Ellendor Robbins shook her head. “Maybe Tyree has more imagination than we gave him credit for. I never thought he’d turn a hair at the prospect of an execution. Falcon and Tyree will follow directly behind the prisoner. He’ll be manacled, so you’ll all need to make sure he gets up the steps without a mishap. Catch him if he starts to fall. And you’d all better keep an eye on Tyree as well.”
The doctor frowned. “Am I in this parade of yours?”
“Yes, sir. Just after the first two deputies. You need to be on the platform in case anything goes wrong beforehand. After the trapdoor is released, you’ll have several minutes to get down to the area beneath the scaffold so that you can check on the prisoner’s vital signs and officially pronounce him dead.”
“Several minutes.” The doctor spat out the words.
She sighed. “It can’t be helped. We’re following the law as best we can.” She glanced down at her notes. “After the doctor ascends the platform steps, Deputies Phillips and Aldridge will follow, both armed with shotguns. I don’t anticipate any trouble from the crowd—expect maybe shoving in hopes of getting a closer look—but we have to be prepared for anything. They will guard the steps while Mr. Wallace and Mr. Madden are preparing the prisoner—adjusting the hood, tying his legs with rope instead of the iron shackles, and so on.”
Roy Phillips bit his lip and shuddered a little. “Do you have any idea how long all this is going to take, Sheriff?”
It was the doctor who answered. “Deputy, it will be the longest fifteen minutes of your life.”
Galen Aldridge came back from the cell corridor alone, carrying a rolled-up bit of paper. “The prisoner is dressed, Sheriff. That suit fits him pretty well. The preacher decided to stay back there and pray awhile longer, but Mr. Varden doesn’t seem overjoyed to have him there. It’ll prove a distraction, though. Falcon is standing guard, as ordered.” He handed the rolled-up paper to the sheriff. “The prisoner asked if you were coming back there, and I said I thought not, so he asked me to give you this. Said he stayed up most of the night to finish it.”
She unfolded the paper, setting an empty coffee mug on the end of it so that it would stay open. Roy took the other end and unfolded it slowly so that the sheriff could see the picture. Lonnie Varden had drawn portraits of the Robbins children, but his work was not an exact copy of the snapshot he had used as a guide. Instead of depicting the two little Robbins boys in their Sunday clothes, seated on a log, he had drawn only the head and bare shoulders of each child, but there were five images in all, both in profile and full face, one of them looking directly out at the observer, with a hint of wings here and there where the shoulders should be. The images were positioned opposite one another, looking off into the distance with gentle, angelic smiles. The likenesses of Eddie and George Robbins were excellent, idealized, but easily recognizable to anyone who knew them. They were the Robbins children as seen through the eyes of a loving mother. The composition of the portrait itself was even more recognizable, though not, perhaps, to the residents of a backwater mountain town. And what did it matter, anyhow? Lonnie Varden, even knowing that this small sketch was his last chance to make art, had copied Sir Joshua Reynolds’s A Cherub Head in Different Views, familiar to any student of art, even if he had not seen the original, which was in a museum in London.
Ellendor Robbins had not taken her eyes off the drawing. “It’s beautiful. A perfect wonder.” Gently, she touched one finger to the charcoal-shaded cheek of the younger boy.
Galen nodded. “Like I said, it took him most of the night to finish it. They look like Christmas angels. I wonder what Eddie will think of it? Are you sure you don’t want to go back there and see him, Sheriff?”
For a moment she hesitated, glancing back at the door to the cells. “It’s best that I don’t. I’ll thank him when I see him, for he has given me a priceless gift here, but if I tried to see him now I might start to cry and that won’t do. I mustn’t show weakness.”
“Ain’t it about time we got this show on the road?” Tyree Madden, red-faced and still far from sober, staggered out of the john, one hand on the holstered pistol at his side.
