Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  The gallows consisted of a raised platform supported by a trusswork of crossbeams and uprights. He’d overheard guards at the prison mention it had been rebuilt with materials used to hang Nathaniel Marks, “the outlaw of the mountains,” executed out of public view in January. The planking appeared almost new, blond and clean-smelling, as though fresh from the mill yard. Jarom detected a faint scent of pine resin. What a waste of good lumber, he thought. Better a bullet.

  The guards turned their backs on him now, as if what they had to fear was not from Jarom but from the crowd around them. They formed a barrier of blue and held their rifles at port arms, taking every precaution to see the hangman wasn’t cheated. The guard from the hack and a new guard undid Jarom’s ankle chains so he could mount the stairs of the scaffold to the platform. A turn of the key and he felt the manacles snap off his ankles.

  Instantly, he had a feeling of lightness, of boundless possibility. He felt his legs extending beyond the restriction of the chains and knew they would lift him up the steps. He felt a surge in his limbs and imagined escape, a picture in which he was running, running, the crowd parting in amazement, the stiff line of guards crumbling into motion, tentative and confused, a few of them dropping their rifles to take up the chase and pursuing until he’d outdistanced them all and lost himself in the maze of alleyways and backyards, blocks away. He saw Mollie Thomas wearing a pressed gingham dress standing on her porch and opening her arms to him as he came up the steps of her father’s house unfettered and buoyed with possibility and hope.

  The chains clanking in a brittle pile as they slipped off his ankles brought him back. There was small relief in this small freedom as he felt a nervous tic in his legs, a tingling in his ankles. For the first time in three days, he could move without hindrance. He imagined coffles of slaves as they plodded across the landscape, droves of them yearning not for anything so abstract as freedom but simply for the fetters to be removed and movement restored to their ankles and wrists. The illusion of freedom, he realized, was enough for most of us. Freedom itself was a burden most seemed unwilling or unable to carry.

  They moved toward the platform then, guards in front, guards behind. For the first time Jarom became aware of the din about him, the gabble of thousands speaking in words from which he could not extract any sense. He thought of the honeybees fretting in an opened hive, an incessant and indecipherable music whose song carried only the drone of busyness. Those standing toward the crowd formed a buffer of flesh, but Jarom knew the going would not be easy as pushers elbowed their way to the front and into his path to paw at his jacket for souvenirs. He felt their eyes scan his face for signs of fear or whatever they looked for there. He’d almost made it to the steps when someone jostled him off balance. His weight shifted out from him until Freckle-Face dipped under his shoulder and lifted him back again, steadied his step. Jarom heard himself thanking him kindly.

  The stair treads that Jarom felt under his boots were reddish blond—pine, he guessed, from the knots. They looked so new he could imagine them still powdered with yellow leavings from the saw. They sounded hollow as step by step the five of them clopped up to the platform, square nail heads shining four to a step like eyes. Halfway up, he looked out over the crowd. A blinding light splayed off the brass of the band instruments in golden spangles. Tilted parasols capped many of the heads, popping out of the multitude like mushrooms. A great swell of flesh spilled across the fairgrounds and lapped against the buildings, a gumbo of simmering faces. Rising from it were mixed odors of cigars, sweat, and a cloying sweetness he couldn’t name but had smelled among masses of men on marches early in the war. In it hung a pervasive staleness like the must of some long-unopened trunk in the attic.

  As he stepped onto the platform, he felt what Patterson had described to him as buck fever, a nervous anticipation that would cause the hunter to shiver before hammer struck cap and sent the load home into the flank of a browsing deer. Jarom felt it the first time he drew a bead on a man on the second day at Donelson and afterward each time he knew himself about to visit ruin on someone’s body. He felt it now as he stepped onto the platform into a crow’s nest, a point from which he could see as well as be seen. Courage keep me, he said to himself, give me strength to go through, as he turned to look over the sea of faces. The exertion, the anxiety, quickened his breath. Looking out, he discovered that the ten feet of elevation did not permit him to see more so much as it altered his perspective.

