The Kid Who Lived: James Townsend’s The Devil in the Coal

A review of The Devil in the Coal by James Townsend

James Townsend is a writer who intimately knows Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, and that knowledge serves him well in a novel set a long way from either. The Devil in the Coal takes place in a West Virginia company town in 1931, but readers familiar with the events of 1878 in Lincoln County will recognize some of the arrangements: a monopoly store, debt used to keep people obedient, businessmen with influence over the law, and armed men whose authority depends on who's doing the asking.

It’s a shrewd move. The conflicts fit Appalachian coal country without much forcing, and Townsend can develop his characters without having to deliver them to the end of a trail the reader already knows. A Billy the Kid novel has Pete Maxwell’s bedroom inevitably waiting somewhere ahead of it. Here, I could recognize the historical parallels without being certain exactly how far Townsend would follow them. That uncertainty kept me interested.

I should say that I’m far from a neutral reader of a West Virginia novel. My father’s people come from there. My grandmother was born in Terra Alta, up in Preston County, where the Messenger family burial plot now sits just off Route 7, which is to say, in a cow pasture. My grandfather studied mining at WVU in Morgantown and spent World War II inspecting coal mines for the Army Corps of Engineers; his father was a wildcatter who worked the state with Michael Benedum. I have fond memories of summer visits at my Uncle Bob’s place at Grafton on Tygart Lake. It was Uncle Bob who was once lost for the better part of a week in an old coal mine, which is the kind of sentence you can only write about a West Virginia relative (I’ve told that story elsewhere). I know what that country looks like, and I’m particular, some might say unreasonably so, about how it sounds on the page.

Townsend gets it. Coal River is a company town “fashioned all at once, from a single thought” by the man who owns the mine. Its houses are “squared out in the same pattern as if dropped down from a machine on an assembly line.” The church occupies the highest point in town, an arrangement the clerk Clara Bailey suspects has as much to do with the company’s interests as with God’s. Outside town, the abandoned coke ovens are “black mouths opening into the earth, half collapsed and reclaimed by the woods.”

The history is close enough for people to remember. Blair Mountain is ten years back. Men still talk about Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers on the courthouse steps. A river hermit knew Mother Jones and called her Mary. Townsend also pays attention to the less dramatic business of keeping a town under control: ration cards, lease reviews, relief offered with conditions attached. The company’s power reaches into decisions about groceries and rent, and the novel is convincing about just how little room that leaves people to object.

The passage that first caught me comes early, as Will Dodson walks home from the mine:

I recognized that smell, or at least the ghost of it. It brought back places I hadn’t thought about in years.

Will is eighteen when he comes home to find his father being beaten to death by the Cumberland Detective Agency’s “blackhats,” while their district supervisor watches from across the street. Almost immediately, people begin assigning meaning to whatever Will does next. Reverend Harlan Walton’s sermons about wolves acquire a recognizable target. The local newspaper turns an ordinary action into evidence of a threat. A fistfight becomes a story that travels farther than the circumstances warrant.

Silas Kincaid, who owns the mine and much of the town, is baffled by the attention:

This was where Townsend’s familiarity with the Kid interested me most. Will’s reputation gets ahead of him, shaped by people who have their own reasons for needing him to be dangerous, admirable, or both. Whether Will is being used, his story certainly is. The reporter Addison Clay contributes to it, but so do neighbors, allies, and boys looking for someone to admire. Will has to live with their expectations while he's still trying to decide what to do.

He finds work with Elias Boone, who runs the one shipping yard in the valley Kincaid doesn’t own. Here, Boone quietly diverts supplies to hungry families in the hollows. He is willing to oppose Kincaid, though his methods are more practical than Will initially understands, and his explanations tend toward understatement. Asked whether he’s giving the goods away, he says:

“I’m just moving some surplus through an inefficient inventory structure.”

Boone's shipping yard gives Will work, but it also supplies him with friends. Chief among them is Mackie, the crew’s joker, loyal past the point of good sense and the book’s most honest mourner. But more friends also means more people to lose. When Boone is killed on a road outside town, the law, in the person of Sheriff Royce Talbot, newly elected with Kincaid’s money and determined not to be owned by it, seemingly cannot make anything stick to the men everyone in the valley knows were responsible.

Townsend is particularly good at the uncomfortable distance between what Will intends and what he can later justify. Will and Mackie knowingly plan a killing, and nearly everyone Will trusts tells him not to go. He goes anyway. But when the moment arrives, he has the man in his sights and doesn’t fire; he fires only when the man turns a gun on someone Will cares about. That gives Will a reason, and it's a real one. But Clara and the yard’s foreman, Rourke, refuse to let him use it to avoid discussing why he went there armed in the first place.

I appreciated that the disagreement survives the shooting. Will has a defensible account of the moment he pulled the trigger, and his friends still have grounds to question him. Townsend lets those competing truths complicate their relationships well beyond the action itself.

Clara is especially good in these scenes. She keeps a notebook because she distrusts the accounts other people are producing, and her commitment to accuracy can be uncomfortable for her friends. Asked why she writes so much, she answers:

She's observant, stubborn, and frequently funny. She also understands that being on Will’s side doesn't require her to endorse everything he does.

Reverend Walton surprised me. He preaches order, distrusts Boone, and helps make Will into a public menace, and he means every word of it, which is the problem; a cynic would have been easier to dismiss. Townsend lets us see the vanity and convenience mixed into his convictions. He spends a great deal of time on sermon titles (“Watchmen with No Tower” pleases him more than it should), and he has a habit of arriving at decisions in the act of announcing them. His wife, Sarah Beth, is reliably one thought ahead of him and has stopped pretending otherwise. I found myself increasingly interested in what he would do when events made his principled position harder and harder to maintain.

Then there's Hank, the shipping yard’s fifteen-year-old errand boy, who watches Will with an admiration Will gradually finds increasingly hard to accept. It's difficult to dismiss what people say about you when a boy you know is listening and taking it seriously. For me, part of the generation that idolized Billy the Kid because of Young Guns, it was easy to see myself in Hank's shoes.

If I have a reservation, it’s that Townsend, who is a clever and funny man, sometimes hands a little too much of that cleverness to everyone in the room. The doctor, the clerk, the foreman, and the boys all share a similar dry wit, and while I enjoyed their exchanges, I sometimes wished they sounded just a little less like one another. Occasionally a character explains what the moment meant when the moment has already made its point. But these are the faults of a generous writer, and I’d much rather have them than the opposite.

As I read, I found I enjoyed spending time with these people. They work, argue, deliver supplies, tease one another, and worry about who has come home. Those ordinary attachments make the violence matter, and they give the reader something to care about beyond whether Kincaid can be beaten.

Readers who know the Lincoln County War will enjoy recognizing its echoes and watching Townsend decide which ones to pursue. Those who don’t will find a story that needs no explanation or understanding of New Mexico: a young man grieving his father, a town grown accustomed to being afraid under the thumb of a rich man, and a group of people trying to help as best they can without agreeing on what help requires. More than anything, I wanted to know what happened to them. By then, I’d stopped trying to guess from the history and simply enjoyed the journey.

The Devil in the Coal by James Townsend is available on Amazon: https://link.amazon/B04MSL6oz