The Fall River Axe Murders-1
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Lizzie Borden with an axeGave her father forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her mother forty-one.
Childrens rhyme
Early in the m of the fourth of August, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Hot, hot, hot. . . very early in the m, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers uhe attack of white, furious sun already high iill air.
Its inhabitants have never e to terms with these hot, humid summers -- for it is the humidity more than the heat that makes them intolerable; the weather gs like a low fever you ot shake off. The Indians who lived here first had the seo take off their buckskins when hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the desdants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestahic wholesale into a try intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra behind drawn blinds and closed shutters; you wear clothes loose enough to make your own breeze to cool yourself when you infrequently move. But the ultimate decade of the last tury finds us at the high point of hard work, here; all will soon be bustle, men will go out into the furnace of the m well ed up in flannel underclothes, linen shirts, vests and coats and trousers of sturdy wooll..en cloth, and they garrotte themselves with ies, too, they think it is so virtuous to be unfortable.
And today it is the middle of a heat wave; so early in the m and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ast.
As far as clothes were ed, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this m, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock -- but, uhat, went a long, starched cottoicoat; another short, starched cottoicoat; long drawers; woollen stogs; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkiween her legs because she was menstruating.
In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementi, her belly in a vice, she will heat up a flat-iron on a stove and press handkerchiefs with the heated iron until it is time for her to go down to the cellar woodpile to collect the hatchet with which our imagination -- "Lizzie Borden with an axe" -- always equips her, just as we always visualise St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion.
Soon, in just as many clothes at Miss Lizzie wears, if less fine, Bridget, the servant gir<mark>?</mark>l, will slop kerosene on a sheet of last nights neer crumpled with a stick or two of kindling. When the fire settles down, she will cook breakfast; the fire will keep her suffog pany as she washes up afterwards.
In a serge suit, one look at which would be enough t you out in prickly heat, Old Borden will perambulate the perspiring town, truffling for money like a pig until he will return home mid-m to keep a pressing appoi with destiny.
But nobody here is up and about, yet; it is still early m, before the factory whistle, the perfect stillness of hot weather, a sky already white, the shadowless light of New England like blows from the eye of God, and the sea, white, and the river, white.
If we have largely fotten the physical disforts of the itg, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical disfort on the hen we have mercifully fotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours -- ill-washed flesh; infrequently ged underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; iely plumbed privies; rotting food; unatteeeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the om acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.
You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed.
Five living creatures are asleep in a house on Sed Street, Fall River. They prise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth or tract. His house is narrow as a coffin and that was how he made his fortune -- he used to be an uaker but he has retly branched out in several dires and all his branches bear fruit of the most fiscally gratifying kind.
But you would hink, to look at his house, that he is a successful and a prosperous man. His house is cramped, fortless, small and mean -- "uious", you might say, if you were his sycophant -- while Sed Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house -- see "Andrew J. Borden" in flowing script on the brass plate o the door -- stands by itself with a few st feet of yard oher side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this season.
On this particular m, as luck would have it, only one of the two Borden girls sleeps in their fathers house. Emma Lenora, his oldest daughter, has taken herself off to nearby New Bedford for a few days, to catch the o breeze, and so she will escape the slaughter.
Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Sed Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls but, as if on purpose to mortify her flesh, as if important business kept her in the exhausted town, as if a wicked fairy spelled her in Sed Street, she did not go.
The other old man is some kind of kin of Bordens. He doesnt belong here; he is visiting, passing through, he is a ce bystander, he is irrelevant.
Write him out of the script.
Even though his presen the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the c of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.
Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.
One old man and two of his women sleep in the house on Sed Street.
The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridgets alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the minute-hand stutters on the hour; back the little hammer jerks, about to hit the bell on top of her clock, but Bridgets damp eyelids do not shudder with premonition as she lies iig flannel nightgown under ohi on an iroead, lies on her back, as the good nuns taught her in her Irish girlhood, in case she dies during the night, to make less trouble for the uaker.
