by Jim Shepard
“The People make their demands,” Henri-Francois remarked one night at dinner, apropos of our ever-increasing workload. His hair fell across his forehead like a scrubbing mat. He always seemed to be nursing a grim new resentment against his mother.
“Their inner lives have been made bestial,” Anne-Marie said to him, after having been silent the entire meal.
“That's not entirely what she means,” I told Legros, who observed her as though she were a mouse in the grain supply.
“That's exactly what she means,” he answered, with some affability, and then went on with his meal.
I drove my assistants day and night, but we could not master our burden. Lethal misadventures and irregularities compounded daily as batch after batch moved out of the tumbrils and into the baskets. One Tuesday we dispatched twenty-two condemned in twenty-nine minutes. Pastry merchants divided their attention between the scaffold and their customers. Friends asked friends in the crowd if they were staying and were told, no, not today—they had things to do. So much blood ran down the front of the platform supports that boots there sank into the supersaturated earth as if into a mire. One woman in line among the condemned told me that the lunette's wet wood looked like it would be unpleasant on the front of her neck. When the blade dropped, her body jerked in the straps, as if abruptly trying to find a more comfortable position.
In our home, with Legros and Henri-Francois sent away on an errand, we received the Sacrament from our nonjuring priest.
“They're putting the Queen on trial,” Anne-Marie told me one morning, once the priest had left. She said that he had confirmed the rumor. In one stroke she seemed to have resuscitated all of her old intensities. She crossed and recrossed the room. She wrung her hands in a series of nervous contractions. She was beside herself with certainty that the Queen would be condemned.
“Not necessarily,” I told her, trying to get my bearings.
“You have to resign. You have to withdraw. You have to refuse to have any part in this,” she said.
“There's nothing to refuse, yet,” I told her.
“You have to refuse,” she cried.
I told her I would attend as much of the trial as I could. On those days I did attend, she demanded a full recounting. I spared her very little. In those chambers, the Queen was the Austrian she-wolf, the arch-tigress, the cannibal who wanted to roast alive all the poor Parisians. It was claimed she'd bitten open the cartridges for the Swiss Guards in their defense of the royal family to help speed their slaughter of the oncharging patriots. She sat alone in the dock, a childlike figure further diminished by her incarceration. Her eyesight had begun to weaken and her hair to turn white. She looked twenty years beyond her age. She'd been made to reply to accusations of incestuous relations with the Dauphin. The poor boy had been made to parrot unspeakable things, and his testimony was read back to her.
Everything about the Dauphin injured Anne-Marie. She knew a wife of the assistant jailer and learned the boy had just passed his eighth birthday alone. Apparently he was chronically ill and had been ministered to by his mother with unceasing tenderness until he'd been made a ward of the Republic and dragged to a cell immediately beneath hers, from which she could hear him shrieking in his terror and loneliness. He was left to himself for weeks at a time. The shoemaker appointed to be his personal jailer looked in only every so often. Even he found the boy's cries hard to take. But he also made him wear the red bonnet and sing the carmagnole and the Marseillaise and to blaspheme God from his windows.
My wife lay awake nights, mute with suffering as she considered various aspects of his plight, until she burst out with wailing, jolting me from my half drowse. When I embraced her she demanded a promise that I wouldn't be a part of this. She needed to be sure that I wouldn't be a part of this. I wouldn't be a part of this, I assured her, and reapplied my embrace.
Only weeks after the inauguration of the machine, the medical community found itself grappling with the controversy concerning the survival of feeling and consciousness in the separated head. Did the head hear the voices of the crowd? Did it feel itself dying in the basket? Could it see the light of day above it?
The question became more urgent following Charlotte Cor-day's execution for the assassination of Marat, when Legros, apparently communing with his inner brute, saw fit to slap the severed head while he was displaying it. And the face, hanging by the hair, showed the most unequivocal signs of anger and indignation in response. There was an uproar from those in front of the scaffold who could see it, and afterward many medical eminences were interviewed on the phenomenon for the newspapers.
