Angels Unaware

said grudgingly.
“Have you hanged anybody in Pennsylvania?” I asked.
The others looked at me. Jewel had often said I was morbid, and maybe that was true, but I couldn’t help being curious.
“Nah, they give ’em the ’lectric chair now. But my father hanged a man here in Schuylkill County back in ’11, and my grandfather some more back in the days when hangings was public the way they should be. Now it’s all hush-hush behind prison walls. Takes all the joy out of it.”
“Joy?” Jewel said, frowning.
“That’s right. The joy of knowing I’m riddin’ society of the scum of the earth. Man I’m on my way to hang now in Concord killed a ten-year-old boy—did things to him first, if you know what I’m getting at. World’s got no use for somebody like that, and I’m proud of what I do. There’s an art to it too. Not many folks realize that. ’Course I have to depend on the wardens not to let the bastards cheat me and hang themselves before I can git there. Then, when I do, I set up my own scaffold—don’t trust nobody’s but my own—and I measure ’em. They gotta fall just so many feet and not further. Otherwise the head pops off and makes the witnesses vomit. Happened to my grandfather long time ago. And it was a woman yet. If you measure right and they’re lucky, the neck breaks and it’s over quick. But sometimes God seems to want to extract a special punishment and the neck don’t break, like the man back in ’11. Noose slipped around the back of his neck and he was strangled. That can take minutes. Don’t bother me. I got no place else I have to be. But it ain’t too pleasant for him.”
“You owe Luca a dollar,” Jewel said coldly. She seemed to feel that was quite enough for us to know about hanging. “He earned it.”
“The hell he did! He asked for an extra clue. That’s cheating.”
I hadn’t often seen Jewel angry and I was surprised to see her so then, and over something so ridiculous as guessing an occupation. “Give that boy his dollar or get out of my house!” she said, and he wouldn’t and he went, and that was the first and the last time I ever met a hangman. When I look back on that evening, I wonder if it was Jewel thinking of the orchard and who was buried there that made her so inhospitable to Joe Gibbet, never mind the dollar bet. I also think that Luca really had earned the dollar, because Gibbet never said anything about a player being disqualified for asking for a final clue. The rules should be made clear before the game begins if it’s to be fair and that’s, at bottom, why life’s unfair. You just get thrust into the game whether you want to play or not and without being made aware of the rules, which you only come to understand later when it’s already too late.
That summer was godawful. Hot as hell and making people mean—and by people, I of course mean me. Then September came and with it that peculiar exhilaration that comes with the first chill. At dusk, my favorite time of day, I used to sit out on my porch in my wicker chair all by myself. Jewel and the girls knew I liked to be alone with nobody but Old Sam, asleep under my chair, for an hour until the sun went down. It was really the only way I indulged myself and they knew better than to disturb my solitude or try to join me. Being around people all day and having to listen to them and respond to them, even if they are your family, can be exhausting. Being alone for that short time was my way of reconciling myself to the sociability that dinner would again demand of me. Only once did anyone bother me and that was when the stove caught fire, and even then, Jewel came out real timid of approach and only after all attempts to bribe Jolene and Caroline into getting me had failed.
What I thought about when I was sitting out on my porch was, I knew, an enduring mystery to everybody. I’d just sit there rocking, gazing out across the fields, past the broken fence to where the land sloped up and away, to the dense foliage of trees and shrubs. Everything was so still, so perfectly still at that hour, that the quiet was like a balm on all the day’s scrapes. I liked the smells of autumn, the decay of what weeks before had been at its peak, the hay bales lying in the field, the smoke of a distant burning. And I liked to think about things, things that had happened and things that maybe would. My family would have been shocked to know the plans I made, plans that never included them. Someday I would travel to places they could not imagine. Exotic and savage places. I would send them postcards. (I’d gotten a postcard once. From Mrs. Gulliver who’d gone to Pittsburgh for three days.) Sometimes, I could see myself so clearly, with suitcase in hand, poised to step on a boat or a train, and my heart would start to beat real fast, so fast it slammed against my ribs, and I’d have to put my hand on my chest to make it stop. Then my hour would be up, and a voice belonging to its own time would call me in. But for that hour, no one dared to intrude on my private wanderings and wonderings—except for Luca.
He’d walk right up onto my porch as bold as brass and plop himself down in the chair beside me. “Come sta, Darcy?” he’d say, just so as to be annoying. And I would always shoot back, “Speak English!”
His dimples would retreat into a frown. “Why have you been away from school for so many