What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust are all words I might use to entice you into thinking yourself interested in the scene at Sing Sing where Schaumann, of whom you\u2019ll hear quite a bit more, was dispatching such and such a killer on a day, let\u2019s say, in spring. Did you know that he lived in an undecorated house? As a rule, he was inclined toward plainness. An absence of adornment in his clothing, comestibles, decorations, speech, wife, car, habits. He would have lived thus even if employed as a dogcatcher or chiropodist. He had never been otherwise. Ostentation was indefensible. He pretended not to see it. Tasteful or un, he found anything done for no reason than to excite the senses to be in poor form. Perhaps the result of a transcription error in ye old zygotic alphabet. A possibility that would not have been unfamiliar to Schaumann, breeding his mice. Here a one with a longer tail, there a one who wouldn\u2019t take food. Schaumann eschewed even condiments. Nor would he wear charms or trinkets. He had lost his wedding ring on his honeymoon. While swimming. Sucked away by the salt he would not have added to his beef stew. Leading his wife to jibe that Schaumann was now married to the sea. Yes: a joke, for those with an ear for such things. But Schaumann hadno wit. Even less guile. His children found it easy to deceive him. His children found him simple. Given his profession, however, I am tempted to see something defensive in his meticulous triviality. Ostentation would draw attention. If attention were paid to Schaumann, the attender might learn what Schaumann did for a living. So he was ashamed of it? Sources differ. His children found him simple. I think they were mistaken. And, anyway, they will not read this story. I won\u2019t encourage them to do so, and I\u2019ll ask that you not bring it to their attention. And did you know that when Schaumann left his house to drive to the state prison to execute someone, he changed his license plates halfway? I\u2019m unsure as to the legality or feasibility of this. Maybe he had received some sort of dispensation from the state. I\u2019m sure the state made allowances for the privacy of its employees engaged in such sensitive work. And that was how Schaumann lived his private life: he was one man in town, walking to the store, going to church; another during his grim bivouac in the piney woods, spinning and unspinning his license- plate screws, changing his clothes, a legal criminal: killer, breeder of mice, husband, father. Don\u2019t tell me there aren\u2019t such men. Don\u2019t tell me our great and sovereign state is empty of such men. He didn\u2019t wear a hood. He owned a hood, it\u2019s true, but no one insisted that he wear it. Hood ownership was ceremonial; the hood was passed down to the next executionerwhen its previous bearer retired. A symbol of office. Not that Schaumann\u2019s superiors would have begrudged him its use. They were traditionalists. The hood was, however, left at home. Even when Schaumann would have preferred to walk hooded to the Chair. It lived in his bureau, the hood. I mean in his armoire. I mean in his dresser. It was folded in with his underwear, the hood. Schaumann\u2019s wife knew it was there: she had folded it, as she had the underwear amid or amidst which it resided. She knew about Schaumann\u2019s job, though he was, as a rule, taciturn. She probably knew about the mice too. In her basement. It may in fact be a simpler matter to keep one\u2019s employment as state executioner secret than to bring mice secretly into one\u2019s unadorned home. Especially with two children. The squeaking, the rattling of those filament- thin cage bars, the little corpses, the smell. Why keep secrets in any case? It would not have occurred to Schaumann that a deceit was worth the making. (It would not have occurred to Schaumann that a painting or poem was worth the making.) He covered his tracks without covering his coverings. He covered his tracks with water, not with leaves. And though Schaumann\u2019s wife didn\u2019t know it, it\u2019s no secret that I stole her husband\u2019s name from a novel I\u2019m fond of. I\u2019m sure she wouldn\u2019t have minded, had she known, so long as she didn\u2019t have to read the novel. Her name, however, is still open to conjecture. I go back and forth on this question. What is gained, or not, by naming. In deference to Schaumann, I too am trying to adopt a style of meticulous plainness. He bred mice in his spare time, in his basement, which was spare. And which, though underfurnished, was decorated like a ship\u2019s wheelhouse. I\u2019m serious. It even had a working wheel. Working, in that it spun. More squeaking. Imagine that. Installed before a painted landscape, continuous on every wall. And though he never bothered looking at them, Schaumann\u2019s square, flat seas were calm and Mediterranean. A working guardrail was set into the plaster. Working in that one could grip it. Imagine that. All of this