She steeled herself: knife’s steel trickled from her joints and into her shoulders, her fingers. She straightened and slipped the noose over Liza’s hood. The woman flinched at the scratch of frayed fiber. Edith could hear both their breathing, heavy and rough, like a scrub brush over stone. It still might fail, Edith told herself. It still might fail because it wasn’t Edith who truly wanted the woman dead, so it was not Edith who was truly killing her. She hadn’t built the trapdoor, or woven the rope. Maybe the whole premise was weak and rotten.
Edith crossed the platform to the lever that would swing the trapdoor.
Pull it, she told herself.
But she couldn’t. The part of her that had driven her to this platform and this moment was satisfied; it went no further. She’d persuaded her husband and outmaneuvered Peter and Caroline and even the damned governor. She held nothing but an abstract idea of punishing the Barrow woman for her crime, outrageous as it was, and that wasn’t enough to pull the lever.
“Mrs. Smylie?” From beneath the gallows, the governor’s lawyer spat up her name. “Is there something wrong?”
Pull it, she told herself, her fingers hard with old steel, and she pictured again the Barrow boy tied to his bed and crying. But he was gone, his teary, unfamiliar face already sinking into the mattress.
“Come on with it!” a man in the back of the Common yelled, and the mob echoed it, “Ka-mon, kaaaa-mon!” As if she were dithering over the right change at a shop counter with a long queue behind her.
The governor’s lawyer whispered up directions, and in a swift instant one of the police escorts had his hands over Edith’s on the lever and thrust it back so hard she nearly toppled over.
The trapdoor bottomed out with a loud, wooden clap. The rope made a squeezing noise as it went taut, and didn’t break. The body on the line thrashed, and stilled.
Edith and the policeman looked questioningly at each other. The crowd had hushed again, entranced; she could hear even the sputter of whale oil in their lanterns. The night carried in sea air from Boston harbor, and everything felt clammy, salty, and hot—the whole seaboard thick with the heat wave summer would bring.
Edith approached the hanged woman doubtfully, setting her feet down wide like a man’s. In the uncertain light, she thought she saw the gray hood moving. It could have been the flickers of torch fire; or it could be the cloth pulsed and spasmed, like a grain sack infested with rats, or it fluttered, like a bag of blackbirds fighting to get out. But the body didn’t move—wasn’t that a kind of reassurance?
Someone handed Edith a pair of thick tailor’s shears. Edith’s chest heaved with shallow breaths. The hood flickered, or fluttered, and she cut a long slit across where Liza’s eyes might or might not still be, and slipped her fingers inside to part the cloth and see what new thing in the world was inside.
Sofia Samatar
Hard Mary
I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions.
We found her behind the barn. It was the eve of Old Christmas, the night the animals speak with the tongues of men, and we knew very well that if we could manage to walk around the barn seven times, each of us would see the man she was to marry. We met shivering in front of the Millers’ barn, which was the most central to all of us, though of course some of us had to walk much farther than others. Kat was complaining because her one foot had gone into icy water on the way. Barb Miller kept shushing us, scared we’d wake the house. Mim was late.
“She’s not coming,” said Barb. “Let’s go without her.”
“She’ll come.”
The barn looked huge. You know how much bigger things seem at night. Behind it curled a misty, chilly sky, the stars all blurred together. From inside the barn, someone said, “Turtledoves.”
Esther gripped my arm and squealed, “What was that?”
“Shut up! It’s the horses.”
“Is that what horses talk about?” asked Esther, starting to cry.
“Pigeons,” murmured the horses.
I felt like crying myself. My hair stood on end. But here was Mim coming across the field.
“Okay, okay,” babbled Barb. “Let’s stick together.”
“Hello, girls,” said Mim. She made a funny figure in the dark. Her long white nose stuck out from under her hood, glinting a bit in the starlight. Her hood looked overlarge, stuffed with her crinkly hair. Still, I was glad to see her, for though she was the shortest of us by an inch, just smaller than Esther, and the ugliest by a mile, Mim was also the toughest. I could never forget how, as a child, she had taken a whole bite out of Joe Miller’s arm.
“Mim,” whimpered Esther, “the horses are talking.”
“Good,” said Mim. “It’s working, then.”
We all linked arms and started around the barn. The ground was rocky and hard with old snow, and a freezing wind came over the empty fields, flapping our skirts about our legs. Inside the barn, the horses spoke of a she-goat and a ram. A cow groaned: “Fowls came down upon the carcasses.” You could tell it was a cow, because while the horses had fuzzy, velvety voices, the cow spoke in a voice of blank despair. To distract ourselves from the animals, we whispered about the boys we might see, and whether they would come themselves or only their apparitions. “I hope it’s not ghosts,” said Esther. Mim said she expected we’d see a sort of layer peeled off the boys, something like a photograph.
In the end we didn’t see any boys, because just on the seventh round, Mim stubbed her toe in the dark. “Shit!” she said, hopping.
We all had to stop. There was something lying on the ground in the shadow of the barn: something large, with the faintest gleam of metal.
“What on earth,” said Kat.
We all crouched down.
“Is it a radio?” asked Barb.
“Let’s take it into the light and see.”
The thing was cold and heavy. We dragged it out of the shadow of the barn, into the starlight. There we saw it was a lady made of metal. It was about the size of a real lady, but only from the waist up. It didn’t have any legs. Its eyes were closed.
We stood around it, looking down.
“It’s from the Profane Industries,” said Mim.
My skin prickled all the way up to my throat. The Profane Industries, which lay between us and town, was a place of evil, where they manufactured all kinds of monstrosities. It was said they grew sheep in a field like vegetables. They sewed babies together with other animals to make slaves for the world of men. When we were little, unkind people used to joke that Mim was one of these mismatched children; her nickname had been Dog Baby. Now, staring down, I knew we were face-to-face with a Profane instrument. Over the years we had often complained that they threw things around our farms. Mysterious white balloons had been found in the creek, and though they never admitted it, we knew PI was responsible when our cows suffered an outbreak of the Stamps.
This poor metal lady was one of their failed experiments. Her shoulders were stained with dark, rusty blotches, her head dinged in on one side. I knew we were going to save her. In the distance a pair of dogs began to bark, “Behold a smoking furnace.”
(Sitting at the kitchen table, writing this, I feel again that enormous night. That time.)
A wave of weeping rolled from the barn. “And, lo,” cried the cows, “an horror of great darkness.” We didn’t listen. Mim and I picked up the metal lady, holding her awkwardly between us. A vole sneaked past, muttering something about a burning lamp, but it was too late, we had already decided to name the lady Mary, and because she had given Mim’s toe such a nasty knock, so hard in fact that the toenail would soon turn blue and fall off, we called her Hard Mary.