  At a glance he could see almost every available swatch of ground occupied. He remembered Aunt Mary Tibbs’s account of her father saying that during Kentucky’s first settlement the wilderness was so dense that except for some waterways it was possible for a squirrel to traverse the state from limb to limb, tree to tree, without touching ground. The mass of humanity before him was the largest he’d seen under one sky except for the surrender at Donelson, if one counted those prostrate on the ground. Five thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand, he could hardly estimate the number. Packed with people, the open ground extended south for two blocks before ending at another wall of storefronts and row houses. Shade trees here and there broke the flatness of the fairgrounds, upright funnels of bared limbs with nipples of half-opened buds.

  As he looked out, faces began to emerge from the mass: a gristle-jawed farmer wearing a tattered hat, a middle-aged trollop blued about the eyes, a jumpy bootblack, a bonneted heroine from an engraving in Mr. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, a whole ladder team from the firehouse got up in ridiculous helmets. He could see tribes of ragamuffins burrowing through the crowd like moles. Less obvious were the pickpockets and snatch-purses. From the courthouse he made out politicians and clerks, barely distinguishable from their retinues of hangers-on. What was it, he asked himself, that brought them? Passersby, sometimes whole families, seemed drawn to spectacle like ants to spilled sugar.

  Across Broadway each window above the storefronts and offices had its display of faces. Even the rooftops attracted watchers. A few game souls, mostly teenage boys, perched precariously in the trees, hanging like some out-of-season fruit. Looking back toward Broadway, he could see the crowd backed up the steps of a Catholic church nearly two blocks away. The number of flags surprised him. Competing with the band, a group off to his left started up a patriotic hymn, but the breeze wafted it up so it didn’t catch on. Vendors selling sausages and souvenirs worked their way along the fringes of the crowd. One enterprising citizen, at some risk, appeared to be hawking miniature Confederate flags. Another adjusted a tripod to support an enormous box camera while his assistant wrote down orders from a line of enthusiasts. For the first time Jarom felt that he’d stepped forward naked, exposed.

  Having seen enough, he now familiarized himself with what occupied the platform. Perched on top, the gallows was wobbly, the work of jacklegs, a word that Patterson defined as someone who takes a long time getting to where he’s going to go and doesn’t do much when he gets there. The only part adequately built was a six-by-six with one arm rising above the platform, well-braced and sturdy. Looking at it, he was sure it would support twice his one hundred fifty-three pounds. Crude but effective, it extended horizontally over a trapdoor in the center of the platform. This trap was hinged, supported from under by a prop to which a rope was attached. Remove the prop and the trap would fall. Centered above it and secured to the arm was the rope itself, two yards of braided hemp, obviously new. Looking at it, Jarom felt a quavering in his lower back just above the rectum, a lightness, a queasiness that shot along his spine, tingling. He felt his body in rebellion. Snapping his shoulders didn’t rid him of shudders. He felt the ligatures in the joints of his arms begin to jerk sympathetically, and it took all of his concentration to compose them again. Nervously, he shot a glance at the crowd.

  From the platform everything seemed more pronounced, more finely etched in space, even lighter, as though he’d walked into a familiar room one morning after a snowfall and found walls and objects, the air itself, brushed with bright inte
nsity. Again he centered his attention on the rope, knotted in a hangman’s noose. Irresistibly, it drew him like filings to a magnet. Though he tried to look away, he found himself counting the coils—one, two, three . . . thirteen, as he knew there would be. He imagined the rope as a caterpillar with thousands of tiny hairs. In the sunlight they glowed fine and honeyed as wisps of a woman’s hair, the hair on Mollie Thomas’s head.

  Jarom felt unnerved, the feeling he’d had in his previous life when he sensed but could not remember some task he’d not completed, something important left undone. Mollie, Aunt Mary, Billy Magruder, Sam Jones, Patterson standing sightlessly—all rose in his mind. They huddled before him, an improbable grouping, strangers randomly assembled to pose for a tintype, held for a minute before the lens as the shadow-catcher counted the exposure, the light recorded, released.

