Emma was dismissed. She wasn’t giving them anything. I wondered if Emma was like me, a protector of sisters, willing to do anything to keep them happy and safe. In the illustrations, it always looked as if Lizzie tried to make eye contact with her sister, and Emma was always looking away. It made me think she knew something about her sister that nobody else did.
I got a kick when Lizzie was made to look at her father’s broken skull. ‘This is what an axe can do,’ the prosecution told the jury. I knew what a lot of things could do. I had seen Andrew and Abby’s heads, had smelled the heat coming out of their skulls. I’d always wanted to see what their heads were really like once the skin had been peeled back. Were they like plaster dolls? I read and reread these articles like it was breathing.
A black box was brought into the courtroom, placed on the prosecution’s table and was opened. Out came Abby’s skull, out came Andrew’s, chiselled white-yellow bone. The courtroom gasped, Emma snapped a cry, Lizzie lost control, fainted where she sat. Imagine how they would’ve reacted if they saw that firsthand, all fresh, like I had. But I knew the score—the prosecution was doing this in the hope they would find a weapon to match the injuries. They would never find it. That made me laugh good and proper.
‘This is an outrage!’ Jennings said. ‘Absolutely no consultation was made with my client and her sister to do this to their parents.’
Why would anyone ask the sisters whether they could decapitate the bodies after the funeral service? The medical doctors would’ve waited until the last horse-drawn carriage had left Oak Grove Cemetery before bringing the coffins into the women’s quarters near the cemetery gates and opening them up. The sight that must have been. Like all dead things, the Bordens would have slipped from their skins, bodies bloated before returning to size, their heads a mess of summer hate. The doctors would have held their breath, readied themselves to remove the decomposing heads so that the bodies could be put back in the ground, covered up and mourned over.
The prosecution made the scene sound warm, a family-friendly vacation—the heads took a trip to Boston, rode train carriage comfort, and arrived at North Station, made their way over paved, horse-browned mud roads, past multi-storey sandstone buildings and down sidewalks to the Harvard Medical School. Squirrels climbed oak trees as the heads neared, streetcars dinged greetings, welcomed them to Boston, power lines zapping as electricity pulsed like blood. A grand city show for the sad New England heads. Andrew would’ve thought it all too much.
I learned what it took to boil human skin from bone. First, a vat of water was brought to the boil, then the heads were taken from their box, and a thick fluid spilled from the underside, soaked into the velvet lining. The medical doctors said, ‘We realised then that their brains had begun to liquefy. Mrs Borden’s brain had evacuated out through the large hole in the right of her skull.’ Evacuated. I liked that, just like the image of water boiling and the heads being dropped in like mutton legs, bounced around the pot in a dance until skin bubbled like animal fat, floated to the surface in a mess of hair.
There were illustrations of the skulls being held high in court. The Bordens, what was left of them, had kept well, and it was easy to see how much the axe had destroyed. But Jennings didn’t like it. ‘Your Honour, it would please us if the heads were put away this instant. This does nothing to solve the crime. Poor Miss Borden is a mortified mess. Look at her.’ Everyone would’ve looked at poor, pale Lizzie, just as they had done all throughout, and Jennings said, ‘I’d like to take this moment to state the obvious. Her demeanour proves she couldn’t have committed the crime. The very sight of the heads is making her ill.’
The heads were put away. Nobody had any sense of fun.
On the thirteenth day, the day I had been waiting for, Lizzie took the stand, spoke for herself. But it was for nothing. She touched her forehead, composed herself and said, ‘I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me.’ Then she sat down, said little else on the matter. I remembered her back in the house. She seemed to have a lot to say then. She had been nothing but a drawn-out mumble, a repeat of prayer, of know-it-all excitement.
Both sides made final arguments and the jury was sent to deliberate whether or not they would let a respectable woman hang from the neck. If she had been someone like me, like one of my sisters, they would’ve rushed her out of court and done it themselves. The jurymen considered the fact that no one found blood on Lizzie, considered the fact that the house showed no signs of forced entry, considered the fact that Andrew could be a very hard man, considered that there was no murder weapon found. If I’d been there, I would’ve given them so much more. When the twelve men decided Lizzie was not guilty, because, ‘We believe women just don’t do this type of crime,’ the courtroom broke out like cannons, cheers lasted for three minutes and could be heard almost a mile away. It reduced Jennings to tears, reduced Lizzie to an ecstatic. Emma sat with her sister, and waited for Lizzie to regain her composure.
I got thinking that if I had been there, I would have shown them the axe head and Abby’s skull, told them that thanks to John, the Bordens would have died regardless. They needed someone to tell them that it’s family you need to worry about, not an outsider. I knew what people were capable of.
‘No murder weapon found.’ I’d been keeping a big Borden secret for a decade. I’d saved Lizzie. And now she owed me, John owed me. I liked the idea that one day, this little thing might show up, bring her what she deserved. Give me what I deserved. Maybe I’d feel right about things, could search again for my mama and my sisters after I’d finished with Fall River, go and belong to a family once more, tell them that they no longer had to worry about Papa.
I stole onto a train to Fall River. When I arrived I walked through the same streets that John had shown me. There was the same sulphur-river smell, the sounds of church-bell booming like an ache. My gums bled and I went in close to a shop window, opened my mouth. A tooth hung. I gently pushed the tooth back into the gum line, and pushed on to Second Street.
There was the algae-green tiled roof of Lizzie’s house. Pedestrians weaved in and out of each other, children laughed and poked each other’s arms, legs. Near the house, people crossed the street, crossed their hearts, zigzagged briefly from one side to the other. I quickened towards it. A small boy darted out in front of me, yelled, ‘Karoo-karoo, I touched it! I touched the murder house!’ and raced away to a group of children waiting down the street. They took his hands and rubbed them. The boy looked back towards the house he had escaped from, saw me, and said, ‘Don’t do it, mister. It’s cursed.’