“IT’S THE SAME DAMN story as always, Blizz,” said Big Frank. “Don’t you see that?”
Blizzard looked down at his boots, rubbing his chin. Hundreds of shadows had gathered along the rocky banks of Crooked Creek, shifting in the darkness, whispering among themselves. Their heads nodding.
Law only serves them that’s in power.
Ain’t no different than always.
Our boys died for nothing.
Blizzard shook his head. He’d been all across Blair Mountain in the night, hiking from unit to unit, speaking in trenches and foxholes, telling the men it was time to stand down, to go home. The U.S. Army had arrived. Their fight was with King Coal, he told them, not Uncle Sam. With thugs and corrupt lawmen, not American soldiers. They’d put up one hell of a fight, and then some. But they couldn’t fight the United States military. Most of the miners agreed, and word spread through the night. Time to pack up, to come down the mountain, to head home.
But Big Frank and the other miners at Crooked Creek Gap had been in the bloodiest fighting of the battle. Men had died before their eyes. Friends. They wouldn’t go easy.
“I don’t like it, neither,” said Blizzard. “But this ain’t the state militia or guards. I saw them, boys. War train a mile long if it was an inch, and that’s just the first. This is the United States Army, dressed in the same uniform some of you are wearing now, and they’ve come with howitzers, motor-sickles, and machine guns. It will be a damn massacre, and won’t a single American outside the coal camps of this state give a good Goddamn about it either, about any one of us blown to hell or our starving children left behind, because it ain’t the gun thugs or company bloodhounds or vigilantes no more. It’s the United States Army. You know who it was on that train I met? The 19th Infantry Regiment. The Rock of Chickamauga. Hard of the hard, ready to shoot and bayonet whatever they’re pointed at. And there’s at least two more regiments on the way.”
Another voice from the darkness. “What about Crockett and all the rest kilt up here? Thirty-some, they say, just here, just today. We go home now, what the hell did they die for?”
Blizzard squinted, his eyes moon-specked. “They died for a cause they believed in. If we go on, we kill that cause, and their memories, too. They died for their children, and their children’s children. For solidarity, and a better future. For us. If we go up against the U.S. Army, there won’t be no future. We will kill that cause, bury it dead in the ground beneath a sea of blood. Crock and the rest? They won’t be heroes no more. They’ll be called criminals, insurgents. Murderers. Not only dead, but dishonored. Their names sullied. And we’ll be the cause of it, us here on this creek, sure as we spat on their graves.”
The men were nodding now, hearing him.
“We go gentle, and we might just show this country we ain’t in it for the blood. No, sir, we’re good Americans standing up for the freedoms taken from us. The rights this country promises. The liberties. The same ones thousands before us died for. And there’s a chance our stories will be heard. The cause won’t be killed alongside them that died for it.”
The men nodded, whispering to one another.
We can’t let this be the end.
Let’s bury them with honor.
Solidarity forever. Let the cause roll on.
One of the men hugged his rifle close. “What about our guns? We supposed to give them all over to the Army? The second they leave, we won’t be but lambs for the slaughter. The Baldwins will kill us for sport.”
Blizzard cracked his knuckles and winked. “Now, about that.”
THE MINERS WERE DISPERSING, taking up their packs, talking of how they’d get home. What roads or paths or hopped trains. Frank stepped up to Blizzard and took his arm, lowering his voice. “They’re like to string somebody up for all this, Blizz. Maybe you.”
Blizzard ground his teeth and cocked his head. Veins popped out of his neck. “They can try.”
“See they don’t.”
“And you? You going home?”
Frank sniffed and looked up the creek. Dark, rock-ridden banks and canted trees. The glint of water over stone. A hundred different shades in the night, shifting like ghosts. He shook his head. “Home? No, Blizz. Not like this. This is surrender. Only home I got’s on the other side of that mountain.”
Blizzard reached for his arm, but Frank was already gone, vanishing into the trees. He was headed toward the double knuckle of Blair Mountain. A great fist in the night, still clenched.
BOYDEN SPARKES WATCHED THE dawn ridges pass through his window. They’d left a rear guard at the outlying station and headed deeper into the battle zone. Now the troop train was pushing through the early mists that hung heavy in the hollers and along the ridgelines, shrouding the world against the impending sun. Inside the passenger coaches, the soldiers were dozing again in their seats, their snores filling the cabin.
