DOC MOO STOOD BEHIND the schoolhouse, relieving himself on a tree likely to wither and die after this battle given how many miners had watered it. As he was buttoning his fly, he heard a gritty swish of clothing and a man appeared out of the dawn darkness of the woods, a small man in shambled hat and coat and trousers, a knotted tie tucked into his shirt. His jaw was wide and square like a prizefighter’s, though he’d make one of the lighter weight classes, flyweight or bantam. Wiry and quick, with outsized fists.
He shot out his hand. “Bill Blizzard, United Mine Workers.”
Doc Moo knew the name. A district leader who seemed to be in some kind of command. He shook the man’s hand. “Doctor Domit Muhanna.”
Blizzard nodded. “I want to thank you for your work here, Doc. Word’s got out. The boys up on the line, they’re thankful to know we got somebody down here who ain’t some damned sawbones. Not like the company doctors they’re used to.”
“I’ve done my best.”
“It’s known and appreciated. I’d like to say your work is done here, Doc, I sure would, but it’s doubtful. Word is, Washington’s deployed federal troops. They’re heading our way even now, trains and bombers.”
“What happens when they get here?”
Blizzard shook his head. “I don’t rightly know, Doc. Depends on their orders, that and the mood of our boys. One thing I do know, it’s like to be hell on the mountain today. So I wanted to ask it direct, can you stay another day?”
Moo nodded. “As long as I’m needed.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Means the world to the boys up the line to know you’re down here. It’ll keep their spirits up.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Blizzard nodded and looked up the mountain. “Our sources tell us the defenders are running low on ammo. Today’s the last, best chance for our boys to bust through and teach Chafin, the Baldwins, and the coal operators a lesson before Uncle Sam arrives. Last chance to make all this blood mean something.”
Doc Moo looked down at his hands, the dark-dried creases of his palms. Inshallah, he thought. “With God’s will.”
Blizzard nodded. “Amen, Doc. A-fooking-men.” He thrust his hands into his coat pockets. “Well, I better get on down the line, keep on spreading the word.”
“When will the troops arrive?” asked Doc Moo.
Blizzard looked to the sky. It was beginning to pale. “Word is, a storm forced the bombers down somewhere in Virginia yesterday. I imagine they’ll be in the air soon’s the weather clears. Now the troop trains, Doc, the troop trains…” Blizzard’s voice trailed off and he squinted an eye in the direction of the Guyandotte River. “We’ll see if them troop trains don’t get themselves delayed somehow.”
FRANK CROUCHED ON A ridge beside the Bad Seven, deep inside enemy lines. They’d been fox-walking all through the night, rolling their weight slowly onto the balls of their feet, gently compressing sticks and leaves, making as little sound as possible. They paused here, gathering their breath, then descended into the trees, following Bonney into the lower darknesses of the Guyandotte River.
The Hellfighter had appeared at Frank’s position just before dusk. He looked different from when Frank had last seen him. His eyes lurked inside deep hollows and his cheeks were sunken, his face skull-like, as if part of him had died alongside his brother. He carried a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight. Green rags and vines draped from the barrel and hung from his overalls.
He had five men with him, three of the original Bad Seven—the Poles and one Provenzano—and two new men. One old, one young. A father and son.
“Got us a little assignment,” he told Frank. “You up for night-walking?”
“Where to?”
“Hell, most likely.”
“Here I thought we were there already.”
Bonney grinned. “Gonna seal off the gate so the devils are stuck inside with us.”
Before setting off, the Hellfighter made each man turn out his pockets to ensure they had nothing metallic to jingle, no scrip or keys or loose cartridges. He had them double-knot their bootlaces high and tight above their ankles, nothing to trip or snag, and he smeared a paste of shoe polish and burnt cork ash across their overalls in tigerlike stripes, mottling their silhouettes against the surrounding night.
Bonney walked point, leading them through the darkness, while Frank was second in line, armed with an ancient double-barreled shotgun they’d furnished him. Then came a long-boned teenaged miner, already a veteran of the coalfields. He was unarmed, toting a canvas haversack on his back like a schoolboy, his hands hanging from the thin shoulder straps. The contents were carefully wrapped in bandannas so as not to rattle.
