They hung the stranger on Tuesday as the clockwork figures on the tower struck the twelfth gong.
Roscoe Gordon had seen the man the day before as the stranger climbed onto the fountain’s rim and started speaking in words no one could understand. He held something small and shiny in his right hand, alternately thrusting it toward the crowd and pointing at it with his left hand. Most of the early morning crowd ignored him, ducking their heads as they bustled past. Running late as usual, Roscoe hadn’t paid much attention either as he hurried across the square toward his job at the cemetery on the far side of town. Then the stranger’s narrowed eyes caught his. Roscoe felt a jolt like a spark of electricity at the man’s intense gaze.
The steam whistle from the brass factory sounded the hour, letting Roscoe tear his eyes away. He brushed back his thick, brown hair and strode on, his long legs carrying him away from the square and the unsettling stranger.
The stranger was still at it when the trolley rumbled past on its third round of the evening. He’d grown hoarse by then, with an air of desperation in his tone. Roscoe paused to listen on his way home. By now some of the townsfolk surrounded the stranger. Shopkeepers closed their doors to join the gathering crowd. Workers on their way home from the mill stood at the back with crossed arms and scowling faces.
Dawdling under a gas lamp at the edge of the square, Roscoe still couldn’t tell what the man said. His outlandish tongue mixed with a few words of English made him sound like someone possessed by demons. He had the look of a demon too, unlike anyone Roscoe had seen before. Tangles of wild hair the color of faded autumn leaves sprouted like bushes from his head, and his eyes, bright with the intensity of his words, were different colors, one a pale, nearly colorless blue and the other so dark the pupil and iris melted together. He wore a bright yellow cravat, an ancient green vest, and a tattered coat of motley that flapped like the wings of an exotic bird as his speech grew ever more emphatic.
A rabble of younger boys mocked the stranger. They took turns climbing on the fountain’s edge and shrieking in a singsong imitation of the stranger’s gibberish, then doubling over in laughter. They waggled their fingers in their ears and pranced about. The stranger paid no attention, not even when the boys tossed pebbles at him. Then Tommy Pettigrew, a twelve-year-old known for mischief, dug a couple of rotten apples from the garbage behind the grocer. He pelted the stranger, catching him on the ear.
The stranger stopped talking. He turned and fixed his pale eye on Tommy. Slowly, the stranger raised his arm, pointing a stubby finger at the boy. The arm shook in anger and something else, more sinister perhaps. “Beware!” he roared in accented English.
Surprised, Tommy stood still, as if the word had knocked the breath right out of him.
They might have remained, gazes locked, for all time, but Tommy’s father pushed through the crowd and broke the spell. He grabbed his son by the ear, dragging him toward home, scolding all the while.
At sundown, when it became clear the stranger meant to go on haranguing the good townsfolk, the sheriff locked him up in the town jail. They might have let him go the next morning, running him out of town with a warning. But Tommy Pettigrew took sick that evening and died before daybreak. Sure, the stranger was in jail by then, but Tommy’s mother swore he’d hexed the boy. Then she took sick and died an hour later. By mid-morning the whole Pettigrew family, along with the maid and the cook, were dead. The stranger’s weird words and evil eye were the only explanation.
The town’s justice was swift. By noon they had mounted the stranger on a wind-up trolley, tied a rope around his neck, and threw the loose end over the branch of the hanging tree on the edge of the square. Folks said he never stopped shouting at them until the noose choked the breath out of him.
Roscoe wasn’t in town for the hanging. If he’d been there, he could have told them no good ever came of hanging a man without a trial, not that anyone ever listened to Roscoe. While the townsfolk were stringing up the stranger, Roscoe was still out at the cemetery. His job as assistant groundskeeper mostly meant mowing the grass, weeding, and picking up trash folks left behind. For all the fancy title, it was little more than janitor work, but Roscoe didn’t mind. It meant he didn’t have to talk to many people, not live ones at least. He spent a fair amount of time talking to the dead folk there. And that suited Roscoe too. Dead folk usually had a lot fewer troubles than people with more corporeal concerns.
Roscoe learned of the hanging mid-afternoon. He was lounging against the Mehlkopf monument, eyes closed. He chewed the tender end of a blade of grass and listened to the steady clacking of the grass clipper, a clockwork contraption meant to keep the grounds neat. The machine did a reasonably good job of cutting the grass in a straight line. Roscoe needed only to rewind it every fifteen minutes or so and straighten it if it went off course. He dozed in the warm sunshine.
A sudden kick to his boot startled him. His eyes flew open. Frowning down at him was Mayor Mehlkopf, a bird-like man with a shiny bald head and a beaked nose. A half step behind the mayor was the mayor’s brother, Sheriff Mehlkopf. On the other side of the sheriff, Bill Anders, the cemetery sextant, scowled.
“You think I’m paying you to sleep in the sun?” Anders fumed. “That’s an expensive piece of machinery you’re like to ruin.”
The grass-clipper had stopped clacking. Instead it emitted a soft, petulant whine, having gotten hung up on the rough edge of a gravestone.