Galen and Sheriff Robbins exchanged glances. She nodded toward the coffeepot. “Get a cup of coffee down his sorry throat while the rest of us get ready. And see that he washes his face. Then get the rope, go out to the scaffold, and set it in place. Make sure it’s well fastened to the crossbeam.” She turned to the other deputy. “Roy, please go back there and tell Reverend McKee to finish up with the prisoner. It’s time for him to join us out here.”
She let the drawing roll up and glanced up at the clock. “It’s quarter past eleven. I’ll just go and put this in my office and get the hood to cover the prisoner’s head. Let’s begin in ten minutes. We’ll assemble here and have the pastor say a prayer for all of us before we go out.”
Tyree put his fist to his mouth to cover a belch. “Are we the Christians or the lions?”
At eleven forty-five the door to the sheriff’s office opened partway, and a great roar went up from the onlookers close enough to observe this. Their shouts alerted others that the ceremony was beginning, and the crowd left the main street in front of the office and surged through the grass and gravel alleyways between buildings in order to reach the back lot where the gallows stood. Some of the photographers stayed put beside the steps to the sheriff’s office, hoping for one good close-up shot of the condemned man struggling in his shackles, and of the lady sheriff weeping into a lace handkerchief. They were to be disappointed, though: neither the prisoner nor his executioner showed any sign of emotion. They walked slowly, but without hesitation, ignoring the crowd, which parted to let them pass: first the sheriff, shorter than the rest, with her badge pinned neatly to the front of her brown dress. Behind her walked a spare, balding gentleman, obviously a clergyman, because, although he wore no dog collar, he was holding a Bible and murmuring to himself. The prisoner, stumbling a little in his leg irons, stared straight ahead, affecting not to notice the strangers shoving one another in hopes of getting a closer look at him. Their efforts to reach him were thwarted on either side by stone-faced lawmen carrying shotguns. The frowning, fair-haired man in the black suit who trailed them must be the physician, judging by the leather satchel he carried, and behind him two more deputies brought up the rear, preventing the spectators from closing in behind the procession. A three-minute walk, around the side of the building and down the gravel alleyway to the back street, and they had arrived at the foot of the scaffold.
The sheriff stopped for a moment, looking up at the newly built platform, still smelling of pine resin and sawdust. From the crossbeam erected at one end of the flooring hung a thick hemp rope, itself smelling faintly of lard. “You have to grease the rope,” one fellow was explaining to his neighbors, “and then tie it to a beam with a weight tied to the end of it, else the bulk of the hanged man will stretch the rope during the execution, perhaps carrying the prisoner all the way to the ground below.” Someone else said, “It’s a short rope, no danger of it stretching that much.” No hope of a quick, clean death by a broken neck either.
Mrs. Robbins took a few steps forward to inspect the bottom of the platform. The supports of the structure were thick and well braced, and the trapdoor was bolted firmly in place. All was in readiness.
From the other side of the dusty lot someone waved to get her attention. She recognized Mr. Lidaker, the carpenter, respectfully attired in his Sunday suit, and she nodded an expressionless greeting. When he was sure she had seen him, he motioned toward the small flatbed truck containing the coffin, hastily constructed from scrap lumber left over from the building of the gallows. The sheriff’s expression still did not change, but she nodded again, and then turned to mount the steps—thirteen of them, as required by tradition.
Reverend McKee waited until the sheriff reached the third step before following her on the ascent. His lips were moving, and
he stared straight ahead, as if there were no crowd surrounding them. The roaring was so loud now that even if he had shouted his orisons, no one would have heard them.
Lonnie Varden mounted the steps slowly, and when the shouting grew louder, he shuddered a little and glanced about him. He stumbled once as the iron shackles caught on the edge of the step, but the tall young deputy just behind him lifted the chain above the step and watched for the rest of the climb to make sure it did not catch again.
The doctor who followed the first two deputies stopped halfway up the steps to survey the bawling spectators with a look of utter scorn. They paid him no mind, though, and with a sigh of disgust he made his way up to the platform.
