46
STEVEN MILLHAUSER
on the beach, mowed our lawns, argued about the proposed meters for Main Street parking. A guillotine stood in the middle of our green, but it had grown less visible, obscured by familiarity. It was like the front of the town library, with windows topped by elegant designs of brick and stone that most of us could not visualize with any precision. The day itself, though hardly forgotten, seemed to have taken place long ago, like a childhood visit to a museum. We were shaken out of our apathy by an incident that erupted one day in late July. Richard Penniman, a semi-retired handyman who had worked in many of our homes, was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. A neighbor had discovered him in his backyard at dawn. The story, which emerged gradually, was this. For two months Richard Penniman had spent long hours in his basement workshop, constructing a guillotine. Penniman’s skill as a craftsman was well known to us – he had once built a dollhouse village for a neighbor’s daughter, including a gas station, a grocery store, an elementary school, and three streets of houses – and the construction of a secret guillotine would have seemed less ominous in retrospect if his intention had simply been to display it as an object worthy of our admiration. Whether he had planned from the outset to demonstrate its perfection is unknown. As always, he traveled in his pickup to lumberyards and hardware stores in nearby towns, choosing material carefully. At least part of what compelled him, in my view, was the desire to build a guillotine superior in every way to the one on the town green. Only afterward did a neighbor realize that the shrill whining sound emerging from Penniman’s workshop at night must have been the sharpening of the steel blade. Late one night, Richard Penniman carried up the separate parts – the polished posts with their grooves, the latched opening that allowed the head to pass through, the diagonal blade, the supporting base, the basket lined with oilcloth – and laid them out on his back lawn, which was enclosed by a high wooden fence. In the darkness before dawn he began assembling his masterpiece. It rose sixteen feet into the air. In the pre-dawn light, Penniman stepped onto the base, lay down on his stomach, and opened the top half of the neck-hole. He inserted his head over the bottom half-circle and closed the top over the back of his neck. A lever near his right hand enabled him to release the blade into the grooves of the posts.