Her little brother and sister, the twins Georg and Barbara, six years old, were playing in the yard, running between the elder bushes that were just beginning to bud. Again and again, the children squealed with delight when the long branches brushed over their faces like fingers. Magdalena couldn’t help smiling. She remembered how, just a few years ago, her father had chased her through the bushes. She pictured his massive frame as he ran after her, raising his huge hands and with a big bear’s threatening growl. Her father had been a wonderful playmate. She had never understood why people would cross to the other side of the street when they met in town or murmur a prayer as he approached. Only later, when she was seven or eight, had she seen how her father didn’t just play with his huge hands. They were on Hangman’s Hill, where Jakob Kuisl had drawn the hemp noose around the neck of a thief and pulled tight.
Nevertheless, Magdalena was proud of her family. Her great-grandfather Jorg Abriel and her grandfather Johannes Kuisl had been hangmen. Magdalena’s father Jakob had been apprenticed to Granddad just as her little brother, Georg, would someday be apprenticed to their own father. Once, when she was still a child, her mother had told her at bedtime that Father had not always been a hangman. He had marched off to the Great War and only later felt the call to return to Schongau. When little Magdalena asked what he had done in the war and why he would rather cut people’s heads off than put on his armor and take up his shining sword and march off to foreign lands, her mother simply fell silent and put her finger to her lips.
After she had finished grinding the herbs, Magdalena emptied the green powder into an earthenware container, which she carefully closed. After it had boiled down to a thick broth, the fragrant mixture would help women resume their interrupted menstruation-a well-known remedy used to prevent an unwanted birth. Thyme and club moss grew in every other garden, but only her father knew where to find the much rarer mountain lovage. Even the midwives from the surrounding villages came to get their powder from him. He called it “Our Lady’s Powder” and thus earned one or two extra pennies.
Magdalena pushed a lock from her face. It kept falling back. She had her father’s unruly hair. Thick eyebrows arched above black, glowing eyes, which seemed continually to blink. At age twenty, she was the hangman’s oldest child. Her mother had given birth to two stillborn babies after her, and then to three infants that were so weak they didn’t live to see their first birthday. Then the twins had come, finally. They were two noisy rascals and her father’s pride and joy. Sometimes Magdalena felt something like pangs of jealousy. Georg was his father’s only son and would one day be apprenticed in the hangman’s trade. Barbara was still a little girl, dreaming of all the things possible in this world. Magdalena, however, was the “Hangman’s Wench,” the “Bloody Maiden,” whom nobody could touch and who was the object of gossip and laughter behind her back. She heaved a sigh. Her life seemed to be already prescribed. She’d marry a hangman from another town, as executioners’ families always stuck together. And yet there were a few young men in town whom she fancied. Especially one…
“When you’re done with Our Lady’s Powder, go in and do the laundry. It won’t wash itself, you know!”
Her mother’s voice awakened Magdalena from her reveries. Anna Maria Kuisl looked at her daughter with disapproval. Her hands were covered with dirt from yard work and she mopped her brow before she continued.
“Dreaming of the boys again, I can tell by the looks of you,” she said. “Get your mind off the boys. There’s enough gossiping as is.”
She smiled at Magdalena, but the hangman’s daughter knew that her mother was being serious. She was a practical, strait-laced woman who cared little for her daughter’s dreams. Also she thought it was a waste of time that her father had taught Magdalena to read. A woman who buried her nose in books was regarded with suspicion by the men. And if she was the hangman’s daughter on top of that and liked to flirt with the lads, then she wasn’t far from the pillory and the scold’s bridle. More than once, the hangman’s wife had prophesied in the darkest tones how her husband would have to clap his own daughter into the shrew’s fiddle and lead her through town at the end of a rope.
“All right, Mother,” said Magdalena and set the mortar down on the bench. “I’m taking the laundry down to the river.”
She grabbed the basket of soiled bedsheets and walked through the garden and down to the Lech River. Her mother’s eyes followed her pensively.
Right behind the house, a well-worn path led past herb and flower gardens, barns, and handsome houses down to the river, to a place where the water had shaped a shallow cove. Magdalena gazed at the whirling eddies that were forming in the middle of the river. It was springtime, and the water was high, reaching the roots of the birches and carrying along branches and entire trees. For a moment Magdalena believed she saw something that looked like a shred of linen in the earth-brown waters, but when she looked more closely, she saw just branches and leaves.
She bent down, took the laundry from her basket, and started scrubbing it on the damp gravel. She was thinking of the festival at St. Paul’s Fair three weeks ago, especially how she had danced with
Magdalena was humming a song now and rhythmically slapping the laundry on the gravel.
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that at first she believed the screaming was only in her imagination. It took her a while to realize that the cries were coming from somewhere upstream.
A woodcutter from Schongau up on the steep bank was first to see the boy. He’d grabbed hold of a tree trunk and was spinning around like a tiny leaf in the foaming water. Initially, the woodcutter was not sure that the tiny thing down there in the rushing water was really human. But when it started to kick and struggle wildly he called to the raftsmen who were getting ready for their first run to Augsburg in the early-morning fog and asked for help. Not until just before Kinsau, four miles north of Schongau, did the riverbank flatten out, with the Lech calm enough for the men to try to reach the boy. They tried to pull him from the water with their long poles, but each time he slid away like a slippery fish. At times he went under completely, remaining beneath the surface for a troubling length of time, then popped up again like a cork at a different spot.
Once more the boy gathered enough strength to pull himself up onto the slippery log and raise his head above the surface to breathe. He reached for the pole with his right hand, his fingers outstretched, but he missed. With a loud thud, the log bumped against the other logs that were clogging the raft landing. The impact caused the boy to lose his grip; he slipped down and sank among dozens of gigantic floating tree trunks.
Meanwhile the raftsmen had steered toward the small pier at Kinsau. Tying their rafts together with great haste, they carefully ventured onto the treacherous surface of the logs closest to shore. Balancing on the slippery logs was a challenge even for these well-seasoned raftsmen. It was easy to lose one’s grip and be crushed to a pulp between the mighty beech and fir trunks. But the river was calm at this spot, and the trunks just bobbed up and down lazily.
Soon two men had reached the log with the boy. They prodded in the gaps with their poles in hopes of feeling a soft object. The logs underneath their feet began to wobble and roll. Again and again the men had to get their balance; their bare feet were slipping on the glistening bark.
“I’ve got him,” the larger and stronger of the two suddenly called out. With his powerful arms he pulled both boy and pole from the water and tossed them to the safety of the shore like a fish on a hook.
The raftsmen’s calls had made others aware of the emergency. Washerwomen from nearby Kinsau had come running to the river together with some wagon drivers. Now they were all standing on the rickety pier, gazing at the dripping clump at their feet.
The burly raftsman brushed the boy’s hair from his face, and a murmur went up from the crowd.
The boy’s face was blue and puffy, and the back of his head was crushed in as if he’d been struck hard with a heavy piece of wood. He was groaning. Blood was oozing through his wet coat, soaking the pier and dripping into the river. This boy had not just fallen into the water. Someone must have pushed him, and that someone had dealt him a fierce blow before that.
“Why, that’s Josef Grimmer’s boy, the son of the wagon driver in Schongau,” a man exclaimed. He was standing close by with his wagon and team of oxen. “I know the kid. He used to come to the landing site with his father. Quick, put him on the wagon. I’ll drive him to Schongau.”
“And somebody run and tell Grimmer that his boy is a-dying,” a washerwoman screamed. “Good Lord, and him having lost so many kids already!”
“It would be better to tell him right away,” the stocky raftsman grumbled. “This one’s not going to last long.”
