A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

by Glenn Taylor

  Down the hall, Goldie could hear every word.

  Taffy Reed had noted the tone in Rutherford’s far-off voice. He’d put his ear to the cracked-open door.

  “How about we get down to it?” Rutherford said. “How about ole Jake?”

  Abe stayed as he was, his arms beneath him tingling.

  “People knew him and that Italian wasn’t just carpenter buddies.” All that Rutherford had kept to himself was blooming from his throat unchecked. “Me and Harold Beavers was on a bender, and we followed them nancies up in the woods.” He pointed upward toward nothing in particular and kept on. “I bet Harold he couldn’t hit your brother more than two out of three from a hundred yards off.” He laughed then. “Fuckin rifle jammed or he’d have took the other one too.”

  Down the hall, Goldie had quit breathing. She saw, inside the darkness, the white of Taffy’s eye as he blinked and aimed his ear on the hall.

  Rutherford gripped the iron of Abe’s cell door. He said, “Trent never spoke a word on ridding this world of Jake Baach. Jake wasn’t no more than a fart on the wind to Henry Trent.” He stuck his mouth between two bars. “And hasn’t nobody of import taken notice of you bein here neither,” he said. “And tomorrow I get to watch you and your woman drop, and there isn’t anybody but me left to run this whole place.” That very evening at dinner, he’d strangled the life from Rufus Beavers. They were arguing over the money they’d discovered as counterfeit when it escalated. He’d pinned the old man to the floor of Trent’s office and watched his eyes pop. He’d rolled Rufus up in a horsehair rug and toted him to the shuttered bootleg slope mine, and there he’d dumped him down the three-hundred-foot hole.

  Without a sound, Taffy Reed stepped into the darkened hall and cupped his ear.

  “No more Rufus,” Rutherford said, “and pretty soon no more Fred Reed.”

  Abe looked at the man. The lantern by his chair cast him bigger than he was and his shadow stretched long on the floor.

  Rutherford stepped back from the bars. “Taffy!” he hollered. “I’m going home to bed! Come out here and watch this cocksucker!” He left a white-labeled pint of Chokoloskee whiskey by the chair.

  On the straw mattress, Abe listened to the main door close, and when it did, he unclenched his fist. He unwrapped the pebble and read Tong’s coded note:

  Luna in flight

  Serpiente tucked tight

  Taffy Reed stepped back in the embalming room for his lantern.

  He walked past Goldie without swinging it. He set it down by the chair at cell one and took up the whiskey and drank. It nearly choked him. When he’d quit coughing, he said, “I’ve reconsidered.”

  Abe stood up. “What’s that now?”

  “How to align myself,” Taffy said.

  Abe smiled. “Good,” he said. “Set yourself down there. Let’s talk a little while.” His plan could proceed a little easier now. He could finally use what he’d stashed in his mattress.

  Taffy said, “I can likely take out the perimeter guards.” He pointed beyond the jail’s walls. “You two might slip out before sunup.”

  “No,” Abe said. He procured the notes and fattened folds of paper from betwixt the straw shoots of his foul tick. “The people want a hanging.” He pulled on his drawers and stepped to the bars, sliding through to Taffy Reed what he’d accumulated at the behest of the wild notions in his mind. He smiled. His eyes went wide. “The people want a big show,” he said.

  Taffy swallowed. There was a coldness at the pit of his stomach.

  Abe told him to gather himself. “You got work to do,” he said.

  Sleep was not something to be had. In the past, Abe had gone without it for as long as fifty-four hours, maybe more. Still, he did not feel sharp as he walked in a fine suit and shackles to the box wagon waiting at the jail’s side door. He could hear the words repeating as he sat down and swayed at the bullwhip crack on horse’s rump: You can sleep when you are dead.

  It was the truth.

  The early morning hours of their execution day had played as if a dream. Now noon was close at hand, and as he got his first look at Goldie in near a month—beautiful as she was, straight-backed on her coffin-seat—he thought he might drop where he rocked, sabotaging all that he’d planned.

  But she winked at him as they rolled over mud ruts and through the people crowding the lane. In the rain, she mouthed the words I love you and keep your temper. And so he did.

