SID STOOD BEFORE THE United States Capitol, the slave-built facade of quarried Virginia stone dancing slightly over the vast green lawn, undulant in the sweltering heat of a D.C. summer. A great bastion, white and proud, broad-shouldered in the very center of the federal city. How often he seemed to find himself standing before such structures—buildings designed and constructed to appear stern and just and strong in paintings and photographs and the eyes of those who entered them.
Sid leaned and spat in the grass. Now, as he’d felt in the past, he sensed the deep and wide roots of the place, as if the basements and foundations spread miles wide beneath the earth, in vast hidden chambers, connecting at some black and utter depth to the courthouses whose own proud facades broke through the coal-rich earth of West Virginia like chiseled-down mountains. Every one of them trying to stare him down.
Sid straightened his jacket lapels and swaggered forth to testify before the Senate committee on the mine violence in West Virginia.
Hearing Before the Committee on Education and Labor
UNITED STATES SENATE
July 14, 1921
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Mr. Hatfield, you spoke about Mr. Felts shooting the mayor. How many shots did Albert Felts fire?
MR. HATFIELD: Well, I didn’t have time to count them.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: How many shots did Albert Felts fire?
MR. HATFIELD: I didn’t have time to count them. If you had been there I don’t think you could have counted them.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: You say he shot more than once?
MR. HATFIELD: I couldn’t say how many shots he shot.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: When you were tried you were defended by the attorneys for the United Mine Workers of America, were you not?
MR. HATFIELD: Mr. Houston and Mr. Burkinshaw.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: The United Mine Workers paid all of the expense of your defense, did they not?
MR. HATFIELD: I suppose they did.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Wasn’t it your defense that Albert Felts fired two shots, and wasn’t that the defense made by your lawyer, that he pulled out his pistol and shot Mayor Testerman, and then turned over his shoulder and shot at you? Wasn’t that the defense?
MR. HATFIELD: I believe that was the testimony of some of the witnesses.
[…]
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Mr. Hatfield, did you not within less than two weeks after Mayor Testerman was killed, marry his widow?
MR. HATFIELD: I did.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: And are you not now running his place of business?
MR. HATFIELD: I am.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Don’t you know, Mr. Hatfield, that a number of witnesses who testified before the grand jury, one of whom also testified against you in the last trial, have been assassinated?
MR. HATFIELD: I do not know that.
[…]
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Are you not under indictment in McDowell County, an indictment returning this week, charging you with a conspiracy, in connection with others, to blow up the coal tipple at Mohawk?
MR. HATFIELD: That is the first I heard of it.
[…]
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Are you not under indictment for knocking down Mr. P. J. Smith with a rifle, the man who now sits back of you?
MR. HATFIELD: Not as I know of.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: You were arrested, were you not?
MR. HATFIELD: No, sir, I was not.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: You did have a rifle with you, did you not?
MR. HATFIELD: Yes, sir.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: And you got into a controversy with him?
MR. HATFIELD: I slapped him down.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: And you hit him with a rifle, didn’t you?
MR. HATFIELD: No. I hit him, but not with no rifle.
[…]
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Have you not been instrumental in bringing a number of rifles into Matewan?
MR. HATFIELD: Yes, I sell rifles.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: Where did you get them?
MR. HATFIELD: From Cincinnati.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: How many did you bring in?
UNION LAWYER: I am going to object to this line of testimony.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: All right. He does not have to answer.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: I will ask you if you have not brought in and distributed through your place several hundred rifles since this trouble started?
UNION LAWYER: We object.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: You need not answer.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: That is not a violation of the law, Mr. Chairman.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: We are not going to insist on his answering.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: All right. A short time ago, since the establishment of military law, did not the military authorities seize from the Norfolk & Western Railway ten cases of rifles and ammunition that had been consigned to you?
UNION LAWYER: We object to that.
MR. HATFIELD: They did not.
COAL COMPANY LAWYER: At Bluefield?
MR. HATFIELD: They did not.
[…]
SENATOR: I want to ask you, before this killing, how long had you been chief of police of this town?
