“Fie on the witch!” cried a merry girl,
    As they rounded the point where Goody Cole
Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
    A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul.
—from “Wreck of Rivermouth” by John Greenleaf Whittier

By Matt Miller
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

The world will work to twirl girls into witches, or they will twirl themselves into witches, or they will twirl and turn away from the witch they could be, would be if not for the world saying no, the world saying that their lives are their own fault. Goody Cole, the witch of Hampton, walks the marshes, haunts the dune grasses, watches the ships from the granite perch above the Atlantic shoreline of Little Boars’ Head. She is looking for her name.  

“I can’t back,” my father said and so I thought this was a story about my father. In the old stories, every father is an ogre, an ogre of absence or an ogre of presence. Today he was present and being pulled out into the Atlantic, borne upon his own currents.   

“I can’t get back,” my father said, just loud enough to carry his cinnamon licorice voice out from under the oxidized iron drawbridge where he fought the current and cold of Hampton Harbor. He smiled a smile torn with something crazed in his brown eyes, something I only saw for a second.  

But I saw it.   

In Whittier’s poem about Eunice Cole, the witch, a mother tells her husband:  

Rake out the red coals, goodman,—  
For there the child shall lie,  

Till the black witch comes to fetch her  
And both up chimney fly.  

Perhaps every mother flirts a secret wish they dare not speak: to murder the child who has murdered her, taken her from a thing that is to a thing that was. So in guilty fantasy she gives the child to the fairies. To the witches. When the child shrieks again, and sleep is a tattered rag on prickly stick, set the child on the coals, she says. The witch will come for the child, come for the sadness eating, the sadness that eats. Goody Cole will come.   

Yesterday I was seven with my cousin and we leaped from the tall, bladed grass of the dunes, beach towel knotted around our necks, my cousin imitating Superman and me Batman, both of us posing in the air for a second before dropping down to land in the soft sand that swallowed us up to our knees. Then we’d pull ourselves out of the sand and do it again, climbing the steep incline of and grass of Seabrook Beach, summoning metamorphosis, emerging as the heroes of our own curved universe.   

Once, when my brother and I were teenagers, my mother walked up the path through the grasses to yell at us for sneaking out to meet the Daly girls, the beautiful brainy soccer players in the house the next block over. We’d snuck out with no other desire than to see if we could sneak out, with no idea what to do once we did except giggle in the cool of the onshore breeze. In her pale nightgown and against the full moon my mother glided up the path, looked like the ghost of a witch flying toward us, stole the words and breath right out of our lungs. Incantations of anger summoned from her terror of empty bedrooms, of lost children.  

There was a Sunday in July in 1979 on this spit of beach on the New Hampshire coast. My uncle was taking my cousins away from the two-family cottage our families had rented, twelve of us crammed into one half of the tiny house seemingly built on fried clams rolls on s’mores and on Budweiser. The cousins were leaving on one of the charter fishing boats that goes out of Hampton Harbor every morning. I was not yet seven and I wanted to do what my older cousins are doing. My cousins, three boys just like me and my brothers, were a few years older. I whined to my mom as they left. Why can’t I go too? She sipped her coffee, twirled her spoon like a broom, buttered a corn muffin for me that Gram had just baked.   

When my cousins left, I ran out of the house and down the still-cool morning sand of the beach to the long rock jetty that shot out into the harbor. I climbed onto my favorite rock, the dark grey one with a crawlspace under it that was my fortress of crashing waves echoing inches away. I looked to the bridge, seeing if I could spot their green Buick station wagon crossing over into Hampton to where the party boats launched. I swear I saw the car and I waved and thought I caught a glimpse of them waving back. But maybe I just want that memory of that car, all the cars, as radials hummed along the steel, like a nest of wasps, echoing beneath the bridge and out into the harbor. I watched from my rock then walked back to the cottage. 

My mother once took a bus across the state of Massachusetts to see my dad while they were engaged. “My father wasn’t pleased,” she told me. “He said that I was chasing your father.” Her father once told her she could go anywhere in the world for college. As long as she was home every night for dinner. My mother told me that her first real night away from home was her honeymoon. While showering the next morning, the first morning out from under her father’s roof, my father poured cold water on her. To be funny. Oh, for a spell, any spell, she might have wished at that moment. Nothing drastic. A rash or boil cooked up in a pot. A little justice. Nothing like an ulcer perforation. Nothing that would sink a sailor’s ship for the refusal of chestnuts.  

