THE RAIN BROKE LOOSE in a roar, a violent barrage come slapping down on the streets of Logan. Storm drains boiled, gutters foamed. Sparkes and Mildred rode with their backs against the buckboard slats of the paddy wagon, watching the town assemble itself from the storm.
Another war train had just pulled into the station and soldiers were hurrying through the city streets in slickers. Officers rode in motorcycle sidecars; sentries erected barricades. On Stratton Street, a commander in a long trench coat waved his swagger stick like a conductor, lining up two columns of infantry between the lunch counters and shoe shops and pool halls. On a cross street, a mule passed with its head down in the harness, pulling an artillery gun.
They were taken to the Aracoma Hotel, headquarters of the Logan defenders. The lobby had been transformed into a mess hall, and the hallways and anterooms were lined with rifles. Sparkes and the others were shuffled into a hotel suite that smelled rank, thick with sweat and whiskey and cigar smoke. A colonel of the state guard had his forehead on his desk, his tie hanging rumpled between his knees. He was snoring, his hand lying inside an open desk drawer. Probably a bottle there, empty. A pair of deputies dozed in armchairs behind him, their ashtrays heaped, their pistols spilling out of their coat lapels, while officers and staff came and went from an adjoining room, faces glazed with sweat and fatigue.
The infamous Sheriff Chafin sat perched on an oversized couch. The man they called the Czar. On a coffee table before him sat a whole bank of telephones—models of every size and description, some ringing, some not, their wires strung helter-skelter across the floor, into other rooms and hallways. He was shouting back and forth between a pair of receivers, his cheeks pouched red.
“How many rounds, you say? Thirty-three left? Christ, man, you’re cutting it close. Another supply train’s just arrived. Yes, they’re loading the trucks now, the ammo will be there in fifteen minutes.” He turned to the other receiver. “Yes, the Army’s just arrived, they’ll be taking over the defense line. Yes, I’ll see they head to your sector first.” He looked up. His eyes had purple creases beneath them, as if he’d been punched. He gestured with one of the phones. “Deputy, these people are bleeding on the floor, please. Deputy.” A deputy roused himself and spread a towel for them to stand on.
Finally the sheriff hung up and checked their press credentials and identification. “What about these two?” He jutted his chin toward the two miners.
“In our employ,” lied Sparkes. “Our hired guides.”
The sheriff raised his eyebrows. “You got receipts to prove it?”
Sparkes opened his mouth, caught out.
Chafin smiled. “Naw, I’m just jerking your chain, Mr. Sparkes. You and Miss Morris here are free to go. Why don’t y’all go get yourselves a warm meal downstairs. My deputies here will make sure you have clean rooms to rest up and write your stories. We’ll send a doctor around, too, get those scrapes bandaged up.”
Mildred stepped forward. “Scrapes, Sheriff? These men were shot by state police.”
Before Chafin could reply, the coffee table leapt alive with ringing telephones. Three, four, five at once. The high sheriff floated his hand over the rattling machines, pouching his lip with his tongue. One of them looked like a TNT detonator, a wooden box with the receiver jingling atop its brass stand like a plunger. He snapped the receiver from its cradle, clapped his palm over the mouthpiece, and cut his purpled eyes at them.
“Y’all just remember who your friends are, huh?”
With that, they were escorted from the room.
SPARKES SAT HUNCHED OVER the typewriter in his skivvies, his wounds bandaged, his socked feet hooked in the spindles of a ladderback hotel chair. The spring-loaded keys punched their letters hard and neat across the page, forming long trains of sentences, the carriage return ringing as he reached the edge of each line. He was writing the story of his trip into coal country, into the heart of industrial violence in America.
He wrote of riding on the very first troop train into the battle zone, the cars loaded with a vanguard of handpicked infantrymen, the engine pushing three empty flatcars like barges in case of explosives or ax-felled trees or other barricades. He wrote of barefoot women and children perched high on cabin stoops, strange-faced and gaunt, watching the train pass through the dawn, raising their hands to the soldiers, and Blizzard riding on the rear platform of the caboose, watching a miner return to his family, the wife dressed in calico, the children clutching their pappy on the porch of their little house beside the tracks.
Sparkes was deep in the piece when someone hammered at his hotel door.
“One moment.”
He slipped into his trousers, cinching his belt as he limped toward the door.
“It’s Mildred.”
“Coming.” Sparkes turned the knob.
“Goddamn censors!” she said, marching into his room. Her face was knotted, her cheeks fired red. A bull-faced state trooper followed her into the room. He had his spine bowed back, his thumbs hooked in his gun belt.
Sparkes hadn’t invited the man into the room. “Excuse me?”
The trooper shrugged, setting one hand on the butt of his revolver. “I go where she goes, buddy.” He tapped his toes on the floor. “Orders is orders.”
Mildred crossed her arms, flexing her muscles. “They want our stories checked by censors. I protested, and look what they gave me.” She cocked her head at the slouching trooper. “A chaperone. And not just outside my door. He’s been ordered to follow me into my room.” The man was twice her size, built like a bullmastiff.
She lowered her voice. “I’ve taken to writing my piece in the lobby.”
Sparkes looked at the trooper. “You must be joking.”
The man shrugged again. Orders.
“I care more about the censors,” said Mildred. “That’s a clear breach of the First Amendment, and no one around here seems to give one inch of a Goddamn about it.”
Sparkes looked at the trooper. “Whose orders are these?”
“Come down through a colonel of the state guard.”
Sparkes thought of the drunk officer in the sheriff’s office, the one dozing at his desk. He shook his head. “The United States Army is in charge here now,” he said. “Federal troops, not state. And certainly not Sheriff Chafin.”
The trooper squinted out the window, his elbow cocked high from his hip. He tapped his fingers on the butt of his gun. “Well, buddy, I hear the U.S. Army, they done set their headquarters up there in Madison. That’s a town on the other side of Blair Mountain. We’re still in charge of keeping order here.”
Sparkes looked at Mildred. “Who’s the censor?”
BAD TONY GAUJOT HELD the typewritten pages between his large, flat thumbs. Sparkes watched his eyes flit across the sentences, jumping from phrase to phrase, sometimes back again, rereading. His eyes were clear, sharp, hard. He’d won the Congressional Medal of Honor, knew Sparkes, as had his older brother—the only such pair in American history. He’d spent the battle on the Logan defense line, running a machine gun. His uniform blouse was draped from a coat hanger, his sleeves rolled, the muddy tattoo of a heart on his forearm.
“Cut this,” he said, setting the paper on the table, striking a sentence with his thumbnail, hard enough to leave a crease: Gaunt-faced women, barefooted and expressionless watched the troops pass. Some of them waved half-heartedly.
“No sob stuff for these Rednecks,” he said.
He went on cutting and deleting, killing more lines, turning images into ghosts. People who once existed in the story were cut out. They disappeared between the lines, into the margins, like they’d never been.
Sparkes ground his teeth. He’d followed the American Expeditionary Force across Europe in the Great War, working on the bloody edge of the campaign, and never faced such a knife. The man before him seemed so sure of himself, so certain of his rightness. “No patriotic stuff from these people,” he said, cutting another line.
“You seem pretty cavalier about this, Major. You’re cutting awfully close with the United States Constitution right now, don’t you think?”
Bad Tony raised one eye at him. “All that time on the front lines, writing your stories, and you ain’t learned how it works yet. ’Tis the victor who writes the history—”
“And counts the dead. Yes, I know the quote.”
The old battler nodded, as if they’d come to some agreement, then cut another line from the story.