The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, 3 May 1641 – Food as Payment

 This morning, very early, a servant knocked on our door. His name was Friedrich, if I remember correctly, and he had wrapped a blood-soaked cloth around his hand. He worked for the brewer by the Gose, he said, and had cut himself on an iron ring on a barrel cart. His eyes looked pale, his hand trembled beneath the rag. The blood had mixed with the chaff on his sleeve. A scent of yeast hung around his shoulders.

I looked at his hand and saw that the flesh had split all the way into the palm. No bone struck, but deep. He would not be able to keep it dry for long. Anna brought water; I cleaned the wound, applied honey and comfrey, and wrapped it in clean linen. He clenched his teeth and said little. When I was finished, he looked at me sideways and asked what I wanted for my trouble.

I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “No money today.”

By midday he was back at the door, with a skinned piece of game over his shoulder, still dripping from the forest. “From the hunter near the Smeltmühle,” he said. “He doesn’t know I took it, but you saved my hand.” He winked. “And it’s not a dog.”

It was a roe deer – or a fox, I couldn’t say for certain. The meat was lean, dark red, the smell sharp. Anna accepted it with a cautious smile. “A shame to waste it,” she said, and immediately began slicing onions. She found some horseradish in the herb box and fetched an old bottle of wine from the cellar, once given by the son of a councillor who had gotten his horse back after a night of drunken mischief.

The stewing began toward evening. The scent filled the whole house – meat, wine, sharp root and bay leaf. I sat at the table in the corner, leafing through my notebook, listening to the rustling of Anna’s skirts, the soft sigh of the pot on the fire. Upstairs Anna Maria, our second youngest, called down to ask whether we were having a feast. “No,” I called back. “But we eat as if we were.”

There was something oddly comforting about that meal. Not because the meat was so tender – it was tough at the edges – but because life, for a moment, was not brutal, not harsh, not cold. No gallows, no fire, no chains or water trial. Only the smell of game stew, Anna’s hand on my shoulder, the laughter of a child at the table.

And yet, somewhere inside me, something shifted. This meat was payment. Not in silver or copper, but through a detour – a piece of game, perhaps stolen, in thanks for care. I had broken no rule. Misused no law. And yet… Was I still an executioner, or already a dealer in favours?

The servant’s wound will heal. The memory of the meal will fade. But the smell clings to my coat. And I know: even when I keep silent, the fire speaks. Even when I ask for nothing, people always pay.




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