My mother, in the rented beach house on a rented July Sunday, putting down her coffee, closing the Lowell Sun, might have wanted me thrown to the coals, needed me swept away as I whined her soft summer morning away. A son can make every hurt his mother’s fault with just the pitch of voice. The oldest of three I set my brothers to whining with me. And the charm worked over her until she broke and magicked my father.    

Eunice Cole was born around 1690. She was married but childless, that great crime and failure foisted on womanhood. She was said to have a “mumbling habit, which was bad, and a wild look, which was worse.” For 25 years she was persecuted by the people for being a witch. For a spell she was imprisoned in the Ipswich jail, often flogged, her leg chained to the floor.  

All my dad probably wanted to do on his first summer day off was nothing. He’d come in late from some other part of the world the night before. Some work trip. My mother had done the drive down to Boston to get him at Logan and he crowded in for his vacation week. He didn’t even like the beach. He grew up in western mass, in Pittsfield, near the Berkshires. His summers were spent in the woods and fishing in ponds and rivers and creeks. I can’t recall what we said or what spell was cast at the beach house that morning but at some point, my dad stood up and barked, his brown eyes like gun barrels, “Everyone in the car!”   

“I can’t back,” my father said when the story was still about him. The little blue rowboat was dead in the water. I looked at my mother holding my brother Paul, not yet three years old. Jon watched as my father continued to be pulled out by the sucking tide. Jon wasn’t crying yet. None of us were crying yet as my father tried to swim to us. The air was hot and dry. Greenheads buzzed and bit. I wonder if my mother ever thought of casting us to the water as well, all her handsome Hansels. I wonder if she would follow us or paddle to the marshes where the ghost of a witch searched for a grave without a name.   

By noon we were crossing the bridge in our own Buick, this one white, with no fake wood paneling, toward Eastman’s Fishing, where the cousins had boarded a charter. But we weren’t hopping on some big party boat that would take us out to sea. Not on such short notice and not at that is time of the day. All those boats had left hours ago. No, as we stood anxiously in the black fly heat of some low tide smelling bait shack, my dad put a deposit down to rent a rowboat.  

Goody Cole was not burned nor hung nor pressed with a stone for being suspected of familiarity with the devil. She would not reach Salem fame. She was released from prison because she was old and sick and because her husband was old and sick. They had come to the new world after a release from indentured servitude in England. Now the people of Hampton were asked to bring her food and help her with daily tasks. The people complied, at first. And yet even before we were America, we were Americans, so terrified of old women, of the reminder of age and death. Not long after her release, her husband died. Not long after that, Cole was found a few days dead in her home. Forgotten and ignored by her townsfolk. Invisible for not being beautiful enough or mother enough. She was thought to be in concert with the devil for being surly, for being old and childless. It is said those that found her quickly covered her up “in the nearby earth.” A stake was driven through her heart to make sure she stayed in the ground, body and spirit. Her gravesite was left unmarked.  

My father has no grave. His ashes have been on my mother’s shelf in Lowell since he died in 2007. He’d been sick a long time, suffering from the aftereffects of a massive stomach ulcer that exploded and went septic in summer of 2000. He got to see his sons marry, have their first children, but he suffered long and was never the same person he’d been. Even his big voice was swallowed up, kept to a strained hush by some squid witch Ursula of sick and surgery. My mother took care of him through it all. And then when he was gone. She was all alone. She told her sons a few years ago she has a place to put the ashes. Where she also wants her ashes. She wants us to do a ceremony for our dad at last, together. We put it off. She told me a few weeks ago she does not want her ashes going in there the same day as her husband. She wants her own moment, the tears for her, the stories for her. She wants her first night in the tomb to be her own, no pranks of cold water surprising her.   

Hampton historian Joseph Dow found reports that Goody Cole was “ill-natured and ugly, artful and aggravating, malicious and revengeful.” She’d come to America with her husband well after her childbearing age as an indentured servant. Having completed their service, they settled in the Hampton area. Soon, belief that this is unpleasant old woman was the source of devilry began to grow. From Whittier’s poem:  

“She’s cursed,” said the skipper; “speak her fair:
I’m scary always to see her shake  
Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair,  
And nose like a hawk, and eyes like a snake.”  

