Croak Carless’ wife weeps at the bars,
Croak weeps in a grated cell.
They’ve mortgaged the farm for a lawyer’s fee
To save Croak’s soul from hell.
For the Coroner has a bat-like thing
In a bottle safe in his room.
It looks like a baby devil fish—
It’s Cora Williams’ womb.
A woman’s womb is a thing of doom
And winged with a fan-like mesh.
And who was the father, they’re asking Croak,
Of this bit of jelly flesh?
And the doctors took an oath in the court
That a sharp club did the deed.
And the judge was a foe of the lawyer man
Croak Carless paid to plead.
And Croak had talked too much in jail,
And he trembled and testified
To a woeful tangle of time and place,
And the jury thought he lied.
Croak Carless’ wife sobbed out in court
As they twisted him out and in.
For they made him swear he drank with the girl,
And swear to his carnal sin.
They stood him up on the gallow’s trap
And his voice was clear and low:
If I killed Cora Williams, men,
My soul to hell should go.
They sprang the trap, Croak Carless shot
Like a wheat bag toward the floor.
And the doctors let his body hang
Till his old heart beat no more.
They let him alone to work and sweat
For a wife’s and children’s ease.
But they hung him up for a little beer
With a woman on his knees.
And he might have died in bed in a year,
For when they opened him up
They found his heart was a played out pump,
And leaked like a rusty cup.