A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (17 page)

That same night, Ben Moon took young Abe to the home of his personal tailor, who awoke and fed Abe amber whiskey before stitching the cut closed with his finest six-cord
thread, and two weeks later, when his face had healed sufficient, Abe was sent back to the tailor, this time with a note from Moon to make the young man four fine suits. Moon had come to understand the rarity of Abe’s intelligence and hand mechanics by then, and it wasn’t long before he sent him out on the mainlines to every East Coast town worth a damn, and in those towns Abe played the role of card salesman for the Radiant Moon Playing Card Company, a square paper by all appearances. He wore his fine suits and carried a leather grip full of sealed and unsealed card decks, but Abe Baach was no square paper. He was a confidence man with five fake names. In April of 1910, where he was headed, he’d not be able to use any of them.

THE PULPIT WOULD HAVE WHEELS

April 21, 1910

The journey from Baltimore to Keystone had been a long and fractured locomotion. When the long train crossed the state line into West Virginia, Abe tapped his foot seven times upon the rumbling carriage floor, one for each year he’d been gone. Despite the lengthy absence, he knew every high trestle, every roaring downgrade. He recognized in the echoed sound of the steam whistle a loneliness only heard where hills grow close as camel humps, the narrows between them waiting on floodwater.

The engineer blew his whistle again at the last crossing before town. The engine slowed at the switch, its brakes rattling hard. Inside the passenger car, Abe watched the people sway together in perfect time, a traveler’s muted dance. Their fingers and toes were gripped and steadied by habit,
and they looked through windows bleared by coal dust. The hillsides rolled by slow on either side, steep-banked and the purest green. It was early afternoon. The sun held its angle and warmed the earth.

Abe sat alone in a wide-backed coach chair. His big leather grip was flat on the seat beside him, a duffel on top. He studied what passed outside his window. A tipple clutching the hill. A line of beehive coke ovens with two men to a hole, one for the wheelbarrow and the other for the shovel. The train lurched. He could see up ahead now the bridge at Elkhorn Creek, the square brick buildings on Railroad Avenue, more of them than when he’d left. Between the buildings were packed-dirt alleys staked and strung across with clothesline—white sheets agitating in the wind, silent, like flags.

The train slowed at the new N&W passenger station. It was of the board-and-batten variety, its tin roof sharp-angled and striped by the shadow of two chimneys.
KEYSTONE
was painted in red across the building’s side. Out front, two buckboard wagons were stacked double with whiskey kegs. A boy stood and waited for someone, his trousers hitched high above his waist, a man’s black bowler hat in his hand. Beside him, a policeman leaned against a post and checked his watch. The train came to a full stop. It hissed. Abe tucked his chin, picked up his suitcase and duffel, and jumped from the coach to the platform before the brakeman could set out the stool. It was half past noon.

He walked past the policeman with his head low and his hat pulled down. He nodded hello to a good-looking woman in a plaid skirt, and he snorted at the wind to catch sin’s direction. It blew from where it always had, the windows of the saloons and houses of ill fame across Elkhorn Creek. It blew steady from Cinder Bottom.

The Alhambra Hotel was due south, just past the bend. He did not so much as turn his head in its direction.

Nearing the bridge, Abe regarded the water below. It rolled quiet over jutted stones, its color black and its level as low as Abe had ever seen it in spring. Still, evidence of flood times abounded on the banks. A wardrobe with the doors torn off. A bed frame split in two. Like bones in the mud, they held until the next one came. The bridge’s boards were fresh cut, and they’d be fresh cut again before long.

At the middle, he spat.

He breathed in the smell of sawdust and dirty water and coke-oven ash. He looked across the bridge to the Bottom, the place that had born and raised him. The streets were yet to be cobbled, a testament to dirt’s resilience. Men and women stood upon them and talked, their features unknown from where Abe stood. There were more of them than he’d ever seen, and payday was still a day off.

