Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

She lowered her reading material. Her expression was neither welcoming nor cross.

“I couldn’t help but read your headlines,” Abe said. He pointed to her lap. “I have it on good authority that the comet reported there will rain poison on the lot of us.”

“Yes,” the woman answered. “My sister has been stockpiling comet pills from the apothecary.”

“Smart gal.”

“No such thing as too cautionary.”

He nodded.

A man seated ahead of him stifled a cough. A child ran the aisle with an apple-head doll in her fist.

“Where are you travelin to?” Abe asked.

“Lynchburg.”

He leaned forward. “I couldn’t help but notice the other news, from Germany. The syphilis cure?”

“Yes?” She’d never liked the sound of the word syphilis .

“That’s my old cousin,” Abe said. The train car swayed. The knuckles moaned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The German fella. One that brewed up the magic serum. He’s my old cousin. He give me an advance dose half a year ago, cured me up right. My pipes are clean as polished brass.” He winked at her.

She looked around to see if anyone had overheard. It was the strangest conversation she could remember, and he was the handsomest man she’d ever encountered. “Well,” she said. “How delightful.”

Abe smiled. He liked the way she said delightful —quick, as if built from a single syllable. He watched her take in his smile. He watched her own emerge. He told her he was pulling her leg and she chuckled. He told her he was not the type to contract syphilis and then he asked if she fancied playing cards. She did.

Abe reached his hand across the aisle. “My name is Joe,” he said. “Joe Visross.”

He began calling her Dee. When she asked him why, he said that to him, she was Miss Dee Lightful, and that she always would be. She chuckled some more. He moved to the seat facing hers and utilized the table between them to spread the deck. “Oh my,” Dee said. She’d not seen the work of such hands before. They moved as if mechanized, oiled for unbroken ease. He blind shuffled, smooth-talking all the while. She picked cards and he shuffled again, palming without the slightest trace of impropriety. He plucked the cards she’d chosen every time. She was impressed.

Fifty miles from Baltimore, they’d already shared and finished the contents of his second flask. Abe flagged the porter and handed him a fin to allow them passage across the loud rollicking vestibule to a vacant compartment car. Once inside, he set down his luggage and pulled the window shade on the locking door. Dee lay down on the low bunk and hiked her skirt. Her eyes were wanton from whiskey. Abe was quick and careful to take his customary position astride her, groin to loin, weight on his elbows.

When he shut his eyes to kiss her, he saw, plain as daybreak, the face of Goldie Toothman.

He raised up and hit his head on the iron luggage berth. The blow nearly put out his lights, and when he touched his hand to the back of his skull, a knot rose slow. He’d lost his vision but was able to shove off the bed and stand.

Dee regarded him there, shuffling against the train’s rollick. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked.

He put his hand out against the wall. His sight returned dull at the edges and he looked through the window glass at the Susquehanna bridge trusses whipping by. He’d once seen a man hung by the neck from such a truss.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Dee said. She’d begun to realize what she’d almost done with a stranger on a train.

“I’m sorry,” Abe managed. He picked up his bags and was out the door without a sound, a steady throb at the back of his skull. His breath was still hung up in his throat at the sight of Goldie.

Memories can be nullified, and when she’d started to fade some years back, he was glad. It had made everything easier out in the world.

Now he stood inside the roar of the vestibule, taking deep breaths in order to compose himself.

Jake dying . They were words he could not outrun. He watched the accordion walls contract around him like the gills of a fish. He looked at the pressed-steel floor of the gangway beneath his shoes. It was nearly reflective, spit-shined. At the corner, it was factory-stamped Pullman No. 123 . “I’ll be damn,” he said.

Four hundred miles away, locked inside a fitful nap, Goldie Toothman heard another kind of roar, the kind that often accompanies daytime slumber, and she sat upright, ears ringing. She was in an upstairs room at Hood House. She had waked out of breath.

She stood from the sweat-addled bed and cursed the unseasonable heat.

Across the room, Jake Baach lay dying on the other twin mattress.

She checked his pulse at the neck, where the skin had gone purple-yellow. The wrapped dressing there was a foul brown, the wound beneath it a scabbed bullet graze. The one in his belly had gone clear through. Another was lodged in his scapula. Goldie lowered her ear to his face and listened. He still breathed.

She went to the dressing table mirror and regarded her reflection there. It displeased her. The crows were in the evergreens again, making their awful racket. She walked to the window. Somebody had closed it while she slept. There were those at Hood House who believed Jake might sweat out whatever was in him, whilst others believed in the cure of spring air.

All of them knew by then that such things did not matter. Doctor Warble had done what he could. He said it was most likely a blood infection, and that hope was a notion to think about quitting.

Goldie looked into the yard.

She opened the lower sash, pulled from the floor stack a sturdy book, and stuck it in the channel. The window was open wide enough to put her head through. The birds kept at their cawing, and she said to them, in a near-whisper, “Shut your cock-chafin beak holes.” When they did not obey her command, she returned to the white iron bed, knelt, and reached underneath. She took the hammerless shotgun from its mount against the slats, checked that both barrels held shells, and took a crouch position at the open window, barrels resting on the sill. She lined up her shot, shut her open eye, and imagined herself squeezing the trigger, and that the room-rattling noise of it awoke Jake Baach from his wretched death nap to behold black feathers and pine needles bursting from the branches.

She opened her eyes. The crows had gone quiet.

She was about to stand from her crouch when one of them cawed again.

“I’ll murder the murder of you,” she told the crows.

Spending the night at Hood House had put her in a foul mood once again. She’d offered to administer to Jake as he worsened, and she was glad to ease Sallie Baach’s load, but the trees and animals did not suit Goldie any longer. She longed for town. She could see it from the window, pulsing already just down the clear-cut face of the mountain.

How odd, she thought, to have such contrary worlds cheek by jowl.

She looked at the table clock by the bed. Nearly noon. She could be on Railroad Avenue by half past.

The washbowl was half full of clean water. Someone had hung a hand towel on the edge.

She lay the shotgun on the dressing table and took a hairbrush from the jewel drawer. When she had her hair up and her face and neck washed, she regarded herself in the mirror again. Her displeasure was mostly set aside. She watched Jake’s reflection in the mirror’s corner, so still under the sheet. The back of his hand was like a swollen plum, fingers black.

Someone was coming up the stairs.

It was little Agnes. She stopped and stood in the open doorway.