Lizzie reddened. ‘Father?’
‘I’m surprised the Reverend lets you teach as often as you do.’
Lizzie’s jaw angled. ‘I’m a good teacher, Father. The children like me.’
‘Children like children, I suppose.’
‘Andrew . . .’ Mrs Borden choked her words.
I pushed myself into the wall, wanted to disappear inside of it, did not want to see a grown woman squirm in front of her father. The wall was hot against my hands and Lizzie shot me a look, made my face burn. I did not care to see, did not care to listen to the conversation.
Lizzie said, ‘What’s wrong, Father?’
‘Your mother and I have been ill.’
Lizzie straightened her back, got stiff. ‘Bridget mentioned.’
‘There’s no reason we should be.’
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘Unless, of course, there’s disease in the house.’
‘There’s not, Father.’
He arrowed a finger towards her. ‘You’ve not got rid of your pigeons, Lizzie.’
‘That’s because I shouldn’t have to. They’re kept safe in the barn.’
‘Nonsense. You let them out and they come inside through the roof and leave their filth around.’ He pointed to the ceiling, the sky, to God.
Lizzie tightened her fists under the table. I did not care to be in the room.
‘I’ve not done that, Father.’
‘I want you to get rid of them.’
‘No.’
Mr Borden pushed himself upright, a giant. ‘Don’t defy me, Lizzie.’
‘But they’re mine. You should fix the roof if you’re so worried about disease.’ Her eyes wide. I sunk against the wall, hard in my back. Lizzie should’ve known better.
‘What’s that you teach the children? Obey and honour?’ Mr Borden leaned into his chair, made it creak, made me think he’d fall back and Jack and Jill his head.
Lizzie slammed her hands on the dining room table, made her piece of pork jump off the plate and onto the floor. ‘That’s different.’
Mr Borden stood then, adjusted his trousers and came towards Lizzie. I’d seen this before. I prepared myself. I could see little yellow string-saliva in his beard. He went in close to Lizzie, slapped her across the face. Oh, the sound filled the room, that noise of skin, a cleaver working meat, and Lizzie’s head snapped to the side, her shoulders metered wide, wings, and my heart raced, my knees weakened, brought sweat to my brow. Lizzie stared at her father.
‘Andrew, please.’ Mrs Borden held her napkin tight.
‘You better start listening to me, Lizzie.’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘You’re a nasty.’
Mr Borden struck her again. I did not know where to look. Lizzie ran out of the dining room, went up the stairs and slammed the door. Mr and Mrs Borden didn’t say anything and I collected the dishes, careful not to make too much noise. I left the room, my face ran hot, the feel of wanting to cry. How I wanted to leave the house right there and then.
I sympathised with Lizzie in that moment, the suffering. There’d been that moment back in Cork at the estate where I worked. I’d been touched one too many times by the master of the house. He was a giant hand, reached for my breasts as I poured him coffee, the way he did, and this time I looked at him, his dirty-red wine-coloured, mushroom-bulbed nose, his English matchstick teeth, and I slapped his hands off me, slapped his chest, slapped his face. Hot coffee went everywhere, made him leap from his chair.
‘Look at what you’ve done!’ he yelled.
‘Ya keep yer bloody hands to yerself. Ya shouldn’t’ve touched me.’
He came close to me, smelled of damp wool, of coffee grounds. ‘I’m the one who gives orders around here. Who do you think you are?’
I was beginning to find out. I was sent packing, was sent without a recommendation. It had been my third posting. I was running out of options.
‘Ya didn’t need to go do that,’ my brother said. We were all standing in our warmed kitchen when I told them what had happened.
‘Ya know nothin’ about what it’s like.’
He ran his stubby fingers through his hair. ‘If yer so smart, whatcha gonna do now?’
Like women and men before me I counted out money, counted out how far it would take me. Away from here, away from grubby landowners. America. Mammy and Daddy didn’t want me to go, said they’d miss their baby girl, said to at least try Dublin.
‘I’m hearin’ girls are makin’ more money there. Let me have an adventure,’ I told them.
