A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read online

  He tied the horses one-handed, pistol drawn. The bay bit at a grass knot like nothing had happened. Al followed the drag trail into the woods, where, a hundred yards in, he found Vic Moon on his back in a scatter of brown pine needles. His pockets were inside out and his forehead was staved in deep and square by an axe butt. His eyes were open, dead to everything.

  Al Baach pulled him one-handed by the ankle back to the road, pistol still readied in his other hand should the waylayer return.

  He hefted Moon into the wagon, and when he fetched the stirrupped boots, he saw something through a tear in the left sole. He pinched his nose and dug and came up clutching one hundred and twenty-three dollars in folded bills.

  He rode into Keystone with the bay tied and trailing, a dead man behind him in the wagon. It was nearing eighty degrees. Hammers called in rhythm and echoed all around, frame houses and buildings springing upward inside the narrowest stretch of creek land Al had seen. Hills rose up on either side like walls, striped empty here and there in clear-cut lines of stumps. Up at the bend, he could see men lining ties and spiking rails.

  He stopped at the first place he came to, a frame building that had yet to get its siding or window glass. Two men stood out front in the mud. Al got down, gave his name, and reported the peddler killer to one Henry Trent, a sharp-shouldered man in a tailored suit, and one R. Rutherford, the smallest man Al Baach had ever encountered. Rutherford made some claim to being the law, though there was no official law to be had in those times. He ate a hardboiled egg. Its white had smeared gray from the filth on his hands.

  They stepped to the wagon where Trent leaned over the top box to see for himself. Rutherford had to climb the wheel and perch on the hub in order to have a look at the dead man. Vic Moon was stretched lengthwise along the side rail where Al Baach had refashioned crates to make room. Tobacco tins lay scattered across his middle like an offering.

  Henry Trent shook his head and took his pipe out. “I believe that’s Vic Moon,” he said.

  Al Baach was caught off guard by this and managed only to nod.

  Field crickets signaled louder from the ridge.

  Trent struck a match and put it to the bowl and drew, all the while watching Al Baach. “I suspect you were unaware of all his business here?” he said.

  Al did not know who or what to look at. He could not speak.

  “I summoned Vic Moon. He served me a drink once upon a time in Baltimore.” Trent smiled despite the pipe stuck in his teeth. He said, “His price on pewter was competitive.”

  Al Baach thought a moment and then took the one hundred and twenty-three dollars from his pocket. He held it up. “Mr. Moon has wife and boy in Baltimore,” Al told them. “I need to make arrangement.”

  They were highly accustomed to the sight of paper money.

  “What’s your accent?” Rutherford asked. He was still perched on the wheel hub, where he picked at the seat of his pants, eyes on the wad of bills.

  “I am from Germany.” He looked from one to the other. He said, “There is one hundred and twenty-three dollars to arrange this man’s family.”

  Trent nodded at Rutherford and pointed the bit of his pipe at a small building up at the bend. “You had better get things ready,” he told him.

  Rutherford leaned over for a last look at the dead man. “You’re lucky I’m a undertaker,” he said. He jumped off the wheel, cocked his head, and took a good look at Al’s broad trunk. “Lucky besides it weren’t you.” He laughed a little. “You a Jew?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Vic Moon was married to a Jew,” Trent said. “I suspect you knew that?”

  Al nodded that he did.

  “I met his little boy,” Trent said. He shook his head. “Half-Jew, half-Italian. I said they ought to have named him Sheeny Dago. It tickled Vic.”

  Rutherford walked off in the direction of his undertaker’s room. He’d only just been trained a month before in the embalmer’s ways. He muttered to himself as he strode. Rutherford was a lazy little man, and there was much preparation for the slow work of body draining.

  The small building at the bend was half jail, half mortuary. Men in Keystone were already acting up sufficient to be jailed, and in the mines there would always be rock fall and cage drop and white damp and black damp and choke damp and fire.

  The hammers quieted and the crickets could be heard again. Trent said, “Vic Moon’s real name was Vincenzo Munetti.” The pipe waggled while he talked. “He had himself a woman down here too. He tell you about her?”

