A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (20 page)

Al made his cane a cane again. He leaned on it and turned to the coffin. “No one can understand the brain,” he said. “But your brother makes beautiful things.” He bent
and blew a little mound of sawdust from the coffin top. “I don’t get the handles on it in time,” he said. He’d meant to put eight holes in and knot some rope.

Abe said, “You think Trent had him shot?”

Al didn’t answer. There was an eastward wind in the treetops, and a branch scratched across the shed roof above them. He sighed. Then he said, “I can know the weather by my bad knee.”

Abe looked up at the rafters. There was an abandoned bird’s nest at the corner joist.

Al regarded the scar on his middle boy’s face. He looked him in the eyes. He said, “Your mother wants you to take everything from the man who shoots your brother. Everything.” He worked his lips and kept down all that wanted to come out. He said, “She wants to move then to seashore.”

Neither spoke.

Al turned and patted the coffin. “Empty, it isn’t heavy,” he said. “You and I carry it to the room. Samuel will be here in an hour.”

Al and Sallie had decided they would bury Jake in the Hood family plot up the hollow. They had not asked her father’s permission, for they agreed it wouldn’t matter.

There was no preacher and there was no rabbi. Only the family, and they put Jake in the ground as quickly as Sam and Abe could heft him into the wagon and steer the mare to the circled iron gates, spear-tipped and listing on the overgrown slope.

Abe and Sam wore no gloves to shovel. Blisters filled and opened, peeled back and burned.

Agnes went off alone in the hillside field, and when they’d refilled and patted flat the earth, she set down three handfuls of blue phlox. One for Jake, yet unmarked by a headstone, and one each for the Baach babies who had not lived.
Infant Son
and
Infant Daughter
, the little tablets read.

Sallie pulled up all the weeds.

Back at Hood House they ate together and spoke in happy tones for the benefit of the children, who were not subject, on this night, to a particular bedtime. Sam drank too much as was usual, and Goldie watched Abe delight Agnes by pulling coins from her ear and nose and shirt collar.

Al said he was going for a walk. They watched him from the porch. Twilight’s hue lit orange the tops of canted trees on the opposite ridge.

Abe and Goldie walked with the children through a skinny plateau of high goosegrass. The seed heads in the dying light glowed like links of gold.

Between the houses, six crows sat on the jutted branch of an evergreen. They cawed and rolled their throats. “I loathe those birds,” Goldie said.

Abe looked up at them. He told Agnes to come over by the tree. He called too to Ben, who was smashing an armyworm in his fist.

At the base of the big tree, Abe pointed to the crows. “Just watch those blackbirds,” he told them. “I’ll bet you each a nickel I can make them fall from their perch.”

“All at once?” Aggie asked.

“All at once,” Abe answered.

“You ain’t going to shoot em?”

“I ain’t going to touch em.”

The crows cawed. Ben cawed back.

“Good boy,” Abe told him. And he made his own call, a high
look here
, and the crows aimed their beaks at the ground.

He stared hard at them, and they stared back, their heads twitching at first, then going still. Abe walked a slow circle around the low branches of the tree, and where he went, the birds’ eyes followed, their small heads swiveling. He circled again. Around and around the tree he went, each time increasing his speed just enough. The crows kept watching. Swiveling. On the sixth time around, the first crow fell. On the seventh, the rest came down. They hit branches as they came, their bodies thudding at the feet of the children.

Agnes stepped back, her mouth open.

Ben kicked at one with his bare foot.

“Are they dead?” Aggie asked.

“Asleep,” Abe said. “And if you wait a little while, you can watch em wake up.”

They waited. Abe had to pick Ben up to keep him from kicking at one poor crow.

From his perch, the boy grunted at the birds.

Agnes frowned and looked as if she might again begin to sob.

A minute passed, then another, and when one began to stir, Agnes sounded a gleeful note. Two flapped a wing and she clapped and hopped in place.

Then the crows rose from the smashed goosegrass, awaking from their hypnosis on wobbly legs.

“Climb!” Abe commanded, and they did.

Goldie smiled at the sound of their wings on the air, the birds otherwise silent as they flew up past the heads of the children.

Back inside, Goldie lowered the lampwick and got next to Agnes in her bed. She let the girl read to her. Abe watched them before he went to the kitchen, where his mother stood staring out the same window. He rubbed her shoulders.