  And as he sat there between a preacher and a devil-man, rolling past an alley where bent souls shot dice, Abe nodded to Ah Tong, who leaned against the bricks and grinned. He’d dismantled his Punch and Judy booth and was making his way through the crowd, giving signals and watching the box wagons close.

  After Independence Day, Tong had hidden himself in Wan’s storeroom for a month before venturing onto Keystone’s streets. On his first night in the Bottom, he’d stood in the lane and stared at the empty Baach saloon. Across Wyoming, Goldie’s beautiful cathouse, where he’d seen a window woman dance, had been burnt to the ground. All that remained was piled ash and two-by-fours bubbled and blacked. It was the same night he’d met Bushel-Heap Lou McKill, who was clumsily tossing a paper wad at the jailhouse window while the outside guard paced his square. Tong had helped the giant man and then together they got drunk, and they discovered the wondrous things folks discover when they sit and visit awhile. It turned out that Tong knew more than the superiority of marionettes over puppets, and when he’d shown his back-palm and his cigar-through-the-nose and the difficult maneuverings of plugging a gun barrel undetected, Bushels had known he could help. “Abe’s got a big one brewin,” he’d told his new friend.

  Now Tong stepped quick from the brick alley wall and fell in behind the surrey at the rear. He had sabotaged Rutherford’s tomato-crate speech and plugged the chief’s gun barrel too. He’d swayed the mind of his rain-dotted crowd with the tale from his puppets’ mouths. And he’d called out his signals to the paid-off jewelry peddlers and the barkers at their tables three-shelled.

  Ahead of him, the wagons split the crowd as the procession toward death carried on.

  On the hillside to the east, Bushels was in position, peeking now and again from the willow-tree’s cover. The crowd had backed up the ridge from the push at leveled plot, and he could hear them laugh and mumble down below. His pocketwatch read two minutes to noon. He leaned into the wide willow’s trunk and rested his head on the scrape. He thought of Ben Moon’s last telegram, and he hoped that it was the truth.

  Near the circled chain-link, with his hands in his pockets, a stout man stood eyeballing the gallows wood. It had been some time since he’d leveled and planed such fine timber. He’d enjoyed the elaborate work, particularly when his son had helped him with the latches and the hinges encased inside. He’d not understood at first when Frank brought by the giant Scotsman and the Chinaman who dressed like an Italian. But they told him he could avenge his nephew’s death, and time was of the essence, it seemed. So Tilio Dallara had ridden into Keystone Thursday morning, just as they’d told him to do, and he’d presented the forged letter to the drunk judge and his midget friend, and now he looked on, waiting for the show.

  He nodded to his son, who stood by the peanut vendor.

  Frank Dallara had grown tired of the peanut man’s shouts. “Sellin nuts! Hot nuts!” the man called, again and again. Frank had eaten three bags already, hungry and spent as he was from such lantern-light, last-minute work.

  Four policemen hopped from the surrey and cleared an entrance at the gallows fence gate.

  Taffy Reed undid the ankle cuffs of the Kid and the Queen.

  They all climbed the thirteen stairs single file.

  On the scaffold stage, Abe listened for the sound of the noon train. None came.

  The preacher preached on eternity and time, and Goldie was told to say her peace. But by then, she’d lost a little of her hope, and all those babies in the crowd had frightened her.

  Rutherford swayed impercept
ibly where he stood. He told Abe to make his speech.

  Abe too was losing hope in the plan by then, and so he stalled with reminiscence on his daddy’s saloon. He spotted ole Warts Wickline at the fence, and together they told a tale.

  At nine minutes past twelve, the whistle of the westbound noon train came faint on the air. The rain slowed.

  When Abe took out from nowhere his deck of playing cards, Rutherford nearly fainted. His skin hummed and a squelching sound arose from his gut.

