Doug WaltersBy Doug Walters
First published in November/December, 2006, Volume 3, Issue 4, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
Of Bordens and Butterflies
(A Momentary Lapse)
AUTUMN
1894
Autumn strikes again, or did so barely a fortnight ago as I scribble here. She has come hard and fast as autumn sometimes does, but with such a force as to stun the viewer into a state of almost tender contemplation:
Oh thou beauteous Mystery,
Solved are ye at last! How strange it
Be that such wonders so pleasing to
The eye should come of nature’s death.
Nonsense, fair reader! I have not been swimming in the spirits today—or yet today I should say; when the time should come (it’s far too early in the day at present) I might be amenable if not to a swim, at least to a dip of the toe. For the moment, however, I will make do with other spiritual things and a common bit of nonsense known as the daily business.
The sisters Borden? Well, it seems they too are presently suffering some profound desire to commune with nature, as it were. The both of them recently departed the French Street domicile—off to Marion on a fishing trip, of all things. The most reliable of filthy rumors has it that Miss Lizzie actually went so far as to invite Attorney General and Mrs. Hosea Knowlton to share in their sojourn. Mr. Knowlton reportedly dispatched a note to the French Street address declining the invitation with thanks, explaining that the duties attending his present office prevent him from accepting at this time. He did, though, send a gift or remembrance of sorts: a roughly middle-sized box of lead sinkers, appropriate to fishing.
The note (according to a servant who saw it) read:
Miss Borden,
I find myself unable to accept your kind invitation at present. I send along this box of sinkers. May they keep you out of the barn at No. 92 and bring you luck in your angling.
Regards,
H.M. Knowlton
Attorney Gen’l
Some days there are which are most unkind, completely uncooperative when it comes to getting things done. Such a day is today in the office of ye humble Compositor. I had planned a poker game with Ed Porter of the Globe—always a good source of something in the way of news, whether it be true, partly true, or entirely fancied.
Luckily for the finances however (his finances—ye humble Compositor can do a thing or two more than compose and set type) the planned game had to be called on account of an unexpected dental visit by friend Porter. We shall see next week what the story behind that one is, but he did not sound at all well on the phone this morning.
So much of the day thus far has given way to a rather thoughtful turn of mind—interesting of itself, but highly unproductive. As with most things, the fault is my own. It’s what I get, I suppose for even thinking of having that new window put in the office here. By some fortune (whose ultimate effect I’ll admit is presently debatable) it just happens to look out into a small and particularly picturesque grove of red maple trees.
If that’s not bad enough, the butterflies are even in cahoots against me. There was a pair of them this minute, perched on the sill of the new window—fighting, of all things! (At first sight I thought of other things but then reason told me it had to be a fight.) If you’ve never seen butterflies fight, you have indeed missed a sight!
I laid down a three-penny bet on the orange one to win because he was rather the larger and looked pretty mean as butterflies go, then turned a resigned yet hopeful eye to the day’s mail.
I was about to open my copy of The Independent when a muffled thud against the windowpane announced that the battle had renewed in earnest.
Some explanation of this publication: The Independent has now been in circulation for some years, having begun its existence (as I understand it) as a publication of the Congregationalist church. A number of years ago its scope was broadened beyond strictly religious matters, however, and it became something of a haven for writers. Among those writers The Independent has been associated with over many storied year, are—to name but two—Henry Ward Beecher, the famed minister and abolitionist whose sister, Mrs. Stowe, penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the late Mr. Sidney Lanier, renowned Georgia poet. Reverend William Hayes Ward of The Independent authored a “Memorial” which appeared in Poems of Sidney Lanier, first published some ten years or so ago, in 1884, by Mrs. Mary D. Lanier, who survives her husband.
This then is the venerable Independent, in whose pages I did seek refuge against the Lepidopteran Armageddon then developing upon my humble windowsill.
So I enjoyed a few minutes of relative peace among its pages—a solitude broken only by the occasional muted thud as foe did meet foe.
But, as sometimes happens with “Indian summer” in the northern regions of New England, it was not to be for long: I turned an Independent page and found myself face-to-proverbial-face with a verse penned by a young man of Lawrence, Massachusetts. I had no quarrel with it per se`—it’s really very good, finely-written and thoughtful, as the best of them ought to be. All its ‘daughters of music’ did sing as I scanned it, striking notes and chords which were all-at-once pleasing and yet somehow deeply-stirring.
