The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ man there is your daddy,’ she said.

      The boy rolled those lips over his teeth in such a way that they might break through. He sneezed, a fit of them really, for no good reason.

      ‘He come to take you when you wasn’t but a baby, a little baby,’ the Widow said. ‘He come drunk and wild and unfit to father anything breathing. Your father was a bad man.’ The condensation of her speech hung heavy in the air.

      Trenchmouth stood. ‘He would have taken me from you,’ he said. He looked at her like a son looks at his mother when he needs more than words.

      ‘He would have.’

      ‘He would have kilt you to do it.’

      ‘He would have.’ She pulled the dead man’s mouth harmonica from her shirt pocket, gave it to the boy. ‘His,’ she said. ‘You’re liable to make somethin good of it.’ The boy looked at the little silver and wood instrument and felt sick at the thought of putting it to his mouth. She pulled him to her so that he hugged her around the hips, his face in her belly. An eight-year-old can know a great many things, and at the same time very few. That morning, at an outhouse burying ground, Trenchmouth Taggart knew he had been raised up right by the only woman who could’ve done the raising. He knew he’d most likely be dead or starved were it not for her. And he knew, that since the time of his last linen diaper some six years earlier, for every day of his young life, he’d been pissing and shitting on his very own daddy. That sat just fine with him, he decided.

      That evening, the Widow sat down with her children and told them things she never had before. The time was right. Due.

      She told Clarissa, among other things: ‘Your mother was too young, and most likely had got herself where she was by way of a drunk man’s forceful hand.’ The Widow knew things about the young mother, things like her name, Cleona Brook. Her whereabouts, Huntington by way of Charleston. Her profession, actress. The Widow even knew that Cleona was starring in a current production of Girl of the Golden West at the Huntington Theatre, less than a hundred miles of track away.

      It wasn’t coincidence that she turned to Trenchmouth that evening and spoke of similar knowledge, similar geography. While Clarissa whimpered next to the washtub in the kitchen, confused by discovery, and while the sunlight through the windows died and the room went orange and soft, the boy’s practicing mother told him of his birth mother. ‘She is in a room alone at the Home for Incurables in Huntington,’ she said.‘She pulls off her own fingernails. Thinks Satan is among us.’ Her name was spoken aloud with less sympathy than the girl’s mother. ‘Mittie Ann Taggart.’

      The Norfolk & Western ran a 1:50 p.m. daily out of Williamson. Columbus and Cincinnati, all points west and northwest. But the train stopped in Kenova and Huntington, and Ona Dorsett trusted it would be good for her children, aged eight and twelve, to strike out on their own for an overnighter. Children were babied too much, that was her thinking.

      Moonshine sales bankrolled the excursion of course, and the finger sandwiches in the café car were unlike anything Trenchmouth had tasted before. While he chewed, he almost let his teeth show.

      All of this, the fancy train car, the fancy finger food, would take the boy’s mind off Frank Dallara.

      Huntington was the big city. A train conductor had taken pity on the two, drawn them up maps on paper napkins. ‘The Theatre and the Asylum?’ he’d said. ‘Not your most visited sites for out-of-towners, but easy to git to anyhow.’

      The two split up at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 20th Street, Trenchmouth heading north to the nut bin on the hill, Clarissa east to the theatre. It was cold out, and she’d held her little brother’s hand since getting off the train, something he’d never let her do at home. Walking alone and looking back at one another, it seemed like they’d always clasped hands till now.

      The Huntington Theatre was of good size, all intricately carved maple, painted gold and red and blue. The red velvet curtain was stained and the hem needed repair. Clarissa asked a woman with a cigarette where she might find Cleona Brook.

      ‘How old are you?’ the woman answered. She spoke through her nose, wore a chicken feather in her silvery hair, and spat specks of cigarette tobacco between her tongue and top teeth.

      ‘Twelve,’ Clarissa said.

      ‘Too young to be told the truth, too old to lie to.’ The woman pointed to a door beside the stage and walked away.

      Clarissa walked down a hallway lit by a single gaslight on the wall. Behind one closed door she heard moans. A woman or a man’s, she couldn’t tell. The next door was open, and inside, a young lady with thin wrists smacked color into her cheeks in front of a mirror. Her hair was pulled back with an elaborate assortment of pins. ‘Excuse me,’ Clarissa said.

      The woman turned in her chair and looked Clarissa up and down. She sat with her legs spread, wearing nothing but a brassiere, stockings, and a pair of men’s shortpants. ‘Do you have something for a cough?’ she said to Clarissa. ‘I’ve got a terrible cough.’ She faked a hacking sound.

      ‘No ma’am.’ Clarissa thought about moving on down the hall. ‘Are you Cleona Brook?’

      ‘Cleopatra Brook. Who told you Cleona? You from the apothecary’s?’

      ‘I’m sorry, I’m Clarissa. My adoptive mother is Missus Ona Dorsett from Mingo County. She—’

      ‘Ona Dorsett. I know that name. Was she the one that died from gonorrhea up at Detroit? The Shakespearean?’ She looked around herself wildly, presumably for a production poster on the brown walls littered in newsprint and cheap fliers and dried up flowers pierced by nails.

      ‘No ma’am, Missus Dorsett raised me after you dropped me off to her. I was just a baby, you were young yourself.’ Clarissa was finding it difficult to speak with her normal level of confidence.

      ‘Puddin, I wasn’t ever young,’ the woman said. She turned back to the mirror and snorted. Spat what came up into a trash bin next to her foot. ‘I was Cleona Brook, that’s for certain, but I wasn’t never young. I didn’t have no babies in Mingo County. No, no, no babies in Mingo.’ She smiled then, cocked her head so that she could see her daughter in the mirror’s reflection. ‘Got me some babies now though. One named Jack, one named Phillip, and another Bill. All of em babies even though they’re grown men. Do what I tell em to, cry when I yell at em. You know, I smack those three and they call me mama, kiss my feet? It’s a real dream.’ She opened the drawer at her chest and put in a dip of snuff. ‘Let me see your teeth, girl.’

      Clarissa pulled back her lips. She tried to make it look like a smile.

      ‘White as white can be I guess. Hold on to that,’ Cleona said.

      ‘You’re my mother,’ Clarissa said.

      ‘Like hell I am.’

      The show was in two hours. Clarissa watched her mother shut the door with her toes. She had to step back to keep it from hitting her in the face. A fat man swept the hall on his hands and knees. His broomstick had broken off to a height of eight inches, and he swept the dust side to side, breathing it in down low on the floor and coughing it right back out.

      The Home for Incurables was a big stone building with over two hundred rooms. A hair-lipped nurse with calves the size of cantaloupes took to Trenchmouth, and though it was not СКАЧАТЬ