  The dozen eggs he’d eaten were taking their effect, for before the sun had risen, Taffy Reed had used an embalmer’s bulb-syringe to inject each one with a careful mixture. The mixture itself had come from the medicine trunk of Tony Thumbs, a final gift for Abe, given on July 22nd, in a foul-smelling room above the Old Drury Theatre. Bushels had kept the trunk locked and hidden at his boardinghouse room in Kimball, and along with it, he kept the old man’s batch book. When chances arose, Tong had tossed paper sleeves through the bars of Abe’s cell window. Each powder was named in pencil. He’d wadded batch-book recipes and thrown those too. Abe had stashed them all in the rotted spaces of his straw tick, and he’d hoped he might use them somehow. That morning, he’d given them over to Taffy Reed, who worked fast from a torn page of Tony Thumbs’s scrawl:

  Paralysis without death or the cessation of respiratory function:

  A half-pint of water to a tablespoon of fart juice. Two teaspoons of curare and a dash each of maypop and opium and valerian too.

  Now Rutherford stood on the sweetgum boards and swayed on his feet. The crowd before him seemed to groan and wobble.

  Abe split the card deck’s seal with his thumbnail and said, “At the end of it, if the law is still behind me, he can by God yank the handle.”

  Taffy Reed leaned to Rutherford and whispered, “I best put them ankle irons back on.” Rutherford nodded, unable to speak, and Taffy knelt before Abe and set to work. He could see that the chief was well on his way. He left the ankle cuffs undone and loosened the wrists all the way.

  With his last bit of gumption, Rutherford bent to the nooses where they hung and gathered their lengths in his fist. The tingling in his fingers and toes had reached a burn.

  Beside him, Abe roared, “I’ll tell the truth before I die, or I’ll walk out of hell in kerosene drawers and set the world on fire!”

  Some in the crowd were struck by his words, for they’d heard tell of a fire out West. It burnt wild on the wind and swept three states, and it killed the men who fought it. There were those who said it would swallow the country whole. A bald street preacher claimed foreknowledge of the Devil’s Broom Fire. He said sinners were reaping what they’d sowed.

  Rutherford wobbled, then dropped to his knees. When his face hit the boards, there came from his backside a ragged slap of wind that carried forth without cease for a full fourteen seconds.

  Abe said, “Amen,” and tossed the deck to Goldie. They played shackled catch as if it were a common game. She winked at him and pulled back the flaps and dropped the wrapper to the boards. The cards wore heavy varnish.

  The sun came free of the clouds then, and the people looked skyward, and there was only the north-born sound of the tardy noon train’s wheeze. The engine was not yet fully stopped at the station when Ben Moon’s men began to jump from inside the empty coal hoppers. They hit the hard dirt beside the railbed and rolled and got to their feet quick. They ran on wrenched ankles, headlong into the people staring dumb at the heavens.

  Anchors had gotten the telegram in Baltimore the evening prior, and he’d gathered the men and talked fast. To each he handed cash and a rifle from Moon’s stash. They slid them in duffels and hopped the train. Orders were to be in Keystone by noon, and to suppress with drawn guns whatever crowd had gathered there. Now they did just that, shouting “Nobody moves, nobody dies!” at the men on the edges who looked to be pondering the vigilante’s way.

  At the scaffold Abe hollered, “Unroll your bought confessions and read what it says at the end! Turn over our last living photographs and heed what’s written there!” He heard faintly the engine of the airship then, coming in against the westerly wind.

  The people read what was printed on their execution souvenirs. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are innocent of murder. Henry Trent and Munchy Briles were killed as they leveled their guns. There is only one murderer on the gallows today, and his name is Rutherford Rutherford. Listen close to what you’re told and do not produce any weapon.

  Mr. Tong and the barkers and peddlers drew their guns from the circled perimeter they’d made. They trained them on those they suspected of trouble.

  Some had heard the airship engine by then too, particularly those on the hill. The cloud cover was wispy. The rain was no more.

  Abe and Goldie stepped from their ankle cuffs and shed the irons from their wrists.

  The one-eyed police officer was panicked by then. He drew his revolver slow.

  Goldie cocked back a card and let it fly. It sunk in his neck at a pulsing vein and he dropped his gun to the ground.

