Amongst the throng, looming and weaving through the bodies, comes Mazy. She’s broken away from her waiting Pa and Little Sparrow, who sit in a wagon on the edge of town, she said she needed to do her necessaries, but that was a lie. So here she is, she squirms through the crevasses made and passes glances with other young children there.
There's innocence to them, an innocence that Mazy feels she no longer has. She's not sure if she's feeling pity or jealousy in those moments, maybe a brew of both. She knows her memories of this day will stand in stark contrast to theirs, and when time whittles their memories to splinters of images, she will remember everything, till she can’t remember nothing no more.
Mazy hustles her way to the front of the crowd; her soft brown eyes rest upon wooden gallows. The smell of freshly hewn timber lingers as a taste in the air. Her burrowing focus is fixed upon the centre piece of the wooden stage… A figure. A figure dressed in a red all-in-one undergarment, a hessian sack over his head, a stump for a left hand, propped up in a chair, with a noose loosely resting around his neck, ready for the snap.
Mazy didn’t accompany Louis or Little Sparrow, as they took Bear’s pallid body up to the sheriff’s office. Jensen instructed the night before to trade him in for the reward, a reward they were to use to make things a little better for themselves. It was a bittersweet transaction for Louis, a receipt for $5000 to be picked up at the bank in Dunston, in exchange for his dead friend.
As they packed their belongings in the farmhouse, to trek to Dunston, Mazy knew she had to say her farewells.
Mazy, breathes in deep and lays her hands on her stomach, to dissuade nausea. The gulped pockets of snap, fill her lungs, she momentarily holds her breath, hoping the cold will chill through to her raging core. All there is for her is the pang of regret saddled on her swollen chest, and that figure cradled on the gallows. He had alluded to the coming of such a moment, yet her heart filled with unyieldingly hope, that there would be another way.
Maybe he wanted it to go in this fashion?
The Sheriff’s words of accusations and crimes fall on Mazy’s hardened ears. Only a few words burst through her bubble of silence.
…”The Johnston City Butcher”…
Mazy glances around to the cheering of the crowd, like a pack of animals baying for blood. She’s a brew of emotions that punch into her small frame, she bites her lip and tries to cope with bubbling feelings that threaten to engulf her.
The Sheriff’s bulbous fingered hand, rests on a mechanism and in deliberate fashion, he yanks hard. A resounding thunk. A trap door splays on its hinges, allowing the chair and the body to submit to gravities invite. The rope snaps tight, cracking the neck of the figure in red, as he is killed after he is dead.
The crowd falls away, slither by slither, though Mazy waits. The hanging mass still sways, a pendulum to the beat of creaking wood. Mazy ponders upon the Johnson City Butcher, she never really knew who he was, and now she never will. Whether in fact, he knew himself? Regardless of that, she came to understand that - What was done, and what was said, are rare bedfellows. Though she didn't know the truth of past happenings, she knew the truth of other's ignorance.
As she turns her back on the past and strides to her future, she will deny ever being in Johnson City, and at that moment decides, she'll never come back here again.
- END -
About the Author
Chris Webb is a stuntman & a produced, award-winning screenplay writer. A lover of action he brings his punchy, exciting screenplay-style to his books.
For more information or to contact the author.
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Also by Chris Webb
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Conflict - a Science fiction saga.
Redemption's Blood Page 23