A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read online

  “He look like he is to you?” Abe said.

  Al thought on acknowledging the cessation of collection. He wondered for a moment if his middle boy might indeed have found the way, if Trent might finally cut them in on the real money. But he was tired. He told them he was heading upstairs to bed. “Please don’t hammer tonight,” he told his oldest boy.

  “Only cuts,” Jake said. He was building an arch and batten for the stage.

  They watched their daddy back through the swinging door with the money bags. “Goodnight boys,” he said.

  They said it back in unison.

  Jake finished off his beer, crossed the room, and set to work with a pencil in his teeth.

  It was customary for Abe to watch his brother mark and cut. He’d done so for years, ordinarily while he counted his daily take or practiced his card manipulations. He gave Jake the nickname Knot, for Jake would stare at a two-by-four knothole for ten minutes. He would turn lengths of wood in his hand and he’d sniff at butt cuts, and in all those years of moments he rarely spoke a word. Abe found peace in his brother’s wood rituals. It was, for each of them, as if they’d found a quiet place, a place both together and alone.

  Jake took a measurement with a length of string and wrote it down. He straightened and finished off another beer. He shook his head. “Rutherford doesn’t sit right with me,” he said. “Don’t ever do a thing he asks you to do, and don’t ask from him so much as pass the salt and pepper.”

  Abe looked at the ceiling. The tin wasn’t tacked by anyone true-eyed as Jake. “By 1910,” Abe said, “I’ll have electric lamps in here.”

  “The hell you will.”

  Goldie came through the door.

  She said her daddy’s back was bad off.

  With the pencil in his teeth, Jake said, “Don’t let him sleep on his belly. Worsens everything.”

  “He’s on his back now.” She’d left him that way with his arms up over his head and his feet against the iron footboard. He said it felt best to have his heels on something.

  Goldie gave Abe the eyes. “I’m tired,” she said. She wasn’t.

  They bid Jake goodnight.

  Later, they could hear his saw from below—short, clean cuts every one. It was cold in Abe’s room, and the two of them huddled under the quilt. After a while, he had to jump from the bed to stoke the little cookstove fire, and she laughed at his shivers when he got back in.

  Two or three times, somebody yelled in the street.

  They looked again and again at the note Rutherford had delivered. It read: I have consulted my associates. Let’s make it 3%.

  “Who does he mean?” She put her head on his chest.

  “I believe he means the Beavers brothers,” Abe said. “Or at least Rufus. The other one lives in the Florida everglades.”

  Rufus Beavers had gotten himself a law degree from Washington and Lee. He had his sights on being circuit judge. He’d sold his interest in the mines and the mill both. He had money to burn, and he was not content as Trent’s silent associate. His younger brother Harold grew less refined as he aged, a man who knew no talk but the blackguard variety. He was a fine hunter and had gotten rich bagging Florida egrets for millinery. “Killed over thirty-two hundred little snowies,” Harold Beavers was known to say. “Half of em I squeezed on while they stood in a inch of water puffing up their fuck plumage.” He had always been exceptional in the art of concealed approach.

  “Sneak-up is what they used to call Harold,” Abe said. As a child, he’d been told, like all of Keystone’s children, to stay clear of Sneak-up Harold.

  He and Goldie pulled the quilt high to their ears. They spoke on the plan. He would refrain from spending his table earnings. She would do the same, plus the take on her skims from Fat Ruth. Before long, there’d be money enough to go around. Big Bill could stay off his feet, and so could Al and Sallie when they took a notion. The saloon would be renovated. A proper wedding would be in short order. And all the while, Goldie had the working girls of Fat Ruth’s to teach her about cycles, about when and when not to wear her plumage, about how to cut a lemon in half and wedge it up inside herself before she lay down with Abe. He was happy to respect the cycle and the lemon wedge both. He’d not bring a child into being.

  He jumped again from the bed to retrieve a big smooth rock he’d leaned against the cookstove leg. It was hot, and he tossed it on the bed by her feet. He shivered when he got back in beside her.

