THE EXECUTIONER

As my writing becomes darker, this theme hit me hard. I had been reading an article on the many Inquisitions that the Catholic and Christian churches had conducted over centuries. The belief was sin could only be absolved through pain or death. The more pain, the greater the forgiveness. This, the bloodiest, most brutal ritual killings in history came at the bequest of modern religion.

The question for me was, what kind of person could conduct the actual execution. It would not be enough to simply follow orders, this person my love this work for other reasons. It is easy to believe the person was mentally defective, but what if this was just a product of their normal childhood? What kind of life would a small boy need to have to embrace being an executioner?

THE EXECUTIONER

The ground was cold and damp.  Ilse’s racking cough kept them both up much of the night.  She would occasionally throw another stick or two on the fire, careful not to wake Bran.  Never wake Bran.  When the fire was once again putting off meager heat, she would curl herself around me and pull the tattered wollen shawl over her shoulders and my small body, huddling to keep me warm.  In the night her feet, wrapped in filthy, ragged socks, would ache with cold.  The shawl was not long enough to cover us both.

  Before the sun was up, she was stoking the fire and putting on a pot to boil.  Some rotted potato’s and carrots. Some herbs she picked and dried last Fall.  The last of the rabbit Bran killed two days prior.  She made a weak tea of dried nettle and elderberry and then sat in the short wooden chair, her feet to the fire trying to get warm.  Bran stirred and she quickly scurried into her worn leather shoes and stepped out into the frost of winter.  The carpet of sparkling white frost was not welcome or beautiful.  As she toiled for the next hour collecting eggs from the hens, feeding the stock, milking the goat, and cleaning the pens, her feet became numb with cold.  Forever, her feet were in agony, day, and night.

  She limped back to the farmhouse, quietly entering.  Bran was sitting on his pallet bed of straw, his warm covers thrown aside into the corner.  Bran grumbled about needing new straw in his pallet, and the blankets had bugs.  She had better remedy that.   The fire had died in her absence and Bran fixed a stare on Ilse that made her cower.  Bran threw a few sticks on the coals and fanned them to life as Ilse fetched a bowl for his pottage.  She scooped a ladle of the meager meal into the bowl, putting a large chunk of the rabbit on top where bran could see it, and careful to hide a piece of the meat in the pot for her son.    Bran, ever watchful caught her holding out on his meat. Ilse put her hands up, but Brans fist always knew the way through.

  I lay unmoving under the wollen shawl.  An eye peeking through a tear in the knitting. I saw the raw anger in his father’s face as he struck my mother.  Once done, the look changed to pleasure, as he hit her again and again, the blood splattering on the walls.  The tough hide of his fists cracking and splitting against her bones.  In his violent frenzy, Bran kept on until Ilse’ face was mashed. Blood flecked his face and his forearms and hands a were covered in crimson.  When he finished, he collapsed, sitting on the floor, feet splayed.  He had a throaty, insane laughter that went on for long minutes before he abruptly stopped and stood. “Clean this mess up boy,” he said.  He then walked out the front door, leaving it wide open and allowing the wind to cut a swath through the room.

  At five years old, I was already a veteran of caring for my mother’s wounds.  She had taught me to boil water and clean rags for dressings.  The very same rags that had been used time and again.  She taught me the herbs to mix into a paste, and gently apply.  How to keep a barely-alive creature alive for just a moment longer than expected.  I learned how to mend bone and skin. How to stave off infection and how to prolong the agony of life.  My young life was spent in the forest gathering herbs and seeds that my mother used in her remedies. All of the women of the village were taught these remedies from their mothers and grandmothers.  Remedies for the backhands and fists received by husbands, lovers and the priests who caned them for their wicked ways.  No woman was safe in this village or any other.  

  I had never said a word in my young life in my fathers presence.  I stayed out of the way and seemed to blend into the walls and floor when my father was mad.  I avoided the vicious tongue and the coarse backhand that my mother so often endured.  I stood by and watched, and learned.

  In the farm yard were their meager holdings of chickens, a pig and a cow.  Such were the luxuries of peasant life.  We dare not eat the chickens for the eggs they received.  We dare not eat the cow for the milk it gave, and the pig provided piglets that were sold at the market.  The only meat we received was game trapped or killed by Bran.

