American legend revisited
He hung there limp and swaying in the silence, face purple and bloated and tongue hanging brown and slick from his open mouth. His legs twitched still warm and stunned into their violent end and somewhere up near the front of the crowd his wife began her tearful howl. The dead man swung there in the garage and the boards creaked with the rocking burden of weight and the smell of excrement filled the room where people started to file out in single formation, their heads bowed to the immensity of the deed they just witnessed and had so fervently pursued, their principles now muddled and rearranged by the gravity of their former desires. If only they could forget the way he looked.
The hangman waited until the last of them had left and he refrained from looking into the young widow’s eyes to see the barrenness there for it was always the same. Eyes rimmed red and searching beyond the human experience to the dens of gods or demigods where explanations of such emotional desolation are muttered in tongues unspeakable in their truth. The blank stares were always the same, portraits of deep cosmic sufferings that sever forever the present and future widow from the mother and wife and lover and moral agent she had been.
The hangman emerged from the dark corner of the room and stepped through a white pillar of sunlight shining through the upper window and he cut down the dead man. As he had done so often in the past he asked if there was anything he could do for him and just as in the past there was no answer. He untied the knot behind the man’s head and covered the slack and stinking body with a black hand-woven shroud. Very slowly and with careful precision he picked up the body and placed it on the gurney with blood and bile and steaming visceral matter dripping from the dead man’s pant leg. The hangman saw the priest standing in a dark corner of the warehouse watching him. He secured the dead man to the gurney and walked through the pillar of light, through the dust particles frozen in the air like roving constellations, through the smell of death into life just as darkness into light and he said hello to the priest as the coroner wheeled the body away in the silent aftermath of fleeting life.
“These things never get any easier,” the priest said.
“No, father. They don’t.”
“I believe they get harder.”
“They get harder.”
The priest stood with his hands behind his back and the hangman stood staring at the shaft of sunlight in the garage and the two of them walked out into the raging afternoon brightness. There were no people scattered and waiting for the dead man to wake from his transient spell and there were no divine harmonies resounding in the vapors of afternoon radiance. The priest and the hangman walked slowly from the building through the dirt lot between the old weathered garage and the jailhouse, neither of them looking at one another nor mentioning the dead man.
“Where did you grow up?”
“I’m sorry, father?”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Oh. Sioux Falls.”
“Ah,” the priest said, nodding, walking to the jailhouse, hands behind his back, his black robe like a shadowed tapestry of voided light in that bright desert waste. “I grew up in eastern Kansas. Near the Neosho River.”
The hangman said nothing. Frozen in his nasal membrane was the smell of shit and urine just as frozen in his mind were the ripened images of all the dead and hanged and vanished wayward men of spoiled flesh.
“There used to be an old Cheyenne warrior near the river used to tell stories to us boys. Was like a rite of passage all the boys in that town used to go through. Out there on those lost golden plains. We’d go to school and then go home and help on the farm and have supper and then a couple of us’d get together and head over to the old Cheyenne’s house and listen to his stories. He had a white woman for a wife and she’d bake us cookies and we’d eat them with fresh milk and the old man would tell us stories and we’d be thinking about them long after we went back home that night and kissed our mothers and lied there full of energy and sleepless in the shadows. Stories about Dog Soldiers and red men’s electric sprits. Stories about beautiful young women with eyes and hair as black as this robe and stories about the sun rituals and their divine truths. We sat eating cookies by the hearth and the old man would tell us about the lost souls of the dead roaming that country and his eyes darkened into granite pools and his face pulsed a deep hypnotic red with the glow of the fire. He used to tell us Indian legends about massacres during the white man’s conquest of the indigenous peoples and he said that men and women oughtn’t be killed according to the jurisprudence of other men and women but that only the One Spirit was the ultimate arbiter of souls and that all souls stripped of their privileges without the Spirit’s consent would be reinserted into the world into positions of moral superiority and social credence. The old man told us this and said it was common knowledge among his people and that is why certain white officers during the westward march would so freely order the executions of red people or any souls deemed uncivilized because they believed to take the life of a red man or woman was to do them a favor in their next lifetime.”
They reached the door of the jailhouse and both men stood staring out to the dusty expanse of desert with a breeze burning hot and dry on their faces. The hangman thought silently about what the priest said and after a while he asked the priest what happened to the people who were ordered to kill the enemy. Maybe they didn’t really want to kill the Indians, the hangman said. But they were soldiers and soldiers had orders that could not be disobeyed.
The priest stared out to the clouds on the western rim of the blue world and he knew the hangman would see through any lie he told, for the hangman was composed of death and death will forever be immune to the lies of men.
“The old man said those people would return to the world as a grain of sand, until the end of time. For orders are indeed orders—they can be dishonored just as easily as friendship between a white man and a red man. This is what the old man said.”
The hangman looked up and stared the priest in the eyes and saw hope in them and a genuine caring spirit but also despair and deep fatigue that extended beyond the priest’s own life and back through the open veins of history to a time distant and tragic where men who shared his principles and benevolence also experienced his anguish and lasting failure. Then the hangman dropped his gaze, for he knew this black-robed amulet before him had been witness to treachery and death in previous lives and was proof in flesh of the sanctity and truth of American legend.
I always enjoy these. It’s truly curious how you come up with so many brilliant stories.