The Scribe (16 page)

“That's my job,” the engineer said sourly. He cocked an ear toward the rear of the train and, satisfied by what the clanking song of metal told him, nodded to Vernon. “We're ready.”

“North, then. With speed.”

Vernon clapped the fireman on his shoulder, where he was shoveling coal into the firebox at a pace too slow to suit him. “Feed that box, you dirty Irish son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Stoke it up!”

The engineer tugged on the whistle and pushed forward the handle that unlocked the brake. Like a slumbering beast awakened, the engine began to churn and the locomotive to move, its wheels slowly gaining purchase on the slick rails.
They pulled out from the shadows of the Western & Atlantic depot and northward through town, the steel wheels beginning to keen on the rails.

“And thus the Number Nine departs up the Marietta Line, hours ahead of the schedule,” Vernon said.

“And short of its freight,” the engineer added.

But Vernon seemed not to have heard. As he measured the progress of dark buildings against the pace the train was picking up, he seemed satisfied, or at least eased. He pulled a cigar from his vest and lit it, tossed the match over the rail. “There is yet time.”

“If they are on horseback.”

“Which they surely are. And one of them with Greenberg in the saddle afore him to slow the group down.”

“How long was the guard tied?”

“He figures an hour before he worked himself free.”

Canby smiled bitterly. “
Figures?
Then he surely was asleep when they broke in. We will have to do better. Are you well armed?”

“Quite. Yourself?”

Canby patted his jacket, where under the cloth and snug against his chest hung his .32 Bulldog. The pocket revolver tucked into his boot. Anse's big Colt, he regretted, was still under the couch in Vernon's front room where he had slept last night. And the rest of his arms still at the Kimball House, in the empty room there. He knew that whatever force they met at Buckhead would surely outmatch these meager munitions.

“We are a small posse, Vernon.”

“A small posse in search of a large one. How fucked is that?”

Because he had had the same thought himself, Canby did not bother to answer. Instead, as the city lights faded behind them, he watched the ember of Vernon's cigar flare and ebb in the darkness, smelled its rich smoke fill the small cab of the locomotive with each exhalation before it was snatched away by the night wind. Once, they lumbered over a trestle, the wood planks popping like shots and the Chattahoochee roiling below. At regular intervals the fireman would feed the firebox, and each heave of coal into the box brought forth a shower of sparks before he shut the door. And at some point between the openings and closings of the firebox door Canby became aware of a muted glow on the horizon ahead.

The light grew. While the sleepers clacked beneath the engine it seemed to be burning with a rhythm of its own. As they drew nearer Canby could see that it was the flickering pulse of dozens of torches held aloft by the men in the mob and that some of them, off to a corner of the crossroads, had started a bonfire. The engineer threw the brake on the train and the wheels began to grind against the steel of the tracks, fighting the momentum the engine had built up in the miles since Atlanta, and before it had slowed to a jog Canby and Vernon were leaping out of the engine and running.

Most of the men circled around the tree had turned at the sound of the train; those who hadn't now glanced over their shoulders at the sound of bootheels on the hard-packed clay of the road. They parted for Canby and Vernon, stepping back with torches in hand to make way. Canby's sprint had carried him nearly to the trunk of the tree when he brought himself up short before it, looking up at what hung there.

“Goddamn,” Vernon said.

Leon Greenberg's wrists and ankles were still shackled. His rent clothing hung on him like rags. They had covered his face with a white handkerchief but the noose's knot under his chin exposed the throat's elongation, the brutal realignment of skull and body that the rope and his broken spine had created. The body still twisted in a slight pendulous swaying against the rope. Canby thought he could hear, under the snickering of the flames, the hemp fibers creaking. He reached up a hand and put it against Greenberg's shin to still the dead weight.

“How long?” he asked.

“You just missed his last kicking,” one of them said. “Pulled that wagon bed out from under him and he commenced to jumping like a cat in a skillet.”