  As I walked with mother to the market each week, we passed by the other women of the farming region. Each had blackened eyes, or arms in slings.  It was a brutal time to be a woman, and as long as liquor was cheap and plentiful, there was always an unpredictable and violent husband looking for someone weaker to take out their failures on.  In this society, the wife was a socially acceptable way to vent anger or frustration.  So much that the men of the village would look on with admiration at the thoroughness of Brans handiwork on Ilse. “There is a man who knows how to manage his wife,” they would say between pints at the pub.

  As I followed along behind his mother, I played a game. In filthy, bare feet, I would stamp on the ants and beetles that were on the path.  I ran back and forth across the dirt, crushing out the life of each one I could see.  Skipping, hopping and jumping, I would feel the thin lump of shell underfoot. The ants were hardly sport, but the beetles cracked and splintered under my weight.  The cold smooth shell giving way to the squishy innards.  I once stepped on a small mouse that skittered across the lane.  I felt the soft fur give away to firm bone and then the fracturing, crunch of skeleton underfoot.  As my foot lifted, I was disappointed that the mouse seemed intact.  Hardly more than asleep.  While my mother walked on, I ground my heel into the soft, small carcass until viscera squeezed from both ends.  I knelt in the dirt and ran a tiny, dirty finger through the shit and gut, feeling the warmth and texture. I was completely lost in the moment until mother bade me to catch up.  I ran on, but never forgot that exhilaration.

  In the village, I would run to join the other boys.  They were every bit as grimy and poor as I, and unlike the adults who separated by wealth, class and community standing, kids stuck together.  We fiercely protected each other, even as we fought, cheated, and stole from each other.  Ours was a kinship, a bond between rich and poor.  We hardly realized the difference except through clothing and manner.  We all fought, stole and created mayhem equally.  Thus was the way with my dear friend Tomás, a child of wealth and privilege in whom I had found a kinship. We shared a secret life that we discussed together, but never among others.

The boys of the village did not segregate by age.  From four to fourteen, they skulked around the shadows of the village market.  Shopkeepers would see the group of them walking down the street and they would plant themselves in front of their carts and stands, threatening the boys off.  Those that were not vigilant would have their goods thieved and swiped, with boys continuing their way eating apples, or sharing a roast duck among them.  This was the only true division of class among boys.  The poor always shared with each other, while the wealthy always hoarded.  

Among the village boys there were bullies and victims. I was neither.  I was generally liked.  I kept to myself.  I did not choose sides.  Living between my mother and father had taught me to walk between divisions.  I was a diplomat, a neutral party in a partisan world.  As I stole and fought alongside the village boys, I rarely caught the fist or boot and I rarely delivered the blows.  In my deepest self, I knew that once a side was declared, it would never be forgotten. I was told I was an old soul in a young body.  That I had a deeper sense of understanding than others my age.  I was intuitive and intentional while the other boys were volatile and spontaneous.  I was just as likely to thieve and cheat when called upon by the others to lead the effort, but I always made a plan, assigned diversions, and escaped without the shopkeeper even realizing they had been victim of thievery until I was long gone.

†††

This story would play out until I was seven years old.  This was the year I dug a shallow grave by myself in the garden.  I drug my mother’s lifeless body from the house to the grave, filled it over with soil and planted my father’s favorite vegetables over the top, knowing that as my father ate them, my mother’s soul would  go into him and she would get her revenge.  I would eat these vegetables with relish, taking in my mother’s strength, endurance and love. It was the same potato for both father and son, but I knew that each bite held my own intention and desire.

Without my mother to fix his meals and take his abuse, I became my father’s target. The routine that Ilse had kept up for her short lifetime was now adopted by a small boy.  Keeping the fire stoked, cooking the meals and enduring relentless beatings from my father. The abuse abruptly ended in the Spring of my eighth year, when I served my father roasted potato’s from the garden cooked in a broth made from hemlock my own mother had harvested and dried two summers prior. While the leaves, roots and leaves of the hemlock plant are poisonous and fatal if misused, the plant is also a powerful medicine when used properly.  Mother harvested hemlock for breathing problems, to ease teething pain in small children and to ease swelling in joints.  I determined to use it for its fatal properties, and I used it liberally in the soup I prepared for my father.

  My father’s death was slow in coming. It started with an upset stomach which earned me a vicious back-hand for my poor cooking skills.  Once the vomiting started,  father was too pre-occupied with the intense pain and gut-wrenching vomiting to do anything but curl up on the floor and sweat.  There was a moment that chilled me to the core.  In between the uncontrollable shivering and dry heaves, father looked directly into my eyes.  The look was of sheer hate and vengeance.  My father’s daily acts of aggression were flippant and almost haphazard, a casual and thoughtless attack.  This was altogether different.  Father knew what I had done, and when he was well, I would pay dearly.

