SID WATCHED THE JURY foreman rise to read the verdict. He was an old mountaineer who’d ridden his mule into town when the ridges were still snow-heaped and brown, naked of leaves. Now the hills were full and green outside the courtroom windows, bursting with life. A trial of forty-some days and nights. More than two hundred witnesses. Enough lies and truths, testimonies and cross-examinations, facts and speculations to fill up the onionskin pages of a Holy Bible.
The bailiffs had wheeled out a scale model of Matewan, a detailed miniature of town complete with the railroad tracks, the train depot, the main street of downtown, and the models of the various buildings: the Old Matewan National Bank, Chambers’ Hardware, Nenni’s Department Store, the Urias Hotel.
Sid had watched the attorneys poke at the tiny town with wooden pointers like schoolmarms, opining on the locations of shooters, victims, witnesses, hiding places, escape routes, even the direction of the sun, the way the shadows had been flung across the scene. They were each trying to tell their own story of how the fracas had unfolded, who’d drawn what gun first and whose fault it was and who was acting in self-defense—overlaying their own kind of map on the place.
Even Sid was less sure what had happened that afternoon on Mate Street. Every successive witness offered a new story, a different angle. A unique window or doorway or gunsight. Each new testimony—sometimes twenty a day—called up a different truth, a new cinema picture in his mind, each vision a little different from the memories already in place. Each one elbowing for territory in his mind.
He reckoned that was all part and parcel of the legal strategy. These attorneys, they picked apart a thing until there was so little left they could put whatever story they liked in its place. There was the thin coal seam of the truth buried deep under the mountain and they sent a whole town armed with steam-hammers and dynamite to find it. Little surprise all they found was a bunch of rubble, just dust and ash blowing in the wind. They might as well have dropped a bomb in the middle of the Tug Valley for whatever truth they thought they were going to find. They might as well as have blown the top off the mountain.
He didn’t let himself get too attached to any of it, to all the lies and slights swirling around his head. If he did, he might turn dark and cold, carrying it like a bone between his teeth he could never bury or crack. The same bone so many of his ancestors had carried to the grave, feudists long before Devil Anse himself who held their grudges tight as gods or lovers or kin, and died for them. Better to smile and keep in mind Baldwins were Grade A sons of bitches, and if putting them horizontal was a sin, it was also a public service. He’d known that when he took the badge, known what the people wanted. Someone who wasn’t just willing to die, but to kill.
His smile disappeared but once during the proceedings, when the lead prosecutor turned a hooked finger on Jessie, as if he would pull down the top of her dress, and accused her of improper relations—that term again. Sid’s smile vanished, sunk down some dark mine shaft inside him. His face turned cold and ugly, hard as the limestone hillsides dynamited to build the roads to the mines. His hair stiff as the naked timber of a ridge. His temples flickered beneath his hairline, as if hot magma swam inside his skull, his eyes crazed bright enough to split a man open, to spill a heap of guts on the floor.
The prosecutor’s tongue turned thick in his mouth, as if he’d been snake-bit.
In the gallery, miners leaned to one another.
If he can kill ye smilin’, what happens if you make him angry?
Now the jury foreman coughed into his fist. His chin was bladed clean, his overalls ironed board-stiff. His hands were shaking, making the verdict flutter. It was obvious he had a fear of public speaking—either that, or he was afraid of the words he was about to read. What they might mean for his family and homeplace. Whether he’d have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his days, fearing the crack of a rifle that could drop him neatly from his mule, his brains puffed pink into the breeze.
The old mountaineer licked his chapped lips and cleared his throat again. He read the verdict with his head bowed to the paper.
“We, the jury, unanimously find the defendants not guilty.”
A roar exploded in the courtroom. Everyone leapt from their seats and cheered, flinging their hats to the ceiling as they shook hands and slapped backs and embraced. Sid and Jessie clasped in the aisle and kissed long on the mouth, like at a wedding, her nails clawing through his coat, and the flung volley of hats and caps and bonnets seemed to float on the very breath of the cheers, trembling high among the rafters before they came tumbling back down. Someone ran to the window and shouted the news to the crowd outside, and the cheers redoubled, thundering outside the courthouse walls even as the judge hammered away at the gavel, trying to call the place to order.
Sid and Jessie rode home to Matewan on a special train, finding the once-bloody streets crowded with well-wishers—miners and organizers come down out of the camps and colonies to give Smilin’ Sid a hero’s welcome. Every last man wanted to shake the hand that held the bright gun that shot down the most dreaded thug in the whole history of the state. Sid and Jessie lived just two hundred feet from the station—a distance it would take them two hours to cover, cheered and congratulated at every step, from every angle.
Sid’s smile flashed gold in the sun, but his eyes were narrow, slit dark as those of a gunfighter in a Hollywood western, Riders of the Purple Sage or The Last Outlaw. He was watching every hand for a weapon. A knife or pistol or sawed-off shotgun—a retaliatory strike.
He knew the war had just begun.