Canby lowered his hand and turned around, looking at the men and boys in the crowd. Their faces seemed dazed and Canby knew the look: bloodthirst slaked, and after it, a kind of guilty wonder turning in the minds of each of them at what they had unleashed. He reached into his jacket and pulled out the Bulldog.

“Bring the wagon back around.”

“Now, just you wait a minute.” One of the men, older, took a step forward. Canby recognized him from the courthouse yard. Not even bothering with a hood for this work. “This ain't your deal here.”

“Oh, indeed it is, Malcolm,” Vernon said. “Shall I even begin to list the felonies you've committed tonight?”

The man's sunburnt face cracked into a crooked smile. “You aim to take me in? For hanging that wicked son of a bitch?”

“I've a mind to.”

The smile dimmed. “Boys, y'all cut that jewboy down and get your souvenirs. Mary's got her justice. Let's wrap this up.”

Canby felt his hand rising, the revolver's weight steadying his arm. “Cut him down, yes. But the first one to maim him is a dead man.”

“You ain't got bullets enough for all of us.”

Canby looked at the pistol's barrel, then at the man. “You're right,” he said, cocking the pistol. “But the first one is yours, Malcolm.”

Canby kept his eyes on the man's face until he saw the peckerwood cunning leave his eyes. Light flickering on his face, he nodded to the men closest to him and three of them broke off from the group, one mounting to the wagon's bench and the others climbing in back. The driver snapped the reins and the horse came around, snorting as it passed Greenberg's earthward-pointing feet. The wagon stopped and one of them wrapped his arms around Greenberg's waist and lifted while the tallest man sawed at the rope with a Barlow knife. They lowered him first to the wagon bed and then, almost gently, to the dust at the foot of the oak.

Wordlessly, they began to depart, the circle dispersing. Men tossed their torches into the bonfire as they left, the fire itself beginning to dwindle now, and untied their horses and mounted. Soon the last sounds of hoofbeats had faded into the distance. Vernon sat down wearily and leaned himself against the oak tree.

“Well, that's the end of it, Thomas. I hate to see it done outside the law, but that is an end to it.”

“An innocent man, Vernon.”

Vernon did not answer. Canby stood regarding the locomotive, still and dark now where it had come to a stop on the tracks. His chest felt hollowed out. “Think we could take him back on the engine?”

“No room. Go on over to Irby's and ask him to wire Atlanta for an undertaker.”

Canby looked over to Irby's store. Its windows were resolutely dark. Irby too good a man to have sought or taken any kind of profit from this affair. Straining, Canby could nearly make out the profile of the buck's head hung over the door. Still too dark to see how much it had weathered since he'd last passed through. He started across the road.

“And Thomas,” Vernon said, “see if he has a horse to spare.”

Canby stopped and turned around. “What for?”

“Solomon Pace is still taking lodgers at his place,” Vernon said, lighting another cigar. “Vinings is only five or six miles.”

“Vernon—”

“Go on up to Vinings, see Julia. Uncle Solomon will put you up. I'll see if anything can be done in Atlanta to save your job. And mine.”

“Vernon,” Canby said, waving a hand at the hanging tree, Greenberg's body, “this is not over.”

Vernon shook out the match, exhaled a plume of smoke, and leveled his eyes on Canby. “I'm not speaking as a friend, Thomas. That's an order.”

Canby's footsteps sounded leaden to him as he crossed the empty road. He knocked on a window, called out, “Police,” and watched as a point of candlelight appeared and made its
way to the front of the store. Soon there were sounds of the door being unlatched from within.

He emerged from the store fifteen minutes later with the telegraph receipt. He had asked the telegraph office to send a courier out to the undertaker's home immediately, Bond's or Roth's, whichever was closest to the telegraph office. Just before the transmission went out, he appended,
DID WHAT WE COULD TO STOP IT
.

