BULLETS SNAPPED ACROSS THE river and came hissing through the woods, slapping bark from trees. Doc Moo moved on all fours, head low, his pants dark-kneed with dirt. His white shirt soaked with sweat, nearly translucent against his olive skin, his eyeglasses perched foggy on the tip of his nose. His graying temples oozed with exertion, fear. He cursed beneath his breath, in his mother tongue.
“Al’aama.”
The Battle of the Tug—so the papers were calling it. A battle of snipers and sharpshooters. Striking miners exchanged fire with Baldwins, scabs, and state police. Small bands of fighters stalked the ridges, hunting one another. Small communities like Rawl and Sprigg and Blackberry City, perched high along the riverbanks, looked abandoned. People were afraid to go outside; the air was full of death. They’d taken to sleeping in cellars or under beds, their children curled in bathtubs. At night, any light could draw a shot.
Now Moo was in the very thick of it. That morning, he’d found the new commander of the state police waiting outside his office. Captain Brockus. The town fathers of Williamson had made much of the man’s pedigree. He’d served his entire life in uniform, commanding infantry forces in the Philippines, Mexico, and the Great War. He was not from West Virginia, but Tennessee. A thirty-second degree Mason, a member of the American Legion, a Shriner.
“The meanest old son-bitch ever shat behind a pair of shoes,” said one of his troopers during a routine visit to Doc Moo’s office.
Brockus had been appointed for his abilities to restore law and order—to keep the miners in line. Moo knew most of his fellow professionals supported that mission, especially in the bigger towns. Physicians, bankers, attorneys, businessmen, and clergy.
“Somebody’s got to put them back in the ground,” a local druggist told Moo. “Mines or graves, their choice.”
Captain Brockus enlisted only overseas men into the new state constabulary—combat veterans with experience in foreign wars. Doc Moo had passed their patrols while making his rounds. Troopers with campaign hats rammed low on their heads, cutting their faces with shadow. Hooded stirrups, horse pistols, carbines in saddle scabbards. This morning, he’d found Brockus and a squad of them sitting on their horses in the street outside his office, waiting for him.
“Doctor Domit Muhanna?”
He’d brought Musa to the office today—the only way to ensure the boy wouldn’t run off to the woods, becoming the target of a sniper’s bullet. The boy stared wide-eyed at the captain’s giant chestnut gelding—a horse trained to perform the cakewalk, the quick-step, the Virginia reel for the crowds. Doc Moo pushed his son slightly behind him. “Yes, Captain. That’s me. Is there some trouble?”
Around them, the distant crack and carom of rifle fire. The din of gunfire had been nearly constant for three days. The antiunion forces had been driven to the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, so the river itself became a battle line.
“No, Doctor, not beyond the obvious. Fact is, we’re here to ask for your help.”
“Mine?”
The captain swung down expertly from his horse, his spurs ringing. He wore a big revolver at his hip with a curved white handle, ivory or pearl. His bearing was stiff, militant, his chin shaved clean despite the battle around them.
“Doctor, I have it on good authority that you’re a man respected by miners and coal company men alike, as well as the local townspeople and professionals. A man willing to ride to either side of the river day or night, treating people in medical duress no matter their color, creed, or political bent. That’s earned you the respect of both parties in this affair.”
“It’s simply the oath I took, Captain.”
The captain nodded and looked out at the hills. “Doctor, this valley is imperiled, and every man, woman, and child has now become a kind of patient of yours. Their conditions are dire. They need you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We need someone to arrange a truce.” He paused. “Someone to cross the river.”
DOC MOO WAS PREPARING his medical kit when Musa tugged on his sleeve. He looked down to see the boy holding up his most prized possession, his possibles bag. His brow was set like a little soldier’s. “So you’ll have your hands free for climbing.”
Doc Moo’s heart squeezed like a fist in his chest, making it hard to speak. “Thank you, son,” he managed, taking the bag from him. “I’ll take good care of it.”
He packed the bag with gauze, tourniquets, iodine, morphine, forceps—everything he might need to treat a gunshot wound—his own or someone else’s.
In the street, the troopers tied a white flag with a crudely painted red cross to a thin whip of hickory and ran it down the back of his shirt, securing it beneath his belt, while Doc Moo knotted a length of borrowed shoestring to the temples of his eyeglasses so he wouldn’t lose them while dashing across the river.
Captain Brockus held out a small derringer on the flat of his palm, a tiny two-shot pocket pistol. “A final instrument for your kit, Doctor.”
Moo looked down at the gun. Too often he’d had to clean up the mess such an instrument made of someone’s insides—too often he’d failed.
“No, thank you, Captain.”
“There’s mad blood stirring in these hills, Doctor.” He glanced toward Musa, lowering his voice. “This item might be the only thing between you and a rabid dog. The kind for which there’s but one cure.”
Doc Moo touched the small Maronite cross hidden beneath his shirt, a gift from his father before he left home. “With respect, Captain, it won’t be the only thing.”
He crossed the footbridge at a sprint, drawing fire despite the emblem whipping over his head, the bullets smacking the water around him, and then he was starting the long climb through the trees, the red cross rattling over his head like some terrible joke, an invitation to shoot.
He rested in the crater of a wind-felled blight tree, again touching the three-barred Maronite cross, which resembled a Lebanese cedar—a tree whose timber Solomon had used to build the Temple of Jerusalem, whose bark Moses had used to treat the lepers. Saint Maron himself had been a mystic, a priest who left the great Christian city of Antioch to live high in the mountains, where he converted an old temple into a monastery and prayed for long hours exposed to wind and rain, snow and hail—a man who could free himself from physical suffering, it was said, achieving a mystic union with God and nature. Doc Moo wondered what the old black-robed saint would think of these mountains, their slopes slashed and dynamited and drilled into a scarred landscape, their trees blighted, fuming with gun smoke.
Rarely did the doctor resort to the tongue of his childhood, but the old language seemed made for prayer, the words rising in incantatory strings, curling like smoke, like they might just touch the ear of God.
“Aydan idha sirtu fee waadi…”
Yea, though I walk through the valley …
A round whizzed overhead and struck a tree behind him, tearing a wound in the trunk, the thunder-crack echoing beneath the canopy. The doctor touched his forehead to the earth, unable to remember the prayer. He’d been struck dumb, the thoughts knocked from his skull. He lay a long moment heaving, gathering himself, finding his way back to the beginning of the psalm, letting the words come again.
“Aydan idha sirtu fee waadi…”
He raised himself from the dirt, the crushed green ferns uncurling beneath him, as if drawn by his body’s gravity, and then he was scrambling up the slope again, his hands grasping clods of dirt and mossy stones and raw weeds—whatever gave purchase. Praying despite his ragged breath and blowing lungs, praying and climbing, grasping the words of the psalm as he said them, gripping them like handholds, while death shrieked through the air.
Nearing the top of the ridge, he paused and looked back over his shoulder. The Tug had become a green curve far beneath him. Doc Moo placed the three-barred gold cross between his teeth, then took it inside his mouth like a host. Like the blessed flesh of Christ, whose blood dripped outward into the bulbed needles of the tree of life. Like a Lebanese cedar, whose rich hearth-smoke he would give so much to smell again, floating through the souk of his home village. To scent it in the collars of his parents when he embraced them. To smell it, one day, in the hair of his wife and children, burying his nose in the crowns of their heads.
A shot ripped through the branches overhead, shattering the bottle-green leaves. Doc Moo climbed over the top of the ridge and pulled the thin hickory flagstaff from the sheath of his shirt, raising it aloft like some slim weapon of peace.