My hands are still trembling as I write this. Fingers like ice.
Pray, dear friends, to never see what I have seen. For not only will the sane rhythm of your heart never return.
… No one will believe you.
If you dare continue, first take a deep breath and hold it. Taste the dryness of your mouth as a single bead of sweat snakes down your spine.
Are you afraid?
ON THE DAY they hung him in 1862, young private Bell, too, was seized by fear.
Though the July heat was suffocating, his limbs grew numb with cold, stomach acidic and bilious.
A week earlier, he’d been drinking and getting wild with his Union brothers near Humboldt, during a brief respite from his duties at the fort in Iola.
Now he was to “suffer death by being hung by the neck until … dead, dead, dead.”
If only he’d never touched her, Elizabeth Haywood. But he’d done it all the same. Threw her down, she said. Threatened to “blow her brains out.”
An example thus needed be made — the first execution in Kansas. This was no longer a lawless territory.
In order to avoid a spectacle, Col. Cloud had John Bell marched to the site of what would become Highland Cemetery almost 70 years later.
And that’s where I found him, ascending the gallows one wretched fall evening.
Drop. Snap. Swing. Back and forth he swayed, bloodless.
Then dropping to the ground, he stumbled and crawled in my direction, menacing, and with eyes full of the cruelty of hell itself.
I could only flee in horror, my mouth unable to articulate a scream.
Perhaps if I crossed running water, I thought, the ghoul would be unable to follow.
SO UP the Neosho now, just outside of Le Roy.
