21 minute read
THE HANGING by Doug Gray WELL DONE! Fiction
THE HANGING by Doug Gray
On Christmas Eve of the year my mother ran off, my father hanged three men in the cedar lot behind the barn. It’s been many years now, I had just turned nine, but it might as well have been yesterday. The night air was brittle cold, and I stomped around, flattening the frost-stiffened grass, inhaling deeply and blowing out long breaths, pretending the thick plumes were cigarette smoke. It was the first night of a new moon and so dark I could barely see beyond my nose. Pop’s men had driven straight from the road and across the harvested cornfield, their tires popping and crunching against the stobs and stalks, and parked their trucks up close, so everything played out in a semicircle of harsh brightness, like footlights on a primitive stage. Long shadows stretched to the edge of the clearing before getting swallowed by a thick wall of cedars. An ancient chestnut oak sat at the edge of the field, the old tree already claiming a piece of the land when my great-great-grandfather exchanged a wad of sweaty bills for four hundred acres of rocky hills and hollers at the foot of Monteagle Mountain. Now, from a jutting, bare limb as thick as a man’s leg, three ropes were slung up and over, dangling a few feet apart. Stark in the smoky headlights were three men, shoulder to shoulder. Nooses draped their necks to the middle of their chests. Rope bound their hands in front. The man in the middle was bald with a thick, red scar running diagonally across the top of his head. I knew him better than the other two because he was the one who always kept a gun strapped under his suit coat when he drove me to school and Pop to his appointments. They called him Shug, short for Sugar, because that’s what his granny had nicknamed him as a boy. That fact came one morning on the way to school, but Shug had glanced over at me in the passenger seat and winked, saying he’d greatly appreciate it if I didn’t share that little bit of history. He was always nice to me and particularly polite to my mother, and it troubled me to see him standing there with a rope around his neck. We struggled to avoid each other’s eyes. I had seen the other two fellows around from time to time, both a part of Shug’s team, but I didn’t know their names. I supposed right then it didn’t much matter, because now, they were simply two stocky bookends to the tall, slender volume of Shug.
Most all of Pop’s men were there that night, scattered in the dark alongside their vehicles, proof of their presence limited to an occasional metallic snap and the leaping flame of a Zippo, their featureless faces leaning in for a light and just as quickly receding. If any of them questioned my father’s decision to have me in attendance, it wasn’t aired. Pop had been on the phone most of the morning rounding them up, speaking quietly into the receiver. I was out of school for Christmas break, and we lived out in the middle of nowhere, so I sat at the kitchen table playing with my plastic soldiers, pretending I was fighting in the Korean War like my Uncle Johnny, while eavesdropping on my father conducting business. He was the boss—all his men called him Big Ben, for his size and his status—and now he was the one who walked up to those three men, one at a time, and yanked at their nooses to tighten them. Same as he did my church tie every Sunday. After each cinch, he stood back, checking his work, and spoke to each one quietly. He got in their faces and looked them in the eye and said, “Now you know what you did, don’t you?” And I guess they did because they just dropped their heads and didn’t try to argue. He asked them all that same question. “You know what you did, don’t you?” He saved Shug until last, and, when he walked up to Shug, it was different. Something heavy passed between them, like something curdled and sour, between grief and anger. Different in the way his hand hesitated before he reached for the knot, but, when he grabbed it and pulled, Shug winced.
I never knew my father to ever get mad over anything and I only saw his eyes fill up once. “An angry man is a compromised man,” he’d tell me. And he’d go on to say that the Bible calls on a man to refrain from anger and turn from wrath. Over the years, I was witness to many fifteen second sermons. Some took, some didn’t. After I turned fifteen, he started taking me along on some of his business appointments. Our destinations were bars tucked into remote crevices in the hollers, stocked with tables, chairs, and a jukebox, floors tacky with beer spills and air so smoky as to be barely breathable, where people played cards and rolled dice into the early morning hours, drinking bootlegged whiskey straight from the bottle. There were stronger things to be had for those who wanted them, things to smoke, snort, or shoot up, but that sort of business took place outside in the shadows of the bar or behind the fogged windows of the cars and trucks scattered outside the reach of the lights in the graveled parking lots. One thing was certain: if you wanted to drink or drug in our neck of the woods, you did it through my father. There were those who invariably attempted to start up some small businesses of their own, but they disappeared from the foot of the mountain like the Rapture. Every so often, a brave soul introduced a referendum to move the county from dry to wet, but it was always soundly defeated at the polls.