The single clinker struck by the verse involved its overt subject: it was an elegy to a blessed butterfly!
With shake of head and heavy sigh punctuated by thuds against my window I began to read.
In a moment my thoughts had traveled beyond the recorded demise of some poor and pathetic butterfly (whose end in and of itself fairly fit the occasional thud which indicated the nearby struggle) and I found myself betaken down an odd, unexpected path. My thoughts wandered back some two years over those few minutes, to the horrible events which occurred one August morning upon Second Street—those with which the whole of the intelligent world, it might be fairly said, is now thoroughly familiar.
Of course poetical interpretation is a matter unto itself. A verse means what it means to the individual, and quite often the individual reading is not at all what the writer had in mind when pen first scratched paper. (One noted exception to this rule might be found in the works of the late Mr. Lear, the “Nonsense Prince” of our age. I once vowed to seek out hidden meaning in Lear’s work—it was a slow day, I had nothing much else to do. The only result was a broken chair and a fair bit of soreness in the ribs, on account of excessive laughter.)
But to return to the former issue—in reading the work of this talented young feller, the butterfly façade collapsed right quick. For all the world I could not help but feel that some of these lines fit the Borden family in some way.
Three immediate examples which leap to mind are:
Ah! I remember me
How once conspiracy was rife
Against my life—
The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
The breeze three odors brought,
And a gem-flower waved in a wand!
“Mrs. Borden through and through, poor thing,” I thought to myself.
“Hmmm? Who’s that?” At that moment my lepidopteran ruminations ceased, being disturbed by two raps upon the office door. I rose and opened it.
“Well, Porter—come in here feller! I surely didn’t expect to see you today!”
The visitor was none other than Ed Porter, apparently not long finished at the dentist. The poor man looked as if he’d been freshly whipped by a crazed horde of chipmunks or similar such wildlife: his hair was badly mussed, the left side of his face freshly scratched, and both cheeks bulged outward, packed full of gauze and a material which appeared to be some sort of cotton wadding.
His eyes I noticed bore an odd look, suggesting a mix of mystification and blood-curdling terror.
He said something, which thanks to the state of his mouth came out as “Mfffflllllzzzzzzzlllllllllllwwwwggggg!”
“No, I’m actually not busy at all now that you ask—and you’re quite correct, that misery does indeed love company,” I said, figuring to cover as many possibilities as might be reasonably covered.
“Grrrrmmmmmmmppphhh!”
“Here, let’s make this easier,” I said as I handed Porter a paper and pencil. He nodded, making a small sound which I took to be an offer of thanks.
Note: The following is a transcription of the ensuing conversation between myself and friend Porter. The order of the exchanges should indicate the speaker fairly well. If need be, notice will be given as to whom is speaking.
“So I would suppose the dental visit didn’t go all that well?”
“Nooooooooo!!” (Here friend Porter shook his head emphatically.) “Three teeth were removed.”
“Good grief! Well when you phoned earlier today I knew things were not good. I had no idea though that it would be so serious. You didn’t either? (He shook his head again, grimacing, and scribbled that he had made a mistake in visiting a different dentist, mentioning the name and location.)
“Wait a minute—you must mean a different dentist. The only one I know around here by that name who’s any sort of a doctor, he’s a veterinarian specializing in horses.”
Grrrrbffffffffflllllllll!! (“Not that one!”)
“Well, that’s good news. There’s a difference between horse teeth and people teeth!”
(Friend Porter here scribbled an expletive which I will not record.)
“Say, have you seen the week’s Independent yet? There’s a strange little poem in it called ‘My Butterfly: An Elegy.’ Written by a young feller I never heard of before, out of Lawrence, Massachusetts I think.”
Friend Porter gestured in the negative
“Well, give a listen. Does this remind you of anyone?”
Laying the magazine open, I read to friend Porter the following:
When that was, the soft mist
Of my regret hung not on all the land,
And I was glad for thee,
And glad for me, I wist.
He shook his head, inquiring who I was thinking of.
“Well, it has nothing to do with her, mind you,” I said. “But when I first read that stanza there earlier today, it struck me as befitting of words Miss Lizzie Borden might speak or have spoken over the grave of her late father.”
Porter looked at me puzzled for a long moment, but puzzlement was soon displaced by the light of dawn in his eyes after I read it again.