  He expressed his newfound and half-earnest idea of hosting one final game of stud poker at the saloon. A big game for big money before he headed off to his apprenticeship at the Alhambra. “You can serve drinks at the table,” he said. “And you’ll get a look-see here and there at somebody’s cards. We’ll have us a system of code words.” She would flatter the men at the table with her eyes or her bosom as she bent to give them sustenance. She would eagle-eye what they held with great subtlety.

  “Code words have got to seem innocent,” Goldie said. “Natural.”

  They came up with a series of phrases for Goldie to utter, each a cue for Abe to fold or to go all in. At the best of them, they laughed together. “This hangnail’s a cocklebur” was one of Goldie’s favorites. “That man at the bar is a tallow-faced prairie dog” was another.

  They lay in this way, laughing and keeping their feet near the hot rock, and all was right and easy. She watched his eyes close and put her hand to the side of his head and listened to the sound of his sleep-breathing.

  Inside Goldie, the premonition remained. She would ignore it as best she could, but it would be there, someplace in her middle. Deep enough to forget most days, but shallow enough so that when things went wrong, she’d have already steeled herself to carry forth in a manner requiring great fortitude.

  Such pushed-down knowing will fester quiet in waking stages, but it will come fast after a body that slumbers. And so Goldie’s repeating dream commenced that very night, and in it, she found herself sitting way up in the tallest tree there ever was, and though she did not want to look down, she did, and there below her dangling feet was Abe, hung by the neck from a willow-tree limb.

  Rutherford wore his wool long underwear and two pairs of socks. Lining his fingernails was the root-black dried blood of the man he’d dumped down a three-hundred-foot hole, a young man with nothing in his pockets to name him.

  He scraped at the dried lines with a letter opener. He gave up and set the opener down on the bedside table. His newest batch of pickled eggs rested there, a clear-brine jar of six. He took it up and regarded the stirred white specks of membrane where they spun. Cracked pepper ringed the bottom like river silt. A long slice of pimiento pressed against the glass. He’d begun to use the peppers on the advice of Taffy Reed. He’d begun to dropper into his brine a hearty dose of embalmer’s fluid, which he believed fortified his resolve. Alcohol and arsenic. Ether and zinc. He’d preserve himself while he lived, even if it killed him.

  He got on the floor and pulled the locked trunk from under his bed and opened it. He put the skimmed bills in a old cheroot pail with the rest. It angered him, the cessation of the Baach collection. He touched at the treasures in his cherished trunk. From under the rusted pail he pulled the document he’d secured at fifteen, when his parents told him he was adopted—the torn-out page of a birth register. Just as he had done each night of his life since, he read it.

  Rutherford had been raised by a wealthy family in Fairmont, and when he’d gotten old enough to ask why he was so different from them, they told him he was adopted. Soon thereafter, he’d gone to the courthouse and found his origin, and he’d torn it loose and taken it with him so no other would ever find it. In the Marion County Register of Births, someone had written the following for the birth date of Rutherford: February 30th, 1856. Such an odd and impossible date was only the beginning of this foul record. His name was recorded Rutherford Rutherford. Both White and Colored were marked. Under Sex, both Male and Female received the pen’s slashing touch. And, as the register�
�s keeper must have drowsily attempted mere consistency at that juncture in her hand’s sweeping dash across the page, the category called Born showed a mark for both Alive and Dead. Place of Birth was left blank. Israel Rutherford, a name for which no record could be found, was given under Father’s Name in Full. Father’s Occupation: Laborer. Father’s Residence: Near Lowsville. Another empty column for Mother’s Name in Full. Of the forty-three babies born on Rutherford’s page, forty-one, under Deformity or Any Circumstance of Interest offered the word Perfect. One offered Stillborn. Rutherford’s line read: Deformity on Ear and Foot.

