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He spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable with care, “I come up from Matewan.” He was tall and powerfully built—looked like a real mountain man with long, straight brown hair that hung down to his shoulders. He made my exam room seem too small. But there was something about his deeply set blue eyes and low-pitched voice that gave me a sense of profound sadness. “Getting up here from Mingo County is a long haul. We left at 3 o’clock in the morning. It was black as coal. The trip took forever.”
I guessed it did. Mingo County is as far as you can get from Morgantown. It is in the southwest corner of the state, and Matewan sits right on the Tug Fork River just across from Kentucky. You travel a lot of winding, two-lane roads before you finally get to the big interstate that takes you north.
“I’m Anderson,” he said, holding out his hand. “People call me Anse.”
Anse. Now there was a unique nickname. I’d heard it used only once before, and it was a name well entrenched in West Virginia history.
“You’re not related to ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield?” I asked. “He was from Mingo.”
“They say I am, they say I got Hatfield blood runnin’ in me.”
Mingo is the newest county in West Virginia and its history is rich with stories of the Hatfield and McCoy feud in the late 1800s—mostly begun, so the story goes, over the disputed ownership of a razorback hog. The raging family feud caught the country’s attention at the time and is still part of West Virginia lore.
“That was a bad time for the Hatfields,” Anse said. “Both sides lost a lot of good men.” He turned to his wife, who was sitting next to him. “Peggy’s a McCoy …
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