Lizzie Borden (2 page)

He reached down and took off his shoes, then his socks. His long toes were white and hairy, and his toenails were long and cracked. Kind of yellow. He wiggled them.

“This is the kind of day that you should try to memorize, Lizzie,” he said. “Look around you and see everything. Focus on everything. The way the water runs so shiny and fast in the middle of the stream, yet swirls slowly near the bank. The way the reeds growin the shallows here. The color of the new leaves, the dampness of the earth. The clouds… This is the kind of day that you put in your heart and you remember during those times when life isn’t quite so good, when life turns hard and mean, you pull out this streambed and you and me under the clouds…”

Lizzie looked around because she knew he wanted her to. Then she put her head back against him, hoping he’d start to talk again so she could hear his words through his chest instead of through her ears.

“I have wonderful drams for you, Lizzie. Wonderful dreams. Do you want to hear?”

Lizzie nodded. She opened her eyes for a moment and thought she saw a fish come up and take a gulp of air on the other side of the bank, showing her its big orange mouth. Her eyelids were getting heavier and heavier in the warm sunshine. She’d tell him about it later.

“You’ll be beautiful when you grow up. Your blonde hai9r wil be long and luxuriant. You will live in a big house in the hill with a nice view, and have many, many friends. Dozens of friends. Famous friends.”

Lizzie could feel him talk more than she could hear him. Her ear rested on the side of his chest and she loved the vibrations of his deep voice.

“I’m going to make us rich, Lizzie, very rich, very, very rich, and you will have your pick of thousands of eligible young men who will come courting. But you hold out for the very best. You’ll have a substantial dowry, and you should have the very best husband. The very best.”

Lizzie dreamed about the little rag doll that Emma had made for her.

“Lizzie, are you asleep?”

“Hmm?”

“Lizzie, I have to know. When you are so rich and popular, and I am such an old, old man, will you still love me?”

“Of course, Papa,” she muttered, her voice thick.

“You will?”

Lizzie looked up at him and she couldn’t tell if he was joking with her or not. He had a queer expression on his face, as if
he
didn’t know if he was joking or not. She nodded, then settled her head against him to hear his vibrations some more.

“That’s good, Lizzie,” he said. “That’s very, very good.”

Lizzie wanted to look at her worm again, but as she brought the stick up, something grabbed it from down below and began to pull on it.

“
Papa!”
She came wide awake in an instant, holding onto the stick with both hands. “Papa!”

“He laughed. “It’s a fish, Lizzie! You caught a fish! Hold on tight and bring him up. Have you got him? Do you need help?”

Lizzie put her bottom lip between her teeth and held onto that stick as tight as she could. She dug her heels into the soft mossy grass at the edge of the bank and pulled up on the stick that was wiggling with life on the end of the line. Something silver flashed in the water below her.

Then her father’s hands were on her waist and he helped her to stand up. “Okay now,” he said. “Easy. Just bring your stick up and swing the fish right over here onto the bank.”

When she was steady, he let her go and stepped back.

She swung the fish—a big one!—onto the bank and began to giggle as it flipped and flopped, its pink-striped speckled sides flashing and throwing off raindrops in the sun.

My fish. My beautiful fish.

“Look at my fish, Papa. I caught a fish, Papa. Emma, come look!” she said, but Emma was already standing there, tall and gangly, staring down at the fish.

“You certainly did, Lizzie. A beauty, too.” Andrew Borden picked up a rock and slammed it down on the fish’s head.

“
Papa, no!”
She grabbed onto his arm, but he shook her off and so she watched in horror as the bleeding fish flopped a few last times.

“It doesn’t hurt, Lizzie. It’s just a fish. We have to kill it.”

Again, he smashed the rock onto the fish’s head. Again. And again. He just kept doing it, over and over again, and when he finally stop, beads o sweat stood out on his forehead and where the fish’s head had been was a red, pulpy mass.

“There.” He stood up and threw the rock into the stream. “Good catch, Lizzie. Let’s take this home and have Mother fry it up for supper.”

The fish had lost its shin, the day had lost its magic and even Lizzie’s new shoes weren’t so nice any more, she noticed as they walked back to the farmhouse. Her father carried the fish by the tail because she wouldn’t touch it; it had been so beautiful and full of life just a moment before. He could have just let it die, it could have just
died
, or it could have flopped back ito the water, that would have been all right, too. Anything,
anything
but smashing its head in with a sharp rock.

And Emma smiled.

Lizzie came to the dinner table that night, but she wouldn’t sit next to her father and she wouldn’t look at the fish. She kept her little fishing stick, though, and vowed to remember this day just like her papa had told her to.

January, 1892

Lizzie heard the front door open and close. A moment later, the draft of frigid air swept up the stairs and under her bedroom door. She gently refolded the letter from Beatrice and slipped it between the pages of the book she’d been trying to read.

Father is home
.

She set the book down, smoothed her hair and skirt, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, then opened the bedroom door, closed it, locked it behind her and gently descended the stairs.

A package sat on the hall table. A book-sized package, wrapped in brown paper and string, with stickers and stamps and official looking ink all over it, and Lizzie knew it was for her before she could see to whom it was addressed. It was the book Beatrice had promised to send from England. Heart pounding, she stepped down into the hallway in an orderly manner, ignored the package, and went directly to the sitting room.

“Hello, Father.”

“Lizzie. There’s a package for you. I left it on the hall table.”

“Thank you. Tea?”

“Please.”

She left him to the reading of his mail, excitement gurgling in her stomach as she jangled down the ashes in the wood stove and put in a few more pieces of wood. Then she filled the kettle with cold water from the faucet and set it on to boil.

