SID WALKED DOWN MATE Street under a high sun, gold teeth aflash despite the gunfire. Friends in dark hats flanked him on either side, armed with repeaters, while the hills crackled and popped around them.
This sudden bout of violence had been waiting in the springtime air. Everyone felt it. The atmosphere over the river had turned sulfurous, yellowy—a hot-tempered haze too thick to breathe. Tree pollen and wet spring heat, blighted chestnuts and ten thousand minds bending toward rupture. Only the hatching mayflies seemed unaware of the coming violence, swirling dumbly between the riverbanks, drawing trout to the surface.
Sid could hear the sharp crack of high-powered rifles and the lesser pop of pistols. Now and again, the tat-tat-tat of the state police machine gun. Word was, the troopers had been churning and sliding down the muddy roads in their automobiles, snow-chains on their rear tires, trying to sweep up miners for arrest.
Matewan was a ghost town. All the businesses were closed, the doors barred. Chambers’ Hardware, Dr. Witt’s Dentistry, Leckie’s Drug Store, even the post office. Many of the scabs had fled, their company-built houses pocked full of holes, their windows shot dark. Rainwater dripping through their roofs. People were living in root cellars and basements and bathtubs. They rode the trains lying flat between the aisles, praying they wouldn’t catch a sniper’s bullet.
Sid’s hat lay far aback his head, haloing his face. Now and again, a round spanked the dirt in his vicinity. He didn’t flinch, didn’t frown. In the crook of his arm, he cradled a Winchester repeater—a lever-action .30–30 from a crate delivered on the train from Cincinnati, the oiled rifles packed like skinny sardines, destined for his and Jessie’s gun shop. The receiver was machined from solid steel billet; the blued octagonal barrel glistened with a light coating of Cosmoline. A handsome piece, carried like an instrument of civil commerce.
He was headed for the Matewan rail depot—the long, red-roofed station where a train had just made an unscheduled stop, the dark engine ticking alongside the platform like an overheated machine gun. Closer, he saw P. J. Smith, mine super of Stone Mountain Coal—the man who’d had the Matewan families evicted last year.
Smith, dressed in a light suit and straw hat, was overseeing the unloading of a boxcar—a shipment of long wooden crates, which his men were transferring to a teamster’s wagon. He turned around when he heard Sid’s boots on the platform and set his hands on his hips, elbows thrust wide, as if to make a larger silhouette.
Sid stood before him and cocked one ear to the hills, revealing his dark gums and gold teeth. The air was a constant, muted thunder. “Ain’t it some strange weather we been havin’, Mr. Smith?”
Smith lifted inside his toes, tapping the planks. “What do you want, Hatfield?”
Sid squinted out over the surrounding hills. “Almost sounds like Indy-pendence Day, don’t it? Except it ain’t no celebration for them in these hills. No, sir, reckon they still fighting for their freedom.”
“I got business to tend to, Hatfield. They can go back where they came from, they don’t like it here.”
Now Sid leaned to one side, looking past the man’s shoulder. The blinkered draft horses stamped the dirt, ready to return to the stabled darkness of the livery, their hay beds and sacks of oats. “What you got in them crates, Mr. Smith?”
“Secure yourself a warrant and I’ll be happy to show you the waybill, constable.”
Sid had lost his position as police chief due to the shoot-out, but the people had elected him constable of the county’s largest district. He sucked on one golden tooth. “You ask me, Mr. Smith, them crates look sized just about right for some rifles.”
Smith clapped his toes on the platform again. “Well, you sure would know, Hatfield.”
Sid’s eyes flicked back to the man before him. “Say I would?”
Smith’s cheeks had colored, his heat rising clear as red mercury in a gauge. An ire he could not fully control. He leaned forward at the hips. “I do. I say the mayor gets gut-shot and you feast on his leavings, turning his store into a gun shop. Convenient, that.”
Smith’s men had slowed their loading, watching over their shoulders. Sid licked the edges of his teeth. The name of Jessie, his wife, lingered unsaid in the air, so close.
“Leavings, Mr. Smith?”
Smith didn’t notice how the smile had left Hatfield’s face. The rarity of this event. No, Smith’s blood was up, his neck bulling out from his open collar. He’d had no one to vent to but his wife at the dinner table.
“Arming these fucking animals. They’ll believe anything that senile old bitch Mother Jones and the rest of those agitators tell them. ’Case you ain’t noticed, this country runs on coal. Coal is King. And some poor son-bitch has to dig that coal up out the ground so the rest of this country can have their lights on at night and their radiators running. The job ain’t pretty, never has been, never will be. Dark, dangerous work. But it don’t take a fucking genius, now does it? And it’s equal work, equal pay. Forty cents a ton, no matter if you’re white, black, brown, red, or blue. Tell me where else you can get that in this country.
“Those operators up north, they’re closer to market. Down here, we got hairline margins, everything against us. We got to dig deeper and ship farther. We put picks and shovels in the hands of men and pay them for honest work. But the Union tells ’em that ain’t good enough, has ’em throw down their picks and take up arms. Now we got a bunch of unhappy Blacks, wops, Polacks, and hillbillies with guns. What a world, Hatfield. What a fucking world.” Smith leaned farther forward, his hands on his hips. He couldn’t seem to help himself. “And you’re just riding high on the hog, ain’t you, boy? Sucking at the teat of it all.”
Sid had been watching the man with a kind of violent fixation, as if he must memorize every last crease and pore and cleft of his face. As if this were a face he would like to paint or sculpt one day—a face he must fix clearly in his mind, at this moment, in case he never saw it again this way.
“What you saying, Mr. Smith?”
Smith leaned farther forward, his torso near parallel to the wooden planks. He enunciated his words clearly, loudly, as if speaking to a fool. “Suck-ing-at-the-TEAT-of-it—”
The blow came so fast that witnesses would never agree how it happened. Whether Sid’s fist, as he maintained, or the steel butt of his Winchester had struck the blow that landed P. J. Smith in the hospital for nine days. There was no wind-up, no telegraphing the strike. There was a flash and a crack and the superintendent of Stone Mountain Coal lay curled on the platform, wailing, his arms covering his head, as if to hide what had become of his face. His blood rilled toward Sid’s boots, seeping between the planks.
Above them, from the hills, a roar like applause.