THE FIRE SIREN SOUNDED over the roofs of the county seat. Salvo after salvo, sounding through the walls of law offices and drugstores and funeral homes, breaking into boardrooms and bank vaults. They blasted into the church sacristy where Doc Moo sat with Father Rossi, checking the old priest’s blood pressure. Moo’s mouth went dry; he knew what those four-blast salvos meant.
The call to arms.
Father Rossi, a wizened Sardinian with bright eyes, put his free hand on Doc Moo’s shoulder, smiled, and nodded toward the inflated cuff on his arm. Doc Moo looked down and nearly jumped, realizing he’d kept pumping the rubberized air bulb long beyond the normal point. The cuff was squeezing the old man’s arm like an iron claw, surely bruising him, while the fire siren continued to wail.
Doc Moo thumbed the valve, letting out the pressure with a hiss. “Ita paenitet, Pater.”
I’m sorry.
The two of them spoke Latin when they were alone—a language they’d both been taught as boys, on different sides of the Mediterranean, and which had followed them into their professional lives. The old priest waved his hand, dismissing the apology. “Est nihil, Doctor.”
It’s nothing.
Father Rossi had not come to this small parish church in West Virginia for rest. A lot of Italian, Spanish, and Polish miners lived in these hills, mostly Catholic, and a pastor had been needed. After the parishioners’ needs proved too much for a less experienced priest, the Church had asked Father Rossi to come—a veteran of Italian Harlem, known for his steel in the face of La Cosa Nostra. He liked to call Doc Moo his “Son of the East”—a reference to Moo hailing from the Levant, a region whose name came from the Italian levante—“rising”—as in the rising of the sun in the east.
Now the old priest nodded toward the small sacristy window, outside of which the firehouse siren sounded a final salvo. “Sanguis exspectem,” he said.
My blood can wait.
“Es certus?”
Father Rossi nodded, switching to English. “You refused to join the Vigilance Committee, no?”
Doc Moo nodded. “That’s right, Father.”
The Sardinian gripped his arm. “Of this I am glad. But perhaps, Doctor, God placed you here today to hear these sirens, no? Someone who is not a member of the committee.” His hand tightened on Doc Moo’s arm—surprising strength from the small man. “Someone to stanch the spill of blood.”
Doc Moo nodded and began to pack his medical bag. The priest followed him out to his horse. Below, they could see men hurrying from all directions heading to the firehouse with their rifles. The old man stepped down and touched Altair, the white swell of his great chest. Then he looked away from town, toward the tent colony.
“Alis aquile,” he said.
On eagle’s wings.
IN TOWN, THE MEN of the Vigilance Committee felt their hearts strung high in their throats, as if they’d driven too fast over a sharp spine of railroad tracks and been launched weightless from their seats. They leapt from desks and counters and barber’s chairs, lifted on the very blasts of the siren. They tucked their ties between their shirt buttons and took up their rifles, slinging cartridge bandoliers over their suit jackets and dress shirts and work blouses. They kissed their wives and saluted their secretaries and ran outside, holding their hats down, making for the firehouse.
They’d heard story after story of the striking miners, tales of violence born in the tent colonies coughed up in the hollers and hanging from the hillsides. The hacked slopes were blistered with shoddy canvas tents, peopled with gaunt figures risen of every color and coast. Potshots had struck the cars of mine bosses and state police; bullets had perforated boxcars and passenger coaches that passed beneath the road.
Now the news came leaping down the streets, jumping ear to ear.
“You hear? Raiding party went up Lick Creek this morning, almost didn’t come back.”
“I heard the miners were banging damn pots and pans like sirens.”
“That’s right. Then this big Black one stepped out in his underclothes and threw down on them with a horse pistol.”
“He didn’t.”
“He did. Blasted a piece of brightwork right off the car.”
“They shoot him down?”
