Sisters, the suffragette had said, don’t let them turn us against each other.
Should Edith go to the prison, for instance, and face the woman she was to execute: Liza Childkiller, Liza Tie-Me-Down, the North End Devil.
And yet this preacher irritated her too. Edith touched the brooch at her collar: a cameo of Apollo pursuing the nymph Daphne, and Daphne’s father, the river, turning her into a laurel tree. For her protection, of course. Edith’s father had given her the brooch for her sixteenth birthday: Edith’s father, like Daphne’s, had awkward notions of paternal love. Edith felt willful, perverse. She felt suffocated in the heat. The heavy sky’s colors seemed to droop over the rooftops, the blue sour and sinking into chimneys.
Oh, why do we hang anyone at all! Edith thought. Gerry’s uncle, another lawyer, had once sat her down and answered this very question—he loved to expound—To prevent, he said, holding up one finger; to punish (raising another); to deter others from the same crime (a third); to express the polity’s condemnation. This was the most elusive of the justifications, and the gold band on his fourth finger slipped and shimmered under the lamplight. Some crimes cannot go unanswered or else a part of us, he’d said, goes sideways. Edith thought she understood this better now, looking at the childkiller’s scaffold. Possibilities lift disturbingly into view: if nothing stopped Liza, what stops me from doing that. An execution puts things back in their places, and the phantasm world, the world with other, looser rules, fades like a dream.
Edith’s heart broke for the wretched Barrow boy, terrified and wild with thirst and straining at the ropes, flea-bitten, stewed in his own urine; and she loved all her children, fiercely; but she knew she had resented each one too, at least once, however briefly. She knew she’d thought of who she might have been, unconstrained by them, and now that they’d all left home those thoughts were sharper.
She set off for home with a decisive pivot. If she were to change her mind, she reminded herself, Caroline would think she’d convinced Edith to follow Peter’s wishes, and then what wouldn’t be asked of her! She mopped the perspiration guttering in her brow lines—when, Edith wondered, had she become afraid of her own daughters?
But if she were to go to the women’s prison in Framingham and meet Miss Barrow—oh, she’d have so many questions she couldn’t ask her! It was odious enough to presume that kind of intimacy between them, but Edith’s questions would be odious themselves: “Why?” It always, of course, came down to “Why?” But then, what if Liza should ask her, “Why?” What was in it for Edith? In the register of hangings, they always listed motive: “Vengeance.” “Jealousy.” “Sadistic Pleasure.” Miss Barrow’s—“Unnatural Cruelty.” Mrs. Smylie’s—“Unknown,” which likewise meant Cruelty.
1899 Apr 30th.
Edward PARNE, 44 (Drink)
Parne, a bootmaker, was known for his vicious temper and long-suffering wife, Dorcas Parne. Dorcas had a temper as well when she drank, and gave almost as good as she got. One night the Parnes had a row that started when Edward teased his wife by dimming the lamps as she read. He ended in throttling her, then he stabbed her in her shoulder, which crumbled into sand so that the knife stuck in the wall behind. He forced poison on her, at which point she turned into a thornbush that gave him rashes and hives on contact. He took an ax, chopped his wifebush into pieces, and threw the pieces into a nearby textile factory’s furnace, where spinners found Dorcas the next day, reformed and very cramped but, all reported, in fair spirits.
The jury retired for eight minutes only in their deliberations. The hanging was notable for the attendance of several prominent Bostonians who, it seemed, had liked Parne’s boots.
Edith waited behind the gallows, her head bowed, already hooded. She paced, her hands on her hips, and the hood’s close fabric sent her breath sourly back into her nose. Up on the scaffold, the magistrate read aloud a standard admonition to Liza Barrow’s eternal soul, and the crowd stirred with impatience. When, when do we get to the hanging. It was late for deathpomp: the moon was rising over the peaked rooftops, the street lamps spitting with gas, and they had to wonder how long the execution would go—midnight, the small hours, even dawn? What kind of ceremony was this, to kill the unkillable?
Edith wished she knew where her daughters were, though she didn’t know where she wanted them to be. Next to her, the regular hangman smoked nervously and reminded her at intervals how to tie a noose. As if Edith hadn’t practiced a hundred times on every cord and string in the house: curtain rope, bell rope, packaging twine. Her hands shook and she covered them in the folds of her executioner’s cassock.
Gerry was in the audience, instead of supporting her here—to avoid any suspicion, he’d said, ridiculously. Was she so ready a suspect, in their social circle, for the part of secret executioner?
There had been a lot of mundane bother about what Edith would wear, whether it could ever be proper to dress a Boston matron in the hangman’s black trousers and gunner’s boots, and how far they dared adapt the costume before alerting an attentive public. They’d settled on the cassock for her and she’d snuck on her husband’s trousers underneath. Trousers felt unspeakably strange, like straddling a wool horse.
There was a drop in the ambient sound. The governor’s lawyer, prowling behind Edith, gave a frosty little cough. It was time.
Edith picked up her hem to climb the stairs, and immediately let it drop again: that was a lady’s gesture, neither appropriate nor necessary. The steps were difficult to make out in the moonlight, but she mounted them slowly, ponderously, and then her eye line lifted above the scaffold planks and the brilliance of torches and lanterns dazzled her.
It was a mob; there was no other word for a crowd of men with torches, hungry for a death.
This is wrong, she thought, terrified; all of this is horribly backwards.
Miss Barrow stood in the subtle square of platform marking the trapdoor. Her head bowed, under a gray falcon’s hood. She wore a dull-blue prison frock and held her tied hands in fists, her back braced against the footsteps she heard coming and going on the boards. Edith wanted desperately to be home. Now on the platform, she was sick with terror—of the blurred and brilliant mob, of her own power over Liza Barrow’s life, of her own muscular hands. This is nothing like, she thought stupidly, this is nothing like a chicken.
Edith turned to the policemen who’d escorted Miss Barrow to the scaffold. But they hung back; they wouldn’t help her. Everything had to be done by a woman, or the execution might fall apart—might publicly, dramatically, horrifically not take.
She hadn’t realized she was tying the noose until she found it lying tidy in her gloves.
The mob was still luridly silent, and over her own breath Edith heard the frogs croaking in chorus in the pond, and in her deranged imagination this became the bleating of the Barrow boy, roped down to his bed floating like a raft in the moonlit pond, calling hoarsely for his mother.