I wasn’t glad to see Henry and Elva that evening, but at least they weren’t newspaper reporters. I was busy doing the supper dishes when there was a knock at the front door. Before I could call out to warn the boys not to answer it, I heard Georgie shout, “Uncle Henry!” I slapped the dishrag against the side of the dish pan. Too late! I would have to give both boys a talking to as soon as possible, before they turned the parlor into a lounge for newspapermen. The deputies had been telling strangers that I lived on a farm six miles out of town, which deterred most of the reporters, but sooner or later one of them would question some unwary citizen who would tell them where I really lived. Well, at least they hadn’t found me yet.
I smoothed down my apron—no point in taking it off just for them—and headed them off in the hall, motioning for them to go into the parlor. Elva sat down on the sofa with Georgie doing his best to crawl into her lap, but Henry went straight to Albert’s old Chesterfield chair by the radio and sat down in it as if he owned it. Maybe I wouldn’t have let that pass before, but now it didn’t seem to matter much. It was just a chair.
I said good evening and sat down at the end of the sofa away from Elva and waited to see what they had come about, because Henry wouldn’t make a trip to town just to pay a social call.
Henry looked around, and I wondered if he was looking for signs that I was spending money on new household goods or if he was just checking to see how much I was neglecting my housecleaning chores. Eddie had come in from the bedroom, where he had been reading a Tarzan book, but right away he picked up on the tension in the room, so instead of speaking, he nodded solemnly at his aunt and uncle and slipped down on the floor beside the sofa. Henry nodded back and kept looking around the room. I didn’t let on that he annoyed me, though, and I didn’t let my nervousness rush me into speech.
After a few more moments of heavy silence, Henry said, “Well, Ellendor, I hear you’re still doing the job of county sheriff.”
“I’m doing fine, thank you, Henry.”
“I expect you’re finding it more complicated than you bargained for, though.”
“How so?”
Elva looked at me in amazement. “How so? Why, the execution, Ellie! People are talking about it day and night. It has even been in the newspaper. Our sister-in-law is actually going to hang some poor man. We hardly know what to say to people.”
“Well, you might explain to them that I’m the one doing the hanging, and not the one being hanged.” I didn’t expect them to be amused by this, and they weren’t. I tried again. “Look, I’m doing a good job, as far as I can tell, and I’m taking care of my sons without anybody’s help.”
Henry leaned forward with that jaw-jutting look of his that meant absolute stubbornness. “That’s just it, Ellendor. We have come to offer you some help.”
“Really, Henry? What do you propose to do? Carry out the hanging to spare me from having to do it?”
“Me? Why I have to get the Baileys to kill our hogs for us come fall. I am certainly incapable of killing a human being. But, Elva can say what she likes, I’m impressed that you have enough sand to do a man’s job and carry through with it even when it turns out to be more than you bargained for. And if anybody dares to complain about it to my face, that’s what I’ll tell them. No, I’m not offering to do the hanging for you. The help we came to give you is to take George and Eddie back to the farm until all this is over.”
We had all forgotten that Eddie was there, sitting quietly on the floor next to the sofa, but when Henry said that, he sprang to his feet, looking from one of us to the other. “No! I don’t want to leave town and miss the hanging!”
Henry went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “After all, it is summertime. He won’t be missing school, and with all the hoopla there is here in town—reporters and whatnot—you might be glad to have one less thing to worry about.”
I had been all set to say no to whatever tomfool notion Henry had come to see me about, but as soon as I thought about what he was suggesting, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. I didn’t want my children at that execution. I didn’t want anybody’s children to be there. And the longer Eddie stayed in town, the more likely it was that some enterprising reporter would ferret him out and concoct some kind of fanciful story about the boy whose mama was the hangman. I didn’t want him put through that. It occurred to me that a few weeks ago I would have asked myself what Albert would have wanted me to do. In fact, that question would have occurred to me before anything else. But now, I didn’t give a fig for Albert’s wishes. I did worry, though, that there might be a catch to his brother’s new generosity.
“This isn’t a trick, is it, Henry?”
“To take the boys away from you for good?” He shook his head. “You’ve proved that you don’t need anybody’s help to take care of them, and I reckon Albert wanted them to get town schooling, or he wouldn’t have moved here in the first place. Now if they wanted to stay up on the farm with us, that’d be different.”
“But we don’t,” said Eddie.
Neither of them really wanted to go, either, though for different reasons. Georgie was too young to understand about the execution; he just didn’t want to leave his mama, but I didn’t give either of them any choice in the matter. I packed their clothes and their favorite toys—Georgie’s red fire truck, of course—in a flour sack, and gave Eddie fifteen cents pocket money to lessen the disappointment of having to leave. They were better off away from town until all this was over, and, although I would miss them, I wasn’t sorry to have one less thing to worry about in a week that already held too much for me to bear.
“Come see us when you can,” said Henry, as they headed out the door.
“When it’s all over,” I said.
The next morning when I got to the office, Galen told me that Lonnie Varden was sleeping, so I decided not to disturb him. Roy or Falcon could give him the paper and charcoal when they delivered the prisoner’s breakfast. That morning the execution began to seem more real, because I was summoned to inspect the tangible proof of it.
