SID AND JESSIE RODE the train into Williamson, the county seat, disembarking at a station fortified with sandbags and concertina wire. They trudged down the snow-scraped sidewalks of town, heading toward the courthouse, passing soldiers posted on rooftops and Baldwins who glared from doorways and street corners. Sid walked with his hands in his front pockets, gripping a brace of pistols, smiling as he went.
The courtroom was brimming with spectators, the galleries flocked with miners and townsfolk come to watch Sid face down the legal artillery of King Coal. Everyone turned to watch them enter. Sid and Jessie smiled, walking down the aisle arm in arm. They hadn’t had a church ceremony and the spectacle seemed part wedding, part prizefight.
He leaned to her ear. “You the prettiest thang in here. Like always.”
Sid had on a sharp new suit, chocolate brown, and Jessie wore her finest dress, bedecked with rings and pearls. She was savvy about such things. “We can’t let them make us out like a bunch of crude folk,” she’d told him. “The operators want us to look like a bunch of murdering savages, same as the feud days, so the rest of the country won’t give a damn what happens here.”
On Jessie’s instruction, the other defendants had ironed their denim coveralls or donned tweed or corduroy jackets for the occasion—some slightly ill-fitting, borrowed from friends or neighbors or the late mayor’s wardrobe. They sat on the hard benches and looked out the broad courtroom windows, which gave onto the Tug Fork River and the brown rise of a hill on the Kentucky side, wooly with bare-branched trees. The presiding judge sat high at the bench, a thickset man with red hair and blue eyes.
No sooner had they sat down than a well-dressed gentleman rose from the gallery, buttoned his double-breasted coat, and approached the prosecution’s table. Sid followed him with slit eyes. Thomas Felts, founding partner of the Baldwin-Felts, sole survivor of the three Felts brothers. He was in his fifties, clean-cut in a dark suit and wire spectacles, his pouty mouth and chin starting to sag over his double-starched collar. He lived in a big brick house in Bluefield alongside the coal operators and politicians he served. He went to their churches and country clubs. He was their hard man, the muscle behind their law.
Sid smiled, wondering what it might be like to have him in a dark room. Just the two of them and naught but something sharp or heavy in their hands. Picks or shovels or hammers. He wondered how long Felts would last with him in the black chamber of a mine. The hot squirt and crunch of the man in that dark place, how he would squeak or moan or gurgle before he ceased, his spirit sinking down through the layers of coal and slate to meet his brothers in torment.
Felts bent at his waist and whispered to the prosecutors, cocking his head in Sid’s direction. The attorneys set their hands on the table and looked back and forth at one another, their rumps wiggling like they had tails. They asked to approach the bench. The judge’s face reddened at what they told him—a fiery bluster that matched his scalloped hair. He raised the gavel high beside his temple and hammered the sounding block.
“It has come to my attention that persons in the gallery have brought sidearms into my courtroom. Let it here be known clearly, no firearms will be allowed in my courtroom but those of my deputies. None, no matter what carry permits you have. Deputies will search all persons at the door for the duration of this trial.”
Tom Felts was looking directly at Sid now, smirking like a pastor with an eye for sin—for the pair of pistols bulging the pockets of his coat. Sid shone his gold teeth back at the detective, cocking his head toward Jessie. “Won’t he look pretty with a hole in his head?”
THE TRIAL SEEMED ENDLESS, a drone of procedure that reminded Sid of his worst schoolhouse days, when the trees waved outside the windows and the river ran high through the valley and he was supposed to pay attention to the scratch of strange formulas on a chalkboard that had scant to do with the limited sunshine he could soak up before his life ran straight down into the black depths of the mines, sure as a tunnel on the railroad tracks.
When the sun dipped behind the western ridge, they still hadn’t gotten to the part where they entered their pleas. Everyone was tired—defendants and attorneys, families and reporters alike—ready to go home to their hotel rooms or boardinghouses or apartments. Ready for a drink, a hot supper, a tumble in the bedsheets. The judge gaveled and cleared his throat. “A last matter to attend. The bonds of all defendants are hereby revoked.”