  A doctor at the hospital in Marion County had taken in the baby Rutherford. He’d found it prophetic that the abandoned boy shared his family’s surname. He and his wife raised the boy as best they could, short and strange and funny-looking among all those tall beautiful children bound for college and medical school after the war. At nineteen, Rutherford was angry and bound for southern West Virginia, where he followed a job his daddy secured him with the railroad. He worked as a station agent, and on a quiet night in 1876, he left a siding switch open to the main track at Welch, as was his custom. But on that night, such a lazy practice resulted in the collision of two loaded coal trains, one moving, one still and unhooked. Rutherford, then twenty years of age, had nearly leapt out of his brogans when the ruckus commenced, and when he ran from the station to the site of the mess, he found the locomotive’s engineer unconscious with a wide cut across his mouth. The man was on his side with his arms over his head, one hand gesturing by instinct to grab the brake. Without considerable thought, Rutherford looked around for witnesses, pulled the half-empty pint bottle of homemade wine from his jacket, poured some on the engineer’s face and open mouth, and stuck the bottle in his outstretched, grabbing hand. The man’s fingers, no doubt happy to have found what they thought was the brake, closed upon the bottle like the jaws of a vise.

  Rutherford sucked on a plug of tobacco to cover the wine’s smell, and then he waited on the authorities. They didn’t like his story.

  But a man at Keystone did. Henry Trent had heard of Rutherford, the little station agent with a big gun who moonlighted as a yard bull so he could beat tramps senseless for riding cars. If the tramp gave him a quarter or a necktie or a jackknife, he’d let him go with a singular whack from the butt of his legendary Colt revolver. It was custom-built with a twelve-inch barrel and sperm-whale-ivory grips. Rutherford claimed to have won the thing in a game of three-card monte run by a deaf pirate. The pirate had bought the gun in Hartford Connecticut from Samuel Colt himself, and later, when the deaf pirate happened upon a beached sperm whale in Beaufort, North Carolina, he’d pulled two of its teeth and fitted his ridiculous pistol with ivory.

  Trent liked a young man who was short and ugly and capable of violence, who believed himself to be important. He further liked Rutherford’s obsession with rich people, and his need to be one, come hell or high water. He offered him a job as his security detail, errand boy, and collector of monies. He had a tanner fashion the longest holster ever seen, open-ended so that the barrel stuck out. He said Rutherford should get trained in the ways of the embalmer, because together they would be making considerable progress in the coalfields, and with progress, Trent told him, come bodies.

  Now Rutherford sat on his floor and read, for the 9,495th time, the words and numbers marking his arrival in the world. Deformity, he read. Circumstance of Interest. Words had always confused him, no matter how many times he sounded them out.

  But numbers he understood.

  He was forty-one. He’d counted more money than men fool enough to live twice his time. He wasn’t through counting, not by a damned sight.

  SPRING

  1903

  IT’S A TOAD-STRANGLER

  May 15, 1903

  He had not aimed to bed another woman. He had not, in fact, known that he’d done so until the following morning, when he awoke next to her in the altogether.

  She had her back to him. They were on his bed at the Alhambra, a third-floor corner room where he slept on two-hour breaks from the big table. The game at the big table had a reputation by then from Cincinnati to Savannah, Georgia. Cardplayers called it the Oak Slab Game. Play had not ceased in six years, for just as Trent had predicted, they came from all over to sit against the Keystone Kid.

  But things had lately soured. Abe was twenty-three and had not yet saved enough money to enact his grand plan. He had complained of his staid wages and he had too often behaved sloppily on exorbitant whiskey, and so, on the advice of Rufus Beavers, Henry Trent had turned on the Kid, quietly taking away the very pieces of Abe’s livelihood he and the Beavers brothers had supplied in the first place. His card show on the Alhambra’s stage. His seat at the Oak Slab. The rented room would be next.

  The unfamiliar back was nearly pressed against him. The dyed black hair stirred no recognition. He thought of raising himself to look at her face, but he closed his eyes instead, hoping that when he opened them again, she’d be gone.

  It did not work. Her small hand sleep-twitched atop the curve of her hip. She wore cheap engraved rings on all four fingers.

  It was the sharp quill of a goose feather that had caused him to open his eyes. It poked through the pillow at his throat. He had pinched it tight and pulled it free when there came the sound of the doorknob turning. He sat up, and there Goldie stood. She was stock-still.

  There was a quivering hum in her knees. She wore the spool-heeled shoes he’d bought her, and her ankles nearly turned.

