A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Al rapped his middle boy’s door, three quick.

Abe had heard someone coming on the stairs. He picked up the spike nail and put it back in his pocket.

When he opened, there stood his Daddy, sweat drops squeezing forth from the pores in his nose. Behind him was Jake, who smiled and pushed his way in and tried to make himself as tall as his younger brother by standing straight. He stuck his face in Abe’s. “Don’t forget whose room it was first,” he said. “Don’t forget who can whup you in a fair fight.”

Abe wouldn’t forget. After Goldie, it was Jake who knew him best.

Al closed the door behind him. “Do you play at Trent’s table?” he asked.

“Who’s tending bar?”

“You answer my question Abraham.” Al spoke loud and set his jaw. None of the boys would ever forget who could whup all three.

Abe said, “I played at his table and I won.”

Al shook his head and looked at his hands. He wanted to use them to choke his middle boy, but it would serve no end. Al had known it the first time he’d ever switched Abe, who was ten at the time and had been seen hopping a slow coal train. While Al swung the switch, the boy had whistled with his eyes shut, and he’d spat on the ground when it was done.

Choking the boy wouldn’t steer him clean. Al crossed his arms.

Abe thought his Daddy looked old then, and he thought Jake did too.

Jake had a pint bottle in his back pocket. He had a pencil behind one ear and a skinny cigar behind the other. He was supposed to be fixing the storeroom shelves.

“Who’s tending bar?” Abe asked again.

“Big Bill. He come over with me,” Jake said. He was dark-handsome like Abe, but his nose was bigger and his chin weaker.

Abe knew by the way his brother said “come over with me” that Jake had been at Fat Ruth’s again. He’d been lifting from the saloon’s money box for two years, just enough to dip his wick once a week. Abe said, “Bill’s not well.”

“He’s better now.” Jake put his thumb to a corner edge of peeling wallpaper. “Worry about your own health Abe,” he said. “Be dead soon enough you get in with Trent.” He walked to the closed wardrobe and knocked on it. “Never was well made, was it?”

“Goldie won’t like seeing her Daddy at the barback,” Abe said. “He’s ill.”

“Bill will be okay.” Al uncrossed his arms and breathed hard through his nose. He said, “Abraham, Henry Trent has nothing for you. You think he gives you everything, but he gives you nothing in the end.” He opened and closed his hands. “As he gives, he takes.”

There was a noise outside the door and the three of them turned their heads.

It was Sallie. She’d swung it open without knocking and looked at the men. She toted an unfamiliar baby girl on her hipbone. Behind her was Sam, the only Baach boy forever in need of sunlight. He was skinny as ever and fourteen years old.

“Stand up straight Samuel,” Al told him.

The boy did so and followed his mother inside.

“Shut the door,” Al told him.

Sallie said to leave it open. She looked at Abe when she spoke. “We’re not staying.”

The years had not been easy on Sallie, but they’d fortified her resolve. After Samuel’s birth in ’83, there was a still-born. A year after that, there was another, and for a time, Sallie only lay on her back in bed. She’d taken one basting spoon of chicken broth per night for two months. One day she came out of it and never looked back. The Baach boys did what she told them, and Goldie and Big Bill helped at Hood House when it was needed, but mostly Sallie ran the place, and she did so with considerable attention to cleanliness and well-kept books. In ’95, she took in the unwanted baby of a Tennessee girl working at Fat Ruth Malindy’s and named her Leila. With Goldie spelling her from time to time, Sallie attended that child’s every need, sleeping next to her crib up at the second house on the hill. At Christmastime in ’96, a wealthy friend of her father’s and his thin barren wife adopted Leila, and Sallie had nearly taken to her bed again. Instead she cried for a night and half a day. Then she stopped. “Sometimes, the eyes can’t keep from crying,” she’d told her boys. “They’re pushing out the poison.”

Now Sallie’s hair was mostly gray. She’d kept it long. She shook her head slow and said to Abe, “You look guilty.”

The unfamiliar baby tossed her little covered head and made a noise.

Sam tapped his foot on a floorboard by the bed. He suspected his brother of hiding money underneath.

They had all known that another motherless child was coming to Hood House to live because Sallie had proclaimed it and Goldie had backed her up. The child was born December 30th in a bed at Fat Ruth’s. Her mother had left before sunrise on New Year’s Day.

Abe regarded the baby and thought on how to answer his mother’s accusation of guilt. “I am guilty of making the kind of money that will build you another house, and another one after that. Anybody that wants to live on the hill can do it in—”

“I thought that maple baby carriage was in here,” Sallie said.

“Storeroom,” Al answered. “But steel brake is broken.” He looked at his watch and walked out the open door.

Jake pulled the half-spent cigar from behind his ear and lit it. He said, “Somebody’s got that carriage loaded with pickled egg jars.”

Sallie hadn’t looked away from Abe. She swung the baby to opposite hipbone. “Samuel!” Sallie called.

“Yes ma’am?” He’d sat down on Abe’s bed and was fixing to recline.

“Go unload the carriage and roll it to the street.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Jake opened the dresser drawer and looked at the newspaper lining. He slid his fingers underneath.

Abe turned, stepped to the dresser, and slammed it shut, Jake pulling clear just in time. “Don’t forget whose room it is now,” Abe told his brother.

The door closed, and they turned, and their mother was gone.

“You got the gold pieces?” Abe asked.

Jake produced a small burlap sack tied with twine.

Abe took it and tossed it on the bed. He retrieved his jacket from the wardrobe, stuck in one arm, and pulled the sleeve inside out. In the silk lining there was a long, buttoned sheath at the seam. He loaded into it, one by one, the little cedar pieces painted gold. They were hand-cut by Jake, just like the saloon’s poker chips. Abe rebuttoned, righted the sleeve and put the jacket back on.

Jake laughed. “Goldie sew that?”

“She is possessed of many talents.”

He opened a vest button and put a hand inside. There, in a seam in the lining, were four slick pockets where he customarily kept two of each bill, one to ten. He took out a five and handed it to Jake. “Just watch you don’t catch Cupid’s plague,” he told him.

Jake smiled. “Whatever you say highpockets.” He shook his head. He admired the insistent spirit with which his younger brother lived. He only hoped that Abe would stay alive long enough to tamp it down, and that tamping it down might buy him a few more years, and that those few years might carry him to the time in a man’s life when he quits carousing, when he’s content to read books again, like he’d done as a boy, and Jake and Abe and Sam might get old together, telling stories about how it is to go bald or to watch your shot-pouch sag to your knees.

“You got any of that Mingo shine?” Jake asked.

Abe shook his head no. “I’ve got to get downstairs.” He took a fresh deck from a stack on the dresser.

“You planning to play at Trent’s hotel?”