Lizzie Borden with an axe
Gave her father forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her mother forty-one.
Childrens rhyme
Early in the m of the fourth of August, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Hot, hot, hot. . . very early in the m, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers uhe attack of white, furious sun already high iill air.
Its inhabitants have never e to terms with these hot, humid summers -- for it is the humidity more than the heat that makes them intolerable; the weather gs like a low fever you ot shake off. The Indians who lived here first had the seo take off their buckskins when hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the desdants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestahic wholesale into a try intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra behind drawn blinds and closed shutters; you wear clothes loose enough to make your own breeze to cool yourself when you infrequently move. But the ultimate decade of the last tury finds us at the high point of hard work, here; all will soon be bustle, men will go out into the furnace of the m well ed up in flannel underclothes, linen shirts, vests and coats and trousers of sturdy woollen cloth, and they garrotte themselves with ies, too, they think it is so virtuous to be unfortable.
And today it is the middle of a heat wave; so early in the m and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ast.
As far as clothes were ed, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this m, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock -- but, uhat, went a long, starched cottoicoat; another short, starched cottoicoat; long drawers; woollen stogs; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkiween her legs because she was menstruating.
In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementi, her belly in a vice, she will heat up a flat-iron on a stove and press handkerchiefs with the heated iron until it is time for her to go down to the cellar woodpile to collect the hatchet with which our imagination -- "Lizzie Borden with an axe" -- always equips her, just as we always visualise St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion.
Soon, in just as many clothes at Miss Lizzie wears, if less fine, Bridget, the servant girl, will slop kerosene on a sheet of last nights neer crumpled with a stick or two of kindling. When the fire settles down, she will cook breakfast; the fire will keep her suffog pany as she washes up afterwards.
In a serge suit, one look at which would be enough t you out in prickly heat, Old Borden will perambulate the perspiring town, truffling for money like a pig until he will return home mid-m to keep a pressing appoi with destiny.
But nobody here is up and about, yet; it is still early m, before the factory whistle, the perfect stillness of hot weather, a sky already white, the shadowless light of New England like blows from the eye of God, and the sea, white, and the river, w