[Jim Ramsey]

A Boy and a Girl

The soldiers let the boy and a few other children from the village stand nearby to watch the executions. The soldiers had been told to make the children go away, but they knew the children would watch anyway from the cover of the jungle. After the bullets exploded, the male prisoners bound to three of the posts hung limply dead against their ropes while blood spread across their shirts. The woman tied to the fourth post was still standing physically unscathed. She began weeping and shaking even though she was blindfolded and unable to see her fallen companions.

The soldiers scanned the road to doublecheck that the officers who approved the final order had driven away. They grabbed the arms of the two village council elders assigned to observe procedures and pulled them toward the posts. Both elders protested they had done nothing except ask for time to pray. The elder who was most shrill and loud was struck in the head by a rifle butt and after falling was yanked back to his feet and pushed forward. The soldiers cut two of the dead men loose. The bodies, hands and feet still tied, one of them blindfolded, twisted to the ground. The heads of the dead men flopped on their necks like puppets’ heads and thudded on the packed sand of the roadway that ran in front of the line of posts.

One of the dead men, the boy’s uncle, had refused a blindfold. He lay now eyes open, face-on to the children. The uncle had beaten the boy earlier in the week for stealing fish from the lines the uncle set hanging from limbs overarching the river. Just as the soldiers were raising their guns the uncle had glanced at the boy and smiled thinly, knowingly, but now his lips shaped an O like a foundered carp as his face pressed the ground. The uncle had beaten and scolded the boy several times since the boy’s father died in the first revolt following the massacre at the picket line during the farm workers’s strike. The boy’s mother, who lately had been sleeping in the uncle’s hut, had cast her eyes down and said nothing as the uncle cuffed the boy’s head and cracked a green piece of cane against the back of his legs.

The soldiers steered the elders between the dead men and tied them with their torsos in line with the splintered sections of the newly empty posts. They gagged the louder elder who now was moaning. One soldier cut the rope that held the woman to her post. She was from a distant village and had been a servant to the dead Christian missionary still roped to a post. The soldier led the blindfolded servant woman by the hand into the back of the military transport truck. None of the soldiers tried to make the children go away, but the children left by choice as the elders were being blindfolded because they did not want to be witnesses even though they were not afraid of the soldiers—sometimes the soldiers gave them candy and even paper money when the children told them who in the village had spoken out against the president or his government. This is what the children had been taught to do in school. Among their teachers, only the missionary had refused to teach them this.

The children did not watch the executions of the elders, even from the jungle, but they heard the rifle shots despite the jungle in-between and listened as raucous birds again lifted from the trees and as small macaque monkeys unseen high in the trees began once more to shriek and chatter. The children had heard the startled flutter of birds and the clamor of alarmed macaques all their lives. The little animals were weak and noisy. The animals raised the same fuss whether a big snake was motionlessly wound around some nearby limb; whether, the wash ladies balancing baskets of laundry on their heads were gossiping and laughing on the trail to the river; or, whether, a military transport was rumbling past. Just because birds went flying or monkeys began crying did not prove a hungry tiger was waiting within the jungle for a child working in a field to come carelessly closer. The children always tried to be strong like they were taught, and to never behave foolishly like jabbering monkeys; and after all, the soldiers were always close by to protect them.

The children were returned to the village and playing a made-up game of hitting nuts across bare ground with sticks when they heard the next set of shots. The boy stuck his arm into a patch of young bamboo spreading near the water well and, shouting for help, frantically struck the thick growth with his stick while pretending he was being dragged into the mother jungle. The other children laughed and kept playing their game, but then one, the oldest girl—the one whose long, clean hair shone in the sun and whose legs were as liquid and limber as a cat’s, the one the boy thought about when he masturbated—shook her finger, admonishing him without smiling, and told him that his uncle had been a brave man and that only a stupid boy would sell fish to the army cook.