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By Root 397 0

A.D., when, riding around in the meat of one Walpurga Hausmännin, I was executed in the Austrian village of Dillingen. The alleged crime of my meat was witch-craft. When I heard the sentence, I certainly wanted out of that meat. I was about to leave it anyway, having worn it for more than eighty-five years. But I had to stay right with it when they tied it astride a sawhorse, put the sawhorse on a cart, took my poor old meat to the Town Hall. There they tore my right arm and left breast with red-hot pincers. Then we went to the lower gate, where they tore my right breast. Then they took me to the door of the hospital, where they tore my right arm. And then they took me to the village square. In view of the fact that I had been a licensed and pledged midwife for sixty-two years, and yet had acted so vilely, they cut off my right hand. And then they tied me to a stake, burned me alive, and dumped my ashes into the nearest stream.

As I say, I haven't been back since.

It used to be that most of us who didn't want to go back to good old Earth were souls whose meat had been tortured in slow and fancy ways—a fact that should make very smug indeed proponents of corporal and capital punishments and deterrents to crime. But something curious has been happening of late. We have been gaining recruits to whom, by our standards of agony, practically nothing happened on Earth. They scarcely barked a shin down there, and yet they arrive up here in shell-shocked battalions, bawling, "Never again!"

"Who are these people?" I ask myself. "What is this unimaginably horrible thing that has happened to them?" And I realized that, in order to get proper answers, I am going to have to cease to be dead. I am going to have to let myself be reborn.

Word has just come that I am to be sent where the soul of Richard the Lion Hearted now lives, Rosewater, Indiana.

Eliot's black telephone rang.

"This is the Rosewater Foundation. How can we help you?"

"Mr. Rosewater—" said a woman chockingly, "this—this is Stella Wakeby." She panted, waiting for his reaction to the announcement.

"Well! Hello!" said Eliot heartily. "How nice to hear from you! What a pleasant surprise!" He didn't know who Stella Wakeby was.

"Mr. Rosewater—I—I never asked you for anything, did I?"

"No—no, you never did."

"A lot of people with a lot less troubles than I got bother you all the time."

"I never feel that anyone is bothering me. It is true—I do see some people more than others." He did so much business with Diana Moon Glampers, for instance, that he no longer recorded his transactions with her in the book. He took a chance now: "And I've often thought of the awful burdens you must have to carry."

"Oh, Mr. Rosewater—if you only knew—" And she burst into violent tears. "We always said we were Senator Rosewater people and not Eliot Rosewater people!"

"There, there."

"We've always stood on our own two feet, no matter what. Many's the time I passed you out on the street and looked the other way, not on account of I had anything against you. I just wanted you to know the Wakebys were fine."

"I understood—and I was always glad to get the good news." Eliot couldn't recall any woman's turning her face away from him, and he walked around the town so rarely that he couldn't have offered the overwrought Stella very many opportunities to react to him. He supposed correctly that she lived in frightful poverty on some back road, rarely showing herself and her rags, and only imagining that she had some sort of life in the town, too, and that everyone knew her. If she had passed Eliot on the street once, which she probably had, that once had become a thousand passings in her mind—each with its own dramatic lights and shadows.

"I couldn't sleep tonight, Mr. Rosewater—so I walked the road."

"And many's the time you've done it."

"Oh, God, Mr. Rosewater—full moon, half moon, and no moon at all."

"And tonight the rain."

"I like the rain."

"And so do I."

"And there was this light in my neighbor's house."

"Thank God for neighbors."

"And I knocked on the door, and they took me