DOC MOO SAT BLOODIED on the schoolhouse stoop in the hour before dawn, his hands shaking as he tried to tie a length of twine around the temples of his eyeglasses. They kept slipping down from his brow, sliding on the greasy sheen of sweat and grime that covered his skin. He hadn’t washed, hadn’t hardly slept or eaten. He no longer knew what day it was.
He’d been working nonstop. Gunshots, shrapnel, broken limbs. They’d set up a triage station beneath a canvas fly in front of the schoolhouse, routing lesser cases to one of the nurses or veteran corpsmen. The gravely wounded came to Muhanna’s desk. His fingernails were grouted with dark-dried blood, and though he’d stitched up fifty men or more with his forceps and needle holder, he couldn’t seem to get these knots for his glasses right. He was getting irritated and stopped a moment to gather himself.
He breathed. In, deep, out, deep.
He looked up at Blair. At least the predawn hour had brought a rare quietude. The sky was lightening, no sun yet. The mountain a deep, dark blue.
He couldn’t get Musa out of his mind. The boy had to be safer out on the trails and roads than here, where bombs were falling and bullets flying—didn’t he? And the boy’s mission was no contrivance. If the violence spread, Moo wanted his family out of its path. All of Matewan. He’d grown up hearing of the atrocities of civil war, not just here in America but in his own homeland.
When the Maronite peasantry overthrew the Druze feudal lords, there was massacre, outrage, and pillage on both sides. As always. His father had rarely given details in the stories he told of his time in the war, in the fighting around Mount Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, where ancient Roman columns stood like dead trees, fire-scorched and bullet-pocked. But Moo came to learn what was unsaid could be as powerful, more powerful, than what was stated outright. The power of negative space. The way it forced one to imagine the unspeakable. His father telling of a Maronite militia returning to their home village to discover a Druze cavalry unit had visited while they were away—and several of the women and children had gone mute, never to speak again.
Homes could be rebuilt, possessions replaced, but certain traumas never healed. He worried the violence could spread from this pocket of coal country to the towns, the cities. Shops burning and glass in the streets. Mothers wailing, keening over sons and daughters killed fighting or running or just walking in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong hour. Atrocity and massacre, irregular factions matching blood with blood, as if the Old Testament mathematics of eye for eye might one day work out. As if they ever had.
And Moo had taken a side now. There were those who might want to punish him however they could, to strike deep behind the lines. To hurt his family.
FIRST LIGHT CAME TRICKLING along the ridges, touching the tops of the trees. They forded a shallow part of the Guyandotte River where the stones were smooth beneath Musa’s bare feet. He’d led his ward all night, staying well ahead of the miner who carried the bomb high on his shoulder like a giant hammer—a device that might blow him into the treetops if he tripped and dropped it.
They’d kept their distance, communicating via bird calls and flashes from Musa’s flint striker—when to stop, move, or hide. Several times in the night, Musa signaled for them to halt along game trails or creekbanks while armed men passed through the darkness. Once a buck with velvety antlers stepped out of the woods and bent his head to drink from the creek, his hide silver beneath the moon.
The water of the Guyandotte was cool and dark around Musa’s waist, untouched by the impending sun. Downriver, he could just make out the N&W trestle bridge, which Blizzard had instructed them to avoid, as it would be guarded. When Musa reached the far bank, he squatted on a flat rock and watched the dark figure come wading across the river, wide-legged, hugging the iron bomb to his chest for extra security. The man rose up out of the shallows with the water streaming off him, spilling out of his overalls.
He stopped twenty paces short of Musa’s perch. “You supposed to be keepin’ your distance, young mister, case this baby goes boom.”
Musa halved a pawpaw on his knife blade and held it up. “Thought you might’ve worked up an appetite.”
“Thank you, but I’d rather keep my belly empty till the job’s done.”
“Fair enough.” Musa hopped down from the rock and looked east, judging the time. “If Mr. Blizzard was right about this old mine, we ought to be there before the sun clears yon ridgeline. Come on.”
Soon Musa found the old narrow-gauge rails that Blizzard had described, where mules once pulled squeaking coal carts in the days before tipples and conveyors. The tracks were overgrown; Musa could tell nobody had come this way for weeks.
