by Brandy Purdy
Save me; save me; set me free! I prayed to it, like a silver gilt idol, with all my might, and a little voice in the back of my head began to sing, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—repeating over and over again the verse that went: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”—free as I ached, body and soul, to be, to live by my own will and whims, not wholly at the mercy of Father’s, or some other man’s, sufferance!
Gripping the handle tight, holding on for dear life, I walked slowly back to the house, with the hatchet’s glistening blade hidden in the folds of my skirt. When I glanced down and saw it nestled against the part that was stained with paint it occurred to me then that the reddish-brown color looked just like dried blood.
I went upstairs to my room. I laid the hatchet down reverently upon my bed. I stood and stared at it with heavy, drowsy suddenly very sleepy eyes, swaying like a woman mesmerized. As the sunlight pouring in through the open window played over the silver gilt like sunshine reflecting upon a river, I thought of water and baptism, of being cleansed of my sins, renewed, reborn. I began to take off my clothes. I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up, and if God was truly merciful, I thought, that was what would happen. He would gather me to His bosom instead of foisting me into David Anthony’s arms.
Through the thin wall I heard Abby singing in the guest room. David’s visit had interrupted her before she had finished tidying it up for Uncle John. That was Abby’s way; I knew she was trying to distract herself and put all the unpleasantness out of her mind until Father came home.
I tossed my paint-stained housedress onto the bed—sky-blue diamonds merging with navy, like ripples of water, light and dark, in sunlight and in shadows. I pulled my chemise up over my head and peeled off my petticoat and stepped out of my slippers and drawers. I scowled in annoyance at the single pinprick-sized spot of blood on the back of my petticoat; it was the kind of stain the women of Fall River discreetly referred to as a flea bite. I think I meant to change the heavy, blood-sodden towel for a fresh one. I even pulled the pail out from under my bed. I heard . . . saw? . . . the slosh of bloody water and the soiled napkins swirling inside the pail. It sounded as far off as the sea, the vast blue waters that had once carried me away to another continent, another life, another world, and given me one sweet, sweet taste of freedom.
My head felt unbearably heavy. I thought my neck would surely break beneath its weight, like a pile of bricks balanced upon a toothpick. My sight was shrouded by a rolling red mist and exploding stars, bright bursts of light popping against the red, making me fear that one of them would extinguish my sight forever and leave me stone-black blind. I wanted to lie down, I felt so sleepy and faint, heavy and light-headed all at the same time, but my feet were already moving with a mind and determination of their own and the hatchet was in my hands, hell-bent on securing my freedom. Now was not the time to waver or succumb to weakness like some swooning heroine in a romance novel waiting for the hero to save her. There was no “hero born of woman” to “crush the serpent with his heel” (the little voice in my head was still singing random snatches of “The Battle Hymn”: only it wasn’t one voice anymore. It was a whole chorus all singing different verses and snippets at the same discordant time so I could hardly think, only intuitively understand what they were telling me I had to do). There was only me . . . that song, and the hatchet, “the Great Emancipator.” “His truth is marching on. . . .”
Wearing only the bright red-flowered pink calico belt that held the cumbersome towel in place between my raw, red thighs, with the silver gilt of the hatchet’s head cold as ice against my hot, sweaty breasts, I approached the guest room door. I laid the hatchet down on my desk while I lifted and shifted the end that partially blocked the door just enough for me to open it. I vaguely remember my nipples puckering as I paused on the threshold and stared down at my feet as though I had never seen them before. I wiggled my toes, sweaty and pink, against the faded flowers of the ancient carpet.
I hefted the hatchet in my hand and shivered as it grazed my breasts. I closed my eyes and let myself dream I was the truehearted heroine whose hope sprang evergreen being caressed by her long-lost love, one of over a hundred souls presumed perished on an ill-fated Arctic expedition. I felt so weak, and then, as I stood upon the threshold of the guest room, I tingled with a surge of sudden strength, like a jolt of electricity, that made my spine snap erect.
