May 17, 1720: Superiour Court Justice Counsels Elizabeth Atwood in His Chambers Before Sentencing Her to Hang
Vivian Shipley

In the final conversation about Judgement, you will be the first
to get to give your version. Quivering to hear your name,

Elizabeth, remember scarlet in the live oaks was blinding
that first day when the bench you sat on was just a bench.

Hair thin as dune grass, I believed I had roots, that your beauty
would not be small waves coming in with the tide, sucking

my clothes. I left, came back. Left, came back, hiding under
branches so God would not see me, thinking how cool, green

the garden must have been. Michael Wigglesworth, I wrote
in my diary, For admiring myself, I loathe myself. Your house,

a whistle only I could hear, the gray cat was the other life I saw.
Pressing my stomach against your spine, your breasts cupped

in my palms were better than any hope of afterlife. I fell asleep
in your bed, awakened to a gull startling me like a rusty hinge.

Fog hung like a bedsheet. I was in the wrong house, could not
find my clothes, my wife. The first time, I told her I had been

praying deep in briar, then it was the bay gleaming like tar,
the smell of the Atlantic that drew me. Those dawns spread like

a rash, but sunset was your menstrual smear until there was snow
filling, white, white, swelling to banks. I never wanted the child

to be the sum of our parts, rounded into an irregular face almost
human. Even under oath, I knew you would not name me father.

This court will never prosecute me for fornication or adultery.
Our bastard’s red hair above my earlobes would have spoken

our sin in each street of Ipswich. You refused to kill what love
had created. I had to do what you should have done. Surely,

Elizabeth, you must want to leave me in peace. When we go out
of this room, it will be time for you to say what you have to say.

The courtroom stilled by our entry, even God will be looking
down with interest. Like ships dry docked in Salem’s harbor,

or dogs with heads cocked, Essex County’s women are hushed
to hear loneliness, hurt, a poem you might have written. Spinster,

twenty-eight, you slept with no husband’s arm across your hip.
Ipswich’s men understand you were filled with sin, with desire.

I am trying to give you a defense. Plead insanity or great
emotional stress during pregnancy. Crazed by pain, you didn’t

know what you were doing. Whisper ignorance, delirium,
or illness at birth. All are legal excuses for fatal neglect. Fitting

the weak nature you share with all women, claim inexperience.
Because of incessant crying, you dropped our son or placed him

in an unheated attic, fell asleep and had no money to pay for
a doctor. You could have overlaid such a small body, smothered

it in bed. Just last year, I acquitted an exhausted mother because
her infant slipped from her unsteady grasp, fell into the privy.

Using gloves, I was careful, didn’t leave marks on our son’s neck
to condemn you. No recorded testimony, the boy was

already dead when your stepmother came and cleared herself
by giving this court the date of birth. February the 20th is branded

into me. Willful, unrepentant, you wear your blood-stained dress
to court, but will not acknowledge your sin. Elizabeth, how can

I save you? Don’t ask me for what purpose and quote St. Paul,
I Corinthians 15: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.

Ink dripping from my pen, you give me no choice but to date
your death warrant: June 23, 1720. As the chief magistrate

for Massachusetts Superiour Court of Judicature, Assize and
General Goal Delivery, it’s my duty to lead you to Mile Lane

and High Road, watch Sheriff Denison hang you at gallow’s lot
on Pingrey’s Plain. Elizabeth, raise your clenched hand to me,

uncurl it slowly, release me at least from your judgement. Think
of my days closed up in this room after you are gone. Imagine

the ache in my lungs, like a right whale wheezing in dark, each
breath in deep water held a very long time. Spring will resurrect

our first mornings. I will peer from attic slats, not knowing one day
to the next, if I will stride around a judge, vivid like God,

shoulders in the clouds or be staring into that little elastic face.
If I take a walk into a pasture, the scent of milk on your breasts

might come to me. Think of the place in my body where the past
with you will thorn, rise sharp as the question of what will

happen to me if I am found out. Sins deducted from graces,
you will go to heaven, but I will be roped to this earth, knotted

by memory, by the fear of last breath: the noose on your throat,
my hands like a baptism chain circling the neck of our son.

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