‘It’ll kill us,’ Nanna said, ‘but it would kill ya more to stay,’ and she stroked my cheeks with her half-sized finger, the one she lost when she fell under a horse, and it was smooth and knobbly like a newborn bird head.
Just like that I got my ticket for the SS Republic down in Queenstown. A grown woman full of decisions. I knocked on doors in streets around our house, said, ‘I’m havin’ my American wake. Come see me off.’
Come they did. They filled me up with food and drink, cabbage and bacon, mutton with soda bread. Mammy made loaves of brack, made sure there were chunks of plum, my favourite, and for hours I was toasted with mulled wine, toasted with all their home-grown drops.
They filled my ears with fiddle and drum, flute and cruit, got my heart beating in time with ‘The Devil and the Bailiff’, and I was danced from one neighbour to another, danced from a brother to a sister to a brother. Everyone laughing, screaming out song. I took that in, tried not to think about it ending.
Daddy had organised the photographer and so we stood there, arms around shoulders, all of us sweating against each other, staying still, trying not to blink, and Nanna said, ‘I’ll die before this bloody photograph is taken.’ Oh, that sent us breaking, made the photographer stomp his foot, tell us we were useless. ‘Now I’ll have ta take it again.’
I didn’t mind.
We’d been celebrating for hours when the keening began. I laid myself out on the sofa, looked up at them, all the people from my girlhood, who knew me too well. They had come over to me, one by one, to kiss me on the forehead and lips, tell me that I’d be missed, that they hoped to see me again, that I was already a little bit dead for having to leave them behind.
My face was covered in their wet salt, how we cried, and when it was Mammy’s turn to love me and say goodbye, she let out the banshee wail, lay her hands on my body and howled in my ear. She sounded like a killing wind, moaned low and deep, and then my sisters joined her, then Nanna, then the women, a circle of grief thundering towards me. I was frightened. On they went, like cats, like foxes, heating in the night.
Then Daddy sang ‘Blow the Candles Out’, got his voice singing beer-sweet, and just like harbour waves, everyone joined in, was accompanied by Uilleann pipes, that sorrow sound washing over me, made me cry, made me realise I had no idea what to expect in America.
I went to my nanna, who sat small in her chair, and I got on my knees, wrapped myself around her, touched her empty, old cheeks, and cuddled her onto her feet. The butter smell of her hair. She was yellow, skin tight to bone. Yellow her face, yellow her arms, yellow her half-finger. Her eyes were wrinkled half-moons, still deep brown like mine, still watching me with love, and I held right on to her for our last hold. I was able to reach my arms all the way around her, could feel her ribs struggle against me. Hold tighter, I thought. Bridget, hold tighter. But I was afraid I’d break her. Nanna breathed in my ear, short and tired and her heart beat into mine. What a sound.
‘I love ya, Nanna,’ I said.
‘I love ya too.’
I lost it then, started keening over her, let nineteen years of love wail at her. I’d never heard myself like that before. It made Nanna’s body shake and I held tighter to her and she said, ‘Will I ever see ya again?’ I didn’t answer.
The next day I was on the ship, was with dozens of others leaving. The ship’s horn bellowed and I threw up over the railing. Thought America better be worth it.
>
As things calmed, Mr Borden left the house for work and I went about my morning, found it hard to shake off the slap. Hard to shake off that Borden fever.
Mrs Borden came looking for me. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked. She held her stomach, looked in pain.
‘Just continuin’ along, marm.’
‘I have something to cheer us up,’ she said. In her hand was a telegram. ‘Look what I got yesterday. Did I tell you? I’ll be having guests this Saturday.’
She had not. ‘Who’s it, marm?’
‘Some old friends.’ The way her face became bright. It made me smile. ‘I knew them from school. Fancy that. After all this time.’
‘It’ll be nice for ya.’
‘Yes.’ She read the telegram to herself again, said, ‘You and I have a lot to do in two days. You’ll need to begin cleaning and thinking about what you’ll cook for meals. I don’t want to disappoint them.’