The boarder descended the staircase. He thought for a moment of leaving without acknowledging the pair, but he changed his path and stepped in their direction.

He was a frail man whose spectacle lenses were thick as lampshade glass. Beneath them, his eyes were small and quick to twitch. They were the kind of pale blue that was not to be trusted. His mustache was thin as gut string, his posture weak. Abe did not like the man from the moment he stepped into the kitchen.

“I am quite a bit more than sorry for your painful loss,” the boarder said to them. The sharp enunciations of his
t
’s and
s
’s were not pleasing to the ear of regular folk. “Young
Mr. Baach had turned to the Lord and will find his place in the kingdom.” He smiled. “I must journey now for my nightly walk.” He donned his block crown hat and stepped to the door.

When he was gone, Abe said, “That was a lady’s hat he put on his head.”

“It wasn’t.” Sallie turned to the heap of unwashed dishes.

“Put a peacock feather in it why doesn’t he?” Abe said. He picked up a stack of plates and dunked them. “What’s his name?”

“Ladd,” she said. “Oswald Ladd.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Virginia.”

“I don’t trust his eyes.”

“Hush Abraham.”

Goldie came down the stairs and stood in the kitchen doorway. “Agnes enjoys some very strange literature,” she said. She stretched her stiffened back. “A man had his nose cut off and buried and sewed back on upside down.”

“Did you spy my biscuit roller up there?”

“The man had to stand on his head to blow his nose.” Goldie watched the muscles in Abe’s neck, the way the lamplight lit his ears transparent.

“Does that boarder’s room have an outside lock?” Abe asked his mother.

“I said hush.”

“Abe, let’s you and me go for a walk,” Goldie said.

In the dark aisle of the crib barn Jake had built with her father, Goldie brushed the neck of the mare who’d pulled the wagon to the cemetery and back. She was the only horse on the property then, a chestnut with two white socks and a snip at her nose. Hers was the only stall housing life—five of six cribs kept little more than sawdust and chicken feed. Spun webs thick as cheesecloth linked rafter boards. A square of moon through the loft window lighted the place. Goldie said to Abe, “This mare is Snippy. You knew her mother.”

“Dot?”

“That horse could outstrip a downgrade mail train.” She could still remember the old urge to throw a leg over.

“What happened to her?”

“Back broke coming down the creek bank.” She put her hand to the mare’s white spot. “Jake put her down with his Winchester right there in the water.” Drool ran from the horse’s jutted lip. “This one here isn’t half what Dot was.”

He neither spoke nor moved to touch her.

Goldie looked in the eye of the horse. She said, “You broke off the end of Nina Gyro’s tailbone.”

He took a deep breath. There was a whistle in his left nosehole.

“She stayed here in town for a while,” Goldie said. “Mostly at the opium den.”

He watched her shoulders, her neck. All that brown and gold hair knotted high by an ebonite comb.

“After she fell, it hurt that little woman to so much as sneeze, and that magician husband up and left her. What kind of man leaves his broken-tailboned wife?”

“Not much of one.”

“You know I met a man told me the Great Gus George got committed two years back for running the streets of New York raving naked?” She laughed. “Man said it was nine degrees outside. Said old Gus had a mitten on his tallywags.” She shook her head. “At any rate, once Nina could walk, she limped into Fat Ruth’s asking about work.” She shooed a slow fly from Snippy’s muzzle and the horse nodded deep. “I was liable to have killed her had she not told me the truth about that night she spent in your bed.”

He could think of nothing to say in return.

“Well,” Goldie said. “She died of her own accord the next winter.”

There was a gust through the aisle. Colder air was coming.

Abe said, “I looked for you that day. I aimed to tell you nothing happened.”

The horse had gone still at Goldie’s touch. She said, “I imagine you’ve had your share of women now.”

He thought on how to answer. “I’ve got my rules.”

She turned and faced him. “What are they?”

“She’s got to smell good, one.”

Goldie lifted her arm over her head and sniffed. “Like a pink pasture rose,” she said.

He smiled. “Two, she’s got to have a little money in the bread box.”

She stuck her finger and thumb between her breasts. “Well, I’ve always got a little in mine,” she said, and she produced a tight roll of notes shoestrung in green ribbon.

