SMILIN’ SID HATFIELD, KIN to Devil Anse, stood on the plank porch of the hardware store, his palms set casual over the curved handles of his double-action revolvers. He was the tenth child of twelve. One of nine who survived. The badge over his heart read MATEWAN POLICE, with the number “1” stamped between an eagle’s wings.
Chief.
His head was shaved high over his ears, his hair grown spiky from the crown of his skull. His tie was wide and flat and short, decorated with paisleys. People called him “Smilin’ Sid” on account of the gold caps on his teeth, which flashed whenever he smiled, which was all the time. A gold metal smile, loved and feared. Folks said he was cut from the same stump as old Devil Anse himself, patriarch of the Hatfield clan, who lived in a bulletproof log fort not ten miles from Matewan, his beard grown long and gray as a wizard’s.
Sid cocked his head. Thirteen men stood in the street before him. Men from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Mine guards. Gun thugs. Hard-faced men in city-cut suits, who thought they were the law here in the Tug Valley, where the railroads had come boring through the mountains at the turn of the century and coal became king.
Here, four of five towns were coal camps, company towns that smoked from the hillsides, and miners worked ten hours per day, six and one-half days per week, paid forty cents for each long ton of coal they blew, picked, and shoveled out of the sunless dark of the mines, where collapse and explosion and sickness lurked. A land where any attempt to organize, to join a union for better pay or safer conditions, was met with these men in the street.
The Baldwin-Felts, hired guns of King Coal.
Some of them cradled self-loading rifles disguised in butcher paper, like cruel bouquets. Others held their gun-hands inside their coats like upstart Napoleons, thumbing the hammers of their pistols. They pushed their bellies with pride against their belts.
Sid smiled back at them, showing them the raw blade of his teeth.
They’d built themselves an ironclad automobile for use in the silver mines out west, using it to machine-gun striking miners as they huddled in trenches dug beneath the duckboard floors of their canvas tents. The Death Special, they called it. A girl was shot in the face, a boy shot nine times in one leg. For West Virginia, they’d built the Bull Moose Special, an armored locomotive that steamed past a strikers’ tent colony up on Paint Creek in ’13 with machine guns ablaze, blasting the brains of a well-loved miner across the walls of his frame house.
Now they’d come to Matewan.
Mingo County, West Virginia.
Sid’s town.
That morning, they’d gone up to the coal camp above town and thrown out the families of every miner who’d joined the Union. While the men were at work underground, they’d forced out the wives and children at gunpoint, piled their belongings in the road, and barred the doors behind them. Quilts and kettles and hobbyhorses were hurled out into the rain, cane chairs and hanging mirrors and old war uniforms—anything the company didn’t own.
Now they’d come for Sid.
Days back, their leader, Albert Felts, had offered him one thousand dollars to mount machine guns on the town rooftops—enough cash-money to buy three Ford motorcars fresh off the lot. Sid had smiled at Felts and told him what he could do with his machine guns, where he ought to insert them. The man didn’t seem to understand that you could buy a whole valley, but not the people who lived in it.
Now Felts stepped forward from his bunch, holding out a writ. “We got us a warrant here for your arrest, Hatfield. You’re gonna have to come back to Bluefield on the train with us.”
Sid kept smiling. “Say I am, Albert?”
Past the man, not one hundred yards from where they stood, ran the heavy green water of the Tug Fork River, which divided West Virginia from Kentucky. In this borderland, Sid’s ancestors had warred with the McCoy clan for thirty years before his birth. Hatfields had splashed back and forth across the Tug Fork in midnight posses and raiding parties, revolvers thumping against their thighs, shotguns slung across their backs on strings and ropes. Men of his blood had tied McCoys to pawpaw bushes and shot them to pieces. They’d set fire to McCoy cabins in dead of winter so that McCoy children went barefoot in the snow.
Sid had come up on a tenant farm just across the river. As a teen, he’d wielded a pickax and blasting powder in the mines, back-bent in those squarish caverns of rock eons beneath the earth where blackdamp could choke a man to death and firedamp blow him to kingdom come. Friends of his had been killed in roof falls and blasting accidents; he’d seen boys not ten years from their mamas’ bellies with their fingers sheared off in coal conveyors—one squashed dead beneath the wheels of a mine car. A sight you never unsaw.
His hands were black-seamed from the mines, cuts and blisters healed with coal dust under the skin, as if tattooed. He’d worked as a smithy’s striker, too, swinging a sledgehammer onto an anvil again and again, pounding shapes from that glowing iron, dousing red-hot horseshoes and plow blades in bubbling cauldrons of quench water. Policing was the first trade in which his face wasn’t blacked with dirt or coal or soot, only his eyes and teeth to show.
“That’s right,” said Felts, cocking his head, his dozen thugs spread wide-legged behind him. “We’re taking you back to Bluefield in cuffs.”