Some evenings the county sheriff or some of his deputies would show up, looking uncomfortable and out of place in their civilian clothes, hatless with their hair slicked back and shiny, trying to blend in and have some fun just like their neighbors. Or the district judge who would be ferried to the bar by his driver and then be carefully deposited by a half dozen strong hands into the backseat of his sedan a few hours later. In my father’s establishments, rules were blurred, and identities were suspended. You checked your past and future at the door and picked them up on the way out. There was always an undercurrent of tension in those places, tension that sometimes spilled over into the margins of violence. My father had men to handle those times, and those men handled them quickly and efficiently. Sometimes it required Pop’s personal attention. More than once I saw my father march straight up to drunks, huge men fighting mad over a poker hand or some woman, a few with knives clenched or pistols cocked and pointed. He would walk right up to them and reach out and lay his big hand on their shoulder and squeeze. Just one good, hard squeeze. And like magic, all the air bled out of those fellows, and they calmed right down. It was like he squeezed the anger and wrath right out of them.
As freezing as it was that night, no one seemed to be in a hurry. After Pop finished speaking to each of the men, he stepped back several paces and viewed the scene. He lit a cigarette and stood there with it between his lips, smoke circling his head, his hands on his hips. The only sound that wandered into that lit-up clearing was a hound in chase up on a knoll of thickets across the river. It sounded a lot closer than it was, the way sound carries through bitter cold. The sharp scent of green wood smoke sifted through the thin air. It started to snow a little from a single dark cloud passing overhead, and flecks of ice swarmed like gnats in the beams of the headlights. Everybody looked up like they were trying to figure out what in the world it was that was falling around them. In seconds, the rogue cloud moved past, and the snow stopped as quickly as it started. From the woods, a deer yelped and went crashing through the brush, and everyone, including the three fellows with ropes cinching their necks, looked in the direction of the sound. Seconds slid by and became minutes. Somebody cleared his throat and spat.
I was just old enough to practice a basic level of rational thought, and I couldn’t help but wonder what those men had done to deserve such an evening, and, for some reason, at that very moment, I started thinking about why mother had left. My young mind hadn’t cataloged the necessary sins and grievances that would add up to a hanging nor which of my failings or misbehaviors had been the one that finally drove my mother away. I had this weird feeling that the two things had something to do with each other, but, to this day, I don’t know back then how I managed to connect my mother’s leaving with these men’s hanging. But a time would eventually come when I discovered my instinct was dead-on.
She left on the ninth of November, a week after my birthday, with Pop having been gone most of the week handling business. I awoke that morning knowing something was different. The house was dead quiet except for the steady tick of the clock at my bedside. I didn’t smell breakfast cooking, and I strained for the sound of my mother’s slippers flip-flopping from room to room against the plank floor. I pulled myself from bed and walked into the kitchen in my pajamas. The first thing I saw were her wedding rings on the table at the spot where Pop drank his coffee and a tented note in front of the chair where I sat. I took the note and opened it and read “My dear Campbell” in my mother’s perfect script. I read no further and quickly refolded the note and set it back on the table. A bolt of premonition threatened to take my legs out from under me. I thought if I ignored the note, denied its existence, in a short time my mother would appear at the door wearing her pretty smile, her arms trying to balance sacks of groceries. Or stroll out of the bathroom in her light blue, fuzzy robe, rubbing lotion on her hands and smelling like toothpaste and shampoo. I went to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat in the quiet to watch the sun grow brighter outside the window over the sink. I don’t recall moving a muscle, and when Pop got home a couple of hours later, the first thing he asked me was why I wasn’t in school. Then he saw the rings and the note. He picked up the note, plopped down at the table, and read it. When he finished, he wadded it up and put it in his pocket.
“What did she say?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Well, she wrote it to me so it must have said something.” I squirmed a little in my chair because nobody ever corrected my father. Ever. Especially not me.
“It don’t matter, boy,” he said, standing and walking over to look out the window facing the road. “She’s gone either way.”
I had seen the tears starting up in his eyes before he turned away. There wasn’t much that could scare me that morning more than I already was, but that did. I left the table and went to my room and got dressed. I didn’t see any reason not to go to school. I wasn’t about to give up that easy. No matter what my father thought. I figured that the best chance I had for my mother to come back was to go to school and take my mind off things, so by the time Shug picked me up and brought me home, she would be waiting at the door like always, excited I was home and asking about my day.