was a holdover from the previous owner, who must have had good reasons to spend his money in this way, Schaumann assumed. No one would have accused Schaumann of being capable of such eccentricity. But, then, his character likewise forbade spending his own money, or making a spectacle of his home in order to have such eccentricity removed. And before you get any crazy ideas, neither was it in Schaumann\u2019s character to stand on his deck and pick out some figure in the indifferently daubed middle distance, this figure blobbed with what one might suppose, in a charitable moment, was meant to be a muslin frock or robe by whichever rural housepainter had been commissioned to produce this panoramic travesty; Schaumann would never wring some fluffy aesthetic satisfaction out of the figure\u2019s artless art, would never wonder about that tanned splotch, never think profound things indicative of his own artless conception of himself as a man, a killer, a breeder of mice, a husband or father, with regard to the figure\u2019s static solitude, forever posed observing themotionless ship of his basement not drifting by. He would never feel anything for or about this forgotten digit in a bad painting on the walls of a room about six feet underground on the unexceptional side of the world. No, believe me, none of that for Schaumann. He hardly even\u2014hardly ever\u2014noticed his cubic sea, its two- stroke gulls, its labored clouds, its peeling Etna. He was, as far as representation, like a cat, our Schaumann. Flat birds, you know, squawk not. Painted seas smell only of mildew and plaster. I don\u2019t mean Schaumann was unimaginative: mainly uninvested. Mimesis, even when accomplished, even when photoreal, was lost on him. Schaumann went down to his basement not to brood but to breed. And, while we\u2019re setting out some rules, neither did Schaumann see any correlation between his playing vengeful god with his prisoners at the death house and playing fertility god with his mice in their cages. Because Schaumann didn\u2019t feel the least bit empowered\u2014a word he wouldn\u2019t have used, or probably known\u2014by his quotidian killings or propagations. Nor, before you jump to conclusions, was he numb to the unappetizing nature of his work, an unthinking processor of the condemned. It was like this: Schaumann had assistants who helped with the cleanup, and their chatter annoyed him. They had been selected for their solemnity, and yet, \u201cbehind the scenes,\u201d they talked and talked. They had not been raised right. Schaumann had to assume, therefore, that their fellow guards, all his younger colleagues, assigned to the general prison population, talked even more than they. The others had lacked even the solemnity of these chatterers. Sobering to Schaumann. He considered himself lucky, then, to have been plucked from normal duty to work here in the sanctum back in the days when, out there, men who were, like himself, unforthcoming, were still in the ascendancy. He had found such men congenial company. Together unconversing. Strength in silence. Days bygone, or perhaps vanished, or perhaps present but misty in Schaumann\u2019s middle distance as he came back from the cafeteria, his awkward shuffle the only movement there in the center of the center, the inside of the inside, where they keep the real if cheerless secrets of Sing Sing. Oh, I don\u2019t know: the panopticon, the spirit jars, the fetish bracelets, the guillotine; the different sizes of death chair, with or without cushioned armrests, pillows, claw feet, intaglio images of Itztli, the Ghede, Yama; the shrine to the Rosenbergs, piled with skulls and bowls of rice and mustard greens: the scent of the couple\u2019s smolder reproduced by costly parfumeurs and pumped continually into the corridor by unpaid interns. All of which Schaumann passed without remark, breathing symphonically through his one unclogged nostril, carrying his timecard, wondering how many pups from the latest litter aboard his basement might survive till summer. Would Schaumann\u2019s two popinjays have been considered apprentices? Did they nurse hopes of succeeding him and being handed the hood in turn? But Schaumann insisted on doing all the paperworkhimself. His work signature distinct from his home signature. Left leaning or right, more or less legible, more or less ambitious stroke structures. Hiking each of these mountain ranges in aid of the same Germanic name. Schaumann only wanted to divert attention elsewhere, not dissemble. If someone had asked him what he did for a living, a stranger, though he rarely met any that weren\u2019t dead an hour later, Schaumann would have been evasive, but he wouldn\u2019t have lied. If cornered. And if you kept at him. So is it awful? Are they violent? I\u2019m never alone with them, usually they don\u2019t have much fight left by the time I see them. Are they scared of you? Not me, exactly. So exactly what? He never wrote his memoirs. All his predecessors did. But he had missed killing