Edith saw them, from time to time. In the market crowds, a woman with a neck turned partly to bluish stone, hinging at her waist to inspect the butcher’s cuts or lifting an onion to her eyes. In the park, a girl with a bullet-sized pucker at the back of her head, where no hair now grew. Sometimes they noticed Edith staring and turned away shyly, or haughtily; mostly they were oblivious, absorbed in living indistinguishably, and Edith tried as well to ignore the steely prickling beneath her skin.
Twenty years ago a boy had stabbed Edith in an alley near Scollay Square. Vengeance, he’d said. She forgot the details: something her cop husband had done. Edith had laughed—he’d been so young. She’d felt her body change even as the knife went in: a deep, interior wrenching, like a pair of burly hands turning soil. No one had heard of the Protection yet, and Edith remembered thinking, That’s what death feels like. She remembered, in that split second, feeling brave and practical about it, like a Roman drinking poison. Then her stomach ate the blade off the hilt.
The boy screamed and ran.
For weeks after, she sensed the blade inside her, being broken down into shards, then shavings, then steel dust. She sat carefully. She pricked herself on herself when she crouched to get a bowl from the bottom cupboards. She inspected her stool in the pot with a candle, looking for reflective slivers. The knife never left her, but flowed in scratching particles through her veins. She’d never told Gerry. She was frightened of her new knife-blooded body and what it signified. She studied her temper and thought she saw herself quicker to spite and impatience—a little proud, a little waspish. A little cruel, maybe. That power, that kind of freedom frightened her. What exactly did it license? What did it obligate?
When she was pregnant with Caroline, she’d dreaded the knife filtering into her daughter, making her willful and cruel-blooded from the start; but in the years after, when it was clear no such thing had happened, she’d felt foully disappointed.
Even later, when the existence of an unkillable sex became generally known, Edith still didn’t tell Gerry. He’d just risen to bureau superintendent, and she examined the registry of executions he received from the Suffolk County prisons as if they might teach her something about the Protection. How far, exactly, did it extend? She knew the men wondered: What about very young girls? What about quickened fetuses? Men and women alike disbelieved it. There had to be exceptions. Did women still die in childbirth? What about “unwomanly” women? No one discussed the Protection publicly or in print—it was a barbarous subject, head to toe—but in her living room the men asked Gerry, who sat baffled, hands upturned as though lifting his own ignorance back at them.
The wives in Edith’s circle never spoke of the New Woman. They still used language like “the weaker sex,” as if reminding themselves of an errand they had to perform the next day. Edith purred along with them, agreeably enough, sharing their fear of a new century that would outpace them. She only felt the shame of it the mornings after, as she scraped crumbs from the tablecloth.
In Scollay Square they’d taken down the old oil lamps and installed electric lights. Edith had read a thorough scientific editorial on electric current and the light-bulb; still, she kept her distance as the new lanterns buzzed to life, as if by their own unthinking volition. A suffragette preached on a soapbox under one of them: Sisters, she said, waving her sheaf of handbills, don’t let them turn us against each other. She was young, bony, and awkward like a fledgling, her chest and elbows held uncertainly in her dove frock. In the dusk, the tungsten light painted her in uncanny new yellows—neither the molten, soupy gold of oil lamps nor quite different enough to forget that old color; the suffragette’s square little face shone like a moon, or like something altogether unfamiliar, something there wasn’t a word for yet.
1899, Apr 15th.
Henry Abolition TOAL, 49 (Vengeance)
Harry Toal was a well-liked ferryman in the lonely salt marshes along Massachusetts Bay, and had doggedly wooed Lidia Mazzola, a widow and housekeeper for the local Catholic priest. He grew embittered after a brawl with Lidia’s son left Toal with a broken jaw; he claimed Lidia had put the boy up to it, and his jaw being slow to heal, and him having to take his beer through a straw, to the great and rowdy mirth of his marsh neighbors, Toal let his bitterness climb into a rage.
Toal swore Lidia had left town, but the priest was suspicious because Lidia’s clothes were still in her room. About a year went by, however, and she was largely forgotten, until the new housekeeper, whom Toal had likewise courted, found Lidia’s bicycle in his overgrown back garden. Police dredged the marshes and found Mrs. Mazzola at the bottom of the Belle Isle inlet, tied and weighted with several large stones. She’d developed gills and had fed for the past eleven months on the tiny marsh fish she caught in her kelplike hair.
Toal was hanged behind Charlestown Prison. Lidia’s gills never went away, and she died of pneumonia some time after.
Boston Common was busy even late in the afternoon, with the sun low over the spire of Park Street Church. Edith held a scented handkerchief to her nose as the stink of horses and sewers followed her into the park, where workmen were hammering together a public gallows on the lawn, between two massive, screw-limbed oaks. Most executions now happened in yards behind prisons; but a notorious case like the Barrow childkiller demanded a notorious answer. The noose wasn’t yet slung, but the wooden framework was raised: recognizably a gallows.
Of course, I will be wearing a hood, Edith reminded herself.
In front of the scaffold, a white-haired preacher with white, horned brows denounced the Obscenity behind him, with his forefinger raised to Heaven: for the State of Massachusetts to apply its authority of violence to a woman was shamely, ungodful, a high crime no less immoral than the attacks for which men were hanged. Adam, charged with Eve’s protection, even in her sin. Holy matrimony. The weaker sex. He went on for some time, his raised finger crooking from fatigue. A small crowd of men murmured in agreement: if God wanted no woman killed, who was the hangman to thwart Him? A larger crowd of men jeered and shouted back arguments of varying sophistication, from the scriptural (Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live) to the scatological (sounds unrecordable in any notation). The women hung back in the shade and said nothing.
Edith tilted her head aside with queenly severity and a farmgirl’s sneer. The men jeering for the gallows looked frantic with need: Finally, their faces said, finally. No one knew exactly when the Protection had emerged—there were stories as far back as the end of the Civil War, of liberated slaves generaled by unkillable black women, rampaging behind Sherman’s March to the Sea. But once the bald new facts of womanhood did become publicly known, five years ago, the horrors visited in retaliation upon the indomitable sex had shocked the world. In Georgia, a man roped his wife behind his horse and dragged her galloping for miles. In California, a mob blasted a woman with dynamite. Across the country, there were men emboldened, or affronted, or both, who seemed to go savage as cornered dogs attempting to regain a sense of mastery. That was why attempted gynocide was always a capital crime: otherwise, women’s unkillable nature authorized a kind of insane license. Some additional deterrence was crucial. But now that the shoe was on the other, daintier foot, so to speak, small wonder that a few brutes were salivating at the prospect of a woman’s execution. It made Edith pause, and a little voice asked if she’d committed herself too quickly.
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 fel
t 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.
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
from Lightspeed Magazine
I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions.
—Proverbs 8:12
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 10