FALL 1877
ARE YOU A DRINKING MAN?
September 22, 1877
Al Baach commanded the peddler’s wagon from its single broken spring seat. It was an old buckboard, modified to carry wares, and it clanged and slapped and creaked along what had once been a Cherokee trail. Now some called it the Baltimore Turnpike. At the place where Virginia met West Virginia, the roadway was steep and everywhere switchbacked. Al Baach had known hills in Germany, but he’d not piloted a wagonload of wares across them. His forearms were tired. The old horse he steered had quit listening to his commands. She stiff-rumped the britchen and downhill was too swift. Al’s reins were dry and taut. Up ahead, Vic Moon rode in a fine saddle, and Al thought momentarily of leaving him and walking south to Tazewell, where he hoped his uncle lived.
The wagon belonged to Vic Moon, who was toting a load of pewter mugs to a man in southern West Virginia. Vic sharpened knives outside the Fell’s Point cigar factory where Al had stripped leaves for two weeks before deciding to leave Baltimore, though he’d only stepped off the steamship at Locust Point two weeks prior. He’d come from Germany, alone. Twenty years old and twenty years late. Only one other in the entire men’s steamer compartment had spoken German, and that man was seasick most days — he’d done more vomiting than talking. Only two others in his compartment were Jews, both from Poland. Those in the berths above and below Al had spoken Russian, and so he’d slept as much as he could, a handkerchief plugged up his noseholes. In Baltimore, there were those who would spit at his feet, for he was a foreign man, and some were blaming foreign men for what had happened. A month before his arrival, during the railroad strike, the state militia had shot workers dead on Camden Street. Al did not care for people spitting at his feet. Nor did he care for stripping leaves. His work was repairing boots and shoes. And so it was that when Vic Moon said he needed a traveling companion to McDowell County, West Virginia, Al had looked at a map. He knew his uncle had lived and worked in Tazewell, Virginia, since before Al’s birth, and now there were Baaches in Virginia who’d never seen Germany. Al aimed to get to these Baaches and work in their dry goods store. Vic Moon was his chance.
His given name was Arnold Louis Baach. Al was what the Americans called him.
His English was good. He was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. Across the chest he was big as an iron stove.
Vic Moon had a wife and boy he was leaving behind until he could pay their way to join him. The three of them had come over from Calabria, Italy, the year before. He had told Al Baach, “In southern West Virginia, the people are the finest I have seen.” He said the railroad in those parts was just getting started, and there was money to be made, and all you had to do was holler out front of a house and someone would open the door and say, “Get off your horse, come get you something to eat, and stay all night.” Fifteen cents got you that. Twenty fetched breakfast and your horse taken care of too. That very scenario had played the night they came down off the mountain to Bluefield. The people of West Virginia laughed easy and looked at you straight when they spoke, and there was something in the closeness of the hills that Al found agreeable.
Now it was their fourteenth day of travel, and Vic Moon said he’d bet on reaching their destination by five.
In truth, it was not Al’s turn to pilot the wagon, but he’d done so because Vic Moon was fifteen years his senior and claimed the wagon seat was hell on his hemorrhoids. He rode ahead on his big bay. It was a fine horse, full-rumped, unlike the bone-pointed animal pulling Al along. She was a small old mare who, in the morning hours, farted in time with her gait. Vic Moon had complained three evenings prior of the cart-pulling mare and said he’d not be downwind again.
He whistled the melody to Yankee Doodle and called back to Al every quarter mile to make haste. He enjoyed the quiet away from towns and cities. He enjoyed the company of the untroubled youngster from Germany.
Two miles out of Keystone, twelve feet up above the road, a man clutched the thick bough of an overhung red oak. Its canopy of leaves hid him well. When Vic Moon passed underneath, the man let go his clutch and dropped, turning midair and landing with considerable force upon the head of Vic Moon, snapping his neck and pulling him to the ground at once. It happened so quickly that Al Baach saw only a falling blur. He stood in his seat and watched the holey bottoms of Vic Moon’s socks as he was pulled into the stickweeds by the armpits. The waylayer had yanked him from his perch so hard his boots had hung up in the irons, and there they swayed, open-mouthed and foul. So foul were the boots that Al nearly choked when he stepped off the wagon and neared them.
He tied the horses one-handed, pistol drawn. The bay bit at a grass knot like nothing had happened. Al followed the drag trail into the woods, where, a hundred yards in, he found Vic Moon on his back in a scatter of brown pine needles. His pockets were inside out and his forehead was staved in deep and square by an axe butt. His eyes were open, dead to everything.
Al Baach pulled him one-handed by the ankle back to the road, pistol still readied in his other hand should the waylayer return.
He hefted Moon into the wagon, and when he fetched the stirrupped boots, he saw something through a tear in the left sole. He pinched his nose and dug and came up clutching one hundred and twenty-three dollars in folded bills.
He rode into Keystone with the bay tied and trailing, a dead man behind him in the wagon. It was nearing eighty degrees. Hammers called in rhythm and echoed all around, frame houses and buildings springing upward inside the narrowest stretch of creek land Al had seen. Hills rose up on either side like walls, striped empty here and there in clear-cut lines of stumps. Up at the bend, he could see men lining ties and spiking rails.
He stopped at the first place he came to, a frame building that had yet to get its siding or window glass. Two men stood out front in the mud. Al got down, gave his name, and reported the peddler killer to one Henry Trent, a sharp-shouldered man in a tailored suit, and one R. Rutherford, the smallest man Al Baach had ever encountered. Rutherford made some claim to being the law, though there was no official law to be had in those times. He ate a hardboiled egg. Its white had smeared gray from the filth on his hands.
They stepped to the wagon where Trent leaned over the top box to see for himself. Rutherford had to climb the wheel and perch on the hub in order to have a look at the dead man. Vic Moon was stretched lengthwise along the side rail where Al Baach had refashioned crates to make room. Tobacco tins lay scattered across his middle like an offering.
Henry Trent shook his head and took his pipe out. “I believe that’s Vic Moon,” he said.
Al Baach was caught off guard by this and managed only to nod.
Field crickets signaled louder from the ridge.
Trent struck a match and put it to the bowl and drew, all the while watching Al Baach. “I suspect you were unaware of all his business here?” he said.
Al did not know who or what to look at. He could not speak.
“I summoned Vic Moon. He served me a drink once upon a time in Baltimore.” Trent smiled despite the pipe stuck in his teeth. He said, “His price on pewter was competitive.”
Al Baach thought a moment and then took the one hundred and twenty-three dollars from his pocket. He held it up. “Mr. Moon has wife and boy in Baltimore,” Al told them. “I need to make arrangement.”