Michael Malone - Weebly

devil, as his southern relatives had called them; for each
of those bold official scrawls might have, long ago,
ordered the loss of an ancestor of theirs, or the burning
of a town square. Hayes had collected them in his youth
not merely because fame intrigued him, but in order to
be perverse: "What makes you like to fly in everybody's
face that way?" his family had asked him with sad and
puzzled reproach. He'd answered, "I thought you'd be
tickled to see all those Yankees dead and hung up
before your eyes," and then he'd grinned at them with
the superiority of his first year at college, which was one
more year than any of them had had.
Later his collection had turned to criminals—a
natural progression, his relatives would have said. To be
made history, to be defined by one act, an act that
might have taken no more than the minute needed to
murder—that was fame, too. And besides, the
existential act of crime, the willingness to choose the act
and then perform it, fascinated Hayes with what he
suspected was envy. Those who could concentrate rage
or greed or madness (as a painter might concentrate
skill) had the advantage of that distillation over those