短篇小说｜Robert Coover：The Hanging of the Schoolmarm
The schoolmarm is playing poker in the town saloon. The stake is the saloon itself. As she is preparing to deal the cards, one of the men demands that she cut the fuckin’ deck, and she shoots him from her lap. “Sorry, but I simply cannot allow . . .”
The others tip their crumpled hats. “No, ma’am, you just go ahead and deal.”
The men of the town find the schoolmarm difficult but are awed by her refined and lofty character, and generally do what she tells them to do. The sheriff likes to say that she’s as pure as the spotless lily of the lake, though they have no lake, and there are no lilies in it. No damn lilies. The men cuss a lot—in fact, all the time—but never around the schoolmarm. Cussing doesn’t go together with the schoolmarm. It’s like salting your coffee, to put it politely.
After winning the saloon in the poker hand, the schoolmarm has the deceased removed and turns the card tables into school desks. The bar becomes an altar on Sundays, but there’s no preacher, so the schoolmarm provides temperance lectures from it, which the men are obliged to attend. In their minds, it’s still the old bar, the old saloon, so they carry along hip flasks and beef jerky to ease themselves through the unholy tedium, belching and snorting noisily.
The men are also obliged to take spelling and counting lessons on weekdays, using the signs on the saloon walls and the playing cards with numbers on them as their schoolbooks. The men learn that there are two “t”s in “spitting,” for example, and, when they forget or when they ignore the sign’s admonition, they get their heads rapped with a wooden ruler. The schoolmarm also raps their heads for uncouth laughter, bad grammar, cigar smoking in class, and tardiness. This head-rapping hurts, and finally it’s too much for them. They form a jury and condemn the schoolmarm to be hanged for her cruel city ways.
The schoolmarm insists that they discuss it first at their weekly meeting of the Deep Thinkers Club. The men associate deep thinking with deep drinking, so they welcome the opportunity. They’ve been missing the old saloon since its unlucky conversion. They gather at their desks, as the schoolmarm calls them, feeling like they’ve come home again.
The schoolmarm says that today, her last day, she wants them to think about justice and time, how little there is of either, and also about irony, which somehow relates to the same circumstances. The schoolmarm’s just showing off again, making their brains ache, unrepentant criminal that she is. There is talk of getting on with the hanging, but the men are comfortable where they sit, sucking their teeth contentedly, so no one really wants to get up and go do it.
The sheriff, famous for his quick wit, says that time is what he never has enough of, but at least he’s got more than the schoolmarm has. He laughs at his own little joke. The men think about it for a while, and then they laugh, too. The schoolmarm says that that’s what she means by irony, and the sheriff says he’s glad she explained it, because he couldn’t figure out what the dang ironing had to do with anything. Neither could the others. They still can’t, but they hoot and slap their desks just the same. The sheriff’s a pal of theirs.
On the subject of justice, the sheriff considers himself something of an expert. He disagrees with the schoolmarm about there being little of it and reminds her that he himself has dealt out a potful. In deference to the schoolmarm, he doesn’t say what sort of pot it was, but the men grunt knowingly. The sheriff then provides a discourse on law and order, which he says are birds of a feather. Blue, he says when someone asks, like a jay’s. One of the men says he thought it was more yellowish, like a chicken hawk’s. The sheriff says it depends on the color of the law that was broken, and at what time of day or night order got criminally disordered. On that subject, he explains to the Deep Thinkers that he prefers order to ordure, though they are more or less the same thing, only because “order” is easier to spell and don’t sound so foreign.
“Doesn’t sound so foreign,” the schoolmarm corrects.
“Yes’m, that’s what I said,” the sheriff says. “I ain’t completely stupid.” The men applaud the sheriff’s incomplete stupidity.
Then the schoolmarm delivers a lecture on eternity. It is too long. Many of the men’s heads are now on their desks. The schoolmarm’s lecture cannot be heard over the snoring, so she walks among them, twisting their ears. This wakes up only one at a time, and meanwhile another head falls. It’s a kind of dance of bouncing heads.
The sheriff does not want to get his ear twisted, so while the men are dropping off he takes the schoolmarm out to hang her. On the way to the gallows, the sheriff says that sometimes, in shootouts with desperadoes or when wrestling cattle rustlers at the edge of a cliff, he suffers trepidations, and he wonders if the schoolmarm is feeling anything like that now? She isn’t. Her unsentimental tough-mindedness is legendary. Self-pity, she says, is the lowest state to which a person’s mind can fall. Other than lust and gluttony, of course. And indecency.
When the sheriff leads the schoolmarm up onto the gallows, he says, “I know you’re sad about losing your life, ma’am, but you gotta understand—out here, life don’t mean nothing. What only matters is rocks. Rocks and the un-effable, pardon the French.”
“Your French loses something in the translation,” the schoolmarm says, “but I suppose when you speak of the ineffable you are speaking of me.”
“Yes’m,” the sheriff says. “Sure am.”
“Rocks have more to say,” the schoolmarm says. “They express something profound about this place, this life, as I cannot. Language, even when grammatically correct, is simply inadequate. The situation is, in that sense, unspeakable. A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to.”
The sheriff nods, but he doesn’t know what the heck she’s talking about. He fits the noose around her neck.
“Only humans can experience time,” the schoolmarm continues portentously, “so time itself will not exist when life ends, as life inevitably must. Between the beginning of time and the end of it, there’s relatively only an eyeblink, and without life there’s no one to see that eyeblink or remember it. That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all.” The schoolmarm smiles, having invented a new expression.
“Excuse me, ma’am, ain’t all this just a way of putting off what’s got to happen?”
“Well, yes, sorry. I suppose it is. Give me a rock to hold.”
作者：Robert Coover
来源：纽约客（2016.11.28）
【纽约客·短篇小说阅读系列】
The Maraschino Mogul's Secret Life