Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Taffy Reed leaned to Rutherford and whispered, “I best put them ankle irons back on.” Rutherford nodded, unable to speak, and Taffy knelt before Abe and set to work. He could see that the chief was well on his way. He left the ankle cuffs undone and loosened the wrists all the way.

With his last bit of gumption, Rutherford bent to the nooses where they hung and gathered their lengths in his fist. The tingling in his fingers and toes had reached a burn.

Beside him, Abe roared, “I’ll tell the truth before I die, or I’ll walk out of hell in kerosene drawers and set the world on fire!”

Some in the crowd were struck by his words, for they’d heard tell of a fire out West. It burnt wild on the wind and swept three states, and it killed the men who fought it. There were those who said it would swallow the country whole. A bald street preacher claimed foreknowledge of the Devil’s Broom Fire. He said sinners were reaping what they’d sowed.

Rutherford wobbled, then dropped to his knees. When his face hit the boards, there came from his backside a ragged slap of wind that carried forth without cease for a full fourteen seconds.

Abe said, “Amen,” and tossed the deck to Goldie. They played shackled catch as if it were a common game. She winked at him and pulled back the flaps and dropped the wrapper to the boards. The cards wore heavy varnish.

The sun came free of the clouds then, and the people looked skyward, and there was only the north-born sound of the tardy noon train’s wheeze. The engine was not yet fully stopped at the station when Ben Moon’s men began to jump from inside the empty coal hoppers. They hit the hard dirt beside the railbed and rolled and got to their feet quick. They ran on wrenched ankles, headlong into the people staring dumb at the heavens.

Anchors had gotten the telegram in Baltimore the evening prior, and he’d gathered the men and talked fast. To each he handed cash and a rifle from Moon’s stash. They slid them in duffels and hopped the train. Orders were to be in Keystone by noon, and to suppress with drawn guns whatever crowd had gathered there. Now they did just that, shouting “Nobody moves, nobody dies!” at the men on the edges who looked to be pondering the vigilante’s way.

At the scaffold Abe hollered, “Unroll your bought confessions and read what it says at the end! Turn over our last living photographs and heed what’s written there!” He heard faintly the engine of the airship then, coming in against the westerly wind.

The people read what was printed on their execution souvenirs. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are innocent of murder. Henry Trent and Munchy Briles were killed as they leveled their guns. There is only one murderer on the gallows today, and his name is Rutherford Rutherford. Listen close to what you’re told and do not produce any weapon .

Mr. Tong and the barkers and peddlers drew their guns from the circled perimeter they’d made. They trained them on those they suspected of trouble.

Some had heard the airship engine by then too, particularly those on the hill. The cloud cover was wispy. The rain was no more.

Abe and Goldie stepped from their ankle cuffs and shed the irons from their wrists.

The one-eyed police officer was panicked by then. He drew his revolver slow.

Goldie cocked back a card and let it fly. It sunk in his neck at a pulsing vein and he dropped his gun to the ground.

Ah Tong shouldered his way through the people and stood at the fence, where he tossed a tin bullhorn in a perfect arc into the open hands of Taffy Reed. Taffy put it to his mouth and told the people to listen, and they did. He told them their police chief had killed their judge, that he’d been tossing bodies down Buzzard Branch mineshaft for years. It was the same thing he’d told his daddy that morning, and now, as he spoke it to the crowd, Fred Reed was up the ridge, prying open the mine’s mouth to see.

Some in the crowd were beginning to shout. Others were protesting they knew not what.

Abe took the bullhorn then. “Listen!” he called. Some heeded and some did not. He hollered, “You’ll never again pay a monthly consideration!” It drew the attention of all those then living in Keystone. “You’re about to see a show you won’t ever forget! You have my word we’ll astound and delight!” Children asked if they could perch on the shoulders of their daddies. Abe went on, “And if you keep calm and steady, then riches will rain down from above!” He pointed to the sky, where the airship named America was nearly in view.

High above in the gondola basket, Ben Moon stood in a wide stance with binoculars at his eyes. “We need to get east by fifty yards and decrease altitude!” he called to the relay man, who nodded from where he hung from the envelope, then shot into the hull, where he relayed to the elevatorman and the rudderman both. They were low already, just over the canopy on the ridge. “Can he slow this thing down?” Moon asked, but it was too loud up there. No one in the basket could hear him.

Beside Moon was Walter Melvin. His blue scarf whipped behind him. He turned the handle of a moving-picture camera he’d built himself. It was mounted on a tripod he’d bolted to the deck. He aimed it down. “Just marvelous, absolutely marvelous,” he said of the mountains and riverbed below. “They said we couldn’t fly America in here,” he shouted. “Well? What say they now?”

Little Donnie crouched at basket’s edge, tethered to the guardrail by his belt. He cut the safety tie premature, and the massive rope cargo net unfurled with a whoosh. As wide as the ship, it extended in seconds to its full length of two hundred feet, and its weighted bottom tore off the high limbs of the big willow-tree.

Beneath the tree, Bushels ducked and covered his head, and the branches came down around him. After a moment he stood and came out toward the flat, and he reached up as the cargo net moved on.

The airship America was at the mercy of the day’s strange wind.

Bushels caught up and grabbed at the rope’s thick lengths. He held fast, hooking his arms through the holes. Willow branches twisted throughout, and a sizable limb knocked his head.

The people on the hillside stared as Bushels came, his boots dragging in the dirt and then lifting upon the air. They could not understand what they saw, a giant riding a cargo net to a behemoth silver ship in the sky. A few fell trying to get down the hill, where the others looked up at the vision of flight. America was a rigid, bullet-shaped zeppelin, a hundred and fifty feet long, and sixty feet side-to-side. Its shadow played across a vast stretch, and some in the crowd were deathly afraid.

By then, Taffy Reed had drawn his gun and convinced the officers below to put theirs on the ground. He took his place by the lever, his boots on the framed two-by-four edge.

Goldie had let go her cocked cards and told the preacher and stenographer they had better descend the stairs or jump off from where they stood. She glanced up the hillside where Bushels twisted and yanked. She wished Agnes were there. See , she’d tell the girl, some giants are good .

Rutherford’s eyes were open where he lay. He was alive enough to moan and blink.

Abe tossed the bullhorn to Goldie. He bent and cinched the little man’s ankles in the noose. Then he stood again on his square, and Goldie stepped to her own. “Behold!” she called through the horn. “The devil drops!” Together, they nodded at Taffy.

When he pulled the lever, the whole scaffold floor unlatched and the hinges creaked as it swung open in two parts. Tilio Dallara had made a masterful box, an anti-gallows where the squares of the condemned remained pedestal-fixed while all other panels fell free. Rutherford dropped through the open middle as a dead man would, snapping straight when the slack went taut. He made the sound of an animal shot but not dead as he swung in full view of the crowd. The encased bottom panels had fallen too, smacked flat and laid out on each side. Only the frame remained. Abe and Goldie stood on their pedestaled squares and looked below at Rutherford. He was upside-down and swaying loose, his arms limp as window meat. And all around his fingers, copperheads and rattlers coiled up and sidewinded both. Some were scared into striking by the thud of the boards and pendulum man above.