  But he did not get well.  He lay on the floor in the drying vomit.  Saliva was pouring from his mouth and he had soiled himself.  He was still doubled-up in pain, begging me for water .  Gone was the hate and violence.  All that was left was pleading and suffering.  This was the first time I had seen father weak, and I liked it.  I dropped to a sitting position next to him, my little filthy arms wrapped around little filthy knees as I watched the poisonous plant do its work.

After two hours, father was only semi-conscious.  Moans came with each labored breath. His skin was a ghastly white.  Even in this medieval time where sanitation was unheard of and humans lived in a constant state of filthiness, the smell in the room was beyond foul.    I opened the doors and windows.  With the cold breeze of spring blowing in, I cut away his father’s clothing and drug it outside to the pit where we burned our trash.  I returned to a shivering shell of a man.  In a moment of pleasure, I poured cold creek water on my father’s form and watched the goose bumps rise like mountains on his pale white skin.  His teeth clattered, but his eyes would not open.  

  With dusk came the bitter cold and I stoked the coals and got the fire going.  I would need to collect more firewood tomorrow. As the small room warmed, father’s shivering stopped. I reflected that my father was laying on that place on the floor that had always been reserved for I and his mother.  It was the place where I had looked though the tears in the shawl to watch my father brutalize and kill my mother.  He now lay, passed out and comfortable next to a warm fire that he did not deserve.  I fetched the ash shovel from alongside the hearth and scooped up a few red, glowing coals.  I rolled his father onto his back, then placed the coals on the man’s chest.  An acrid smoke as the chest hair singed and burned. It took a moment for the heat to register in the comatose brain of the man.  When it did, it hit him like a raging fire.  His eyes flew open and his head lifted off the floor, threatening to dump the hot coals from his body.  I quickly used the ash shovel to press the hot coals firmly against his father’s skin.  Now the smells were of burning flesh.  A silent scream came from the mouth of the man as I stared blankly at the roof.

  Worried that the coals were not enough, I scooped a mighty shovelful and poured it across his father’s belly and crotch. The hair sending up smoke and the coals burning nice round red welts.  Where the first coals had been placed, the skin now bubbled and blistered.  My father unconscious again, depriving me of my revenge.  Once again, I used the shovel to remove a strip of kindling that was fully engulfed in flame.  I dropped it on the ash covering my father’s belly, then another and another.  I fed this small fire for hours, the skin of my father’s body splitting and crackling.  I do not know how long his father lived, but I did know that it was not a comfortable, pleasant death.  It was the death he deserved. It was the death my mother and I deserved.

  Morning found me waking on the floor next to the charred body of my father. The stench was overwhelming, but through the night I had developed a kinship with it.  The smell was simply a physical manifestation of my revenge.  I looked calmly over the body of this man.  Head and feet untouched, but the belly had become a campfire, hollowed out and crisp around the edges.  I used a finger to break the charred edges off, pushing them into the cooked cavity.  I considered tasting the cooked flesh, but I did not want to get sick like my father. I knew that men had died from eating birds who had ingested hemlock seeds.  I would not make the same mistake.

Eventually, I would rise and open the doors and windows to the chill of morning.  I donned his ragged jacket and ate a small bowl of pottage. I had many decisions to make today, but first would be getting my father out of the house.  The man was huge to an eight-year-old boy.  There was no way I was dragging him to the garden like I did my frail and petite mother.  I could not go into town and seek help, for I would end up in prison, or passed off to a family that would treat me the same as his father had.  I would need to take care of this myself.

  If the burning of the body were a revenge or punishment, the butchering of the body was a purification ritual.  As my father’s sharp hunting knife first carved a clean cut into the wrist, I felt a lightening of the load.  I understood that I could do this.  It was not beyond my ability or tolerance. The hand was removed from the forearm with a few deft strokes.  I held the stiff adult hand in my own.  It was large and calloused.  Each finger was thick and sausage-like.  The nails thick and grainy. Without the taught tendons pulled tight in rigor, the fingers were manipulated easily. Stiff, but not frozen in a clutched fist as they had been in death.

  I walked the hand out to the pig trough and tossed it in, where the pigs fought over it as they would do any slop offered.  Over the course of the day, the pigs ate well and the rest was buried in the garden, facing down towards the hell my father deserved.