The last two lawmen, shotguns in hand, barrels pointed at the ground, went up one after the other, with the last—a scowling banty rooster of a fellow—undertaking to ascend the steps backward so that he could face the crowd, in case someone tried to storm the steps. For a lark a drunken spectator pretended to head for the steps, but the last deputy brought up the barrel of his gun and motioned with it for the man to back off. The joker staggered away, shaking his head at the ferocious response to his jest, and by then the participants were all assembled on the platform, so the crowd quieted down, captivated by the drama before them.
The banty rooster deputy and the heavyset older one stood on either side of the crossbeam, facing in opposite directions, shotguns at the ready. The tall young deputy and the woozy-looking one worked in tandem, removing the manacles and leg irons from the prisoner, and replacing the metal restraints with rope. They tied his legs together (“So’s he doesn’t kick once he falls through the trapdoor!”), and bound his hands behind his back, to prevent him from clawing the rope around his neck. During all these preparations Lonnie Varden stared straight ahead, and the minister leaned in close to him speaking in low, urgent tones. Sheriff Robbins stood by observing the proceedings, glancing down at the papers she held.
When the prisoner was secured and placed squarely on the trapdoor with the noose around his neck, the sheriff walked to the middle of the platform, faced the prisoner, and began to read the official formula required by the state to be delivered before an execution. Her voice was clear and steady, but she spoke softly so that those who were not close to the scaffold had trouble hearing her. The recitation took only a couple of minutes, in any case, and then she approached the prisoner, who was pale but composed. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Do you have any last words?” No one beyond the platform could hear her, but that must have been what she said, because the condemned man half turned and surveyed the crowd. He hesitated for a moment, and then a hoarse voice from the back of the onlookers called out, “She fell farther than you will!” A few people clapped and murmured in agreement.
At this display of hostility, Lonnie Varden’s face crumpled and he shuddered. Then he murmured something to the sheriff, who was now standing beside him. She replied, and he shook his head.
Why waste a speech on this vicious mob of spectators?
She spoke a few more words and touched his shoulder gently. He nodded.
She handed the legal papers to the blond deputy, who still looked green to the gills. He stuffed them in his pocket, and then she was holding only a black cloth, which turned out to be the hood the condemned man would wear into eternity.
Rev. McKee began to pray louder now, the Lord’s Prayer, and some in the crowd joined in.
The lady sheriff slipped the hood over Lonnie Varden’s bowed head and drew the ends of the white cord together to close it under his chin. She lifted the noose and tightened the rope until the knot rested tight against the side of his neck.
Any further delay would not be a kindness. She took a few steps back, clear of the trapdoor, until she was standing at the base of the crossbeam, next to the lever that would draw the bolt. A few more breaths, then complete silence, and—before she could touch the lever, the blond, woozy-looking deputy stumbled a little, pushing her aside. Before she could recover her balance, he jerked the lever forward, and the prisoner’s body dropped out of sight.
The longest fifteen minutes of your life.
The deputies waited ten minutes before they began to disperse the crowd. The moment the body dropped through the opening the shouting had died in mid-roar. A couple of news photographers lingered to take their last shots of the swaying body, but most of the onlookers had begun to edge away, frightened or sickened by the spectacle of imminent death. Beneath the platform the doctor waited alone, staring at the face of his pocket watch and occasionally glancing at the twitching body at the end of the rope, no more than five feet from the ground.
The deputies cleared a path so that Mr. Lidaker could drive his truck up beside the scaffold, and two of them helped him haul the pine coffin out of the back and set it on the ground nearby, in readiness.
The sheriff shook hands with Mr. Lidaker. “Thank you for all you did, sir. When the coffin is ready, take it to the undertakers. Tell them to bury Mr. Varden on the hillside cemetery, in the plot alongside Albert Robbins.”
