“Let’s go,” Lady Mae said and turned on her heels. “We can take the hill path.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

As she tried to pull him away, she heard clearly the chanting, the low calls, beastly and berating. “Come on, Arbuckle. Ain’t nothing for us over there.”

“Seems like something,” he said.

It was Saturday—market day. It had slipped her mind what with the preparations of Arbuckle’s arrival and then Ruby’s alarming demeanor. She never went to town on market day if she could avoid it. She’d told Arbuckle why in her letters, but she’d mentioned it only briefly and without opinion as she worried the Deputies would read her letters and disallow the correspondence. Outcries—that’s what they called what happened on the scaffold most market days. Residents that were beyond the butcher’s hand, their crime blasphemy.

“Go on now,” she said, and elbowed him to the side. “We don’t want to be there.” But his legs were longer, his gait wider, and so he strode out in front of Lady Mae to get a better look. “Arbuckle,” she said over and over again. “Don’t you remember? I told you in the letters how—”

Lady Mae’s explanation, her pleading, was drowned out by a large roar that erupted from the square. A throng of residents had converged across from the courthouse—it looked like nearly everyone in the settlement was there. Arbuckle grabbed her hand and pulled Lady Mae toward the back of the group. They could not get closer, but Lady Mae saw the shape of a Deputy up on the scaffold, a steel megaphone in his right hand. The residents, who stood dozens deep, pushed up against the wooden steps and platform, their arms spreading across the beams, touching and writhing as though they were snakes in a pit. Many had children on their shoulders. Some of the women sobbed, others raised their fists and punched the air.

The residents stared at the two of them as they walked along the edge of the crowd. Arbuckle was back, and that girl was next to him. The two of them joined at the hip as anyone could be. But Lady Mae noticed the difference between a blink and a shift of the eyes, the rigidity of the residents’ bodies as they drew near; they were not welcome there despite the expectation that all residents attend the outcries.

“Come on,” said Lady Mae.

Arbuckle, though, was looking toward the scaffold. They were closer now, and Lady Mae could see that near the edge was Deputy Daniels, Deputy Parson, too. The other two Deputies—Griffin and Worth—held a man by each arm. But over to the left, near the edge of the scaffold where the stairs met the ground, there was the fifth. From where she was, he looked no different than the others. He stood with the megaphone poised at his mouth. The brim of his tall hat covered his face. The crowd hushed, and he spoke.

“We, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness!”