Behind the boy walked his father, a Black man in his fifties, his temples and sideburns gray-worn beneath his rumpled miner’s cap. He walked back-bent, stooped from decades in the mines, carrying an ancient leather mailbag cradled against his chest, as if a babe slept beneath the brass buckles and broad flap.
His name was Boom. Frank had heard the stories but never met him. In his thirties, he’d blown a charge in a mine that collapsed the wall of an old chamber, releasing a great pocket of blackdamp. These days miners had canaries to alert them to the lethal gas, the birds carried in glass revival cages in which they could be resurrected again and again by the simple twist of an oxygen valve.
But Boom had no such bird to alert him. He went unconscious and couldn’t be revived until twenty minutes later, laid flat beneath the sun outside the mine. Wherever his soul went while he was out, it returned with a newfound knowledge of explosives. An artistry. Such was the story told. They said he could eye a length of fuse down to the millisecond, more exacting than any stopwatch, and blast a twenty-room mansion into the granite belly of a mountain, complete with flushing toilets.
The Da Vinci of Dynamite, they called him. The Beethoven of Boom.
Inside his mailbag, cradled carefully, were bundled sticks of dynamite, resting in a bed of sawdust and wood shavings. The explosives, purloined from a company store, had been sitting on the shelf too long. The nitroglycerine had begun leaching from the sawdust sorbent, sweating through the heavy paper wrappers. Liquid nitro, highly unstable. Now and again, Boom hummed or crooned over the leather bag, as if singing lullabies to a sleeping child.
Bonney led them lower, lower, creeping through the night, their bootheels seeking purchase on dewy roots and rocks. Now and again, in the distance, they heard eruptions of gunfire, each shot echoing ridge to ridge, fading, like shadow battles of the one being fought.
The Guyandotte River roved through the darkness, winding toward Logan. Soon they were kneeling on its shoals, concealed in a bed of reeds, looking up at the skeletal trellis of the Norfolk & Western bridge—the one the troop trains and company reinforcements would cross.
Bonney crouched next to Frank, scanning the trestle through the long scope. The rifle was an old Swiss Vetterli from the previous century, a military rifle that fired powerful black-powder cartridges—a gun storied to take down bear at range.
Bonney looked back over his shoulder. “What you think, Boom?”
The old dynamiter spread his hands across the broad flap of the mailbag and looked to the sky over the bridge, as if envisioning a work of art. “High as heaven, baby. Gonna tickle the angels’ feet.”
Soon they were watching Boom’s son scale the stone piers of the bridge, the mailbag strapped across his back. The boy was barefoot, his fingers and toes seeking ridges and crevices in the mortared stone. The green river fumbled against the piers beneath him, gurgling and foaming. Long before it had a name, the Guyandotte had sawed a channel for itself through the bedrock of these mountains. Given enough time, Frank knew, it might cut the very legs from beneath this bridge, lapping the stone piers into distant sands, dropping the rusted skeleton of the trellis into the riverbed.
They couldn’t wait that long.
Dawn was breaking, raking through the cloud cover. Within half an hour, the rising sun would touch the far ridgeline and come crashing down the slope, hounding the last shreds of night from the hills—no more darkness to hide them.
Frank looked back at Boom. The old dynamiter’s eyes were raised to his boy, his gnarled fingers interlaced. The boy had ascended into the eaves of the span and sat hunched there amid the underpinnings. Bonney raised the long rifle again and squinted through the scope, scanning the bridge and riverbanks for sentries or traffic. Then back to the boy. He did it in a certain pattern, in certain intervals, precise as a pocket watch.
The boy lifted the bundled charge of dynamite from the leather satchel slowly, carefully, holding it apart from his body. His father, known all through the coalfields for his cool nerve, was breathing audibly now.
“Know who it was invented dynamite?”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
“Alfred Nobel,” whispered the old man. “Same one founded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ain’t that some shit.”
The boy was standing now, lifting the dynamite into the shadowy recesses above his head, nestling it among the braces and beams. He pulled out a roll of twine and fastened the charge in place, then climbed up through the crossbeams, emerging onto the tracks. Here he knelt and lifted a can of kerosene from the bag and began dousing the rail ties.
