Red Water: A Novel

The Execution

One

A wind was blowing that day, old and wintry and mean. It came up in the morning, arriving from the southeast, and by noon it had gained in force and shook the heaviest branches of the trees and caused them to saw back and forth with a low groaning noise. Patches of snow still lay on the hills, old grainy slubs nestled in crevices on the north-facing slopes and thinner white lines running in scallops along the northern ridges.

When he sat on his coffin, the wind ruffled his hair and lifted the flaps of his jacket and they fluttered like the wings of some small black bird clinging to his breast.

Meadowlarks broke into song occasionally, and the wind continued to blow in heavy gusts as more men arrived, riding singly down out of the hills, or coming in groups of two or three, like pale apparitions.

He could hear the sound of the water in the stream.

Where the cows had trod the muddy ground they left hoofprints the size of dinner plates and the earth had now dried and the path was left uneven and hard to walk. The wind made it unpleasant to be out of the shelter of the wagons and many of the men stood with their backs against the running boards or set their shoulders against the warmth of their horses.

In spite of the cold, it felt like spring would soon arrive. All the signs were present--the hopeful notes of the meadowlarks, the grass greening up in the meadow, and the patches of bare earth on the hillsides. There was a feeling some corner had been turned and winter was behind them now, even though the wind still held such bitterness. The sky, though not really overcast, was covered with a white film of clouds, thin and insubstantial, like a layer of gauze stretched over the palest blue eye, and this lent the day a muted feeling. It seemed like a time between seasons--not yet spring, though spring had officially arrived two days earlier, and no longer winter, though something of its recent chill still carried on the air. He noticed the photographer standing downwind of his portable tent and he also noticed how the tent billowed in the surging wind like a living breathing thing.

He could hear a hammering sound of a woodpecker working away at the trunk of a gnarled and misshapen cottonwood tree whose lower branches had grown so thick the main trunk had broken and the heavy limbs now bent to earth. All along the stream the spidery and tangled old cottonwoods had been stunted from drought years and grown more horizontal than vertical, and yet they had managed to hang on to the stream bank, sending out new shoots and new growth each year, shedding the heaviest of limbs to wind and the forces of gravity.

All morning the birds called from the east and the west sides of the stream and the silence seemed magnified by the pale and colorless sky, the dry brown hills, the ridges and north-facing canyons scalloped with the thinning snow. In another month the sedges would green up along the banks of the creek and the snow would be gone and the deer that bedded down here now would leave the meadow and begin working their way back up among the cedar-covered hills.

By June it would be so hot and dry the grasses would begin to dry out and the creek would fall, the once deep water lowering and eddying in pools deep enough to hold fish in the shadows.

They killed him before noon.

The wind was still blowing.

Both spring and winter were on the air.

He had been brought to this spot by the marshal who had befriended him during his long incarceration and who had been helping him maintain his spirits during his first trial, as well as his second.

He arrived about an hour before the actual execution and he appeared to be tired yet calm.

The firing squad was not visible. The five men were hidden behind the canvas cover in the back of a wagon drawn up before the man sitting on his coffin, and they fired their shots through an opening in the canvas.

Before that, however, before the shots were fired, he was allowed to converse with several men who had come to witness the execution.

His photograph was taken by the man who had been pacing near his tent and he asked the photographer to deliver a copy of his likeness to his remaining wives. When that request had been made and agreed to, he rose and said a few last words to the crowd that had assembled to witness his execution.

His voice broke only once and that was when he mentioned his wives and his children who, he said, would be left unprotected in this world.

A minister knelt with him and prayed.

He sat again on his coffin. He took off his coat and handed it to a young man standing nearby with the request that it be given to one of his sons. He said he could see no use in destroying a perfectly good jacket.

He was blindfolded but, at his request, his hands remained unbound.

When the blindfold was in place, he called out to his executioners in a strong and steady voice: Center my heart, boys. Don't mangle my limbs.