When I returned to the kitchen, face washed and hair plastered down, my father had bacon frying and was cracking eggs.
“No school, today, son,” he said. He took two plates from the cabinet and put them on the table. “But don’t think we’re going to make a habit of this.”
Now I stood shivering in that clearing wondering what hurt worse, that morning I found my mother gone or this mess that was playing out in front of me, when my father flicked his cigarette away and said, “Let’s go boys, let’s get this done.” At that, three of Pop’s biggest men marched behind that old oak, and each grabbed a loose end of rope. Shug sagged a little at the knees and let out something between a whimper and a moan.
All eyes were on Pop. When he nodded and said, “God be with you,” the three big men turned their backs to the tree, shouldered their ropes, and leaned forward with a grunt, staggering till their feet found purchase. The nooses lost their slack, tightening just under the men’s chins, stretching their necks, and lifting them to their tiptoes. Then Pop’s men trudged forward. The hanging men surrendered their footing, and, as their bodies rose from the ground, they kicked and shuddered, grabbing at their necks with bound hands, scratching and scrabbling to work their fingers under the nooses. They were instantly frantic, like they had just realized they were being hanged, and they needed to do something about it. But it was too late. Their eyes bulged from their reddening faces, and the noises leaking from their mouths sounded more like a pen of spooked hogs than any sound a human could manage.
I spun away and huffed huge clouds of breath toward a zillion stars jabbing their way out from the back of the night sky and forced myself into another night, another place, another time. Not that many months ago, just my mother and myself, and our words floating around us.
“It’s your daddy’s birth sign, too,” she had said, her voice soft and distant, like it was coming from the heavens themselves. “Both you and Ben were born under Scorpio.”
It had been a perfect night, the moon, a clipped fragment of ivory. Crickets and cicadas had worked themselves into a frenzy, and a breeze carried the bass reverberations of bullfrogs from the river. A carpet of mature clover and scattered thickets of honeysuckle filled our noses with a sweet wine. We had settled out in the middle of the field surrounding our house, lying on doubled-up quilts, our heads almost touching and our bodies, hers long and lean and mine stubby and short, forming a lopsided vee. This was another of the nights my father wasn’t around, choosing instead to roam the hollers, enjoying being Big Ben and navigating the far reaches of his dark, mountain-shrouded universe. The two of us spent many summer nights like that, locating stars and spotting planets that had wandered close enough to the sun to borrow its light. Sometimes we caught the streaks of icy-tailed comets and the steady, mute blinks of planes heading to places we both figured we’d never see. When she introduced me to Scorpio that night, she said that like a real scorpion, it scuttled across the sky through the months and seasons, always changing its hiding place. “It’s a sneaky little devil,” she said, “But if you’re patient and look hard enough, you’ll always find it.”
When I asked her why it moved around so much, she said it was because the universe was always expanding, like a flower slowly opening in spring, and that was what kept all the stars on the move.
“Everything is in motion,” she said. “It’s what gives it life and keeps it safe.”
I asked her how she knew so much about these things.
She laughed. “Well, I went to school, Campbell,” she said. “All the way through college. Did you believe your momma never went to school?”
I told her I’d never thought about it. That I thought she was always just my mother and Pop’s wife.
I followed her finger as she located Libra and Sagittarius, and then, moving her hand toward the south, there it was, Scorpio. She pointed out the claws and the tail.
“There in the tail is where the stinger is, Campbell. That one up there is harmless enough, but if you run across any down here, try and stay clear of that stinger.”
I had the feeling she was talking about more than insects, but I didn’t want to break the spell with questions.
Then she put her hand next to my face and had me follow her finger to a star in the center of the scorpion, a star so bright it glowed red, like a wind-blown ember.
“That’s Antares,” she said. “The heart.” She sat up and looked toward our house which was completely dark except for the faint buttery glow cast through the curtains by our living room lamp. She grew quiet, but after a minute, she turned back and took my face between her palms.
“Even something as deadly as a scorpion has a heart, Campbell. Sometimes you just have to look harder to find it. You have to look past the stinger. And no matter how bad things get, there’s always a way out. Sometimes the way out is only in your head, at least until you can figure how to get out for real. Use your mind when you can’t use your legs.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said. “I don’t think my mind is smart enough.”
