Starting from Seneca Falls

by Karen Schwabach

  They got up to take their empty cups back to the lemonade stand. There was still a crowd of people from the convention milling around.

  “What I’m hoping to prove with my experiments,” one of the ladies was saying, “is that different gases will cause the sun’s rays to behave differently.”

  The woman she was talking to wore a somewhat glazed expression. “Well, I’m not quite sure what you mean, Mrs. Foote….”

  “I mean that human activity could affect the earth’s atmosphere. Cause the earth to warm up or cool down. If only I had access to a laboratory, and could correspond with scientific colleagues, like a man…”

  “How fascinating,” said her friend politely.

  Bridie noticed that Rose really did looked fascinated. This was science.

  But science wasn’t for women. Surely Rose had just heard Mrs. Foote explain that.

  The convention reconvened, but Rose went home to study, and Bridie went home to help make dinner. With so many people staying in the house, there was a lot to do. Usually they just had one dish for dinner—it was less work—but of course with guests, Mrs. Stanton wanted to do things up brown, with beef à la mode and vegetables and corn pudding and gooseberry custard and all sorts of things.

  There were a lot of dishes that got used in the cooking and had to be washed so they could be used in the cooking some more.

  So Bridie went out to the pump, again and again, to fill buckets with water and carry them inside. In the end she decided it would be less work to haul a washtub close to the pump and bring the dishes outside.

  She went into the washhouse to get a tub.

  The washhouse was dark and stuffy, and smelled of soap and dirt. An oaken tub hung on the wall, just visible in the gloom. The thing was heavy, and getting it down from its hook was a struggle.

  As she tried to work it free, she heard something stirring behind her. Probably a woodchuck. They had a burrow under the washhouse.

  Something touched her shoulder.

  Bridie jumped a mile. She spun around. Lavinia Kigley stood there, just visible in the darkness.

  “I’m not coming back, so you can forget that,” said Bridie. “I have rights.”

  “No one’s asking you to,” said Lavinia. “We’ve left.”

  She didn’t sound as haughty and, well, snotty as she used to sound back on the farm. She was talking to Bridie like an equal. It was rather discombobulating.

  “What, you’ve moved to town?” Bridie didn’t care; if the Kigleys had left their farm and moved into Seneca Falls, they still didn’t have any right to Bridie and she still refused to be afraid.

  “No, I mean Mother and I have left.”

  “Help me get this thing down,” said Bridie.

  Lavinia reached up, and together they managed to wrestle the heavy tub from the wall without dropping it on their toes.

  “We had to leave. We thought he was going to kill us.”

  Bridie remembered the wild, animal look that got into Mr. Kigley’s eyes sometimes. “That’s why I left too,” she said.

  Not confiding. Just letting Lavinia know this wasn’t Bridie’s problem. After all, he wasn’t her father.

  “And don’t think I’ve forgotten all those times you blamed stuff on me,” Bridie added.

  “I had to! I didn’t want to get killed!”

  “And you wanted me to get killed instead?”

  “Well, I mean, you’re just a girl from the poorhouse—”

  Bridie raised her hand to hit Lavinia. It had been building up in her.

  But Lavinia cringed and cowered, and Bridie instantly felt like a beast. She lowered her hand.

  “Look,” said Bridie, “you need to go to the poorhouse if you haven’t got anywhere else to go. They’ll take you in.”

  “People like us don’t go to the poorhouse! It’s for colored people and foreigners and idiots!”

  Bridie gritted her teeth. She was not going to hit Lavinia.

  “And it’s the first place my father will come looking for us,” Lavinia added, “and they’ll give us right back to him.”

  That was true. Bridie had seen it happen. After all, the poorhouse was always glad to reduce its numbers, and everyone knew that you couldn’t interfere between man and wife. Everyone knew it. You heard it in church at every wedding.

  If Mr. Kigley actually did kill his wife and daughter, then the law would take an interest.

  Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia were in exactly the same fix Bridie had been in at their house, except that, unlike her, they didn’t have rights.

  “Then go somewhere else,” said Bridie.

  “We don’t have anywhere else.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Let us hide here.”

  “In the washhouse?”

  “Yes. Well, Mama’s in the woodshed.”

  “It’s not my washhouse. Or woodshed. It’s Mrs. Stanton’s.”

  This was one of the strange things about Mrs. Stanton, Bridie had learned: Her house really was her house, and not her husband’s. She owned it.

  “Well, everyone knows Mrs. Stanton’s good at talking to men that aren’t treating their families right.”

  Bridie thought again about that killer look in Mr. Kigley’s eyes. Was Mrs. Stanton any match for that look? Should she have to be?

  “Phoebe! Dishes!” came Nancy’s voice from the kitchen door.

  “I’ll think about it,” Bridie told Lavinia. She dragged the washtub out to the pump.

  * * *

  Bridie and Nancy and Rose, who had been hired for the evening, ate first. Then they waited on table during dinner. Bridie carried out a big dish of buttered parsnips, and Rose brought in the corn pudding, and Nancy, with a flourish, brought in the beef à la mode.

  Everyone at the table bowed their heads, and Mrs. Stanton intoned, “Make us thankful for all the blessings of this life and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that often in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food.”

  Part of Mrs. Stanton’s strangeness was that she had very firm ideas about who ought to be thanked for dinner.

  “And are men to be permitted at your speech tonight, Lucretia?” asked Frederick Douglass as he passed the parsnips.

  “They were there today!” said Daniel Eaton.

  “Children are to be seen and not heard, Daniel,” his mother murmured.

  “As are men, and about time, no doubt. Had I known we were to be admitted, I would have gone,” said Mr. Douglass.

  The parsnips were all gone. Bridie went out to the kitchen to get more from the pot.

  “My speech tonight will be about reform in general,” Mrs. Mott was saying when she came back. “Anti-slavery, women’s rights, the care of the poor, and of course famine relief in Ireland.”

  Most of the time Ireland stayed in a tightly closed box in Bridie’s brain. But at Mrs. Mott’s words it leapt out, dancing like death, and stood stark and starving in the middle of the laden table.

  “I shall certainly look forward to hearing it,” said Mr. Douglass.

  Bridie didn’t realize she was frozen in place. She saw the dark green potato leaves poking through the soil on her family’s plot in Ireland. Filled every inch of the family plot, right up to the cottage door. They were bigger and greener than ever, in that year of 1845. It had looked like a good crop.

  Then the rains began.

  She remembered the strong plants suddenly getting dark spots, and then withering and dying overnight.

  The grain harvest on the estate survived. But the grain was for the English landlord. It was not for tenants like Bridie’s family.

  She remembered the wagons that hauled away the grain harvest to be shipped to England, while all over Ireland, potato plants died and potatoes rotted. She r
emembered throwing rocks at the wagons with her brothers, Michael and Seamus.

  Michael was a year older than Bridie, and good at school. Everyone said he might be a teacher himself someday. And Seamus was two years younger, and not much good at school at all, but clever with his hands. He could make things; baskets and such.

  But by then, by the time they watched the wagons, she and her brothers were getting weaker. Soon they couldn’t throw rocks anymore, but could only stand and stare as the wagons rolled and creaked down the dirt lane, passing other cottages of staring, starving people. Why was the grain going to England?

  To pay the landlords. And when the potato crop failed again the next year, and the year after that, and people were too weak to grow grain, the landlords didn’t get paid. So the landlords sent men to pull the tenants’ cottages down. And then Bridie’s father had gone out to break rocks for the road, to earn relief money. One day he had lifted his hammer to swing and had fallen down in the dust. And he hadn’t gotten up again.

  And then her brothers…

  Bridie felt Rose take her by the arm and lead her out to the kitchen.