We worked to find balance in the pale blue and deeply weathered boat. Dad rowed us past and around the bigger fishing boats and lobster trawlers that seemed to bob with disdain. The air was dead, and the sun was hammering down. This was in the American golden bodied haze before sunblock and skin cancer, our faces and limbs all naked melanin. Life vests slid in the puddled floor of the boat. My dad wore his white khaki shorts, a white golf shirt, and brown penny loafers. We had a cooler of sodas. Jon and I couldn’t sit still. Our frustrated mom, her arms aching, I’m sure, with Paul’s toddler weight, kept telling us to stop walking around, rocking the boat, to stop leaning over the gunwale to stare down into the water, daring each other to stick our hands in and see what might stare back.   

The fish were not biting, not in that dead midafternoon heat. Gasoline rainbows swirled on the dark surface of the water like little day glow snakes swimming with the current. I’m not sure what we would have done if we had gotten a nibble with all of us crowded in that space. Only my dad knew what to do if we did pull a fish up. Maybe that’s why I thought this was about him. Jon and I cast with our little poles then reeled in our little hooks with their little bait, fidgeted in the splintery wooden seats, and pushed at each other in boredom. The Poke Brothers my mother called us.  

Some lingering residue of a witch’s curse got caught on the wickedly light breeze as we sat in the boat that afternoon. The water in the harbor seemed calm enough. Until you looked over at the bridge. There you could see the roil of the current as it threw foam against the big barnacled concrete bases that were bearded in long dark tangles of seaweed. Jon and I tried to put the bait on the hooks, cut mackerel we’d bought at the boat shop. But we were squeamish about pushing the hooks through the eyes. This needed a little more force than the work we were used too, school and soccer and Fun Dip and comic books. My dad, a Lucky Strike at the corner of his mouth, walking around and under hooked fishing lines, tried to help us as my mother held Paul and we all felt the wilting breath of afternoon. 

What is my mother thinking then? Is she smiling, having fun in this half ass adventure of her boys. Is she dreaming of the daughter she will never have? I could ask her now but that her was a million hers ago.  

That’s when one of the oars, caught in the moving water, slid out of the oarlock and over the gunwale and into the harbor. It cut fast across the water, slipping like an eel in the current across the surface.  

“Marge, grab the oar!” he spat in a voice that made it all her fault. “Marge!”  

And so, near the end, she has a name. Not mom or wife or daughter, but Marge. A witch of Hampton Harbor. For the way he said it, the way the Lucky tar roiled in the back of his throat, so that her name came out in a phlegmy bark, like a curse, like it she was to blame for the oar that slipped into the sea.   

Marge, huddling your children in a boat with one oar, unbook your spells that they might save us from ourselves.   

In 1964, a Hampton school teacher and part-time police officer decided to erect a stone on the supposed location of Cole’s property. Unmarked at the time, the stone now has a memorial plaque. Rumors of a ghost searching for the final resting place of Goody Cole perpetuated for years. Stories of an old woman asking travelers where Eunice is buried and then suddenly disappearing when the traveler does not know.  

The oar rode the current of the sucking out tide toward the Hampton Bridge. The bridge I grew up crossing and recrossing, the one I still see my dad still floating under, was built in 1949. It’s a girder bridge with a bascule leaf that lifts to let boat traffic come through. When I was a kid there was nothing cooler than when the bridge went up, the lights going off, the bells ringing some demon’s long rattling chain. To stand on the jetty rocks or on the beach by the harbor and watch the leaf rise to full height as it grinded against the decades of salt water, sun, and winter nor’easters that beat at the concrete and steel was a thrill back then. I always liked it best when we were in traffic and I could watch rusty steel lurch to full height in front of me while I’d look for the boats that were coming in or going out, either because they were too tall, or the tide was too high. As a teenager I would leap from it with friends all of us hoping not to fall on trawlers passing on the ocean’s surface or the smashing on rocks in the dark chthonic below.    

My dad stood up, kicked off his penny loafers, and dove into the water. I recall it or recast it as a beautiful dive. At least, I remember it that way. He cleared the gunwales easily, the athleticism of his youth still with him despite his Bud belly. He slid beneath the cold ache of water for a moment and then began swimming toward the wayward oar. After the splash of his diving into the water there was a sudden silence. But soon someone may have started crying, maybe my middle brother Jon, still holding the rod in his hand. I can’t remember any sound as the oar moved faster than my father could swim, gliding toward the bridge and the mouth of the harbor. Paul was tucked into my mother’s arm against the sun.  

“Just let it go!” Marge yelled, imploring him to come back to the boat. She had no incantation to pull us toward the docks. With one arm she held Paul, with the other she tried to row, twirling the boat in the black sea, twirling her children, twirling towards the witch and away from the witch she would be and not be.    

