Some of them had come because they could not stay away. Ione Mulgrew stood at the front, arms crossed, face like a thundercloud, tears frozen on her cheeks. Walt Dunore stood beside her, holding his wife's hand. Clara Dunore was holding baby Ruth, and she would not look at the gallows. Abel Lund was there on his crutch, crying without making a sound.
And in the front row in a fine wool coat, his gold watch chain glinting in the first light, stood Leland Ashcom just like he promised. They brought Anel out at sunrise. Chains on his wrists, chains on his ankles. He had to duck going through the jail door. He had to duck again going up the gallow stairs.
13 steps he counted everyone. At the top they had to build a box for him to stand on because the hangman could not reach his neck. Somebody in the crowd laughed at that. Nobody laughed with him. The hangman put the rope around Anel's neck.
Rough hemp, cold, heavy. He drew the knot up tight under his left ear. Anel did not fight. His hands were chained in front of him and in his right fist, crumpled, scorched. He still held the note.
He hadn't let go of it since the ashes. Not once. Not in the jail. Not on the stairs. Like the others, the preacher read a psalm.
Anel didn't hear it. Judge Kemp read the sentence. Anel didn't hear that either. He was looking out over the crowd, all those faces, looking for one. Just one small, silver-haired, unafraid.
She wasn't there. Of course she wasn't. The sun cleared the ridge. Gold light poured down the street, across the snow, across the gallows, across the giant standing on a box with a rope around his neck. Any last words, Branick?
said Tull. Anel opened his mouth, closed it. There was nothing to say. So he looked down at the note in his hand instead, one last time, because it was all he had left of her, her handwriting, her words. He smoothed it out against his chest, and the hangman reached for the lever.
He smoothed the note against his chest just to hold it, just to feel the paper, just to have one last thing of hers before the floor dropped out. And then he read it. All of it. This time his eyes went past the first line. I'm sorry, Anel.
like the others. And then underneath that in smaller letters, cramped, like she was writing fast, like she was writing in the dark with someone standing over her. Except I am not like the others. His heart stopped. He read it again because maybe he got it wrong.
Maybe the letters swam. Maybe after everything, after the mine and the cold and the blood and no sleep and the rope around his neck, maybe his eyes were playing tricks. He read it a third time. Except I am not like the others. The ren flies east before the hawk.
Look for me where we first stood together. The ren r. He stopped breathing because she knew. She had always known. Every single night beside the fire.
Every time she put her finger under that word and said wre E n. And he said there is no point to that w. And she threw up her hands. Every time he carved it on the slate wrong and she corrected it. And he did it wrong again on purpose just to see her expression.
Their joke, their word, the word that existed only between the two of them in the whole world. If she had written it the right way with the W, it could have been dictated. It could have been forced. A man with a gun at her back saying, "Write this down." And she writing it exactly as told. But she wrote it wrong.
The way only he wrote it. The way only he would recognize. She wrote it under a gun barrel in the dark with God knows what threat hanging over her and she still found a crack in the wall. She still pushed the light through. She was not gone.
She had never been gone. She was taken. And she was telling him exactly where she was going and exactly how to find her. Look for me where we first stood together. The depot.
The train running east. The same platform where she stepped off a train in the rain and did not flinch. The hangman's hand was on the lever, and Anel Branick looked up from the paper. He looked out over the crowd, past the faces turned up at him like pale stones. Past Ione with her frozen tears.
Past Walt Dunore gripping his wife's hand so hard his knuckles had gone white. Past Abel Lund on his crutch, not making a sound. The way a boy cries when he has learned that making a sound does not help. Past all of them. Down the street to the far end of it.
to the low roof of the depot one mile south. To the white smoke rising above the rooftops into the cold April sky, the morning train already making steam. She flew east before the hawk. Now, said Tull. Anel threw himself sideways.
Not down, sideways. Every single muscle in his body wrenching in the same direction at the same moment. A decision made not in his mind, but somewhere older and deeper. The place where a man decides whether he wants to live. The chain on his wrists snapped taut against the gallows post.
The rope went hard. The whole structure swayed on its new lumber green pine that had not had time to cure, and a sound went through it like a scream, a crack, like a rifle shot. The arm of the gallows torqued, twisted, the bolts at the joint tearing free of wood that was too fresh and too soft, and had been built too fast by a carpenter who was told he had one night and a bottle of whiskey. The arm broke. The whole top of the structure tilted sideways, groaned, then came apart in a cascade of lumber and sawdust and rope and the most enormous crash Copper Hollow had ever produced, which was saying something in a town that had Anel Branick in it.