  Then George Swope, watching Jarom, fumbled with the handcuffs, his stubby fingers unable to fit the key. Finally the lock tripped, and Jarom felt the heavy rings slide from his wrists. Relief. Rubbing, he felt the blood return to his fingers, felt the itchy-tingling sensation as it irrigated his palms, his fingertips. He felt the corners of his mouth twitching and ran his tongue along his lips.

  “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said to himself.

  On all sides of him was the platform, an almost perfect square. Nailed to the corner posts ran a single rail, waist high. Jarom saw himself as part of a composition: Swope, Talbot, Freckle-Face, and a black-hooded hangman. The center had been reserved for him. He took no pleasure in recognizing that the executioner, true to folklore, didn’t speak but communicated only with nods. Jarom felt his stare through the eye holes in his hood. Significantly, he thought, the hood had a nose slit for breathing but no opening for the mouth. Nothing about him seemed human—no name, no identifiable features, no age. Even the sex wasn’t certain. Who was he? Jarom suspected a regular soldier chosen or volunteering because he fit a soldierly ideal—impersonal, efficient, unquestioningly obedient, possessed of an undersized conscience impervious to guilt. A machine, Jarom thought, to perform a machine’s work.

  “Lord have mercy on my soul,” Jarom whispered to himself, conscious that his lips were moving now.

  The hood that covered the hangman’s upper half hung in droopy pleats, much like a judge’s gown. Beneath, he wore shapeless pants of ragged gray twill, holding too much heat for this weather. Jarom noticed his high-topped shoes, cheap and spotless.

  Then down his neck Jarom felt the hangman’s breath, familiar and tropical with a faint reek of garlic. He felt his wrists being bound with rope, this time from behind. The hooded figure stooped to bind his legs with a second length just above the calves, and he expected the noose itself to follow. From the corner of his eye he saw Swope ceremoniously put his hand to his hat, and the band stopped playing the Dead March, one stray horn blaring on for a few bars before dwindling into silence. There came a pause, and after a few moments the silence seemed to make everyone uneasy. Jarom could almost feel the respiration of ten thousand lungs as someone feels rather than hears the wing beats of low-flying geese, the air rippling as they pummel past. From the crowd came an incessant murmur of expectation that reminded Jarom of gravel being poured slowly from a cart.

  Then Talbot stepped from his corner and knelt next to him, his bony knees on the hard decking.

  “Will you kneel with me?” he asked, and Jarom knelt.

  “Do you still take the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior?” Talbot asked, not daring to look at him.

  Remembering their sessions over the better part of two days, Jarom didn’t answer. He remembered his baptism in the body and blood of Christ.

  “Jarom,” he said, “do you still take Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

  “I do,” Jarom said.

  “Have you confessed your sins and made your peace with God?”

  “I have,” Jarom said. He hadn’t, wasn’t able to enumerate them all, but thought to himself, This is important to Talbot and it costs me nothing to say it.

  “Will you join me in the Lord’s Prayer?”

  Jarom looked over at him. His eyes, not yet ready to look at Jarom’s, held to the plank floor on which Jarom’s complaining knees were throbbing.

  Not waiting for Jarom’s answer, Talbot started the recitation.

  Hearing Talbot’s voice begin, deep in his throat Jarom felt his own breath shaping the familiar syllables and his lips trying to sound out the words. But no words came. Instead, his best voice produced a croaking whisper.

  When Talbot reached the forgive-us-our-trespasses, Jarom couldn’t find the words though he had them by heart, had recited them a thousand times. He glanced over to see if anyone noticed. Freckle-Face had lowered his head and closed his eyes, a perfect altar boy. Swope gazed off at some imaginary battlefield, dreaming of promotions and glory. Only the hangman looked at him, appraising him through his black mask like a wood-splitter sizing a stump. His eyes formed twin islands isolated from all the seasons and the world’s ocean of feeling. Jarom considered that the eyes, marooned as they were from the other features of his face, knew everything, knew nothing.

  Stumbling over the forgiveness part, Jarom picked up again with “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.”

