No Doors, No Windows

Eight: Pride in the Profession

There were many who called the lynching of Eustace Powder a blot on the previously-unbesmirched reputation of Princetown, but for Matthew Carty, it was the handing-down of a latter-day Ten Commandments.

The alleged crime for which the dusty Negro was swung high is of no consequence at this time; suffice to say he was innocent, if not in thought, at least in deed, indeed; but all things pass, and the momentary upheavals that result in the neck-stretching of one unimportant dark man are of no importance in the shadow of later, more electric events.

For it was the excitement, the crowd-respect directed at the man who knotted the rope and threw it over the elm’s thick branch, that struck eight-year-old Matt Carty with such lasting force. The humid, expectant rustle of the summer day, the pavement warm beneath his bare, dirty feet, the women watching flame-eyed. It was all such a rich experience, he could not put it from him.

There was even an unexpected touch of homespun humor. The black, black man’s last request, jocularly offered by one of the local rakehells, was to have a pair of dice, to hold in his hand when they swung him aloft. “Those who live by the bones gonna die by the bones!” replied the last-request-man, and fishing in his own jeans, he came up with a fine set of red plastic dice; as neat a set of see-through galloping dominoes as ever was. And giving them to Eustace Powder, the local happy-smith patted the Negro on the cheek. “Roll a natural, boogie.” He grinned, and the black man clenched them in his fist tightly as they yanked him aloft.

The face of the gap-toothed Eustace Powder, his mouthings of horror and expectation. The gurgle and retching and final gasp as he swung clear of the ground. He seemed to thrash and twitch interminably. It was one of the two high points of Matt Carty’s life, even if Powder did drop one of them.

In the light of that one incident, his existence was systematically directed, till the day he died, many years later.

For Matt Carty liked the idea of being a hangman.

There was a certain pride a man could take in such a profession. So he took pride, and he took the profession. It suited him, and he suited it. A wedding of the right job with the proper tool.

Matt Carty had always been a little man. Not a small man, for that is a thing of personality, and Matt’s personality was just fine, thank you. He was outgoing and dryly witty, with perception to temper it; but this was too much offset by his lack of height — an almost comical lack. He was five feet, one inch tall.

He had often considered elevator shoes. Only the inherent hypocrisy of them prevented their purchase. In their place he substituted an almost pathetic eagerness for love and friendship. Indiscriminately, Matt Carty made friends.

Unfortunately, they did not stick to him for long:

“Jeez, it’s real funny, meeting a guy from Princetown here in Chi. I mean, me being a guy from Henshaw, I mean that’s only twenty-six miles, an’ this is a helluva big town. Wanta ’nother drink, Matt?”

“Oh, golly, no. So tell me — uh, what was it? Harold? — Harold, tell me, what are you doing here in Chicago?”

“I’m a buyer for a linoleum house. You know, I price rolls and cuttings. How about you?”

“I’m at the U. of C.”

“No kidding?”

“Uh-huh. Studying plane geometry and advanced engineering design.”

“What line are you in?”

“I’m a hangman.”

“— uh?”

“That’s right. I’m a professional executioner. I work free-lance for the states. Of course, I haven’t had too many jobs to my credit, but, well, you know … you’ve got to start somewhere. You see, I’m studying the mathematics of falling weights, and the force of vectors so when I — say, where are you going?”

“— uh — I just saw an old friend of mine, a business acquaint — I, uh, gotta go. Say, it was real swell meeting you; take it easy, huh.”

End of friendship.

With love, it was considerably more difficult. Being a normal, red-blooded American lad, Matt Carty sought the companionship of attractive young women. But in that case, also, it was star-crossed:

“Matty, pl eee ase!”

“Aw, c’mon, Jeannie.”

“Now, Matthew Carty, if you don’t take your hand out of there, I’m getting out of this car this minute! ”

“I thought you loved me …”

“… well … I do , but …”

“But what?”

A prolonged silence.

“Isn’t the night cool, Jeannie?”

“Mmm.”

“It was on nights like this that the hangmen of Henry the First’s period prepared their scaffolds.”

“What a perfectly sick thing to think about, Matt.”

“Why, what’s sick about it? I think it’s a real fine thing to think about. I mean, after all, it is my line of work.”

“You-y whaaat? ”

“I, uh … heh-heh …”

“You told me you were in lumber!”

“Heh-heh …”

“ What, exactly , do you do for a living, Mr. Carty?”

“I’m a, uh, well, I’m a h —”

End of love.

But the hazards of the trade were offset by other, more ephemeral, pleasures. There was the pleasure of the feel of good hemp stretched taut. There was the satisfying rightness of a great weight swinging free, like a pendulum, at the end of a straight plumb. There was the heady wine of sound produced by the progression of an execution:

Feet mounting scaffold.

Milling about.

Monotoned prayers.