She is a good girl, on the whole, although her temper is sometimes uain and then she will talk back to the missus, sometimes, and will be forced to fess the sin of impatieo the priest. Overe by heat and nausea -- for everyone in the house is going to wake up sick today -- she will return to this little bed later in the m. While she snatches a few moments rest, upstairs, all hell will be let loose, downstairs.
A rosary of brown glass beads, a cardboard-backed colour print of the Virgin bought from a Puese shop, a flyblown photograph of her solemn mother in Donegal -- these lie or are propped on the mantelpiece that, however sharp the Massachusetts winter, has never seen a lit stick. A bain trunk at the foot of the bed holds all Bridgets worldly goods.
There is a stiff chair beside the bed with, upon it, a dlestick, matches, the alarm clock that resounds the room with a dyadic, metallic g, for it is a joke between Bridget and her mistress that the girl could sleep through anything, anything, and so she he alarm as well as all the factory whistles that are just about to blast off, just this very sed about to blast off. . .
A splintered deal washstand holds the jug and bowl she never uses; she isnt going to lug water up to the third floor just to wipe herself down, is she? Not when theres water enough i sink.
Old Borden sees no y for baths. He does not believe in total immersion. To lose his natural oils would be to rob his body.
A frameless square of mirror reflects in cated waves a cracked, dusty soap dish taining a quantity of black metal hairpins.
ht regles of paper blinds move the beautiful shadows of the pear trees.
Although Bridget left the door open a cra forlorn hopes of coaxing a draught into the room, all the spe of the previous day has packed itself tightly into her attic. A dandruff of spent whitewash flakes from the ceiling where a fly drearily whines.
The house is thickly redolent of sleep, that sweetish, ging smell. Still, all still; in all the house nothing moving except the droning fly. Stillness oaircase. Stillness pressing against the blinds. Stillness, mortal stillness in the room below, where Master and Mistress share the matrimonial bed.
Were the drapes open or the lamp lit, one could better observe the differences between this room and the austerity of the maids room. Here is a carpet splashed with vigorous flowers, even if the carpet is of the cheap and cheerful variety; there are mauve, ochre and harsh cerise flowers on the aper, even though the aper was old when the Bordens arrived in the house. A dresser with another dist mirror; no mirror in this house does not take your fad twist it. On the dresser, a runner embroidered with fet-me-nots; on the runner, a bone issing three teeth and lightly threaded with grey hairs, a hairbrush backed with ebonised wood, and a number of lace mats underh small a boxes holding safety-pins, hairs etc. The little hairpiece that Mrs Borden attaches to her balding scalp for daytime wear is curled up like a dead squirrel. But of Bordens male occupation of this room there is no trace because he has a dressing room of his own, through that door, on the left. . .
What about the other door, the oo it?
It leads to the back stairs.
And that yet other door, partially cealed behind the head of the heavy, mahogany bed?
If it were not kept securely locked, it would take you into Miss Lizzies room.
One peculiarity of this house is the number of doors the rooms tain and, a further peculiarity, how all these doors are always locked. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory; it is a house with no shared, no on spaces between one room and the . It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal dot.
The only way to Emmas room is through Lizzies. There is no way out of Emmas room. It is a dead end.
The Bordens of log all the doors, inside and outside, dates from a time, a few years ago, shortly before Bridget came to work for them, when the house was burgled. A person unknown came through the side door while Borden and his wife had taken one of their rare trips out together; he had loaded her into a trap a out for the farm they ow Swao ensure his tenant was not bilking him. The girls stayed at home in their rooms, napping on their beds or repairing ripped hems or sewing loose buttons more securely or writiers or plating acts of charity among the deserving poor or staring vatly into space.
I t imagine what else they might do.
What the girls do when they are on their own is unimagio me.
Emma is more mysterious by far than Lizzie, for we know much less about her. She is a blank space. She has no life. The door from her room leads only into the room of her sister.
"Girls" is, of course, a courtesy term. Emma is well into her forties, Lizzie ihirties, but they did not marry and so live in their fathers house, where they remain in a fictive, protracted childhood.
