Do not let them steer you. You have a single purpose, and consequences will trail you like buzzards when the line is crossed.
Four-by-fours were what he ordered. They bungled it up every time. Four-by-fours and two-by-sixes and hemp rope thirty feet in length. He would not supply it. In Redwood, they had rough-sawn lumber and a few pulled-up floorboards, and he had to go to the saloon to find the man in charge and complain about the materials. There was something about hanging a man that made people prone to mistakes. As if the silent part of the soul was honor-bound to sabotage it.
He brought his tools: a mallet, a hammer, auger, spirit level, ruler, plumb bob, planer, saw and square. The leather fold he wrapped them in. Taken all together, his tools, sawhorses and personal effects weighed about a hundred pounds. His jenny, Dorcas, was accustomed to the weight.
In Tucumcari, they had given him half the lumber he had ordered. "Not enough for a long drop, not enough by a mile. You can do a short drop without a scaffold, just throw the rope between the rafters or over an oak branch. You still have to pay my fee; I've made two days to get here."
But they liked the construction. It certified the ordeal, made it seem legal. They said they would find the lumber. The prisoner could wait another three days, and he did.
There was a purpose for every board. The joinery was simple but sturdy. The last smell the prisoners smelled was fresh cut pine and the soap on the knot behind their left ear. He made sure there was no creaking of the boards. For a man prospecting for any sense of hope, false hope was cruel.
Among other measurements, the prisoner had to be weighed. He would not do it himself.
"Sheriff ain't here. Took sick last week; ain't seen him." The postal clerk had a lazy way of standing out in the street, as if he were desperate for a countertop or, lacking that, a post of any kind to lean on.
"Then fetch his deputy."
"He's five miles out of town. Just to weigh a man he should spend a half a day traveling?"
"I don't undertake the particulars. I build you the scaffold. I test it, and I instruct your hangman. I depart before the deed."
"Deputy won't do it, judge is over in Albuquerque. Mayor ... " The clerk looked around at the near-empty thoroughfare and shrugged.
"I don't undertake the particulars."
That was roughly how he came to be standing in the jail in Socorro. The prisoner stepped out of the cell, a young man, long brown mop of hair. His leathers were crusty from the mud they had dragged him through. The barber had brought over his scale and stood chewing a toothpick in the doorway. The lawyer stood beside him, cleaned his spectacles with a soft square of flannel. The postal clerk leaned on the open window sill. The ruler had the man at six foot two.
"Weigh him with the shackles. Won't risk a surprise."
Shackles on his wrists and ankles, the young man stepped on the scale and the bar thunked to the side. The carpenter avoided his gaze while he measured the mass of the man before him, sliding each weight to the right until it balanced level.
"I never seen myself weighed before. What's the verdict, Red?" When the prisoner looked up, his eyes were a searing flash of lapis, the way a finch could dart before you like a bright shock in the browns of a landscape.
He had never looked the prisoner in the face. He focused on the weights, the calculation not coming to him.
"Red?"
"Shut your mouth," said the barber.
"Hundred sixty-three. With iron shackles at wrists and ankles. Don't go switching to rope the day of, on some romantic historical whim, you wouldn't be the first to try, nor the first to regret it."
He could put up his tent next to the jail, near his tools and the livery where Dorcas was stalled between his flea-bitten Pinto and Carl's swaybacked Paint. He began laying out the boards in the single-man pattern out on the side of the thoroughfare as the sun was setting, and lit some lanterns to arrest the dark.
It was one of those gnawing facts to know, that it took a young ponderosa, of some forty years, in order to hang a man. It should be thirty feet high, stripped, planked. It was enough to construct a small scaffold with ten steps, a single upright, the horizontal and the brace. If they paid more, a rail could be added. For multiple hangings, it was two verticals and braces, and room for up to four, costing maybe two or three trees then.
This was for one man, this young, blue-eyed man with the mud-crusted leathers. What sins he had committed, of God or man, was not the carpenter's business.
He hadn't felt confident about his work since Carl had died. After that, there was no one to second guess the work, to double check the measurements. It was as if he had stored part of his memory in his partner, and left it under a pile of rocks at the foot of a well-joined wood cross outside of Cimarron. He had taken time to carve the name with the tools he had for fashioning scaffolds.
The one tiny window facing the alley was the jail cell's outlet for light and air, and the young man squeezed his face against the bars to watch the carpenter come back to his canvas for tools. The carpenter lifted a board and the hammer dropped from his belt onto his toes.
"Looks like you could use some help, Red."
