Today's Reading
PROLOGUE
THE ADVOCATES
Catharine read Arnold Williams was a fearless woman. Her multilayered skirt firmly in hand, she gingerly stepped over ground littered with broken maple limbs before coming to a stop and gazing down at the green, well-trodden grass. Hoof prints marked various spots where cattle had grazed. I hovered nearby, settling beneath a towering maple tree. It seemed surreal as we both stood where a young woman, gifted with ability and loyalty, had lost her life. We stayed hushed for a bit, out of respect for Sarah Maria Cornell.
The tiny lines on Catharine's alabaster skin around her eyes deepened when she expressed concern. We were the same age, but my freckles revealed years of sun damage from working on my father's farm in Texas as a teen. Catharine, on the other hand, had never done a bit of manual labor in her life—though her wrinkles seemed perhaps more pronounced than mine, her worries etched deeply on her face. Our lives were an illustration of extreme contrast, but our divergent experiences had led each of us to similar writing careers propelled by diligence and necessity.
Catharine's life up to that point had not been easy. The forty-six-year-old had contended with an abusive marriage and a humiliating divorce, before settling into life in New England as a single mother. Through it all, Catharine had nurtured a writing career that she cherished, penning a short list of novels, poems, and biographies that braided religion with history. Despite almost immediate professional success, Catharine tended to be an impatient wordsmith who fretted over financial stability and never seemed content with her creative output or the resulting earnings.
I understood that concern. As the main breadwinner in my own home and the mother of two young children, I was also continuously on the lookout for the next opportunity, the next assignment, the next book. Authoring is a tricky craft, one that feels risky even at the best of times and positively precarious during uncertain economic moments—when recessions loom, pandemics rage, and politics threaten to upend our social structure.
Aside from all that, writing is horribly tedious. I've often compared the art of narrative writing to the act of conscripted self-reflection. Yet Catharine claimed it was meditative for her—as I said, we had varied experiences despite our similarities.
Writing a book with another person can be tormenting, melding two voices, two sets of observations, two life experiences into a single narrative. That was certainly my experience working on this book, The Sinners All Bow, with Catharine. Each of us saw things the other did not, and while our observations lined up perfectly much of the time, we each had to contend with the occasional blind spot or different interpretation of the same event. Still, I think the sum of our work together is greater than its individual parts. The collaboration process can be strenuous, but the fruit borne can also be satisfying.
As Catharine and I wandered beneath the graceful branches of the magnificent maple tree that summer, we surveyed the precise spot where the victim had exhaled her final breath. In most documents, our protagonist, Sarah Maria Cornell, is referred to as Sarah, even though she signed her personal letters with a variety of names over the years, including Maria and Sally. Catharine and I call her Sarah in our pages. Another quick note: Sarah was discovered on a farm in what was Tiverton, Rhode Island, about fifty miles south of Boston. In 1856, the town of Tiverton would vote to rename its northern section, where the Durfee farm was, Fall River, Rhode Island. Five years after that, the U.S. Supreme Court moved the state of Massachusetts's boundary to include that area, which is how 1833's Tiverton, Rhode Island, became Fall River, Massachusetts, by the twenty-first century.
Sarah's story held many mysteries for two avid true crime writers like us. Standing on that same field where Sarah had walked years ago, Catharine and I could almost see her before us. When Sarah herself had slowly navigated through the dark December night, it had been deep into a cold New England winter, just below freezing. She had wandered across Fall River without the assistance of streetlights—only starlight and moonlight. Catharine and I braced ourselves against the imagined western wind that rushed across Mount Hope Bay, which was just a few yards away down a gentle slope. Sarah must have felt chilled as she made what would become her final walk—the dead grass crunching under her boots, the wind swooping beneath her cloak and seeping into her bones with every step.
My coauthor and I were standing at the location of a tragedy that had perplexed and shocked the residents of nearby Fall River for nearly two centuries. As nonfiction authors, Catharine and I thought it was critical that we make the trip. We needed to see the site of this tragedy firsthand. We both noted our impressions of the area, initial thoughts that would—we hoped—eventually translate into spirited, visceral descriptions on the page. We knew how to tell a story, yes. But we also were reporters who believed in telling the truth and retrieving all the facts. These were facts, we would soon learn, that could be interpreted many ways, by those with many different agendas.
...
