DOC MOO STOOD ON the schoolhouse steps. Aeroplanes were wheeling over Blair Mountain, their shadows shooting down through the trees. Biplanes with open cockpits, so close he could see the pilots in their goggles and leather flying caps, the white silk scarves snapping from their necks.
The Logan Air Force.
They were hunting for red bandannas, he knew, turning razor-edged on their wingtips to look down through the trees. First blood had been shed on the mountain this morning. One of the men killed was Sheriff Chafin’s chief deputy, a man called Gore. A sworn officer of the law. Doc Moo could almost hear the voices on the defense line, the townsmen in khaki and armbands.
Anarchy is what it is.
Killing Gore? That ain’t anarchy, it’s an act of war.
If it’s war they want, we’ll give it till the creeks run red.
Meanwhile, miners were still swarming in from every point of the compass. Word had company stores raided of arms, men in overalls training in the clearings, and Black miners eating in Jim Crow restaurants right alongside their white comrades, rifles propped against their tables. Moo feared what the country might do to put such a movement back in the ground.
Moo loved America, he did. This country had attempted a “Great Experiment” for the promotion of human happiness—a written recognition that all men were created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and the state existed to guarantee those liberties, not to impede them. In practice, those high ideals made it a nation of deep hypocrisy—a country ever on a knife’s edge, ever failing to live up to its own principles. A nation ever in conflict with itself.
Here, he thought, on this mountain, they would see what happened when those rights and liberties had been taken from those to whom they were promised—taken for years and years, at the ends of fists and ax handles and guns.
Musa came running around the schoolhouse and grabbed his sleeve. “Papa, look.” He pointed to a biplane circling just west of Blair Mountain, gyrating like a hawk over a field mouse. The boy ran inside to the map tacked to the wall, tracing his finger along the blue line of a watercourse, then came back out to the stoop. “It’s flying over Crooked Creek.”
Doc Moo had seen Big Frank’s column march off in that direction. Now, as he and Musa watched, the biplane carved upward into the blind white eye of the sun, as if going to hide. Then, moments later, it came diving back toward the creek, as if lining up for a strafing run.
“Ya Yasue.” Oh Jesus.
A CURIOUS WHINE FROM the sun. Big Frank looked over his shoulder, squinting. While Bonney was out front scouting for the column, shaping his grief and fury into a spear, Frank had volunteered to help carry the column’s Gatling gun—a prize piece stolen from a company store, slung from a long pole like a killed animal, and carried between his shoulder and that of a burly Marine Corps veteran called Crockett. The six-barreled contraption could fire nine hundred rounds per minute as the gunner cranked the firing handle, spinning the ring of octagonal barrels.
They were headed for Crooked Creek Gap. A smaller force than those marching on Blair itself but well organized, led by Great War veterans and a small stick of human dynamite named Bill Blizzard—a man well-named, people said, built of fury and blasting powder, with a square jaw and three-inch fuse.
Frank knew him by reputation. An Irishman out of Cabin Creek, eighteen years old when the Bull Moose Special rolled past his tent camp and machine-gunned the place. People said his mother, called Ma in honor of Mother Jones herself, went out in her nightgown and tore up the tracks with her own bare hands, her fingers bleeding, her arms veined with baby copperheads, so those gun trains couldn’t come again. Such was the story told deep in the mineshafts, high on the shanty porches.
“We’re going to give them such hell, we are, they’ll think they died and already went,” Blizzard had told them. “While the others hit them head-on, we’re going to bust through the Gap and flank the sons of bitches.”
Now Frank looked up again. Everyone did. The curious whine was becoming a wail, a rising scream. A shadow leapt from the sun, streaking down on them like a predatory bird.
“Ground attack! Everybody down!”
Men scrambled for cover, diving behind rocks and trees and creekbanks, throwing their hands over their heads as the ship roared just over the treetops, shrieking with banshee wire and engine power. Miners squeezed themselves into tight little balls and Frank and the other gunbearer hunkered beside the Gatling gun itself. Then the ship was gone, droning off into the distance. Slowly, the miners uncovered their heads, looking up slack-jawed to find a blizzard fluttering down through the trees.
Leaflets. The papers alighted along the creek like a strange flock of birds. They stuck in branches and snagged in briars and pasted the creekbanks. Some caught in the reeds or went shooting and swirling down the creek itself, washing up on stones downstream. Some of the men cursed and squinted down the sights of their rifles, hoping to get off a shot at the departing biplane, while others reached out their free hands, trying to catch one of the papers still twist-turning toward the ground.
Frank raised his head to find one of the leaflets stuck upright between the ringed barrels of the Gatling gun. A breaker boy plucked up the paper and held it under his nose, frowning. The others crowded around him, waiting.
“Well?”
The boy licked his lips, squinting. “Ain’t got my readin’ glasses.”
One of the other miners—an old graybeard with rosy cheeks—snapped up the handbill and held it beneath his wiry spectacles. He cleared his throat. “By the President of the United States of America,” he read. “A Proclamation.”
Then, as the man’s eyes scanned down to the finer print, his face contorted like the young miner’s had. He began to read slowly, haltingly, the words strange on his tongue. “Whereas, the governor of the State of West Virginia has represented that domestic violence exists in said State, which the authorities of said State are unable to repress, and Whereas, it is provided in the Constitution of the United States that the United States shall protect each state in this Union on application of the legislature or the executive when the legislature cannot be convened, against domestic violence…”
The man looked up from the paper, his mouth slack.
“The hell? T’ain’t but a bunch of whereas and thereof and aforesaid, the whole damned thing. Like they want to read us to death.”
The big Marine, Crockett, pulled a flask from the bib pocket of his overalls and sucked off a pull. He was a bear of a man, shirtless beneath his overalls, with a round grizzled face and the word TEUFELSHUND tattooed across his hairy chest in olden script. Devil Dog. A nickname the Marines had earned at the Battle of Belleau Wood, advancing again and again against German lines.
Crockett shook his head. “Sounds like legalese to me. Lawyer talk, like all them high-hat city folk fancies. Keeps ’em feeling high and mighty, lording us over.”
The first man held out the paper. “Anybody know legalese?”
When no one spoke, Frank held out his hand. “My wife was a schoolteacher,” he said. “Give me a look.”
He took the leaflet and scanned the lines. The others gathered close, looking over his shoulders. Frank looked up. “It’s an ultimatum, near as I can tell. President says we’re insurgents and we are to retire peaceably to our abodes by noon tomorrow.”
The miners waited. “Or what?”
Crockett stoppered his flask and spat. “Or next time it won’t be a bunch of papers they drop on our heads.”