NIGHTFALL. MATEWAN WAS HAUNTED, the streets heavy with dread. Fear floated in the very atmosphere—Doc Moo could almost taste it, like bile on the back of his tongue. He’d overseen the laying out of the bodies on spare doors from the hardware store, readying them for the No. 7 train bound for the county seat. Their hands folded across their chests, their hats set over their faces. He’d had to chase away some of the town’s little runarounds who dared one another to run up and spit on the corpses or steal their hats.
Seven detectives lay dead, including two of the three Felts brothers, along with two miners, one a teenager. The mayor would die before the night was out. At least ten killed. If Doc Moo wasn’t mistaken, that made Matewan the bloodiest shoot-out in American history to date, even bloodier than the gunfight at the O.K. Corral or any of the others he’d read about in Wild West Weekly—one of his son’s magazine subscriptions, which Moo read at the kitchen table when he couldn’t sleep.
Worse, more violence might be boring toward them. Rumor had another gang of enforcers en route from the Baldwin-Felts headquarters. A kill squad. Whispers came floating down the dark streets, jumping from mouth to mouth:
It’s another bunch comin’ on the night train, armed with submachine guns.
Tom Felts himself leading them, brung the coldest mothers he’s got.
He’s like to be in a revenging mood, his two brothers laid out.
Doc Moo stood on the platform as the westbound train chugged out of town, carrying off the corpses. He was in his undershirt, with blood dried crusty along his arms and Musa’s possibles bag looped over his shoulder.
Some people thought of doctors as prim men in offices who hardly touched people except with palpating fingertips and stethoscopes. But his own father had fought in a Christian cavalry unit during the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, when the Maronite peasantry rose up against the Druze lords, and he’d seen the work of the battle surgeons firsthand—men who sawed through the bones of shrieking soldiers and dropped their gangrenous limbs in bloody buckets, just as their comrades were doing in America at the very same time.
His father had gone to war carrying a double-barreled shotgun with rabbit-ear triggers, long as a broadsword, and a fat scimitar on his belt, riding out from the mountain village of Hadath al-Jebbeh, where the family had roots going back to the 1100s. It overlooked the Qadisha Valley—the valley of the saints—a land of steep stone cliffs and mountain caves, which had sheltered Christian mystics and monasteries for centuries.
As a boy, Doc Moo had stared for hours at the ancient daguerreotype of his father as a high-chinned young horseman, posing between two other men with broad black mustaches and crossed bandoliers, their billowy pantaloons tucked into knee-high riding boots. Later, the man had been tasked an assistant in the medical corps due to the crude veterinary skills he’d learned on the farm.
“Physicians are respected in every country and culture of the world,” he’d told his son. “Because of their learning and the lives they save, yes, but also the blood, disease, and death they daily face.”
So, even as a boy, Doc Moo had known the dark valleys into which the path of medicine might lead him. It already had. He’d come to the Tug Valley at the invitation of a distant relative, Mr. Youssef Khoury, an early peddler who’d walked the backroads selling wares and sharpening knives, then opened a dry goods store in Williamson around 1900. Wheeling, in the north of the state, had a Maronite population of three hundred and a Maronite Catholic church—one of the only such churches in the country. Khoury hoped to build a similar community.
Doc Moo, as a young physician, had found as brutal a world as he could imagine, a land torn bloody on the backs of the railroads and coal mines. Injuries of incredible violence, horrific as battle wounds, and a feudist mindset that hadn’t quite vanished with the end of the Hatfield-McCoy War. Though Khoury passed away not long after Moo’s arrival, the man’s reputation paved his entry into the community. Many of the miners distrusted the company doctors, who seemed more interested in the health of the company than the worker—so Moo was busy from the start, and the blood never ceased, running like the Tug itself.
Now he looked out at the ridges above town, high and bluish in the night, hissing with cicadas. The town of Matewan seemed so small in comparison, a cluster of brick and clapboard buildings crouched along the river.
On nights like these, Moo could squint his eyes and imagine the surrounding hills as the enormous swells of a great dark sea, the town floating like a raft amid those angry waters, and he thought of the night his New Orleans–bound steamer had run into a storm off Cuba. The hull of the ship groaned and thundered, the decks heaving, and he pulled himself green-faced to a porthole to find lightning flickering across vast mountains of seawater, their peaks risen white-capped, threatening to roll and smash the vessel.
“Doc?”
Moo started, turning to find Sid beside him. The young police chief thumbed up the brim of his bullet-shot hat. “Ain’t meant to sneak up on ye, Doc. Not the night for it, I don’t reckon.” Sid squinted up at the ridges above town. “I just wished to thank you for what you done for Cabell today.”
Doc Moo nodded. “I only wish there was more I could do. At least the morphine will have eased his final hours some.”
Sid shook his head. “Gutshot.” His teeth flashed in grimace. “You seen a worser way for a man to go down?”
Doc Moo thought of the breech births he’d attended, women shrieking in one-room cabins, hemorrhaging, bleeding to death while six or eight or ten children huddled in the barn or corn crib.
“Not for a man,” he said.
Sid’s temples flickered and he looked up the dark railroad tracks. He was quiet for a time, his jaw muscles working. “Might could be a second fracas coming down the line. Got it on good authority Tom Felts boarded the train in Bluefield with a whole gang of thugs.” He turned to the doctor. “Think you could stick around case we get any more wounded?”