Eventually I was asked to assist a Dr. Seguret, professor of anatomy, who'd been commissioned to study the problem. He set up an atelier on the same square as the machine and my assistants delivered to it a total of forty heads. We exposed two—a man's and a woman's—to the sun's rays in his back courtyard. Their eyelids immediately closed of their own accord, and their faces convulsed in agony. One head's tongue, pricked with a lancet, withdrew, the face contorting. Another's eyes turned in the direction of our voices. One head, a juring priest's named Gardien, dumped into the same sack with the head of one of his enemies, had bitten it with such ferocity that it took us both to separate them.
Other faces were inert. Seguret pinched them on the cheeks, inserted brushes soaked in ammonia into their nostrils, and held lighted candles to their staring eyes without generating movement or contractions of any sort.
His report was suppressed, and he refused to have any more to do with such experiments, or with me.
“What have you decided?” Anne-Marie took to asking each day as the Queen's trial dragged itself on. In addition to all of the other charges, there were the letters abroad, many of which had been intercepted. All military defeats were being blamed on her treachery. Her son's illness on her sexual demands. As proof of the latter, his hernia was displayed.
In bed with my weeping Anne-Marie, I tell her I see no way out: the letters demonstrate conspiracy, and for all other charges, the accusers invent the evidence they lack. We must be resigned to God's will and summon the strength to prepare ourselves to endure the terrible stroke.
“Your terrible stroke,” she responds. “You must not do this. You understand that.”
But she knows, I tell her, that God alone can alter the course of events at this point. It's His mercy for which we must ask, even as we submit to His decrees.
“I'm not appealing to you to save her,” she answers. “You know what I'm requesting.”
A few nights later, lying beside me in the darkness, she palms my cheeks and moves her face so close that her lips graze mine.
“Listen to me,” she says. “Don't dismiss me like this.” She moves our bodies to their newlyweds' position. But then she says nothing else.
Henri-Francois brings us the news as we're sitting down to some pigeon, red currants, apricots, and wine: the tribunal, according to the declaration of the jury, and in compliance with the indictment of the public prosecutor, has condemned the said Marie Antoinette, called Lorraine d'Autriche, widow of Louis Capet, to the pain of death, the judgment to be carried out in the Place de la Révolution, its dictates printed and exhibited throughout the Republic.
On the appointed day, my wife is missing when I awake. Our drunken neighbor across the courtyard claims not to have seen her. She's nowhere to be found when I return. The Queen flinches upon seeing the open cart in which she'll ride. She explains she'd been hoping for the enclosed carriage that carried her husband. She apologizes for treading on my foot as she climbs the steps.
My wife does not return that evening, or the next. Henri-Francois notes a missing trunk but mentions nothing else, contemptuous of my agony. Legros takes over the cooking. In the wee hours I occupy my fireside chair, swigging wine. The future unfolds in the flames like a gameboard dotted with opponents' pieces. I envision new laws abolishing the accused's right to any defense; the frightened seeking to outpace one another with the
zeal and homicidal efficiency of their patriotism; and prisoners condemned in groups, identities muddled in the confusion, as sons die in the name of fathers, alongside entire families decimated by misspellings and clerical errors. At the scaffold, a nightmarish constancy, with only the actors changing. Chemists. Street singers. Fifteen-year-old servants. An abbé who founded and ran the orphanage for the city's chimney sweeps, most as young as five or six. Carmelite nuns. Peasant women from the Vivarais, unintelligible in their patois and bewildered at their arrest. One boy in a forgeman's cap. One in a hat of otter skin. One already bloodied and bareheaded. One with little guillotines on his suspenders. One who'd drawn in ink on his neck: Cut on the dotted line. The executions proceeding at such a pace that the heads tip from the filled baskets and roll from the scaffold's lip. Never enough in the way of carts, straps, bran, hay, nails, soap for the grooves, or tips for the gravediggers. Baskets changed every two weeks, the bottoms rotted through, the sides chewed by teeth. The machine frequently moved as a menace to sanitation. An old man taking in the great pile of clothing discarded by his predecessors and extending me his compliments, and noting that I must have the most extensive wardrobe of anyone in France.
A man climbs the stairs. He's strapped to the plank. The plank slides forward. The half-moon is brought over his neck. There's a frightful second. His open eyes see the basketful below.
