HIGH ON THE DEFENSE line, the reporter lowered his field glasses. “You think anything can stop them, Major Gaujot?”
Bad Tony said nothing, belting more rounds from his machine gun.
All through the night, Blair Mountain had erupted with jagged planes of light, antic figures scurrying before the stuttering illuminations of gunfire. Behind their bulwarks, the defenders became shadow-haunted, firing at any trace of movement, man or beast or ghost. With dawn, their fears were realized. The misty ridges began cracking with the rifles of shooters who’d crept close in the night.
More bombs fell that morning, rocking the ridges to their bedrock, and still the miners kept coming. It seemed the bombs had only stoked their fury, redoubled their drive. Again and again, the reporter watched them marshal their numbers in the trees or along the ridges, then burst into another charge, the defenders’ guns tearing into their ranks each time.
They heard the schoolhouse below the mountain had been turned into an infirmary, the bloody wrecks of men laid out on the plank floors, tended by wives and daughters in makeshift nurse’s caps.
“I don’t understand it,” said the reporter. “They keep coming straight into the guns, like they aren’t even afraid.”
Bad Tony fired a burst into the trees, then tilted his jaw toward the newsman, keeping one eye aimed through the iron latch of the leaf sight. “They’re afraid, all right. Sweating like whores in church, they are. Asses puckered tight as granny’s jam jar. It’s just they’re more afraid of where they come from than where they might be going.”
“Don’t you think that adds meaning to their cause?”
“Means more of them are going to die for it.”
A runner came scampering up to their position. “Message from Sheriff Chafin,” he said. “A constable’s sister wired from Virginia, said a whole squadron of Army bombers lifted off from Langley Field this morning, headed west and loaded for bear.”
“And?”
“And the Baldwin-Felts got multiple sources confirming the bombers still headed our way, following the James River across Virginia. Could be in case the Rednecks don’t stand down come noon.”
Bad Tony sniffed, traversing the gun. “Ain’t but rumors till they get here. I seen them Army fliers dive for the ground at the first spit of rain.”
“What you want me to do, sir?”
Tony scratched his chin. “Go tell it on down the line. True or not, it’ll keep the men’s spirits up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The newspaper reporter rose slightly to look down the defense line. Baldwins, constables, troopers, and militiamen were firing down into the narrow gap in the mountains. Every shot from the miners seemed to trigger a hundred in return. Thousands of spent casings lay piled in the trenches. A blizzard of brass. He thumbed the point of his pencil and checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Two hours.
“You think the President’s ultimatum will stop them?”
Tony cocked his eye at the sun. “It don’t, they’ll be needing hip-waders in that schoolhouse.”
DOC MOO LOOKED OUT the window to see a line of prisoners coming down off the mountain. Men in khaki shirts and white armbands, hangdog and ragged, shambling down the road with their hands bound and a rope running the length of them. A skinny, red-faced miner in overlarge overalls was driving them along, poking at them with his rifle, shouting and harrying them like a sheepdog.
“Hie, hie, you sons of bitches, keep it moving.”
He sat them down against the wall of the schoolhouse, swinging his rifle back and forth across their faces. “Just you sons of bitches try it. Just one of ye try it.”
Doc Moo finished dressing the wound of the miner on the table, cleaned his hands, and ventured outside to check on the new prisoners. Their guard had sat them on the unshaded side of the schoolhouse. They had their faces buried in their arms. Their balding pates were sunburned, their khaki shirts and trousers drenched dark with sweat. Moo fetched a bucket of water for them to drink.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said the miner, holding his rifle crossways to block his path. “Where you think you’re going, Doc?”
“These men are badly dehydrated, in need of water so they don’t stroke out. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
The red-faced man stepped in front of him. “No, Doc, I don’t reckon I will. These sons of bitches here are lucky we don’t line ’em up and blow their brains to the wall. The sun wants to kill them, it ain’t no fault of ours.”
“Actually, it would be very much our fault. Now kindly step aside and let me administer aid to these men. I see some of them have wounds that need tending. If they infect, they could lose digits, limbs, or worse.”
“Oh, you mean like this.” The miner held up his left hand, wiggling the stumps of three fingers. “Blowed off at the Island Creek Number Nine.” He pointed his rifle at one of the prisoners. “I offered to do office work, but Mr. Simms here, the mine super, he given me the boot, put me and mine out our house without a red cent. So excuse me if I don’t give a good Goddamn if his pecker itself turns black and falls off. Hail, I might take a mind to blow it off my own self.”
His breath smelled like kerosene, and he was swaying slightly in his boots.
Moo nodded. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Mister…?”
“Buddy. You can just call me Buddy.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Buddy, but I’m in charge of this aid station, and I won’t have men dying on my watch, prisoners or not.” He started again, still holding the bucket, and the guard sidestepped to block him, leveling his rifle at Moo’s belly. “Don’t make me, Doc. I’ll put your fucking guts in the wind.”
Moo stared at the muzzle of the rifle. The sun hung high and hot, ticking toward noon. He wanted to be afraid, to feel his veins run cold and his legs carry him safely back inside, but the old blood was rising instead. He’d had his hands in the hot guts of too many screaming, frightened boys over the past two days. This likker-breathed son of a bitch, so quick to send a bullet ripping through the glorious organs and tissues of a fellow human being. Moo wanted to rip the rifle from his hands and beat out his brains with it.
He closed his eyes and tried to count to ten like Buddeea told him, but other words came rolling off his tongue, strange to him, said as if in a dream.
“My name is Doctor Domit Ibrahim Muhanna of Mingo County, West Virginia. I was born in the village of Hadath al-Jebbeh, in the mountains of Lebanon, where the Muhanna ancestry can be traced in an unbroken line to the twelfth century. I speak six languages, am the father of three daughters and one son born in this country, and I was a personal friend of Sid Hatfield. If you kill me, you kill every man, woman, and child I will save between now and the time of my death, including your own comrades in the days to come. Now step aside, or one of my men will be forced to make you.”
“One of your men, huh?”
The crack of a hammer. The miner looked up to see a patient hanging from one of the blown-out schoolhouse windows, a big revolver leveled. “Let him pass, Buddy.”
“You gonna shoot me if I don’t?”
“I believe we got six witnesses here would say you done shot your own self.” He nodded down at the prisoners lined up against the wall beneath him.
“Seven.” Another patient came limping around the back of the schoolhouse, carrying a double-barreled shotgun. “You leave the doctor to do the doctoring, and hie yourself back on up the mountain. Put that rifle-gun to better use.”
“Who’s gonna guard the prisoners?”
“I am.”
“Look at you. What if they run?”
“They ain’t outrunning two barrels of buckshot, and neither are you. Now go on. It’s the mean sons of bitches like you we need up on Blair, not down here.”
The skinny miner seemed to see the truth of that. He huffed and spat at Doc Moo’s feet, then turned and started back up the mountain, walking wide-kneed, arms out, like he had something heavy hanging between his legs. Moo watched him go, trying to calm his breathing, waiting for his fury to subside.
Above him, the sun had nearly reached its noon zenith. The President’s deadline. Moo wondered whether the Rednecks would come down off the mountain and retire peaceably to their abodes, as the leaflets commanded. Or would that be like trying to put blood back into a wound?