Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

Roscoe Niles smiled a crooked smile, one Jesse had trouble reading. There was something feral about it, something angry in it, too. Jesse guessed he understood the anger. Roscoe Niles had been a fixture on FM radio for decades and was now being shown the door. No one was going to give someone Roscoe’s age a job, not in this environment. Roscoe was a fellow alcoholic, and alcoholics didn’t deal very well with big changes in their lives, though big changes, negative ones in particular, opened the self-pity spigot and nothing gave an alcoholic carte blanche like a healthy dose of self-pity. Jesse was well familiar with the mechanics of how that worked.

“Hey, man, you mind if I have one while you do that?” Niles asked, pulling two glasses and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label out of his bottom drawer. “Want one?”

“No, you go ahead.” Jesse repeated his question. “What’s in the envelope?”

“A myth realized,” Niles said, pouring himself his usual half-glass of scotch.

“Uh-huh. C’mon, Roscoe.”

“I’m not yanking your chain, Jesse. I swear. You’ll see.”

Jesse flipped the envelope over, undid the two-pronged clasp, lifted up the edge of the flap with his pinkie, and reached his right thumb and index finger inside.

“Careful, man. It’s pretty old and fragile, though it’s in plastic.”

Jesse felt the corner of the plastic and carefully pulled it out of the envelope. What it was was a very yellowed, almost brown sheet of unlined paper in a thick, clear plastic folder. There were fifteen handwritten lines on the paper. The handwriting was a beautiful, flowing cursive. The line at the top of the page read: The Hangman’s Sonnet.

THE HANGMAN’S SONNET
By my own hand I have murdered love
And by so doing have thus murdered me.
Neither Devil below nor God above
Led me into my somber destiny.

My fair viper Jane May played well her part

For what she gave as love was a fiction.
Ice made nest where should have beaten her heart.
In lieu of her soul, a cold affliction.

So the rope and gallows are sturdy built

Sandbags dangling to counter my dead weight.
But I am troubled not by bloody guilt
Nor relive I Jane’s agony or fate.

In death’s black-lined womb I seek her grace.

The mirror has revealed my hangman’s face.

59

Jesse read it and reread it. He wasn’t much for poetry. He wasn’t even sure he knew what distinguished a sonnet from any other kind of poem, but there was something about the verse in front of him that hit a raw nerve. So many times in his career he’d heard the confessions of the guilty, of men who had brutally murdered their wives, girlfriends, or lovers. Men who inevitably blamed it on their victims. Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of the poem or his reaction. He’d worry about that later. For now, he slid the envelope and the poem into the evidence bag.

“There it is,” Niles said, gunning down his scotch. “The genuine article. The actual ‘Hangman’s’ fuckin’ ‘Sonnet.’ I never quite believed the myth about the poem. I guess I’m going to have to readjust my chronic cynicism.”

“What’s the myth?”

Niles shrugged, poured himself another. “Story goes that Terry Jester took a motorcycle trip out west after he went into his funk. He was in some trading post on an Indian rez in Wyoming and he came across this poem stuck between the pages of a horse soldier’s diary. The diary was in a different hand, so Jester knew it hadn’t been written by the soldier. Apparently, he went nuts over it and spent the rest of his time out west writing a song cycle inspired by the poem, imagining who wrote it, thinking about this Jane May woman, and contemplating how the poet killed her and why. Like I said, I always thought it was a crock, some story dreamed up by Stan White to market the album. I mean, he never released the text of the poem. All anyone ever knew was that it was written by a condemned man forgiving his executioner. Turns out that it’s way more complex than that.”

“What is it you don’t like about Stan White?”

“Ah, man, where to begin? We were pals once, but... I’d rather not relive the bad old days, not when I’ve got the unemployment line staring me in the face.” Roscoe took a big gulp of scotch. “Sure you don’t want one?”