Abby was still singing. “From this valley they say you are going/ Do not hasten to bid me adieu/Just remember . . .” She had her back to the door; she was bending over the bed, plumping a pillow she had just put in a fresh white slip and adjusting the coverlet. She never sensed that anything was wrong. The hairs never tingled warningly on the nape of her neck. No guardian angel tapped her shoulder to alert her that Death was sneaking up behind her.
“He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword. . . .” I raised the hatchet high, I felt its heaviness in my shoulders, and I brought it down HARD. It pulled and hurt me too as the blade bit deep with a terrible crunch into the back of her head. This hurts me just as much as it hurts you. . . . I wanted to tell Abby, and maybe I did; I just don’t know if the whisper was only inside my own aching, pulsing, pounding head. I wish it didn’t have to be like this.... Then I did it again. And again. Again and again and again and again . . .
The popular singsong rope-skipping rhyme that came afterward says I did it forty times, but the coroner counted nineteen blows. But I wasn’t counting; I only know I did it several times. After the first blow, or maybe two, she fell facedown, jarring the whole house. I half-feared she would fall crashing through the floor. I almost wish she had; maybe they would have thought her death was just a terrible accident? But she didn’t; she just lay there twitching and bleeding on the floor, her blood reviving the faded flowers on the carpet. I’d never seen them look so bright before.
I planted my feet wide, standing firmly astride her, and raised the hatchet high. One blow cut through her switch of false hair and it flew up onto the bed like a wild black bird that raised goose bumps all over me and nearly startled me out of my skin. I felt her blood splash my face, salty and hot. I tasted it on my lips. The blood is the life—I tasted her life as I was taking it away! I never felt such power, or such horror, or such a terrible sadness. I hated myself; I hated Abby; I hated David Anthony; I hated that I had been driven to this murderous madness. But what choice did they give me? They drove me to it! It wasn’t my fault! So I just kept hitting her. I couldn’t stop! I don’t think I wanted to, but in a little part deep in my heart I did, but I couldn’t. I just kept hacking away at the back of her head.
Blood and gristle and bone kept flying while the muscles in my arms, shoulders, and back felt like they were fraying, screaming and straining with every blow. My breasts ached and felt painfully heavy as they swung free. Free!—the way I had always wanted to be! Free! But there was always something or someone that wanted to enslave me, to keep me chained and bound like a dog or a slave or a criminal to an owner or some outmoded or unjust social convention! There was a large flap of skin on the back of Abby’s scalp that kept opening and closing, like a bloody mouth, mutely crying out for me to Stop! Finally I listened; I really did stop.
As suddenly as it began, all the rage and resentment left me. Like a great wave of icy water had just struck me and knocked me off balance, I slumped, shivering mightily, onto the floor. It was the hottest summer in human memory, yet I’d never been so cold in my life. My knees simply buckled and I dropped down onto the floor beside Abby. “And then she saw what she had done . . .” So goes the rhyme. They got that part exactly right.
Breathless and quivering, I sat there, naked as a babe in a diaper, in Abby’s blood, feeling it soaking through the towel and mingling with my monthly blood. For the second time in my life I was sitting in my mother’s blood; only this time it was my step mother’s blood and I had been the one to spill it. I had killed her. I had made the b
lood pour out of her.
“Mother!” I whispered, and reached out a tentative hand to touch her shoulder; it was still twitching. My hand was still there when it finally stopped, when the last little bit of life left her, and then I began to cry.
In my mind I saw Abby, her moon-round open and friendly face and sweet, shy smile, her crinoline billowing wide, like a big plum-colored cloud, as she crouched down to shake my hand for the very first time. I remembered mincemeat pies sprinkled with rosewater and love like a dash of fairy dust, a pretty pink dress and the unexpectedly becoming sunny yellow sash she tied around my waist, the painstaking care she had taken to curl my hair into perfect gleaming red ringlets garnished with ribbons, “just like a little French doll.” She beamed with proud delight as she stepped back to admire me; anyone who saw her face then would have truly believed she was my mother—I could still hear her! She had loved me; she had liked me then. In those days she really was my friend! I could have been the daughter, and she could have been the mother, whom we both wanted and needed so badly, but . . . I chose to let Emma step into our dead mother’s shoes and take my hand and lead me away from Abby. I thought it was my duty. I was a good little soldier; Emma said so.
