by Bill Crider
A Time for Hanging
By Bill Crider
Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Edition
Copyright 2010 by Bill Crider & Macabre Ink Digital Publications
Recreated from scans by David Dodd
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1.
Paco Morales had seen the woman before, had seen her often in fact, at least for the past month or so, despite the fact that his mother would always send him out of the shack when the woman was there.
"Paco," his mother would say. "Go and draw up a bucket of water and give it to the mule."
Paco would dutifully go outside and lower the wooden bucket into the old well, the pulley creaking as the rope slid through it. When the bucket hit bottom with a splash, he always waited a long time for it to fill, longer than really necessary. Then he pulled it slowly back up, reached across the rim of the well, and pulled the bucket to him, hardly ever spilling a drop. Then he poured that water into another bucket and took that one to the mule.
The mule hardly ever wanted to drink. The woman never came except late in the evenings, and by then most of the heat of the day was gone. Paco's bare feet could still feel it in the hard-packed dirt, but the night air was cool and there was nearly always a slight breeze.
Still, it was Paco's job to make the mule drink, or to wait until it did. By the time he got back to the house the woman was always gone. Paco's mother never said what it was that the woman had wanted, and Paco never asked. There were some things his mother never discussed, and her visitors were one of those things.
They often gave her money, which Paco knew was important to the family, especially so since his father had been killed by a gringo in a card game. The gringo had accused Paco's father of cheating, though Paco knew that his father would never have done such a thing.
It didn't matter what Paco thought, however. Everyone else was quite ready to believe that the gringo was telling the truth and that Paco's father had died the way a cheater should -- shot through the heart with a .44 caliber slug.
Paco had tried to be a man for his mother and sisters since that time. He was, after all, fifteen years old now and could do as much work as any man. His shoulders were wide, and they strained at the seams of his father's old shirts. The frayed legs of the stained and faded levi's stopped far above his ankles, and his hands were broad and strong.
His mother had not let him go out into the world, though. He had been forced to stay around the little farm, plowing with the mule, doing the planting, fetching the water. They had a cow, too, and some chickens, so with what they could grow and take in from the visitors they managed to get by.
This was one visitor that would not be coming again, Paco thought as he gazed down at her. He hardly recognized her now.
Her dress was ripped and torn, and it bunched about her waist. Her legs were twisted back under her, and her head was lying at a very strange angle. There was blood on her face.
In the moonlight, her legs were pale and white, and Paco suddenly wished that he had taken some other way home that evening. Fear stabbed at him, churning his stomach, yet he could not tear himself away from the sight.
He had gone to town for a little salt and a bit of sugar from Tomkins' Store, but he had long since forgotten that he held the twists of paper in his hand.
He had never seen a dead woman before, not like this.
He had been late because he had stopped to talk to Juanito Garcia for a few minutes, and dusk had crept up on them unnoticed. So he had taken a short cut home, off the main road and over a little-used trail through a thick grove of trees.
He could no longer even remember what he and Juanito Garcia had said to one another.
All he could think of was the dead woman.
She had been beautiful when she visited his mother, or so she had seemed to Paco, her red hair shining in the lamplight of the shack.
It was not shining now.
Go home, Paco thought. I must go home.
But he couldn't move. His feet seemed rooted to the ground as he stood in the grove of trees, looking at the body lying in front of him.
He might not have seen her if it hadn't been for the noise. She wasn't exactly right on the trail, but off a little way, hidden in the brush.
Paco had heard something as he walked along, something like the cry a small animal might make if it was trapped or afraid. He liked animals, and he thought he might help it if he could. There was nothing to be afraid of this close to town, nothing more than a squirrel, he thought. Perhaps a deer.
The sound came from somewhere down the trail, and when he got to the spot he thought was about right he began looking for the source of the noise, peering through the gloom of tangled branches and thick leaves.
He wasn't thinking about how late it was, or that his mother would be worried about him. He was thinking about some poor animal in distress.
He caught sight of the woman's dress, and he realized that it was not an animal that he had heard. There was no animal of that color in all the country. He made his way to the bundle of color that had caught his attention and found the woman.
He didn't even know her name, he realized. His mother never mentioned the names of her visitors.
He wondered who he should tell.
Then he wondered if the killer was still around. He looked over his shoulder so quickly that his neck popped but there was no one there. Whoever had killed the woman was long gone.
Another thought came to him, the most frightening thought of all. What if they thought he killed her?
They would, of course.
"They" were the ones who had stood by when his father was murdered and said nothing. Nothing good, that is.