Sparkes had hardly slept. He was filled with the sharp air of the front, his pencil whittled sharp, ready to scratch down the story of the place, as if tracing out its heartbeat on ticker tape. He’d been watching the ridges, the early light sectoring down their faces, catching the miners’ shanties perched high in the mists, clinging reckless to what looked like vertical hillsides gouged bare of trees. Some were shuffled together in ranks, their hovel roofs protruding like shelves of giant fungi or a poorer version of Mrs. Winchester’s house. Many were hollow-looking, their windows dark.
He was glad he’d received the telegram from Mother Jones. His own sources had been slow to keep him apprised of the situation here, as if they hoped he’d miss the train, pass on the story. Not a direct attempt at suppression, but he had enough experience to sense the words not said, calls not made, telegrams not sent.
Now Sparkes eased up from his seat and stepped carefully down the aisle, careful not to bump any of the men awake. He felt like a headmaster letting them sleep a few more minutes. In 1916, he’d been mustered into the 1st Illinois Cavalry when Pancho Villa was raiding along the Mexican border. The U.S. Army had called up the state guards to support the American expeditionary force plunging deep into Mexico, pursuing the bandoliered revolutionary general. But the men on this train were a different breed, not guardsmen but crack infantry, many with experience overseas.
Rumor was, Sergeant Samuel Woodfill was on this train, the most decorated soldier of the Great War, a man who’d charged three German machine-gun emplacements during a battle in the Meuse, advancing through thick fog and mustard gas, fighting hand-to-hand despite his gassed lungs. Woodfill had been discharged as a captain after the war and reenlisted as a sergeant—and he might well be on this train, headed to Blair Mountain.
Sparkes reached the back of the car, lit a cigarette, and slipped outside, closing the door softly behind him. Leaning on the railing of the gangway, he watched the mist-laden hillsides shuttle past, blue in the dawn, pocked here or there with the paling antlers of blighted chestnut trees. Forest giants, cankered and dying, as if they’d sucked up some poison through their roots, coal or gunpowder or hate. Sparkes had seen them dying all through their range, but they seemed sadder here, where some had grown the size of castle towers.
The early light, pale and watery, seeped farther down the hillsides, catching on roads tangled with cut telegraph lines, the wires lying about in cursive scrolls. As they rolled closer to the front, Sparkes began to see traffic out there, dark shapes trundling down the roads, lumbering through the mists. Men and wagons and flivvers, rattletrap automobiles that lurched and jounced through the ruts.
Everyone was heading out of the battle zone, it seemed—an exodus of men in rumpled denim overalls, their bandannas hanging soiled from their necks like dried gouts of blood. A whole river of them, flowing opposite the slow chug of the train. Many of them walked with their arms crossed high against their chests, thumbs sticking up, or with fists thrust low in their hip pockets, shoulders slumped.
None of them, saw Sparkes, was carrying a gun. Not one.
He squinted an eye out there, aiming his mind on the point, then turned and opened the door of the next coach down the line. Here, the soldiers were waking, yawning, palming the sleep from their eyes. Sparkes walked down that aisle and then another and another, each coach full of stirring men, as if he were the one tickling them awake, feathering their noses with his passage. Finally he arrived at the caboose, where a sentry checked his press badge and granted him entry. Sparkes passed through a cabin of adjutants, nodding hellos, and stepped out onto the rear platform of the train.
To his surprise, Blizzard was standing there among a group of young officers in breeches and Sam Browne belts. The man looked like he’d been all across the mountain in the night. His jacket hung from his shoulders like an organic thing, draped with moss and leaves, and Sparkes could smell him. Soil and smoke, wet stone and rimed sweat. He must have swung up onto the caboose in the last hour, returning from his trip to the front lines.
Blizzard was watching the roads, a store-bought cigarette pinched between his fingers, surely proffered by one of the young lieutenants. There was a heavy silence on the little balcony, every man watching the emigration in the mist.
Sparkes licked his lips. “They’re not armed, are they? Where are their rifles?”
The officers stiffened—hadn’t they noticed?
Blizzard turned from the rail and sucked hard on the cigarette, crackling it down to a nub before pinching it hot from his lips. “Guns is hid. High up in the hills, where we can find them when need be. Stump holes, tree hollows, buried in slickers beside old Indian trails. Need ye a century to find them all.”
He mashed the cigarette butt beneath his thumb, a sprinkle of ash. “We ain’t about to get gunned down in the street once you boys is gone.”
The officers looked at one another, said nothing. What could they do? Out on the roads, the men drifted through the mist, a trail of smoke-blue ghosts in the dawn.