Abby . . . She had never stopped trying to win back my love, but every time I felt my heart start to soften . . . Emma was right there like an evil black crow cawing in my ear to remind me and stiffen my resolve, like a good little soldier serving Mother’s memory like a queen. And then David Anthony had come along and changed love to hate forever; he had made certain that there was no going back, I could never change my mind. Even if I decided to let Abby into my heart again, hers would be closed to me, locked and barred forever because of what I had done in the hayloft with David Anthony. I was not the kind of daughter any respectable God-fearing woman would ever want to call her own. Did those women who walked the streets in their gaudy gowns and painted faces, selling their bodies, even have mothers or had they all disowned their daughters, cast them out of their hearts the way Abby had me? Even being a mere stepmother to one such as me would shame Abby. I was an object of disgust, riddled with sin, more loathsome than any toad, snake, or slug! I suddenly wanted very much to be invisible, so no one could look upon my shame.
But there was another reason I chose to hate Abby, one that no one else ever guessed. When I looked at her I sometimes thought I was looking into a magic mirror that foretold the future—my future. I saw too much of myself in her. It frightened me so much that I shrank and ran from her and pushed her away every chance I could even as I secretly despised myself for my cruelty, simply because I didn’t want to wake up one morning and discover that I had become her.
Abby knew what it was like to live without love. She had married Father for security and to acquire a ready-made family. It was a match of convenience, not love. For thirty-seven years she had stood by and watched her friends and female relations marry and give birth while she sat home alone, a dutiful and obedient daughter, an old maid without prospects seeking consolation in sweets, watching her hips and belly broaden with fat instead of a baby. I pitied her, and I also understood her, we were two of a kind beneath the skin, and then the likeness truly began to show.
I knew how it felt to hear the dressmaker cluck her tongue when my dresses had to be let out an extra inch or she measured me for new ones and paused to make a note of my broadening girth. I had seen a photograph of Abby as a young woman when her figure could still be called pleasingly voluptuous, but as the years passed, her waist disappeared, all pretense at fashion faded, and her dresses became more like sacks and then tents. Whenever I ate cookies for comfort, I thought of Abby. I thought of the future and saw myself becoming her and it terrified me.
And I knew in my heart, no matter what hopes and dreams I harbored, that if I ever made a match of my own it would be because my husband saw a great big dollar sign whenever he looked at me and not the love of his life. Father was right, no matter how much I denied and despised that hard and brutal fact—and he would never let me forget it—and whenever I looked at the mirror of Abby and saw myself in her, she wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t, let me forget either. The truth is ugly and viciously unkind!
I don’t know how much time passed before Bridget found me, sitting there in the blood, stroking Abby’s back. Bridget just suddenly seemed to materialize like a spirit out of the ether there beside me.
“Oh, Miss Lizzie, what have you done?” she wailed.
I looked up at her with a quivering chin and eyes wide and dumb as a cow’s.
Bridget had always liked Abby and her eyes were filled with tears as she crossed herself and muttered a quick prayer for Abby’s departed soul to rest in peace.
I began to sob and shake; I felt the emotions building within me like a volcano that was about to erupt with a vengeance and destroy everything. I had killed Abby, I hadn’t made things better, I had made them worse, and now I would surely hang or spend the rest of my life in prison. I would never be free!
“Hush now, macushla.” Bridget started to reach for me, to take me in her arms, but then stopped herself at the last moment and drew back quickly, as I was covered in Abby’s blood. “Shhh . . . you just sit quiet now, Miss Lizzie, an’ stay right here, don’t you move a hair now, an’ I’ll be right back, I will. . . .”
I heard her footsteps hurrying briskly down the stairs. Then up again. I heard a rustle of paper behind me. As she came back in I realized that Bridget was laying a trail of old newspapers from my bedroom to where I now sat beside the guest-room bed in a sticky fast-cooling pool of Abby’s blood.