While the master and the mistress were away and the girls asleep or otherwise occupied, some person or persons unknown tiptoed up the back stairs to the matrimonial bedr<q></q>oom and pocketed Mrs Bordens gold watd , the coral necklad silver bangle of her remote childhood, and a roll of dollar bills Old Borde under union suits ihird drawer of the bureau on the left. The intruder attempted to force the lock of the safe, that featureless block of black iron like a slaughtering block or an altar sitting squarely o the bed on Old Bordens side, but it would have taken a crowbar to pee adequately the safe and the intruder tackled it with a pair of nail scissors that were lying handy on the dresser so that didnt e off.
Theruder pissed and shat on the cover of the Bordens bed, khe clutter of this and that on the dresser to the floor, smashing everything, swept into Old Bordens dressing room there to maliciously assault the funeral coat as it hung ih-balled dark of his closet with the self-same nail scissors that had been used on the safe (the nail scissors now split in two and were abandoned on the closet floor), retired to the kit, smashed the flour crod the treacle crock, and then scrawled an obsity or two on the parlour window with the cake of soap that lived beside the scullery sink.
What a mess! Lizzie stared with vague surprise at the parlour window; she heard the soft bang of the open s door, swinging idly, although there was no breeze. What was she doing, standing clad only in her corset in the middle of the sitting room? How had she got there? Had she crept down when she heard the s door rattle? She did not know. She could not remember.
All that happened was: all at once here she is, in the parlour, with a cake of soap in her hand.
She experienced a clearing of the senses and only then began to scream and shout.
"Help! We have been burgled! Help!"
Emma came down and forted her, as the big sister had forted the little one since babyhood. Emma it was who cleared from the sitting-room carpet the flour and treacle Lizzie had heedlessly tracked in from the kit on her bare feet in her somnambulist trance. But of the missing jewellery and dollar bills no trace could be found.
I ot tell you what effect the burglary had on Borden. It utterly discerted him; he was a man stunned. It violated him, even. He was a man raped. It took away his hitherto unshakeable fiden the iy i in things.
The burglary so moved them that the family broke its habitual sileh one another in order to discuss it. They blamed it on the Puese, obviously, but sometimes on the ucks. If their e remained stant and did not diminish with time, the focus of it varied acc to their moods, although they aloihe finger of suspi at the strangers and newers who lived in the gruesome ramparts of the pany housing a few squalid blocks away. They did not always suspect the dark strangers exclusively; sometimes they thought the culprit might very well have been one of the mill-hands fresh from saucy Lancashire across the o who itted the crime, for a slum landlord has few friends among the criminal classes.
However, the possibility of a peist occurs to Mrs Borden, although she does not know the word; she knows, however, that her youepdaughter is a strange one and could make the plates jump out of sheer spite, if she wao. But the old man adores his daughter. Perhaps it is then, after the shock of the burglary, that he decides she needs a ge of se, a dose of sea air, a long voyage, for it was after the burglary he sent her on the grand tour.
After the burglary, the front door and the side door were always locked three times if one of the inhabitants of the house left it for just so much as to go into the yard and pick up a basket of fallen pears when pears were in season or if the maid went out to hang a bit of washing or Old Borden, after supper, took a piss under a tree.
From this time dated the of log all the bedroom doors on the inside when one was on the inside oneself or oside when one was oside. Old Borden locked his bedroom door in the m, when he left it, and put the key in sight of all o shelf.
The burglary awakened Old Borden to the eva nature of private property. He thereafter uook an y of iment. He would forthwith i his surplus in good brid mortar, for who make away with an office block?
A number of leases fell in simultaneously at just this time on a certain street in the downtown area of the city and Borden shem up. He owhe block. He pulled it down. He plahe Borden building, an edifice of shops and offices, dark red brick, deep tan stone, with cast-iroail, from whence, iuity, he might reap a fine harvest of unsaleable rents, and this mo, like that of Ozymandias, would long survive him -- and, indeed, stands still, foursquare and handsome, the Andrew Borden Building, on South Main Street. Not bad for a fish peddlers son, eh?