Man puffing cigarette.

Adjustment sounds, most precise.

Trap release.

The door banging free.

The thwumpppp!

The twannnng!

The sound of silence.

From the first tentative stirrings within him, the subliminal cravings for recognition — recognition in the field he had chosen — Matt Carty had gone about the business of preparation properly. First high school, with emphasis on woodworking (in case of do-it-yourself emergencies), mathematics, abnormal psychology, dynamics of geometry and a fine grounding in biology — one must know the merchandise with which one works.

Then college, with several architectural courses, penology, criminology, group behavior classes, ethics, advanced vector analysis and even biochemistry. He did not stay long at any one University, however, and as a consequence, he never came up with a degree of any sort. How could he, with the variegated courses he undertook, a smattering of one, a spray-exposure to another?

And oddly enough, there were no deterrents to his career. His parents at first expressed a white-faced horror and complete refusal of cooperation. But they were much too involved with their own problems — she with her religion composed of unequal parts devout hypochondria and incipient nymphomania, and he with his God: the Mighty Green Buck — so they sent young Matthew to the schools he wished to attend.

Thus he observed the slaughtering of cattle, watching carefully as they were weighted and hung. He sat in at executions. His eyes were constantly on watch for stresses and effects brought about by pressure and dead-weight. He carried on harmless experiments.

He went to study at Columbia, and fell in with a disparate clique of Greenwich Village bohemians, one of whom was a bottle-auburn brunette named Carinthe who inducted him into the mysteries of sex and liquor, narcotics and bad poetry, and who cast him aside, huskless, some months later, leaving him with a bruised id and a resolute determination to become the first hangman in history to bring neck-stretching out as a sincere art-form.

Soon enough, for he was — as noted — perceptive and diligent, he developed a certain efficiency and style in the matters of hangsmanship. So, figuratively speaking, he hung out his shingle.

He offered himself — after his first bonding — to the state of New Hampshire. His rate was reasonable, his manner quick and orderly, and the job was dispatched with aplomb and a certain grace. His reputation was very much like a summer virus: it spread to odd places and sank deep.

By the time he was an unwrinkled thirty, Matthew Carty was known as “that hanging man” and he had acquired a scent of fame that was responsible for articles inTHE SATURDAY REVIEW, andTHE AMERICAN PENOLOGIST. He was known as “that hanging man.”

There were high points, of course, as there must be in all careers of note:

The celebrated swinging of “Lousy” Harry Gottesman, the helicopter-employing rustler, in Montana. His was a singular case: Mr. Gottesman weighed three hundred and sixteen pounds. It brought Matthew Carty to the notice of law enforcement agencies in each of the (then, nine; now seven) states and two territories where hanging was the accepted form of capital punishment. And, until they became states, switching to life imprisonment, Hawaii and Alaska as well. For Gottesman’s demise was achieved with a facility and care that could only be arranged by a genius in his field.

In his way, Matthew Carty had become the Picasso of the scaffold.

There was an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii, in the sixth year of his fame, sponsored by the local government, to perform what the officials called an “ Aloha ceremony” on Miss Melba Rooney, a four-timer poisoner of husbands, not all of them her own.

There was the notoriety gained from the Restout Case, and its accompanying gruelling activity on the part of the Utah state police to locate Algernon Restout’s victim, a certain Miss Mamie Helf, known locally as an exotic dancer. Mr. Restout had separated the well-known belly dancer from her equipment — with a meat cleaver.

Public sentiment was high on that occasion; the bleachers were packed, and the popcorn sales were a local record high; Matthew Carty fulfilled his obligation to an attentive audience.

In each case, and to each hanging, Carty brought a certain indefinable gentleness and savoir-faire that were identifiable to the perceptive as an unflagging pride in his profession.

He was the best, and there was no getting around it.

Then, when he had begun soaking his plates in warm salt water, when he had acquired a sturdy set of grouse-tracks around his eyes and nose, when he had been warned by his doctor to move slowly in protection of an aging heart, when he was, in short, in the thickening of his lifetime, he was called upon to create history.

It was several months after he had completed the execution of a certain gun-runner named Moxlossis, who had butchered his partner with an icepick over a center cut of filet mignon on the cruise hack from Cuba, when the governor of the state of Delaware contacted him.

By official conveyance, Matthew Carty was brought to the State House, and in secret session with the Governor — that year a rather paunchy man with a predilection for cigarillos and fetid breath — he was informed he was to preside at the hanging of Dr. Bruno Kolles.

Matthew Carry’s aging heart leaped into his wrinkled throat. The culmination of a glorious career! The piece de resistance!

Matthew swallowed heavily, and swung his short legs in the air with unrestrained emotion. It was a high-legged chair, and though he felt awkward, this was news enough to sublimate his feelings of awkwardness.

