The Deputies holding the chains gripped them tight and began walking in opposite directions. They must not have heard Arbuckle above the man on the scaffold being stretched to his death, his guttural screams straining toward the sky. Lady Mae looked up. The birds dove down and landed in the settling dust. There was another scream, curdling and grotesque, and when she looked back up at the scaffold she saw that in the hand of one of the Deputies was a long piece of fabric to which another held a torch. The fabric caught and drew the flames upward. The Deputies, satisfied with their work, looked at Lady Mae and Arbuckle, the only two left in the square, and threw the fabric out toward them. It landed near their feet. Only then did Lady Mae realize that it wasn’t fabric at all, but the skin of the man they had pulled apart, the remains of which glistened underneath the hot afternoon sun.

9

Arbuckle paced in the front room of Lady Mae’s shack. The floor creaked and its pine boards bent under his feet. She stared after him as he moved back and forth from one end of the small room to the other. From where Lady Mae sat on the sofa, she could see with each thundering step how he worked his jaw, trying to unpick what she had tried to say in her letters. But he did not speak. He could not, had not since they had returned to the shack. What he had seen—what words would be enough? As it was, Lady Mae tried not to think of the savageness of it all. But when she looked at his gritted teeth, lips in two thin lines, all she could say was, “I told you to get, Arbuckle. Said we got to go and you didn’t listen.”

She sat down on the sofa and pressed her unsteady hands down on her knees that were bony and thin until she felt muscle.

“I was hoping things might’ve changed,” he said and gestured to Lady Mae. She knew he wanted her to say that things had changed, that what they saw in the square had been an exception, and the man on the scaffold was a man who deserved whatever he got.

“Nothing’s changed. Gotten worse more like it. That was the ninth,” she admitted. “The outcries. Five men and four women.”

“But that—that—what they did to that man? That ain’t right—killing him right in the square like that. They don’t even try to hide it no more?”

“Guess not.”

“You guess not? This what you been trying to say in your letters?”

When he sat down next to her on the sofa, the cushions gave under his weight and his knee knocked hers once. “You ain’t tell me this,” he said.

“You know right as I do I couldn’t.”

She hadn’t because to write killing and murder and stay there—there would be repercussions for that. The Deputies would question her and put their thick hands on the letters she kept behind a drawer, carefully stacked and tied with a string. They would not see what was, only that which they wanted. Arbuckle and Lady Mae had always been careful with their words, but it’d make no difference; to punish her they would set out after him and find him with his pen and paper, and the earth would eat his bones.