  Ah Tong shouldered his way through the people and stood at the fence, where he tossed a tin bullhorn in a perfect arc into the open hands of Taffy Reed. Taffy put it to his mouth and told the people to listen, and they did. He told them their police chief had killed their judge, that he’d been tossing bodies down Buzzard Branch mineshaft for years. It was the same thing he’d told his daddy that morning, and now, as he spoke it to the crowd, Fred Reed was up the ridge, prying open the mine’s mouth to see.

  Some in the crowd were beginning to shout. Others were protesting they knew not what.

  Abe took the bullhorn then. “Listen!” he called. Some heeded and some did not. He hollered, “You’ll never again pay a monthly consideration!” It drew the attention of all those then living in Keystone. “You’re about to see a show you won’t ever forget! You have my word we’ll astound and delight!” Children asked if they could perch on the shoulders of their daddies. Abe went on, “And if you keep calm and steady, then riches will rain down from above!” He pointed to the sky, where the airship named America was nearly in view.

  High above in the gondola basket, Ben Moon stood in a wide stance with binoculars at his eyes. “We need to get east by fifty yards and decrease altitude!” he called to the relay man, who nodded from where he hung from the envelope, then shot into the hull, where he relayed to the elevatorman and the rudderman both. They were low already, just over the canopy on the ridge. “Can he slow this thing down?” Moon asked, but it was too loud up there. No one in the basket could hear him.

  Beside Moon was Walter Melvin. His blue scarf whipped behind him. He turned the handle of a moving-picture camera he’d built himself. It was mounted on a tripod he’d bolted to the deck. He aimed it down. “Just marvelous, absolutely marvelous,” he said of the mountains and riverbed below. “They said we couldn’t fly America in here,” he shouted. “Well? What say they now?”

  Little Donnie crouched at basket’s edge, tethered to the guardrail by his belt. He cut the safety tie premature, and the massive rope cargo net unfurled with a whoosh. As wide as the ship, it extended in seconds to its full length of two hundred feet, and its weighted bottom tore off the high limbs of the big willow-tree.

  Beneath the tree, Bushels ducked and covered his head, and the branches came down around him. After a moment he stood and came out toward the flat, and he reached up as the cargo net moved on.

  The airship America was at the mercy of the day’s strange wind.

  Bushels caught up and grabbed at the rope’s thick lengths. He held fast, hooking his arms through the holes. Willow branches twisted throughout, and a sizable limb knocked his head.

  The people on the hillside stared as Bushels came, his boots dragging in the dirt and then lifting upon the air. They could not understand what they saw, a giant riding a cargo net to a behemoth silver ship in the sky. A few fell trying to get down the hill, where the others looked up at the vision of flight. Ameri
ca was a rigid, bullet-shaped zeppelin, a hundred and fifty feet long, and sixty feet side-to-side. Its shadow played across a vast stretch, and some in the crowd were deathly afraid.

  By then, Taffy Reed had drawn his gun and convinced the officers below to put theirs on the ground. He took his place by the lever, his boots on the framed two-by-four edge.

  Goldie had let go her cocked cards and told the preacher and stenographer they had better descend the stairs or jump off from where they stood. She glanced up the hillside where Bushels twisted and yanked. She wished Agnes were there. See, she’d tell the girl, some giants are good.

  Rutherford’s eyes were open where he lay. He was alive enough to moan and blink.

  Abe tossed the bullhorn to Goldie. He bent and cinched the little man’s ankles in the noose. Then he stood again on his square, and Goldie stepped to her own. “Behold!” she called through the horn. “The devil drops!” Together, they nodded at Taffy.

  When he pulled the lever, the whole scaffold floor unlatched and the hinges creaked as it swung open in two parts. Tilio Dallara had made a masterful box, an anti-gallows where the squares of the condemned remained pedestal-fixed while all other panels fell free. Rutherford dropped through the open middle as a dead man would, snapping straight when the slack went taut. He made the sound of an animal shot but not dead as he swung in full view of the crowd. The encased bottom panels had fallen too, smacked flat and laid out on each side. Only the frame remained. Abe and Goldie stood on their pedestaled squares and looked below at Rutherford. He was upside-down and swaying loose, his arms limp as window meat. And all around his fingers, copperheads and rattlers coiled up and sidewinded both. Some were scared into striking by the thud of the boards and pendulum man above.