Lizzie Borden (11 page)

They would jog along, the filly making a nice little trot over unused roads in the backcountry. Lizzie would be asleep next to him, her reddish golden hair shining and blowing in the wind. He would reach down and put a work-hardened hand on her head and the very idea of her being his daughter would stun him.

It started out innocently enough. He began to make promises to her. He promised her money, gold, health, happiness, a husband who would adore her, a house on the Hill, servants that knew how to serve, wealth and glory. He told her about the workings of business, the workings of life, as Andrew Borden saw it, not always a pretty picture. He told her of his life as a young man, of his family, and the struggle he had to make a financial gain in Fall River.

The more he talked, the more he realized that he struggled so hard for
her
. For her sake and for no other reason. He worked himself harder than he had any right to ask of any employee. He was amassing his fortune for her. Just for her. His purpose for being was to provide for his daughter,
this
daughter, and as the realization took place over several weeks, he realized also what would happen were he ever to make good on all the promises he had made.

She would move away. She would move away and marry some man unworthy of her beauty, unworthy of her talents, unworthy of her affections and attentions. She would take everything he had given her—his
life
for the love of God—and she would dismiss him just as the new generation dismissed the corpses of the old people he hauled.

From the time he understood the depth of deception that would take place, were his unselfish, loving bestowals come to fruition, Andrew Borden tried to hold his tongue and found that he could not.

And his running monologue toward his sleeping daughter grew more bizarre, even to his own ears.

Worse, he occasionally wondered if she were really asleep, or if she just pretended because she knew he would begin to bare his soul to her somnolent form as soon as he saw evidence she could no longer hear him.

It began innocently enough, talking of her future, and ended up talking of his future. He would describe to her in lurid detail, every inch of his failing flesh. He would talk of incontinence, and bedsores. He would ask her over and over again, the rawness of the question salt to his wound, if she would still love him, still care for him, still bring him tea and read to him when he was not fit for company other than that of the grave worms. He would imagine himself wrinkled beyond compare, old, old, a hundred years and more, drooling, blind, palsied, and he would describe the breakfast table scene, for example, once Lizzie had carried him down to the table. He would go on and on about how she had to feed him and how irritable and mean he would be. He drew such scenes in great detail, always at the end, wondering, agonizing, if she would continue to stand by him.

He wanted to know if there would be a line, further than which, she would not go in her love for him. He had to know that boundary of Lizzie’s affections, for he wished to die before crossing it.

But she was always asleep, and never answered those questions. As a result, they burned within him, brighter and brighter as each week went by.

Because he could never voice those terrible, detailed worries to her face, he resented the fact that he was so emotionally dependent upon her approval.

So he began to shame her in public.

This was the crux of the matter, as far as Lizzie was concerned. She would no longer accompany him on his Saturdays, because surely at one time or another, he would insult her or speak falsely of her to someone of Fall River or its environs, and never hear an apology.

He hated himself every time he did it; but how could he ever explain to her that she was the one who made him do it? She was the one. She was the entire reason for his existence. She drove him to conduct business that was sometimes unethical for collection of the dollar. She drove him to mutter to her sleeping form. She drove him to marry that Abby woman because he knew she needed a female besides poor, disturbed Emma to help bring her up. She was the one who made him tight fisted with the money, his money,
her
money, so she would never be able to fulfill all those disloyalties he was sure she harbored in her heart.

And, in fact, hadn’t he proved it? He gave her money for a trip abroad, then begged her not to go. Did she listen to him?  Not for a second. She made arrangements and was gone for six weeks. Six weeks when he thought he would expire from worry and frustration. Six weeks without the light of his life plunged him into a dark depression so severe he wasn’t sure he would ever come out to see the light of day again.

When she returned, his world righted itself and the family went on as a whole once more. It was as if nothing had changed. And nothing had, really, except that now Lizzie corresponded—a little too enthusiastically for his peace of mind—with a friend from Britain. That couldn’t be too bad a thing, as long as he made sure she had no money to visit there.

His dependence on her shamed him. For that, he shamed her amongst her peers, and that made her angry. Angry enough to change churches! To change churches, after he bought the Borden pew at the First Congregational!

But Andrew couldn’t blame her. She was angry at him, and with just cause. He hated to see her angry, but anger was all right. The girl had fire, and that was one of the wondrous things about her. She had fire in the midst of a houseful of ice.

Andrew sighed. There were many things in life that he could do nothing about. He snapped the reins. But his tenants and their rents were not among them.

He looked down at the package of goat cheese as it rode alongside him on the buggy seat. Those people made a fine cheese. I imagine that would fetch two bits at market today, he thought. I’ll stop there on my way home. No sense in letting it go to waste.

It didn’t take Lizzie long to realize that if she were going to do the exercises in the book Beatrice had sent, she would need some privacy. She never knew when Emma would come barging through her room, and she needed to concentrate, particularly when she started on the second exercise in the book.

So as soon as the weather turned warm, Lizzie packed up candles, candlesticks, book and a few other personalizations, and took them to the hayloft in the barn.

The barn was an old stable, but Andrew had gotten rid of the lone horse over two years ago. Since then it had been used for practically nothing—a little storage space, but nothing, really. Lizzie enjoyed the barn. When young, she used to love to go upstairs into the loft and look down upon the horse, smelling his richness. Even after he was no longer there, she still liked to go up and lay in the dusty hay and read of a long summer afternoon.