MR. HATFIELD: Going on to two years.
SENATOR: Had you ever been in other difficulties or shootings of any sort? I do not want to embarrass you, and if you do not want to answer the question, you need not.
MR. HATFIELD: Well, one time I had a little shooting match with a fellow by the name of Wilson, the mine foreman for Mr. Lindon.
SENATOR: How long ago has that been?
MR. HATFIELD: Why, something like five or six years ago.
SENATOR: Something like five or six years ago?
MR. HATFIELD: Yes, sir.
SENATOR: And from that time on you did not have any trouble?
MR. HATFIELD: No, sir.
SENATOR: Were you arrested for this shooting that took place several years ago?
MR. HATFIELD: I was not arrested, but I went and give up and was tried and found clear.
SENATOR: You were tried and come clear of that?
MR. HATFIELD: Yes, sir.
SENATOR: And that is the only previous difficulty you had had for which you have been tried?
MR. HATFIELD: It is all I had anywhere.
SENATOR: And you said that you had been marshal about six months?
MR. HATFIELD: No, going on two years.
[…]
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: What is your age?
MR. HATFIELD: Twenty-eight years old the 15th day of last May.
MOHAWK. SID LOOKED OUT the window of his room at the Hotel Harrington, just half a block from Pennsylvania Avenue. His temples throbbed. God-damned Mohawk. That indictment was the one surprise of the day’s proceedings. He knew the high-talking lawyers of the coal operators would try to stick him however they could. A lot of talk is what it was. They didn’t seem to understand that you needed a rope to hang a man or a gun to shoot him. That you couldn’t talk him to death, even if you could make him wish to die for want of silence.
But Mohawk stuck in his craw. Apparently, it was true. He’d been indicted on charges of attacking Mohawk Coal and Coke. The place had been shot up good last summer, left punctured and smoking on the hillside, the tipple dynamited—a response to the attempted murder of Big Frank Hugham. Sid welcomed the attack, but he’d been miles away at the time, at home in Matewan playing checkers with Ed. The indictment had come out of McDowell County, the same county where Frank had been attacked. It was a frame job, plain as day. A maneuver to draw him into enemy territory. Enemy streets, spies, courts—penning him like an animal.
That night, flat in his bed in the nation’s capital, Sid dreamed of fording the Tug Fork on horseback like so many Hatfields before him, bloody-minded on dawn raids, the green river coiling cool around his knees and the hard barrel of the animal wide as a dreadnought beneath him. His guns blazing white-hot at his hips, as if newly forged. He and the horse rose smoking from the far side of the river like a single beast and entered the gates of the enemy stronghold, the guards pulling back their rifles and setting them spear-straight at their heels to allow his passage, their eyes gone wide and strange, their mouths slack, as if witnessing the rise of a centaur or other beast of mystery from the storied waters of the Tug Fork.
Sid clopped down the paved streets in the dawn, heading for the courthouse, whose square bright turret stood against a backdrop of dark hills still shrouded in mist. The light came slantwise through town and Sid’s shadow, lean and black, skated across the brick and clapboard facades on the far side of the street. He was bare-chested, his pale torso zigzagged with blood or war paint like some savage come newly blooded from the wilderness. The town was full of shadows that darted at the edges of his vision, slipping from alleyways or attic windows just before he could catch them.
As he passed through the streets, he began to feel a heat building in his hands, pulsing through his palms. Hotter, hotter, throbbing in time with his heartbeat, quickening as he neared the courthouse at the center of town. A searing white pain, cracking into his bones, as if his marrow might burst through his flesh like tree sap in a wildfire. Finally he released the grips of his pistols and looked down at his hands. His palms were blistered and red, stamped as if with a branding iron, bearing the angry red shapes of running ponies.
When he looked up again, the town was gone. He was riding upon a vast prairie of stone, dead flat for miles, where no green thing grew. In the far, far distance, he saw hills standing black as night, hunched beneath the dark bellies of flickering storm clouds.
Toward these he rode, his scorched palms held smoking at his sides.