DOC MOO WAS HELPING load the mule-cart with the last of Miss Beulah’s belongings, lashing them in place for the rough journey up to the Lick Creek tent colony above town. Her grandson Frank had brought the borrowed cart down from the camp, where the Union kept it handy to assist with evictions. He was a burly man, a coal hewer known for his strength in the mines, slinging a sharpened pick into the raw belly of a coalface hundreds of times each day, tearing the black guts from the earth. Not tall but wide, built like a fireplug. His muscles bucked beneath his loose cotton shirt.
“You ain’t got to stay, Doc. I got this.”
His wife, Evie, had been the teacher at the coal camp’s colored school, well-respected in the local community. But she’d contracted the flu during the Great Influenza of 1918, during the deadly second wave of the epidemic late that year, and Doc Moo had been all but helpless as the secondary lung infection—pneumonia—starved her body of oxygen, as it had so many millions that year. A pair of dark blotches appeared on her cheekbones and then crept into her fingers, toes, nose, ears—heliotrope cyanosis, the purplish-blue coloration of dying tissue. Frank and Doc Moo had been sitting on either side of her bed the night she’d died.
Now the doctor shook his head, tightening a knot. “Least I can do. I just wish I could’ve stopped them. I shouldn’t have left to go up to the super’s office.”
Miss Beulah looked down at the doctor. “Don’t you go double-guessing what you done, Doctor Moo. No way them thugs was going to let me alone, no matter what you said.”
She was sitting up on the wagon seat, her swollen feet propped on the footboard, her rocking chair lashed upside down on top of some packing crates in the bed. Up the dirt street, other families were loading their possessions onto carts or wagons, errant towers of chairs and tables and cookpots, candleholders and milk crates and rumpled bedding. A woman was weeping in Italian, trying to pick seeds from the mud—heirloom parsley and beans from the Old Country, which the Baldwins had cast out.
Miss Beulah jutted her chin at the mule standing patiently in the traces, sucking her teeth. “Fact is, we ain’t but brutes to them, Doctor. There’s the crux of it. No more’n beasts of burden for King Coal. My husband was working a drift mine in Pike County back in niney-nine and the foreman had him put iron helmets on the driving mules cause he was afraid of a collapse. Husband asked why the miners didn’t get helmets, too. Foreman said, ‘Kill a man and we can hire another. But you got to buy the mule.’” She shook her head. “If that’s how the foreman thinks, imagine the gun thugs. They was on a mission to turn us out today and not a thing in this world was like to stop them. Not you nor me nor they own mamas if they was there. Onliest thing them thugs seem to understand is the pointy end of a gun.”
Frank nodded from the other side of the cart, his big arms snapping tight a knot. “Maybe that’s how we ought to be talking to them, then.”
Miss Beulah snapped her head around at him. “The hell we ought, boy. I don’t want to hear none of that talk, specially not in front of the doctor. A healing man.”
Frank held up his hands like the old woman was pointing a gun at him. “Sorry, Mama-B. Not every day a man’s got to swallow his grandmama getting throwed out in the rain.”
Miss Beulah clucked. “Try being the grandmama.”
Now she opened the large sack of wares on her lap, rummaging with one hand. “Here now, Doctor, I almost forgot I had something for you today. For that boy of your’n. Them thugs ’bout made me forget.” She unfolded a patchwork bag with a single thick shoulder strap. “What we have here’s a possibles bag, Doctor. Just like the frontiersmen used to carry slung over one shoulder. You said your boy got some ridge runner in him, would rather traipse about them woods than sit in a schoolhouse. Well, there’s worse things, in my experience. But when he goes a-traipsing he better have a bag to hold his possibles, whatever he might need if these hills try and catch him out. Fire-striker and tinderbox, compass and cup and fishing hooks, candle stump and edibles and punkie dope. All he might need. Kept in one bag so it’s always there.”
Doc Moo took the bag from her, spreading it between his hands. It was perfect for his son, Musa, whose heroes were woodsmen like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and Kit Carson—deadeye scouts and rangers who’d worn animal skins and slept under the stars most nights, or so the dime novels told it.
“Miss Beulah, you didn’t have to do this. Musa will love it.”
“Least an old woman can do. Got to pay you some way for coming up here out your way. Now it might be patchwork, but she’s double-stitched with denim gussets. Like to see somebody less than John Henry rip it sunder.”
Doc Moo slung the bag over his own shoulder, trying it on. There was even a buckle to adjust the length of the strap. “His mother and I will feel better knowing he’s got what he needs when he heads off in the woods.”
Miss Beulah nodded. “I might not have growed up in these hills, but I learnt enough in my day to know you best respect them. They got everything you need to survive and double what you don’t, specially these days. Used to be you just had your cold air, your rattler snakes, your panther cats. Now you got your Baldwins and blockaders crawling around ever damn street and crick.” She sucked her teeth, squinting at the steep green sides of the holler, the heavy mist. “Rather have them old she-bears and catamounts still around stead of these damn thugs think they own the place.”
“Amen,” said Frank, coming around the cart to Doc Moo. “We best be getting on, free up the cart for the next family.” He never blamed the doctor for the death of his wife, but there’d been a heaviness between them ever since. A mountain of trauma, unspoken.
Now he held out his hand, looking Doc Moo in the eye. “Thank you again, Doc.”
“You’re welcome.”
The big man climbed up next to Miss Beulah and slapped the reins. Doc Moo waved to them as the cart went rumbling up the rough dirt street, passing between the close rows of coal-camp houses. Frank’s mother had died in childbirth, he knew, and Miss Beulah had raised the boy after his father—her son—had disappeared, some said at the hands of Baldwin thugs, though no body was ever found. Now they sat side by side on the wagon seat. Big man and little lady, but with something of the same shape to them, the rake of their shoulders.
They’d just passed into the mists above the camp, becoming hardly more than shadows, vanishing, when Doc heard the first pop from the direction of town—a single pistol shot, like the first rivet or button popping from a seam, and then the rest of them broke loose from the valley floor, busting like a hundred sutures from a wound.
He swung into the saddle and steered his horse for town, heeling him for speed.