Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

At eleven, Rutherford walked past the condemned without looking at them. He threw open the door at the end of the jail’s hall and stepped into the embalming room. “I’m liable to faint if I don’t get them eggs,” he said. Taffy Reed sat on an iron stool and read the newspaper. He pointed to the big steel table, where he’d laid out a soup-plate of a hardboiled dozen.

At a quarter to noon, lawmen toting repeating rifles cleared a path, and two open box wagons rode up to the jail’s side door, a black coffin centered on each. Behind them was a long-top surrey. Most of the crowd had started for the gallows, but some remained. They watched the big door swing open, and there stood Abe Baach beside chief Rutherford. The lawman’s full height, upon first sight, marked him a boy next to the condemned, though Rutherford was nearly twice his age. Abe was bolt straight in shined shoes and three-piece suit. He wore a high collar and a fine silk necktie. No expression on his face.

“My Lord that fellow is handsome,” one woman said.

His hands were shackled in the front, and his steps into the wagon were short and measured for the ankle cuffs. He sat down on the coffin with the chief on one side and a portly preacher on the other. The driver nudged the big bay forward, and the second wagon fell in.

Officer Reed appeared in the doorway, Goldie Toothman’s elbow gripped loose in his hand. She’d gotten her plaid dress in line and her hair tidied. The wrist shackles rode tight against purple velvet cuffs. Her eyes were shut. She sang in a whisper.

Reed and the skinny preacher guided her to the coffin bench. She sat down slow. Men astride horses regarded her movements, her magnificent shape, the fine hue of high-cheek skin. The big, beautiful assemblage of her up-tied hair. They looked on with lust in their eyes despite their wives, who rode behind them in the same saddle, pressed uncomfortable against stiff belts and gun grips.

The second driver lashed the haunches of the big black horse, and the wheels spit mud as they pulled away from the jailhouse. The surrey fell in behind. It picked up four lawmen, two reporters, and the court stenographer.

The wind shifted, and thick ash from the coke ovens on the hill began to fall. Light rain started and stopped. The procession was relatively quiet, save for the street peddler calls and the barkers beckoning folks to the three shell tables. In an alley, men were shooting dice. One called, “Come you seven, come eleven!”

Abe Baach smiled where he sat.

Next to him, the portly preacher started up. He shouted, “The Savior comes and walks with me, and sweet communion here have we.” The skinny preacher in the wagon behind raised his face to the heavens, and they God-called in unison. When Abe could take it no more, he lifted his shackled hands from his lap, sprung his elbows, and swiveled at the hips, knocking the preacher from the coffin and the wagon too. It was a mighty blow that sent him circling, his backside to the sky before he landed on his belly in the mud. It took his wind from him. Some gasped. Others had a laugh. Two onlookers came to his aid, and when they rolled him to his side, a muddy crater he’d left behind.

The driver held up the horses, but Rutherford said move on. He’d stood from the coffin and put his colossal revolver to Abe’s head. “This road is full a ruts,” he told him, “and my finger’s inside the guard.”

Abe shouted at him: “Well go on Admiral Dot and squeeze it!”

Goldie had opened her eyes long enough to see the gun at Abe’s head, and when she shut them again, she gathered her air and coiled herself and let out a war cry so full as to ring the ears of the dead. It set the skinny preacher’s arm hair on end. It panicked the breath of officer Reed, and it ceased the barking of those hawking corn salve and silver and fixed games of chance.

Rutherford grit his teeth and told the driver to see to his buggy whip.

Abe sat on his coffin and swayed in time with the rusted wagon springs. His head knocked the barrel of the long short gun, but he did not much feel it. His ears caught the echo of his woman’s din, but he did not much hear it. His eyes looked ahead to the waiting gallows, but he did not much see it.

The people had amassed there, four thousand strong. Most had traveled from Mingo or from Mercer. They’d caught wind the day before and made haste to see the show. They stood upon a plot northeast of Elkhorn Creek, a flat patch where a house of ill fame had once held sway as the unofficial boundary to Cinder Bottom, Keystone’s red-light district. Now the land had been carved and leveled by seventeen mule teams in preparation for a new switchout and tipple. The people filled it up and stood on their wagons. They covered the surrounding hillsides, slipping and lending one another a hand. They waited fifty deep in line for hot roasted peanuts at five cents a bag, and they pressed against the barbed wire fence that circled the scaffold stage.

The gallows platform was wide and high, its ladder bearing thirteen steps and its side-by-side traps triggered by a singular lever. It had been built by a stranger. An Italian master carpenter with the straight-ahead eyes of a clergyman who called himself Signore Buonostirpe. He’d walked into Judge Beavers’ office early Thursday morning and proclaimed, “I make catafalco. I make for nothing.” He had a letter from George Maledon at Fort Smith Arkansas which read: This man has a gift from God, and it is to build, completely gratis, the most beautiful killing mechanisms you’re likely to see . Buonostirpe said he believed the guilty should pay with their lives. He wanted only to have his choice of timber and to work in solitude. He was granted both, and in two days’ time, he’d built the custom long-drop scaffold. The beams were spruce. The encased bottom, sweetgum. It was costly to panel the high pillars, but encased bottoms were customary since 1901 when Black Jack Tom Ketchum had been decapitated by a long-drop gallows in New Mexico.

Four policemen hopped from the surrey and cleared an entrance at the fence gate. It took some time. The people were thick, and when they parted, they pressed against one another in a ripple. The wagons rolled inside, and the gate was latched behind. Abe and Goldie stood from their coffin tops and waited.

The officers toted stepladders to the rear of each wagon. Rutherford and the skinny preacher descended like the rest. Reed did not. He unhitched a key ring from his belt and bent at Goldie’s side.

“What are you doing?” Rutherford called up.

Reed said, “We undo their ankles now. Less you want to carry Baach up that pitch.”

Rutherford looked at the stairs awaiting. He mumbled for Reed to hurry on and do it.

A procession toward death commenced as a new vendor began to call out, “Abe and Goldie’s picture, twenty cent! Last chance!”

Folks patted their pockets and fished for coins.

“They’ll never have another one took,” the man called.

They ascended the stairs single file.

The rain picked up again and the beaten ground troughed under the feet of the people. They listened to the rain against their shoulders. They were quiet and uncertain. Those who knew about rain and ground asked how in God’s name the earth could be so wet after having been so long dry.

On the platform, the players took their places. Chief Rutherford, officer Reed, news reporter, preacher. The court stenographer was given a straight-back chair too small for her frame, but she took her seat and produced a leather-bound book and fountain pen. She held them at the ready, her fat hand trembling.

Rutherford moved Abe to his spot on the drop door. Reed followed suit, escorting Goldie to her own square. The two ropes dangled behind them, nooses nearly touching the platform floor.