He put down his suitcase and duffel long enough to adjust his new pistol, secure at the small of his back. Then he walked across the bridge and onto the main thoroughfare, where a man had fallen down drunk next to a horse-drawn
wagon. He was snoring, and three little boys stopped to watch him, passing a poke of hard candy and laughing. One of them kicked the drunk in the armpit, but the man did not stir. The owner of the horse and buggy emerged from the doors of the wholesale grocers. He shooed the boys, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled for a policeman. Four of them leaned against the slats of a saloon up ahead. They looked, then went back to talking.

Abe walked down the middle of Bridge Street. It was good to be back in a place cinched by hills. On all sides, they rose up and watched over man’s thin attempt at living.

He noted the new clocktower, the fancy striped awnings that stuck out everywhere, some of them lined in fringe. Telegraph wires hung between rough-hewn poles full of knotholes. Men stood on second-floor balconies, and here and there spilled perfectly good beer on pedestrians below. One of them whistled to any woman he supposed a whore, and if she looked in his direction, he’d proclaim his love in a song of questionable discernibility and origin. He hollered the chorus: “And my knob’s as hard as hick-ry and it’s stiff as a churn.”

When Abe had left Keystone, there were three whorehouses. Now, there were twenty.

Everywhere was the smell of whiskey and beer, the way it lingers and heats in the sun. He looked no one in the eye. He stepped into an unnamed side street and the crowd thinned some. A girl leaned against the iron post of a fence and called, “Hey sugarcube,” but it was unclear if he was the
man in question. He walked on until he came to the corner of Wyoming Street. He could see it now, his daddy’s place. The sign across the front of the building was in disrepair.
Saloon
it read, and underneath,
A. L. Baach & Sons
. It was as if he were looking at the place for the first time.

He only glanced at Fat Ruth’s, where an unfamiliar woman in pink stood by the window, before he approached his old home.

There was no fancy awning, only a stoop, and next to it, a wheat-flour barrel acting as a table. It was an old cask with half-rotted staves. Three men sat around it talking, each blacked in coal dust save a clean-wiped spot at the eyes and mouth. Abe nodded in their direction and walked inside.

It may as well have been midnight in there. The window shades were drawn tight—sharp, thin lines of sunlight carried inside a few feet then died. The air was heavy and rank. Vinegar water streaked the floor, and its smell pulled at memories the way smells sometimes will. Two black men sat at the bar. Coke-yarders, both of them, coming off third shift. They turned to look at him, then kept at their conversation on the monetary risks of raising roosters to fight. Next to them, a mop handle leaned against the bar top, its bucket base of dirty vinegar water still settling.

A heavy tarpaulin covered what had been the little stage. Beneath it was the stopped progress of Jake’s skilled carpentry, a cobwebbed affair of grandiose intent. A plan never realized.

From the storage room in back, there came the sound of breaking glass and mumbled cursing. A moment passed, the swinging door kicked free, and a young man stepped through it carrying a five-gallon kerosene can in one hand and a jug of whiskey in the other. He was tall and thin and he wore an uneven beard. “You two better sip it slow,” he said to the men at the bar. “I broke one gettin it off the high shelf.” Then he saw Abe standing there.

“Hello Samuel,” Abe said.

Sam Baach had grown hard and wiry and his teeth wore the stain of all that he put to his lips and swallowed. His nose had been broken. He had a voice like an old man.

He set the kerosene can and bottle on the bar top. His mouth went dry. There was a tingle at the backs of his knees. “Abe?” he said.

The men at the bar frowned and traded a look. They had heard the name.

He took off his hat and left his luggage where it lay. His strides toward Sam were long and he spread his arms wide on the way. It was an embrace known only to brothers. Abe cracked a couple of vertebrae when he squeezed. “Boy, you are a pawpaw knocker aren’t you?”

“No taller than when you last saw me,” Sam said. They stepped back from each other and cocked their heads and beheld. Sam was the first to look away.

The men at the bar looked at one other again and nodded. It was, in fact, who they thought it was, and though
they’d lived in Keystone only two years, they had heard tell of the man, and they’d suspected, as most did, that Abraham Baach would not ever come home.