  Bridie blinked. It was hot in the kitchen, and it smelled of beef à la mode, and Ireland was a long way away.

  Rose handed Bridie a tin cup of water and Bridie gulped it down, suddenly realizing she was very thirsty.

  “It’s like you try to keep it locked up all the time, and then when it comes bursting out it’s big enough to swallow you?” said Rose.

  “Yes,” said Bridie, glad she didn’t have to explain.

  “I know how that is.”

  They gathered up the dishes that were ready to be cleaned. Ireland was a long way away, and there was work to be done.

  “I put a washtub out by the pump to save hauling water,” said Bridie. “Oh, there’s something I should tell you.”

  Rose listened to her explanation about Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia. “Are they well hidden?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not the Underground Railroad, Rose.”

  Rose wasn’t having any. “The first thing is, are they well hidden. The second thing is, do they have food, water, and conveniences.”

  “Well, there’s conveniences out in the yard,” said Bridie. “Do you think we should tell Mrs. Stanton?”

  They both looked toward the dining room. Laughter and conversation filtered through the closed door.

  “She’s busy with her guests and her convention and everything,” said Rose.

  “We’ll wait till after it’s over and then tell her,” said Bridie.

  “If they haven’t gone away by then,” said Rose.

  Bridie nodded; it was what she’d been thinking too.

  “But we do have to feed them,” said Rose.

  Bridie opened her mouth to say that the Kigleys were horrible people who didn’t deserve feeding. Then she shut it again. When you’d watched people starve all around you, when you’d been starving yourself, well, then you couldn’t let other people go hungry. Besides, eating was probably a human right.

  Nonetheless, after they’d brought the food in from the dining room, Bridie took a certain satisfaction in selecting the least appealing bits to take out to the Kigleys.

  * * *

  Taking care of the Kigleys turned out to be an infernal nuisance. They had to be fed, and water had to be pumped for them. They could have pumped at night, under cover of darkness, but when Bridie mentioned this, Mrs. Kigley sniffed and said someone would hear the pump handle creaking.

  “So what if they do?” said Bridie, when she took them some bread for breakfast. “It’s not the Underground Railroad.”

  “How dare you compare us to colored people!” said Mrs. Kigley.

  “I wouldn’t. All the ones I know are nicer than you,” said Bridie.

  “The Underground Railroad is a travesty,” said Mrs. Kigley. “People ought to stay in the positions to which Providence has assigned them, and not run away.”

  “Except you,” said Bridie.

  They glared at each other for a moment. Then Mrs. Kigley looked away.

  “This bread is stale,” she said.

  “But better than nothing,” said Bridie meaningly.

  “Did you tell Mrs. Stanton about us yet?” said Lavinia.

  “She’s busy,” said Bridie.

  “You mean she won’t help us?”

  “I mean I didn’t tell her.” At the desperate look in Lavinia’s eyes, Bridie relented and added, “I’ll tell her when all these people leave. If you’re still here.”

  “We have nowhere else to go,” said Mrs. Kigley, as if that was somehow Bridie’s fault.

  Lucretia Mott’s husband, Mr. Mott, was to be chairman of the meeting on the second day, because men were going to be allowed to participate. Everyone agreed that having a woman in charge of a meeting where men spoke would be too shocking.

  “I’m not saying it couldn’t happen someday,” said one of the women. “But right now it would be too much, too fast.”

  “Indeed. We want people’s attention on the Declaration of Sentiments, not on who is chairing the meeting.”

  Bridie had her work to do around the house, but late in the morning she was sent to carry some sandwiches and cakes to Mrs. Stanton and her guests, down at the Wesleyan Chapel.

  It was another hot day. Bridie walked along the catwalk by the canal lock. The lock was closed, and filling slowly with water, while a long, covered canal boat waited patiently between the two sets of water doors.

  She hoped Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia would be gone by dinnertime. Surely there were other places they could go. It wasn’t Bridie’s job to help them. She didn’t owe them a thing.