They said things like, "That'll teach the greaser to cheat a white man at cards."
Or, "How many men you killed, Hank?" -- Hank being the offended gambler's name -- "not countin' meskins, o'course."
Or, "Hell, Hank, you had to kill him. He was cheatin'. Hell, yes. That's just what comes of lettin' a meskin play cards with white men. We shoulda known better."
They were the same ones who would say that Paco had killed the woman, if they got the chance.
Well, he wasn't going to give them the chance. He was going to get out of there. Right now. He willed his feet to move, and this time they obeyed him.
He turned back to the trail, and now the noises of the evening that were normally so un;threatening became magnified and frightening to him.
From far off in the grove there came the cry of an owl, and that call was echoed by the voice of some other night bird that Paco could not identify.
Or perhaps it was not a bird.
Something scurried through the brush at his feet
, making a sudden rush from one place of concealment to another.
Paco began to run.
The trail, when he came to it, was rough and hard. It had not rained for several weeks, and the ground had been churned by horses' hooves when it was last muddy, making it very uneven. He stumbled along as fast as he could, the hard ground bruising his feet.
He thought he heard something at his back, and he veered off the trail into the trees, panic causing his heart to pump faster. What if there was someone behind him?
He was almost too afraid to look back.
The tree branches lashed at his face, and he put out his hands to keep them away. He had dropped the sugar and salt long ago, but he did not remember doing it.
He was sure there was someone behind him now, and his fear and panic increased. What if they caught him? Thee would show him no mercy, no more mercy than his father had received.
He conquered his fear momentarily and looked back over his shoulder, a mistake. He should have kept his eyes to the front. He ran headlong into a tree.
For a few seconds he felt nothing; then he felt only the throbbing of his head as pain washed through it like a fast-moving stream.
He could no long hear the hoofbeats, if he had ever heard them. He could not hear anything.
He fell face forward on the ground.
2.
The Reverend Wayne Randall wondered where his daughter was. She had been acting strangely lately, going off with no warning and coming back in time for supper. Such behavior was very unlike Elizabeth. She had made it a habit to be around the house to help her mother with the meals, but now her unexplained absences had become more frequent, and she had not responded obediently to his questions, refusing obstinately to answer him when he asked about her whereabouts.
Tonight the table had been set for over an hour, and Randall's wife, Martha, had tried to keep the meal warm.
Finally she had to speak. "I don't believe out daughter's coming home for supper."
Randall was sitting at his place at the head of the table, as was right for the man of the family. His head was bowed over his plate, but he looked up at his wife's words.
He tried to keep the distaste he felt for her out of his voice. "Sharper than the serpent's tooth," he said.
Immediately, his wife teared up. He knew that she hated for him to talk like that about Elizabeth, but he didn't care. He had long since stopped caring one way or the other about what she thought. He knew it wasn't Christian, but he couldn't help himself. He had prayed about it, to no avail.
It was the way she looked. When they had married, she had been slim and fair, hair as red as fire, but something had happened to her, something that he hated but could not prevent.
She had changed.
After the birth of their child, she had become larger and larger, turning to soft fat before his eyes. Her arms were as big around as his own thighs, or so it seemed to him, white and thick as bread dough. He often thought that if he stuck a finger in her, it would leave a dimple.
He never tested the theory, however. He had long since ceased to touch her, and she had long since ceased to care.
She looked at him across the table, her little faded eyes almost blurred in folds of fat, the tears squeezing out of them.
"You don't even care about your daughter," she said.
Even her voice irritated him. It was high and whiny.
"I care," he said, feeling the anger rising in him, the way it always did.
"You've mistreated her, mishandled --"
"That's enough!" Randall roared, standing abruptly, shoving the table away from him, rattling the dishes. He was an imposing man, corpulent, with an impressive hard belly. He was dressed, as usual, in black, except for his white shirt. His tie, which he wore from morning until bedtime, was also black.
"I have done my best for that girl," he said, biting off the words and spacing them for emphasis. "I have always done my best."
He reached for the Bible which sat on the table by his plate. he always had a Bible close at hand.
When he picked it up, he gripped it in his right hand and held it to his breast. "I have raised her by this book, and by God's words. Any mistakes that have been made --"
"No!" Martha said, and she too stood up. She was not tall, no more than five feet and a few inches, which emphasized her bulk. "I won't allow you to say that again."