the Rosenbergs. By just a few years. Can you imagine the sense of professional loss? Schaumann was, at best, occupying the iron age of executioners. The heroes and immortals of the discipline were no more. Really, his profession was itself in danger of extinction. Not the practice but the profession. Courts- martial and the like, they don\u2019t require special executioners. It wouldn\u2019t be long before Schaumanns were obsolete. So what did he have to brag about? His figure? I can tell you he was never unfaithful to his wife. Who, in the end, was named Tina, short for Kristina. But Schaumann wasn\u2019t much fun to be around. Isn\u2019t that also a sortof bad faith? He tried his best with his family; that was obvious; I mean he labored obviously to do his best. It was important to him that people should recognize that he was doing his best. When a poet, or was it a painter, with connections to the so- called New York School opened a small bistro in Schaumann\u2019s town, Schaumann wanted everyone to see him take his wife there for dinner. They walked down Main Street and lingered where there might be witnesses. The owner of the restaurant spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Schaumann of a region in Italy where the natives cooked using unwashed basil. They refused to wash it, these aboriginal Italians. They\u2019d pick the leaves and then brush them with twigs. That\u2019s all. And so into the sauce. \u201cSuch is their reverence for the leaf,\u201d said the owner. \u201cHoly God,\u201d (cap\u2019d, direct address) thought Schaumann, or perhaps he muttered it. If Schaumann did \u201chave a book in him\u201d after all, it would be the sort of book where people don\u2019t say but mutter (if not murmur). I hope that doesn\u2019t sound condescending. I don\u2019t mean to be, neither toward Schaumann nor the poet turned restaurateur. So don\u2019t you look at me that way. What was it that poet, (or was he a painter?) just back from Italy muttered or murmured about revering his basil? \u201cReverence is a twig, water somehow too familiar. So don\u2019t you look at me that way.\u201d Schaumann bred mice in his spare time, I am told. He was good at it. He experimented, tried to produce litters of only one color, bearing a certain pattern of spots, possessed of a particular nose or eye width. Which is to say that he found mice malleable, as a medium. In time taking special orders from labs from around the state. A little money on the side. Promptly reinvested in his mice. Cages expanding to sheds, additions, new buildings, a veritable farm. And after Schaumann\u2019s death, his legacy: glow- in- the- dark mice, monster mice, mice even Schaumann\u2019s skilled hands could not have produced: mutated mice, mice of the future. Do you know what a knockout mouse is? It\u2019s a mouse whose DNA has been altered to remove or disable a specific gene. For example, the FOXP2 gene, mutations of which supposedly affect language or vocalization. And yes, Schaumann killed many of his failures, whether out of shame or simply to protect his sovereign gene pool. He bought his son or daughter a snake so as to better dispose of the evidence, as he had no assistants attending him in these off- duty executions. But he didn\u2019t brag about his mice either, though they were his great success in life: not even in a murmur, not even to the lanky galoot from the city, who would have listened, who would have been eager to take in such nourishing specificity, but who Schaumann recognized as a threat to his (Schaumann\u2019s) anonymity. This epicene, glasses- wearing transplant. Wanting to fit in, like Schaumann, but unlike Schaumann talking too much and too strangely to be anything but an anomaly here. Even when using simple words, our urbanite couldn\u2019t use them right. And I\u2019m not saying he preferred words that weren\u2019t simple. I\u2019m not saying he was an intellectual. But he was from a different milieu, that\u2019s indisputable. He\u2019d traveled. He\u2019d eaten gritty basil somewhere on a different continent. He\u2019d published poetry in magazines Schaumann wouldn\u2019t have heard of, and\/or exhibited at galleries Schaumann wouldn\u2019t have considered worth a visit. Schaumann would have said, had he been forced to acknowledge such products, \u201cYou don\u2019t need talent to do what that guy does.