A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (5 page)

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 straight 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.

She got up and came around and kissed him on the mouth, and it was to her liking.

He said, “The people here in southern West Virginia are the finest I have seen.”

“Just wait till I cook you supper.”

When Sallie made up her mind on something, it could not be unmade.

The twice-a-year preacher came through at Thanksgiving. He wed them at the Marrying Rock at two in the morning. A candlelight service, no witness in earshot but the crickets.

There were those who chattered about the couple, and Sallie’s family was among them, but from the start she was unenthralled with such talk. Those who would fault her love for a German Jew could go on and fault themselves silly. She had a boardinghouse to run.

Inside a year, she had a baby boy to rear, and inside another two she had a second. Her third boy came in ’83. There were easy years and hard, and when Hood House had no vacancy, the boys lived over the saloon. Each boy
was free and lively and sweet, and each was trouble. The first was Jake and the last was Sam. The middle one they named Abraham.

WINTER
1897

QUEENS FULL OF FOURS

February 17, 1897

It was Wednesday. Snow had stuck to the mountaintop but not the road. It was the day on which a game of stud poker commenced in Keystone that would last thirteen years. It wasn’t intended to last that long. It was intended instead to carry in the kind of money most couldn’t tote, and it would do so in a quiet fashion, for the game itself was the only of that day’s events not publicized by handbill in the growing town.
You must see the lobby to believe it
, the papers said.
Grand Opening. Alhambra Hotel
. It was Henry Trent’s most ambitious project to date, a three-story brick building with four columns in front. He’d built it on the southwest bank of Elkhorn Creek, where the monied folk had moved.

Five men had been invited by courier to sit at the big stakes table. One of the five was Abe Baach, then seventeen
years of age. Having already cleaned the pockets of the men at his daddy’s saloon, he had a reputation. Most had quit calling him Pretty Boy Baach in favor of the Keystone Kid.

The Kid whistled that stale February morning as he walked west on Bridge Street with his arm around his girl. Goldie Toothman whistled too, pressed against him tight for heat. She’d bought him a six-dollar gray overcoat for his birthday to match the stiff hat he wore. The coat was long, well-suited for Abe, who’d stretched to six foot two.

They stopped halfway across the bridge, and though his pocketwatch told him he was nearing late, Abe said he needed to spit in the creek. It was superstitious ritual, but neither of them was taking chances. They regarded the water below, rolling black over broken stones. Along the banks, it was frozen. Brittle-edged and thin and the color of rust.

“I’ll play quick and clean,” Abe said.

“I know you will.” She put her hands inside his coat button spaces for warmth. She kissed him at the collarbone and told him, “Don’t cross Mr. Trent.” She whispered, “Keep your temper.”

He locked his hands around her and squeezed. “Liable to freeze out here,” he said. Beneath her jacket she wore only an old gown. There had been little time for sleep the night before and no time for proper dressing that morning. Sleep came short and ended abrupt when cards and bottles turned till sunup.

Where the crowd grew thick, Abe and Goldie parted. Her daddy had taken ill again, and she’d have to see about his duties. Big Bill Toothman swept up and kept order at Fat Ruth Malindy’s, a boardinghouse-turned-whorehouse above which he and Goldie lived. Goldie’s mother had died giving birth to her, and Big Bill had raised her alone ever since, with no help from Fat Ruth Malindy, who was his sister-in-law. She was madam of the house and the meanest woman there ever was. So Big Bill got help from the Baaches, whose saloon sat directly across Wyoming Street, where Abe, from his second-story bedroom, had spent his boyhood kneeling at the sill over stolen card decks, knifing seals and opening wrappers like little gifts, shuffling and dealing and laying each suit out to study them. All the while, he waited for Goldie to look back at him from across the lane. From the time he was ten, he’d waited for her, and while he did, he memorized the squeezers from the New York Card Factory, emblazoned in cannons and cherubs and birds of prey and giant fish and satyrs and angelic, half-nude women who fanned themselves with miniature decks of cards. He stole a fine dip pen from his father and began marking them, even recreating their designs on newsprint, down to the tiniest line.

It was Christmas Eve 1892 that Goldie had looked him back.

Now he watched her return to the swinging bridge. He blew hot air into his cupped hands and moved at a fast clip
up Railroad Avenue, sidestepping the crowd and walking, without hesitation, between the wide columns and into the kind of establishment only a boomtown could evidence.

The Alhambra’s lobby was indeed rich with curvature and girth. Through the right bank of mahogany double doors was a small auditorium, equipped with a fine stage. A purple felt grand drape hung behind it, a narrow row of gas footlights in front. They were lit for an ongoing opening-day tour of the facilities, and the children of the rich danced before their glow with spotlighted teeth, and one girl fell onto her fragile knees and cried.

At the back lobby wall, a man named Talbert recognized Abe and showed him around a card room with fourteen tables. Each one was covered in fine green billiard cloth. Iron pipes striped the high walls, and twenty or more jet burners lit the place with steady little flames that left no wall streaks. Abe was accustomed to the flat wick lamps at A. L. Baach and Sons, where kerosene smut marked every inch. Al Baach wasn’t concerned with decor. He was content to merely keep open the saloon he’d bought outright in 1891, for the great panic of ’93 had frightened him, and he’d not cleared sufficient money since to renovate.

Abe surveyed the men at their tables, the timid manner in which they moved their wrists and fingers, the slight shiver of their cigar tips.

The smell of good varnish was still on the air.

Talbert asked what his pleasure was.

Abe took the invitation from his pocket and showed it.

Talbert scratched at the mass of greasy hair on his head and squinted at the invitation card. On it was the embossed seal of a round table. “Why didn’t you show me this right off?” he asked. “You’re late.” He told Abe to follow.

They walked across the wide main card room and Talbert tapped five times at Trent’s office door before entering. Inside, it was empty. Wall-mounted gas lamps ran hot. He shut the door behind Abe and pointed to a second glass-paned door at the back. He said, “They’ve already gone through.” When Abe didn’t move, Talbert said, “Go on in.”

When he did, Abe found himself in a room lit by a single lamp. It hung on a hook above the middle of a great big round table fashioned from a white oak tree with a breast circumference of twenty and one-half feet. Four men stood around it talking and smoking. They wore suits. Trent and Rutherford stood in the corner next to a seated black man who was paring his fingernails with a penknife.

When the door was shut, Henry Trent said, “That makes five.”

Rutherford walked to Abe and held out his hand and said, “Buy-in.”

Abe took the fold of notes from his inside jacket pocket. Rutherford licked his thumb and counted five twenties and said to the black man, “Dealer take your seat and split a fresh deck.”

Abe took off his coat and hat and hung them on one of seven cast-iron coat trees lining the wall.

He and the other four card players took their seats around the table.

The dealer wore a black satin bow tie. His suspenders were embroidered in redbirds. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his fingernails were smooth as a shell. Abe had heard how good he was and had played once or twice with his son.

The man shuffled. He had fast mechanics and a soft touch. “I’m Faro Fred,” he said. “I’ll turn cards till I’m dead.”

Abe sized up the other men. Each of them he knew, whether by face or by name.

They had all heard of him.

Rutherford poured whiskey into a line of cut-glass tumblers with a bullseye design. He set one before each man. Then he sat down in a chair beside the cookstove and took out his chewing tobacco.