The Kolles case was a cause célèbre . The tabloids had been publishing steadily on the matter, publicizing his arrest and conviction for over seven months:

Anna Pasteur had been a cancer victim. Her days had been numbered, and her body wasting away. It had been a body loved with singular ardor by Dr. Kolles, and as a result of the strain and horror visited upon the good Doctor at sight of his paramour wasting away, a mercy killing had been performed, her hand locked in his throughout the activity with hypodermic and sleep-inducing drug.

It had been quick and with sweet terror. But he had been discovered in the act by a jealous nurse, a remarkably horsey woman he had several times rebuffed, and she had turned him in. The case had been followed with much accompanying conjecture and opinion from all sides.

It was, in fact, that the country was divided in its feelings. Half the people believed he should be turned loose — for his had been an act of compassion, easily understood and condoned — and half believed he should be hanged with brutal speed.

Thus it was that the Governor of the state of Delaware (chewing on a fetid cigarillo) told Matthew Carty, “We cannot chance a slip-up in this matter. Public sentiment is too strong.” There was a detectable note in the Governor’s voice, vaguely reminiscent of subdued hysteria. “You can do a speedy job, without trouble, can’t you?”

Matthew assured him he could. He was most convincing. The tariff on this execution was slightly higher than usual, for the prestige was greater.

Prestige, yes, but more! This was the high point of a career marked by high points.

On the morning of the execution, Matthew felt strange quivers in his stomach. He told himself it was the nervousness of his greatest job, his most exacting bit of artistry. It was da Vinci completing La Gioconda; it was Wilbur and Orville on that chilly morning near Kitty Hawk; it was Melville, cribbing out painfully the last magnificent lines of “Moby Dick.”

He felt like Icarus soaring toward the sun.

The public notice — which would not be removed until after the inquest — had been posted some twenty hours before. The demonstrators had been staunchly turned back from the prison walls. The sheriff, jailer, chaplain and surgeon of the prison all were present, as well as several dry-faced relatives, resigned to the fate of Dr. Kolles.

Matthew Carty made a point of never meeting the man (or woman) he was to execute, but today was something special, something remarkable, so he went to the cell in the late afternoon, rubbing his chin warily.

He wanted to meet the man who was soon to be the most intimately involved with his art. It seemed fitting, though oddly disquieting, somehow.

Kolles was a short, fat man. Not quite as short as Matthew, but still under five-and-a-half feet. He had a fine hairline mustache that seemed almost hesitant about its own existence, and he took the impending stretching of his neck with restrained impotence.

“Are you the man who is going to do this thing?”

Matthew nodded. “I thought I’d come in and say I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

Kolles bowed his head. A red flush came up from inside his shirt and clouded his face. “What kind of a man are you?” he asked with a quiet fury. It was the first sign of emotional strain he had evinced since the beginning of his trial. “I’m a man who tried to save lives … but … you! You take them, without apparent compunction.”

Carty stared at him silently for a moment. Then he leaned down and stuck his uncomplicated face into the Doctor’s. “I’m a craftsman,” he explained. “My idol has always been Henry I of England. Do you know why? Because he furthered the cause of hanging. He was a great man, and his life has given me inspiration. I’m an artist, Doctor. My work is important. I take a great deal of pride in it, because I’m the best in my field.

“Can you understand that?”

None of it made much sense, and of course the good doctor did not understand.

Dr. Kolles turned his face to the wall.

Matthew Carty left the cell, and went out to the courtyard where the white pine scaffold rose in cleanlimbed serenity. This was the first time he had been talked to like that since the days of his rude beginnings, when the girls had slapped him and turned gray at mention of his beloved trade. The days before fame had made him tolerable, if not socially acceptable. He had encysted himself, and this stripping-off of his shell left him raw and unprotected. He shuddered to himself.

The fools, he thought, they could never understand me.

He checked the sash weights and the oiled trap. He checked the arm and the lever and the floorboards for squeaks — which made an unpleasant effect of jollity when he was struggling so earnestly for somberness and seriousness. Yes, everything was in readiness.

Kolles would drop eight feet before the breaking strain. And served him right

Yet that nervousness, compounded with the annoyance generated by the Doctor, and the pressure of the event itself, further unsettled Matthew Carty. He began to perspire on the job for the first time in his life.

He found himself biting his perfect little nails.

How glorious today would be — his ultimate triumph!

When they brought Kolles out, with the newsmen trailing along behind (and that hideous sob-sister from the New York paper, with her frock much too gay for this occasion) something seemed to frazzle inside Matthew. For as Kolles emerged out of shadow, he stuck his tongue out at Matthew Carty.

Carty was too surprised to be flabbergasted.

It was very much like that time in Alaska, up past White Horse, when he had had to thaw out the hemp in a bucket of boiling water before he could do the job. Or the time in Kansas when the fall had been too great and had pulled the prisoner’s head off. He had been unnerved then, too, but he had been much younger and his confidence had returned, buoyed up.