My mother smiled.
“Oh, your mind is plenty smart, Campbell,” she said. Then there was a shift in the mood, in her voice. She stared in the direction of the woods at the edge of the field, like she was trying to make out something in the shadows. “If I didn’t think so, I’d go crazy worrying about you.” She was quiet for a few seconds and then she sat up and pulled me up with her, embracing me so tightly I thought she was going to break my ribs. When she released me, she leaned back on her hands and smiled, the earlier mood returning. “And you know something, Campbell? I don’t worry about you at all.”
And now with all the fury and racket that was boiling over in the glare of those headlights, I searched the sky, brushing away everything in front of me and around me, looking for that scorpion. I shut my ears off and tuned my eyes in. And there it was, Scorpio, seeming so much larger than I had ever seen it before, the stinger a sharp point of light. The heart was right where I knew it would be, and I grabbed onto that deep red pulsing with everything I had. Just me and Antares. I clenched my jaw and concentrated with everything I could muster until every last one of those hateful sounds was snatched up and carried away across the tops of the cedars, over the dark mountains to the east, into endless light years of space, to be sucked up like poison into that glittering scorpion. As precious seconds formed themselves into silent minutes, there was no longer a clearing alive with the chaos of struggle, no ungodly commotion, no keening and thrashing, just my mother back at the house humming and working a spoon through a simmering pot of soup, waiting for me to come home and get my bath.
At last, now somewhere beyond the reaches of my mind, the racket tapered off, evaporating from a roar to a whisper, finally leaving only the creaks and groans of frozen limbs high up in that oak, like a door swinging on warped hinges. There was nothing from across the river. That dog had either taken down its prey or had grown tired of the hunt. When Pop’s men released the ropes, it sounded like burlap sacks fat with feed corn colliding with the hard ground. When I could make myself move, I turned back and all three men lay stone still, legs and arms sprawled, their posture almost peaceful, like babies napping in their cribs. Steam rose from their bodies and formed a milky vapor in the headlights.
Big Ben walked to the men and put two fingers against each of their throats just below the jawbone. After a minute, he nodded to his boys, and, as they busied themselves with the bodies, he started toward me, taking long strides, trailing his giant shadow across the clearing to where I stood. I couldn’t get as much breath as I wanted, and my heart thumped against the quilting of my heavy coat. When he got to me, he dropped to his knees to get us eye to eye. He studied my face for a long minute before he reached out and mussed my hair. He squinted and gave me the look he always did when he needed to read my mind. Then he leaned in until the tops of our foreheads bumped and with his big hands gave both my arms a good, solid squeeze.
“You alright, boy?” he asked.
That night, there was but one answer.
“Yessir,” I told him, straining to keep my teeth from chattering. “I’m alright.”
Of course, I wasn’t. Not then, not now, and maybe not ever. It wouldn’t have occurred to me back then that I had a choice. To not be alright. I didn’t know that time would eventually strengthen me and diminish my father in equal quantities. To imagine that Big Ben could ever be diminished was heresy. Or that the time would come when truth was a viable option rather than a stark risk. That night, I was Big Ben’s man child and had been from the very moment I drew my first lungful of air, still slippery from my mother’s womb. The only son of an only son. And the truth is, that’s the main reason why never once in all these years have I even thought of faulting my mother for what she did. For disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving me to manage my father and grow up in his shadow. My mother had a choice, and she made it. That was the advantage of being a wife and not blood. And why when we finally met again those many years later, she offered no apology and I expected none.
“Well, good,” he said, standing and hoisting me to his shoulders, lifting me so high I felt I needed to duck to keep my head from scraping the sky. Behind us truck motors turned over one after the other, and headlights reared and jostled through the field, the hard earth snapping under cold tires. Finding the blacktop, they turned single file in the direction of town and convoyed down the road, taillights shrinking to red pinpoints before being completely swallowed by the distance and the night. My father let out a shout that came tumbling back in a wave of echoes from the frozen recesses of the holler. No words, just a sound, like something hard and cold breaking loose.
Then he lifted me from his shoulders, set me on the ground, and grabbed my gloved hand with his. Above me, Scorpio crept forward a few inches before skidding to a stop.
“Then let’s me and you head to the house, son,” he said. “And see what Santy brought you.”
