Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Jake took a measurement with a length of string and wrote it down. He straightened and finished off another beer. He shook his head. “Rutherford doesn’t sit right with me,” he said. “Don’t ever do a thing he asks you to do, and don’t ask from him so much as pass the salt and pepper.”

Abe looked at the ceiling. The tin wasn’t tacked by anyone true-eyed as Jake. “By 1910,” Abe said, “I’ll have electric lamps in here.”

“The hell you will.”

Goldie came through the door.

She said her daddy’s back was bad off.

With the pencil in his teeth, Jake said, “Don’t let him sleep on his belly. Worsens everything.”

“He’s on his back now.” She’d left him that way with his arms up over his head and his feet against the iron footboard. He said it felt best to have his heels on something.

Goldie gave Abe the eyes. “I’m tired,” she said. She wasn’t.

They bid Jake goodnight.

Later, they could hear his saw from below — short, clean cuts every one. It was cold in Abe’s room, and the two of them huddled under the quilt. After a while, he had to jump from the bed to stoke the little cookstove fire, and she laughed at his shivers when he got back in.

Two or three times, somebody yelled in the street.

They looked again and again at the note Rutherford had delivered. It read: I have consulted my associates. Let’s make it 3 % .

“Who does he mean?” She put her head on his chest.

“I believe he means the Beavers brothers,” Abe said. “Or at least Rufus. The other one lives in the Florida everglades.”

Rufus Beavers had gotten himself a law degree from Washington and Lee. He had his sights on being circuit judge. He’d sold his interest in the mines and the mill both. He had money to burn, and he was not content as Trent’s silent associate. His younger brother Harold grew less refined as he aged, a man who knew no talk but the blackguard variety. He was a fine hunter and had gotten rich bagging Florida egrets for millinery. “Killed over thirty-two hundred little snowies,” Harold Beavers was known to say. “Half of em I squeezed on while they stood in a inch of water puffing up their fuck plumage.” He had always been exceptional in the art of concealed approach.

“Sneak-up is what they used to call Harold,” Abe said. As a child, he’d been told, like all of Keystone’s children, to stay clear of Sneak-up Harold.

He and Goldie pulled the quilt high to their ears. They spoke on the plan. He would refrain from spending his table earnings. She would do the same, plus the take on her skims from Fat Ruth. Before long, there’d be money enough to go around. Big Bill could stay off his feet, and so could Al and Sallie when they took a notion. The saloon would be renovated. A proper wedding would be in short order. And all the while, Goldie had the working girls of Fat Ruth’s to teach her about cycles, about when and when not to wear her plumage, about how to cut a lemon in half and wedge it up inside herself before she lay down with Abe. He was happy to respect the cycle and the lemon wedge both. He’d not bring a child into being.

He jumped again from the bed to retrieve a big smooth rock he’d leaned against the cookstove leg. It was hot, and he tossed it on the bed by her feet. He shivered when he got back in beside her.

He expressed his newfound and half-earnest idea of hosting one final game of stud poker at the saloon. A big game for big money before he headed off to his apprenticeship at the Alhambra. “You can serve drinks at the table,” he said. “And you’ll get a look-see here and there at somebody’s cards. We’ll have us a system of code words.” She would flatter the men at the table with her eyes or her bosom as she bent to give them sustenance. She would eagle-eye what they held with great subtlety.

“Code words have got to seem innocent,” Goldie said. “Natural.”

They came up with a series of phrases for Goldie to utter, each a cue for Abe to fold or to go all in. At the best of them, they laughed together. “This hangnail’s a cocklebur” was one of Goldie’s favorites. “That man at the bar is a tallow-faced prairie dog” was another.

They lay in this way, laughing and keeping their feet near the hot rock, and all was right and easy. She watched his eyes close and put her hand to the side of his head and listened to the sound of his sleep-breathing.

Inside Goldie, the premonition remained. She would ignore it as best she could, but it would be there, someplace in her middle. Deep enough to forget most days, but shallow enough so that when things went wrong, she’d have already steeled herself to carry forth in a manner requiring great fortitude.

Such pushed-down knowing will fester quiet in waking stages, but it will come fast after a body that slumbers. And so Goldie’s repeating dream commenced that very night, and in it, she found herself sitting way up in the tallest tree there ever was, and though she did not want to look down, she did, and there below her dangling feet was Abe, hung by the neck from a willow-tree limb.

Rutherford wore his wool long underwear and two pairs of socks. Lining his fingernails was the root-black dried blood of the man he’d dumped down a three-hundred-foot hole, a young man with nothing in his pockets to name him.

He scraped at the dried lines with a letter opener. He gave up and set the opener down on the bedside table. His newest batch of pickled eggs rested there, a clear-brine jar of six. He took it up and regarded the stirred white specks of membrane where they spun. Cracked pepper ringed the bottom like river silt. A long slice of pimiento pressed against the glass. He’d begun to use the peppers on the advice of Taffy Reed. He’d begun to dropper into his brine a hearty dose of embalmer’s fluid, which he believed fortified his resolve. Alcohol and arsenic. Ether and zinc. He’d preserve himself while he lived, even if it killed him.

He got on the floor and pulled the locked trunk from under his bed and opened it. He put the skimmed bills in a old cheroot pail with the rest. It angered him, the cessation of the Baach collection. He touched at the treasures in his cherished trunk. From under the rusted pail he pulled the document he’d secured at fifteen, when his parents told him he was adopted — the torn-out page of a birth register. Just as he had done each night of his life since, he read it.

Rutherford had been raised by a wealthy family in Fairmont, and when he’d gotten old enough to ask why he was so different from them, they told him he was adopted. Soon thereafter, he’d gone to the courthouse and found his origin, and he’d torn it loose and taken it with him so no other would ever find it. In the Marion County Register of Births, someone had written the following for the birth date of Rutherford: February 30th, 1856 . Such an odd and impossible date was only the beginning of this foul record. His name was recorded Rutherford Rutherford . Both White and Colored were marked. Under Sex , both Male and Female received the pen’s slashing touch. And, as the register’s keeper must have drowsily attempted mere consistency at that juncture in her hand’s sweeping dash across the page, the category called Born showed a mark for both Alive and Dead. Place of Birth was left blank. Israel Rutherford , a name for which no record could be found, was given under Father’s Name in Full. Father’s Occupation: Laborer. Father’s Residence: Near Lowsville . Another empty column for Mother’s Name in Full . Of the forty-three babies born on Rutherford’s page, forty-one, under Deformity or Any Circumstance of Interest offered the word Perfect . One offered Stillborn . Rutherford’s line read: Deformity on Ear and Foot .