A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read Free Page A

both, and in two days’ time, he’d built the custom long-drop scaffold. The beams were spruce. The encased bottom, sweetgum. It was costly to panel the high pillars, but encased bottoms werecustomary since 1901 when Black Jack Tom Ketchum had been decapitated by a long-drop gallows in New Mexico.
    Four policemen hopped from the surrey and cleared an entrance at the fence gate. It took some time. The people were thick, and when they parted, they pressed against one another in a ripple. The wagons rolled inside, and the gate was latched behind. Abe and Goldie stood from their coffin tops and waited.
    The officers toted stepladders to the rear of each wagon. Rutherford and the skinny preacher descended like the rest. Reed did not. He unhitched a key ring from his belt and bent at Goldie’s side.
    “What are you doing?” Rutherford called up.
    Reed said, “We undo their ankles now. Less you want to carry Baach up that pitch.”
    Rutherford looked at the stairs awaiting. He mumbled for Reed to hurry on and do it.
    A procession toward death commenced as a new vendor began to call out, “Abe and Goldie’s picture, twenty cent! Last chance!”
    Folks patted their pockets and fished for coins.
    “They’ll never have another one took,” the man called.
    They ascended the stairs single file.
    The rain picked up again and the beaten ground troughed under the feet of the people. They listened to the rain against their shoulders. They were quiet and uncertain. Those who knew about rain and ground asked howin God’s name the earth could be so wet after having been so long dry.
    On the platform, the players took their places. Chief Rutherford, officer Reed, news reporter, preacher. The court stenographer was given a straight-back chair too small for her frame, but she took her seat and produced a leather-bound book and fountain pen. She held them at the ready, her fat hand trembling.
    Rutherford moved Abe to his spot on the drop door. Reed followed suit, escorting Goldie to her own square. The two ropes dangled behind them, nooses nearly touching the platform floor.
    The preacher took his place in front of the condemned and spoke. “These two, convicted of the worst crime, are standing on the line of eternity and time.”
    A loose conglomerate of horses began to whinny, and babies cried as their mothers held them high to witness.
    The preacher preached on. “Their immortal souls are about to enter the unseen world, where the years are as the sands of the sea, as the leaves on the tree.”
    His hands were crossed over his Bible when he stepped to the back of the platform.
    Rutherford nodded to Reed, who in turn nodded to Goldie that she could make her speech.
    Rutherford had proclaimed the night before that when it came to hangings, speeches were customary and that ladies spoke before gentlemen.
    The people waited for Queen Bee to speak.
    It had been said of Goldie that you could ask her what time it was and she’d tell you how to build a clock. She could dress a man down in two sentences. But on this day, upon being asked to speak, she said nothing. She looked at Abe, who looked at the square beneath his polished shoes. She looked to the sky above. The dark gallows crossbeam split the dirty clouds. She looked back at the people, whose numbers and expanse took her breath. She’d not seen so many together, and when she let her eyes blear, it was as if the people were a wide gray skin on the land. She took note of the mothers in the crowd, the ones holding their fat babies aloft, and how those little ones shut their eyes against the rain and opened them again, looking askance on the world before them, and she said, too quiet to be heard by any but those on the stage, “Children ought not be out in this choke damp rain.”
    Rutherford told Abe to make his speech.
    The stenographer kept a good pace. Tiny impels condemned to speak , she wrote.
    Abe cleared his throat. “My name is Abe Baach,” he said. “I was born right here