And when the blade comes down, a fiery mist explodes about his eyes. It's radiant with reflected light. The light converts to pain. The pain saturates all that follows. The head suffers for three days and nights, its spark finally extinguished beside its body in the lime pit.
Sulla said he stood before all of Rome and dared to declare: “I am ready to answer for all of the blood I have poured out on behalf of the Republic. I will render an exact account to anyone who comes to plead for a father, son, or brother.” And he said that all Rome was silent at his offer.
What a creature is Sanson! Impassive, standing with his slightly timorous look beside his sinister friend, the black heart of the Revolution. He chops off whatever is brought to him. Does he fear being alone? He eats. He gazes at others. Their heads elude him, as his eludes theirs. Will he in his dotage have visitors, each wanting to touch the blade, peer inside the baskets, lie upon the plank? Will he become the town eccentric who plays the cello badly but remains a good neighbor, puttering with his tulips and relating anecdotes to the curious?
Through years of vigils and crises and alarms that kept men from sleeping, he was never seen unshaven. Insignificance, silence, and dissimulation were his most powerful tools. His machine was a celebration of geometry formally applied, and geometry is the language of reason.
Who presented Pompey's head to Caesar in Egypt? Who presented Cicero's to Antony? History records only whose head was presented to whom. Who did the chopping? Those impossible beings. That species unto themselves.
From his chair Sanson tends the fire and coddles the past. The past for him is his wife. On their first walks their conversation was like the exhilaration of learning itself. When he spoke with her, she lowered her eyes. When he stopped, she lingered until he continued. He blurted during one of their partings that without her he'd be his broken cello, all tunes lost. She smiled when he was in particular need of indulgence. And when her mouth touched him, she smelled like a linen sheet in the sunshine.
In a day or so he knows he'll receive a letter, its hand uneven as though composed on a knee or post: a letter in which she advises him not to be anxious on her behalf, but to honor her steadfastness, which he should have no trouble imagining. A letter in which she tells him she has no counsel to give, and that he should follow those he needs to follow. In which she informs him that she wants nothing in the way of a settlement. In which she confides to him that the time will come when he'll be able to judge the effort she has made to write this. In which she closes by noting that she has no more paper, and that the misfortune that she's awaited has arrived, and that she claps him to her heart.
And even then he'll understand the implication that he could still renounce this life and find her where she suffers. But instead he'll sit in his house, with the face of an absconding debtor. His father told him that if he offered to carry the basket, he shouldn't complain of the weight. His grandmother told him that the tears of strangers were only water. He himself was given a miracle and threw it away. Let his society perish, then, through the ferocity of its factions. Let his city return to its original state of forest. Let his neighbors relapse into the primitive, from which they could one day start again. Let it all go on without him. He was already that head without its body, jolted with the consciousness of its own death. He was already a tiny, bat-winged machine fluttering over a wave of corpses. He was already that empty narrow space between the raised blade and its destination: that opportunity, gone in a tenth of a second, which would never return again.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set in Minion, a typeface produced by the Adobe Corporation specifically for the Macintosh personal computer, and released in 1990. Designed by Robert Slim-bach, Minion combines the classic characteristics of old-style faces with the full compliment of weights required for modern typesetting.
Composed by Creative Graphics,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by RRD Harrisonburg,
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Shepard
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Stories in this collection originally appeared in the following
publications: “The Zero Meter Diving Team” in Bomb (Fall 2007),
“Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian” on failbetter.com (Summer 2005),
“The First South Central Australian Expedition” in Granta (Fall 2006),
“Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” and “Sans Farine” in Harper's
(September 2005 and November 2006), “Hadrian's Wall” in McSweeney's
(Fall 2004), “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay” in Ploughshares
(Spring 2007), “Courtesy for Beginners” in A Public Space
(Summer 2007), “Ancestral Legacies” in Seed (Summer 2004),
“Eros 7” in Tin House (Winter 2007), “My Aeschylus” in
The Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2006).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepard, Jim.
Like you'd understand, anyway:stories / Jim Shepard. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48752-0
I. Title.
PS3569.H39384L55 2007
813′.54—dc22 2007003639
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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