Word: feud
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Hatfields and McCoys are still here, hundreds of them, Hatfields clustered around West Virginia towns like Belfry and Double Camp, McCoys settled in Pilgrim and Jamboree in Kentucky. Many still hunt (raccoons, squirrels) and gather (chestnuts, huckleberries), but they also watch cable TV and vacation in New Jersey. The feud is unequivocally over. All is forgiven. Forgotten? Not just yet. "Why, we're plain old Hatfields and McCoys," says one of the latter in a shrugging, boiler-plate disclaimer, "good friends and neighbors . . ." Yet after a reminiscence has meandered a while, and the truce reaffirmed again, the rote kindliness...
...perfervid killing had finished. Says Dutch: "My grandmother, Ellison's wife, wouldn't talk too much about it. She lost her husband. It was sad for her." Dutch's cousin Belle Hatfield Pendergrast is 80, and full of a delighted sassiness about everything except the feud. Her father was indicted in Kentucky for a feud crime, and as long as he lived would never cross the Tug Fork...
...just a young boy but he was still goin' at it in the mountains." Henry D. Hatfield, 53, says of his great uncle Henry D., a physician and politician: "He would actually, physically, throw you out of that hospital if you'd ask him about that feud." Peacemaking was an active mission among both families. "My parents," Belle says, "made us be friendly with the McCoys. If you met one of those McCoy men that was in the fighting, you'd be nice and kind...
...takes his own backhanded swipe: "Those poor Hatfields, as I understand it, were too easy with their drinking back then. It took away their sense, made 'em too brave." Given the chance, Hatfields abandon impartiality as well. Says Henry D. cheerfully: "Really, the Hatfields won the feud. Devil Anse would have ended it any time. But Randolph McCoy was so irate. . ." Even Dutch, appalled by his ancestors' attack on a McCoy family home in 1888, reminds a visitor that the victims had "done something bad to my grandmother...
...played for the past 45 years. "They have more chance of moving the stadium than they do the game," declares John F. Scovell, president of the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association and a prominent Dallas real estate developer. Says Bentsen, who organized the theft attempt: "If it's a feud, it's a positive...