  Al nodded that he hadn’t.

  Trent let his pipe go out and watched Rutherford in the distance. He laughed and squinted one eye and used his thumb to sight his associate. “Isn’t as big as your fist is he?” He turned and squared up on Al Baach. “Tell me your last name again,” he said.

  “Baach.”

  “You say you’re a Dutchman?”

  “I come from Germany.”

  “You come from one of the big cities?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My uncle has dry goods store in Tazewell.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Isaac Baach.”

  “I know of him.” This was not true. Trent worked his jaw muscle, and when he tried to imagine what Germany looked like, he saw nothing but castles and men in funny hats. “Your people live in the hills or on the water?”

  “Hills.”

  In the mud of the lane, they looked each other in the face.

  Trent was twenty years older. He was three inches shorter and Al Baach outweighed him by thirty pounds. But Henry Trent had eyes only prizefighters possessed and hands like meat mallets too. After the war he was known for a time as the man who went sixty-eight bare-knuckled rounds with Professor Mike Donovan in Mississippi City, Mississippi. He’d lost on a foul.

  He found intrigue in the young man. Al Baach wore a brand of confidence that Henry Trent liked to test. “Well Baach,” he said, “ole Vic Moon was abandoning his wife and child.” This too was not true. “Taking post as Keystone’s very first bartender. I had him all fixed up and ready to go.” Trent raised his left fist up between them and knocked his pipe hard against the knuckles. Black ash settled in the creases between his fingers. He held his fist there, clenched, and, with his right hand, slipped the pipe back into its pocket. He asked, “Do you know what I used to do about now if I smelled something wrong on a fella?”

  “No,” Al Baach said.

  “I puckered up and blew him a kiss.” Trent stepped to the side so that he wouldn’t dirty the young German, and then he demonstrated by pursing his lips tight and blowing hard on the pipe ash. It jumped right off his knuckles. He told how his blast of ash blinded a man in a half second, and how, before another ticked away, he’d have already sent a straight right home to its justifiable place—the smack-dab middle of the lying man’s face. “Put him to sleep every time,” Trent said. He smiled at the memories. “Give the devil his due.”

  He told Al Baach he didn’t smell a thing wrong on him. There was something he quite liked in the young man. “And if you want to know my mind, you’ll make a damn sight more money here than you ever will in Tazewell.” He considered the offer he was about to make. “If you think you can do it, I’ll make you bartender at the saloon. I’ll pay you a better wage than your uncle, I’d imagine.”

  It was then that Al Baach truly considered the strangeness of his day. Vic Moon had the good luck to ride the good horse, and the bad luck to be killed. Al had been downwind of a flatulent equine, but he was alive, and now he was looking at a prospect that, in his estimation, would not come along in a dry goods store.

  Trent considered further. He said, “I’ll wire that money to the Munettis in Baltimore, pay out of my own pocket to embalm ole Vic and put him in a sod-box too.” He looked up at the clouds coming purple-black from the west and started toward the frame building. He waved Al to follow. “Hell,” he said, “You know what else?�
�� He scraped his boots on the threshold and stepped in the empty doorframe. Al followed suit. “Rutherford can tote Vic up to White Sulphur and have him on the B&O mail train by sundown tomorrow.”

  “The little man will do this?”

  Trent nodded. “He’s got a rig for pulling coffins.”

  Inside, there were two men at the back. One sanded the floorboards on his knees. The other stood on a wobbly split-pole ladder and looked up through the empty rafters.

  “Go get supper,” Trent said, and the men stood and walked out between two wall studs.

  In the center of the room stood the most beautiful table Al Baach had ever seen. It was a great big round table, thick as a headstone at the edges, and it sat atop cast-iron legs. It carried only a stack of fine paper, and next to the paper, a silver inkwell and dip pen. Trent said, “I’ll tell you the story of this table.” He rubbed its thick lacquer. He ran his finger along its circle rings. He asked, “Are you a drinking man?”

