Written By Dean Gessie
After Dinner Conversation Series
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After the war, I travelled to a village in the south of the province. It was my intention to vacation for the weekend in an unknown land. I followed a small river that was alternately green beneath the foliage of the forest and blue while it coursed through elevated plains and sunken but exposed valleys. I was driving one of those all-terrain vehicles that permitted me to follow paths that were clearly less travelled. It was not an aquatic vehicle, however, and an error in judgment forced me to abandon it to a finely camouflaged bog. I breast-stroked to safety while my truck took water through its sunroof.
With mischance at my back, I followed the river on foot until it opened up into a small lake. On the northern-most shore of the lake, a settlement, of sorts, sprawled upward into black hills, its watery threshold flagged and dotted with light, fishing craft. I walked through vineyards and a peach orchard, each of these bursting with fruit, until I came to what appeared to be the main thoroughfare of the village.
The street was desolate save for mongrels as numerous as flies. They lounged about on their flabby bellies, yawning and blinking in the sun, and, apparently, abandoned by their lords and masters. One of the mongrels, more animated than the rest, fell in behind me wagging its short, stubby tail. I stopped to pet its flank and noticed that its tail had been freshly severed at its point. Remarkably, when the dog craned its long neck to look, as a greyhound might or a horse, the root of its tail became fixed when I clutched the memory of its remainder.
I had little time to contemplate the peculiar psychology of the dog at my calves. Out of the silence of this place came a young boy running as fast as his legs would take him, huffing and puffing dramatically. I gestured with my arms, like a traffic cop, for him to stop. I would have thought the gesture clear enough to communicate my needs, but the boy sped past me as though my existence were in question, his thin, eager face flushed with purpose and exertion.
I followed with some speed and anxiousness of my own until I saw the lad disappear into a throng of people whose focus elsewhere precluded my seeing their faces. The crowd before me, the emptiness of the village, was mingling about a large and dead tree whose stark grey branches thrust skyward like an ancient hand contorted to hold a crystal ball. There looked to be a hundred or so gathered and they were dressed in the traditional garments of country folk. This struck me as odd since my travels during the war had revealed to me the penetration of the global clothing market.
On tiptoe, I noticed that there was a man of about thirty tied to the tree, his arms pulled back and around the trunk of it, his hands bound, his head bowed. A two-wheel, wooden cart balanced on long wooden posts stood some five feet to the left of him, its carriage filled with stones.
To confirm my suspicions, I inquired of an elderly gentleman as to the nature of the gathering. The man did not answer my question, but regarded me with astonishment, his nose hairs disentangling and vibrating with each shallow and rapid exhalation. He then proceeded to push his way into the crowd until he broke into the clearing that separated the gathering from its victim. He conferred with a lean, tall gentleman who appeared to be the arbiter of the ceremony and pointed excitedly in my direction. All eyes turned toward me, sized me head to toe. My existence was no longer in question.
The tall man, whom I learned later to be the village mayor, invited me forward with his hand. I and my dog heeded his invitation and walked the corridor made for us by the separating throng.
“You are a stranger?” asked the man.
The question was asinine since the mayor of this small town would surely know better.
However, the emotional content in the man’s voice was that of a lottery winner overwhelmed by the evidence.
“Yes,” I said.
“You have come at an opportune time,” he said. “We are about to execute a man.”
It was as I suspected. I asked the fellow why, however, the time should be described as opportune.
“Our people have a custom,” he said. “If there is a stranger among us, he is given the honor of casting the first stone. It is our way of including him in the life of the village. It is our way of extending the boundaries of justice, of communicating justice between the communities of the earth.”
I congratulated the mayor on the lofty goals of his citizens. Most public officials concern themselves with more modest matters, I said, like keeping drug addicts and hookers off the street. And so it was that I was to represent the co-habitation of time and space with the laws of men. For both sundry and weighty reasons, I queried the crimes of the condemned man.
“For that,” said the man, “you will have to trust us. He has been found guilty by due process in a court of his peers. The evidence was overwhelming and indisputable.”
I did not betray a smirk, but I had seen more than once overwhelming and indisputable evidence tumble like a house of cards. As a result, I expressed some reticence about firing a death blow under these conditions.
The mayor appeared dismayed that I was making a debate of it, that I wouldn’t credit the wisdom of his particular collective.
“Where you are from,” he said, “are there executions?”
I assured him that my country took great pleasure in extinguishing the lives of criminals.
“And is your reticence as great when men and women are killed and you have no knowledge of or interest in their crimes?”
I informed the man, as he no doubt wished and anticipated, that I had long ago handed over the responsibility for such decisions and actions.
“Precisely,” he said. “You trust others to end the lives of others on your behalf. You tacitly condone their judgements with your indifference and weave the thread of the noose. Will you not trust us this one time and exercise the sovereignty of your will?”
I congratulated the mayor on the quality of his argument, so compelling was it that I felt as though I were on trial as much as the condemned man had been.
“You needn’t do it,” said the mayor. “It’s your free choice to assist or stand aside.”
The mayor saw my self-conflict, how my mental processes were virtually stalled, like a large machine creaking inexorably to a halt.
“Are you are baseball player?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “I don’t have the legs for it. But,” I added, “I have been to the fair often and won many prizes for female companions by striking the effigy of a clown’s face with a rubber ball.”
“Good,” he said. “You have both the power and the ability to end the life of this criminal quickly or, at the very least, knock him unconscious so that the cleaning up is less painful for all concerned. I will tell you this,” he added. “The women with children will cast the first stones, if you choose not to.”
We returned to the front of the gathering. The women in our midst collected their stones from the two-wheel cart. I was provided a large, almost perfectly spherical stone.
I felt my adopted dog, the short-haired mongrel from the street, weaving its way playfully between my legs. I knew that no one could see the lost half of its tail but that she, herself, reacted to its absence. It was the invisibility of this impregnable reality that permitted us ignorance of its existence. It occurred to me that the phantom limb – that which we have cut away and discarded - was summation to the mayor’s argument.
I was only disposed to a ten-foot buffer between myself and the criminal. I fired the stone, shaped very much like a ball, with as much force and accuracy as I could muster. It struck him flush mid-temple. The breaking of his skull would be sickening to some. A blue, bloody bruise emerged in relief.
The women around me tossed their stones, joylessly, to the ground. They were prepared to do as much but the feeling seemed to be that I had managed the work efficiently.
The crowd dispersed and returned in the direction of the village. In one breath, the mayor informed me that the deceased criminal had horribly assaulted a young girl and that he would be cut down and buried. His soft smile communicated satisfaction with me and, by extension, satisfaction with himself. “We will surface your vehicle from the water bog,” he said. “You are a free man.”
Notwithstanding the objective execution of what I had done, the seeming incontrovertibility of my decision and the groundwork of judgment, the criminal’s face, at the moment that I threw the stone, appeared to my eyes as that of a clown.
I hadn’t done anything extraordinary.
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