  After all, nobody had helped Bridie and her mother when they were on the way to the poorhouse. Certainly Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia wouldn’t have helped….

  Bridie brought herself up short. It didn’t matter what Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia would have done. What mattered was what Bridie would have done. Surely she could be kinder than a Kigley.

  Maybe the Kigleys could get jobs. It ought to be possible for a woman and girl, together, to work hard enough to stay out of the poorhouse.

  Of course, if Mrs. Kigley got a job, her husband would go and collect her wages. He would collect Lavinia’s, too. That was how Bridie and her mother had ended up in the poorhouse.

  If only Bridie’s mother hadn’t remarried, she and Bridie could have made it.

  When Bridie got to the Wesleyan Chapel, it was even more crowded than the day before. Fans fluttered. The Declaration of Sentiments was being read and discussed, item by item.

  Bridie carried the basket of sandwiches and cakes up and set them behind the chairs near the podium. Mrs. Stanton was at the podium.

  “Next item,” Mrs. Stanton announced. She looked down at the Declaration of Sentiments, and then up at the audience. “ ‘He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.’ ”

  Bridie froze, just like she had last night at dinner. Only this time it was her mother that she saw: Bridie and her mother headed to the poorhouse, walking a line of light in a dark, uncaring world.

  A man in the audience stood up. “Well, actually—”

  Mr. Mott stepped up beside Mrs. Stanton. “The chair recognizes Mr. Ansel Bascom.”

  Mr. Bascom was a frightfully important man, a politician, and the owner of the apple orchard where the Fourth of July picnic was held—the orchard that the Cayugas had planted.

  “Actually,” said Mr. Bascom, “thanks to the Married Women’s Property Act, which I worked hard to pass in Albany this year, women in New York State do now have the right to control their own property if they inherit it or if it is given to them.”

  Mr. Bascom went on talking for quite a while. Bridie looked around her at the people in the hall. There wer
e men and women, all of them people who didn’t have to go to work today, a Thursday. Probably a lot of them didn’t have to work any day. There were boys and girls. There was Mr. Bascom’s daughter, sitting in the pew beside where he stood. She had white ruffles on her pantalets. There were no other girls with just stockings in the church. Bridie was the only one. As far as girls were concerned, it was strictly a white-pantalets meeting.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Stanton when Mr. Bascom paused for breath, “but the new law does not include a married woman’s wages. Those still belong to her husband.”

  “Granted,” said Mr. Bascom. “But since a woman, having chosen her husband, can surely trust him to expend those wages—”

  “BALDERDASH!” yelled Bridie.

  There were gasps amid a stunned silence. Every eye in the chapel was turned on Bridie. Even Mr. Bascom halted in mid-flow.

  Bridie wished, oh how she wished, that her Bump of Cautiousness wasn’t merely a hollow. She knew she was in disgrace. She was about to get thrown out of the chapel. Quite possibly she was about to lose her job.

  And she might get arrested for swearing, too. A girl could say fiddlesticks, but balderdash?

  She took a step toward the door, ready to flee, when the chairman’s voice rang into the silence.

  “The chair recognizes Miss Phoebe”—he turned to Mrs. Stanton, who murmured Bridie’s last name to him—“Gallagher.”

  All eyes turned to Bridie again, but this time they looked interested.

  “Well, um.” Bridie had to think of something to say, and fast. “Sometimes a woman’s husband maybe isn’t all he could be, and—”

  “Louder,” said several people, and “Can’t hear you!”

  Bridie stepped in front of the pulpit, where they could all see her, the only girl there that wasn’t wearing white pantalets.

  She remembered what boys had been taught about public speaking, in the schools she’d attended. She’d overheard the teacher telling the boys to talk to the back of the room. Bridie put her head back and looked at the people ranged around the gallery on three sides of the room. She tried to make her voice go up to the gallery.