  He poured from a hammered flask given to him by his company captain after the war. There were no chairs about, so they stood, each man lifting his glass with considerable frequency.

  He told Al how he’d fashioned the table from a white oak tree with a breast circumference of twenty and one-half feet. The tree had been felled in 1867 by his logging crew out of Pumpkintown, South Carolina. “I was high-climber,” Trent said. He said he bucked the logs himself and drove a length down the Saluda River to the mill, where he won, on a bet, the thick stump cross-section that now stood before them. He said he’d ridden the log knots up, whistling all the way.

  Al listened and drank.

  Trent could tell a story, and his whiskey flattered the palette of any sensible man or woman.

  He told of how it wasn’t long before he bought that timber outfit and it was his name branded on tens of thousands of floating butt cuts. “Everybody called them hot cuts on account of my initials.” Oliver was his middle name.

  He told of 1875, when he sold the company for four hundred times what he’d paid, and, like so many speculators before him, bought up considerable land tracts in southern West Virginia. Hill land he stripped of timber. Creek bed he built upon. He settled in Keystone and partnered with two local men, the Beavers brothers. Together, they opened a sawmill and a mine.

  Dynamited railbeds and opened coal seams had men primed for a rush on black gold. Clapboard and brick raced upward, and there were, at that time, too many thirsty workers and too few barstools. But Trent said he would keep pace, building two-story tenements and boardinghouses and squared-off spaces meant to be saloons. He motioned all around with his hands, gesturing at the air beyond the open wall studs. “Virginia ought not to have given up McDowell County,” he told Al Baach, “for this is where fortunes will sprout.”

  And so it was that on that September day, Al Baach gave over the one hundred and twenty-three dollars to a powerful rich man who vowed he’d wire it to Vic Moon’s widow and boy.

  Trent picked up the pen and dipped it. He wrote the contract in a fashion that was nearly indecipherable, but his numericals were in order. They were readable and substantial, the kind of numbers that allowed ample room for a man like Al to save in a hurry.

  In those numbers, Al Baach could foresee a time close at hand when he’d buy the saloon outright and do as he pleased with it.

  He said, “The many men who come here to work, they will need shoe repair.”

  Trent nodded. “Isn’t but one cobbler, and he’s missin an eye.”

  “When there is no man at the bar, I repair boots and shoes for money?”

  “You mean to say extra money? Make something on the side for yourself?”

  “Yes, on the side.”

  Trent smiled. “Well hell, by all means.” And he held out the pen, and Al took it.

  There were words put together in English that he sometimes couldn’t follow but that he nonetheless enjoyed for their thick combined sound on the air. On the side. By all means. His insides were warm with drink and his head tingled as he signed his name where Trent pointed a finger.

  “You are a lucky man, Jew Baach,” he said, “for the real money always comes to those who get there first.”

  He poured the rest of his flask into their glasses and they raised them.

  They walked along Elkhorn Creek and toured what would become the saloon. Trent went for more whiskey while Al unloaded Vic Moon’s wagon. He opened the crates with a pry bar and saved a wide length of board. Upstairs, he set it on the floor and put down a blanket. He stretched out and closed his eyes. He would soon enough be rid of the memory of his paperboard bed in the cigar factory storeroom, of his foul steamship berth. He sat up on his elbows, and through the open ceiling rafters of what would become his room, Al watched the sun fall behind the hill.

  At midnight, drunk, he watched Rutherford trot his horse out of town with a fresh-cut coffin in tow, the rig drawing lines in the dirt.

  He stood in the dark with Trent, a lantern on the ground between them.

  Rutherford winced at the buggy seat’s unforgiving springs. He muttered about there being not enough moonlight to see. He gave a wave as he passed below the balcony veranda of a long-roofed house. The two men perched up there did not wave in return. They leaned in slat-back chairs, their feet propped on the balustrade. They were the Beavers brothers. They liked to think they saw everything from their high covered domicile.

  Trent could see their cigar tips glowing. He watched his man pass beneath. He watched Harold Beavers lean sidewise in his chair and take something from a covered basket on the porch floor.