In 1938, during the 300^th anniversary town meeting of Hampton, a movement was started to clear Goody’s name and restore her as a citizen of the town. Copies of Cole’s court records were symbolically burnt at the ceremony. The ashes of the documents were to be buried beneath a planned memorial stone. This was done to stir up national interest about the town, to brew tourism. The effort worked. Papers all over the country features stories about Eunice “Goody” Cole. NBC dramatized the story on a radio program. Plans were made to dedicate a memorial for her where the ashes of her burnt court documents would be interred but a hurricane struck, and the plans were forgotten. It was then that sightings of a ghostly old woman wandering around Hampton, looking for her grave, looking for her name, began to grow.   

My mom shouted for help as she tries to row back to shore with one oar, spinning yet making progress, one child in her free arm, the other two huddled at her feet.  

“I can’t get back,” he said, smiling, almost laughing at how preposterous this moment is. But he was also scared. I saw that too. I saw his head above the water, slowly receding under the bridge.  

The water quickened around him. I thought that he was going to disappear forever in that moment.  

Eventually someone heard my mom’s calls for help. A harbor patrol boat came out to pull us in. We ran up the dock toward the rocky shore descended into the water by the bridge. Someone else went to get my dad, beyond the bridge and just out of sight. I remember being on shore as he scrambled up the rocks where some fisherman had dragged him out. He was soaked and cold. Water poured off the khaki and cotton of his clothing. The first thing he did was hold his watch to his ear. Then he looked at it, then he smiled at us all and said, “Son of a bitch. It’s still ticking.”  

My dad got to joke, got to break our terror with bravado, got to mask his fright and smile at us all with a look that tried to say that none this was a big deal. It was Marge who had to calm us. It’s Marge who got the keys and drove her soaked husband home. It’s Marge who held her children who don’t know death, who don’t how close or not close he came and what that would have meant.   

“Marge, relax,” he says now calmly cockily, in a voice that makes our trembling all her fault.   

When she was sitting there in the boat, in the beating eye of July sun, completely adrift and holding her children to her, did she see some allegory in that moment? This is my life now, she may have thought, spun about by the whims and egos of the fathers and husbands and sons they love or want to love. Does she wonder if such love requires self-oblation? The water must have looked so cool and so calm. So constant.   

“I can’t get back,” my father said so I thought this was a story about him. But it’s not. It’s a story about a woman who became a mother and another woman who did not and the way the world worked to twirl them into witches or away from the witches they would be if not for the boys, the men ever boys always so scared, always spitting at the women in a way that makes it all their fault.    

It is an early evening, mid-July, the violet and pink still in the sky. The sun just set behind the nuclear power plant. It sits in the marshes where somewhere wanders the ghost of Goody Cole, still looking for a grave with her name on it.  Or maybe she’s looking to pluck away the children she was falsely accused of stealing when she was in life. Maybe she is looking for us, for me, a man evoking her story to make his own. She follows the marshes, and they lead her to Hampton Harbor where the last of the boats are docking for the night. A thick line of cars stacks up on the new bridge that crosses the harbor on Ocean Boulevard, taillights and headlights brighten in the growing dusk. Pushing out of the water are remnants of the old bridge, the one under which my father fought and fled the tide. The concrete foundations, the trunnions rusting on the dune grass, all headstones of what once was. There are families in minivans, bikers on Harleys and Ninjas, teenagers walking across in that bounce of step only the young have, all heading into Hampton for the night or maybe leaving after a long lazy day in the sun.  

Underneath the new bridge the phantom rumble and whine of tires, the lilt of laugher and joyous shrieks, the pounding bass of sound systems. Late anglers drop lines from its railing. Eunice Cole reaches the soft sand of the water’s edge. She sees, I imagine, my mother, floating on the water, still folding her children close with one arm, still trying to row to shore with her other arm. Goody sees one made or unmade into a witch by the world. It is getting darker out, the water a deep blue black now.  

Marge keeps rowing with one oar toward the harbor of docked boats. She holds an us who are no longer there in that boat. She is pulled out deeper into the river mouth, past the bridge now, out towards sea, smiling an unconvincing smile, forcing a laugh, winking at Eunice Cole as she says at last, “I can’t get back.”   

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Currently a Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Matt W. Miller taught English and coached football at Phillips Exter Academy for 18 years. He earned his BA from Yale University, an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The Bennington Writing Seminars, and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Emerson College. He is the author of Tender the River, winner of the Independent Publishers of New England Book Award, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner. He was a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, and the Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. A former Walter E Dakin Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.