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to the woodpile. The red receding from her face, Lizzie went down to inspect
the instrument of destruction. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand.
That was a few weeks before, at the beginning of the spring.
Her hands and feet twitch in her sleep; the nerves and muscles of this
complicated mechanism won't relax, just won't relax, she is all twang, all
tension, she is taut as the strings of a wind-harp from which random currents
of the air pluck out tunes that are not our tunes.
At the first stroke of the City Hall clock, the first factory hooter
blares, and then, on another note, another, and another, the Metacomet Mill,
the American Mill, the Mechanics Mill . . until every mill in the entire town
sings out aloud in a common anthem of summoning and hot alleys where the
factory folk live blacken with the hurrying throng: hurry! scurry! to loom, to
bobbin, to spindle, to dye-shop as to places of worship, men, and women, too,
and children, the streets blacken, the sky darkens as the chimneys now belch
forth, the clang, bang, clatter of the mills commences.
Bridget's clock leaps and shudders on its chair, about to sound its own
alarm. Their day, the Bordens' fatal day, trembles on the brink of beginning.
Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death
roosts on the roof-tree.
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
Lizzie's Tiger
John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Gun for the Devil
The Merchant of Shadows
The Ghost Ships
In Pantoland
Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost
Alice in Prague or The Curious Room
Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene
Lizzie's Tiger
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When the circus came to town and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living
on Ferry Street, in a very poor way. It was the time of the greatest parsimony
in their father's house; everyone knows the first hundred thousand is the most
difficult and the dollar bills were breeding slowly, slowly, even if he
practised a little touch of usury on the side to prick his cash in the
direction of greater productivity. In another ten years' time, the War between
the States would provide rich pickings for the coffin-makers, but, back then,
back in the Fifties, well -- if he had been a praying man, he would have gone
down on his knees for a little outbreak of summer cholera or a touch, just a
touch, of typhoid. To his chagrin, there had been nobody to bill when he had
buried his wife.
For, at that time, the girls were just freshly orphaned. Emma was
thirteen, Lizzie four -- stern and square, a squat rectangle of a child. Emma
parted Lizzie's hair in the middle, stretched it back over each side of her
bulging forehead and braided it tight. Emma dressed her, undressed her,
scrubbed her night and morning with a damp flannel, and humped the great lump
of little girl around in her arms whenever Lizzie would let her, although
Lizzie was not a demonstrative child and did not show affection easily, except
to the head of the house, and then only when she wanted something. She knew
where the power was and, intuitively feminine in spite of her gruff
appearance, she knew how to court it.
That cottage on Ferry -- very well, it was a slum; but the undertaker
lived on unconcerned among the stiff furnishings of his defunct marriage. His
bits and pieces would be admired today if they turned up freshly beeswaxed in
an antique store, but in those days they were plain old-fashioned, and time
would only make them more so in that dreary interior, the tiny house he never
mended, eroding clapboard and diseased paint, mildew on the dark wallpaper
with a brown pattern like brains, the ominous crimson border round the top of
the walls, the sisters sleeping in one room in one thrifty bed.
On Ferry, in the worst part of town, among the dark-skinned Portuguese
fresh off the boat with their earrings, flashing teeth and incomprehensible
speech, come over the ocean to work the mills whose newly erected chimneys
closed in every perspective; every year more chimneys, more smoke, more
newcomers, and the peremptory shriek of the whistle that summoned to labour as
bells had once summoned to prayer.
The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, leaned at a bibulous angle on a
narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the
old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses
lurching this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and
windows stuffed with old newspapers, and the snagged picket fence and raised
voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known
of the world only the circumference of their chain. Outside the parlour window
were nothing but rows of counterfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.
Such was the anxious architecture of the two girls' early childhood.
A hand came in the night and stuck a poster, showing the head of a
tiger, on to a picket fence. As soon as Lizzie saw the poster, she wanted to
go to the circus, but Emma had no money, not a cent. The thirteen-year-old was
keeping house at that time, the last skivvy just quit with bad words on both
sides. Every morning, Father would compute the day's expenses, hand Emma just
so much, no more. He was angry when he saw the poster on the fence; he thought
the circus should have paid him rental for the use. He came home in the
evening, sweet with embalming fluid, saw the poster, purpled with fury, ripped
it off, tore it up.
Then it was supper-time. Emma was no great shakes at cookery and Father,
dismissing the possibility of another costly skivvy until such time as plague
struck, already pondered the cost-efficiency of remarriage; when Emma served
up her hunks of cod, translucently uncooked within, her warmed-over coffee and
a dank loaf of baker's bread, it almost put him in a courting mood, but that
is not to say his meal improved his temper. So that, when his youngest climbed
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kitten-like upon his knee and, lisping, twining her tiny fingers in his
gunmetal watch-chain, begged small change for the circus, he answered her with
words of unusual harshness, for he truly loved this last daughter, whose
obduracy recalled his own.
Emma unhandily darned a sock.
"Get that child to bed before I lose my temper!" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]