“Come on now, macushla. Up you get. Keep to the paper now. There, that’s it, good. Follow it now, just like a trail; there you go, good girl, good girl!” she said, walking backward, beckoning encouragingly with her hands, urging me to follow her back into my bedroom.
Once I was inside she bade me stand on a square of old newspapers, then she rolled up her sleeves, poured lukewarm water from the pitcher into the basin and took a fresh menstrual towel from the bottom drawer of the bureau where I kept them and went to work bathing me, scrubbing me clean with swift efficiency. From time to time she would pause for a fresh towel, tossing the soiled one into the pail from beneath my bed. I think she used three, or maybe four. Then she fastened a fresh one between my legs. I remember her clucking sympathetically and daubing some thick, greasy yellow ointment onto my raw red thighs, tending me as though I really were a helpless tiny naked newborn babe incapable of doing anything for myself.
Hands on hips, she stepped back and looked me over carefully. My hair was damp where she had wet it to wash the blood out, but in the sweltering summer heat it would soon dry, and if need be I could always claim I had lain down to nurse my headache with a cold compress over my brow. She dressed me as though I were a child, kneeling at my feet to roll the black stockings up my legs and lace my numb, clumsy feet into my boots. At her urging I stepped dumbly into my drawers and petticoat. I seemed to suddenly awaken from a trance at the hard tug of corset strings cinching my waist in, followed by the heavy, stultifying folds of my best blue bengaline town dress sliding stiflingly over my head. For a moment I thought I might faint. I turned blank faced to Bridget and pointed down at the stained and crumpled blue housedress lying on my bed. I didn’t understand why she was dressing me up as though I were about to go to town. My housedress had been lying there innocently on my bed all along while I went naked to kill, so why couldn’t I put that back on?
“You’re to town now, macushla,” she gently explained as she nimbly did up the back of the bengaline with swift, sure fingers that didn’t shake a bit, “to the dress goods sale at Sargent’s, you know, an’ I’m to follow just as soon as I finish those blasted windows—Devil take them! You told me about the dress goods sale they’re havin’, at eight cents a yard, remember that when they ask, an’ sure they will, you know. Here’s your hat now, an’ your gloves. Be quick now! It won’t do for us to linger hereabouts. They’ll all be wantin�
� to know where we were an’ what we were doin’ when they find her lyin’ dead up here; sure they’ll be wanting to know where we were an’ what we were doin’ when it happened. There now, macushla.” She hugged me quickly and kissed my cheek. “It’s all right; your Bridget’s taken care of ev’rything. Come along, step lively now.”
She nudged the pail of bloody napkins, with her foot, back under the bed to tend to later.
“They’ll never go pokin’ their fingers an’ noses in there! Thank the Lord policemen are all men, an’ they’re a finicky bunch an’ want to hide their eyes an’ stop their ears at the mention o’ a woman’s monthly!” She paused and looked at me again. “Step lively now, Miss Lizzie; time’s a-wastin’!” she said, jerking her head, beckoning me to follow her, as she went out the door.
As I followed dumbly, numbly, my feet feeling like they were shod in lead and my hem dragging like a deadweight, moving just like Trilby in a trance following her Svengali, Bridget passed me on the stairs with a thick wad of soiled newspapers held at arm’s length out in front of her. By the time my sluggish feet carried me into the kitchen the newspapers were already in the stove, burning. And on the table, now clean and sparkling, lay “the Great Emancipator,” the hatchet that would either be my avenging angel and set me free or be the demon that would damn me to Hell for all eternity. I started to reach out and touch it, then snatched my hand away as though the hatchet had reared up and snarled and threatened to bite me.
“My purse, I forgot my purse,” I said with a stupid, slurry tongue. How curious, I was standing close enough to reach out and touch her, but my eyes . . . it was as though Bridget were standing miles away at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
“I’ll fetch it,” Bridget said, but I stopped her.
“No, I’ll go,” I said, and started for the stairs before she could stop me. My eyes still weren’t right and I had to grope like a blind woman for the banister. It took a great effort to pull myself up; my feet were still as heavy as stones and every step seemed as high as a mountain.