Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Goldie turned on the stool to face her. “Hello sweetie,” she said. How tall she’d gotten for seven years old. Her short pants long outgrown, lean legs with big kneecaps. A tooth had gone missing up top. Goldie wondered if Sallie had buried it in the yard. She’d missed so many such things staying away all the time.

“Is that my book in the window?” Agnes asked.

“Aren’t all of em in these stacks yours?”

“Have I read you the story of Krustikuss and Growlegrum?”

Goldie stood and picked up the shotgun. “If you’re up for sitting with him till Grandma Sallie comes, I might let you read it to him.”

“I’m up for it,” Agnes said.

They crossed in the doorway and Goldie kissed the top of the girl’s head. She hesitated, asked if the baby was asleep.

Agnes nodded that he was. She watched Goldie descend the stairs, and then she stepped inside the room. She took note of the used water and towel she’d laid out for Goldie. She did not look over at the man she called Uncle Jake, but instead sat in the chair by the window and opened her book and read, “So one was tall and one stout but both were of the same size in wickedness, and as to Krustikuss he liked to eat babies while Growlegrum was fond of young ladies.”

Downstairs, a thin line of oven smoke adhered to the kitchen ceiling, dancing there, slow and fickle to the whims of wind through open windows. Al and Sallie sat at the long table drinking coffee. Between them were two plates covered by dishtowels.

They regarded her as she descended the landing.

“Supper won’t stay hot much longer,” Sallie said.

“I’ve got to get to town.” Goldie set the shotgun in its hooks over the pie safe and headed for the door.

Al picked up a section of the paper and crossed his legs. He rubbed his knee where the ache was deep.

“I just got Ben settled in the cot.” Sallie pointed at the little one where he slept in an iron rocker by the sideboard. “We can set and visit a minute fore I go back up to Jake.”

Goldie wanted to tell her that they’d visited plenty the night before at that very table. Al had told them then what he’d done. He’d said, “I sent a telegram to Baltimore, to Mr. Ben Moon. And if Abe is alive, Mr. Moon will send him home.”

Goldie had nearly laughed. In seven years, Al Baach had never said a word on Abe. Seven years she’d watched the Baaches shrink while Henry Trent took what he wanted from them, and not once did anybody say they knew Abe’s whereabouts, or that they might send a telegram his way.

Goldie stopped, her hand on the doorknob, her back to them. “Did you go to the telegraph office this morning?”

“Yes,” Al said.

“Was there something there for you?”

“No.”

Goldie turned the knob, stepped outside, and shut the door behind her.

A mouse ran the length of the kitchen floor. “Where’s the cat?” Sallie asked. Al didn’t answer.

She stood and went to the door, watched through the squat square panes. The young woman walked down the dirt path to where the cinder clouds billowed and the train whistles blew. Through the thick water glass, she seemed to fall apart and reassemble with each step, her red and yellow dress twisting like a column of fire.

Sallie just stared.

“Her food?” Al asked.

“Eat it.”

“And the boarder’s?” The other covered plate was for the only present boarder at Hood House, a scholar of some kind up from Virginia who said he was writing a travel book. It was customary in those times to have vacancies. Henry Trent had long since convinced the railroad and coal company men to spend their boarding money elsewhere.

“Eat his too,” Sallie answered. She’d not have doubled her dumpling recipe if she’d known folks were going to be rude. She could hear her husband getting fatter behind her.

She watched through the glass until Goldie was gone.

Sallie had worried on her since Fat Ruth disappeared and Goldie quietly took over the business, a madam who was younger than half her girls and better looking than all of them. Sallie had worried on her more since the passing of Big Bill. Goldie had neither shed a tear nor missed a money delivery to either saloon or boardinghouse, and it was her deliveries alone that had kept the Baaches afloat.

Trent had been collecting from the Baaches when and how he saw fit, ever since Abe left town. He had more recently wired Sallie’s daddy in Welch, offering a fine price for the land on which Hood House sat. She’d gone to Welch and told her daddy that to sell would be a sin, but he’d looked at the floor while she talked, and then he’d asked her, “Is it a sin worse than intermarriage to a Jew? Is it a sin worse than rearing the mixed-blood bastards of whores?”

Sallie walked to the iron rocker and looked at the baby boy. He was a year and a half. He was the first half-black baby to come to Hood House, and there were those who found in such offspring nothing more than blather for the front porch.

A train whistle split the quiet. Sallie turned and watched the old man eat.

In town, Goldie walked with purpose down Railroad Avenue. The sun had moved free of the mountain and set up overhead.

Two men who looked to be railroad brass stepped into an alleyway, their stiff hat brims pulled low, heads tucked. She knew what they were looking for.

In a patch of dirt next to the Union Political and Social Club, a black dog was rope-tied to a chunk of brick chimney. It was a sizable ruin, big as a rich man’s grave marker. The chimney had toppled in a fire the year before and was left, in pieces, where it fell.

The dog’s tongue moved forward and back as if on a timer. It whined with each pant. There was not a water bowl or a puddle of rainwater to be found. Nor was there an inch of shade, as every tree in downtown Keystone had long since met its end — some by fire, some by flood, and some by tooth of saw.

Goldie freed the rough length of rope from the bricks’ sharp red edge and pulled the skinny dog across the dirt. When she stepped inside the heavy door of the barroom, nobody paid much mind. There was a card game in the corner where men mumbled low and angry. A girl no more than fourteen sat on the lap of a bearded man whose eyes were nearly shut and whose hands hung dead at his sides.

“Which one of you does this animal belong to?” Goldie shouted. All gave attention, save the half-conscious drunk with the too-young whore on his knee.

Chief Rutherford sat on a stool at the end of the long bar. He’d taken off his gun belt and hung it on the stool next to him. He ate his customary noon plate of pickled eggs prepared by Taffy Reed. “That’s my Sambo,” he said.

He stumbled when he stepped off his stool. He wiped his hands on his shirt and walked slow toward where she stood by the door.

When he was close enough, Goldie said, “He had neither water nor shade out there in the yard.”

Rutherford snorted away the drip on his lip and smiled. “Well, I reckon he don’t mind, long as a peach like you wanders by to save him.” He looked her up and down and shook his head in slow disbelief that a woman so beautiful could still be stuck in the bowel of McDowell. “Matter fact,” he went on, “I believe when I put him out there on that rock I was settin bait for the likes a you.” Like every man in Keystone, Rutherford wanted more than anything the privilege of bedding Queen Bee, no matter the cost.

She smiled back at him.

Taffy Reed was tending bar, a habitual vocation in service of his daddy’s customers, the most frequent of whom was Taffy’s other boss, Rutherford.

Reed had not seen Goldie in weeks, but they’d nodded when she came in the door. The sight of her always made his throat clench. Nobody but the two of them knew that he was the only Keystone man to sleep with her since Abe had run off. It went on for a month in 1905, ending as abrupt as it began. She’d bedded other men, but only a handful, only tall-money types in from New York, and only if they laid down the big-face red-seal notes.