The End of My Rope
She was quiet, and kept to herself. She was not "unmarried" but disinclined to marry. She managed a small farm, and in the evening read books, including, but not exclusively, The Bible. In Salem, Massachusetts, Becky Woods engaged in social activity, though, it seemed, obligingly. Her gaze made many uncomfortable. Revealed. Thus, when the accusations began, she was an easy target. At her tribunal, she said, "I don't believe in witchery, or much else that I can't see". Of course this sealed her doom. She offered no further defense, thinking silence might alert her prosecutors to the tenor of their stridency. But she doubted it. And it was her quality of doubt, unexpressed in words but transmitted in reticence, that so unnerved the village, and incurred a judgement. She accepted her fate the way she accepted illness or a hard winter - with resignation but without defeat. And before she hanged, she met the eyes of every villager assembled, in whose minds the memory of that gaze became imprinted like a hymn.
The End of My Rope
The girls form a circle, and pray.
They throw back their heads, groan, and sway.
Their tongues, forked and black, dart with each out cast piety,
As I wait at the end of my rope.
The elders are dressed all in black.
The Goodmans, the Goodys, in black.
The sun’s light is shunned by this benighted jury,
Who put me at the end of my rope.
I would kill every one, save the babes,
Whom I’d nurse while I dug out the graves.
Whom I’d carry to the forest, and bed in the leaves,
Whose siblings would be ravens, and rivers, and trees.
Where the witches were midwives, and warlocks the saints,
Where we’d dance round a Maypole with harlots and haints,
Where the natives would teach us the proper use of bounty.
A dream at the end of my rope.
Home at last, at the end of my rope.
Song by Joe Christiano
Vocals: Jhene Canody
Piano: jxo; woodwinds: The 1824 Wind Ensemble
Arranged and recorded March, 2023, in Berkeley, by jxo