Silver Moon Tavern
Over on Main Island Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, where Devil Anse Hatfield held forth in his day, another picture greets the eye today. Coal-mining camps are strung along from one end of the creek to the other. Omar, near where Devil Anse is buried, is quite a thriving town. It was here that Jonse, the eldest son who loved Rosanna McCoy, spent his last days as a night watchman for a power plant. Jonse’s nerves were so shattered he jumped almost at the falling of a leaf and the company, fearing some tragedy might be the result from too sudden trigger-pulling, found other occupation for the Hatfield son.
Within a few yards of the spot where the home of Devil Anse burned to the ground stands today a rustic lodge garishly designed. Over the doorway painted in bright red letters are these words—
SILVER MOON TAVERN
Neighbors call it a beer j’int. Entering, you are greeted by the proprietor, a mild, pleasant fellow who asks in a slow mountain drawl, “What kin I do for you?” If you happen to be an old acquaintance as I am, Tennis Hatfield—for he it is who runs the place—will add, “Glad to see you. I’ve not laid eyes on you for a coon’s age. Set.” He waved me to a chromium stool beside the counter. “I’ve quit the law.” Tennis had been sheriff of Logan County for a term or two. “This is easier.” He flung wide his hands with a gesture that encompassed the interior of the Silver Moon Tavern. “Well, there’s no harm in selling beer.” He fixed me with a piercing look such as I had seen in the eye of Devil Anse. “What’s more there’s no harm in drinking it either, in reason. Young folks gather in here of a night and listen to the music and dance and it don’t cost ’em much money. A nickel in the slot. We ain’t troubled with slugs,” he said casually. “The folks choose their own tune.” He pointed to a gaudily striped electric music box that filled a corner of the tavern. With great care he showed me the workings of the moan box, he called it. “These are the tunes they like best.” He called them off as his finger moved carefully along the titles: “Big Beaver, The Wise Owl, Double Crossing Mamma, In the Mood, and Mountain Dew. They just naturally wear that record out. Young folks here on Main Island Creek like Lulu Belle and Scotty. See, they made that record Mountain Dew.” A slow smile lighted his face. “’Pon my soul all that young folks do these days is eat and dance. That’s how come me to put the sign on the side of my beer j’int—Dine and Dance. We’re right up to snuff here on Main Island Creek,” he added with a smug smile. “But now Joe Hatfield over to Red Jacket in Mingo County, he follows preaching and he says a beer j’int is just sending people plum to hell. I don’t know about that. There’s never been no trouble here in my place. I won’t sell a man that’s had a dram too many. And if he starts to get noisy”—he lifted a toe—“out he goes! I aim to keep my place straight.” He shoved his thumbs deep into the belt of his breeches. “Not much doin’ at this time of day. The girls in school or helping with the housework; the boys in the mines. Don’t step out till after supper. Then look out! The young bucks shake a heel and the girls put on their lipstick. Them that can’t afford a permanent go around all day with their hair done up in curlycues till they look a match for Shirley Temple by the time they get here of a night. Times has surely changed.”
A bus whizzed by and disappeared beyond the bend of the road.
“Times has changed,” Tennis repeated slowly as his gaze sought the hillside where Devil Anse lay buried. “I wonder what Pa would a-thought of my place,” he said with conscientious wistfulness. His eyes swept now the interior of the Silver Moon Tavern. “This couldn’t a-been in Pa’s young days. Nor womenfolks couldn’t a-been so free. Such as this couldn’t a-been, no more than their ways then could stand today.” The son of Devil Anse leaned over the bar and said in a strangely hushed voice, “Woman, I’ve heard tell that you have a hankerin’ for curiosities and old-timey things. I keep a few handy so’s I don’t get above my raisin’.” He reached under the counter. “Here, woman, heft this!” He placed in my hands Devil Anse’s long-barreled gun. “Scrutinize them notches on the barrel. That there first one is Harmon McCoy. Year of sixty-three,” he said bluntly.
While I hefted the gun, Tennis brought out a crumpled shirt. “Them holes is where the McCoys stobbed Uncle Ellison and there’s the stain of his gorm.”
The gruesome sight of the blood-stained garment slashed by the McCoys completely unnerved me. I dropped the gun.
Instantly a door opened behind Tennis and a young lad rushed in. He took in the situation at a glance and swiftly appraised my five-foot height. “Pa,” he turned to Tennis Hatfield, “you’ve scared this little critter out of a year’s growth. And she ain’t got none to spare.”
Seeing that all was well he backed out of the door he had entered, and Tennis went on to say that his young son had quit college to join the army. “He’ll be leaving soon for training camp. That is, if he can quit courting Nellie McCoy long enough over in Seldom Seen Hollow. ’Pon my soul, I never saw two such turtledoves in my life. She’s pretty as a picture and I’ve told her that whether or not her and Tennis Junior every marry there’s always a place for her here with us. A pretty girl in a pretty frock is mighty handy to wait table.” Again the wideflung hands of the proprietor of the Silver Moon Tavern embraced in their gesture the shiny tables, booths, chromium-trimmed chairs, and the gaudy juke box in the corner.
In September, 1940, Tennis Hatfield’s son, Tennis, Jr., joined the army. He was nineteen at the time.
The Hatfields and McCoys have married. Charles D. Hatfield, who joined the army at Detroit’s United States Army recruiting office, is the son of Tolbert McCoy Hatfield of Pike County and is friend to his kin on both sides.
The two families held a picnic reunion in the month of August, 1941, on Blackberry Creek where the blood of both had been shed during the feud, and at the gathering a good time was had by all with plenty of fried chicken and no shooting.
Today on the eve of another war things are still quiet up in Breathitt County so far as the Hargises are concerned. Elbert Hargis, brother of Judge Jim Hargis who was slain by his son Beach, has passed on. They buried him, the last of Granny Hargis’s boys, in the family burying ground behind the old homestead on Pan Bowl, so called because it is almost completely encircled by the North Fork of the Kentucky River.
To his last hour, almost, Elbert Hargis sat in the shadow of the courthouse looking sadly toward Judge Jim Hargis’s store where Beach had killed his father, the store in front of which Dr. Cox had been assassinated. His eyes shifted occasionally toward the courthouse steps down which the lifeless body of J. B. Marcum plunged when Curt Jett shot him from the back. Again Elbert’s gaze turned to the second-story windows of the courthouse from which Jim Cockrell had been shot to death one sunny summer day.
Ever alert and never once permitting anyone to stand behind him, with a gun in its holster thumping on his hip every step he took, Elbert Hargis must have lived again and again the days when his brother Jim directed the carryings-on of the Hargis clan. But if you’d ask him if he ever thought of the old times, there would be a quick and sharp No!, followed by abrupt silence.
Elbert Hargis is dead now. And a natural death was his from a sudden ailment of the lungs. He died in a hospital down in the Blue Grass where white-clad nurses and grave-faced doctors with a knowing of the miracles of modern surgery and medicine could not prolong the life of the aged feudist for one short second. The last of Granny Evaline Hargis’s sons rests beside his mother, alongside the three brothers John, Jr., Ben, and Jim, and the half-brother Willie Sewell, whose death away back in 1886, when he was shot from ambush at a molasses-making, started all the trouble. In the same burying ground with Elbert is the vine-covered grave of Senator Hargis, father of the boys, who preceded his wife Evaline to the spirit world long years ago.