WANING July light infiltrated maple leaves and one-foot-thick back-wall cement to sift through barred windows and spill shadowy across two telegrams confirming that Mr. George Albert Hamilton and Mr. Rufus James Hamilton must hang early the morrow. His Excellency must let Dominion Law take its local, provincial course. Sorry. Quite.
The quality of that light was yellowish and hellish, but it was still light, and the brothers prayed it would last forever. But the afternoon’s shadows reminded George and Rue of the spectres of the previously hanged. These wraiths seemed to dangle from the ceiling pipes and to smile back from the reflections of themselves displayed in the water in their toilets. They were shades of spooks looking at spooks of shades, amid siftings of light like the dust of blossoms.
Outside, the green grass glittered; ants moved quickly. They seemed huge and fast to Rue’s eyes. He sat and scribbled his one and only poem, “Three Killers”:
Three white men
are coming to kill us.
Their ties are upside-down nooses.
Their faces hammer breath.
Absalom, Chaud, Ellis—
will coolly kill us.
We’ll don a new black skin of flies.
(The gallows swallows you whole: You wallow inside its hole.)
—Rufus “Jesse” James Hamilton
George was most content. He had his Xn resignation. He heard the lush, velvety voices of singers amid wheatfields and tasted the sweet, pure wellsprings of the Bible. He figured his soul was polished pristine. He dreamt a Heaven with feasts of Syrian apples and Israelite quinces, almond-flavoured peaches, jasmine of Aleppo, cucumbers, lemons, sultana citrons, apricots and cottage cheese, pumpkins and pomegranates, white roses and rose-flavoured pastries, rum-laced pound cakes, iced nougats, lime sherbet, tarts, oil of lavender, caviar, grappa, champagne, red wine, eggs, roast turkey, venison stew, rhubarb pie, sausage, clams, lobster, any soup he could imagine, Montreal smoked meat…. Death would thin out his body, but Heaven’d fill his belly eternally.
Unlike George, Rue was coming to his death with an empty heart and empty hands. He wanted to believe he was beset by a demon that’d created a preposterous lie about him. (He thought heresy might displace hearsay.) Once the almost—Duke Ellington of Three Mile Plains, Rue’d now perform a danse macabre. He’d practise the art of being dead, his head splashed against hard air. After hanging, personally he wished he’d just be cut down, not dissected, disgraced, but flung into the closest marsh.
Rue thought—wildly—of India. He almost believed—had to believe in this sole redemption—that he had only desperately wanted to love, like breathing in fiery, milk-sweet air. If he could have interrupted India in her maternity, if he could have brought her bodily—beautifully—before him in her gold flesh and golden ways, Rue’d've said that she could take light and give it new meaning and he’d've admitted to her that when she sang out those fatal words, I love you, her heart was broken and his was not whole.
The alarm-clock hammer berated him, announcing, “You will die, you will die. Tomorrow, July 27th, in the a.m., you will die. You will never see the p.m. of that day.” It wasn’t hardly worth Rue’s while to wake up.
Father Bataille from St. Dunstan’s Catholic Church, across the street from the York County Gaol, was porcine, greasy, with a turpentine smell and a vile face. His sermons was worse than his hygiene. Still, the flushed, spectacled, peach-faced priest tried to preach to Rufus. He spoke of the ruins of love in some broken words, of the terror in the soul that no sermon expiates. Only Christ Jesus could help now.
“Don’t you know the need of the Church in days like these?”
Rufus replied, “Don’t you know the need of a man for a woman?”
Bataille persevered. “Be yes in the eyes of God and no in the eyes of Man, not yes in the eyes of Man and no in the eyes of God.”
“ Father, stand me on the gallows. I prefer it to lying in shit.”
Rufus remembered those good times when he’d been alone, with half a piano, but a whole heart, creating, creating. Oh what he wouldn’t give for a taste of rum! Bataille asked Rue if he had any remorse for the murder. Rue teared up, rueful: “I stole two hundred dollars once. I tell you it required nerve. I used to complain about cockroaches and mice. Georgie and me lived in a shack, dirty, cold. Our flowerbeds were graves.”
Bataille shrugged, crossed himself, then exited. He would play Rue’s keeper, not his liberator.
Lion told Rufus India’d come down from Halifax, was waiting downstairs. “Want to see her?”
Rue shook his head no. “I don’t want her to see me shut up like some slave. Tell her I wish hear … I wish her happiness.”
What did Rufus want for his last meal? “Make it blueberry pie, Sheriff. A whole blueberry pie. I’ll wash it down with two bottles of Sussex ginger ale.”
Outside in the hot night, Salvation Army singers fountained voices like rosewater. Tambourines rustled like rivers.
George knew he’d never eat another Moir’s chocolate. Now he wanted to be where he could breathe endlessly and see the sun eternally. Major Pretty and other members of the Fredericton Corps of the Salvation Army visited his cell. They composed a band whose members included Brothers Olds and Hoyt on trumpet and tambourine, Mrs. Hoyt, Omar Bird (feeling sorry for Rue), Mrs. Pretty, and James Synge on tambourine. They sang songs the death-empowered Georgie chose. The inmate even joined in at times on absurdly ecstatic harmonica. Everyone kept weeping while laughing, then laughing while weeping. Even the most calloused psalmist would never forget this night. Believers sang:
Why should Christian belief
Shake and shiver like a leaf?
George was so calm about his dying he was certain he wouldn’t shame himself by pissing his pants when the rope wrung his neck. The moon rent the sky with light, shivering.
George’d been unfairly angry with Blondola for leaving the court when his cheating was exposed. But she’d still come to see him off. She’d brought Otho and Desiah. George just had tears coursing down his face and that of Blondola too. There were sobs, snuffles, flurries of the tissue paper Lion kindly provided. George told Blondola, bravely, his voice unbrave, “The Spirit of God was in my cell. I don’t care anymore about the gallows.”
Blondola was not mollified. “What about us, Joygee, yer babies an me?”
George just wept. “I’ll be watchin over ya from above.”
Blondola aimed fruitlessly for calm; Otho was looking like he wanted to cry and Desiah was wailing. She sobbed, “We was happy till Rue come out the pen. Rue’s torn us down, ripped us apart. How’ll we live, Joygee? How’ll we live?”
George sobbed, “It weren’t all Rue’s fault. I was readin bad comics and gamblin and drinkin. I was a bad husband, a poor papa.”
Blondola cried terribly, “You were my husband and their pa. We loved you just as you was, with all your silliness an sins, Georgie.”
Then George handed Blondola a gift for the grown-up Otho: the silver-buckled belt Rue’d received from Easter. They hugged a last time. George asked, tenderly, “Blondola, how’d ya get that name? You’ve never said.”
Blondola smiled through her tears. “Ma loved her blond Jesus, and she loved her dark Coca-Cola.”