He picked up the hammer and set the board on the sawhorses to measure.
"My daddy was a natural builder. Owned a hardware business for a while," the prisoner said.
The carpenter lost his concentration measuring and measured again, the flat pencil in his teeth.
"A man might call it old fashioned, but he liked mortise and tenon for a strong joint."
Carl used bridle joints for most scaffolds, and so he used bridle joints. It must be strong enough to hold the judgment of men. Often the jailer, the preacher, the mayor and the prisoner stood there all at once. They had heard about a scaffold collapsing in the act outside of Santa Fe, the work of some handyman who made cabinets and coffins and probably thought he could scale up a door frame into a scaffold. The preacher was killed in the fall, while the prisoner attempted a clumsy escape, still pulling the broken crossbeam behind him from the rope around his neck before he was shot between the shoulders. Shameful, Carl had said, trimming his nails by the fire. The dilettante should have slunk away and never touched a plank again.
The prisoner hung his forearms out through the bars and kept talking from inside. "We built a barn or two, good sturdy hay barns back in Oklahoma. One day he went and hung himself from one of the beams. So what I'm saying is one of them joints will hold."
"Shut up there."
"Can't bear to know the man you're hanging? The money you make don't spend as nice when it talks from the grave, does it?"
Never talk to a prisoner, never look him in the eye. You won't do the work you ought, nor near as well. Your reputation will crumble thereafter, and rightfully so.
"You know that from experience?"
"Me, no." The prisoner gripped the bars again and pressed his face through as far as he could get. "But I am a card cheat, I will admit to that. Additionally, I drove a herd of cattle that weren't strictly my own property from Los Lunas to Magdalena, that being the hanging offense in this case. But I was not the brains nor beneficiary of the operation, so I am no more guilty of the offense than that mallet is guilty of making the gallows to hang me by. The Van Zandts, that's who should be hanging, but don't bother telling that to the judge." Silence. "Given another night on your side of the bars, I'd undo what I done, if I could, that's the God's-honest truth of it."
"Don't make me fetch that barber to shut you up. I will, one more word."
"I know what you're thinking, the mallet ain't got the brains to choose what it does, I do know that. But consider the choice a man has if he's gone hungry or thirsty: his choice is death or duty to his needs. And here it was death all along." The prisoner's voice choked up. "Damn my impulses!" he sobbed. "And not another chance to do right."
With the uprights clamped, the carpenter began to saw the grooves, and could not hear the prisoner going on over the noise. When he turned out the lamp, the little window was empty.
In the morning, he continued, and the usual onlookers made passing comments on the grimness of the construction, and hid their exaggerated horror behind handkerchiefs and gloved hands. He had once mused to Carl that it felt in some ways they were building a stage.
Carl had kept sawing for a minute, then stopped to wipe his face. I have no doubt that we are.
Three weeks later, he had curled up with an ache in his guts, and he was dead by morning.
The lawyer came by with the man who had taken an oath to serve as the one to pull the lever. Some men took to the idea with a certain reserved relish, some watched him demonstrate the pull as if their souls depended on getting it right, and some masked their discomfort with jokes and goofing. He had rehearsed and refined his speech as he made the distance between towns, and as he recited it here, this man, a rancher in his mid-forties, a married man by appearances, seemed to catch on to what he had agreed to, the evidence in his paling face, his dry swallow, his widening eyes.
"Once you have done it, it is done. I have no authority over the process you set forth, but I recommend a meeting of the eyes of the administrators on the platform that all are agreed as to the timing and the act. Immediately thereafter, once you have locked eyes with them all, pull medium-hard—as though you are slowing your team, not with such vigor as to rope a steer, and not tugging your wife's tender hand." He used other analogies depending on the profession of the hangman, be it pulling molars or ringing church bells. It was, being specific, 58 pounds of pressure to spring the trap door. Too much enthusiasm risked a malfunction; delicacy risked drama or unmeet comedy.
"Have you ever hanged a man you pegged as innocent?" The rancher's voice was the echo of the carpenter's voice on the road to Acoma. Ahead of him, Carl's hips and back swayed with each sauntering step of the Paint. His answer was Carl's practiced answer, spoken out to the flats and the mesas rising beyond.
"I don't commit the hanging. I come by the order of the town to build the right structure for the job. I leave the judgment and the duty to the discretion of law-abiding folks, trusting they will do their job as well as I have done mine. I am just the same as the rifle maker, or the stone the axe is ground on."
In the jail window, the prisoner's hands clutched the bars.