Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

They hit Railroad Avenue and made left to travel west. Rose took the lead carrying four. Talbert followed in the second, and Abe drove the third. Goldie rode silent and white at his side. He stopped at street’s middle and looked back to Fred Reed’s.

Chesh Whitt burst from the yard, the short officer trailing him close. He was twenty yards from the car when Henry Trent hobbled into range.

Trent could see now what was happening. He somehow knew what they’d done. He stopped in the road and leveled his Colt.

The officer giving chase dropped to the ground at the crack of Trent’s first shot. The man was not hit, but he played dead just the same, and he wondered why he’d quit his coke-yard job.

Trent fired slow and even, and the fourth caught Chesh in the side. He fell and got up to keep coming, the Oldsmobile five yards off.

Abe left his foot on the brake but stood at the tall curved dash. He took a wide stance and turned his hips. He steadied his center as Moon had taught him inside the long shooting stall.

Trent put his sights on the man who’d stood, the man he now saw was Abe Baach.

Abe fired first and Henry Trent dropped to the hard-packed dirt where he’d stood.

Chesh jumped on the gearbox in back and Abe sat down and took the tiller. “Hold on,” he said, and Goldie turned to clutch Chesh’s wrist, and they drove, a crowd in the street behind them circling their mayor, who lay on his back with a soft-point bullet in his heart. Rufus and Fred Reed took a knee on either side, and Trent looked up at the sky between them where the coke ash gusted gray. His head grew light and tingly. He said something about skyrockets before dark and a monkey and a train. He swallowed. Again and again he swallowed.

Fred Reed took off his pressed white shirt and wadded it over the bubbling hole. “Go get my vehicle!” he hollered to the one-eyed officer standing at his back open-mouthed. Rufus stood and took the man by the sleeve, and together they ran for Fred’s coupe. It was parked beyond the yard, the only automobile left to be had.

When Rufus turned the crank, there was nothing.

Chesh Whitt had dismantled the carburetor.

Dusk came on the drive to Kimball, the sun muted deep beneath the ridge. A mile out, they’d emptied their grain sacks into hat trunks and leather cases. They ditched the vehicles by a tipple at Kimball’s edge and boarded the train bound for Huntington.

At Matewan, Abe stepped off the coach in full dark. Frank Dallara stood by the bulletin light. Giuseppe was not with him as planned.

Abe had wired two hundred dollars that morning on word that the jailer could be bribed.

Now Frank Dallara was stooped and red-eyed. “They found him hung from the window bars at supper,” he told Abe. “Said he knotted up strips of that burlap he slept on.”

They’d planned to bring him to Baltimore, find him work bricking mansions along Druid Hill Park.

“I’m sorry Frank,” Abe said.

The conductor called stragglers to board. “We’re six minutes off!” he hollered. “I’m letting her go!”

At the big Huntington station, Goldie spoke to a ticket agent she knew. The man was a monthly regular at Fat Ruth’s, and as per her instructions, he’d requested extra hours on Independence Day. She slid a silk-knotted roll of twenties between the bars of his window. “When they come askin,” she said, “You tell em Chicago. We were all of us bound for Chicago with transfer at Cincinnati.”

She procured their tickets to Baltimore and Atlantic City, and they boarded the Pullman sleeper in a line. When the porter tried to take their luggage, Abe told him to kindly step back. The old man eyed Chesh Whitt, who was bent at the waist and leaking blood through his dressing. “Colored ain’t permitted in the sleeper,” the man said.

Abe put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhh.” He held out a ten.

Chesh grunted as he made for the step stool. He looked back at the porter, who reminded him of his grandaddy. He said to him, “Don’t fret George. One of us runs these rails tonight.”

At the passenger station in Charleston, they were joined by Sallie, Al, Agnes, and baby Ben, all of whom had spent the evening there, waiting. When Abe inquired on Sam’s whereabouts, his daddy said only, “He is gone. He run.”

They’d last seen him at two that afternoon, while they ate cold chicken behind the station. They’d just spread a quilt on the bank of the Kanawha when Agnes saw him above and pointed. “Is that Uncle Samuel?” she’d asked, and there he was, high up on the river trestle, running just as fast as he could.

Everywhere were riots on Independence Day streets. Jack Johnson had won easy, and as night became morning, men were stabbed in the dark for being black. The quarrelling on Keystone’s dirt lanes was relatively tame. White men mostly mumbled and glared. There were celebratory calls not unlike those of Chesh Whitt, even as Mayor Trent was tended and kept still. He somehow kept breathing, his heart languid but alive.

He was toted by Fred Reed toward the hospital at Welch, his chariot a horse-drawn rig meant for coffins. By the time they hit Bottom Creek at nine, he was dead.

It was Rufus who discovered the others. He’d walked to the Bottom and into Baach’s saloon with the cut-barrel shotgun level at his hip. He’d followed the sound of their calls and nearly turned away when he saw Rutherford and Reed hog-tied on the floor by his brother. Here , Rufus thought, here is delegate-elect Beavers, his member gunshot and bled nearly dry .

He cut them all loose.

Rutherford and Reed chained the de-bolted Baach safe to the hand-truck and rolled it to the alley, where they blew off its door with dynamite. Inside was nothing but a Devil Back Joker. Stuck to its front was the business card of Mr. Tony Sharpley, 57 Great Jones Street, New York.

Rufus Beavers returned to the Alhambra, where he could only stare at the emptied insides of his own thrown-open safe. It was taller than he, and it had not been so bare since the day of its purchase in 1894. All that remained was a foreign metal case. Rufus pried it open to find twenty card decks and one business card. The decks read:

BIG SUN PLAYING CARD COMPANY

NEW YORK CITY, USA.

The business card read:

PHIL O’BANYON

1 EAST SUPERIOR STREET

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.

Tony Thumbs had survived. Knocked unconscious, five front teeth gone, he’d been helped to the train by the suspendered man, who’d thought to seek out and load the luggage too. On the eight o’clock eastbound, the old man rocked with his head against the window glass.

He rode in this fashion through Princeton and on past Lynchburg too, the fear in his bones subsiding as the mountains gave way to flat. He held a frozen Delmonico steak to his mouth and rocked in his red velvet seat. He looked at the empty cushion beside him. Baz had not been so lucky as him.

The monkey was wrapped in the suspendered man’s jacket and stuffed in Tony’s medicine trunk. His little body was cold and stiffening quick, clacking against brown and red bottles of curare and opium and valerian and maypop.

At Silver Spring, Tony peeked inside the trunk to see his oldest and dearest friend in this world. He pulled back the lapel of the fine worsted jacket and looked at the white face and cold open eyes. He cried, and he did not care who saw.

He drank from a red medicine bottle before he closed up the trunk.

He hoped the others had made it out alive. He hoped they would meet him in Baltimore, and that they’d let him rest awhile. He was eighty-two years old after all.