  Harold stood up clutching a pair of writhing black rat snakes. He leaned over the rail and aimed and tossed the snakes upon the passing Rutherford.

  One landed on his shoulder, the other on the swell of his trail saddle. He screamed as a small child would scream and he pulled free his boots from their stirrups and leapt to the ground, where he clawed at the mud, pulling himself from the scene, panting in the high notes of a woman in labor.

  The Beavers brothers laughed as hard as they had in months, and so too did Henry Trent as he watched from afar. When he’d understood what he’d seen, Al Baach followed suit, chuckling uncomfortable at what evidently passed for humor in his new environs.

  Rutherford stood up and drew his lengthy sidearm and shot both snakes dead where they’d slithered against the ditch wall. His horse just stood there, long since gun-broke. Rutherford did not look up at the Beavers brothers where they roared, nor did he turn to regard Henry Trent. He holstered his pistol and climbed back aboard by way of an extra-long fender, and he rode off in the quartermoon dark.

  There was nothing in this world Rutherford feared more than serpents. It could not be helped, and it would never change. He only prayed that others would not likewise abuse his phobia.

  Trent let his laughter fade slow. “Little loyal Rutherford,” he said. He pulled a money roll from his jacket and peeled off three. “Start-up money.”

  Al took it and said goodnight and returned to the unfinished room above the saloon, where he would live rent-free so long as men drank in droves below him. He unpacked the pewter.

  He had not yet gone to sleep when the sun came up over the ridge. It was Sunday, his first in a strange new home. Soon it would be his only day off.

  On that morning, he took the first of many Sunday walks up the mountain. He guessed the temperature to be fifty-two degrees. A fog sat wet on the lowland. He followed a switchbacked path through one of the few wide stretches of hardwood left. He came upon a plateau clearing where he encountered Sallie Hood.

  She stood on a slant yard shaking out a rug. Her arms were strong. She snapped the square of braided wool like a bullwhip and watched the dust carry.

  It seemed to him then that talking to a woman might prove orienting. He was brave on drink and the money in his pocket and lack of sleep and the witnessing of murder. He took off his hat and attempted to slick his hair. “Hello,” he called, and he walked str
aight to her and said who he was and how he’d come to be there. Up close, she was even better-looking than she’d been from afar.

  She found him handsome, and he had the eyes of a good man, but when he spoke on the murder of his traveling companion, she backed up a pace toward the porch step where her rifle leaned.

  He saw that she was afraid of him. “I’m sorry,” he said. He walked back toward the woods.

  There was something true in his apology, and something familiar in his walk, that struck her then.

  He was only ten yards off when she hollered, “Are you a coffee-drinking man?” When he turned and said that he was, she waved him back and invited him inside the big square house.

  They sat at a long oak table and neither was afraid to stare or ask questions about family and homeplace. She told him she came from the Burke Mountain Methodist Hoods and that the Hoods had a plot just up the hollow where they’d buried their people for one hundred years.

  He listened close to her every word.

  Sallie was two years older than Al. She was possessed of a good singing voice. She had little meat on her bones, but her back was strong from work, and she spoke her mind if need be. She’d recently made the big square place on the hill a boardinghouse. It offered a bird’s-eye view of what was coming down below. Her daddy had built the house in 1851, and in the summers it was made a meeting grounds for the preachers of God’s good word. In ’75 he was named pastor at the new church in Welch. The rest of the family followed him there. Sallie did not.

  Her mother and father and sisters and brothers knew better than to try and persuade Sallie of anything, and so she had watched them go and then she had painted a sign that read:

  HOOD HOUSE

  SALLIE HOOD, PROPRIETOR

  50 CENTS PER DAY OR $3 PER WEEK

  She regarded the man across the dining table that morning and found him delightfully unordinary. She knew, in fact, on that very first Sunday morning, that if he could kiss decent, she would marry Al Baach. And so, after a second cup of coffee, she said, “I am going to come around the table and kiss you now.”

  He smiled.