Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

“I always said what I always said.” He coughed and spat in a wastebasket. He asked, “You still are keeping your money in your shoes?”

“Some of it.”

He dropped the awl in the boot and threw it on the workbench. “My hands hurt,” he said. Then he picked up the bottle of leather cement. There was a picture of a white sperm whale on the label. He uncorked it, put his nose over the opening, and snorted twice. He sat back and smiled and held out the bottle to Abe, who passed on the offer. Al asked him, “Do they tell you I have rats in the attic these days?”

Abe shook his head no.

“Well,” Al said, “Mr. Henry Trent has more rats than me.”

It was quiet.

From the corner of his eye, Abe saw them coming across the yard. Goldie carried Ben, and Agnes followed.

He went out to the porch and stepped off the crooked stones, and he met them in the high grass.

Goldie had been with Jake when he’d ceased to breathe. “It was peaceful,” she said.

Al stepped onto the porch and looked at them. He leaned on his cane. “Is someone with him now?” he asked.

“Yes,” Goldie said.

“What time did he die?” Al asked. He’d put the table clock in the room and told them all to keep it wound.

“Half past three,” Goldie said.

Al nodded. He thought it a good hour. A strong number. He said to Goldie, “Please go and tell my wife that I will be there in five minutes to wash him.”

Little Agnes put her face to Goldie’s skirt front. Her shoulders shook from the sobs.

Al leaned his cane against the porch post and wiped his hands on his apron front. “Abraham,” he said, “follow me.”

He’d built a pine box coffin the day before.

It was sitting across two sawhorses under a shed roof that jutted from the house’s rear. Al untied his apron and tossed it on the coffin. He said, “I use your brother’s tools to make it.” He pointed to the sawhorses. “Your brother make these trestles,” he said. He pointed above their heads. “And this roof.” He pointed to the woods’ edge, where long two-by-fours sprouted plumb at the sky. “And the foundation of a cathedral.”

Abe regarded the empty chapel husk. Hung head-high from an upright was a sun-bleached signboard. In wide black paint-strokes it proclaimed: Church of the Free Thinkers of the Merciful Enthroned .

“His friend helps him with the foundation,” Al said. “Strange man from Italy, no English. Thinks and builds like Jake, now they say he shoots him.” He put his hand on the coffin top and rubbed for smoothness. He said, “Couple weeks ago, Jake makes a trade for a new ripsaw, and the other man throws in these pine boards. No charge.” He shook his head. “He was going to make a pulpit. He draws a plan and show me.” Al made circles in the air with his finger. “The pulpit would have wheels, to take on the streets.”

Abe only listened, and the words sounded on the air as if uttered by some other man’s father, a stranger who spoke of the tools and creations of some other man’s dead brother.

“Your brother make this cane for me,” Al said, and he held it forth. It was lacquered hickory with a high silver band. Just above the band was a tiny silver button. “Mechanical.” He pressed the button and a catch inside the shaft released with a tiny sound. The cane was no longer one but two, no longer a cane but a sword and scabbard. Al unsheathed it. The blade was fashioned from a broken-hilted bayonet. “Everybody says your brother was a lunatic after he choke that day. They say it because he stand in the streets and tell them there will come a drought, a hurrycane, a blazing fire, a comet, a more terrible influenza.” He punctuated his words with the up-pointed sword and scabbard. “He says over and over again— It will come swift. He says it will spare no women nor children nor beast. It will end them same as it does the sinning man.”

Abe worked his jaw and thought of the man in the flophouse doorway.

Al made his cane a cane again. He leaned on it and turned to the coffin. “No one can understand the brain,” he said. “But your brother makes beautiful things.” He bent and blew a little mound of sawdust from the coffin top. “I don’t get the handles on it in time,” he said. He’d meant to put eight holes in and knot some rope.

Abe said, “You think Trent had him shot?”

Al didn’t answer. There was an eastward wind in the treetops, and a branch scratched across the shed roof above them. He sighed. Then he said, “I can know the weather by my bad knee.”

Abe looked up at the rafters. There was an abandoned bird’s nest at the corner joist.

Al regarded the scar on his middle boy’s face. He looked him in the eyes. He said, “Your mother wants you to take everything from the man who shoots your brother. Everything.” He worked his lips and kept down all that wanted to come out. He said, “She wants to move then to seashore.”

Neither spoke.

Al turned and patted the coffin. “Empty, it isn’t heavy,” he said. “You and I carry it to the room. Samuel will be here in an hour.”

Al and Sallie had decided they would bury Jake in the Hood family plot up the hollow. They had not asked her father’s permission, for they agreed it wouldn’t matter.

There was no preacher and there was no rabbi. Only the family, and they put Jake in the ground as quickly as Sam and Abe could heft him into the wagon and steer the mare to the circled iron gates, spear-tipped and listing on the overgrown slope.

Abe and Sam wore no gloves to shovel. Blisters filled and opened, peeled back and burned.

Agnes went off alone in the hillside field, and when they’d refilled and patted flat the earth, she set down three handfuls of blue phlox. One for Jake, yet unmarked by a headstone, and one each for the Baach babies who had not lived. Infant Son and Infant Daughter , the little tablets read.

Sallie pulled up all the weeds.

Back at Hood House they ate together and spoke in happy tones for the benefit of the children, who were not subject, on this night, to a particular bedtime. Sam drank too much as was usual, and Goldie watched Abe delight Agnes by pulling coins from her ear and nose and shirt collar.

Al said he was going for a walk. They watched him from the porch. Twilight’s hue lit orange the tops of canted trees on the opposite ridge.

Abe and Goldie walked with the children through a skinny plateau of high goosegrass. The seed heads in the dying light glowed like links of gold.

Between the houses, six crows sat on the jutted branch of an evergreen. They cawed and rolled their throats. “I loathe those birds,” Goldie said.

Abe looked up at them. He told Agnes to come over by the tree. He called too to Ben, who was smashing an armyworm in his fist.

At the base of the big tree, Abe pointed to the crows. “Just watch those blackbirds,” he told them. “I’ll bet you each a nickel I can make them fall from their perch.”

“All at once?” Aggie asked.

“All at once,” Abe answered.

“You ain’t going to shoot em?”

“I ain’t going to touch em.”

The crows cawed. Ben cawed back.

“Good boy,” Abe told him. And he made his own call, a high look here , and the crows aimed their beaks at the ground.

He stared hard at them, and they stared back, their heads twitching at first, then going still. Abe walked a slow circle around the low branches of the tree, and where he went, the birds’ eyes followed, their small heads swiveling. He circled again. Around and around the tree he went, each time increasing his speed just enough. The crows kept watching. Swiveling. On the sixth time around, the first crow fell. On the seventh, the rest came down. They hit branches as they came, their bodies thudding at the feet of the children.