Lizzie cut three of the little cakes Emma had made that morning and put two on a plate, and ate the third while waiting for the kettle to heat. Then she poured two cups of tea and took the tray to the sitting room.

She set the tray on the coffee table and sat down next to Andrew Borden on the sofa. “Anything interesting?”

“No, not really,” he said, and threw the open envelopes onto the tray next to the cakes. Then he looked at her. “How about you?”

“Emma baked. I did some laundry.”

Andrew Borden took a bite of cake and sipped his tea. “Not much taste to these, is there?”

“Wait until summer, Father, when there will be fresh fruit.”

“Yes,” he said. Then he sat back against the sofa and sighed. “I’ve got troubles at the mill,” he said. “Employee troubles. Financial troubles. Bad troubles. And more problems at the bank.”

“I’m sorry.” Lizzie sipped her tea and thought about the book on the hall table. She’d heard this talk from her father before. Every day.

“Things are supposed to get easier as you get older, Lizzie, but they don’t. They don’t. They get much harder. Much harder. I work hard, and I try to be fair, but things just keep getting harder and harder.”

“You’re tired, Father. Here. Let me take off your boots.”

Lizzie untied his boots, slipped them off, rubbed his feet for a moment, then said, “Would you like me to read to you for a while? Maybe a little rest would do you good.”

Andrew nodded. “You’re a good girl, Lizzie. I don’t know what I would ever do without you.”

Lizzie knew the routine by heart. They did this same dance every day until she wanted to scream.
Where is his bloody wife?
She is the one who should be comforting this old man, she should be rubbing his feet and reading to him. “What shall we read today?”

“Anything. You choose.” She stood up and got the book they’d been reading daily for the last month. The bookmark was toward the end. “How about this one that we read yesterday?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Remember where we were?” Is this what it’s like to have a child? A brain-damaged child, perhaps, one that will never grow up?

“I think so.”

Lizzie settled herself on the sofa again, book in lap. She thought again of the brown-wrapped book on the table and resisted the urge to throw this tome at her father and go get her new book, hold it tightly to her breast and run up the stairs to rip it open in the privacy of her room.

“Let’s see. . . Here we are at chapter seventeen.”

“Lizzie?”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t ever leave me. I could never survive without you, you know.”

“You have enough things to worry about, Father,” Lizzie said. “Don’t worry about that. It isn’t likely that I’ll leave you.”

“When you were in Europe, you know, it was a terrible time for me. I thought you were never coming back.” This was new. He’d never mentioned her trip abroad, not once, not even when she wanted to tell him about it. She’d been gone only six weeks with some friends from church, but he hadn’t wanted to hear a word about it. He was just frantically relieved that she was home. It made her want to kick that fat old cow of a step-mother. Did she do nothing for the man?

“But I did come back, didn’t I, Father? And I’m here now. So don’t worry. Try to relax.”

Lizzie cleared her voice and began to read. Within moments, her father was asleep. When he began to quietly snore, she covered him with a lap robe and took the tea tray back into the kitchen. She wrapped the uneaten cakes in a napkin, got her book from the hall table and went quietly up the stairs.

She sat in her rocking chair, package in her lap, her mind still on her father, sleeping on the sitting room sofa. Many times, once he had begun to snore and she had closed the book, she had studied his face, looked at the lines deepening in his brow, his cheeks, and she had wondered about her recollection of a younger, vibrant man who showed outward affection, who had time and energy to spend on his family, a man she had thought was as handsome as any god.

Time is cruel, she thought. Time and age have turned him into something else, something totally different from the way he used to be. He used to be such a. . . such a father. And now he was old, miserly, bitter.

A wretch.

And whose fault was that?

Time. Cruel, cruel time.

Lizzie felt the familiar sadness when she thought of her aging father and the fact that she and Emma would be following the same path into old age.

But those thoughts are for days when time lingers, she thought. Not for today. She looked around her room, at the dingy wallpaper that had been there since they moved into the house twenty-seven years earlier, and had probably been there since the house was built. It had some little flowers on it, but she couldn’t determine their color. She looked at the washstand, basin still filled with soapy gray water from her morning washing. Her single bed with a chamber pot beneath, a small round rug in the center of the floor, a four-drawer dresser and the rocking chair she sat in. Two photographs hung on the walls, pictures of buildings Lizzie had never seen. The room was austere, just like all the other rooms in the house. The only adornment was the vibrant and colorful quilt the church ladies had given her, but in this room, even it looked faded and worn. Beatrice saved her from this room. A letter from Beatrice made her forget everything else.

For a while.

She looked again at the package she held in her lap. She studied the handwriting, almost as familiar as her own. She had met Beatrice in Europe, a brief meeting, but sometimes lasting friendships are forged in just that manner. Swiftly, surely, and forever. Their letters began tentatively and soon grew intimate.

They discussed matters of life Lizzie could never discuss with another human being on earth. Lizzie told Beatrice all about her family, her hardened and embittered father, her fat slug of a step-mother who was all but useless, and her jealous, suspicious sister Emma, who had nothing better to do than poke her nose into things that were not her concern.

Lizzie and Beatrice met on the ferry from Britain to France. Beatrice was fashionably dressed, all in peach, from her hat to her shoes. Lizzie felt dowdy in her traveling blacks, and watched this lovely young woman take in the sights, enjoy a cup of tea and be on an excursion by herself while totally self-possessed. Lizzie envied that quality.

And apparently, her envious stares did not go unnoticed.

Lizzie sat at the end of a row of chairs with her traveling companions, their suitcases and packages littering the floor at their feet. Lizzie rubbed her temples, tired already of Sandra, Rebecca and Winnie. They moved and acted like the consummate American, the weird and ugly tourist to be taken for all his money and treated with no respect. They embarrassed Lizzie.