The carpenter’s eyes widened and he started to reply, but the sheriff had walked away to have a word with the doctor. He was still standing near the open trapdoor, watching the body twisting in a shaft of sunlight.
“Four more minutes,” he said when he heard the sheriff’s approach.
“He’s not twitching anymore.”
“Do you want to take the chance that he’s unconscious and that once you cut him down he’ll come to, and you’ll have to do it all over again?”
“No.”
“Then wait four minutes.”
Falcon and Tyree stood together near the steps, keeping people away from the scaffold. Two men had already tried to go up on the platform to steal the rope. The deputies chased them away, because they couldn’t be bothered with a minor arrest just then. Tyree had sobered up, but he looked even worse now, bilious and unsteady. “I felt like I had to do it,” he told Falcon. “It just all of a sudden hit me that I couldn’t let that little lady be responsible for that man’s death. So I just . . . did it. You reckon I ought to tell her I’m sorry?”
Falcon shivered. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t bring it up unless she does.”
“I could tell her I was still feeling wobbly after being sick and that I stumbled and fell into it. She might not believe me, but she could pretend she did.”
“I guess she could, Tyree.”
“I just couldn’t let her do it. It gave me chills to think of it.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean about getting the willies. After we tied the prisoner’s legs and stepped back, she put that hood over his head, and I looked at him. He was wearing the sheriff’s clothes, Tyree! Mr. Robbins, I mean. That was his old suit. For a second there, seeing him standing there with his head covered up and wearing that suit, I felt like we were hanging him.”
“She said she’d be glad when it was over. Do you think she really could have done it?”
Falcon shook his head. “I’m glad I’ll never know.”
The undertaker’s assistant made her say it twice. He leaned against the funeral home’s black Ford hearse, staring down at the determined little lady with the badge pinned to her dress. “Yes, ma’am, I remember where we buried your husband. Sure do. Wasn’t more’n four, five months ago? Up on the hill near that old weed cedar. There’s no tombstone yet, but we have a little metal marker with a card in it, marking the spot.”
“That’s right.”
“And you want the prisoner laid to rest beside him? Beside Albert Robbins? Are you entirely sure, ma’am?”
Ellendor Robbins’s expression did not change, but her sigh meant impatience. “Yes. I own the plot. Send the bill for the gravedigging to the county.”
“What about a funeral?”
“There won’t be one. And don’t mark the grave, either. I
don’t want it to be a sideshow. In fact, dig the grave this afternoon, but don’t inter the body until after dark. I don’t want any witnesses.”
“All right, but ma’am—”
“Now what?”
“The doctor over yonder under the platform is motioning for you to come. I think he’s ready to cut the body down.”
chapter nineteen
Everything has an ending, and a rope has two.
I had thought about that old saying more than once in the past few weeks, because I had seen more than my share of endings in a few short months, but now I thought that the worst was well and truly over: two men dead, and whether they deserved it or not, I couldn’t save either one of them, and I never asked myself if I’d wanted to.
It was almost over, anyhow.
I had already told the deputies not to expect to see me for a couple of days. Tomorrow I would go up the mountain to get my boys from Henry and Elva’s farm. Maybe I would even stay for supper and go for a walk in the woods. I had more thinking to do.
I left the sheriff’s office a few hours after the hanging, as soon as I thought the day shift deputies could handle things for the rest of the day. The reporters had all checked out of the hotel and were at the depot waiting for the afternoon train, ready to chase some other story into the ground. I went home at four and slept until dark.
An hour later I was at the cemetery, waiting beside the cedar tree, when the black hearse drove up and parked on the gravel road at the bottom of the hill. I watched four men—in work clothes, not funeral attire—get out and haul the pine box up the hill to the newly dug hole next to the grave of Albert Robbins. They looked like shadows in the moonlight, moving soundlessly across the dark grass, swaying a little under the weight of their burden.
Prayers the Devil Answers Page 33