If the blast didn’t destroy the bridge, the fire would.
The kerosene fumed around the boy. The sun had touched the top of the ridge and come filtering down the slope, a slow avalanche of light. Frank wiped his forehead. The very dawn seemed dangerous, as if it could ignite the bridge with the boy still up there, trapped in flames.
Finally, he ducked through the trestle and squatted on the end of a crossbeam high over the deepest part of the river, fishing in his bib pocket for a cigarette, a rollup twisted thin and tight from a scrap of newsprint. He lit it and inhaled.
Somewhere, across the vast miles of this land, the great war trains were under way, thundering through tunnels and hollers, swinging along rivers and ridgelines, hooting and shrieking through small stations at speed, steaming, smoking, ripping up flurries of leaves and dust in their wake. Frank could almost hear them, the warlike pounding of their pistons.
The boy blew a long plume of smoke, then turned and touched the cigarette to the kerosene-soaked ties. Strakes of flame leapt from the tracks above the charge. Boom’s boy turned and leapt from the bridge, bare heels close together, hands crossed over chest, the empty mailbag fluttering from his back like a failed parachute. He smacked the river feet-first, disappearing for one moment, two. Then surfaced, his dark head bobbing toward them, his arms grappling with the current, pulling him toward shore.
Frank pulled the boy from the shallows as the first faint threads of smoke rose into the lower strata of sunlight, black and distinct, unraveling like blood in water. Bonney squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then turned to Boom and the others. “Y’all head back now before it gets light. Me and Frank got this.”
When they were gone, Bonney handed Frank a leather tube. “Gift from one of our less lucky friends. Eyes out for sentries.”
Inside was a spyglass, the name of the maker inscribed on the side: UTZSCHNEIDER UND FRAUNHOFER, MÜNCHEN. Someone’s souvenir from the trenches, taken from a fallen German artillery spotter or infantry officer. Frank propped the heavy end of the spyglass on his fingertips and looked through the eyepiece. The world jumped closer, an amplified sphere. He began making long sweeps along the foot of the span, the tracks, the riverbanks, looking for anything out of place.
Songbirds were coming to life, trilling and whistling as the sunlight caught them in the trees. Doves cooed. A red cardinal swung from tree to tree, following his dun-colored mate. The flames seemed to be rustling along the tracks, as if having trouble coming awake. Since they had no long fuse or plunger, they had to wait for the fire to ignite the charge.
Frank was sweeping the far riverbank when something caught his eye. He worked the focus. A man. Reclined at the base of a tree, dressed in khaki shirt and trousers, hat pulled over his eyes. Asleep. A driblet of saliva hung at the corner of his mouth. A rifle stood propped beside him, a white armband around his shirtsleeve.
Frank touched Bonney’s elbow, pointed across the river. “Sentry, eleven o’clock. Neath that big sycamore.”
The other man nodded, looking through the rifle scope. “Got him.”
Frank squinted back into his own eyepiece. The sun was crawling down the jigsaw bark of the sycamore’s trunk, inch by inch, creeping toward the top of the man’s head. The early flies were aloft, swirling, their bodies glowing in the slashed bars of sunlight. Sun or flies or smoke—any second something would jerk him awake.
Bonney moved the Vetterli’s forestock to the top of a log, steadying the barrel. Frank knew his crosshairs must be dancing over the sentry’s chest, light as a daddy longlegs. No chance of missing from this range. Like hammering a rail spike into the man’s heart. A sleeping man. An American.
Frank licked his lips. “I don’t know. Don’t feel right to me.”
“They kilt Lacey.”
“That one didn’t.”
“I don’t do it, he could still douse the fire in time.”
Frank nodded. Troops, ammunition, and reinforcements could come rolling across this bridge today, all but sealing the miners’ defeat. All this blood for nothing. Frank looked down at his hands, the scabbed slash in one palm. No answer came to him.
He closed his hand and looked at Bonney. “Maybe there ain’t no right answer.”
“Maybe not.”
“Ain’t but one thing to ask then.”
“What?”
“What would make our mamas most proud?”
“Never had one,” said Bonney. “What about you?”