\u201d But, you know, he didn\u2019t consider himself talented, the restaurateur. If you\u2019d asked him at a cocktail party, both of you attending out of obligation, whether he considered himself a talented man, he would have said that his only genius was in being able to locate the word \u201corgasm\u201d on even the most tightly kerned page of type, almost before his forebrain had taken in ink, page, paper grain; before his mind from its filing cabinets had selected \u201cread\u201d as the verb, \u201cbook\u201d the noun, \u201ctoadstool\u201d the odor at hand. To which boast you would reply with amusement or embarrassment, wondering whether the trains were still running. Or I guess you\u2019d know best how you would reply. In fact, when I use the noun man to speak about this alien presence in Schaumann\u2019s small- town redoubt, it may seem as though I am employing precisely the same noun I would use to speak about our plainspoken executioner, had I likewise deferred giving Schaumann a name. And yet, with regard to the poet- chef, the word man in fact has anidiomatic meaning that I\u2019m not sure I can communicate to you\u2014you who are not from around here. But this person, so to speak, would in any case have found Schaumann captivating, had he (the chef) been privy to the things Schaumann would not share. He would have looked at Schaumann as a case study, perhaps to the point of offending Schaumann with his stare; perhaps he would have thought\u2014reviewing Schaumann\u2019s future, which was printed in Palatino on the reticent man\u2019s cheeks and chin\u2014that the details of Schaumann\u2019s life might make a great poem, or painting, or meal. Perhaps questo grande fabbro would even have suggested that Schaumann was something of an artist himself, which is, probably, condescending; I mean, placing an otherwise indigestible personage into a comfortable context the better to dismiss him. You know how it goes. But, in the chef\u2019s defense\u2014let us call him Quakatz, to cut down on the pronouns\u2014Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Quakatz, if you must know\u2014in Chef Quakatz\u2019s defense, Schaumann did produce, did have an audience. It\u2019s just that Schaumann\u2019s readers, so called, and critics too, were unable to submit their reviews to the prison board the following morning, for the simple reason (you\u2019re way ahead of me) that they were by that time on slabs, smelling of fuse box. What a painting or omelet Quakatz could have made out of that! Schaumann\u2019s mice liked him at least as much as his prisoners did. At least the ones resigned enough to their forthcoming departures to take a moment to appreciate their dispatcher\u2019s decorum, his benevolence, his dignity, his melancholy as he led them on his two sinister feet to the long- suffering hot seat; why, some of these hard men even felt sorry for Schaumann. Everyone in the execution party, walking down that long hallway (I am employing my extensive knowledge of clich\u00e9), must have felt sorry for one another. For one another, I stress, not for themselves. Schaumann and self- pity didn\u2019t mix: he consumed it and excreted it. Like an algae- eating fish cleaning its tank. He consumed and converted into compassion all the self- pity the condemned could not help but produce as they saw their last of this glorious world: the drywall, the drop ceilings, the orangeade light in tubes, the flocculent spiral of discoloration on the tiling by the killing chair itself: Gosh it\u2019s hard to leave all this behind! Schaumann knew how to give his charges a proper sendoff. And then the bloody remains in a handkerchief into the trash. Until he went out to the pet store in the next town and bought that snake for his son, anyway. (Do you mind my not looking up the species?) The snake as an intermediary was cleaner, Schaumann thought, than just putting the corpses directly into the bin; the opossum problem was solved just about overnight: no more overturned garbage cans. Offal is offal, yes, whole or first abstracted by snake intestine, but no local, carrion- loving mammal would dare come near the smell of carnivorous reptile. Sorry, did I say that Schaumann didn\u2019t equate his mice and his prisoners? But you know I can\u2019t be trusted. I come from a broken home. The cages, the habitats, the mouse scent filled the Good Ship Schaumann, which despite his supposed disinterest he would have been embarrassed to show Quakatz\u2014Quakatz the tangle, Quakatz the m\u00e9lange!\u2014and only with great diffidence his wife Tina and his two children, who went unnamed most of their lives. And polishing the fittings on the electric chair, oiling its great big knife switch (don\u2019t tell me there wasn\u2019t a great big knife switch), Schaumann thought about what sort of creature the union of reptilian Quakatz with his Tina might have produced. What sort of son or daughter would have resulted. What crimes would it commit. How long before it landed before Schaumann the executioner and recognized this man who could have been its sire, but would instead escort it from this welter of sublunary dissatisfactions\u2014oh, matinee stubs, record- club circulars, septic fingers, amber ashtrays, dust- mops and corkscrews and orgasms. An executioner predisposed by his own two parents to attaining a high level of expertise in the arts both of dispatching murderers and husbanding rodents. Females can become pregnant within twenty- four hours of giving birth, and female pups within five to eight weeks after being born. Schaumann purchased; he culled; he coddled his mice. His human daughter and human