I didn’t see how cleaning for visitors would cheer me up. She told me to start with the parlour rug. ‘Take it out and beat it clean.’ That old heavy wool thing with its ragged yellow and white iris and violet flower pattern, green stem arches that went round and round. She’d be better off buying a new one. But I went and got the wicker slapper from the basement and threw it in the middle of the rug, rolled the whole thing into a long tube.
I dragged the rug through the parlour to the sitting room, worried that I would knock over the small tables with Mrs Borden’s porcelain ornaments on top, those ugly glazed cats and shy dogs, tails between their legs, paws begging for food. The rug rubbed against the floor like a saw, cutting up weeks of foot traffic. My underthings stuck to my lower back. I dragged it some more and there was a thwack and a drop. I put down the rug. ‘Pshaw,’ I said.
It was enough to bring Lizzie downstairs. ‘You’re disturbing me.’ There was a little red Father mark on her cheek from breakfast time. Oh, I’d seen that all before.
‘Sorry about it, miss.’
She scrunched her nose. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Mrs Borden wants this cleaned. She’s havin’ guests Saturday.’
‘Who exactly?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Father didn’t tell me.’ Her hands went to her hips. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve knocked the table.’ I pointed.
She glanced, a smile across her face. ‘Look at what you did.’ She held a porcelain dog, his ears pricked and tail raised. In her other hand, the dog’s leg. Lizzie laughed, forced the pieces together, forced them apart, teased me like that, and I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, felt it against my lips like an earth tremor.
‘It’s the second one I’ve broke.’ My voice came out of me, a mewing.
‘She needn’t know.’ She closed her hand over the pieces, held tight.
‘She will. She loves that one.’
Lizzie stuck the leg against the dog. ‘Stop being so dramatic. If I were you I’d throw it out.’ She handed it to me.
The pieces stabbed the inside of my hand, cut a little. How had she been able to hold it without hurting herself? ‘Maybe it can be fixed?’
She smiled, all crooked. ‘Or you could say someone took it.’
‘She’d not believe me.’
Lizzie shrugged. I put the dog in my apron pocket. I’d think about what to do with it later. ‘I gotta get this rug done.’
‘As long as you don’t destroy anything else.’
I’d not thought her funny, wanted her to make it up to me. I pointed to the rug. ‘I shouldn’t ask ya, but could ya help me drag it outside?’
‘No. I don’t do that.’
‘Sorry, miss.’
‘I’m heading out now anyway. Don’t ever ask me to do your work again.’
‘Yes, miss.’
She came near me, right up close so that I could feel her breath. ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I’ll be doing?’
‘If ya like.’
She stared at me. ‘Never mind. I don’t want to tell you anyway.’
‘I’m sorry, miss.’
Lizzie kicked the rug, went to the entrance cupboard and took her summer coat. ‘You’re all rotten,’ she said, walked out, slamming the front door. I couldn’t wait to leave the house, this family. I took the rug in my hands. The stupid, heavy old thing.
My hands and wrists were aching to snap by the time I got outside. I dragged the rug through long grass and I thought of the early days coming to Second Street, how Mr Borden didn’t believe I was worth his money. I’d been polishing the front stairs banister, Mr and Mrs Borden were in the parlour. She’d said, ‘The girl is very efficient.’ So I polished some more, shined it up so good I could see my teeth reflected, a prize at a show.
‘She’s not strong enough. Why keep her on when we have you and the girls?’ he said.
‘I can’t do it all on my own,’ Mrs Borden told him. ‘My back isn’t what it used to be. She can do the heavy tasks.’
Then he set tests. Mr Borden had me lift wooden boxes above my head, had me pull objects like an Irish bullock. He didn’t care that I could keep to myself or that I could cook a meal. He wanted a backbone for his wife. She wanted someone to give an order to, someone to keep her company. After he’d made me dig holes in the backyard, blister my hands so he could plant an extra pear tree along the fence, Mr Borden looked me over, squinted those grey-blue eyes into sockets and said, ‘Fine. We’ll keep you on. Just stick to what you’re told.’
I’d’ve jumped and clicked my heels if I wasn’t that rundown. When Mrs Borden found out she said, ‘I believe you’re the girl we’ve been looking for. Our last one, Maggie, didn’t seem to fit in.’
