The Last Execution (10 page)

The boy has listened. The boy has nodded. Now is the time.

“Are you ready to surrender to God?” asks the priest.

The boy is silent for a moment.
Now he'll fall
, thinks the priest.
Now he'll fall into God's embrace.

“Those men . . . ,” the boy says.

“The disciples?” asks the priest.

“No. The men.”

“Which
men
?”

“The men who lowered the paralyzed man down into the crowd,” says the boy. “What were their names?”

“What were they
called
? . . . I don't know . . . but it's not about
them
!”

The boy is silent. The priest feels a fly near his ear.

“It's a story about
faith
,” he explains.

“If they hadn't held on, the paralyzed man would never have gotten in,” says the boy. “They helped him. Were there four of them?”

“I . . . I don't know,” says the priest. “It just says ‘some men.' It's the miracle you need to think about. That someone, who could not walk, all at once gets up and goes home.”

“One man at each end would hold it steady,” the boy explains. “Just four men would do.”

“What is it with you and those men?!” the priest exclaims.

The boy looks down at his hands. The ruined one and the other one. The priest needs to listen very closely to hear what he mumbles. But he hears it.

The boy says:

“Perhaps the men could also pull the bed
up
.”

The priest is standing in the prison door, facing the church, and now he can feel it, his exhaustion. The sweat under his gown.

He can't quite decide how he feels.

He tries thinking about his sermon for Sunday. After an execution the church will be full. They will be there, all of them, and
they
will surrender. Perhaps that is why God has sent this lad.
He
will not find God, but the others will. The priest casts a fitting phrase, takes a moment to savor the words: “A drop of evil transformed to an ocean of goodness.”

But the words please his palate only for a moment. Now he realizes what misguided vanity it all has been, how his mind had tried to dodge down an even path. He bows his head, feels the gush of shame.

Now he is loath to admit that everything still revolves around the one who is sitting in the cell. The priest has simply underestimated his task. He has acted over-eagerly, was too focused on victory, too sure of a conquest. He has mistaken success for truth. He knows that his parishioners see the flock only when he makes an example of another standing beyond it. This is the shortest route to success. But truth does not concern him or them alone. It's about being part of the flock.

He realizes that this wasn't the decisive—just the preemptive—battle. And the next will be fought on Gallows Hill. It comes to him so cleanly, so effortlessly, he hardly dares to think the thought:
It is here one can work with eternities!

When the lad is forced to his knees, the priest will be there. When the boy looks up from the scaffold, the priest will be ready. He will be the recognizable face in the crowd; something to cling on to in his final hour.

The priest will not bide the other ninety-nine lambs. Just heed the one leaving the flock on the scaffold. He will search every bush, every shrub, till he finds it and takes it in his arms. A sick, three-legged little lamb.

Every member of the flock must be gathered together. Their number must be complete. There is only one thing that counts: When the ax falls, there must be one hundred out of one hundred!

One town's many mouths, a chorus fair,

Whilst a head that still doth stare

Rolls to the ground

Without a sound.

T
here is one hour till the boy is to be executed on Gallows Hill, and the warden brings him half a loaf of bread. The boy can smell the scent of some other food cloying to his clothing, but the warden says nothing, and the boy does not ask.

The boy knows nobody listens.

He tried to tell the judge and those other men that he did not set fire to the barn on purpose. He lit the fire because he was very cold. But they did not listen. He was arrested for burning down the barn intentionally. As well as two other buildings: a stable and another barn someplace he had never heard of. Then he was led away.

The boy leaves the bread lying on the floor. It smells freshly baked. The fly lands on the bread, and the boy lets it be.

“Help yourself.”

The fly crawls over the bread silently, as if it were looking for the best place to start. It stops where the bread is broken.

“How do I know when you're full?” asks the boy. “When you fly away?”

The fly does not answer.

The patch of sun is approaching that point where floor becomes a wall.
Is it the light or my sight that is blurring?
thinks the boy.

After the boy was sentenced for arson, he was put to work splitting stones in the yard. It was hard work, many hours a day.

The sheriff's son came out and watched him in the yard whilst he worked. The sheriff's son was well dressed, his staring eyes level below the neatly combed hair. He was not tall, could not have been very old, but spoke as if he were much older. The little boy spit on the ground every time he spoke.

“You take forever!” he said, spitting, as if it were his job to ensure that the boy kept his nose to the grindstone.

“Mind your own business,” the boy said, and kept working.

“It's for your own good,” the little boy replied crossly, “or it will all end very badly for you!”

The boy did not answer, he bent over his stones instead.

“Or else you'll end up in the workhouse!”

He tried to block his ears. He tried to drown out the little boy's talk by hammering and hammering on the stones. But still he could hear them so clearly. Each and every word.

“JUST LIKE YOUR FATHER!!!”

The boy's body jerked upright.

“Who says so?” The boy narrowed his eyes.

The sheriff's son laughed maliciously, spat. “Because that's where people in your family always end up!” he yelled. “Including you! That is, unless you get your head chopped off first!”

The boy turned his back on the yelling lad; if he could have, he would have turned his back on himself.

The boy can see that the patch of sun has inched up the first bit of the wall. He can feel his body shaking, whether due to the fever or something else. Even so, the fly is back on the hand. Now it is the fly that whispers, the fly that says:

“Yep, he left his dad in the workhouse.”

It says this as if it were attending a tea party with the hand. Perhaps this is why he nods. Why Niels wants to tell the story himself. This is true: His father is in the workhouse. Unless he's dead now.

The boy stayed near town for several weeks. He left the dog in an old shed with a little food and water. He was scared out of his wits as he circled that place he knew as hell on Earth. One day he dared to go in. In to the people with the black-coin eyes. He posed as a town messenger ordered to collect blankets from the mite-infested loft. But the boy only got as far as the door. Not that anyone tried to stop him, he couldn't bring himself to take another step; he had seen too much.

He saw his father in profile in the far corner. He was sitting bent close to the wall, as if something written there would take the rest of his life to decipher. Hollowed cheeks, eyes dug deep into their sockets, impossibly thin; skin and sinew ready to slip off the bones, onto the floor. The boy could not move. He turned and went on his way before his father could see him.

Every night in prison, Niels dreamt about people with black coins in their heads. Sometimes, they were unknown masses, lumbering toward him; sometimes it was his father, sitting on a chair, staring at him. Every day he split stones, and every day the sheriff's son came out into the yard; the son loomed larger and larger in the boy's mind with every word spoken, every insult, the spitting.

“Someone like you will never have a real life!”