Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Luna in flight

Serpiente tucked tight

Taffy Reed stepped back in the embalming room for his lantern.

He walked past Goldie without swinging it. He set it down by the chair at cell one and took up the whiskey and drank. It nearly choked him. When he’d quit coughing, he said, “I’ve reconsidered.”

Abe stood up. “What’s that now?”

“How to align myself,” Taffy said.

Abe smiled. “Good,” he said. “Set yourself down there. Let’s talk a little while.” His plan could proceed a little easier now. He could finally use what he’d stashed in his mattress.

Taffy said, “I can likely take out the perimeter guards.” He pointed beyond the jail’s walls. “You two might slip out before sunup.”

“No,” Abe said. He procured the notes and fattened folds of paper from betwixt the straw shoots of his foul tick. “The people want a hanging.” He pulled on his drawers and stepped to the bars, sliding through to Taffy Reed what he’d accumulated at the behest of the wild notions in his mind. He smiled. His eyes went wide. “The people want a big show,” he said.

Taffy swallowed. There was a coldness at the pit of his stomach.

Abe told him to gather himself. “You got work to do,” he said.

Sleep was not something to be had. In the past, Abe had gone without it for as long as fifty-four hours, maybe more. Still, he did not feel sharp as he walked in a fine suit and shackles to the box wagon waiting at the jail’s side door. He could hear the words repeating as he sat down and swayed at the bullwhip crack on horse’s rump: You can sleep when you are dead .

It was the truth.

The early morning hours of their execution day had played as if a dream. Now noon was close at hand, and as he got his first look at Goldie in near a month — beautiful as she was, straight-backed on her coffin-seat — he thought he might drop where he rocked, sabotaging all that he’d planned.

But she winked at him as they rolled over mud ruts and through the people crowding the lane. In the rain, she mouthed the words I love you and keep your temper . And so he did.

And as he sat there between a preacher and a devil-man, rolling past an alley where bent souls shot dice, Abe nodded to Ah Tong, who leaned against the bricks and grinned. He’d dismantled his Punch and Judy booth and was making his way through the crowd, giving signals and watching the box wagons close.

After Independence Day, Tong had hidden himself in Wan’s storeroom for a month before venturing onto Keystone’s streets. On his first night in the Bottom, he’d stood in the lane and stared at the empty Baach saloon. Across Wyoming, Goldie’s beautiful cathouse, where he’d seen a window woman dance, had been burnt to the ground. All that remained was piled ash and two-by-fours bubbled and blacked. It was the same night he’d met Bushel-Heap Lou McKill, who was clumsily tossing a paper wad at the jailhouse window while the outside guard paced his square. Tong had helped the giant man and then together they got drunk, and they discovered the wondrous things folks discover when they sit and visit awhile. It turned out that Tong knew more than the superiority of marionettes over puppets, and when he’d shown his back-palm and his cigar-through-the-nose and the difficult maneuverings of plugging a gun barrel undetected, Bushels had known he could help. “Abe’s got a big one brewin,” he’d told his new friend.

Now Tong stepped quick from the brick alley wall and fell in behind the surrey at the rear. He had sabotaged Rutherford’s tomato-crate speech and plugged the chief’s gun barrel too. He’d swayed the mind of his rain-dotted crowd with the tale from his puppets’ mouths. And he’d called out his signals to the paid-off jewelry peddlers and the barkers at their tables three-shelled.

Ahead of him, the wagons split the crowd as the procession toward death carried on.

On the hillside to the east, Bushels was in position, peeking now and again from the willow-tree’s cover. The crowd had backed up the ridge from the push at leveled plot, and he could hear them laugh and mumble down below. His pocketwatch read two minutes to noon. He leaned into the wide willow’s trunk and rested his head on the scrape. He thought of Ben Moon’s last telegram, and he hoped that it was the truth.

Near the circled chain-link, with his hands in his pockets, a stout man stood eyeballing the gallows wood. It had been some time since he’d leveled and planed such fine timber. He’d enjoyed the elaborate work, particularly when his son had helped him with the latches and the hinges encased inside. He’d not understood at first when Frank brought by the giant Scotsman and the Chinaman who dressed like an Italian. But they told him he could avenge his nephew’s death, and time was of the essence, it seemed. So Tilio Dallara had ridden into Keystone Thursday morning, just as they’d told him to do, and he’d presented the forged letter to the drunk judge and his midget friend, and now he looked on, waiting for the show.

He nodded to his son, who stood by the peanut vendor.

Frank Dallara had grown tired of the peanut man’s shouts. “Sellin nuts! Hot nuts!” the man called, again and again. Frank had eaten three bags already, hungry and spent as he was from such lantern-light, last-minute work.

Four policemen hopped from the surrey and cleared an entrance at the gallows fence gate.

Taffy Reed undid the ankle cuffs of the Kid and the Queen.

They all climbed the thirteen stairs single file.

On the scaffold stage, Abe listened for the sound of the noon train. None came.

The preacher preached on eternity and time, and Goldie was told to say her peace. But by then, she’d lost a little of her hope, and all those babies in the crowd had frightened her.

Rutherford swayed imperceptibly where he stood. He told Abe to make his speech.

Abe too was losing hope in the plan by then, and so he stalled with reminiscence on his daddy’s saloon. He spotted ole Warts Wickline at the fence, and together they told a tale.

At nine minutes past twelve, the whistle of the westbound noon train came faint on the air. The rain slowed.

When Abe took out from nowhere his deck of playing cards, Rutherford nearly fainted. His skin hummed and a squelching sound arose from his gut.

The dozen eggs he’d eaten were taking their effect, for before the sun had risen, Taffy Reed had used an embalmer’s bulb-syringe to inject each one with a careful mixture. The mixture itself had come from the medicine trunk of Tony Thumbs, a final gift for Abe, given on July 22nd, in a foul-smelling room above the Old Drury Theatre. Bushels had kept the trunk locked and hidden at his boardinghouse room in Kimball, and along with it, he kept the old man’s batch book. When chances arose, Tong had tossed paper sleeves through the bars of Abe’s cell window. Each powder was named in pencil. He’d wadded batch-book recipes and thrown those too. Abe had stashed them all in the rotted spaces of his straw tick, and he’d hoped he might use them somehow. That morning, he’d given them over to Taffy Reed, who worked fast from a torn page of Tony Thumbs’s scrawl:

Paralysis without death or the cessation of respiratory function:

A half-pint of water to a tablespoon of fart juice. Two teaspoons of curare and a dash each of maypop and opium and valerian too.

Now Rutherford stood on the sweetgum boards and swayed on his feet. The crowd before him seemed to groan and wobble.

Abe split the card deck’s seal with his thumbnail and said, “At the end of it, if the law is still behind me, he can by God yank the handle.”