Lady Betty, gouache on paper, 20" by 16" by Josie Gray

Poem by the same name by Tess Gallagher

 

This painting and handwritten poem are offered together for $1500.
Please contact us for more information.

 

 

So there you stood
giving the hangman’s yank
to the rope attached to
someone’s neck, a neck not
unlike yours, fleshy and strung
to heart and brain. Was it
a cleansing of the general soul
when your sentence for murdering
your husband was made reprisal?
For no recompense but life
you accepted their burden and
yours, to feel each time you took
a life—the death you had
escaped. To know the body as
a thing, a disposable, and the animation
of it gradually twitched away
and stilled.

What did your husband do
so you made a murderer of
yourself? Those times of the Roscommon
jail’s inception, 1740, probably the usual:
beatings in drunkenness, servitude
of the bed, more children than
could be cared for, accusations of
the usual domestic sort. “Who
was she hanging?” asks Maurice,
chopping onions for sheperd’s pie.

Then, putting down the knife,
“She must have known everyone she hung in that
small locality.” Suddenly I see more
than who the hang-woman was—a lantern
flares up in the greater darkness. What
heart was in her? Did she steel it or
let it flow? Retribution. Strange idea.
Yet she agreed to serve it in exchange
for life. Did she wear lost lives or did,
after awhile, it become just another day’s
work? Did they keep her under lock
and key or did she earn the right to walk
the town? If so, what did people make
of her when they met her in the shops?
What rose up in them to encounter
a specter in human form? I think
they stepped aside. Made way for
a dignity in reverse. Lady Betty.
For she relieved them of much, and if
she thought less of them for giving her
their burden, it’s likely she gave
no sign of it. For complicity is like that:
a not so secret bond, by which dread acts,
perpetrated for the common good, can be
accomplished without tearing the fabric.

But she is rent and upright when I think
of her. Then a voice on the radio comes
back, an executioner saying how wrong
it all seems, no matter the crime. He’s
from. Texas. No clemency there. They
are dying like that often in Texas. But
in Roscommon of not so long ago
Lady Betty is stepping high, perhaps going
home to her children whose arms
around her knees must have broken entryways
unwitnessed into corridors of true mercy
where she walks yet
in cavernous rectitude.
 

Copyright © 2004 Tess Gallagher