Hooks and straps for hanging

Hooks and straps for hanging are a crude apparatus in Garbos’s house, but their significance extends beyond their physical simplicity: they turn an empty room into a place where the narrator must endure suspension while a dog waits below. Used repeatedly, they structure a prolonged ordeal and expose the narrator’s attempts to survive through prayer, careful shifts of weight, and attention to the dog’s behavior. The apparatus also changes over time from an immediate threat into a condition the narrator learns to withstand for longer periods.

Construction and First Use

Garbos keeps the apparatus in an empty room at the corner of the house. Two large hooks are driven into the highest part of the ceiling, set less than two feet apart; leather straps hang from them to serve as handles. The arrangement is spare and practical, with no other function described for the room or its fittings. Its height is sufficient to lift the narrator from the floor, but not so great that the dog Judas cannot reach his feet if he drops.

When the narrator enters, Garbos leads him into the room, climbs onto a stool, raises him, and has him take one handle in each hand. Garbos then leaves him hanging and brings in Judas, locking the door on his way out. The hooks and straps thus operate not by themselves but as part of a deliberate arrangement: the narrator is held above the floor, the dog is left in the same enclosed space, and the locked door prevents the narrator from leaving. Judas tries to reach his feet, while the narrator pulls up his legs to keep them beyond the dog’s reach.

The apparatus also gives the narrator time to consider what Garbos expects. He suspects that Garbos is waiting for him to lose his grip and fall, leaving Judas to attack him. The narrator connects this danger to a form of leverage he has built up over many months: he has memorized the number and condition of Garbos’s teeth and uses that knowledge to remind Garbos that killing him could have consequences. In the hanging scene, he fears that a fall followed by an attack would let Garbos treat his death as accidental. The hooks therefore place him in danger while making the manner of any death, and Garbos’s responsibility for it, part of his calculation.

Endurance, Prayer, and Resistance

The suspended position becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The narrator’s shoulders grow numb, and he alternates the load between his hands, opening and closing them and changing his position. He keeps his legs raised when Judas is alert. These adjustments are small, but they give him a way to manage the ordeal rather than simply wait for his strength to fail. The dog sometimes appears to be asleep, yet the narrator watches for its renewed attention and does not assume that it has stopped waiting.

Prayer becomes another measure of endurance. The narrator concentrates on prayers associated with days of indulgence, setting himself the limited task of reciting another ten or twenty prayers before giving up, then making a further promise once he has reached that point. He imagines the accumulating days of indulgence as a possible means of saving his life. This reliance follows his earlier rush to pray at the church altar, where he had hoped that prayers said in a sacred place might reach heaven more quickly. After the organist repeats the new priest’s warning that he should not draw attention at church, he leaves the altar; in Garbos’s room, prayer continues without the altar or the familiar objects of worship.

When Garbos returns late in the afternoon, he takes the narrator down from the apparatus and kicks Judas out. The narrator is too exhausted to walk or move his arms for the rest of the evening, then lies on the mattress and continues praying. The change from hanging to lying down does not immediately end the ordeal’s effects. Rather, the narrator measures the evening through the same hope that has sustained him in the room: that the prayers accumulated during the day might bring some improvement in his life.

Repetition and Adaptation

Garbos repeats the practice over a period of months, hanging the narrator sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the evening. The routine is limited by Garbos’s need to keep Judas in the yard to guard against foxes and thieves. The dog’s presence in the room is therefore tied to practical farm concerns as well as to the narrator’s danger. The straps are used whenever Garbos has no particular work for the narrator; when Garbos sobers up, hears the hungry pigs and the cow, and needs help around the farm, he takes the narrator down and puts him to work.

Repeated suspension changes what the narrator can endure. His arm muscles become conditioned, and he can remain on the straps for hours with less effort than at first. The pain in his abdomen begins later, though he also experiences cramps that frighten him. Judas continues to leap at his legs, but by this stage the narrator’s practiced timing means the dog does not catch him off guard. The apparatus remains a threat, yet repetition gives the narrator a narrow, learned competence within the situation.

He also uses play-acting to divert himself and manipulate the dog’s expectations. He swings as if he is about to fall, provoking Judas to bark and jump; later, cries and other noises wake the dog and make it react as though the narrator’s endurance is ending. When the dog tires, the narrator takes the opportunity to straighten his legs and conserve strength. He sets himself small targets: a change of leg position for a thousand days of indulgence, a resting arm for ten prayers, or a larger shift after fifteen. The hooks and straps make bodily endurance measurable, while his improvised rules divide an extended ordeal into intervals he can attempt to complete.

Significance and Limits

The apparatus is significant because its use recurs and changes in meaning without changing in form. The hooks remain fixed in the ceiling and the straps remain handles, but the narrator’s response develops from urgent efforts to keep his feet away from Judas into a practiced routine of weight-shifting, prayer, distraction, and pacing. Garbos controls when the narrator is raised and lowered; the narrator cannot remove himself from that control, but learns to use small decisions to prolong his endurance.

The scene also sets devotional hope beside physical calculation. The narrator prays for intervention, yet survives each interval through concrete attention to his grip, his legs, the dog’s movements, and the time marked out by repeated prayers. The account does not establish that the hooks and straps are removed or that their use ends permanently. It shows instead how they remain available to Garbos across months, and how the narrator’s growing capacity allows him to withstand longer periods before he is taken down for farm work.