white horse at any hour and barrel through the country darkness to attend to childbirths and hemorrhages and hysterias on both sides of the Tug Fork River, fevers and gunshot wounds and the black-bloody lungs that came with years in the mines, sucking coal dust underground. Some people said he’d saved more Hatfields and McCoys than Jesus Christ—others said that wasn’t but poorly few.
Now his patient, Miss Beulah, patted his arm. She didn’t know Arabic, but she could tell a swear when she heard one. “Don’t cuss ’em just yet, Doctor Moo.” She cut her eyes at the Baldwins getting out of their cars. “Best wait till the thugs can hear you do it.”
Miss Beulah had been born in Georgia sometime around 1850. She didn’t know her exact age, but she’d got her blood the same year the War Between the States blew the country wide open and a whole bunch of men and women and children with it. People thought the Mason and Dixon line was some kind of sharp divide, like it was made with a captain-man’s saber, but there wasn’t a thing sharp and clean about it. It was more like somebody had blown them free with dynamite. Sherman had come through and burned their cabins to the ground alongside the big house and the gin house and the cotton cribs, and soon enough it was the whitecaps and Ku Kluxers night-riding through the land on their white-hooded horses, slinging their ropes and fire like hell on parade.
She and her husband came up to West Virginny in 1880 for him to work in the coal mines opening on the backs of the railroads carved through these mountains. Hellish work down there in the mines and these shabby company towns with their paper-thin houses and tin-scrip money and black dust that got everywhere, all the time—up your nostrils and between your toes. Every man jack of the miners, no matter his skin, came home looking dark as those ancestors of hers when they first stepped off the slaver’s boat. Her husband had died of the miner’s asthma in 1900 and she spent her days now on this little porch of her grandboy’s cabin doing sitting-work, darning socks and quilting blankets, her feet swole up like pink-brown piglets beneath her rocker. The dropsy, what it was. The nice Doctor Moo came to give them a draining once every week.
Her eyes had been clouding these last few years, but she knew Baldwins when she saw them. They weren’t but thugs, petting their oil-slick rifles like skinny little girls. Her grandboy Big Frank had gone to the Great War himself carrying such a gun. People said it was safer to serve Uncle Sam over there than King Coal back home. A statistical fact, that. Now she leaned and rang the spittoon beside her, gripping her rocker’s arms hard enough the old chair crackled beneath her.
“Strength, Jesus,” she said. “Strength for this ole tongue.”
The gun thugs came strutting stiff-legged up to her house first. She figured they would. Their fine town shoes squelching in the muck. Above them, above the sooty roofs of the coal cabins and the steep dark sides of the holler, so steep the trees grew nearly lying down, big clouds of mist held sway. Rain soon, she thought. The head thug snapped his fingers like she was a dog. She knew who it was. One of the three Felts brothers who lawed for P. J. Smith who ran the Stone Mountain Mine that owned the houses and the store and the church and thought it owned them.
“Beulah Hugham,” he said, reading from a list in his hand. “That you?”
“Miss Beulah to you. I seen that mug of your’n up here not a month back.”
“I’m Special Agent Albert Felts of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The lessee of this house, Mr. Frank Hugham, has been terminated from his employ in consequence of joining the United Mine Workers of America labor organization. We’re here to carry out the eviction.”
Behind him, agents were already going to other houses, knocking on doors, using skeleton keys if no one was home. They were coming out with chairs and pictures and folded quilts, stacking them on the side of the street.
“Hell you is,” said Miss Beulah.
“Excuse me?”
“Special agent, hell. You ain’t got a lick of authority outside that gun on your belt. I ain’t coming off this porch without some real law making me.”
Felts took a step closer. “We’ll see about that.”
Doc Moo held up his hand. “Now hold on here, Agent Felts. Mr. Frank Hugham has already vacated. He moved to the Union camp up on Lick Creek last month. But Miss Beulah here is in no condition to be living up there in one of those canvas tents, all but out of doors. I already cleared this exception with Mr. Smith, the mine superintendent.”
Since the start of the year, many of the county’s miners had joined the United Mine Workers of America labor union. The coal companies had responded with mass firings and evictions. For weeks, the ousted families had been living in tents outside town. Men, women, children, pets, livestock. A few refused to leave home, too old, sick, or stubborn to budge.
The chubby-cheeked agent next to Felts shook his head. “Smells like bull to me, Boss.”
Felts looked around, sniffed. “What doesn’t?” Then to Doc Moo: “There will be no more exceptions starting today, Doctor, by order of the Baldwin-Felts.”
Felts jerked his head to the other men, who palmed their belted pistols and started for the porch. Doctor Muhanna stepped in front of them, his heart firing rapidly in his chest. “This woman is a patient of mine, and this eviction is illegal. I want to see a court order.”
In a flash, the blue-black gleam of a pistol in Felts’s hand. “Here you go, Doc. See it here? Now, if you want a special dispensation for the old lady, you can ride your tan ass on up to the mine office and get yourself one. Till then, you stay out of our way lest you want to see how well you can stitch up holes in your own belly.”
Moo gritted his teeth and knelt down beside the old woman. “I’ll be back quick as I can, Miss B.”
Miss Beulah patted his arm and leaned to his ear, her voice hot in his ear. “Nothing but thugs. Got-damned thugs, the lot of them. Don’t strain nothing for them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Doc Moo was halfway to the mine office, hiking the rough road in his riding boots, when he heard shrieks and curses behind him. He looked back in time to see the agents lifting Miss Beulah from her porch in her rocking chair, hoisting her high on their shoulders like a queen or lady of renown, then setting her down in the middle of the muddy street, where she cursed and swung her gnarled fists at them.
“Allah Yakhidkoun,” he hissed.
God take your souls.