“They’d liked to. But the ridges opened up on them, snipers on both sides, shots smacking all around the car. The pistoleer vanished among the tents and the Bulldog stepped down from the car. Just stood there unfazed, what I heard, like he had on an ironclad slicker. Ordered his troopers to open up with those new Thompson guns they got.”
“Trench brooms?”
“That’s right. Strafed the hillsides till they went silent.”
“Then what?”
“Then they hightailed it back to town for reinforcements. Us.”
NOW THE WHOLE VIGILANCE Committee was riding in a convoy of Fords and Studebakers and Packards, wedged three abreast in the back seats with rifles propped upright between their knees, the barrels swaying like reeds in a stream. The twenty-some automobiles clattered and bounced, engines racing, their thin tires slurring and bumping up a rocky creek road that paralleled the Lick Creek tent colony.
In the back of one of the cars, an insurance broker sat jammed between a store clerk and a druggist. The latter two hadn’t stopped talking since they loaded into the Studebaker. The clerk shook his head. “Shiftless, what they are. Would rather whine and strike than earn a fair day’s wages.”
“Simple genetics,” said the druggist. “Violence and sloth, it’s in the blood of these hillbillies, handed down for generations. Then you got the Blacks from down South, don’t know how to work without a whip at their backs. Poles and Wops fresh off the boat, thinking this country owes them something. Far as I’m concerned, they don’t like it here they can go home.”
The clerk nodded and wiped his mouth. “We’ve let it go on long enough. It’s time they learned some law and order. We’ll put them in jail or back underground. Walking upright or laid flat in boxes, their choice.”
“Amen.”
The insurance broker lowered his head between them to pray. He asked God to give him courage and judgment, to help him act rightly in the face of whatever may come. To honor himself, his family name, and the people of his town. The car bounced hard through a rut and his brow pressed firmly, surely, against the barrel of his rifle. He pulled back to feel a thumb-size print of gun oil glistening in the middle of his forehead. As if he’d been anointed, given a blessing of some kind. A touch of holy oil.
He started to swipe it clean but didn’t, thinking of the conniption his wife would have if he stained another shirt. He touched his ribs. He’d left his handkerchief in his coat. He didn’t want to use his hand—he needed his fingers clean and dry, grippy on the gun. He thought of cowboys rubbing sand or dirt or clay between their hands before a fight. Now he understood.
So the mark was still there half an hour later when they stepped down from the cars at the top of the road and formed a skirmish line along the ridge, each rolling the heavy bolt of his rifle to chamber a round. Still there as they entered the woods on foot, in unison, state troopers strung throughout the line like infantry officers. They would come down on the tent colony from above, flushing the strikers into the open where they could be arrested or else.
The insurance man was handy with a rifle. There was a wood-paneled room in his home where the white skulls of stags hung from the walls, the thorny crowns of their antlers curling sharp and wild from their bony bosses—animals he and his forefathers had felled. But it had been years since his rifle put a trophy on the wall or food on the table. Now his family ate store-bought meat seven days a week—beef from the great Midwestern stockyards, inland seas of flesh where men in gum-rubber aprons swung sledges on killing floors awash in blood, crushing the skulls of tag-eared beeves. Now his belly pushed plump against his belt and his hands would blister from carrying this rifle for a single long afternoon.
Still, the thumb of Cosmoline gleamed over his brow like a benediction as he moved with the line of vigilantes descending the slope. He’d been too old for the Great War, but West Virginia simmered with insurrection. Law and order had to be maintained. He’d do his duty to protect his family from the violence festering on the edge of town, threatening to run wild through the streets.
They leapt across a small creek and passed through a grove of blighted chestnut trees, the trunks swollen and misshapen like the gangrenous limbs of a giant. Now the pale, pointed tents of the Lick Creek colony appeared in the narrow holler below them, pitched like the tattered wigwams of some heathen tribe. The thin spires of their many cookfires and stovepipes and burning trash coalesced into a ghostly cathedral of smoke, weightless over the encampment.