“Sam Lidaker wants to see you, Sheriff.” Falcon Wallace was hovering in the doorway to my little office. The door had been pushed closed, but not shut altogether, and he was probably wondering whether or not he should have knocked.
I wasn’t all that busy, though. I was sifting through the pile of letters from this morning’s mail, in case there should happen to be some correspondence mixed in there that was actually worth reading. “Who is Sam Lidaker?” I murmured.
“He’s the carpenter that the county hired to build the gallows. I think you must have spoken to him when he started on the job.”
I remembered now. When we found out that the hanging was going to take place here, I had a whole brood of worries pecking at my heels—jail security for the prisoner, to keep him in and a lynch mob out; obnoxious city reporters; the execution process itself—and the construction of the scaffold itself seemed to me to be the least of them. Vernon Johnson had given us the name of several local builders and named the sum that we would be authorized to pay for the job of erecting a trapdoor platform scaffold. Roy Phillips contacted the candidates for the job, and of the three carpenters who submitted bids, Sam Lidaker’s estimate was the lowest. I had met him for a couple of minutes when he stopped by the office to officially accept the job and sign the contract, but the encounter had been so brief I had nearly forgotten it. After the site had been selected, Mr. Lidaker got on with his noisy assignment and troubled us only with his hammering, not with his presence.
Now he was back, and I wondered why.
A few moments later Falcon ushered him and went back to fielding calls at the reception desk.
“Afternoon, ma’am.” Sam Lidaker was a short, bandy-legged fellow with a mop of tight red curls and a pleasant expression that I’d have expected to see on someone who was building kitchen shelves, not a soon-to-be-used
scaffold. I wondered if he was planning to attend to admire his handiwork. “I stopped by to tell you that we’re purt near finished building your contraption, and I was hoping you had time to go over and take a look at it.”
I wasn’t anxious to get a close look at the gallows until I had to. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job, Mr. Lidaker. My duties here are keeping me busy right now.”
He nodded. “That’s to be expected, but I think you need to take the time to go and look at the structure now, and to make sure you know how it operates. You don’t want to wait until five thousand people are standing there watching your every move before you try to make the thing work.”
He had a point. Bad enough that I had only been sheriff for a couple of months, and that I’d be doing this execution in front of a gaping mob and a passel of photographers—if I got to the crucial moment and was unable to get the mechanism to work it would be a disaster. Worse, it would mean more suffering for the wretched man appointed to die.
“Will you show me how it works, Mr. Lidaker?”
“That’s what I came for, ma’am. After all, if you had difficulty in operating the contraption, it would make me look bad, like I hadn’t constructed it right. Come on over there now, and I’ll show you how it works.”
I saw the sense in what he said, and although the thought of the gallows made me shudder, I knew I ought to see it; at least the walk to the construction site would keep me from having to read any more offers of help from gallant would-be executioners. I was mortally tired of wading through those. I followed Sam Lidaker around the side of the sheriff’s office and into the street behind it.
“It wasn’t too all-fired difficult,” the carpenter was saying. “Except for somebody’s tomfool notion to make the thing twenty feet high.”
“I think they’re expecting a big crowd,” I murmured. “They want to make sure that everyone can see the . . . the proceedings so that there won’t be any pushing and shoving among the spectators. There are likely to be some drunks around, and we don’t want to give them any excuse to start a fight. A tall scaffold means that nobody should have to push and shove to get a good view.”
“I’m mindful of that, but you need to be all the more careful yourself on account of it. There you’ll be on that high platform with a prisoner, who may very well squirm and fight, trying to keep anybody from putting the rope around his neck. In his place, I know I would. I worry that if there’s a struggle, somebody could get knocked off the platform by accident, and like as not that would kill them just as fast as the rope will kill the prisoner.”
I thought about it. “Can you put a wooden railing at waist height around the scaffold?”
“Sure can. Cost you another three dollars, though, for the wood and the labor.”
“Do it. Tell them it’s on my say-so.”
The gallows was constructed of new-milled yellow pine, so recently planed that it glowed in the sunshine, and when I got close to it I detected the sweet smell of pine resin. I wondered if the lumber had come from the sawmill where Lonnie Varden had worked, and if the foreman who fired him had taken a special pleasure in knowing what that wood would be used for. The structure, a high raised platform with steep steps at one side, sat in the red clay of an empty lot, towering above a row of three-room shacks behind it—not a pleasant view for the occupants, but the gallows would be gone a day or two after the hanging, maybe sooner, if the spectators decided to hack it apart for souvenirs. I would be glad when it was over.
“We put in thirteen steps according to custom, ma’am.” He took a long look at me, his eyes coming to rest at my hemline. “If you plan to wear a dress and high heels for the occasion, then see that you watch yourself going up and down those steps. It’s a long way to fall. I hear tell that the fellow you’re a-hanging has already caused one woman to fall to her death. Wouldn’t want to see him take out another.”
