A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (9 page)

Each man nodded at Taffy, who nodded back.

Rutherford looked over his shoulder at the young man. “For all I know, you’re in here every payday Taffy,” he said. “Baach serves niggers and under eighteen both.” He laughed.

“All men are welcome in my saloon,” Al Baach told him, “but the patron must be eighteen for beer, twenty-one for spirits.”

“I’m only pullin your leg,” Rutherford said.

Taffy Reed scratched under his wool cap. He chewed on a toothpick he’d soaked overnight in a jar of homemade whiskey.

“Alhambra’s no-nigger policy won’t last,” Rutherford said. “Mark my words, inside a couple years, Trent will be letting em in like the rest of Keystone does—ain’t no other way when they come to be a majority.” He regarded his fingernails, which were in need of trimming.

Jake scooted the gold pieces off the counter into his open hand. He put them in his pocket.

“What you got there Jake Baach?” Rutherford asked.

“Nothin.”

“Somethin can’t be nothin,” Rutherford said. He stared down the Lincoln lithograph. “You got any pickled eggs?”

“No,” Jake said.

“How about just regular hardboiled.”

“Plumb out.”

Rutherford looked at the mantel clock under Abe Lincoln. Breakfast wasn’t too far off. Every morning of his life, Rutherford ate a half dozen hardboiled eggs. As of late he’d had a penchant for the pickled variety.

“I can put on some coffee,” Abe said.

Rutherford just sat. “Seems like your crowd here didn’t make it to the hotel’s big opening,” he said. “Or if they did, they came awful late.”

Nobody said a word.

Taffy Reed flipped his toothpick and bit down the fresh end.

“Look here,” Rutherford said, turning his attention once more to Al. “Word come down that you ain’t on the hook anymore for monthly payments.”

Al could scarcely believe his ears.

Rutherford looked at Abe and spat again on the floor. Then he smiled at Al. “But what’s say for old time’s sake you go on and give me one last handful.”

Al said he supposed he could do that.

Abe watched his daddy turn and open the money bag. He whispered the numbers as he subtracted from his count.

Before they left, Rutherford told Abe, “I reckon I’ll be seeing more of you real soon.”

In Rutherford’s fist was the last of the consideration money he’d collect from any Baach. He muttered as he left. He had work to do. A young coke-yarder had passed out on the tracks and been cut in two. Rutherford would have to drain what was left from him, and affix him again in a singular piece, and pump him full of preservation juice. Or, if he was tired enough, and if he reckoned there was no kin to miss the boy, he’d wheelbarrow his two halves up Buzzard Branch to the old bootleg slope mine. He’d unlock the big square cover and dump the boy down. Either way, he had work to do before he could retire to his room at the Alhambra, where he would skim from the take like he always did and put a single dollar with the rest of his secret things, inside a locked trunk under his bed.

Jake watched Rutherford leave and said, “There is something wrong with that man.”

Al shook his head. “He likes to make believe he is powerful like his boss.”

“Well ain’t he?” Jake produced his tool chest from beneath the bar and poured himself a beer.

“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.