He took a seat at the bar and turned on his stool to face the two men. “Afternoon,” he said.

They nodded. The tall man was missing an eye. The short one wore his weight funny and had a chest like a woman’s.

Sam chewed his lip and attempted to regulate his breathing.

Abe smiled as he took a small cigar from his pocket and held it up between thumb and fingers. He put the end of it in his ear and pushed, and when it was all the way in, he stuck his finger inside the canal and pushed some more. Then he coughed and pulled the cigar from his lips.

The short man sneezed and shook his head. He’d seen some things, but he’d not ever seen a man stick a cigar in his ear and pull it out his mouth.

“So you the Abe Baach they speak on?” the tall man asked.

Abe smiled. He regarded the pinched hole where the man’s eye had once resided, a belly button now, empty at the center. He said, “If they speak on a man with testes spiked like sweet gum seeds, then yes, I reckon I am one and the same.”

The tall man laughed. The other was not possessed of an imaginative humor.

Abe closed his fist upon the little cigar. There was a faint sound of paper tearing. “You gentlemen look to be making the notable move from ale to whiskey,” Abe said. “I wonder
if you’d mind relocating to another establishment so my brother and I might visit awhile.” He opened his fist, and in it were two Morgan silver dollars. He slapped the coins on the bar top and pushed them forward.

“Wouldn’t mind at’all,” the tall man answered, and he examined his coin before pocketing it.

“I wonder too,” Abe said, “if you’d mind sparing folks mention of my arrival. It would be premature to speak on it just yet.”

Both men nodded. “Lips are sealed,” the tall man said. He’d rightly noted a vague danger should they break their word.

“I’m obliged to you,” Abe said.

They slid from their stools and walked out the door so that for a moment, sunlight lit the place, and Abe listened close to the croak of the rusty spring and the slap of the wooden screen door when it shut. It was a sound he could listen to all day.

Sam had a shiver about him. He pulled at his beard and watched his older brother. “Jake alive?” Abe asked.

“As of this morning, yes, but not by much.”

“What happened to him?”

“Shot. One in the chest, one in the belly, a graze at the neck.” He pointed to the spots on himself as he spoke of them. “One of em still in there. Doctor Warble said blood poisoning.”

The door sounded again and Abe hid himself by putting his hand to his face as if dozing.

Sam squinted to be sure of the patron’s identity. “How do Chesh,” he said. Then he gestured to hold up. “Come back in ten minutes.”

Before the young man nodded and left, he sized up the fellow hiding his face at the bar.

“Who was it?” Abe said.

“Nobody.”

Nobody was Cheshire Whitt, son of councilman J. T. Whitt, owner of the
McDowell Times
and founder of the Negro Presbyterian Church. Cheshire was the only Whitt to associate regularly with folks in the Bottom, and his father did not like it, for he believed the black man would only make his mark by honest means.

Abe said, “Who shot Jake?”

“Italian fella, name of Dallara. Carpenter. Two of em was thick as glue.” Sam cleared his throat. “Happened up on Buzzard Branch Saturday last. Early evenin, three shots. Jake run out of the woods hollerin and carryin on, blood all over. One of the girls from Fat Ruth’s seen him, but he was on the ground time we got to him. Never been awake since. He won’t just die like most.”

“The carpenter?”

“Captured up at Matewan. They’re keeping him up there in the jail. Rutherford’s one that caught him, tracked him to a hideout up some hollow. Rifle was up on Buzzard Branch, three rounds spent.”

“Where is Jake now?”

“Up at the house.”

“I reckon I’ll head up there.” Abe stared at the wall for a moment, then shook his head.

Sam’s nerves were getting the better of him. It was as if a ghost had walked in the door. He set out two glasses, poured for Abe and then himself, and they held them up and drank them down. He wanted to ask about the scar, but he couldn’t think of how. He regarded the fine clothes of his older brother. He said, “Jake was setting right there on your stool back in January when he got religion.”