He laughed. “Is that what you’re calling that spot these days?” And he looked at that spot as he had so many times before.

“Any more rules?”

“No whores,” he said.

She put back the skinny bankroll. “That ought to have been the first one you said.” And she thought about his rules and what trouble he may have found in all those years gone, and she thought too on her own rules and trouble. “Since you are so unaccustomed to the ways of a proper brothel,” she told him, “I’ll explain something to you. A madam might be what she is, but I’ll tell you what she isn’t. She is
no
man’s five-dollar chippy.”

And they said nothing for a time but only breathed and stared, and then they were together and moving to the open stall at barn’s end where they fell upon a waist-high hill of sawdust, and they were quiet, and they shed only what needed shedding, and their eyes were wide open all the while.

Afterward she lay with her head on his chest as before, and they began to speak of a new kind of plan, one wholly unconcerned with marriage or their role in the
reproduction of the species or Delmonico sleeper cars or seeing the world. It was a plan that aimed to do right by Jake. By all the Baaches and Big Bill Toothman too. It would come to be, in fact, not a plan at all. It would come to be the big con.

Abe had once worked long hours for Henry Trent, but the way he saw it now, even back then he’d merely been putting up the mark, merely been working toward the very moment inside of which he now lived.

Goldie looked up at him. “You’re an awful quiet kind of man these days,” she said.

He smiled and kissed at the line of scalp he’d made stroking her hair. He said to her, “I need to know everything about everyone.”

The air in the barn grew chilly, so they brushed themselves off and moved to a vacant room in the second house, where it was Goldie’s turn to talk. They ate cold biscuits smeared in honey. For three hours, she would tell him who was who in town since he’d left. Some of the flush were the same as they’d been and some were new.

On his father’s workbench, Abe found a fat stub of pencil and a daily desk calendar that hadn’t been used in a month. He tore a fistful of sheets from the high rusted arches. He wrote down what she told him. He wrote down every word.

Trent had maintained his wealth, but his theater had not prospered as he’d planned. After Abe left town, Trent had ignored Nina Gyro and her broken coccyx, and when a
preacher found her hung early morning from a low Methodist joist, Trent wouldn’t pay to have her buried. He’d tried to bring in more national acts for the main stage, but news of the cut wires traveled through the circuit and stuck, and no prominent magician would come. For the past two years, he’d been dead set on bringing in Max Mercurio—a magician who’d earned the nickname the Sublime One—and his Beautiful Beatrice. While in New Orleans on business, Trent had seen a handbill with her picture, and on that alone he vowed that Beatrice would come to the Alhambra. At seventy-three, he still thought himself capable of bedding young women, and he’d even tried once to sweet-talk Goldie. She’d walked away telling him to go and find a knothole, but she’d kept her head turned and her eye on him, for above all, she explained to Abe, Henry Trent was ever more volatile. He’d just as soon bear-hug a man as brain him with a rifle butt. None could know his mood from day to day. He’d collected regular from the Baaches since Abe left and blackballed any who darkened their saloon door. He told all company men to board someplace other than Hood House, and he aimed to buy its land from Sallie’s father, Old Man Hood.

Rufus Beavers stayed mildly drunk most hours and took bribes to let men walk free. He played regular at the Oak Slab and still held sway with the railroad, overseeing the clearing and carving of bottomland where a new switchout and tipple would sit. His brother Harold brought back on
his frequent home visits a considerable sum of greenbacks too, putting his into the purchase of hill land west of town, just beyond Hood House property, where he clear-cut and stair-stepped the ridge. Along with his brother and Henry Trent, he had his sights on building proper Keystone environs for proper citizens. He’d come home mid-March and slept with fourteen different whores before he left, less than a week before Abe’s arrival. He took Rufus with him. Extended vacation is what folks called it. A common pleas judge from up at Welch would cover any trial work the judge might miss.

Faro Fred Reed was still president of the Union Political and Social Club. He was loyal to Trent and aimed to be made a councilman in the interim election by splitting the black vote and unseating Reverend Whitt. Fred’s boy Taffy aided him in this endeavor, getting in the ear of every black miner in the Bottom, asking them, “You want a colored man favors whiskey or one that wants to take it away? Can’t have both.” Taffy was a police officer and right-hand man to Chief Rutherford.