Author's important note: My 'Worlds Unknown' stories came about in response to feedback my dear friend Ky had received. Ky's stories (posted on this useful idea of an archive in his own name 'Kyran') and mine were intended to entertain and educate, not propound the virtue or evil of corporal punishment. We are aware that there are readers whose own experiences with C. P. have only been negative and we take your feelings seriously. I welcome more feedback. Thank you. ****************************************************************************************
Just as Moslem and Jewish boys celebrate their twelfth year as heralding the onset of adulthood, for the boys in my village it is our sixteenth year that marks the watershed in our own coming of age.
Of course, we could not yet take a wife or work or raise a family or vote or drive a car. But if we committed an offense we were tried as an adult and we could take an oath in court and our testimony was considered on a par with that of an adult. So it was that a little after I turned sixteen, I was taken by my father to witness a public whipping in session as were many other sixteen and seventeen year-olds that season who numbered about 320 in my village of eleven thousand families. My older siblings had all taken this rite of passage. I had been of two minds about it having been told stories by my siblings of their terrifying experience. But my curiosity had been sufficiently roused to anticipate the day with more than a moderate measure of interest. Even if I had refused, I would not have been able to avoid it. As our village elders and moral vanguards had opined, it was necessary "that our children witness what it is like to be flogged so that they keep on the straight and narrow and live life worthy of God, elders, parents and fellow men."
The laws of my village were harsh but this was so that we might prolong the life of our tribe and prevent the insurgence of insidious influences. The law had at that time provided for the whipping of adult men and some women in a public penal facility. This was owing to the rise in violent crimes. The public whipping was mandatory for crimes that ran the gamut from petty theft and vandalism to domestic offenses such as wife battering and child abuse and _s_e_x_ual crimes such as adultery, sodomy and pedophilia.
Besides bringing their sons, many men came along (most women declined to come for they felt that it served them no purpose nor did they particularly enjoy delighting in another's misfortunes) for myriad reasons: moral, material, medical, pathological. But now after the fifteenth such public display of man's inhumanity against man, the size of the turnout of curious spectators had dwindled to half of what it used to be. In the year I was taken to witness a whipping, the number was slightly over eighty.
Father held my shoulder in a tight squeeze, proffering me both protection and the reminder to behave. We had arrived late and quietly slipped into the front row seats. Father was an important man in my village. I was then too self-absorbed to care much about family and hence was ignorant about just how important he was but now much later I found out that he had the power to absolve a convicted criminal of all his guilt, if he chose to do so.
As soon as I had seated down, the clock chimed one o'clock and the prisoner was brought out as if to obey some vague itinerary. All eyes were turned in his direction, mine not excepted. It was here that something strange happened to me. It was not my habit or custom to examine my comforts by the light of another's suffering but I felt a heightening excitement inside me that hit my groin area as I watched the prisoner being forced up the stage where he was to receive his punishment. In retrospect, I might have found the sight of the man's general disposition pleasing. He was almost naked as he was led to the center of the proscenium, and all he had to insure his modesty was a white coarse-looking towel that hung low and provocatively on his waist.
We heard next his offense being read. It was incest. And then we heard the sentence - twelve strokes of the cane to his naked backside.
My gaze lingered on his lower body while the distant faceless voice, booming over the crackling background of the amplifier, directed next that the towel be removed from the prisoner's body. In a flash, as a prison warder followed the directive, I was able to catch a glimpse of the trembling man's low-hung penis. It was limp and probably four inches in length and of average thickness. I remember thinking at the time that it could not do much damage to any daughter of the village now the way it looked.
Our attention was drawn next to a wooden frame structured into an 'A' shape being carried to the foreground of the stage. The prisoner, a man in his middle thirties, was led to the frame and then quickly his ankles were spread to the two points of the frame on the ground and tied with ropes to the points. Then his body was lowered to a forty-five degree angle until he was lying flat on the main frame of the wooden platform. His arms were then raised over his head and brought together to be linked to the highest point of the frame and thereupon fastened to that point.
