DOC MOO HAD SLEPT fitfully inside the wooden heat of the schoolhouse, listening to mice scamper about the rafters. When the miners had learned he was a medical doctor, they’d insisted he and Musa spend the night under the only roof about the camp, as if they were dignitaries, even though Moo had made it clear they’d be leaving at dawn.
“We’re planning to use this place as the infirmary,” said the miners, ignoring his protests.
Musa, on the other hand, seemed to sleep perfectly well, his hands crossed over his chest as he lay flat aback the teacher’s desk. Moo and Buddeea had many times caught the boy sleeping outside on the porch, seemingly immune to heat, cold, or insects. A hard little knot, he was. The toughest spot in the wood. Still, Moo didn’t think the boy ready to see what the world might reveal of itself through this mountain. Better to have a few more years unhaunted. He’d take him home at first light.
Finally Moo felt the weight of sleep falling over him, pulling down his eyelids. His mind let go, cut adrift, and he floated into strange lands of dream. Mount Lebanon under a veil of night darkness, the full moon flying high over those rugged mountains whose great cedars had sheltered his people for centuries, and then he was down beneath them, floating in the saddle, riding in the same militia band as his father, Maronite riders with long shotguns held across their knees and their mountain ponies passing through the great pillarlike trunks of the Cedars of God, strange glimmerings of moon-shadow playing across their shoulders, and he knew his father was leading these horsemen and he wanted to reach him. A longing in his chest. He wanted so badly to see his father again, as a young man or old, and he urged his horse on, toward the shadowy figure leading the riders—
“Papa,” whispered Musa, shaking him gently. Now louder: “Papa.”
Doc Moo jolted upright, the longing still in his chest. The schoolhouse windows had a pale glow and Musa was standing beside him.
“Something’s happened, Papa.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shots.”
Doc Moo rose and went to the schoolhouse window. The miners were stirring in the dawn, gray-blue shadows rising from spread coats and dewy canvas tarpaulins, many of them turning their heads toward the slopes of Blair Mountain.
“From Blair?”
Musa nodded. “Yes, sir. I reckon a mile, mile and a half at most. Pistols and at least one high-power.”
Doc Moo looked at his pocket watch. “We’ll wait twenty minutes for casualties, and then I take you home.”
Eighteen minutes later, two Black miners emerged from the woods, one of them carrying a wounded man across his shoulders. Doc Moo stood on the schoolhouse steps, watching them come. “Fetch my kit from the car,” he told Musa. “Also, clean water and an empty bucket, wherever you can find them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Others from the camp were flocking to the miners, pointing them toward the schoolhouse. They were nearly there before Doc Moo realized it was Big Frank carrying the wounded man on his shoulders—and it was one of the Hellfighter twins. The other brother was escorting them, a rifle in his hands, carrying their extra bedrolls and long guns strapped across his back.
Sweat streamed from Frank’s chin. “Where you want him, Doc?”
“Inside. On the teacher’s desk.”
Frank turned sideways to fit through the door and Doc Moo cleared the desk, making room to lay him out on top. The man had been shot in the chest and the round had exited through his shoulder blade. Blood in his mouth, coming down his chin. One of his lungs was likely punctured, filled with blood, and Doc Moo suspected extensive internal bleeding. He knew what he would have to do.
He began cutting away the man’s shirt and overalls. A woman came up, a miner’s wife. “I was a Red Cross nurse during the war.”
Doc Moo nodded. “Thank you. There are dressings in my bag there. Let’s get pressure on the wound.”
“Yes, sir.”
Doc Moo looked at Frank. He was covered in blood, breathing like a bellows. His eyes on the man he’d carried, the hole in his breast. Behind him, men were crowding the schoolhouse doors, some of them stepping inside to see the man struggling on the table.
“Frank, can you watch the door? We don’t need an audience.”
“Yes, sir, Doc.” The big man moved toward the schoolhouse entrance, shooing the onlookers outside.
Doc Moo took the wounded man’s hand. His fingertips were bullet-hard, callused from shovels and picks. His torso tightly wired, hardly an ounce of fat to hide the marvel of tendons and muscle beneath the skin, the bloody hole in his chest. On his arm, a tattoo of a coiled snake on a shield.
“Can you tell me your name, son?”
“Lacey,” he said. His eyes rolled back in his head like a drunk’s, a pair of yellowish slivers. After a moment, they found the doctor again. “My brother?”
“I’m here.” Bonney stepped forward to take his brother’s hand.
“Bonbon,” whispered Lacey. Then his eyes rolled back again and his hand went slack. His blood-slickened fingers slipped free.
Bonney looked up. “He dying, Doc?”
“Not if I can help it.” While the nurse kept pressure on the wound, Moo unrolled his belt of instruments on the table, scrubbed his hands, and took the scalpel from the roll. He was sterilizing it when Musa entered through the back door with a canteen and empty bucket.
“Water there on the corner, bucket at my feet.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now please wait outside.”
“Yes, Father.” He went back outside to wait on the rear stoop.
Doc Moo felt the soft spaces between the man’s ribs. He could feel the internal pressure between the bones, the blood distending the man’s thoracic cavity. He talked to him as he prepared to cut, though he knew the man was past the point of hearing. It was something his father had always done, talking to the animals whenever he had to treat them, to stitch up a wound or swab out an infection.
“This is called a thoracotomy,” he told the unconscious man. “It’s to relieve the pressure on your organs. I’m doing it to help you.”
Doc Moo cut between the third and fourth true ribs, a two-inch incision. A stream of blood came flowing from the man’s side, curling down his ribs and off the edge of the desk, splattering into the tin bucket Musa had set on the floor.
As the blood drained, Doc Moo exhaled and looked up at the nurse. She had a square jaw and lined face, her eyes hard and clear. “Thought I’d left the war behind,” she said. “Till the minute I got home.”
“Amen.”
Ten minutes later, Doc Moo walked out onto the schoolhouse stoop. He looked like a butcher, his once-white shirt slashed with blood. Hundreds of men were gathered, waiting to hear. They stood in their overalls and bandannas, holding their rifles, their mouths slightly parted. Their eyes on him. He worried at the power of his words, what fury they could ignite. Ten thousand men sweating kerosene, their lungs full of coal dust and blasting powder, and he held a match. He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his hands, bloodying the white linen, trying to find the words.
He looked out to the miners. “I’m sorry, boys. I did all I could. He’s gone.”
The men exploded with fury, bellowing and roaring, their rage rolling through the camp like thunder. Soon they were forming into columns and charging rifles, marching toward the slopes of Blair.
To Logan!
To Mingo!
Free our boys!
Let God take the rest!
Bonney had stayed beside his brother inside the schoolhouse. Now he emerged on the stoop next to Frank and Doc Moo. His face was stone beneath his tears. “You done what you could, Doc. Thank you. Now it’s our turn.”
They began to go, but Moo stayed Frank a moment, a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to go. You hauled that boy down off the mountain. You’ve done enough.”
The man’s nostrils were flared, his chest a bloody bulwark. Doc Moo could sense the fury inside him, smoldering, as if magma might burst from his skin.
“With respect, Doctor Moo, I’m just getting started.”
He walked down the schoolhouse steps after Bonney, joining a column of men already marching toward the mountain.