A guard came in on the other side, the free side. 'Time's up,' he said.
'We love you, Jeff!' Edith said through her tears. She carried Raymond out. The boys were still crying, too.
'Come on, Pinkard,' said a guard on Jeff 's side of the visiting room. 'Back to the cell you go.'
Back he went. The cell was familiar. Nothing bad would happen to him while he was in it. Pretty soon, though, they'd take him out one last time. He wouldn't be going back after that. Well, what else did one last time mean?
Two days later, he had another visitor: Jonathan Moss again. 'Thought you gave up on me,' he said through the damned unyielding mesh.
'I don't know what else I can do for you,' Moss said. 'I wish I did. I haven't got a hacksaw blade on me or anything. Even if I did, they would have found it when they searched me.'
'Yeah,' Pinkard said. 'So-no reprieve from the governor. Hell, no governor. Son of a bitch thinks he's President of Texas now. No reprieve from the President of the USA. No reprieve from the assholes on the Yankee Supreme Court. So what else is there?'
'Well, you're not the only one they're coming down on, if that makes you feel any better,' Jonathan Moss replied.
'You mean, like misery loves company?' Jeff shrugged. 'I'd love it if I didn't have the misery. But yeah, go ahead-tell me about the others. I don't have a wireless set, and they don't give me papers, so I don't know jack shit about what's going on out there.'
'They hanged Ferdinand Koenig and Saul Goldman yesterday.'
'Goddamn shame,' Pinkard said. 'They were good men, both of 'em. Confederate patriots. Why else would you Yankees hang people?'
'For murdering millions? For telling lies about it in papers and magazines and on the wireless?' Moss suggested.
'We didn't get rid of anybody who didn't have it coming,' Jeff said stubbornly. 'And like your side didn't tell any lies to your people during the war. Yeah, sure.'
The military attorney sighed. 'We didn't tell lies about things like that. We didn't do things like that-not to Negroes, not to Jews, not to anybody.'
He undercut what Jeff would have said next: that the USA didn't have many Negroes to get rid of. The United States were crawling with Jews. Everybody knew that. Instead, he said, 'What other kind of good news have you got for me?'
'If it makes you feel any better, you aren't the only camp commandant and guard chief to get condemned,' Moss told him. 'Vern Green goes right with you here. And…you knew Mercer Scott back in Louisiana, right?'
'Yeah.' Pinkard scowled at him. 'You know what? It doesn't make me feel one goddamn bit better.'
'I'm sorry. If there were anything else I could try, I'd try it. If you have any ideas, sing out.'
Jeff shook his head. 'What's the use? Nobody in the USA cares. Nobody in the USA understands. We did what we had to do, that's all.'
''It looked like a good idea at the time.'' Moss sounded like somebody quoting something. Then he sighed. 'That isn't enough to do you any good, either.'
'Didn't reckon it would be,' Jeff said. 'Go on, then. You tried. I said that before, I expect. Won't be long now.'
In some ways the days till the hanging crawled past. In others, they flew. The last days of his life, and he was stuck in a cell by himself. Not the way he would have wanted things to turn out, but what did that have to do with anything? He asked the guards for a copy of Over Open Sights.
'Wouldn't you rather have a Bible?' one of them said.
'If I wanted a Bible, don't you reckon I would've told you so?' Jeff snapped.
A little to his surprise, they brought him Jake Featherston's book. He paged through it. Everything in there made such good sense. A damn shame it hadn't worked out for real. But the Negroes in the CSA were gone, or most of them were, and the damnyankees couldn't change that even if they did win the war.
The night before they were going to hang him, the guards asked what he wanted for supper. 'Fried chicken and fried potatoes and a bottle of beer,' he answered. They gave it to him, except the beer came in a tin cup. He ate with good appetite. He slept…some, anyhow.
They asked him what he wanted once more at breakfast time. 'Bacon and eggs and grits,' he told them, and he got that, too. He cleaned his plate again, and poured down the coffee that came with the food.
'Want a preacher?' a guard asked.
Pinkard shook his head. 'Nah. What for? I've got a clean conscience. If you don't, you need a preacher worse'n I do.'
They cuffed his hands behind him and led him out to the prison yard. They'd run up a gallows there; he'd listened to the carpentry in his cell. Now he saw it was a gallows built for two. Another party of U.S. guards led Vern Green out from a different part of the jail.
Vern looked like hell. His nerve must have failed him at last. He gave Jeff a forlorn nod. 'How come you ain't about to piss yourself like me?'
'What's the use?' Jeff answered. 'I'd beg if I thought it'd do any good, but it won't. So I'll go out the best way I know how. Why give these assholes the satisfaction of watching me blubber?'
Reporters watched from a distance. Guards made sure they stayed back. Otherwise, they would have got up to the condemned men and yelled questions in their faces. Jeff figured Yankee reporters had to be even worse than their Confederate counterparts, and the Confederates were pretty bad.
A guard had to help Vern Green up the stairs to the platform. Jeff made it under his own power. His knees were knocking, but he didn't let it show. Pride was the last thing he had left. And much good it does me, too, he thought.
Along with more guards and the hangman, a minister waited up there. 'Will you pray with me?' he asked Jeff.
'No.' Jeff shook his head. 'I made it this far on my own. I'll go out the same way.'
Vern talked with the preacher. They went through the Twenty-third Psalm together. When they finished, Vern said, 'I'm still scared.'
'No one can blame you for that,' the minister said.
A guard held out a pack of cigarettes to Jeff. 'Thanks,' he said. 'You'll have to take it out for me.'
'I will,' the guard said. The smoke was a Raleigh, so it tasted good. Vern also smoked one. The guards let them finish, then walked them onto the traps. The hangman came over and set the rope around Jeff 's neck. Then he put a burlap bag over Jeff 's head.
'Make it quick if you can,' Jeff said. The bag was white, not black. He could still see light and shadow through it. His heart pounded now-every beat might be the last.
'I'm doing my best,' the hangman answered. His footsteps moved away, but not far. They've got no right, damn them, Jeff thought. They've-A lever clacked.
The trap dropped.
S tuck in fucking Alabama,' Armstrong Grimes grumbled. 'What could be worse than this?'
Squidface was cleaning his captured automatic Tredegar. He looked up from the work. 'Well, you could be in hell,' he said.
'Who says I'm not?' Armstrong said. 'It's a godforsaken miserable place, and I can't get out of it. If that's not hell, what do you call it?'
'Pittsburgh,' Squidface answered, which jerked a laugh out of Armstrong. After guiding an oily rag through the Tredegar's barrel with a cleaning rod, Squidface went on, 'If you're gonna get screwed any which way, lay back and enjoy it, you know?'
'Tell me another one,' Armstrong said. 'Army chow. The people fucking hate us. We're not careful, we get scragged. Even the broads are scared of us now. If they get friendly, they end up dead. And we don't take hostages for that, so there's nothing to hold the locals back.'
'Army chow's not so bad,' Squidface said. 'There's always enough of it nowadays, anyhow. Back before I went in, I couldn't always count on three squares.' He was skinny enough to make that easy to believe.
But Armstrong was in the mood to bitch, and he wasn't about to let anybody stop him. 'You're just saying
