Helen handed me a telegram. My legs pulled me towards the house even though I wanted to stand still. Somehow bags were packed. Then I was in a horse and carriage on the way to the train station, the way home. Down the road. Further down the road. My lips dried, throat tight. Further down the road my hands shook. Horses’ hooves: cymbals. Down the road. Down the road. I arrived at the train station.
I was uncomfortable on the train’s leather seat. My body stammered, muscle memory: ‘Your mother is not well,’ Father had told me when I was only ten. ‘She’ll need you to help her around the house.’ For weeks Father had avoided looking me in the eye. I took his impending grief for disappointment and resentment towards me. I had tried to be the best I could by staying out of his way, by making sure that little Lizzie was bathed, was read to at night. Every now and then I would sit on Mother’s bed and recite the day’s news: marriages, births, important business, district policy. Obituaries were never mentioned. ‘Doesn’t anyone die anymore, Emma?’ Mother laughed. But they did, they had. She would. Lizzie had simply wanted to hold Mother’s hands and stick them in her mouth. I did not understand how her world kept spinning. ‘Lots of wet kisses,’ Lizzie told me, and then she would yell, ‘Mama, wake up! I eat you.’
On the train back to Fall River I watched a coughing child and fussing mother. Further down the track. Further down the track. A terrible accident. I remembered two months before, the way Lizzie had crawled into my bed at dawn and whispered, ‘I just want to make him suffer . . .’ The way she had laughed. ‘Imagine if he fell down the stairs! What sound do you think he would make?’
I had thought nothing of it. The train went further down the track. Further still. Further still. The telegram in my lap the entire time:
Father hurt. Mrs Borden missing. A terrible accident. Come home.
THREE
BRIDGET
3 August 1892
THE FIRST TIME I tried to leave the house, Mrs Borden miracled herself an almighty flu, got her arms and legs shaking, got herself all hot, all sweat, all types of pain. Dr Bowen had to be summoned over and he told her, ‘Bed rest, love and attention is what you need.’ Mr Borden told me to take care of his wife. I’d take food to her, chicken broth and scone dumplings, have it splashing down the bowl, down my fingers, and she’d be propped up on white cotton-covered pillows, her royal blue bonnet tied tight around her sagging jowls, and she’d say, ‘What would I do without you? You’re looking after me just like you would a mother.’ She’d slurp her broth, dribble a little. I’d mop her up. Oh, she wasn’t anywhere close to my mammy, but I felt for her. I’d be there, cloth in hand, dabbing her forehead, telling her stories from home, rubbing cramps out of her feet, her lips curling like a cat, pushing her cheeks into plump. I felt for her. And that’s how she made me stay the first time, made me give her the love and care until I had no choice but to stay.
The second time I tried to leave, after Emma and Lizzie temporarily split the house in two by locking all the adjoining doors, Mrs Borden raised my wages to three dollars a week and gave me Sundays to myself. ‘Don’t let them put you off,’ she’d said quietly. ‘It happens from time to time. We’ll get over it.’
I weighed my options. I was the luck of the Irish. I took the money, took everything that came along with it. Mrs Borden said I’d made the right decision. I had no other choice. I could send money home and one day money could take me back home, to moss-green fields and craggy rock, to the place where smells of fresh salmon and bottom-mud water swam through the air, the place where I laughed most, to where Nanna’s ghost was waiting for me, to where my childhood lived in streets and trees and my cramped, thatch-roofed house, to the place where people talked about love like it was part of breathing.
I listened to the house, heard nothing but a crack in the roof and I stretched my legs out long in my bed, cotton sheets stuck to my skin. How long could I keep serving the Bordens? I thought of my family, all those faces, those suffocating hugs, those voices saying, ‘God love us,’ when things went wrong, and ‘Bridget this, Bridget that,’ those people around me all day and night, loving and bickering, my nanna and granddaddy, mammy and daddy, my brothers and sisters, all in that house, all together. Sometimes it could be too much and not enough.
I rolled over and lit the kerosene lamp, shined it at my wall. Seven years gone from them. The lonely time. On my wall, the photo taken at my American wake, my nineteen-year-old skinny-fed body, towards Nanna’s little old lady face, her body bones in her chair. We couldn’t afford the photographer but Mammy insisted, said, ‘We’ll pay the price later.’ Two copies were made: one for me and my journey, one for them and Ireland.
‘I’ll see ya again,’ I told them. ‘I want ta see ya again.’
I left the next day.
Now I was twenty-six. Now I was with the Bordens. It was getting hard to go back. Oh, but I had tried.
I didn’t want to face another day with Lizzie, not another day with any of them, not another day of God knows what. It was hot in the attic. The walls popped around me, the old wood, and looking at Nanna, at my family, I told them, ‘I’ve a plan to tell Mrs Borden that I’ll be leavin’ soon. I’m gonna come home.’ I smiled. It felt good. I sat up in bed, stretched. Then I was on hands and knees on the floor, my arm under the bed. I pulled out a heavy, round metal spice tin, green paint flaking, and coins rattled inside. I lifted the lid, lifted my St Matthew card, kissed him on the lips, counted my savings. One hundred and four dollars. Almost two years of saving in secret. It was enough for the ship home, to tide me over till I found another job.
When I had first arrived in Fall River from Pennsylvania, Mrs McKenney, the work agent, told me, ‘I’ll place you with the best families.’ The best families would bring higher wages, four dollars at least. The best families would bring me closer to my own. Mrs McKenney had checked me over, had read my references.
‘They don’t always like us Irish in their homes but we’re the most loyal.’
I nodded.
‘You look like a wonderful domestic. I know a family who could use you well.’ So she sent me along with my bag down Second Street to see Mr Borden. The street was lined with beech and poplar trees, the green blocking the sun, making my skin pimple up. I passed St Mary’s Cathedral, heard a choir hymn the Lord and I quickly Father, Son, Holy-Spirited myself, kept walking, was pushed to the edge of the sidewalk by a bald-headed child, his paw-hands chubbed against my legs. I knew women back home who’d’ve clipped him across the ears. Oh, I thought of it, and laughed at him. Second Street was full of manure, little green wildflowers in the middle of the street. I crossed the road, weaved through the manure field and knocked on a green door. A tower of a man, Mr Borden, his grey hair all neat, a pipe in his hand, answered the door, then let me in. ‘I pay two dollars a week,’ he’d said. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for.