Randall was dumfounded. His wife was a woman who knew her place. That was one of her only good qualities. She never contradicted him; she always did his bidding and performed her wifely duties around the house without protest or complaint.
There were no tears in her eyes now. She pressed the advantage of his surprise. "You've been hard with her, too hard. Whatever she is, you made her that way."
"Woman, you forget yourself," he sputtered.
"No," she said. "I'm remembering."
He looked at her blankly.
"I'm remembering how you treat her, always. Not the way you treat me, not that way, but almost as bad."
"I don't know what you mean," Randall said, putting all the self-righteousness he knew how into his tone as he continued to clutch his Bible to him.
"Of course you know," his wife said. "You've never let her lead a normal life, not the way a girl should."
"I am a man of God," he said, more self-righteous than ever. "A normal life is not for me and mine."
"I don't mean it the way you do," she said. "The kind of life you talking about, well, I guess I accepted that when I married you. I knew that we'd never have much money, that we'd have to live on what we could take in from the church members, whether it was money or chickens or ear corn. That we'd have to live with cast-off furniture in a house that none of the members would want for themselves but that they think's just fine for their preacher."
She paused for breath, but Randall didn't try to say anything. He couldn't think of anything to say, though his face was contorted with the effort.
"It's the other things," Martha went on. "Always making her sit on the front row of the church every Sunday morning, not letting her even move or wiggle so much as a toe without leaning down out of that pulpit and yellin', 'That's the Devil in you, Lizzie! Sit still and shame the Devil.'"
"The Lord our God demands a reverent heart," Randall said.
"And every time a boy'd come around to play, it was off with LIzzie to her room or to her chores. No time for that, you'd say. Not even when she got older, and the boys'd be around her like bees around a honeycomb. You never gave her a chance to let one of them come calling, not ever. Whenever she'd ask, you'd turn it around, make it sound like whoever it was that wanted to come by, even if it was just for a little talk, making it sound like he was burning with all the lusts of Sodom."
Randall pulled himself straighter, pulled the Bible closer to his breast and held it there like a shield.
"That time you found her sitting under the sycamore tree on Sunday afternoon with the Collins boy. You pulled her away from there as if he was the imp of Satan himself, pulled her right back of the house and took off your belt and --"
Randall slammed the Bible down on the table. The plates and forks jumped into the air and clattered down.
"Woman!" he yelled. "You've said too much. Wives must be subservient to their husbands --"
"And so I have been, for far too long!" she stormed at him. "Where has it gotten me?" She looked down at herself and the tears spurted from her eyes again. "Look where it's gotten me. Look what you've made me."
"I've made you nothing," he said coldly. "What you are is your own doing."
"No," she said. "But that doesn't matter. It's what you've made of Elizabeth that matters."
"And what might that be?"
"I don't know." With these words, the spirit seemed to go out of her. "I just don't know. But she's secretive now, the girl who used to tell me everything. She sneaks out of the house at all hours --"
"What?"
Oh, it's been going on for a while. I
knew, but I didn't say anything. I didn't want to have you beat her again."
"Spare the rod and spoil the child," Randall said sententiously.
"I'm almost certain you believe that, and that's why I didn't tell you. The she got bolder, or more desperate, and left even when you knew. But she never said why."
Randall picked up his Bible again and twisted it in his hands. The leather cover creaked. "If it was a man . . . . "
"If it was, what will you do? For all you know she's with him now, and she may never come back."
Randall shuddered as if from a sudden chill.
"She'll be back," he said. "You'll see. She'll be back."
But somehow there was no force in his words. Martha could tell that he wasn't sure. For the first time in his life, he wasn't sure that he was right, and he was clearly shaken.
It must be a terrible thing, she thought, for a man who's always known he's right, known it for nearly fifty years, to suddenly think he might be wrong. And if he's thinking back over those years for the first time, really thinking, to realize that he might have been wrong before, and been wrong more than once.
Seeing the stricken look in his eyes, she almost wanted to walk around the table that separated them and take him in her arms. Almost. But she couldn't bring herself to do it.
The stood there like that, staring at one another like strangers.
3.
Fireflies filled the grove, flickering and shimmering in the darkness.
Paco sat up and shook his head, and the fireflies disappeared. He realized that they had never actually been there. They had been nothing more than the dazzling left behind by the solid blow on his head he had received from the tree.
The night was quiet now; there was not even the call of the owl to disturb the silence.
Paco got to his feet, putting his hand against the tree trunk to steady himself. His head throbbed painfully, and everything seemed to be whirling around him. He could taste blood in his mouth.
