DOC MOO RODE HOME in the gathering dusk. Tomorrow was the first of June, just over ten days since the shoot-out, and the hills were explosive with life, sizzling with katydids and cicadas. The bats were out, wheeling and darting against the violet sky, catching insects on the wing. Moo rode loose in the saddle, weary, hardly touching the reins. Altair knew the way.
He’d been all over the county since dawn. He’d treated an aged farmer who’d cut himself sharpening a plow blade, been down to his office in Matewan for appointments with two regular patients, then came a call from a mine on the Kentucky side of the river. A twelve-year-old trapper boy had been knocked unconscious by a heavy swinging door he was tending. A boy his son’s age, so concussed he couldn’t remember his own name. Doc Moo expected him to recover, but he never got used to seeing boy-miners with their fingernails worked down to the bleeding quicks, their faces knotted early against the world.
He looked up into the dusk. The first silver pricks of stars. As always, the Tug Valley had been full of rumor and chatter. Word was, Sid Hatfield and Jessie Maynard, the mayor’s widow, had been arrested in a Huntington hotel on charges of “improper relations”—based on a tip from Thomas Felts, who’d had his agents tail the pair.
“Improper relations!” roared the aged farmer as Doc Moo bandaged his plow-cut hand. “Done caught ole Sid with his drawers down, they did. Naked as Christ on Christmas. All he had on him was Albert Felts’s pistol. A dark gun.”
It was the word people used for a blued pistol as opposed to a nickeled one.
“Is that illegal?” asked Moo.
The farmer grit his teeth hard a moment, then sniggered. “Legal, Doc, I don’t know. But I do know what ole Sid told them.”
“What?”
“‘Albert ain’t asked for it back.’”
The man laughed and wheezed and laughed again. Moo often wondered how people on such isolated homesteads, high on the hillsides or deep in the hollers, always had the latest news, the stories cast mouth to mouth as if along telephone lines. His family was no different. They lived in a farmhouse above town, but there was the mail carrier, the book women, the tinkers, the pack peddlers, the neighbors—even the birds seemed to sing the news.
The farmer went on, ignoring the stitches Doc Moo was sewing into his hand. “Police hauled them off to the jailhouse, kept them there all night. Next morning, they go before the judge. Well, ole Sid, he smiles and pulls out a marriage license dated the previous day. Says they got it yesterday but couldn’t find no pastor nor justice of the peace before close of business. Jessie tells the judge it was the mayor’s last and final wish she marry Sid if he didn’t make it. Which he did not. She asks that judge if he don’t happen to know nobody willing to tie the marital knot for them? Yes, sir, that’s how they come to hitch, Doctor Moo. Made things nice and proper, Sid and Jessie did, before they left that courthouse.”
Moo thought of his and Buddeea’s wedding. After she’d climbed out the window above her father’s tailor shop, they’d ridden double through the night, leaving Louisville under cover of darkness and meeting a young Roman Catholic priest in a chapel along the Ohio River—a man Moo had enlisted into their cause, willing to marry the young Maronite lovers. One from the village of Hadath al-Jebbeh in Mount Lebanon, the other from Deir al-Ahmar in the Beqaa—come together in the New World.
They wed at dawn, as the light illuminated the mist-swathed river, and Moo had thought he could die right then, happy, with such a dark wonder of a soul bound to his. Already, at that age, Buddeea was formidable, a young woman of fierce will and spirit who seemed to whip back stronger whenever the world knocked the family sideways—and the Tug Valley could throw punches like the great John L. Sullivan, king of the pugilists. It had and it would.
Now, as Moo crested the last rise, the farmhouse came into view, the windows yellow-lit against the bluing earth. He could see Buddeea waiting for him on the porch. She was barefoot, her feet curled one on top of the other, as she watched the girls run pale-smocked around the yard, chasing fireflies. His heart swelled, his belly warmed. Those bare feet were a sign. An unspoken language between them. Moo would not be going straight to sleep this night.
The girls—Adele, Corine, and Amelia—came running as he rode up to the house, hugging him as he descended from the saddle. Buddeea awaited her own long embrace on the porch. She stood up on her toes, burying her head in his chest.
“My Moo,” she whispered.
Muhanna could smell dinner on the stove, wafting through the cracked windows of the house. After a moment, he lifted his head, looked around. “Musa?”
“Due home at dark.”
They both looked west, where the last deep blue glow backlit the hills. They often joked that twelve-year-old Musa, youngest of the bunch, was their feral child. He’d strip off his school clothes as soon as he got home every afternoon and disappear into the woods in his frayed overalls—their “Little Wolf.”
At school, though, he had a hard time fitting in. He was quiet, intense. It didn’t help that he was darker-skinned than his sisters. The other boys teased him at times. They called him names. Tan-assed, spawn of the Phoenician curse. He’d bloodied their noses for such taunts, though he was more often the one who came home with bloody twists of paper rammed up his nostrils. But in the woods he was home, as natural a woodsman as any Mingo brave.
“Papa?”
Moo and Buddeea nearly jumped, whirling to find their boy standing at the other corner of the porch, barefoot, his possibles bag looped across his shoulder.
“Did you hear, Papa?”
“What?”
“The miners are gonna strike tomorrow.”
Moo had heard plenty of talk of a strike coming, but tomorrow was news.
“Where did you hear that?”
The boy scratched the top of one foot with the other, biting his lip. “Come up on a copper pot off Lightning Branch. A couple of miners were talking loud, saying they told their crews not to pack no lunches for tomorrow. They’d be home by noon.”
“Musa,” said Buddeea. “I’ve told you to avoid those pots. Men get the devil in them on that likker.”
“They didn’t see me. I promise.”
Moo felt his ire rising. “Of course they didn’t,” he said, “or you mightn’t have made it back here, God forbid. Let those who want to remain unseen, unseen. Let those who want to remain unheard, unheard.”
“They was talking pretty loud not to be heard, Papa.”
“Supper in your room,” said Moo, pointing upstairs.
Musa frowned and scampered into the house.
“Poor Musa,” whispered Adele.
“Always in trouble,” said Amelia.
“Serves him right,” said Corine.
Doc Moo listened to his son’s bare feet pounding up the steps to the second floor, feeling a small sorrow, but the boy had to learn to stay away from such trouble. These hills were crawling with danger, too much of it two-legged.
A strike. Moo shook his head. It seemed a peaceful action, a simple work stoppage. A laying down of tools, not a taking up of arms. But he’d been in coal country long enough to know better. The operators would fight tooth and nail to break the strike, bringing in scab labor from out of state to keep the coal running and an army of Baldwins and mine guards to stamp out resistance. The miners would fight back. Protests, picket lines, intimidation, sabotage. One side had power and influence; the other was willing to die. One of the oldest, bloodiest stories in a very old book—old as civilization itself.
At noon the next day, just as Musa said they would, the miners put down their shovels and picks and walked out of the mines, emerging into the harsh light of an alien sun.
They struck.