‘Something just come to me,’ Trusdale said.
‘What’s that, Jim?’
‘If they hang me tomorrow morning, I’ll go into my grave with steak and eggs still in my belly. It won’t have no chance to work through.’
For a moment Barclay said nothing. He was horrified not by the image but because Trusdale had thought of it. Then he said, ‘Wipe your nose.’
Trusdale wiped it.
‘Now listen to me, Jim, because this is your last chance. You were in that bar in the middle of the afternoon. Not many people in there then. Isn’t that right?’
‘I guess it is.’
‘Then who took your hat? Close your eyes. Think back. See it.’
Trusdale closed his eyes. Barclay waited. At last Trusdale opened his eyes, which were red from crying. ‘I can’t even remember was I wearing it.’
Barclay sighed. ‘Give me your plate, and mind that knife.’
Trusdale handed the plate through the bars with the knife and fork laid on it, and said he wished he could have some beer. Barclay thought it over, then put on his heavy coat and Stetson and walked down to the Chuck-a-Luck, where he got a small pail of beer from Dale Gerard. Undertaker Hines was just finishing a glass of wine. He followed Barclay out into the wind and cold.
‘Big day tomorrow,’ Barclay said. ‘There hasn’t been a hanging here in ten years, and with luck there won’t be another for ten more. I’ll be gone out of the job by then. I wish I was now.’
Hines looked at him. ‘You really don’t think he killed her.’
‘If he didn’t,’ Barclay said, ‘whoever did is still walking around.’
The hanging was at nine o’clock the next morning. The day was windy and bitterly cold, but most of the town turned out to watch. Pastor Ray Rowles stood on the scaffold next to John House. Both of them were shivering in spite of their coats and scarves. The pages of Pastor Rowles’s Bible fluttered. Tucked into House’s belt, also fluttering, was a hood of homespun cloth dyed black.
Barclay led Trusdale, his hands cuffed behind his back, to the gallows. Trusdale was all right until he got to the steps, then he began to buck and cry.
‘Don’t do this,’ he said. ‘Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t kill me.’
He was strong for a little man, and Barclay motioned Dave Fisher to come and lend a hand. Together they muscled Trusdale, twisting and ducking and pushing, up the twelve wooden steps. Once he bucked so hard all three of them almost fell off, and arms reached up to catch them if they did.
‘Quit that and die like a man!’ someone shouted.
When they reached the platform, Trusdale was momentarily quiet, but when Pastor Rowles commenced Psalm 51, he began to scream. ‘Like a woman with her tit caught in the wringer,’ someone said later in the Chuck-a-Luck.
‘Have mercy on me, o God, after Thy great goodness,’ Rowles read, raising his voice to be heard over the condemned man’s shrieks to be let off. ‘According to the multitude of Thy mercies, do away with mine offenses.’
When Trusdale saw House take the black hood out of his belt, he began to pant like a dog. He shook his head from side to side, trying to dodge the hood. His hair flew. House followed each jerk patiently, like a man who means to bridle a skittish horse.
‘Let me look at the mountains!’ Trusdale bellowed. Runners of snot hung from his nostrils. ‘I’ll be good if you let me look at the mountains one more time!’
But House only jammed the hood over Trusdale’s head and pulled it down to his shaking shoulders. Pastor Rowles was droning on, and Trusdale tried to run off the trapdoor. Barclay and Dave Fisher pushed him back onto it. Down below, someone cried, ‘Ride em, cowboy!’
‘Say amen,’ Barclay told Pastor Rowles. ‘For Christ’s sake, say amen.’
‘Amen,’ Pastor Rowles said, and stepped back, closing his Bible with a clap.
Barclay nodded to House. House pulled the lever. The greased beam retracted and the trap dropped. So did Trusdale. There was a crack when his neck broke. His legs drew up almost to his chin, then fell back limp. Yellow drops stained the snow under his feet.
‘There, you bastard,’ Rebecca Cline’s father shouted. ‘Died pissing like a dog on a fireplug. Welcome to hell.’ A few people clapped.
The spectators stayed until Trusdale’s corpse, still wearing the black hood, was laid in the same hurry-up wagon he’d ridden to town in. Then they dispersed.
Barclay went back to the jail and sat in the cell Trusdale had occupied. He sat there for ten minutes. It was cold enough to see his breath. He knew what he was waiting for, and eventually it came. He picked up the small bucket that had held Trusdale’s last drink of beer and vomited. Then he went into his office and stoked up the stove.
He was still there eight hours later, trying to read a book, when Abel Hines came in. He said, ‘You need to come down to the funeral parlor, Otis. There’s something I want to show you.’
‘What?’
‘No. You’ll want to see it for yourself.’
They walked down to the Hines Funeral Parlor & Mortuary. In the back room, Trusdale lay naked on a cooling board. There was a smell of chemicals and shit.
‘They load their pants when they die that way,’ Hines said. ‘Even men who go to it with their heads up. They can’t help it. The sphincter lets go.’
‘And?’
‘Step over here. I figure a man in your job has seen worse than a pair of shitty drawers.’
They lay on the floor, mostly turned inside out. Something gleamed in the mess. Barclay leaned closer and saw it was a silver dollar. He reached down and plucked it out of the crap.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Hines said. ‘Sonofabitch was locked up almost a month.’
There was a chair in the corner. Barclay sat down in it so heavily he made a little woof sound. ‘He must have swallowed it the first time when he saw our lanterns coming. And every time it came out, he cleaned it off and swallowed it again.’
The two men stared at each other.
‘You believed him,’ Hines said at last.
‘Fool that I am, I did.’
‘Maybe that says more about you than it does about him.’
‘He went on saying he was innocent right to the end. He’ll most likely stand at the throne of God saying the same thing.’
‘Yes,’ Hines said.
‘I don’t understand. He was going to hang. Either way, he was going to hang. Do you understand it?’
‘I don’t even understand why the sun comes up. What are you going to do with that cartwheel? Give it back to the girl’s mother and father? It might be better if you didn’t, because …’ Hines shrugged.
Because the Clines knew all along. Everyone in town knew all along. He was the only one that hadn’t known. Fool that he was.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,’ he said.
The wind gusted, bringing the sound of singing. It was coming from the church. It was the Doxology.
Thinking of Elmore Leonard
I have written poetry since I was twelve and fell in love for the first time (seventh grade). Since then I’ve written hundreds of poems, usually scribbled on scraps of paper or in half-used notebooks, and have published less than half a dozen of them. Most are stowed in various drawers, God knows where – I don’t. There’s a reason for this; I’m not much of a poet. That’s not lowballing, just the truth. When I do manage something I like, it’s mostly by accident.
The rationale for including this piece of work is that it (like the other poem in this collection) is narrative rather than lyric. The first draft – long lost, like my original take on the story that became ‘Mile 81’ – was written in college, and very much under the influence of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, most notably ‘My Last Duchess.’ (Another Browning poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’ became the basis of a series of books many of my Constant Readers know quite well.) If you’ve read Browning, you may hear his voice rather than mine. If not, that’s fine; it’s basically a story, like any other, which means it’s to be enjoyed rather than deconstructed.