son, uncoddled, unresponsive, themselves achieved sexual maturity and took great pains to demonstrate their achievement to their coevals. But they weren\u2019t developed enough characters to move away from this burlesque. They went to schoollocally, they bred with local stock and produced variations so slight from the generations that had preceded them that no researcher could have been seduced into mapping their tiny triumphs. Quakatz, for his part, refrained from breeding. Employed a baker and flourished according to his newer, lower, upstate standards. Kept a diary. Fell in love with and then dismissed said baker. No poem came of this loss. Sad loaves, buns, scones undithyrambed. The baker was solaced soon in the arms of the young and already once- divorced Ms. Schaumann\u2014unworthy, perhaps, of his genius with yeast and oven, but no less so than Quakatz\u2019s predawn kitchen, now so undistinguished, where even the weevils had once been elegized. Did time pass? Every night the restaurateur praying to the Pleiades, Schaumann to the forkhead box. An older Quakatz drove to Albany once to take part in demonstrations demanding the abolishment of capital punishment. Taking food right out of his own mouth, had he known. What with Tina and therefore Schaumann and therefore the death- house payroll office being some of his best customers. Tina and Schaumann ate chez Quakatz once a week. A useless expense, now that no one bothered to comment that Schaumann was a good husband to so treat his spouse. But Tina insisted. On Friday nights, perhaps. Along with other couples of retirement age, or nearly, they were regulars. Though Schaumann himself would never retire. If he retired, he might be called upon to say what from. So he would continue pulling that switch so long as his armwould behave as habit and the penal code dictated, without flourish or tremor. And I would say Mr. and Mrs. Schaumann\u2019s Friday night ritual was intended to hark or hearken back to the early days of their adolescent pair- bond, but Schaumann and Tina had never dated; they were always married, were born old, and their house contained only a basement. Don\u2019t weep for the mice: they have it pretty easy. Short lives, little joy, but lives entire. Are they scared of you? Schaumann\u2019s daughter had asked when she\u2019d gotten her one tour of her father\u2019s terraria. And he\u2019d answered: Not me exactly. And she told this to the reporters who found her at the beginning of the next century, still living with her baker, having moved not three hundred yards from her childhood home, now almost entirely given over to mouse breeding\u2014fluorescent mice caged near mice who could not even squeak, because of their mangled FOXP2s. What took you so long? she asked them, when they knocked. Because all the other state executioners had long since been found, interviewed, published, annotated, celebrated. Not Schaumann, who had left so meager a midden to be sifted by scholars. And Mrs. Baker\u2019s bemused testimony made the front page of the local paper, if only rating a peculiar paragraph in the Lifestyle section of the city rag, downstate\u2014where women were women and men were idioms\u2014which by the way made mention of the excellent if coarse pesto being served in the tiny but ominous town\u2019s bistro. Ancient Quakatz, long a subscriber, cudgeledhis old diaries for some mention of Schaumann the state executioner. Had he fed such a man so regularly and never noted his qualities? It seemed Schaumann was buried not ten minutes from where vacationers now enjoyed gourmet meals priced as though it were still a year when the grease- smoke of fried murderers might have served as a chance condiment for their veal chops. Quakatz visited the grave. Communed with the simple stele. Thought of taking up photography. The funeral? Unostentatious. The son and his snake, the daughter and her baker, Tina and her names, all in attendance. The two death- row assistants wondering how to ask the widow for their hood back. A very small crowd of retired coworkers from the old days, from the prison\u2014not chatting, not chattering, not gossiping, barely speaking. But calling: Move over, Schaumann. We\u2019re coming in after you. Make room. From the grave, muffled, an explanation: \u201cI am trying to adopt a style of scrupulous plainness!\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Forkhead Box is a story from “The Knack of Doing” by Jeremy Davies, published by Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher (c) Jeremy Davies, 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust are all words I might use to entice you into thinking yourself interested in the scene at Sing Sing where Schaumann, of whom you\u2019ll hear quite a bit more, was dispatching such and such a killer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8362,"template":"","categories":[24,10],"class_list":["post-8372","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-7","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n