From my vantage point below the stage, I could see all the man's private parts between his spread thighs, his anus and scrotum and the black wiry strands of his pubic hair.
In the next five minutes, two men I recognized as the village doctors were summoned to the restrained prisoner. They examined him, asked him a few questions which were unintelligible to me, and to which he nodded his head, and then quickly left as they came.
Another man was then directed to take the stage. He was huge, about five feet and eleven inches tall, which would be my father's height, and heavy set with broad shoulders and very taut muscles. He held a cane which he perpetually saw fit to test on his palm, or perhaps for want of something better to do while he awaited instructions to carry out the task for which he was employed. I lowered my eyes momentarily from looking at the cane; it rather unsettled me, this instrument of torture that was about to inflict damage to the condemned man's exposed buttocks.
The whipping soon commenced. My goose pimples broke out as the whoosh of the cane assaulted my tympanum. It seemed to slice the air, but I nearly jumped out of my skin at the scream of the man in response to his first lash. It was the scream of a tortured animal in the captivity of a cruel, rapacious hunter. Father put an arm around my shoulder and studied me closely. I pretended to be calm but before the twelfth stroke could be whealed on the man's buttocks, bleeding where they had been whipped, I had lost all my curiosity.
Strangely, as all truths seem to be stranger than fiction, the sky turned a portentous shade of grey just as the last stroke was delivered to the pitiful, whimpering incestuous man. We got up to leave as if it were a sign for us. A noise started to slowly emanate from the crowd. There was also some laughter.
It was sad. Even at my age, I knew to be angered that there could be those amongst us who could turn what was an important detail of our village culture into an insignificant anecdote which would later be recycled into jokes to be touted about the market place, offices and the privacy of the sleeping chambers. It was unnatural. They were unnatural. I do not know what had possessed me to do it, but I yelled at them, mouthing off some of my most flowery invectives as well.
Father was infuriated by what he regarded was another of my attempts at embarrassing him. Someone from the injured crowd remarked that I ought to have my turn on the whipping stake and suggested my trousers be pulled down there and then. Thankfully he was eventually persuaded that I was just a foolish boy and should be adequately dealt with by Father when he took me home. I believe he only relented by way of monetary encouragement, but the first sign of rain played a bit part in my escaping a public spanking of my own.
Back home, Father made good his promise. I did not see why he had to, but learned a long time ago not to argue.
"Your knickers, too, son," he ordered when I finished removing my outerwear.
I pulled down my underwear and handed it to him who in turn handed it to a servant. Mother stood to his left as witness of Father's integrity.
And wasting no more time, as was his manner, he pulled me over his laps, adjusted my bottom so that it presented a clear target for his hand and said that although what I did was impolite, I did make a point for the others who, he hoped, would come to some sense about their own stupidity.
"I'm proud of the way you controlled yourself during the whipping," Father said. "Prouder that you showed yourself to be above the kind of asinine and immature behavior displayed by grown men. But you did the wrong thing to speak disrespectfully to others, what more others older than you."
Father made short work of his lecture and proceeded to spank my bottom. He was proud of me, he had said, but it did not stop him from spanking me with such force and severity that he soon reduced me to a wailing little boy. If he paused it was to examine places he had missed. After about forty minutes he was satisfied that my bottom, now beetroot-red, had learned an important lesson on respect and self-control.
My sleep was listless that night. My bottom ached, no doubt, but I could not erase the powerful images of the incestuous father's wlealed buttocks from my mind. When I did sleep, I saw him in my dreams. To this day I would credit the start of my obsession for the cane to that eventful moment when I became a witness to a public whipping.
THE END
(Note: Public caning continues to be a controversy in my village, and is the subject of a Bill to abolish it as a practice. Tell me what you think - Han.)