  Abe could neither speak nor move. There was a push of vomit at his jugular and heat behind his eyes.

  Goldie looked only at him, not the woman. She said, “You are a liar,” and left.

  He did not pursue her.

  In the hallway, she couldn’t get her breath. She put her forehead against the wall and was faintly aware of the cherubs in the wallpaper art. They rode plum-colored lily pads and drew back their bows. Up ahead, a red-haired boy of nineteen stepped from a room where someone played a harmonica. He wore only a towel, knotted at the waist. He was laughing, but when he saw her, he shut his mouth and stood up straight and secured the loose knot at his navel. “You alright Miss?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Goldie answered. She straightened and breathed deep through her mouth and walked to the stairwell. There, she leaned again on the wall and thought of the time she’d declared to Abe her suspicions about his behavior with other women, and how he’d eased her mind. “I will look at a woman now and again,” he’d said, “but I won’t look at her twice.” And he’d kissed her then, and she’d ceased to wonder much about the nights he stayed at the Alhambra without her, as theirs was a bond built on truth. He’d always been able to look her in the eyes. So it was, that at six o’clock that morning, when the note slid under the door of her room above Fat Ruth’s, Goldie had very nearly stayed put. She did not believe what was written, for she and Abe were to marry in July, and after that, they’d cross the country in a Delmonico sleeper, getting off when and where they pleased.

  The note was folded precise and penned by the hand of a woman. It read: Abe is not alone in his Alhambra bed.

  Now she ran from the sight of that bed. Her shoes were off and she took four stairs at a stride.

  Abe sat and stared. He’d not felt this kind of sickness in his middle before. He thought he might cease to breathe, and then, from the hallway, came a noise. She hadn’t closed the door behind her, and in a slap-second, there came upon him the fleeting hope that he could jump up and hit the hallway, and she’d be there, willing to forgive him somehow if only he could look her in the eyes again. In that slap-second he believed he could nail his colors to the mast and hold life together before it fell apart.

  He pulled on his trousers and stuck his head into the hall. Goldie was gone. And so too was his hope, which had never been hope so much as a fast cruel trick played by a drunk man’s awaking soul. His was accustomed by then to the ways of his blood, which by night palpitated
unearthly glory before spoiling at the cock’s crow.

  The air in the hallway was stale. He listened for sounds from the stairway.

  The red-haired boy was knocking at another door across the hall, calling, in a low tone, “I know you’re in there Lucille. I need me a bite of those ham biscuits.”

  Abe cleared his throat in the doorway.

  The boy looked at him over his shoulder. “Hello sir,” he said.

  Abe wore a hard look at him until the boy’s face went red and he looked back to the door. He tapped it light with his knuckles.

  Abe slammed shut his own door and his bedmate sat up. Only then did he recognize her face.

  Her tittles hung pale-nippled. She was slight, and when folks remarked on the quality, she was known to say, “Fit me inside a peanut shell.” She’d cut her eyebrows in such a manner as to seem exotic, but it had not worked. Abe had made her acquaintance just four nights earlier at the Oak Slab Game. She was Princess Nina Gyro, the floating gal from Cyprus, though in truth, she was Nina Gill, born and bred in Des Plaines, Illinois. She was the latest lovely assistant and wife to the Great Gus George, stage magician. Gus George was getting old, but he’d played the Keiths once upon a time, and so Trent had hired him both to fill seats and to spite Abe, whose card manipulations, no matter their precision, dissatisfied the Alhambra theatergoers. Henry Trent had also hired Gus George because he’d seen a handbill with Princess Gyro’s likeness, and he’d said to himself that he must have that woman. He’d ripped up Abe’s stage contract right in front of him, and four nights prior, on the very day of Gus George’s arrival, Trent had signaled Abe to let the magician win at the table. But Abe would not fold to a man who took his job. He cleaned Gus out, and afterward Trent spoke to him as if he were a boy, saying, “You do like I tell you to do! Now magic man’s liable to powder out of here.”

  Abe had lost his head then. With other men present, he’d stood and hollered in Trent’s face, “Your magic man owes me three hundred!”