“Gentlemen,” I said, “to what do I owe this pleasure?” and I opened my pouch to them and offered them of my tobacco.
For a moment we were all of us engaged in stuffing and lighting our pipes, and then sucking them slowly down to ash, Rasmus keeping one finger raised to hold my question in abeyance. When he finished, he knocked the pipe out against the heel of his boot and turned fully toward me.
“We have an assignment for you,” he said.
“The hell you have,” I said.
Or at least wanted to say.
I do not know how to tell a story, a real one, or at least tell it well. Reading back over these pages, I see I have done nothing to give a sense of how it felt to have these determined men looming over me, their eyes strangely steady. Nor of Rasmus, with his wispy beard and red-pocked face. Why did we choose him as a leader? Because he was little good for anything else?
So, a large man, ruddy, looming over me, stabbing the air between us with a thick finger, nail yellow and cracking. Minions to either side of him.
What I said was not The hell you have, but “And it takes six of you to tell me?” Perhaps not, in retrospect, the wisest utterance, and certainly not taken exceptionally well. Not, to be blunt, in the proper community spirit. But once I was started down this path, I had difficulty arresting my career.
He tightened his lips and drew himself up a little, stiff now.
“What,” he asked, “was your profession?”
“I have always been a farmer,” I said. “As you yourself know.”
“No,” he said. “Before the conflagration, I mean.”
“You know very well what I was before the conflagration,” I said.
“I want to hear you say it,” he said.
But I would not say it. Instead, I filled my pipe again as they regarded me. Then lit and smoked it. And he, for whatever reason, did not push his point.
“There are rumors about you,” he claimed. “Are they true?”
“For the purposes of this conversation,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about, which rumors, “you should assume they are all true.”
“Paper,” he said, and one of the others came forward, held out a folded sheet of paper. I stared at it a long time, finally took it.
“We have an understanding then,” said Rasmus, and, before I could answer, started off. Soon, he and his company were lost to me.
After they had gone, I dug the arm up again and examined it, trying to determine how long it had been rotting and whether I had been the one to lop it free. In the end, I found myself no closer to an answer than in the beginning. Finally I could think to do nothing but plough it back under again.
The matter of my former profession amounts to this: I had no former profession. I was dissolute, poisonous to myself in any and all ways. At a certain moment, I reached the point where I would have done anything at all to have what I wanted, and indeed I often did. Many of the particulars have faded or vanished from my memory or been pushed deeper down until they can no longer be felt. There was one person, someone I was, in my own way, deeply in love with, whom I betrayed. Someone else, of a different gender, whose self I stripped away nerve by nerve.
When the conflagration came, it was nearly sweet relief for me. And, to be honest, what I did to survive, largely with the hatchet I still carry, is little worse, and perhaps better, than what I had done beforehand.
But for Rasmus, before the conflagration I had been a jack-of-all-trades, someone with little enough regard to take on any business, no matter how raucous or how bloody.
How much easier, I think now, had I just raised my hatchet then and there with Rasmus and his crew and started laying into them. And then simply sewed their bits wide about my field and ploughed them in deep.
There are other things I should tell, and perhaps still others forgotten that I shall never work my way back to. There are the rumors he had mentioned, asking if they were true. I cannot say one way or the other what he thought they were. Some people, as I have said, believe me charmed because of my aboveground survival, others believe me cursed. I am, I probably should have said before, completely devoid of hair — the only long-term consequence I suffered from the conflagration — and as such look to some homuncular, although as though not fully formed. I also heal, I have found, much faster than most, and it is, fortunately, somewhat difficult to inflict permanent damage upon me. It could be this that Rasmus had been referring to, which has become a rumor that I cannot die: a rumor that may well be disproved this winter. Or perhaps it was something else, something involving the past I have just elucidated above, or something touching on my deadly skill with the hatchet with which I live affectionately, as if it were a spouse. Who can say? Certainly not I.
The piece of paper, once unfolded and spread flat, read as follows:
In two days’ time a man will approach your door. You will invite him in and greet him. You will share with him of your tobacco. You will converse with him. And then, when he stands to leave, you will lay into him with your hatchet until he is dead. This is the wish of the community, and we call upon you as a man of the community and one who has often proved himself capable.
There was, as one would have expected, no signature. The words themselves were simple and blocky, anonymous. I screwed the note into a twist and then lit one end of it, used it to ignite my pipe, discarded it in the fire, watched it become its own incandescent ghost and then flinder and flake away into nothingness.
How much shall I tell you about myself? Do I have anything to fear from you? How much can I tell you before I lose hope of holding, by whatever tenuous grasp, your sympathy? Or have I already gone too far?
I have no strong moral objection to murder pure and simple, nor, for that matter, to anything else. Why this is so, I cannot say. And yet I derive no pleasure from murder, have no taste for it. I was as content — and perhaps more content — being a simple farmer as I had ever been in my earlier, dissolute life. I felt as if most of my old self had been slowly torn free of the rest of me, and I was not eager to have it pressed back against me again.
True, I had, on the occasions when our community had been afflicted by swarms of the dead or dying, done my part and done it well. After a particular effort, standing blood-spattered over the remains of one of the afflicted who had refused to stop moving, I had sometimes seen the fear in the eyes of those who had observed my deeds. But I did not like Rasmus’s quick slide from witnessing my having dispatched the dead to his assuming I would do the same without reluctance to the living. Not, again, that I had any reservations about the act of murder, only that I did not care to be taken for granted. And I knew from my past that, having been asked once, I would be asked again and again.
Still, there are sacrifices to be made when one has the privilege of living in a community. I could see no way around making this particular one, even if I was not, technically speaking, the one being sacrificed.
I spent the rest of the day at work on my house, replacing the shingling of the room where the wood had grown gaunt and had been bleached by wind and sun. The next day it was back to the fields, with ploughing and planting to finish and the ditch to be diverted until the near field was a soppy patch that glimmered in the sunset. A pipe at evening as always, and early the next morning a walk two farms away for some more tobacco, trading for it a few handfuls of dried corn from the dwindling stores of the previous year’s harvest. Then a careful survey of the property, the dark, loamy earth of the still damp fields.