MISS BEULAH SAT IN her rocker knitting, listening to the sounds of the holler. A band of coyotes yowled high up along the ridge, wailing like spirits through the night, and she could hear hushed voices coming from the other tents. Somewhere in the camp, a woman was sobbing, muffling her cries into a quilt or pillow.
Miss Beulah whispered a prayer for whoever was hurting so bad.
Lately, she’d been staying up as late as she could, awake in her rocker until her thoughts turned strange, mingling with dreams, and the weight of weariness carried her to bed. Otherwise, she couldn’t hardly stomach the emptiness of the tent, the damp and smell of her own sour bed. When they’d lost Evie, the lonesomeness had been big as the world, bitter as every winter that ever was, and now she was starting to feel a woe like that again, pressing on her chest like an anvil, trying to sink its way in. It hurt sometimes just to breathe.
It was Sid, just buried, and it was Frank. It was knowing they could do her boy just like they’d done Hatfield. Hell, they’d tried already. It was knowing he could never come home, not for good. He’d be hounded always, wherever he went, same as whatever prey those coyotes were chasing.
Her chin dipped to her chest. Once, again.
Her eyes closed. In her dream, she saw a wolf trotting along the spine of the ridge, turning now and again to look over his shoulder, to listen for the cries of the hounds and coyotes always on his heels, haunting his tracks through the world. He was on the trail of something himself, scenting his way through the darkness. Soon he was descending the creek toward her, his broad shoulders burling over the stones. Then he was out of the trees, following the dark jag of creek into the narrow holler, the high banks hiding him as he stepped from stone to stone, leaving no tracks. A big wolf, big as a man. He rose up out of the creek on two legs and Miss Beulah started awake, knowing already who it was before she even lifted her head.
“Grandboy,” she said.
Frank knelt down before her, bowing his head to her knees. Same as he’d done as a boy, when his daddy disappeared. Same as he’d done as a man, when Evie died.
They wept together.
“You come to say goodbye,” she said.
“I got to,” he said, his great chest throbbing against her shins.
She ran her long nails through his hair, scratching his scalp. Same as she’d done for his granddaddy. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
THE BAD SEVEN MADE their way toward the Redneck army under cover of darkness, hitching rides on freight cars and coal hoppers, walking wagon-roads where the grass grew tall between the wheel tracks. They cradled their rifles across their chests and took to the trees at the passing of horsemen and motorcars, wary of state troopers and vigilance patrols.
Soon they began to meet others marching in the same direction, wearing neckerchiefs and carrying rifles. They were streaming out of coal camps and tent colonies all over the state, heading for a certain dark fold of hills near the village of Marmet. The Redneck encampment.
From there, this miners’ army would have to cross more than fifty miles of hard mountain country to reach the Tug Valley, where Smilin’ Sid had been shot down in cold blood and hundreds of miners were still in jail, imprisoned for weeks without charge. A terrain made as if with God’s claw hammer, stove with dark hollers and hatchet ridges and tooth-breaking roads. On the way, they’d have to march through the territory of Sheriff Don Chafin. “The Czar of Logan,” as he was called—a bull-cheeked lawman known to receive a cent from the coal operators for every ton of coal that came out of Logan County.
A fortune.
Already, Chafin had stood wide-thighed before the newspaper reporters, his fancy fedora set dainty atop his head, his bowtie knotted hard at his heavy throat. “No armed mob will cross the Logan County line.”
The Czar carried a pistol with twelve notches filed into the receiver, one for every man he’d killed—enough to make a saw file, men whispered—and maintained a small army of deputies and undercover agents who rode every train in and out of the county, hassling anyone suspected of Union business or sympathies. His men had pistol-whipped reverends for speaking well of labor unions, planted moonshine stills under the homes of Union miners, and fed prisoners plates of beans mixed with crushed glass, too fine to detect, so they writhed in torment for hours before they died.
Two years ago, these stories had whipped the state’s miners into a frenzy. Five thousand of them had come together to cut down the Czar for once and all. Only the state’s promise of a special commission to investigate the abuses of the coal operators had stopped them from marching into Logan to hang the man from the nearest tree branch or lamppost. Nothing had come of the investigation—the state had appointed the Bulldog to head it.
This time they wouldn’t fall victim to more false promises, the slick words of politicians and state officials bought and paid for by King Coal. They squatted around hundreds of campfires, cradling their rifles like lean foundlings of steel and wood, their pipes and cigarettes pinched between gnarled fingers. Frank and the Bad Seven listened to them, hearing the words of these men like their own.
Constitution don’t near touch these hills, seems like.
It’s back to a monarchy, like Revolutionary times.
Time to march on King Coal, chop the legs out under his throne.
They spat hissing into the flames. This time, it would take an act of God to stop them.