Kelly Scott Franklin

The Ballad of Martha Hunt

Hawthorne’s Testimony, American Notebook

That night when Channing woke me from a dream,

I left Sophia sleeping in our bed.

We dragged the Lily to the water’s edge

to help them search the river for the dead.

Taking the oars, he moved us quickly down

beyond the bridge, where distant lanterns glowed

like gloomy fireflies to mark the spot

where they had found a bonnet. Then we slowed,

and pushed through tangled weeds up toward the bank.

A youth and General Buttrick clambered in,

carrying sturdy poles with boating hooks;

the General nodded at us to begin.

I used my paddle now to steer the boat

out to the center, past the shallow shelf,

down where the drop-off meets the deepest point.

An eligible place to drown oneself.

I let the gentle current take us then,

and leaned out staring down by lantern light.

The surface looked as smooth as polished glass,

but showed us only the reflected night.

We drifted. Now they worked their poles along

the river bottom at the steep decline;

how long a time we searched, I could not say,

for Nature still refused us any sign:

the starlight winking, and the summer breeze,

the crickets and the river’s babbling talk,

and sunken logs, and clots of fallen sod

were all that we could find. Just then a shock

went through the body of the youth, who cried

“What’s this?” though we could tell at once he knew.

He braced himself, and heaving on his pole

he dragged until a form came into view:

pale garments first, a glimpse of paler flesh

and then a livid arm, which someone held

close to the boat so I could take us back.

And while I steered, we gazed at her, compelled

to stare at that dead girl, still half-submerged

in inky water, and the limbs that swayed

though stiffened, awkward like a marionette,

with every movement that the river made.

We reached the shore; the men came splashing in

to help us set her down beneath a tree.

How rigid, how inflexible she was—

a perfect horror: such rigidity!

I knew the paintings of despairing women

drawn from the Thames and draped with streaming hair

over the arms of those who carried them,

but none of that was like what I saw there.

Her hands were white, and clenched, held out in front,

her knees half-bent like she had tried to pray,

a boating hook had gouged one of her eyes—

no artist would have pictured her that way.

Her face was almost purple with the rage

of that last struggle with the urge for breath.

What evil courage must have been required

to wade out and accomplish such a death?

I wondered if she had obtained the peace

that she was seeking in eternity:

could I discern God’s judgment in the shape

of that grotesque inflexibility?

A stream of blood came flowing from her nose,

and one old man who seemed to know the drowned,

told us that all such bodies have to purge,

that she would bleed till she was in the ground.

If she had known how she would look that night,

and how tomorrow’s newspapers would read,

how clumsy men would grapple her remains—

it surely would have saved her from this deed.

So horribly she looked, that in the grass

one stout old farmer fainted dead away,

and quite a task it was to bring him round.

Under a sky now showing hints of gray

we gathered rails and laid them in a row

across the oars to improvise a bier,

then wrapped her body in a tattered quilt

that somebody had near at hand. How queer

our lantern-lit procession must have looked

stumbling across that pasture for a mile

and up the hill to her poor father’s house.

We moved in silence now, and all the while

I thought about the burden that we bore,

how desolate she must have been to die alone

down in the darkness, choking out her life;

how strange and fearful if I could have known

just yesterday how I would pass this night.

We reached the door, and met a gray-haired man

who led us to the kitchen, where we laid

the body on the table. He began

calmly but vainly wiping at the blood

that kept a steady trickle down her face.

The family dog had followed us inside

and whimpered, shifting nervously in place,

while in the shadows, sucking at the hem

of her embroidered nightgown stood a child,

a sister, likely, watching with steady eyes

the slow unfolding of a scene so wild.

Old Mrs. Pratt arrived, and Mrs. Lee,

a withered-looking woman, skin and bones,

to help the family lay the body out,

for they were known to have some skill, these crones.

Yet both admitted they were at a loss

how anyone could decently arrange

that bent and rigidly-contorted frame

into a quiet coffin; it was strange,

but I imagined that she would preserve

her dreadful posture till the Judgment Day.

We left them there, still fretting by the body,

the gray-haired man still wiping blood away.

Whether the girl was finally laid out

I never learned. Nor can I comprehend

why she so rashly flung away her life

and youth and body—had she any friend?

Had not her family noticed her distress?

Did she expire for lack of sympathy,

for want of anyone to know her soul?

Was there some deeper well of misery?

I heard that when they stripped the body down

the women found a rope under her dress

so tight around the waist it cut the flesh—

for what, it is impossible to guess.

Some madness, or some monkish penitence,

some torment to distract her from her pain?

For all the brooding insight of my pen,

no tale of mine will ever quite explain

the root or meaning of a death like this—

poor frantic girl, whom no one tried to save!

And what that awful rope could signify,

that secret she took with her to the grave.

Kelly Scott Franklin has published poems and translations in Able Muse, Nimrod (forthcoming), Literary Matters, Driftwood Press Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, National Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Light Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have appeared in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College, and lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters.