Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
SHE WAS SITTING over the Shultzes in their caskets. I was standing over a severed head which would be dug up by a backhoe in 8 years. The head had been in the ground so long that it was just a skull.
A specialist in Forensic Medicine from the State Police happened to be down here when the skull showed up in the backhoe’s scoop, so he had a look at it, told us what he thought. He didn’t think it was an Indian, which was my first guess. He said it had belonged to a white woman maybe 20 years old. She hadn’t been bludgeoned or shot in the head, so he would have to see the rest of the skeleton before theorizing about what might have killed her.
But the backhoe never brought up another bone.
Decapitation, alone, of course, could have done the job.
He wasn’t much interested. He judged from the patina on the skull that its owner had died long before we were born. He was here to examine the bodies of people who had been killed after the prison break, and to make educated guesses about how they had died, by gunshot or whatever.
He was especially fascinated by Tex Johnson’s body. He had seen almost everything in his line of work, he told me, but never a man who had been crucified, with spikes through the palms and feet and all.
I WANTED HIM to talk more about the skull, but he changed the subject right back to crucifixion. He sure knew a lot about it.
He told me one thing I’d never realized: that the Jews, not just the Romans, also crucified their idea of criminals from time to time. Live and learn!
How come I’d never heard that?
DARIUS, KING OF Persia, he told me, crucified 3,000 people he thought were enemies in Babylon. After the Romans put down the slave revolt led by Spartacus, he said, they crucified 6,000 of the rebels on either side of the Appian Way!
He said that the crucifixion of Tex Johnson was unconventional in several ways besides Tex’s being dead or nearly dead when they spiked him to timbers in the stable loft. He hadn’t been whipped. There hadn’t been a cross-beam for him to carry to his place of execution. There was no sign over his head saying what his crime was. And there was no spike in the upright, whose head would abrade his crotch and hindquarters as he turned this way and that in efforts to become more comfortable.
As I said at the beginning of this book, if I had been a professional soldier back then, I probably would have crucified people without thinking much about it, if ordered to do so.
Or I would have ordered underlings to do it, and told them how to do it, if I had been a high-ranking officer.
I MIGHT HAVE taught recruits who had never had anything to do with crucifixions, who maybe had never even seen one before, a new word from the vocabulary of military science of that time. The word was crurifragium. I myself learned it from the Medical Examiner, and I found it so interesting that I went and got a pencil and wrote it down.
It is a Latin word for “breaking the legs of a crucified person with an iron rod in order to shorten his time of suffering.” But that still didn’t make crucifixion a country club.
WHAT KIND OF an animal would do such a thing? The old me, I think.
THE LATE UNICYCLIST Professor Damon Stern asked me one time if I thought there would be a market for religious figures of Christ riding a unicycle instead of spiked to a cross. It was just a joke. He didn’t want an answer, and I didn’t give him one. Some other subject must have come up right away.
But I would tell him now, if he hadn’t been killed while trying to save the horses, that the most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
BUT LISTEN TO this: While idly winnowing through old local newspapers here, I think I have discovered whom that probably Caucasian, surely young and female skull belonged to. I want to rush out into the prison yard, formerly the Quadrangle, shouting “Eureka! Eureka!”
My educated guess is that the skull belonged to Letitia Smiley, a