She did not try to conceal herself as she walked up to the back of the crowd; after all, what could they to do that had not already been done? But as she was nearly there, she stepped on a fallen branch no bigger than a child’s arm. It snapped, and a little boy who was not one meter from Lady Mae turned his head. She put her finger to her lips, her eyes softening, pleading. The boy pointed at her first, then reached his other hand up to the man that stood next to him. He tugged at the man’s sleeve, and the man’s eyes followed the boy’s outstretched arm.

When the man’s eyes fell on Lady Mae, three things happened. The boy cried out the butcher, the man looked down, and one by one, the residents shifted their bodies toward Lady Mae. They turned their heads slowly, raised their own eyes to her. They heaved before her, their bodies pressed up against each other like bricks. She waited for the first shout; torturer, they’d cry. Get her, they’d chant. She waited for the rush of skin; would they grab at her scalp and pull her to the ground, pounding her flesh until it looked like the earth?

But then. Nothing happened. The man gently put his hand on the child’s head and leaned down to his ear. He whispered something and the boy turned to Lady Mae and bowed his head. The woman next to him bowed her head, too, and then another. One by one the women and men—those that had lost pieces of their ancestry to Lady Mae and her mother, to her mother’s mother—softened their eyes and held their hands out palms facing sky. The stillness was broken only by the Deputies, whose feet shuffled on the scaffold as they tried to corral the woman they had pinned. But the rest, the old and the young; they stood silent but hopeful.

Maybe the residents had seen the love between Arbuckle and Lady Mae, had felt it all the way deep in their bones. Maybe when they looked over at the other side of the bed come morning they’d thought of the two of them, the butcher and the only boy that loved her. All that her mother had talked about—what she said the residents spoke of when in the chair. Forgiveness, that maybe if everyone had a little more there wouldn’t be need for any Deputies at all. They weren’t going to hurt her, and she was done hurting them.

The Deputies scrambled around the woman on the scaffold and Deputy Iverson broke from the circle and grabbed a megaphone from the scaffold’s floor. He stood, his belly hanging over his belt like pregnant swine. He had one hand behind him, his palm pressed up the bottom of his back. He brought the megaphone up to his lips, which he licked slowly, purposefully, as if the taste of her death was there on his tongue.