Explore "Barry Holden" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The very fall my sister Nancy Knapp / Set fire to the house / They were trying Dr. Duval / For the murder of Zora Clemens, / And I sat in the court two weeks / Listening to every witness.
It was clear he had got her in a family way;
And to let the child be born / Would not do.
Well, how about me with eight children, / And one coming, and the farm / Mortgaged to Thomas Rhodes?
And when I got home that night, / (After listening to the story of the buggy ride, / And the finding of Zora in the ditch,)
The first thing I saw, right there by the steps, / Where the boys had hacked for angle worms, / Was the hatchet!
And just as I entered there was my wife, / Standing before me, big with child.
She started the talk of the mortgaged farm, / And I killed her.