THE SEVEN MEN MOVED slowly along the ridge above Matewan, their lanterns swinging red in the darkness, the glass globes tied with bandannas to mute their glow. They spoke little, their boots moving through bloodied pools of light, stepping over deadfalls and mossy rocks. Big Frank and six others, all of them Lick Creekers who’d served in the Great War.
The Bad Seven.
For months, the seven veterans had served as the tent colony’s sentries, perching at points around the holler to watch for gun thugs or police posses or vigilante townsmen. Two of them, Bonney and Lacey, the Hellfighter twins, had served with the 369th Infantry, the famed Harlem Hellfighters—a Black regiment that spent more time in frontline trenches than any other American unit. Four months in some of the most hellish conditions ever known, when the earth was soaked with blood and men lived among rats and lice and human corpses.
On a moonless night in 1918, they were in an observation post on the edge of no-man’s-land when they heard the sound of cable-cutters clipping barbwire. They fired an illumination round, alerting their lines to an attack just as the Germans charged. Between them, the brothers killed six enemy soldiers who came over the parapet into their post, fighting with spiked trench knives and the club ends of their French Lebel rifles, turning back the twenty-four-man assault.
They were narrow-shouldered and wiry, fast and tireless as coal shovelers, and crack shots. Their upper arms bore matching tattoos of coiled rattlesnakes—the 369th’s insignia.
After Frank’s narrow escape, the brothers were furious.
Man shouldn’t have to run for his life just for carrying the wrong paper.
It can’t stand. This is America, we got rights.
Not no longer. Our rights end at the point of their guns.
Then, three days later, the final straw. Their man Sid Hatfield was called to court for assaulting P. J. Smith, the mine super who’d thrown them out of their homes a year ago. As his train rolled into town, he found a gang of state troopers and armed vigilance men waiting for him at the station, ready to give him a dose like Lavinder’s at the ice cream parlor—or worse.
Sid narrowly escaped, jumping off the far side of the train as it slowed and then disappearing among the coal cars, only to reappear on the “Great White Way”—the wide concrete avenue laid through the heart of town—walking with his fists buried in his coat pockets, clutching a pair of Colt pocket pistols as he passed through the steep canyon of storefronts and office buildings. By the time he turned onto Logan Street, where the courthouse stood high and solemn beside the river, pale as the stone ghost of a building, he’d become the head of a small parade, a throng of supporters who filled the sidewalk and spilled over into the street.
“Ye done good,” said a woman. “Put that God-damned mine boss in his place.”
“That’s right,” said another. “Down at ye feet, bleeding like a stuck hog.”
“Amen,” said a man. “How many families he’s put out in the cold?”
Sid’s eyes flashed to the clock tower on top of the courthouse, squinting as if to read the time or discern what shadows might linger beneath the white face of the clock. Baldwin sharpshooters or bomb throwers, the long arms of King Coal.
Nothing.
Finally he stood before the front steps of the courthouse, the pale marble of the building thrust from the dark earth of the bottomland like the jagged tip of an iceberg, like the building might spread in ever-widening floors and chambers beneath the ground, too deep to fathom. He was about to climb the steps when a deputy leaned toward him from the shadows.
“Pistols, Sid.”
Sid sniffed and turned over his guns. Before climbing the steps, he looked down at his hands, which had been squeezing the baby automatics buried in his front pockets, their checkered grips emblazoned with rampant Colt medallions.
People whispered what he’d seen: A twin pair of colts, red-stamped on his palms.
BONNEY AND LACEY CALLED a meeting of the sentries.
“Enough is enough. They got to know we ain’t to be bullied no more.”
“We been on defense too long. Time we take the fight to them.”
“King Coal ain’t the only law in these hills.”
“What you say, Big Frank?”
Frank looked down at his hands, black-creased with coal seams that would never wash out—the dust tattooed beneath the skin. No blood on them, not yet. Slowly, as if it weighed a great deal, he got out his clasp knife and unfolded the blade. He pushed the point into the cup of his palm, drawing up a red seam of ooze, the ore of men. Then he held out his open hands. The knife in one palm, a welt of blood in the other.
The seven men made a blood pact, nicking their palms and clasping hands. They were the Bad Seven, scourge of King Coal, bane of the Baldwin-Felts. Besides Frank and the twins, there were the Zielinski boys, veterans of the Blue Army on the Western Front, and the Provos—Provenzano cousins, who’d served in an Alpini regiment. There were several white sentries from the camp, native-born Mountaineers they knew and respected, but those men might assume they were in charge by skin or birthright—not of this crew.
Now the Bad Seven were heading south along the ridge that ran down toward Matewan. The moon was clouded out; the weaving red glow of their lanterns was the only light. The midnight train had come and gone some time ago.
Frank moved in a kind of trance, his feet sorting the dark trail almost on their own, rarely stumbling or slipping. He felt the same way sometimes in the dark room of a mine, when his body seemed to do all the work without him and it seemed he could feel his fingertips in the very point of his pick, taking a coalface apart in half the swings it would take another hewer.
His own Black regiment, though combat-trained, was mainly used for stevedore work during the war, unloading ships at the docks in France. One time, when a Royal Navy submarine moored nearby to receive supplies, the British sailors let Frank and the men tour the underwater boat. Frank’s comrades snickered and joshed him before they climbed down the narrow hatch.
Hell, Big Frank ain’t fitting down there.
Quick now, who brought the axle grease?
Should of saved some bacon fat from breakfast.
Inside, a series of cramped iron chambers that could dive two hundred feet below the surface, into depths where little light reached, and the crew working in near silence, reading gauges and twisting valves while the screws rumbled through the metal skin. Even there at shore, unsubmerged, some of the others began to panic inside the dim confines of the vessel, unable to imagine being trapped in the dark belly of this whale beneath ten tons of ocean. But it didn’t bother Frank, who was accustomed to working shoulder to shoulder with men who blew black powder charges with whole mountains sitting just inches above their heads. The submarine seemed cozy almost—the kind of place he could imagine himself working, were he allowed to man such vessels.
Frank had something of the same sensation tonight on the ridge, he and the other six men moving inside a dim tunnel of lantern light, bound in common toil. A dark world surrounding them on every side, binding them close. When they came upon their destination, it was near what Mama-B would call the witching hour. Three or four o’clock in the morning. A time when the haints came out, when the rest of the world was asleep. Their red-glowing lanterns assembled like spook lights on a rocky thrust of the ridge.
Below, the dark outlines of a mine, tipples and conveyors and headhouse surrounded in barbwire, like some remote military outpost. One by one, the dim red lanterns were extinguished, like souls winking out. Seven darkened forms began filtering down the steep face of the ridge.