His voice boomed through the speaker that he held tightly up to his mouth, rushing over the heads of the residents to the ears of Arbuckle and Lady Mae who stood perhaps a meter behind all of the other residents. His voice—she couldn’t be sure. It was obscured by the echo off the square, made tinny by the megaphone. But still. She felt Arbuckle’s arm press up against hers as he put his suitcase down in the dusty road. The Deputy adjusted his tall hat and said something, but the crowd had cried out with his last statement. They were cheering still, and the Deputy again raised the megaphone in the air. The crowd quieted quickly, and the children, who were normally raucous and feral, fell silent, their eyes wide and lips closed.

“By the butcher’s stripes ye were healed!” the Deputy called. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and we have made an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. And it is the propitiation for your sins: and not for yours only, but also for the sins of the whole world!”

He stood rigidly on the wooden stage as he spoke, his body fighting itself, trembling as though something was about to explode inside of him. It was not unlike how the Deputies were in court, and Lady Mae knew such behavior was meant to rile the crowd. It was a frenzy that was contagious, one that jumped from the body of a Deputy to a soul of a resident as easily as a common sickness. It was happening then. She saw it. The way their feet dug into the dirt, their clenched fists, the way they raised their fingerless hands and stubbed arms into the sky. Dust floated up between bodies dressed in gray and black, feet pounded the hard, cracked ground. Lady Mae kept her eyes on the Deputy as best she could, but she could not make out his face under the brim of his tall hat. The sun, which was directly behind the scaffold, turned his body into an indecipherable shadow.

“Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by your own blood you obtaineth eternal redemption,” the Deputy continued. “And so we sing a new song, saying, for thou hast redeemed us by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and settlement; and almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission!”

There was movement from the side of the scaffold. Two of the Deputies—Griffin and Worth—still held the man by his arms. The man thrashed and tried to throw his body forward over and over again. The Deputies held on, but then the man broke from their grip and lunged forward, tearing at the air with his hands. It was sudden but not surprising. The Deputy holding the megaphone, unaffected by the resident’s actions, did not flinch nor stumble, but stood stoically, assuredly, even as the man began to shout and rush at him, pointing his fingers at the other Deputies. The noise from the crowd quieted and then ceased altogether. Children atop shoulders were gently lifted to the ground. Lady Mae heard the crunching of gravel and the brushing of stiff fabric. She saw the residents back up, distancing themselves from the Deputy and the man facing each other on the scaffold. A few of them—those on the edge by Lady Mae—turned and walked away from the square, back toward their shacks or their shops.