The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Mizell broke in. ‘Are you asking this court to believe you walked four miles without realizing you weren’t wearing your damn hat?’

‘I guess since I wear it all the time, I just figured it must be there,’ Trusdale said. This elicited another gust of laughter.

Barclay came back in and took his place next to Dave Fisher. ‘What are they laughing at?’

‘Dummy don’t need a hangman,’ Fisher said. ‘He’s tying the knot all by himself. I guess it shouldn’t be funny, but it’s pretty comical, just the same.’

‘Did you encounter Rebecca Cline in that alley?’ George Andrews asked in a loud voice. With every eye on him, he had discovered a heretofore hidden flair for the dramatic. ‘Did you encounter her and steal her birthday dollar?’

‘No, sir,’ Trusdale said.

‘Did you kill her?’

‘No, sir. I didn’t even know who she was.’

Mr Cline rose from his seat and shouted, ‘You lying sonofabitch!’

‘I ain’t lying,’ Trusdale said, and that was when Sheriff Barclay believed him.

‘I have no further questions,’ George Andrews said, and walked back to his seat.

Trusdale started to get up, but Mizell told him to sit still and answer a few more questions.

‘Do you continue to contend, Mr Trusdale, that someone stole your hat while you were drinking in the Chuck-a-Luck, and that someone put it on, and went into the alley, and killed Rebecca Cline, and left it there to implicate you?’

Trusdale was silent.

‘Answer the question, Mr Trusdale.’

‘Sir, I don’t know what implicate means.’

‘Do you expect us to believe someone framed you for this heinous murder?’

Trusdale considered, twisting his hands together. At last he said, ‘Maybe somebody took it by mistake and throwed it away.’

Mizell looked out at the rapt gallery. ‘Did anyone here take Mr Trusdale’s hat by mistake?’

There was silence, except for the wind. It was picking up. The snow was no longer flurries. The first big storm of winter had arrived. That was the one townsfolk called the Wolf Winter, because the wolves came down from the Black Hills in packs to hunt for garbage.

‘I have no more questions,’ Mizell said, ‘and due to the weather, we are going to dispense with any closing statements. The jury will retire to consider a verdict. You have three choices, gentlemen – innocent, manslaughter, or murder in the first degree.’

‘Girlslaughter, more like it,’ someone remarked.

Sheriff Barclay and Dave Fisher retired to the Chuck-a-Luck. Abel Hines joined them, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat. Dale Gerard served them schooners of beer on the house.

‘Mizell might not have had no more questions,’ Barclay said, ‘but I got one. Never mind the hat, if Trusdale killed her, how come we never found that silver dollar?’

‘Because he got scared and threw it away,’ Hines said.

‘I don’t think so. He’s too bone-stupid. If he’d had that dollar, he’d have gone back to the Chuck-a-Luck and drunk it up.’

‘What are you saying?’ Dave asked. ‘That you think he’s innocent?’

‘I’m saying I wish we’d found that cartwheel.’

‘Maybe he lost it out a hole in his pocket.’

‘He didn’t have any holes in his pockets,’ Barclay said. ‘Only one in his boot, and it wasn’t big enough for a dollar to get through.’ He drank some of his beer. The wind gusted, and tumbleweeds blew up Main Street, looking like ghostly brains in the snow.

The jury took an hour and a half. ‘We voted to hang him on the first ballot,’ Kelton Fisher said later, ‘but we wanted it to look decent.’

Mizell asked Trusdale if he had anything to say before sentence was passed.

‘I can’t think of nothing,’ Trusdale said. ‘Just I never killed that girl.’

The storm blew for three days. John House asked Barclay how much he reckoned Trusdale weighed, and Barclay said he guessed the man went around one forty. House made a dummy out of burlap sacks and filled it with stones, weighing it on the hostelry scales until the needle stood pat on one forty. Then he hung the dummy while half the town stood around in the snowdrifts and watched. The trial run went all right.

On the night before the execution, the weather cleared. Sheriff Barclay told Trusdale he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Trusdale asked for steak and eggs, with homefries on the side soaked in gravy. Barclay bought it out of his own pocket, and sat at his desk cleaning his fingernails and listening to the steady clink of Trusdale’s knife and fork on the china plate. When it stopped, he went in. Trusdale was sitting on his bunk. His plate was so clean Barclay figured he must have lapped up the last of the gravy like a dog. He was crying.

‘Something just come to me,’ Trusdale said.

‘What’s that, Jim?’

‘If they hang me tomorrow morning, I’ll go into my grave with steak and eggs still in my belly. It won’t have no chance to work through.’

For a moment Barclay said nothing. He was horrified not by the image but because Trusdale had thought of it. Then he said, ‘Wipe your nose.’

Trusdale wiped it.