As he walked back to the tree he saw that Vernon was standing over the dying bonfire. As Canby watched, he pitched a length of rope into the flames. Canby knelt by Greenberg's body and lifted the handkerchief from his face. His glasses were gone—a trophy, he imagined, taken by one of his executioners before they strung him up. Canby saw that, above the handsome but bloodied mustache, Greenberg's nose had been broken. Gone, too, was the noose from around his neck. It had left only its mottled imprint in the flesh.

He looked over to the fire again. Vernon was walking toward him. He lowered the handkerchief over Greenberg's face.

“Irby's saddling the horse.”

“Good. You are overtired. Get away for a while. That's at least some good to come from this.”

“This is not over. Innocent blood, Vernon.”

“I told you, it is an order.”

“I should be in Atlanta.”

“Atlanta will still be there when you get back. Let me see what can be done in town. I'll wire you. Meantime, get yourself rested. Give my best to Julia.”

Vernon put a hand on Canby's shoulder and they stood in
that filial pose for a few minutes, nothing spoken. Above them, dangling from a broad limb of the old oak, the severed length of rope swayed in the predawn breeze. Canby fingered the folded telegraph receipt in his pocket. The response from the undertakers had come back quickly. He imagined he could feel the words of their reply on the paper in his pocket, as though etched on the paper with the finality of chisel on stone:
WOULD THAT IT HAD BEEN ENOUGH
.

After a few minutes, Canby saw Irby emerging from the back of his store, leading a horse by its bridle toward them. Saw, too, that to the east, beyond the rim of the dark horizon, the sun was struggling to rise.

October 28

A
ND YET THE KILLINGS HAD STOPPED
. T
HE ROUTINE
of days in Vinings with Julia, awaiting word from Vernon that did not come and did not come. A telegraph from Underwood nearly every day. But no progress. The overwhelming numbness of his guilt hanging on Canby like a pall, refusing to lift despite the mountain air, despite Julia's presence. Every afternoon he scanned the
Constitution
for news of another murder, report of the killer who surely was not Greenberg resuming his dark work. He had read that the expenses for Greenberg's funeral had been paid by Morris Rich, the department store man, and that the viewing of his body had been attended by hundreds. Burial, the paper reported, was to be in his native Brooklyn. Just as well, the writer editorialized; he never belonged down here anyway.

But the news of Greenberg had run on page three, pushed to the back of the paper by coverage of the International Cotton Exposition. Columns of glowing words on the city-within-a-city, praise for its technological marvels, its brilliant
electric lights, its swelling attendance numbers. News of the impending arrival of William Tecumseh Sherman, the general descending on the city to confirm the reconciliation of this New South the I.C.E. celebrated, to toss a garland for this phoenix arisen from its own ashes.

Canby folded the paper and set it aside. The breeze here on the mountain moved through the trees and scattered the gold and auburn leaves that had begun to drop from the oaks, the hickories, the sycamores. There was a hint of winter in it. The fallen leaves had begun to pool against the headstones of the little cemetery at the mountain's summit, where the early settlers of Vinings' first families—Paces, Randalls—had been laid to rest. He looked away from the stones. Far to the south, near the end of his vision's range, Atlanta teemed in the valley, the railroad roundhouse smoking at its center. He knew his business there was not yet finished.

He heard the clap of wood down below him and figured it to be the door of the Vinings school slapping against the front of the schoolhouse. He looked down and picked out the school from the other buildings of the village, all of them green-shingled, whitewashed clapboard, save for the Negro settlement that sat at a short distance on the northernmost part of the mountain, where the buildings were all spare parts, tumbledown and ramshackle. Surely enough, the dirt lot out front of the school had filled with Julia's scholars, noisily dispersing as though they had flung themselves off its porch in their eagerness for room to move, for fresh air, the precious stretch of an afternoon's freedom in these shortening days of autumn. He smiled. If there had been no truants or idlers today to be
held after, Julia would soon be on her way up the mountainside to meet him.