THE GALLOWS is winsome, awesome, lonesome, lithesome, elegant, functional, classically rough, and ultramodern. Standing on the platform in the barn, Ellis feels the strong, ripe rope; he feels the cool heads of the nails that lock it into place and make it strong enough to kill. Ellis wishes to touch the Hamiltons hardly, but gently. His violence against them must be an expert matter of rope, gravity, and their own weights, their own deeds, counting heavily against them. He pulls a lever that jets two bags of flour through the trap, tumbling, hanging. All is working fine.
George and Rue, chained at the neck, felt their flesh bruise from the weighty chain and heavy padlock each time one of them stumbled. Cool hands were about to grope their necks, crush their throats, while the approaching autopsy’d splay open their bellies. Calm, methodical Frederictonians’d wield stainless steel knives and scissors and cut up the boys’ garb and nooses and hair. So only a last-minute British-inherited reserve would prevent their genitals from being sliced off and their skin stripped off for wallets and purses, as more excitable whites did to their black lynchees in the southern states.
The boys could not know that Alisha’d taken a train all the way from Three Mile Plains to Fredericton. She was the closest family of any sort they had left. She brought with her all the futile prayers—and effective prophecy—of Three and Five Mile Plains. She camped out in the mob-filled streets in front of and around the prison, where, if it had rained, the vast numbers of bodies jostling and jockeying for the best vantage points to attempt to feel—for they could not witness—the imminent but closed-door execution of flesh-and-blood like themselves would’ve prevented any drop from moistening the ground.
Rufus, companioned by Bataille, and George, flanked by Pretty, walked from their cells, down stairs, and out the back of the jail to the small barn in its yard. The men now felt absurdly comfortable in the gently clanking chains on their wrists and ankles. During the brief seconds the brothers were visible to the massed, sandwich-and-pie-picnicking, beer-and-rum-guzzling hoi polloi outside the prison walls, a thunderous series of cheers erupted, punctuated by clapping and catcalls. Six local Klansmen milled about in white sheets and hoods with slits cut out for eyes.
A man’s drunken voice shouted lustily, “Hang those black bastards! Or let us do it!” The crowd surged savagely, anticipating an orgiastic lynching, but the hundred cops round the jail pushed and clubbed the ringleaders back. But neither George nor Rue heeded the tidal attentiveness of their frothing audience. They vanished into the temporary refuge of the barn.
Sheriff Lion explained the final procedures and commanded the boys to bravery. (Both George and Rue felt calm. It wasn’t hanging that was so bad, they reflected; it was the possibility of messing yourself that was disgusting.) All around the small, hay-strewn, shadow-busy barn, under a single electric light bulb, stood skull-faced police—witnesses—at attention. The atmosphere of the hanging barn was hot with hymns, muffled by the wood walls but still infiltrating the death chamber, turning it into some weird joint English-Latin, Protestant-Catholic service, with the Salvation Army band’s marching music dovetailing with the Gregorian-like chants of the Eternal Church. Ellis was poised funereally—a Gothic demon—atop the scaffold. The tolling church bells and the liquored-up shouts from the mob outside seemed quiet and far off now.
Sheriff Lion removed the chains from the Hamiltons. Without the extra weight, they felt light enough to fly. George turned and hugged Rufus. “I forgive you.” That was Rufus speaking silently, George saying it aloud. Tears coated two fraternal faces. Then Lion tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and escorted them, shuffling, to the gallows staircase.
They scaled the mandatory thirteen steps to the top of the scaffold. There was no flinching, no nothing. The boys were so calm that some onlookers believed they’d been injected with morphine. But, no, their eerie, disturbing calm was that of Asa and Easter under water, that of Cynthy in that final bathroom. There was no point to feeling ill used or hard done by or disrespected: they could only pray agony would end in rapture. As soon as the sun’d first shone on them, it’d been shining on their graves. They knew it. Their stars were always a ceiling of nooses.
Ellis arranged the brothers on separate traps beside two nooses, belted their legs, affixed the ropes about their necks, and dropped black hoods over their faces. He was methodical, undistressed, and would have whistled, save that he enjoyed the gravity and solemnity of professionally administering death.
Outside the jail, a black hearse waited. A lightning-undiminished dark sparked above that jail as grey as settecento maps of the New World. A worrisome citizenry milled. A voice wailed, “Let’s butcher em! Let’s work em over!”
Rufus stood on the scaffold, his back to George, and lamented and rejoiced, all at once. He’d been dispensed no merciful love; now he was being dispensed with—mercifully. George imagined he’d laze on the edge of a cliff of gold where doves lie down, eat and drink to his heart’s content.
The priest and the preacher opened their respective Bibles to speak final words of comfort and promise. They found it, strangely, hard.
Lion shouted “Uncover!” A dozen policemen-witnesses doffed their caps ceremoniously. Unceremoniously, Ellis yanked the lever that sent the trembling Hamiltons crashing down into eternity. George was in the middle of Psalm 23; Rufus was saying “Hail Mary” over and over again. The trap went blam! Just like that. As they fell, all the world swooped upwards like flowers. The brothers saw Asa, Cynthy, both forgiven, waiting for them just outside the barn. Rue could feel Easter next to him; George imagined he was holding Otho and Desiah and smiling at Blondola.
The masses in the hot, choking streets felt a collective spasm, a frisson, that made them gasp, quiver, vibrate in their genitals when they heard the trap violently clap, clatter, open. They felt emotionally alive now, but spent.
Was there a rich tremble, the double downslap of feet, a shaking of air and flesh? Two bodies braced like quail; they snapped to a stop, two feet off the floor. Then the stars were hanging, the heads of sunflowers were hanging, the ripening apples were hanging, and two minor Negroes were hanging where the Saint John River was drifting, drifting, drifting.
The boys were not hanged; they were felled.
They were not conquered; they were quelled.
Their deaths will last as long as life itself.
The Negro hands of night moulded stars into immemorial, memorial pearls. Finis the “Black Acadian” Tragedy of “George and Rue.”