‘I can fit in.’
‘Wonderful. It’s important I have someone here I can trust with everything.’
‘Yes, marm.’
It was a few months later that she made me start running messages to her adult children.
‘Bridget, tell them their father and I are going to Swansea.’
‘Bridget, can you ask them not to leave their teacups laying around.’
‘Bridget, tell me if they mention me in any way.’
And I’d go to them, knock on their doors like I was banging a drum in a field.
‘Yer mother says . . .’
‘Yer mother is . . .’
And Lizzie would get all in a flap and say, ‘Tell Mrs Borden that we’ll come down when we’re ready.’
It had been funny at first, this fairytale way of speaking about each other. But when I saw Emma in the sitting room turning Mrs Borden’s photos face down on the mantelpiece, I wondered what exactly did fitting in mean?
I unrolled the rug, tried to throw it up high over the clothesline. The rug landed hard on the ground. I didn’t have it in me. I went to the weather-stained pine fence we shared with Dr Kelly, climbed onto a wooden crate, upped my head over the fence.
‘Ya there, Mary?’ I called out. I waited a moment, tried not to look at the Kellys’ basement—the place, Lizzie had told me, where the bad thing happened.
‘Father’s sister used to live in that house. She did it when no one was looking,’ Lizzie had said.
‘Did what?’ I had been with the Bordens six months at the time, had complained to Lizzie that it was much too tiring to be walking water up and down the basement stairs.
‘You want to know what tiring is? Picking up a kicking child.’ The story came out of her like she’d been wanting to tell me since we met.
She spoke fast. ‘She drowned her children, Holder and Eliza, in the cistern in their basement.’
‘Holy Father.’
‘Guess what she did next?’ Lizzie pushed her dried lips together.
I didn’t care to know.
‘She went inside the house and slit her throat.’ Lizzie said it plain face, like it was nothing, like it was a daily occurrence.
‘What came over yer aunt?’
‘No one knows. Father says that she was always melancholy and then she wa
s out of her head one day.’
The first of many secrets I learned. For a while, the only thing I could think about was the cistern. What sound was made when the children’s heads went under water, whether their mother struggled to keep their kicking legs from hitting her in the face, whether she said anything to them.
It was Emma who noticed me staring at the steps to the basement a few weeks later.
‘Who told you?’ she asked.
‘Miss Lizzie.’
Emma rubbed her hands over her face, muffled a breath. ‘She shouldn’t have.’
‘Did she really throw ’em in?’
She was pale in the cheeks, shallow in the eyes. ‘Yes. The only child she didn’t drown was Maria.’
I couldn’t stop myself. ‘And she hurt herself?’
‘She did.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Before I was born. We don’t think about it much anymore. There’s no use.’
‘Oh.’
We both looked at the basement steps and then Emma closed her eyes, mumbled to herself and walked back to the house.
I’d heard other domestics say it was the maid who found the mother after bringing in a pail of water from the well, found her with her eyes and mouth wide open, razor in hand like she couldn’t let go. It’s always us who do the finding. The bad days at work.
I called loud for Mary again and she came, a sore waddle through the yard. ‘What’s wrong with ya?’ I asked.
‘Dropped the iron on me foot.’ She pointed down her lank leg, down at a bandage, a little stain of blood.
‘How many times do I have to tell ya, ya can’t iron out cracked heels?’
‘One more time, maybe, Bridget.’ She smiled wide, grimaced when she felt pain.
I mimicked a queen, plummed my voice. ‘You Irish may not be bright but you do bleed well.’
She two-finger saluted me and we laughed. Mary limped over to the fence, lifted herself onto a stoop and our eyes met. She had those deep brown eyes, like my sister did, bright, still enjoying the idea of making a living away from her mammy and daddy. A few months ago, Mrs Kelly brought Mary over to introduce herself to me. ‘The Bordens seem happy with you. Teach our girl how to keep house properly.’ Mary didn’t need any help. All she had to do was keep quiet, get on by.
See What I Have Done Page 5