A warmth at Sid’s hips. His shooting irons turning hot in their holsters, same as always before a fracas, as if they recalled the hell in which they’d been born. The red iron, liquid, hammered into the die. He looked from man to man of the Baldwin bunch. They were beginning to shift their weight from foot to foot before him, twitching their noses and tapping their fingers, wondering why he was still smiling.
Sid had dug the black veins of West Virginia coal that made the companies rich that hired these men. Money that could buy mansions on the shores of cold clear lakes and twelve-cylinder Italian automobiles and murder in muddy streets behind the gleaming badges of private detective agencies. Coal money, God-strong in Mingo County. Sid smiled because he was risen from the mud of this place, born to meet such men in the street.
The mayor, standing beside him, squinted at the warrant the Baldwin-Felts had produced. A misty rain was falling now, slanted and feathery, tickling the shoulders of the agents’ suits. Tiny bright pearls in the wool. Sid knew these men had warred for their country in trenched hells of mud, killing Krauts with machine guns and hand grenades and trench knives. He also knew they were aliens in this place, in these jagged dark shadows between the hills of his birth. He stepped slightly back into the door frame, feeling the darkness drip down his face.
He could be happy-go-lucky Sid, devil-may-care Sid, the Sid who didn’t but shoot pool and play poker and run around with the other young men, chasing bucks and gobblers and big brownie bass. But these Baldwins, they just wouldn’t learn. They had to come here and throw his people out their homes without the due process of law. They had to hurl their family heirlooms and hard-bought belongings in the muck like a bunch of trash.
They had to put an old woman out in the rain.
There was the law of the courts, Sid knew, and the law that was older, deeper, which even the littlest trapper boy in the mines knew in his born heart. Which even that boy’s greatest granddaddies had known ten generations back, in whatever highland or desert or forest raised them. There were some people these days who’d chosen to forget that older law, but only because they could. Because somebody had done away with their Baldwins for them, put them in prison cells or pinewood overcoats.
Not a month ago, this same bunch had been arrested for this same crime. Albert Felts had leered at the arresting deputy over a mine office desk covered in guns of every caliber and description. Large-frame revolvers and sleek automatics, bull-nosed shotguns and high-powered rifles with telescopic sights—the latest in handheld firepower. “Know this, I’ll break the unions of the Tug Valley if I have to send one hundred more men to hell.”
Here he was again, still cock-lording about, no matter his late arrest. A man irreformable, it seemed. The Baldwins had the coal operators on their side, which meant the judges, the politicians, and half the high sheriffs of the state. But Sid knew that wasn’t the root of the problem, the real reason they kept coming back. The reason they could. It wasn’t something they had on their side. It was something they lacked.
Fear.
They didn’t know this county had been called Bloody Mingo long before the companies came to unbury the coal kept deep in the guts of the hills and send it forth in mile-long trains of dark rubble to light the boilers of ships and trains, steel factories and power plants. A land of fracture and feud, where men of the same family fought on different sides of uncivil wars and bands of marauders roved the hills since the days of scrape-fires and cap-shooters and a man had to be willing to kill and die to earn any single inch of respect.
They didn’t know where they were. In whose valley they walked.
It wasn’t a thing that could be told.
Someone had to show them.
Sid never took the wearing of the badge lightly. It made the whole town his family, his kin. Here in the Tug, lawing meant swinging fists and wrestling down drunks, raising ax handles and sometimes a gun. It meant sacrifice. A lot of people thought dying for something was the biggest sacrifice of all. Like Christ. But Sid knew there was something more than that. Something he’d learned from Devil Anse himself. They all had. A man didn’t just have to be willing to die for his kin, but to burn in Hell.
To damn himself.
In the distance, the whistle of the 5:15 train, carrying the promise of arrest warrants for the Baldwins from the county seat. Mayor Cabell looked up from the writ. “You got to be shitting me, Felts. This arrest warrant is bogus.”
Sid knew it would be. He leaned back farther into the shadow of the hardware store, feeling the darkness paint his cheeks, run down his neck. The butts of his pistols glowed like skillet handles beneath his palms.
“You’d better wrote that warr’nt on a ginger snap,” said a listening miner, spitting in the road. “So ye could eat it.”
The detectives in the street smiled, hard-faced, like it was all a joke. Then Albert Felts reached into his coat—or so Sid would tell the jury later. Albert Felts, who’d boasted he would break the unions of West Virginia if he had to send a hundred more men to Hell.
He would go first.
Sid’s pistols leapt from his belt. He shot Albert Felts in the head, a halo of spray. The other agents dropped to shooting positions, drawing their guns to return fire, but the rifles of hidden miners cracked from trees and bushes and windows like a dam breaking. Like Sid knew they would. The Baldwins were sent tumbling and screaming, dying in the street. They turned tail and fled, and Sid stepped down from the porch and walked after them, his pistols barking again and again at the ends of his hands, like the barking mouths of dogs.