DOC MOO DROVE THROUGH the night, hunched at the wheel of the Ford, straining to see washouts and rockslides and fallen trees. He rarely drove the car, finding Altair a much better conveyance for the rough terrain of the mountains, the rutted roads and rocky trails, but the four-wheeled machine could serve as an ambulance in a pinch.
Nearer to Logan, he twice encountered blockades, men with rifles and red bandannas who stood behind mule-carts, letting him pass after a cursory search of the vehicle. As a medical doctor, he could cross more freely through the lines.
“Thank ye, Doc, though it’s gonna be them Got-damned Whites in want of doctoring. No disrespect.”
“None taken.”
Moo had spent much of the night circling wide around Logan County, intending to come down on Blair Mountain from the north—the side held by the miners. Faintly, he thought he could make out the double hump of Blair Mountain in the distance, darker against the dark sky, though he couldn’t be sure. He knew he must be close to the encampment, though he hadn’t seen a soul in miles. The road was rocky, little more than a damp creekbed carved by spring freshets. He was just thanking God for his good luck—not a single blowout on the drive—when he rounded a bend to find a fallen tree blocking the road.
A chestnut. One of the old-growth giants that somehow escaped the saws and axes of the previous century’s timbering interests, only to succumb to the blight. A cankered tower, fallen. Still, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been helped along, felled across the road for the purpose of ambush. He cut the engine, killed the lights. The darkness swarmed in, the hissing roar of katydids and cicada. There was a pressure in the atmosphere, a tension—he could feel it pressing against his chest. He sensed he was not alone.
Psychosomatic, he told himself. Inner conflict projected into the physical body.
He took the flashlight from the leather compartment hanging on the inside of the door, tested the lamp against his hand, and stepped down from the car. As a doctor, he’d always felt clothed in a cloak of protection—the high regard that humankind had held for his profession since ancient times. But that cloak had worn thin over these past months—especially after his run-in with the vigilance men at the foot of Lick Creek. Now, unarmed in the darkness, he felt naked.
He was out of Mingo. Here his face was not recognized and his name carried no weight. His heart was thumping in his chest; his respiration had doubled. Deliberately, he slowed his breathing, deepened it. He knew that psychosomatic phenomena worked both ways. Physical stillness could be projected back into the nerves, the mind. He made himself stand still for ten long breaths, then approached the tree.
Stories told of old-growth trees that took ten men to encircle their trunks, arms spread and hands clasped, and Doc Moo had taken his family to see the Mingo Oak at the Trace Fork of Pigeon Creek—a tree said to be the oldest, largest white oak in all the world. Almost two hundred feet tall and thirty feet in girth, towering limb-spread against the sky like the tree of another age, which it was.
The chestnut before him was pulpy and ruined; it reminded him of the great, gangrenous limb of a giant. Still, a smart bushwhacker would fell just such a tree to fool his quarry. He put his hand on the limb. The wood was soft, like flesh.
Doc Moo realized the car might fit beneath the slanted trunk if one of the main branches were cut away. He went to the storage bed mounted at the rear of the car and paused, listening to the mountain night. Then he began unbuttoning the leather boot stretched over the bed to retrieve his ax.
“Hello, Papa.”
“Ya eadra!” Oh Virgin. Moo leapt backward with fright, his hands clutched over his heart as Musa sat upright from the storage box.
“What the hell are you doing here, son?”
The boy stepped down from the bed and adjusted the possibles bag slung from his shoulder. He looked hard-browed at their surroundings, then to the stars, then back to the road—establishing the cardinal directions, his father knew, something the boy could do at a glance, day or night. “I heard Mama get that telephone call from Father Rossi and knew you’d be coming here. I didn’t want you coming alone.”
“Me? You didn’t want me coming alone?” Moo was irate, all but spitting with fury. “This is not a game, son. You hear me? Not one of your Westerns or pulp novels. Men have been killed already, and I fear it’s just the start. This is no place for a boy. None.” He set his hand to his belt. “I ought to lash the Devil from you.”
Musa came forward, head down. “I know, Papa. I’m truly sorry. I am. I accept whatever punishment you see fit.” He looked up, innocent-eyed. “Though a wise man once told me it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
“Al’aama.” He’d told the boy that not two months ago, when the pair of them had ventured across the property line on the eastern edge of their land to pick their game sacks full of ripe blackberries on a morning they’d gone hunting and the turkeys had stood them up—putting the doctor in a mood.
“I am taking you back at once. And you will be confined to the house until I see fit to unground you. No more of your barefoot, carefree days in the woods.”
Musa winced. To him, a punishment worse than any whipping. “If that’s your wish, Papa, I understand. Though if it helps, I did just ride several hours confined in the trunk of an automobile?”
“By your own volition, son. No, it doesn’t help.” Moo turned and looked back the way they’d come, the utter darkness of the road. He shook his head.
Musa spoke up again. “Since we’re so close to the Redneck camp, perhaps it would be better to spend the night there and travel home in the morning?”
Doc Moo looked at his son. “How do you know we’re close?”
The boy looked to the sky. “I believe those are the lights of Logan town to the south of us, on the other side of that ridgeline.” He pointed to a subtle blush of light on the underside of the clouds. A yellowish glow, as from streetlamps and porchlights. “Perhaps the roads will be safer come morning.”
Doc Moo growled. He couldn’t argue with the boy’s logic. It was a miracle they’d had no blowouts, breakdowns, or accidents on the way here given the poor state of the roads, the lack of visibility, and the patrols.
“First we have to get through this tree,” he said. “Fetch the ax.”
Musa straightened. “Yes, sir.” He fished the large felling ax from the bed, slipped the leather sheath from the blade, and approached the chestnut. The pair of them were standing there, appraising the immensity of the task, when Musa touched his father’s arm and nodded back up the road. “Someone’s coming, Papa.”
Before Moo could ask how the boy could know such a thing, a band of shadows emerged from the darkness. A crew of miners, their dark overalls crisscrossed with bandoliers and rifle slings. Their leader had a long telescoped rifle cradled against his chest.
“I’m Pope,” he said. “And these here are the Coal River Hellcats. You on your way to the Redneck camp?”
Doc Moo nodded. “I’m a physician.”
The man named Pope clucked his tongue, squinting one eye at the big chestnut. “Well, let’s see if we can’t get this tree out your way then.”
As if at his command, the miners parted and a pair of Black men came forward. One was old, stooped and bowlegged, and the other little more than Musa’s age. A teenager. The older man eyed the tree, palming it here and there like a sick body. Then he began drilling holes in the trunk with an augur. Meanwhile, the boy rolled blasting powder into fused paper cartridges and inserted them with a ramrod, gently, as if priming an old muzzleloader.
At Pope’s request, Doc Moo reversed the car to a safe distance and the rest of the Hellcats took cover behind trees or rocks or the car itself.
“Fire in the hole!”
The boy lit the fuses and dropped down into the roadside ditch as the lines crackled, the sparks disappearing into the trunk. A moment later, the charges blew in neat succession, blasting great chunks from the tree. When the air cleared, a notch wide enough for a car lay smoking in the road.
The Hellcats cleared the charred debris and stood aside, saluting Doc Moo and Musa as they drove through the gap and continued on toward Blair Mountain, the powder-smoke trailing them into the darkness.