For, although "Borden" is an a name in New England and the Borden between them owhe better part of Fall River, our Borden, Old Borden, these Bordens, did not spring from a wealthy branch of the family. There were Bordens and Bordens and he was the son of a man who sold fresh fish in a wicker basket from house to house to house. Old Bordens parsimony was bred of poverty but learo thrive best on property, for thrift has a different meaning for the poor; they get no joy of it, it is stark y to them. Whoever heard of a penniless miser?
Morose and gaunt, this self-made man is one of few pleasures. His vocation is capital accumulation.
What is his hobby?
Why, grinding the faces of the poor.
First, Andrew Borden was an uaker, ah, reising an aplice, did well by him. Iy of spindles, few made old bohe little children who laboured in the mills died with especial frequency. When he was an uaker, no! -- it was not true he cut the feet off corpses to fit into a job lot of coffins bought cheap as Civil War surplus! That was a rumour put about by his enemies!
With the profits from his coffins, he bought up a te or two and made fresh profit off the living. He bought shares in the mills. Then he ied in a bank or two, so that now he makes a profit on moself, which is the purest form of profit of all.
Foreclosures aions are meat and dri<bdi></bdi>nk to him. He loves nothier than a little usury. He is halfway on the road to his first million.
At night, to save the kerosene, he sits in lampless dark. He waters the pear trees with his urine; waste not, want not. As soon as the daily neers are doh, he rips them up iric squares and stores them in the cellar privy so that they all wipe their arses with I them. He mourns the loss of the goanic waste that flushes down the WC. He would like to charge the very cockroaches i rent. A he has not grown fat on all this; the pure flame of his passion has melted off his flesh, his skin sticks to his bones out of sheer parsimony. Perhaps it is from his first profession that he has acquired his bearing, for he walks with the stately dignity of a hearse.
To watch Old Borden bearing dowreet towards you was to be filled with an instinctual respeortality, whose gaunt ambassador he seemed to be. And it made you think, too, what a triumph over nature it was when we rose up to walk on two legs instead of four, in the first place! For he held himself upright with such ponderous assertion it erpetual remio all who witnessed his progress how it is not natural to be upright, that it is a triumph of will ravity, in itself a transdence of the spirit over matter.
His spine is like an iron rod, fed, not born, impossible to imagihat spine of Old Bordens curled up in the womb in the big C of the foetus; he walks as if his legs had joints at her knee nor ankle so that his feet hit the tremblih like a bailiff pounding a door.
He has a white, -strap beard, old-fashioned already in those days. He looks as if hed gnawed his lips off. He is at peace with his god for he has used his talents as the Good Book says he should.
Yet do not think he has no soft spot. Like Old Lear, his heart -- and, more than that, his cheque-book -- is putty in his you daughters hands. On his pinky -- you ot see it, it lies uhe covers -- he wears a g, not a wedding ring but a high-sch, a singular tri for a fabulously misanthropic miser. His you daughter gave it to him when she left school and asked him to wear it, always, and so he always does, and will wear it to the grave to which she is going to send him later in the m of this bustible day.
He sleeps fully dressed in a flannel nightshirt over his long-sleeved underwear, and a flannel nightcap, and his back is turowards his wife of thirty years, as is hers to his.
They are Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt in persoall and gaunt as a hanging judge and she, such a spreading, round little doughball. He is a miser, while she is a glutton, a solitary eater, most i of vices ahe shadow or parodic vice of his, for he would like to eat up all the world, or, failing that, sie has not spread him a suffitly large table for his ambitions, he is a mute, inglorious Napoleon, he does not know what he might have done because he never had the opportunity -- since he has not access to the entire world, he would like to gobble up the city of Fall River. But she, well, she just gently, tinuously stuffs herself, doesnt she; shes always nibbling away at something, at the cud, perhaps.
Not that she gets much pleasure from it, either; no gourmet, she, forever meditating the exquisite differeween a mayonnaise sharpened with a few drops of Orleans vinegar or one pointed up with a squeeze of fresh lemon juio. Abby never aspired so high, nor would she ever think to do so even if she had the option; she is satisfied to stiple gluttony and she eschews all overtones of the sensuality of indulgence. Since she relishes not one single mouthful of the food she eats, she knows her ceaseless gluttony is nression.
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