THE MCDOWELL COUNTY COURTHOUSE stood like an ivy-clad fortress before Sid. Stone ramparts thrust from the coal-rich earth; rough walls covered in climbing ivies like the storied colleges of the North. The clock tower rose high among the surrounding hills, a four-cornered spear with white clock dials and a single small cross perched from the sharp slate point of its roof.
Sid squeezed his hands at his sides, then opened them. He was unarmed, his hands strangely light without the weight of shooting irons hooked across the palms, almost buoyant. Hands that could pat the heads of dogs or children, squeeze the neck of a loved wife or son. Hands that could do the gentler work of men, unburdened by the need to speak fire from each fist.
Back in Washington, he’d sought counsel from his friend Senator Montgomery, once the miners’ great hope for governor: “My advice, Sid, submit peaceably to the Mohawk charges. Leave the guns at home. Act as a law-abiding citizen and you’ll be treated as such. The rule of law will prevail. I have to believe that, even in McDowell County.”
Sid had turned and squinted out the senator’s office window. A short walk and a man could touch the white marble monuments of the young republic, cool despite the summer sun.
“All right.”
Today, his lawyer would request a change of venue, a motion to move the trial out of this enemy stronghold where the coal operators had hands in every office and men on every street. Already their party had been tailed. On the train, at breakfast, outside their hotel. Baldwin thugs, sure as sugar was sweet.
Sid had smiled at them, then spat between his teeth.
Now, standing across the street from the courthouse, he squinted up at the shaggy green walls, the louvered chamber of the belfry. Jessie stood beside him, along with Sid’s best friend and checkers adversary, Ed Chambers, and Ed’s wife, Sallie. A young Mingo deputy, their bodyguard, trailed a few steps behind them, his thumbs hooked on his belt, one of Sid’s big pistols hanging from his hip. Ford touring cars and runabouts were parked along the far curb, their ribbed convertible tops latched tight in case of rain, and Sallie carried an umbrella. Everyone seemed worried of showers today despite the present sun.
Beyond the automobiles stood an eight-foot stone retaining wall that kept the high green mount of the courthouse lawn from spilling over onto the sidewalk and street. The stone-built place looked proud of itself, standing tall and wooly-green on its little hill, the dormers studded with tiny crosses. The front steps rose to the shadowy alcove of the entrance, dark as the tunnel to the other side of a mountain.
Sid’s hands were humming, so strangely light. He spread his fingers wide at his sides. So many things such hands could do but shovel and hammer and kill. The thought of flight drifted through his mind, that deftness of touch. He sensed even now that he was less a man than a vessel, a conduit hard and true enough for forces greater than himself, like hot magma shot through the pipe of a volcano. Like a gun.
“Well.” He stepped into the street.
Sid and the others were at the first landing of the courthouse steps when they spotted a party of their fellow codefendants coming down the sidewalk, still some distance away. The sight whelmed Sid with warmth. Familiar faces, encountered far from home. His hand, freed of the strong gravity of a pistol, lifted high from his belt to hail them, his fingers open. His smile toothy and wide, like a boy’s.
As if at his signal, the sky cracked open and the first round hit his chest like a hammer, driving white-hot into the meat of him, his deepest places. Then another and another, barked red-mouthed from that tunnel at the top of the courthouse steps, a sudden hayfork of lead that lifted him straight from his heels, weightless for a moment, angel-light, almost flying—then dropped him onto the landing below. The last of his heart was tumbling out of his shirtfront and rolling over his hands, pattering all across the naked stone. And he thought: Rain.
THE SCREAMING OUTSIDE OF Sid’s dark-gone skull had not abated. Baldwin gunmen were everywhere. They’d come out of the shadows on every side. The young bodyguard pulled Jessie shrieking from her husband’s riddled body and hustled her down the street to the sheriff’s office, where they found a note pasted on the door stating that the McDowell County sheriff was out of town on personal leave. The office closed, locked. Jessie kicked and hammered at the door, howling, as if Sid might still be alive on the other side.
The young bodyguard held his face in his hands. He’d been tarrying at the bottom of the steps, assuming his job was done, his charges delivered safely to court, when he sensed the heat of Sid’s dark gun on his hip, blue-black and radiant, like he’d left it out in the sun. He was looking down at the piece when he heard the shots.
Back on the landing, Sallie Chambers lay humped on top of her husband’s body, screaming, roaring through snotty threads stretched across the black oval of her mouth. She was turning out the pockets of Ed’s coat and pants, coins and toothpicks and lint, showing how he’d been unarmed when one of the Baldwins, after shooting Sid, had run down the courthouse steps, reached across her chest, and fired straight into Ed’s neck, then followed his somersaulting body down the steps. He’d knelt to place his pistol in Ed’s ear, underhand, like a doctor taking a reading, and blasted his brains across the stone.
Now the man jabbed a finger at her. “Get her out of here.”
Other agents, their biceps bunched hard under their coat sleeves, hooked her under the shoulders and ripped her screeching and wailing from her husband, her face a wrenched fist of agony, as if they were tearing her guts out on the landing.
Even as Sallie was being pulled from her husband, a cold and alien pistol, full of empty shell casings, was being fit into Sid’s still-warm hand. He no longer smiled, his lungs coughed red over his golden teeth. As Sallie’s hands were ripped from the lapels of her husband’s coat, she looked up to see one of the gunmen, a man she recognized as one of the Baldwins who’d survived the Battle of Matewan.
“We ain’t come down here for this!” she screamed.
The man shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We ain’t come up to Matewan for this, neither.”
“Yes, you did!” she screamed. “That’s God-damned right what you come for!”