A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

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.”

Al took it and said goodnight and returned to the unfinished room above the saloon, where he would live rent-free so long as men drank in droves below him. He unpacked the pewter.

He had not yet gone to sleep when the sun came up over the ridge. It was Sunday, his first in a strange new home. Soon it would be his only day off.

On that morning, he took the first of many Sunday walks up the mountain. He guessed the temperature to be fifty-two degrees. A fog sat wet on the lowland. He followed a switchbacked path through one of the few wide stretches of hardwood left. He came upon a plateau clearing where he encountered Sallie Hood.

She stood on a slant yard shaking out a rug. Her arms were strong. She snapped the square of braided wool like a bullwhip and watched the dust carry.

It seemed to him then that talking to a woman might prove orienting. He was brave on drink and the money in his pocket and lack of sleep and the witnessing of murder. He took off his hat and attempted to slick his hair. “Hello,” he called, and he walked straight to her and said who he was and how he’d come to be there. Up close, she was even better-looking than she’d been from afar.

She found him handsome, and he had the eyes of a good man, but when he spoke on the murder of his traveling companion, she backed up a pace toward the porch step where her rifle leaned.

He saw that she was afraid of him. “I’m sorry,” he said. He walked back toward the woods.

There was something true in his apology, and something familiar in his walk, that struck her then.

He was only ten yards off when she hollered, “Are you a coffee-drinking man?” When he turned and said that he was, she waved him back and invited him inside the big square house.

They sat at a long oak table and neither was afraid to stare or ask questions about family and homeplace. She told him she came from the Burke Mountain Methodist Hoods and that the Hoods had a plot just up the hollow where they’d buried their people for one hundred years.

He listened close to her every word.

Sallie was two years older than Al. She was possessed of a good singing voice. She had little meat on her bones, but her back was strong from work, and she spoke her mind if need be. She’d recently made the big square place on the hill a boarding house. It offered a bird’s eye view of what was coming down below. Her Daddy had built the house in 1851, and in the summers it was made a meeting grounds for the preachers of God’s good word. In ’75 he was named pastor at the new church in Welch. The rest of the family followed him there. Sallie did not.

Her mother and father and sisters and brothers knew better than to try and persuade Sallie of anything, and so she had watched them go and then she had painted a sign that read:

HOOD HOUSE

SALLIE HOOD, PROPRIETOR

50 CENTS PER DAY OR $3 PER WEEK

She regarded the man across the dining table that morning and found him delightfully unordinary. She knew, in fact, on that very first Sunday morning, that if he could kiss decent, she would marry Al Baach. And so, after a second cup of coffee, she said, “I am going to come around the table and kiss you now.”

He smiled.

She got up and came around and kissed him on the mouth, and it was to her liking.

He said, “The people here in southern West Virginia are the finest I have seen.”

“Just wait till I cook you supper.”

When Sallie made up her mind on something, it could not be unmade.

The twice-a-year preacher came through at Thanksgiving. He wed them at the Marrying Rock at two in the morning. A candlelight service, no witness in earshot but the crickets.