Doc Moo nodded. “Already planning on it.”
Sid patted his arm and looked back up the tracks. “Thank ye, Doc.”
Doc Moo left the chief at the station and walked back down Mate Street, hailing one of the town’s young barefoots. He paid the boy a dime to run the news home that he wouldn’t be back till dawn. “Don’t tell them what’s happened down here,” he said. “I don’t want them worrying all night over it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy. He looked down at his bare feet a moment. “But it was a lot of shooting, Doctor Moo. They might could of heard it even up there at your place. What if Missus Moo asks me ’bout it?”
“Tell her the truth if she asks. But leave out the part about this new squad coming in on the night train.” He looked to the spot where the corpses had been laid out. “Just tell her we have grievous injuries down here.”
“Grievous,” said the boy, nodding, committing the word. “Grievous, yes, sir.”
Buddeea, his wife, wouldn’t be pleased to be kept out of the loop, but he’d rather endure her anger than give her another sleepless night—God knew she’d had plenty given his trade. She was tough—tougher than he was, probably. Tough enough to defy her strict Maronite father when he threatened to send her back to the Beqaa Valley if she tried to marry the young doctor she’d met at his tailor shop in Louisville—despite the fact that the young man was, by blood and confirmation both, a good Maronite. A member of the same Eastern Catholic church, in full communion with the Holy See. He said she wasn’t ready to marry yet.
At seventeen years old, in a country still foreign to her, Buddeea had climbed out of her bedroom window, descended to the street by a rope, and eloped on horseback with that young doctor. She’d worked as his nurse before their first child was born, becoming no stranger to blood. Still, Moo would rather she saved her strength for what could be headed their way.
He unhitched his white gelding, Altair—“flying eagle” in Arabic—and led him down Mate Street, stabling him safely at the town livery. The horse was his one extravagance—a lordly charger, sixteen hands tall, ever ready to ford rivers and thunder through the night.
“You’ll be safe here,” he told the horse, filling a sack of oats.
Altair snorted, unhappy to be left out of the action.
When Moo got back, Sid and a local sheriff were standing side by side at the edge of the tracks, deputizing a long line of miners and townsmen, each holding his hat in his hands as he took the oath. Meanwhile, Ed Chambers from Chambers’ Hardware handed out rifles and the ladies from the Dew Drop Inn ladled supper out of a big pot.
Moo stopped in at his office, where he cleaned the dried blood from his hands and arms, watching the liver-dark threads of the mayor’s wound crawl down the drain. Then he changed into a clean shirt and looked at the shoulder bag on his desk.
“Possibles,” he said, packing it with trauma supplies—extra gauze, bandages, morphine ampoules, and tourniquets. Then he climbed to the roof of the building, where men were already posted with rifles. A heavy quiet up here. The station lights hovered in amber orbs of mist and the rails shone slick as gun barrels.
Muhanna rolled himself a cigarette—a rare indulgence—then lay flat on his back on the dirty cinder of the rooftop despite his clean shirt, pillowing his head on his black medicine bag, his hands crossed over his chest. He watched the smoke swirl upward out of his throat, climbing like prayers into the sky. He closed his eyes, feeling the tickle of misting rain on his cheeks.
He woke to a distant whistle. One of the miners squatted at his shoulder, rousing him. “Doctor Moo? She’s roundin’ the bends now.”
Muhanna duckwalked to the edge of the roof and lay prone beside the miner, setting his medicine bag at his elbow. The pale eye of the midnight train came burning toward them, smoking like a meteor, the firebox roaring and the black chimney of the engine blowing fat blooms of coal-smoke between the ridges.
Miners crouched in second-story windows, behind cords of ricked firewood, in the forked branches of trees on the far side of the tracks. They huddled behind rooftop parapets and bulwarks of feed sacks, waiting, their hearts hammering like the single giant piston of the coming engine. Doc Moo knew they were imagining the Bull Moose Special with guns ablaze, wondering if some new death-bringer could be hurtling toward them, ready to tear apart their town like a team of steam-hammers. Brick dust and broken glass, blood pooling in the streets.
Sid was standing before the stationhouse, pale and lean, his face lined hard despite his scant years. He’d be first to meet the train. His palms rested on the curved butts of his pistols, patting them lightly, as if they were hot to the touch. Some folks said he could toss a potato high against the sun and split its belly with a bullet. Some said he could do it with either hand. That his fists were quick as a prizefighter’s, and they shot fire.
The miner beside Doc Moo stared doe-eyed at the young police chief. He licked his lips and spoke softly, as if reciting some prayer of faith. “Let them sons of bitches come.”
The midnight engine came hooting around the bend, huffing and smoking, roaring into town. Rifle barrels swung from alleys and windows and rooftops like steely antennae, following the cars, but the train never slowed, highballing past the station at full speed. A flash of hard faces and dark hats through the windows of the passenger coach. Sid held down his hat with one hand as the train blew past. His mouth open, his metal teeth catching the station light.
“Smilin’ Sid,” whispered the miner. “Terror of the Tug.”
The Baldwins had thought better of stopping in Matewan tonight, it seemed—or the engineer had refused. But Doc Moo feared they’d be back, and soon. Blood came of blood, and he was but one man to stanch it.