DOC MOO SMELLED SMOKE. He’d spent the night on the cot in his office after being called to town to treat an older miner who was coughing up blood—miner’s asthma. Now he rose in his skivvies and went to the window. A strange, reddish dawn, as if a storm were coming. He cracked the window and the smell grew stronger.
He headed to the roof for a better look. There, he saw a dark weed of smoke sprung from the ridge above town, twisting and curling, growing leaves, spreading wild across the sky. Soon a whole tree, holding the red-rising sun like an angry star in its branches, while dawn light rifled across town like tracer fire. A bad omen. Moo went to the corner of the roof and looked down to the street. Sid was sitting on the bench in front of the store, straight-backed, his morning coffee steaming on the side table.
After his recent court appearance, Sid had been forced to sneak back out of Williamson, hopping a train from the switchyard south of the station. In the coach, a local newspaper reporter recognized him.
“How come you came to town alone?” the man asked, licking a pencil nub.
Sid showed his teeth. “When I aim to go someplace, I aim to go it alone. They got in the habit of blaming me for every last thing that happens down at Matewan.”
The reporter scribbled down his words in shorthand, then perched his pencil above the pad. “And what do you make of today’s verdict?”
“Verdict?”
“You haven’t heard? The six surviving Baldwin-Felts agents from the Battle of Matewan were acquitted today, found not guilty on charges of murdering the mayor and a fourteen-year-old bystander.”
The Baldwins had been tried one hundred miles away, in friendly territory.
“Care to comment?” asked the reporter.
“No.”
Soon the verdict hit the papers, the hollers, the camps. Doc Moo had known there would be a reaction. There had to be, sure as physics. Next day, he was walking down Mate Street when a mine downriver exploded. Moo felt the detonation in his bootsoles, an underground thunderclap like the joinery of the earth had blown a rivet or busted a seam. Like something evil was down there, breaking loose. Around him, townsfolk stood dumbstruck, staring down at the street mud like it might start squirming. He looked over to see that Sid and Ed’s checkers pieces had been thrown clear off the board, strewn helter-skelter beneath the table.
Now the red dawn light slanted down on the Tug Valley, burning the mist from the hills, as if the whole valley were smoldering, and the tree of smoke spread wicked across the sky, like the very spirit of hell let slip from the earth. A fine rain of ash had begun to fall, peppering Moo’s bare shoulders. He leaned over the edge of the roof, calling down to Sid. “Is that the Stone Mountain burning?”
Sid’s teeth shone like red copper in the dawn. “Reckon somebody ain’t too happy with ole P. J. Smith. That mine of his got up in smoke.”
NOON THAT DAY, A pounding on Doc Moo’s office door. He descended the narrow flight of stairs and opened the door to find Captain Brockus and a trio of state troopers. When Brockus had come to see him during the Battle of the Tug, he’d held his campaign hat under his arm, his hands clasped like a man at church. This time, he kept the round hat rammed low on his head, the brim flecked with ash. He hooked his thumbs in his thick leather gun belt.
“Doctor Muhanna,” he said.
“What can I do for you, Captain?”
“We’ve come to ask you a few questions.”
No room for the men in the narrow stairwell, so Doc Moo pulled the door closed behind him and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I’m with a patient,” he said. “So we must be quick.”
“It’s come to our attention that you are the primary physician of a Mr. Frank Hugham, formerly of the employ of the Stone Mountain Mine. Currently a resident of the Lick Creek encampment?”
“I’ve been the longtime physician of his grandmother, Miss Beulah Hugham. I treated Mr. Hugham for the wounds he received after his arrest in Welch.”
Brockus raised his chin. “We have no record of any arrest of Mr. Hugham in McDowell County.”
Moo ground his teeth. Of course you don’t. “He was arrested on the rail platform last July, held without charge in the county jail, then taken out into the woods in the middle of the night and beaten very nearly to death.”
Captain Brockus made a grim line with his mouth, as if skeptical of the claim. “And when was the last time you treated Mr. Hugham?”
“I’m sorry, Captain, but I’m afraid such a disclosure would be a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“There’s no such law in West Virginia.”
“It’s part of the Hippocratic Oath, Captain, which I swore to uphold when I became a medical doctor. I’m sure you take your own oath very seriously. May I ask what this is about?”
Brockus sniffed. “Mr. Hugham is wanted for questioning on a variety of topics, including an assault on two of my troopers in Williamson.”
“Assault?”
“That’s right,” said the captain. He cocked his head to eye the smoke still drifting over town. “Among other things. He seems to be a hard man to locate these days.”
“Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, Captain.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “Now, really, I must be getting back to my current patient.”
Brockus pulled his riding gloves from his belt and snapped them against his thigh. “You know, Doctor Muhanna, we seem to find you in a lot of suspicious positions. Up at the tent colony, in the very same ice cream parlor as the agitator Lavinder, and now we hear you weren’t home last night.”
Doc Moo felt his blood rising. This rod-spined son of a bitch out of Tennessee, with his prancing horse and white-handled pistol, who’d beaten a man unconscious in the town ice cream parlor in front of his family, his wife and girls. As if his badge gave him that right. Moo breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, thinking what Buddeea would say: He just wants to rile you, Moo. That’s exactly what he means to do. Don’t let him succeed.
“I have multiple witnesses who can confirm my whereabouts last night, but I’m sure you know that already. Now, I’m afraid I’ve kept my patient waiting long enough. You can make an appointment to talk further, if you like. Thank you, Captain, and good day.”
Doc Moo closed the door and climbed back up the stairs, his blood pounding like a drum inside his head, hammering at his temples. He entered his office and locked the door behind him and leaned back against it, his chest heaving. Then he stepped into the examination room, where his patient sat waiting on the edge of the padded leather exam table, holding a flame-scorched forearm in his lap.
Big Frank.
“You ain’t have to do that, Doc. Captain learns you lied to him, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Moo had been cleaning the burn when the pounding came at the door downstairs. Now he sat on his stool and laid a sterile dressing over the blistered skin. “I am oathbound to do no harm. And handing you over to that son of a bitch would be harmful indeed.”
“You got to think about the harm to you and yours, Doc. You got youngins at home.”
Moo began to wrap a roll of gauze around the dressing, careful to make the turns regular, firm but not tight enough to impede circulation. “I am thinking about it, Frank. All the time. But the man I choose to be will have a great influence on who my children become. I have to remember that, too.”
He cut off the end of the gauze with a pair of stainless shears and reached for the bandaging tape. Big Frank touched his elbow, looking him in the eye. “I want to thank you, Doc. For what you done for me, for Mama-B.” The big man paused; his chest swelled. “For what you done for Evie. I know you done all you could for her.”
A sting behind Moo’s eyes. “I wish I could’ve done more.”
“If something happens to me—”
Moo put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You know I will, Frank. Look after her.”
Miss B.
Moo furnished the man with fresh dressings and instructions to keep the burn clean. Then Frank crouched at the window, watching for a signal from the woods across the railroad tracks. When it came, he descended the stairs and slipped out the door. Doc Moo watched him sprint across the tracks and vanish into the trees just as a coal train came howling past, cutting off anyone who might try to pursue him.