A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (37 page)

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.

Frank Dallara watched close the snakes he’d put in place. Four sacks he’d carried in, each with five inside. Twenty snakes caught in two day’s time by his son and the boy they called T.

Up on his square, Abe took to humming the snake-charmer song, and Goldie joined him in a practiced and symphonious perfection.

The people looked on as Rutherford moaned. One rattler struck out and latched at his wrist. A copperhead struck higher and hung undulating from his head.

There was nothing in this world Rutherford feared more than serpents, and he could not move a muscle as they came.

The women holding their babies aloft now clutched them tight at the chest. A rumble struck up, and some said the show was the devil’s work, displayed before the very eyes of God.

Up above, the big ship slowed and circled back. Ben Moon dropped his binoculars from his face and licked his finger and held it in the wind. “Oh hell,” he said, “let it go, I guess,” and Little Donnie pulled the cord on the cinched king sheet. A hundred thousand dollars in fives, tens, and
twenties dropped in a cluster from the basket’s side rail. The cluster unbunched and the notes spun in whorls. The wind took them west to a stretch of uncut trees.

The people looked up again, and when they saw what came, they chased the big-faced notes to the woods. At first, only the greedy among them ran after the money, but when it was clear that Abe had spoken the truth, that riches were in fact raining down, every man, woman, and child lit out for those hardwoods, and once there, they shimmied up trunks and tightroped boughs in order to pluck out a bill.

Here and there, a twenty clung to the cargo net that extended so long beneath the ship. Bushels strained and jerked at its bottom still, trying to slow
America
down, trying hard to get himself back to the ground. He managed to come lower and touch his toes to the mud, just as the people all cleared.

They would not even notice the end of the show, so busy were they in the woods.

Abe and Goldie had leapt from their perches on high, careful to clear all serpentine paths. Taffy Reed jumped too, and Abe shook his hand at the fence. “Well done,” he told Taffy.

Ah Tong and the barkers and peddlers and riflemen all congregated outside the circled fence. Five or six kept their guns trained on the singular straggling police officer. They watched close the few remaining townspeople—elderly, lame souls who could not run for the trees.

Further hand-shaking had commenced but was cut short in a hurry, as the big net approached twenty yards to the east. Bushels skipped at its bottom and hollered, “Get set!” His arm muscles swelled, intwined at the cargo’s holes, his biceps as big around as telegraph poles. His voice was a boom on the wind. “It’s time to go!”

Abe and Goldie ran then for the tail of their vessel, and their conspirators smiled and looked on. Up above, the elevatorman and the rudderman had slowed
America
as much as she could be slowed, and Walter Melvin had run out of film. He called to his assistant to fetch another canister.

The wind shifted direction, and the cinders came on, for some men at Cinder Bottom never ceased their making. They worked every Sabbath before the six hundred red-mouthed holes in the mountain.

Bushels hooked Goldie first, locking her forearm in his, and he swung her like nothing over his head. “Keep both hands gripped and both feet on a square,” he commanded, “and move up just as quick as you can.”

It wouldn’t be long before the riverbed bent back, so narrow it was between the stumped high walls. If they didn’t reach the basket before the lowland turned, they’d slam dead against the clear-cut cinch.

Abe was next to lock the strongman’s arm, and he swung upward just the same as his bride, took hold of the rope’s rough hide. A five-dollar note slipped free from a length and hit him square in the forehead before fluttering away.
There were willow twigs woven throughout the big net, and they welted his arms like a switch.

Goldie stopped climbing long enough to look down, to make sure her Abe was on. She saw the top of his head beneath a willow-tree limb and the sight of it jolted her bones. It was what she’d seen in a dream thirteen years before, when all the money and the blood was yet to come. But in her dream, Abe hung dead by the willow-tree limb. He’d not once moved. He’d not looked up at her as now.

He smiled from below with the rope in his fists, and he winked at her too. And though their bodies rocked about inside the cindered wind, he would not look away from the Queen. It didn’t matter where he looked at her—the dark of her eye or the nape of her neck or the curve of her wrist at the hand—she swelled the blood’s forgotten memory and she stirred its music too, and for a thing such as that, a man would gladly die.

He called up to her, “Best view in the natural world.”

It tickled her and she laughed despite the task ahead. She even shut her eyes without knowing why, and for a moment, there was not a sound. There was nothing. No beaten ground beneath them and no zeppelin above. Then she heard Abe call out a word from below, and he called it again and again.

Climb
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Deborah Weiner’s
Coalfield Jews
was so very helpful in so many ways. Jean Battlo’s
A Pictorial History of McDowell County
was also immeasurably valuable, as was all of Battlo’s work. I’d like to acknowledge the Archives at the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, particularly the 1897
Jackson Herald
article covering the last public execution in the state, as it became an important resource for this book’s opening chapter. Talmage A. Stanley’s
The Poco Field: An American Story of Place
was helpful as well. I suppose I must also acknowledge a strange, ridiculous, and anonymous source, for it indeed provided a sense of time and place and prevailing racist attitudes, and beyond that, it actually became a tangible part of this novel:
Sodom and Gomorrah of Today or the History of Keystone West Virginia
, published in 1912 and authored by “Virginia Lad.”

I am neither a poker man nor a magician, and so there are many others I’d like to thank for their guidance. James McManus’s
Cowboys Full
was particularly enlightening, as was the work of Jim Steinmeyer, particularly
The Last Greatest Magician in the World
. And Ricky Jay’s
Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women
provided information and inspiration both. David W. Maurer’s
The Big Con
was also quite helpful.

I must acknowledge Larry Merchant’s “Suddenly Respectable” from
The National Football Lottery
, where I first encountered a version of the bank president tale used in this novel.

I’d like to thank West Virginia University’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences for providing me with a Riggle Fellowship, and I’d also like to thank
WVU
’s Senate Committee on Research and Scholarship for providing a summer grant. Both allowed me time to complete this novel.

Thank you to my marvelous agent, Terra Chalberg.

Thank you to Allen Crawford for the beautiful work on this book’s cover.

My many thanks to everyone at Tin House, where great books are being made. My gratitude goes to Jakob Vala, Diane Chonette, Meg Cassidy, Nanci McCloskey, Masie Cochran, Lance Cleland, Cheston Knapp, Win McCormack, and my remarkable editor, Tony Perez.

This is a book about the past, when money and people poured into southern West Virginia. Now, McDowell
County is a very different place, due in large part to the mechanization of coal mining and to the lack of corporate, public, and governmental concern for people living in places sometimes referred to these days as “sacrifice zones.” I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge those who are working to tell the story of today’s McDowell County. Rather than listing them all here, I will give the reader a good place to start: hollowdocumentary.com.

PHOTO © STEVE MILLER CHICAGOCORNERS.COM

GLENN TAYLOR
is the author of the novels
The Marrowbone Marble Company
and
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he now lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, where he teaches at West Virginia University.

Copyright © 2015 Glenn Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and
Brooklyn, New York

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Taylor, M. Glenn.

A hanging at Cinder Bottom : a novel / Glenn Taylor. — First U.S. edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-941040-09-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-941040-10-2 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3620.A9593H37 2015

813’.6—dc23

2015001536

First US edition 2015
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com