At the top, he found the mouth of a boarded-up mine amid rusting hulks of ancient machinery. An old steam donkey with a bullet-pocked boiler, mine cars with rust-seized wheels. He found an iron kingbolt in the bed of a double-axle cart and pried open the boards. A breath of cold musty air, like the mountain exhaling.
He stepped back a safe distance as the miner came forward, lighting an old oil-wick cap lamp before ducking into the mine. Despite himself, Musa crept forward to watch him descend into the darkness, the oil flame burning over his head like the little painted tongues of holy fire atop the porcelain saints in the shadowy corners of Father Rossi’s church. It lit square after square of frame timbering, licking down the great throat of the mountain. Then gone.
Musa waited at the edge of the drift mouth, peeking now and again into the darkness. Three minutes, five. He’d started worrying when the man finally reappeared, smiling now, teeth flashing, shoulders swaying under his little lamp flame. He slipped out from between the pried boards and began hammering them back into place with the kingbolt.
“There’s a burden I’m happy to lay down. They said it wasn’t like to blow on its own, but they weren’t the ones had to carry it half the damn night.” He turned and held out his hand to Musa. Up close, in the growing light, he looked familiar. “Thank you for your help tonight, little man. Very brave of you. I’m Frank, by the way.”
Musa’s mouth fell open as he took the man’s hand. “Wait, are you Big Frank, Miss Beulah’s grandson?”
“That’s right.” The big man squinted one eye. “Now I see it. You Doctor Moo’s boy, ain’t you? Musa. The one was running supplies around the schoolhouse. Your daddy know you out here?”
Musa nodded. “Yes, sir. After they dropped the bomb, Papa sent me on a mission to get our people out harm’s way case the fighting reaches that far. Told me to get Miss Beulah, too, and anybody else I could from Lick Creek. That’s where I’m headed.” He paused. “You want to come?”
The big man gritted his teeth and looked back toward Blair. The morning sun was breaking across the land, striking the misty slopes. Already they could hear the shooting starting up again. “I’d like to, Mr. Musa, but I gave my word I wasn’t going home, not till the job was done. We got to break through the Gap today, make it to the other side of that mountain.”
Musa nodded and unslung his possibles bag. “Miss Beulah made me this.”
“She’s a wonder with needle and thread, ain’t she?”
“You ought to take it with you.”
Frank took a knee beside Musa, crossing his arms on one thigh. They were about the same height now. Musa could see the scarred terrain of the man’s shoulders and forearms, like a war had been fought on his skin. Tiny toy soldiers with artillery and flamethrowers.
“You keep that bag, Mr. Musa. Every good scout needs his possibles close by. I’m glad to know Mama-B will be in good hands. After last night, I couldn’t wish no better scout for her. If I see your daddy again, I’ll tell him to be proud.”
Musa nodded. “I’ll tell Miss Beulah the same thing, Mr. Frank.”
Big Frank squeezed Musa’s shoulder. Tears in his eyes now, as if he were seeing the boy from a distance, from the far side of some ravine he’d crossed and couldn’t go back. “Tell her I love her, too. Can you do that?”
Musa straightened. “Yes, sir.”
The big man squeezed his shoulder again, then unknotted the bandanna around his neck. “I want you to have this here neckerchief of mine. You earned it. You can tell folks back home you were a real Redneck.”
Musa stood very straight as the man looped the bandanna around his neck, knotting it fast. He looked back toward Blair Mountain; Musa could see his chest rising and falling. “I never been one for church, but I remember this one verse about the mustard seed.”
Musa nodded. He’d to memorize it for Sunday school. “If you had faith the size of this mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there.’ And it would move.”
“That’s the one,” said Frank. “The very one. Mama-B, she used to say it was the size of a man’s faith that mattered most, not his arms nor back. No arms in the world can move mountains, no matter how much coal they can shovel. Now I know how right she was.” He looked back at Musa and held out his hand. “Faith.”
Musa shook his hand. “Faith.”
Then the big man was up and gone, jogging back down the old tracks, hurrying to cross the river before the rising sun caught him out.