He said this bit of gallows humor so smoothly that I knew it had become his standard jest about the execution. Like as not, the phrase would appear in some newspaper sooner or later.
He touched my elbow and steered me into the space beneath the platform. “What I wanted to show you in particular, though, was the mechanism itself. The trapdoor, that is.”
From a distance, the scaffold might have been a porch, and the crosspiece mounted above it could have held a glider or a hammock—or perhaps that was just me trying to see things on a woman’s terms, instead of facing the fact that I was looking at a killing device. We were standing directly beneath the platform, under an opening that looked about three feet square.
“The trapdoor,” said Mr. Lidaker. “We cut out the square right below the crosspiece of the scaffold. We’ll go up there directly and you can see it up close. The gallows is two square-cut posts, nine feet high, with a six-foot crosspiece set between them. In the middle of the crosspiece we cut a deep notch. That’s where the rope goes. Are you with me so far?”
I nodded. I could see the crosspiece through the open trapdoor beneath it, but I was trying to look past it at the patch of blue sky beyond.
“Now the whole shebang depends on that trapdoor up there working the way it’s supposed to. It has to be strong enough to stand on, and easy to open when the time is right. We put strong steel hinges on one side of the trap, and across from them there’s a ratchet attached to a lever—you can see it off to the left—it’s that knee-high rod sticking straight up beside the trap.”
“I need to make sure I can pull that lever so the trapdoor will open, don’t I?”
“That’s what we need to know. And if it takes too much strength for you to manage, why then we’ll have to consider the alternatives.”
I wished he had put hand railings on the steps, but since they were only going to be used once, barring practice drops, it probably wasn’t worth the trouble or the expense to alter them. I’d just have to be very careful when I climbed them. The carpenter gestured for me to go up first, “so’s if you fall, I can catch you,” he explained.
Once at the top, I leaned against one of the support posts for balance and looked out over the rooftops to the sprawl of green mountains beyond. The scenery was better at the Robbins farm, but I had been pent up in town for so long now that the sight of something besides buildings felt like the letting go of a long-held breath.
“Now, ma’am, you need to take care not to step on the trapdoor yourself. It was built to hold twice your weight, at least, but there’s no point in taking chances, is there?” He guided me around the upright and put me next to the lever.
I had to stoop just a bit to touch the iron rod. It was warm from the sunshine, and I nearly jerked my hand away as if it were a living thing. “I just pull this?”
Mr. Lidaker raised a forefinger for caution. “All in good time. First you want to make sure that the prisoner’s hands are secured behind his back—so’s he doesn’t try to clutch at the rope, as anybody would. Then someone must tie a rope around his legs below the knees to keep him from kicking out when he drops. The last thing—after he’s been offered a chance to say any last words—is that a black hood is placed over the condemned man’s head.”
I shivered. “Yes. I wouldn’t want strangers to see my death throes.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but I think it’s mostly out of consideration for the crowd. They say the face of a hanged man is a dreadful sight to behold: bulging eyes, tongue stuck out. You wouldn’t want folks to have to look on that.”
“If they’re brazen enough to come to an execution, then I’m not concerned with any unpleasantness they may see, but I’ll grant you the hood is a good idea. Where do we get one?”
He shrugged. “I don’t reckon there’s all that much demand for them. Not much to it. About half a yard of black cotton cloth with eye holes cut in it.”
“Thank you. I’ll take care of it. But there is one more bit of carpentry that I need you
to do, at the county’s expense, of course.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Build a coffin. Just a simple pine box will do.”
He nodded. “That’s all a man needs.”
“It’s a bad business, Mrs. Robbins.” Rev. McKee shook his head sadly. “I don’t say that the poor fellow shouldn’t have to answer for his sins, but this business of making his death a public spectacle puts me in mind of the Roman Coliseum.”
I nodded. “I can’t say I’m in favor of it myself, sir.”
I was ticking off things on my chore list to be accomplished before the execution, and when I got to the part about religious services for the prisoner, I decided to ask my own minister to provide them. Lonnie Varden had shown no interest at all in the proceedings, and he probably would have preferred to have no minister at all, but tradition required it.
I found Rev. McKee in an old straw hat and overalls, tending to the tomato plants in the backyard of the parsonage. When I told him my business would not take up much of his time, he went on weeding as we talked, while I settled myself on an upturned wooden bucket and watched. The sun had turned Rev. McKee’s bald spot quite pink, and his work clothes were smeared with red clay, but he hadn’t let the circumstances impair his dignity.
“I’m sorry that the state requires a public execution, sir, but surely you agree with me that the condemned man is entitled to spiritual counsel?”
“Of course he is. Everyone is. If he repents, his soul can be saved, even though his earthly body is forfeit.”
“He hasn’t asked for any minister in particular, so I thought seeing as how Albert and I were in your congregation, I’d ask if you’d oblige him.”
“It is my Christian duty to minister to anyone in need, Miz Robbins, but I confess that it troubles me that the state’s executioner should be a woman.”
“I can’t help that, sir. I took an oath,” and for good measure I added, “before God.”
Prayers the Devil Answers Page 30
