The Fence

   

       The stranger swore his innocence to the end but the hanging commenced without mercy on the Village Green.  It took a long time, and many turned their backs to the gallows, uncomfortable.  Those who saw his bulging eyes gape open one last time wished they hadn't. 
     "Cursed be Ye'," he rasped, his face mottled with hopeless fury.  A final shudder, and he was dead.
     Clive, the town's blacksmith and gravedigger, cut down the body, gave it a kick, to check, and hefted it to the waiting cart. The crowd dispersed as the oxen carried the stranger's remains away.
     Impatient to get back to the tavern and partake in the merrymaking of the spontaneous event, Clive passed by the church graveyard with a grimace and continued on to the unmarked hole waiting at the edge of town. He resented the extra distance, but there was naught for it.  The stranger would not be buried in the churchyard.  Only townspeople and members of the congregation were buried in the Church's shadow and afforded the protection of the iron fence surrounding the small graveyard.  Criminals and paupers went to the swamp.  
     Clive cursed the slow oxen and slapped their haunches all the way to the intended plot. He dug a shallow grave and backed the cart as close as he could.  A stupid and greedy man, he felt the pockets of the stranger, found a coin, and pocketed it, disappointed until he pried open the stranger's mouth.  Three gold teeth glinted, and he pulled them with the forceps he wore on his belt.
     He rolled the body in, spat, and hastily refilled the hole.  Soon he was on his way.
     Feeling rich with his scavenged gains he spent much coin that night, filling his tankard again and again with bitter autumn ale. By all witness accounts, he left the tavern in a boisterous, jovial mood.

     The next morning the townsfolk found Clive by the Churchyard on the frost-covered ground, his iron forceps beside him, rusty with dried blood and bits of tissue. Every tooth in his head gone, his jaw gaped empty but for the bloody pits.

     Had Clive understood the protective properties of iron better he might have survived that fateful fall night.   The iron fence around the graveyard doesn't keep evil out - it keeps it in.