A Hanging at Cinder Bottom. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ He looked up at the clouds coming purple-black from the west and started toward the frame building. He waved Al to follow. “Hell,” he said, “You know what else?” He scraped his boots on the threshold and stepped in the empty doorframe. Al followed suit. “Rutherford can tote Vic up to White Sulphur and have him on the B&O mail train by sundown tomorrow.”

      “The little man will do this?”

      Trent nodded. “He’s got a rig for pulling coffins.”

      Inside, there were two men at the back. One sanded the floorboards on his knees. The other stood on a wobbly split-pole ladder and looked up through the empty rafters.

      “Go get supper,” Trent said, and the men stood and walked out between two wall studs.

      In the center of the room stood the most beautiful table Al Baach had ever seen. It was a great big round table, thick as a headstone at the edges, and it sat atop cast-iron legs. It carried only a stack of fine paper, and next to the paper, a silver inkwell and dip pen. Trent said, “I’ll tell you the story of this table.” He rubbed its thick lacquer. He ran his finger along its circle rings. He asked, “Are you a drinking man?”

      He poured from a hammered flask given to him by his company captain after the war. There were no chairs about, so they stood, each man lifting his glass with considerable frequency.

      He told Al how he’d fashioned the table from a white oak tree with a breast circumference of twenty and one- half feet. The tree had been felled in 1867 by his logging crew out of Pumpkintown, South Carolina. “I was high- climber,” Trent said. He said he bucked the logs himself and drove a length down the Saluda River to the mill, where he won, on a bet, the thick stump cross-section that now stood before them. He said he’d ridden the log knots up, whistling all the way.

      Al listened and drank.

      Trent could tell a story, and his whiskey flattered the palette of any sensible man or woman.

      He told of how it wasn’t long before he bought that timber outfit and it was his name branded on tens of thousands of floating butt cuts. “Everybody called them hot cuts on account of my initials.” Oliver was his middle name.

      He told of 1875, when he sold the company for four hundred times what he’d paid, and, like so many speculators before him, bought up considerable land tracts in southern West Virginia. Hill land he stripped of timber. Creek bed he built upon. He settled in Keystone and partnered with two local men, the Beavers brothers. Together, they opened a sawmill and a mine.

      Dynamited railbeds and opened coal seams had men primed for a rush on black gold. Clapboard and brick raced upward, and there were, at that time, too many thirsty workers and too few barstools. But Trent said he would keep pace, building two-story tenements and boarding houses and squared-off spaces meant to be saloons. He motioned all around with his hands, gesturing at the air beyond the open wall studs. “Virginia ought not to have given up McDowell County,” he told Al Baach, “for this is where fortunes will sprout.”

      And so it was that on that September day, Al Baach gave over the one hundred and twenty-three dollars to a powerful rich man who vowed he’d wire it to Vic Moon’s widow and boy.

      Trent picked up the pen and dipped it. He wrote the contract in a fashion that was nearly indecipherable, but his numericals were in order. They were readable and substantial, the kind of numbers that allowed ample room for a man like Al to save in a hurry.

      In those numbers, Al Baach could foresee a time close at hand when he’d buy the saloon outright and do as he pleased with it.

      He said, “The many men who come here to work, they will need shoe repair.”

      Trent nodded. “Isn’t but one cobbler, and he’s missin an eye.”

      “When there is no man at the bar, I repair boots and shoes for money?”

      “You mean to say extra money? Make something on the side for yourself?”

      “Yes, on the side.”

      Trent smiled. “Well hell, by all means.” And he held out the pen, and Al took it.

      There were words put together in English that he sometimes couldn’t follow but that he nonetheless enjoyed for their thick combined sound on the air. On the side. By all means. His insides were warm with drink and his head tingled as he signed his name where Trent pointed a finger.

      “You are a lucky man, Jew Baach,” he said, “for the real money always comes to those who get there first.”

      He poured the rest of his flask into their glasses and they raised them.

      They walked along Elkhorn Creek and toured what would become the saloon. Trent went for more whiskey while Al unloaded Vic Moon’s wagon. He opened the crates with a pry bar and saved a wide length of board. Upstairs, he set it on the floor and put down a blanket. He stretched out and closed his eyes. He would soon enough be rid of the memory of his paperboard bed in the cigar factory storeroom, of his foul steamship berth. He sat up on his elbows, and through the open ceiling rafters of what would become his room, Al watched the sun fall behind the hill.

      At midnight, drunk, he watched Rutherford trot his horse out of town with a fresh-cut coffin in tow, the rig drawing lines in the dirt.

      He stood in the dark with Trent, a lantern on the ground between them.

      Rutherford winced at the buggy seat’s unforgiving springs. He muttered about there being not enough moonlight to see. He gave a wave as he passed below the balcony veranda of a long-roofed house. The two men perched up there did not wave in return. They leaned in slat-back chairs, their feet propped on the balustrade. They were the Beavers brothers. They liked to think they saw everything from their high covered domicile.

      Trent could see their cigar tips glowing. He watched his man pass beneath. He watched Harold Beavers lean sidewise in his chair and take something from a covered basket on the porch floor.

      Harold stood up clutching a pair of writhing black rat snakes. He leaned over the rail and aimed and tossed the snakes upon the passing Rutherford.

      One landed on his shoulder, the other on the swell of his trail saddle. He screamed as a small child would scream and he pulled free his boots from their stirrups and leapt to the ground, where he clawed at the mud, pulling himself from the scene, panting in the high notes of a woman in labor.

      The Beavers brothers laughed as hard as they had in months, and so too did Henry Trent as he watched from afar. When he’d understood what he’d seen, Al Baach followed suit, chuckling uncomfortable at what evidently passed for humor in his new environs.

      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.”

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