Hoods on.
Two of them were singing. Muffled, indistinct, quavering.
Nooses round the necks. Frikkie did this himself.
Tightened the knot under each of the left side jaw bones.
He saw the feet in line of the trap. He flicked his hand. The prison officers stepped back, releasing their hold on the condemns.
With both hands he gripped the lever.
**
The explosion of the trap.
Jeez lay rigid on his bunk.
His breath came in great pants.
The silence.
He had heard the feet stamping and shuffling on their way to the gallows. He had heard the swell of the singing, seeking out new heights of sympathy. Then the crash of the trap.
An awful sorrowing silence. The singing was to support four men, and the men were gone from where singing could boost them. The singing had ceased with the fall of the trap, cut in mid phrase.
The God awful silence around Jeez, like he was alone, like he was the only man in the bloody place.
He always heard the trap go.
He heard it the day before when the hangman was practising his drops with the earth-filled sacks, he heard it go on the morning of a hanging. As the crow flies or the worm crawls, Jeez lay on his bed just 29 yards from the gallows beam. He heard everything in the hanging room, and everything in the workshop and the washhouse underneath.
They'd be suspended now, they let them hang for twenty minutes. Then there would be the water running in the washhouse as they cleared up the mess after the district surgeon had completed his postmortem. Then there would be the hammering in the workshop as the trusties nailed down the coffin lids. Last there would be the sounds of the revving of an engine and the sounds of the van pulling away, running down the hill.