He hadn’t really known what to expect of America. He judges it very far from the worst hanging he’s ever seen-no kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knots-all in all, an unusually competent piece of work. There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He’s not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch’s blundered into one it would be bad form to leave. An Irish sergeant bellows-bored but indignant-in a voice that carries forever on the wind, like the smell of smoke. Down at the other end of the Common, a squadron of lobsterbacks drills and marches round the base of a hummock with a stone powder-house planted in its top. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts the knot while an official reads the death warrant. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes to collapse. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her shoulders. Her head forces it open like an infant’s dilating the birth canal. The noose lies on the woman’s gray head like a crown. What is happening now on the Common is of a more Sacramental nature. But the dead men outside the gate were common robbers, killed for earthly crimes. Enoch has just come that way, and reckoned he had seen the last of such things-that thenceforth it would all be churches and taverns. The road up the spoon-handle is barred by a wall, with the usual gallows outside it, and victims, or parts of them, strung up or nailed to the city gates. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow-and, to a Puritan, tantalizing-glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.īoston’s a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713 Boston Common OCTOBER12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M.Į NOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUSTas the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations. I swim, like squid, in clouds of my own make,Ĭan penetrate. Why rustle in the dark, when fledged with fire?Ĭraze the night with flails of light. Much dark can spread, on days and over reams You’re bright as flame, but fickle as the air.
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