And now that horizon that was always out there for him is there no longer, and the vast horizon of his inner eye has also withered away.
I’m gonna miss yu, darlin. The chanteuse smiles, tucking her breast in but leaving the schoolmarm’s bodice unbuttoned. Aint ever day someone like yu comes driftin through.
It is not every day, he corrects her, and goes into the cell to flop down on the bare springs of the cot there.
No, haw! She laughs, they all laugh. Shore as hell aint!
He remembers that when the men went out to rebuild the gallows he looked up through his cell window from where he was lying on the cot springs and saw the stars gathered up and set spinning in the sky like celestial dust devils, and he thought: There’s a serious storm brewing. For a time then there was a silence so dense it made his ears ache, and he recalled one hot day back when he was out on the desert alone under the blistering sun and just such a silence descended and in the middle of it a great band of Indian warriors came galloping past, riding bareback and without reins, heads high and staring rigidly ahead as though drawn by something out on the horizon that he could not see, their horses’ hoofs raising a torment of dust but making not a sound. As they flew past, he saw that their lips were all sewn shut with rawhide thongs and their chests and foreheads were tattooed with mysterious pictographs and the teeth and tiny bones of animals were embedded in their flesh, and he understood that they were galloping into oblivion and carrying the secrets of the universe with them, and that although those secrets were not very interesting, they were the only secrets there were, and he would not be privy to them. In their wake came a raging river, snapping wrathfully at their heels and swallowing up their tracks, and then, as the warriors vanished and the common sounds of the desert returned, the river shrank to a rivulet from which he and his horse drank and they were sick for a time.
And so he was thinking about this when the new silence fell as he was lying there on his jail-cell cot on the last night of his life, and if there’d been any sounds of sawing and hammering to be heard before, they were stifled now by this thick clotted silence and then erased by the sudden all-encompassing roar of the cyclonic wind that followed on, sucking the roof off the jailhouse and picking up the old wooden desk and swivel chair and hurling them at his cell bars, exploding them to splinters that flew at him like darts and arrows, and he curled up with his arms over his head, giving them only his butt to strike at, it being well tanned to leather from his life in the saddle and more or less immune from punishment. The wind brought with it great slashing torrents of burning rain that bit and chewed at him then, with its driving force more ravenous than a pack of wolves, and when the rain had passed the distressed stars fell out of the sky in a shower of meteors that shook the ground and rattled the cot springs, pitching him, stunned, to the floor. And then the dust and earth and busted stones sent flying by the meteors and stirred up by the bellowing wind came rolling over him as though the desert itself had taken animate shape and had risen up against him, and it buffeted him and blinded him and entered him through all his orifices, stopping up his mouth and nose so he could not breathe, and buried him there where he lay. But he is a man schooled to the harsh and whimsical ways of the desert, so patiently he waited out the turbulence (the worst was over, the marm had left him, and she was not even the marm), meditating the while upon the ironies of his extremity — that he was holding his breath and struggling to survive so that he might live another hour to be hanged — and when it had passed he dug his way out and spat out the earth that filled his mouth and unclogged his nose with his fingers and commenced to breathe again as before.
The storm has left behind a noonday sun, shining down upon him now through the roofless jailhouse ruins. His twisted cell door is agape, and his old gunbelt and wooden-butted six-shooter is hanging on a coat hook on one of the walls left standing by the storm. There seems no reason not to do so, so he goes over and buckles it on, and as he does this he remembers that before the men went out (or maybe after) he was visited by a one-eyed photographer, which he took to be an unfavorable sign, or more than one. He was a cadaverous plug-hatted man with a Chinaman’s beard, and he was a voluble enthusiast of his trade. He insisted on showing him his sheaf of photographs of hanged men, giving him a poke in his lower regions with his rifle barrel and jerking on his earring when he showed no immediate interest and closed his eyes. It was his studied opinion, the man said, spreading out his samples and compelling his attention, that a photograph of one hanged man has a more melancholical aspect about it than do those of groups, though men strung up in multitudes of a dozen or more not only provide peculiar challenges and opportunities for the enterprising photographist, being less of a stereotype, as might be said, but they also have a way of opening up the foreground to pictorial scrutiny and drawing attention to those who have not yet been hanged. Put another way, one man suspended solo has a single sad tune to play, while a couple of dozen make a whole band of bemingled and crisscross medleys. They say two’s company, the one-eyed man went on to say, tobacco juice dribbling down his stringy goatee and dripping onto his photos, adding to their sepia tonalities as he rubbed it in with a long bony finger, but it aint. Lookit these two renegade injuns hangin here: yu aint never seed nuthin lonelier-lookin than thet! One varmint pendin’s like astin a worrisome question. Two’s like mockin each other in their silly neck-broke dangle and they aint neither of em got nuthin t’say. I sometimes like t’lookit my pitchers a two men hangin jest fer a hoot. Three’s most folks’ fayvrit, it’s a kinder mystery, like yu know whut two of em’re doin up thar, but whut about the third? Like as not it’s a mistake, like he wuz jest stumblin along’n fell inta the noose. Ifn hangin a person ever is a mistake, thet is. My own fayvrit number, though, is four. Thet’s about the most cloud-kickers yu kin string up in concert and see the whole pattern of em, whilst takin in each one of em at the same time, so’s yu git sumthin combined of all the others. Mostly, though, it’s on accounta my special regard fer gallows arkytetcher. Jest lookit these here pitchers, how differnt they all are, they’s so many novel’n wondrous ways’n shapes a hangin four men all at wunst, and danglin four of em together has a way a bringin out the grain in the wood and drawin yer eye t’the empty space neath their ascended boots. Which a course is the whole reason them estimable things git built.
Rifle now cocked and ready, he peers cautiously out the gaping hole where the street door used to be and sees that no boots will be ascended today, his or any other’s. The debris of the gallows, wrecked by the black mare, has been mostly blown away by the storm, nothing left in the wide dusty street but a few scattered splinters like frail bleached reminders of some previous resolve. Now what there is of intent can be measured only by the ominous absence of any evidence of it, for nothing moves. Not even the lace curtain in the window above the saloon sign. The weathered wooden buildings, utterly forsaken under the baking sun, look fatigued and shrunk into themselves, a grim dead silence sunk into everything the way drink can sodden a man. But that they are waiting for him out there some place, or places, of course he has no doubt. The moment for it has come.
Across the way the bank doors are hanging loose off their hinges as usual, and though it’s about a hundred yards across a wide-open space, masonry’s a better shield than timber, and he figures if he could make it over there he might have more of a chance, or at least last a little longer. He exposes himself briefly on the jailhouse porch, then ducks back inside. Nothing happens, so he checks his six-shooter (a single shot’s been fired; he reloads it), tugs his broad-brimmed hat down over his brow as though felt might fend off lead, cleans his ears out, and gets ready to run. There’s a kind of presence out there, like a filled-up space inside the empty space that’s seen, created by the portentous hour and walled by nothing but its own taut necessity, and when he enters into it, there’ll be no way out until it isn’t there anymore, or he isn’t.