A roar ripped through the courtroom, hisses and boos and shouts. The judge slammed down his gavel again and again. “Order, I said order in the court. All defendants will be held in the Mingo County Jail for the duration of the trial.”
The roars redoubled.
Can he do that?
You got to be kidding.
Who’s paying this son of a bitch?
The men looked to Sid. He rose, buttoned his coat, and held out his arm for Jessie. They led the other defendants up the aisle, toward the deputies who’d escort them across the courthouse lawn to the county jail. Sid smiled wide at Felts as he walked past, as if he and Jessie were headed out on a sweet Sunday stroll, their cares no heavier than songbirds in the trees.
As a teenager, he’d had a habit of scowling all the time, not wanting people to see his rotten teeth. The dentist told him it was too much chew at too early an age that did them in. Not twenty and a head full of dead teeth. He was getting in trouble, too, hair-triggered to fight—especially after a couple snorts of corn likker. So he quit drinking and saved his money, building up a sheaf of bills in an old shoebox.
He thought he was buying gold, but it was more than that. His caps taught him smiling was the way. Everyone reckoned you smiled or frowned on account of your spirits, high or low, but he’d learned it worked the other way around, too. If you scowled all the time, the world was likely to scowl right back at you, heaping trouble in your lap with both hands, frowning on you at every opportunity. But if you kept a smile on your face, things had a way of working out. They really did. And if they didn’t, if the world insisted on putting sons of bitches in your path, serving them up on you again and again, you might as well smile wide while you stuck your pistols in their bellies and blew their guts to the wind.
All these legal wigs, they didn’t scare him much. They had their leather briefcases and thick-lens spectacles, their hard-starched collars made as if from diploma parchments, but they’d not risen from the mud of the Tug Valley. They’d not ridden a coal car deep into the roots of the earth or worked all day on their knees in the damp and dark, swinging a pick into a coalface or shoveling coal into a mine cart. They’d not resisted the thousand-dollar bribes of the Baldwins for mounting machine guns in their towns or stood smiling before the most feared and hated gun thugs in the history of the state and shot them dead in the street. If a jury of his fellow Mingo residents wanted to hang him for that, so be it.
He’d stand smiling at the noose.
“WE GOT TO DO something,” said Frank. He and a group of other miners were standing around a barrel fire in an alley near the courthouse, rubbing their cold-chapped hands together and passing around thinly rolled cigarettes, sharing to make the scarce tobacco last. News of the trial proceedings had come to them by-and-by throughout the day.
“Judge done took their guns from them, might as well strip them naked for the Baldwins crawling round this place. Now he’s got them locked up for the whole trial.”
“Like he done made his decision already,” said Bonney, one of the Hellfighter twins.
“Ain’t his decision to make,” said Frank. “It’s the jury’s. Guilty or not ain’t his say. That’s the law in America.”
“Least it’s harder for somebody to ambush them on the way to court every day,” said Lacey, the other twin. “They’d have to do it on the courthouse lawn, and not even the Baldwins got the gall for that.”
As they talked, a pair of state troopers turned their horses up the alley, the hooves and tack ringing loud in the narrow space, jangling, coming right toward them. Frank side-eyed them. Ever since the beating, men in uniform made his blood jumpy.
He lowered his voice. “Don’t count on it. Baldwins ain’t the least afraid of the law. They got the law fixed so it serves them, not us.”
The troopers rode with their left hands on the reins, their rights spread wide on their thighs—close to their guns. They could tell Frank and the others they needed burn permits in town. They could order them to vacate the area. They could arrest them if they resisted.
“So what can we do?” asked one of the other miners.
Frank sniffed. “They ain’t afraid of the law, we got to make them afraid of us.”
“How? We don’t got permits to carry guns inside the city limit.”
Frank looked at them. “If there’s enough of us, we won’t have to.”