I read him another part which I found particularly striking:
Save only me
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
“That one too I find to fit her—not for something she’s known to have ever said or done, but more as something she might think. Remember the ring, Porter, that which Miss Lizzie gave her father as an affectionate token? ‘Save only me/ There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.’ None will ever love him as she loved him—and none will ever mourn him as she will mourn him.”
“If she mourns him at all?” The question appeared upon friend Porter’s writing-paper, and I had to own that it was a good question indeed.
“I wish I could write like that.” I said, rather absently and to no one at all particularly. The many-layered quality of the verse left me with an odd and uneasy feeling—as though some truth stared up at me from the page, but a truth I could not quite see.
“I can write like that.” Porter scribbled this next upon his paper. I would have paid him no mind, except for that after he wrote it down he jerked his thumb toward his own chest and tried to smile a prideful smile. Unfortunately the gauze and wadding had puffed out his face so that he looked like nothing so much as a bright-eyed chipmunk in imminent danger of explosion.
“Ha! Keep tellin’ them falsehoods feller, and one of these days some little old lady with white hair and a bad case of rheumatic bones will sneak up behind you on the street and whale time out of you with her bumbershoot! All the King’s horses and all the King’s men—exactly that sort of business. But your head will be the humpty-egg.”
Friend Porter gazed at me, a “harrumpphhh” escaping his lips. He scribbled yet again, furiously, on his paper.
“Nonsense,” I said. “What that young feller has written in that magazine is like a good bottle of wine. What you write for the newspaper bears no resemblance at all—comes off like, like cheap gin thrown together by some questionable method and recipe, distilled and dispensed merely to agitate the masses and feed their unquenchable lust for public misery and bloodshed.”
Porter looked at me and growled, a fire in his eyes.
“Oh sure, it’s what you’re paid for; I understand that. But for you to sit here and compare it to poetry is ludicrous at best. I’d venture to guess even the Borden sisters would agree on that point.”
Friend Porter asked if I’d heard of the latest goings-on in French Street. When I said I had not, his pencil was seized anew by a fit of scribbling:
“Well, it seems that Miss Lizzie has made contractual arrangements with the keepers of a Chinese laundry situated not terribly far from her former home, to provide laundry service to the home on French Street. Miss Lizzie was there just yesterday arranging matters!”
“She was? Did you see her there, Porter, or did . . . ?”—He was scribbling again, so I waited. Aha! He had not seen her himself, but had word from someone passing the laundry.
“Oh? Have you written anything about it yet in the Globe?”
Porter replied that he had not, on account of the dental visit.
“What if I were to tell you that the Chinese laundry sighting of Miss Lizzie (or either of the Borden sisters) yesterday—you did say yesterday—is a barrel of hogwash? It never happened, or let me say that your source on this one is very badly mistaken.”
Porter looked at me in utter disbelief—one of those “How dare you question my sources?” looks.
“You think you’re the only one that has sources? That’s simply not so. You want to know how I know the Chinese laundry story is nonsense? Because one of my sources, a servant at the French Street domicile—whom I have spoken to personally by the way—confirmed that both sisters are not in residence at the moment. Miss Emma and Miss Lizzie left for Marion two days ago, apparently with a bit of fishing in mind.”
His cheeks bulged the more, but friend Porter made no move to speak. “Take a look at this, feller. You’ll see what I mean exactly.” I handed him my copy of the Attorney General’s note.
“That’s not the actual note, mind you, but is a copy of the note, which the servant was kind enough to show me. I copied it just as it was written.”
“Who fishes in weather like this—this season?” came the question.
“Folks with money, feller,” I said. “Folks with money, or those in need of it.”
Porter’s chipmunk cheeks deflated a bit as he read the note again.
“Look at it this way feller: I’ve saved you a small bit of work, and possibly even a bit more trouble. Let Hank Trickey be your example: you deserve a better end than his.”
“Now then, put a bandage on that wounded pride of yours and let’s have a go at the cards, shall we?”
Porter brightened at my suggestion.
“That’s a good feller.” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Now, since you are somewhat the worse for wear, why don’t we do it like this: if you want to raise, just jerk your thumb up in the air and toss your pennies.
But be warned: I’m already three cents behind thanks to a bet on a butterfly fight that I’d swear was fixed.”
“Huh? No, I think ‘Robert Frost’ is a fine name to publish under. Jack Frost has a job already. Deal the cards, Ed.”
