Ledger with Rope Marks
written by: Michael Ridinger
“I petition your honours not for my own life,
but that no more innocent blood be shed.”
— Mary Towne Eastey, 1692
I didn’t go looking for ghosts.
I was just tracing names,
the way men do
when the house is quiet
and sleep won’t have them.
Ink.
Dates.
Births that behave themselves.
Then the page snagged.
Three women.
Same blood.
Same mother’s hands kneading bread.
Different endings.
I thought it was one.
Family always wants it to be one.
One tragedy you can set down gently
and walk around.
But no.
History said, Look again.
Mary.
Rebecca.
Sarah.
Two ropes.
One cell left warm.
I keep saying their names out loud
to see if the room objects.
It doesn’t.
Rebecca was old enough
that goodness had settled into her bones.
The kind of woman people point to
when they need proof God still visits kitchens.
They hung her anyway.
Mary—
Mary wrote like someone
who already knew the answer
and asked the question out of mercy.
I do not beg for my life, she said.
I beg you to stop.
That’s not innocence talking.
That’s clarity.
They killed her for it.
Sarah lived.
And don’t think that word is clean.
She lived the way scorched wood lives—
still standing,
smelling like smoke,
remembering everything.
I close the ledger.
It opens back up.
Funny thing about blood—
it remembers laws
even when the law forgets itself.
I try to tell myself this was hysteria,
fear,
bad theology with a gavel.
But the rope didn’t shake.
The judges slept.
The crowd went home and ate supper.
Same as crowds always do.
That’s the part that sticks in my throat.
Not the accusations.
Not the screaming.
The normal evening afterward.
I carry their names now
like a debt nobody asked me to pay
but somebody has to.
Because if three sisters
can be taken from the same table
by neighbors who swore they were righteous,
then this isn’t a story about witches.
It’s a story about permission.
And every time we decide
someone is expendable
for the greater good,
the ledger opens itself again.
And somewhere,
a rope remembers
how to tie itself.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This piece was written after discovering that three full sisters in my direct family line — Mary Towne Eastey, Rebecca Towne Nurse, and Sarah Towne Cloyce — were imprisoned during the Salem witch trials of 1692. Mary and Rebecca were executed. Sarah survived.
This poem does not attempt to reinterpret the trials or dramatize their events. It is offered as family testimony — a descendant acknowledging what was done, what was witnessed, and what continues to echo when fear is granted permission to act as law.
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