She needed a place of her own. A private place to be, to read, to study. It was central to the exercises in the book. The barn was perfect.

Emma had been in the kitchen getting started on the evening meal the day Lizzie began to move her study to the barn.

“Where are you going with those candles?”

“To the barn.”

“The barn? What on earth for?”

“I like to go out there and read, you know, and sometimes I can’t read when the sun goes behind the tree in the afternoon.”

“You’ll set the whole place on fire.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Sounds like a stupid idea to me,” Emma said. “Young women just don’t read in the barn. They read in the sitting room.”

Lizzie unlatched the screen door and walked out into the fresh spring air. It was a beautiful day. The pear trees were filled with blossoms. The neighbors were all out working in their yards. Lizzie took a deep breath and smiled.

The barn door swung open with its customary creak and Lizzie made a second note to oil the hinges so she could come and go from her place without the entire neighborhood knowing it.

There was a small tack room on the left and a workbench area on the right. Father had sold all the tack, but the smell of oiled leather remained in the small room. The workshop area was filled to overflowing with piles of magazines, broken machines that her father fully intended to have mended someday—when he found someone who didn’t want to charge him an arm and a leg to do it—a small pile of kindling that had lasted through the winter, and boxes and crates of miscellaneous junk. Two empty horse stalls were next, their damp dirt floors smelling musty. They needed some fresh straw. The barn would smell hot and dusty as the summer wore on, but for now, Lizzie thought about putting some fresh straw in the stalls to freshen up the air and get rid of the moldy stench of a wet winter just passed.

She put the candles and candlesticks in a pocket on her duster, then climbed the ladder to the hay loft.

There were two piles of hay at the top, both brown and dusty. Lizzie had long thought about forking them down and using them as winter cover on the garden, but the garden was fairly overgrown anyway, sorely neglected, and the hay was where she lay to read. She thought of cleaning it all up, bringing table and chairs, maybe even a cot or sleeping mat of some sort.

She set the candlesticks on the window sill, then flopped down into the hay. She’d have to buy a new mirror, and then hide it, for surely Emma would come up to investigate, to ascertain that Lizzie wasn’t up in the loft doing something Emma didn’t approve of.

The room needed a table of some sort, something to set the mirror and candles upon.

Lizzie jumped up, climbed down the ladder and emptied a produce crate of its load of mildewed magazines, tamped the dust out of it, then threw it up to the loft and climbed back up after it.

Perfect. Lizzie plumped the haystack up a bit to provide a backrest, set the box down and put the candles on top of it. She had an old silk scarf that would lend an air of elegance to the setting. Up she jumped again, and climbed down the ladder.

This reminded her of a “fort” she’d made as a little girl, out at the farm in Swansea. It was a secret place of her own. There was an old willow tree that had been storm-damaged and it leaned over all to one side. The curtains of dangling willow leaves provided a wonderful green translucent screen,  which let in plenty of light and no other eyes. Lizzie stole a scissors from the kitchen and very carefully cut the green trailing fingers out of the center, apologizing to the tree the whole way. Then she brought a pillow and her favorite picture book, a doll and some cookies, and whiled away a long summer day.

She heard Emma call her and it made her giggle behind her hand, even as her heart pounded, wondering if Emma would give her a spank for being naughty. She
was
being naughty, hiding from her sister, hiding from her mother, and she knew it, but that little green room in the middle of the tree was just such a treasure. She couldn’t bear to leave it, she couldn’t bear to have Emma find it, she knew it had to be hers and hers only probably for just that day.

So she put her head on her pillow and played with the baby doll and ate cookies while she listened to Emma and her mother call and call and call.

That night she was sent to bed without supper, but Lizzie didn’t mind. She didn’t get a spank, she got a hug and a lecture from Mother instead. Emma told her that she had better things to do, so the next time she wanted to disappear for the day to just bloody well tell someone so Abby didn’t make her run around hollering for her all day long.

Lizzie had forgotten all about that day. She wondered if the pillow and the doll were still in the midst of that tree. She wondered if another child had found that wonderful peaceful paradise within that living, fragrant room. She’d ask Father if she could accompany him the next time he went out to the farm. She’d like to look for that old tree and see. She’d like to go out to the farm and spend some time in the quiet. Fishing. She’d like to go fishing.

She wondered if this was the way Beatrice felt the first day she rented her first flat in the city, and had a home of her own.

In her room, Lizzie got that silk scarf she’d envisioned, a needlepointed pillow and her hand mirror. She’d get another mirror the next time she went to town, but for now she was anxious to do her exercises again in her new space, to see if things were different.

Abby was busy with Maggie doing the spring cleaning, so nobody noticed, really, when Lizzie left by the back door. Even so, she stopped at the barn door to make sure she was going in unseen.

I’ll have to get a latch for the door, she thought, so it can be locked from the inside. Then she climbed up the ladder, which always made her feel like a man, and began to rearrange.

When everything was in its place up at the hayloft, it looked like a shrine. Lizzie stepped back to the edge of the loft and surveyed her new room. It did look like a shrine. Like an altar, with
Pathways
, the Beatrice book, lying on the center of the overturned crate like a bible.

The book. The marvelous book. Even though it admonished her not to, Lizzie had read ahead a few of the exercises. All harmless. All, in fact, seemed a little bit ridiculous, just like the one she just performed with the candles and the mirror, but she had faith that Beatrice would not steer her wrong.