But now …

Was he getting old, unsure of himself? Had he lost his confidence in his talent?

He swallowed heavily, and strung Kolles up.

Kolles stuck his tongue out once more.

“ Stop that! ” Matthew hissed under his breath, but Kolles just smiled cherubically.

The execution would be accomplished by the fracturing or dislocating of the first three cervical vertebrae, hence crushing the vital centers in the spinal cord.

Matthew heard the music of lyre, sackbut and dulcimer.

He placed the knot behind the ear for the most symmetrical garrote. It was more artistic than the method favored by lesser talents — under the neck.

(In point of fact, Matthew favored the thuggee three-knot method as used in India. He had made an extensive study of choke methods in his exuberant youth, but had, in later life, realized the truth of tried and true old-fashioned approaches.)

His joy was constrained, but enormous. His fingers sang at their work.

He did not notice the knot slip around, as he moved away.

Perhaps it was unsteadiness of hand.

Perhaps the glory of this event in his career had discautioned him.

Perhaps he was not aware of the stress on the rope.

Perhaps Kolles jiggled a bit, out of spite.

Any of these are possibilities.

In any case, when the lever was thrust home, and the trap sprang open beneath Kolles, and he plummeted the eight feet to twaaaang at the end of the line, he did not break his neck. He did not die. Obstinately!

The sob-sister screamed and messed her gay frock.

The newsmen’s faces screwed up hideously in expressions of compounded horror, as their eyes moved click and click, back and forth, as though they were watching a tennis match in slow motion.

The jailer turned puce, then gray, and fled.

The chaplain began praying.

And Dr. Kolles twisted and writhed and bounced and danced and flopped and tumbled about at the end of the hemp. The hanging was a ghastly fiasco … obstinately endless … it went on for a lifetime and a half, in Matthew Carty’s mind. The condemned man seemed determined to kill himself slowly. The corpse was not a corpse for a very long time.

Everyone stood transfixed, not moving, almost blind with the ghastliness of it all. Except the jailer, who continued running till he spanged against a barred door some distance down the hall and was knocked totally unconscious.

After a while, someone croaked, “Get a kn-knife … cut him d-d-down …”

But no one did. They just stood and watched the airborne gavotte.

In actuality, it was a mere three minutes, but it was a week to each of the horrified observers.

The newspapers called him an “incompetent.”

Eric Sevareid referred to him as a “butcher.”

One Sunday morning egghead commentator labeled him a “male Ilse Koch!”

The women’s leagues impeached him as a “paid murderer.”

In all, it was a serious blow, a killing blow to Matthew Carty’s career. For Matthew Carty knew the truth; the truth that lived inside simple appearances. He was not inept. Till Dr. Kolles, he had never felt one way or the other about his “participants” in the act. They had merely been utensils, specified by the authorities as the correct instrument for the assignment. Till Dr. Kolles. He had made the mistake of meeting the man, and from Kolles’ loathing of what Matthew Carty did for a living, had been born the first stench-weed of hate in the little man.

Matthew Carty had allowed himself to become personally involved with Kolles. He had hated, and that had thrown him off his stride. He knew he was washed up. Hung up, really. He knew he had lost his touch. His time had come and gone. He had met each challenge with skill, with pride in his profession, but all that was dust now.

He was a has-been.

Because it was a rather small room, and because he had closed and locked all the windows, and because it was a very hot August, and because he had done it to excess, and because the cleaning woman didn’t come for a week, putrefaction had progressed considerably and, when she came to clean Matthew Carty’s apartment, the smell was overpowering. When she called the custodian and he unlocked the door, and they entered, they began to gag and had to step back into the hall to tie handkerchiefs over their noses.

It was the cleaning woman who first entered the bedroom. When she saw him, she tried to jam her fist into her mouth to stop the screams, but the handkerchief prevented the movement and her hysterical shrieks brought the custodian.

Even the police were shocked and surprised.

He had done it to excess. The bloodstains and brownish material he had vomited were all over the bed. The mouth was corroded and scarred, as well as the throat. He had convulsed so terribly that he was arched back into a perfect bow, the entire weight of his small body resting on the heels and back of the head. His skin was very gray and in places dark blue. The final grimace was the one most commonly associated with lockjaw. The hands had ripped the bedsheets.

Everyone knew who he was, what he was famous for, and none of them could understand the kind of fierce, unrelenting pride in his profession a man could possess that would cause him — as was revealed in the autopsy — to drink a bottle of household ammonia, swallow a diluted half-box of DDT-laden plant poison, and swallow eleven grains of strychnine sulphate.

That hanging man was dead. Pride in his profession. Not even at the end had he compromised his craft; he had poisoned himself.