  Talbot’s protracted “ahhh-min” consumed his own. Despite his show of piety, Jarom couldn’t help wondering if this good man did not love more than a little the resonance of his own rich baritone.

  Then Swope gathered his bulk to take the stage. He stepped forward and stiffened straight, tugging the ends of his tunic tight over his swelling chest, the slackness temporarily secured by the thick leather belt that girded his middle. He unfastened the front and produced an official-looking packet bound in blue ribbon. He untied it, unrolling an elaborate government document. Clearing his throat, he read the charges, the same Jarom had heard at the trial. Jarom did not listen to the sense but concentrated instead on the sounds, hoping Swope would falter or trip over a phrase, a tricky word that would grant him this small victory. In this he was disappointed. Swope’s voice droned on faultlessly, mechanical and precise. As Jarom picked up the gist of it again, he noticed that the sounds had no life or spirit to them. They fell on the ear flat and gray, pennies on tin. Gray was Swope’s color, a dull, dolt, possum gray.

  As Swope droned out the specifications, Jarom gazed from his crow’s nest over the fairgrounds. He saw a multitude of upturned, egg-shaped faces, the features painted on, as fixed and interchangeable as profiles on dimes. The mindless gawkers and bloodlusters he’d expected appeared somber, respectfully curious. In some of the faces he read a kind of reverence, that mix of cherub and undertaker he’d recognized at church funerals in Logan County among the faces of his neighbors. In the lifted chins and squinting eyes of others he detected expectancy and the mildest terror, an aura of disbelief that must pass among witnesses of miracles and climatic disasters.

  Nearby, under a gray locust, stood an army express wagon, four broad-assed government mules plastered with flies twitching in the heat, their glistening rumps striped with harness. In its bed he saw a long plain pinewood box, wedge-shaped and shoulder-wide at one end, tapered where the limbs narrowed at the feet.

  “Lord, have mercy on my soul,” he heard himself saying. “Lord, have mercy.”

  Though he knew the army contracted for coffins by the tens of thousands, he couldn’t remember seeing one before. The wagon driver, a pudgy man with pants cuffs stuffed into his boots in the way of teamsters, was palavering with some rough-looking customers gathered about one wheel. The driver must have made a joke, for they grinned and smirked before raising their heads to look up at him. No one else on the platform seemed to notice. They appeared to be listening intently as Swope read Jarom’s full name, adding “alias Sue Mundy” in his lusterless monotone.

  Jarom picked up snatches as Swope continued to read. Jarom had been duly tried and convicted of taking up arms as a guerrilla and outlaw in the counties of Nels
on, Henry, Marion, Woodford, and so on, during the months of September, October, November, and so on. Jarom twitched involuntarily as Swope added that the prisoner had been sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. And then, almost as an afterthought, Swope asked if he had anything to say before sentence was carried out.

  Jarom felt the impulse to repeat his request to be buried in full Confederate uniform or that, as a Confederate soldier, he be executed by firing squad rather than hanged as a common outlaw. But he knew it wasn’t any use. He’d given the letters to Talbot who’d promised to see them delivered. He could see Mollie and Aunt Mary Tibbs opening theirs, ripping or cutting the mucilage where he had run his tongue across it. John Patterson stood glumly between them, his sightless eyes fixed on a horizon only the blind can see.

  Jarom combed his memory for any last thing else he needed to say that would disburden him. He felt a tiny waver of relief as he considered that for the first time in his life his slate was empty—not clean but empty—his conscience as clear as ever it would be, as white as the scar on his left hand from the bullet that dug a ravine in its heel at Cynthiana nearly two years earlier. Nothing he could think of was left undone.

  Then he noticed those below him closest to the scaffold shushing those behind. A bald little man wearing a green eye-shade held a pencil poised above a pad of foolscap. Prentice? He doubted it. Jarom turned his eyes from him, elevating his line of sight over their heads, nesting them in the top of a gigantic elm at the far end of the fairgrounds. The faintest breeze cooled the sweat runneling down his forehead. That same breeze thumbed the elm’s willowy upper limbs, swaying its green-tipped branches, which seemed for an instant to be the only thing moving in that congestive place.