Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Two minutes later, Taffy Reed followed Rutherford through the main hall door. They nodded to One-Eye as he left, and Rutherford called after him, “Be back here at seven, no later.”

Rutherford sat down in the chair that faced Abe’s cell. He stared hard at the condemned, who was naked and had dropped flat on his belly.

“Bet you didn’t know this here is called a push-up,” Abe said. His voice strained as he up-and-downed on his knuckles. “I know the fella who first coined the term.”

Taffy stood behind Rutherford with a sack of dried peppers in one hand and a lantern in the other. He watched the fluid motion of the push-up. “I’m going to pickle,” he said. On his way past Goldie’s cell, he swung his lantern to see. She stood over the drainhole, naked as a jaybird.

On the embalming table, Taffy poured brine from a quart jar into a gallon that was already half full of boiled eggs. He’d left the door cracked to take periodic peeks at Goldie’s cell. He’d done so for a week, since the condemned had begun to fight the heat with nudity. They were generally clothed only in the early morning hours.

When Abe finished his forty push-ups, he hopped to his feet and brushed the dirt off his chest. He looked down at himself. “Rutherford,” he said. “What about my hog? If I come over and waggle it between the bars, will you brush off the dust for me?”

Rutherford had not shifted posture an inch since he’d sat. “Come on over here,” he said. “I’ll brush it. Rip it clean off too. Fry it up in back with some purple onion, serve it to your mother.”

Abe laughed. “You could serve five or six more than that with it,” he said.

Rutherford looked away momentarily. He tried to see Goldie down the hall, but it was too dark at that end. “Five or six?” he said. “I believe that’s about how many I’ll get to kill when I do find your mother and daddy, and whoever else has that money.”

“That isn’t going to happen.”

“You won’t be here to see it, that’s certain.” If he pointed his boot toes, he could almost touch the floor. He sighed and sat back. “Less you go ahead and tell me now where the money is. I believe you know this is your very last chance to stay what’s comin tomorrow.”

Abe went to the straw tick in the corner and lay down and crossed his legs at the ankle.

Rutherford hated the man with such fortitude he could barely keep from shooting him through the bars right then. He wouldn’t do it. He’d watch instead as Abe died before a crowd. Rufus Beavers had declared Thursday morning that the pair would be properly hanged as soon as a scaffold was built. He even had a man for the job, a man who’d built the gallows used by Isaac Parker, Rufus’s most favorite of judges. By that time, Rufus was drunk every hour of every day. He’d nearly gone mad since the heist and his brother’s disappearance, and he’d finally grown weary of Abe and Goldie’s trickery and money-baiting. He should have known better than to keep them alive on the promise of four hundred grand. He should have known better, even on that July Sunday sundown, when the two of them had surrendered to Keystone. They hadn’t stepped down from the train right off. They’d stood on the coach steps and opened the lid of a four-foot steamer trunk. They’d tipped it forward so Rufus could see the money stacked neat to the top. That’s when Rutherford turned Sam Baach loose on the final outbound train. The young man who’d wanted only to come home now wanted only to leave. When it had departed, and they reopened the trunk, beneath the top layer there was nothing but newsprint.

Rutherford spat on the hallway floor. “Rufus may have given up on that money, but I won’t ever,” he said. “I’ll kill everyone you know to get it back.”

Abe put his arm beneath his head. A luna moth walked up the wall toward the ceiling. “That isn’t going to happen,” he said.

“You don’t know what I can do.” Rutherford stood up and put his face near the red-rusted bars. He lowered his voice and said, “I’ve killed enough to where I lost count. Easier and easier and easier.” He smiled a little. “Even the Keystone Kid, even ole big brains never knew what I done. Always thought I took orders from Trent, from Beavers.”

“That’s right,” Abe said. “You always were superior at takin orders.”

Rutherford didn’t care to bite his tongue when death for Abe Baach was this nigh. “Wasn’t takin orders when I dropped on that guinea from a tree branch,” he said. “One ridin into town with your daddy?” He let it sink in a minute. “That was my first.” He smiled at the old bad memories he’d twisted to good. “Vic Moon kept breathing through a broke neck too, had to knock him in the brain box with the butt of my axe.” He ruminated a moment at his humane ways. “Could have been Jew Baach on that horse,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, nobody told me to do that. I just done it.”

Abe sat up on his elbows and looked at the tiny man.

Rutherford kept on. “And that same night, when your daddy stood in the road with Trent like they was friends, and the Beavers threw them snakes on me from the high porch, I didn’t go to no White Sulphur Springs like Trent ordered me to.” He shook his head. “Nossir, went to that old slope mine and tossed Vic Moon in there. First of many. And here you and your daddy always thought it was Trent that didn’t ship that body.”

Down the hall, Goldie could hear every word.

Taffy Reed had noted the tone in Rutherford’s far-off voice. He’d put his ear to the cracked-open door.

“How about we get down to it?” Rutherford said. “How about ole Jake?”

Abe stayed as he was, his arms beneath him tingling.

“People knew him and that Italian wasn’t just carpenter buddies.” All that Rutherford had kept to himself was blooming from his throat unchecked. “Me and Harold Beavers was on a bender, and we followed them nancies up in the woods.” He pointed upward toward nothing in particular and kept on. “I bet Harold he couldn’t hit your brother more than two out of three from a hundred yards off.” He laughed then. “Fuckin rifle jammed or he’d have took the other one too.”

Down the hall, Goldie had quit breathing. She saw, inside the darkness, the white of Taffy’s eye as he blinked and aimed his ear on the hall.

Rutherford gripped the iron of Abe’s cell door. He said, “Trent never spoke a word on ridding this world of Jake Baach. Jake wasn’t no more than a fart on the wind to Henry Trent.” He stuck his mouth between two bars. “And hasn’t nobody of import taken notice of you bein here neither,” he said. “And tomorrow I get to watch you and your woman drop, and there isn’t anybody but me left to run this whole place.” That very evening at dinner, he’d strangled the life from Rufus Beavers. They were arguing over the money they’d discovered as counterfeit when it escalated. He’d pinned the old man to the floor of Trent’s office and watched his eyes pop. He’d rolled Rufus up in a horsehair rug and toted him to the shuttered bootleg slope mine, and there he’d dumped him down the three-hundred-foot hole.

Without a sound, Taffy Reed stepped into the darkened hall and cupped his ear.

“No more Rufus,” Rutherford said, “and pretty soon no more Fred Reed.”

Abe looked at the man. The lantern by his chair cast him bigger than he was and his shadow stretched long on the floor.

Rutherford stepped back from the bars. “Taffy!” he hollered. “I’m going home to bed! Come out here and watch this cocksucker!” He left a white-labeled pint of Chokoloskee whiskey by the chair.

On the straw mattress, Abe listened to the main door close, and when it did, he unclenched his fist. He unwrapped the pebble and read Tong’s coded note: