Starting from Seneca Falls

by Karen Schwabach

  If only Bridie were going to live in that house, with those friendly-looking people.

  No such luck. The wagon was out of town now, heading down toward the shore of Cayuga Lake.

  Dobbin drew to a stop. A wooden tollgate blocked the way.

  A woman came out of the stone house beside the gate.

  “Two shillings to cross, please,” she said.

  It had seemed odd to Bridie, when she’d first arrived, that Americans used English money, mixed in with their own.

  “But my wagon’s empty!” said Mr. Kigley. “We ain’t come to trade, we ain’t boughten nothing!”

  The woman had the air of having heard that before. “A wagon is a wagon.”

  “But I didn’t pay in the morning coming over!”

  “No one was at home, so we left the gate up. Now it’s two shillings, please.”

  Mr. Kigley swore.

  Bridie was shocked. She’d seen awful things in her life, things so terrible that the nightmares still woke her up with a jolt in the dark. But she had never, ever heard a grown man swear at a woman. It was illegal to swear.

  Mrs. Kigley looked stricken at what her husband had done. She turned to the tollgate woman. “I’m so s—”

  “No one asked you!” Mr. Kigley snarled.

  Bridie got to her feet. She had more than half a mind to jump out of the wagon right then. Later she wished she’d done it. But the wagon wheeled around suddenly and she fell down on the boards. Soon they were cantering along toward the free bridge a few miles to the north.

  After they crossed, the wagon went on for a couple of hours—no longer at a canter, or even a trot. Dobbin was tired.

  How far were they getting from the poorhouse, and from Seneca Falls? Too far, Bridie thought. I should jump out. I should run.

  Then the horse turned off the road and up a dirt track. They passed through fields and stopped beside a whitewashed house and barn with a well in the front yard.

  And they were home.

  It didn’t feel like home, of course. Home was still Ireland. Home was still a stone cottage, even after the roof had been pulled down by the landlord. Home was with her parents and brothers, making a shelter as best they could of the walls and the open sky….

  Bridie blinked back memory. Ireland seemed a lifetime away, though she’d left only a year ago. This was here and now, and she had to be brave and face it.

  She was on an American farm, and not a particularly poor one.

  There was a small clapboard farmhouse and a barn. Hogs rooted in a farmyard that buzzed with flies. The place smelled overwhelmingly of hog. Chickens pecked and gurgled amongst the hogs. There would never be hunger here, thought Bridie.

  But the place felt dangerous, all the same.

  It was a long way from anywhere.

  She put her hand in her pocket and clutched the pebble from her mother’s grave.

  “Come in and help me get supper,” said Mrs. Kigley, as Mr. Kigley saw to the wagon and Dobbin.

  Bridie followed her through the kitchen door. There was a big fireplace with a kettle hanging over top of it. The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke and old onions. There were more flies. It was too warm, but kitchens always were in summer.

  A girl came into the kitchen.

  Bridie hadn’t been expecting that. Well, no one had told her anything. But there she was, the girl, about a year younger than Bridie. She had tight brown braids and a homespun dress and she stared at Bridie as if Bridie were some kind of creature in a circus.

  “That’s Lavinia,” said Mrs. Kigley. “I’ve had five and she’s the only one that lived.”

  This struck Bridie as an uncomfortable sort of introduction, but she smiled and tried to look friendly. “How-do-you-do, Lavinia.”

  Lavinia scowled. “The last orphan we had was prettier than you.”

  “Lavinia, take Brigid out and get water,” said Mrs. Kigley.

  Lavinia grabbed two wooden buckets and half gave, half threw one to Bridie.

  “No one asked me if I wanted another orphan,” said Lavinia as soon as they were outside.

  Bridie didn’t answer this. Sooner or later she might have to deal with Lavinia, but now was not the time. There was a tarnation uneasy feeling about the Kigley farm. All was not right here.

  The well was stone-lined. There was a long wooden lever to raise and lower the bucket. In the next twenty-four hours Bridie came to know the lever and the bucket very well.

  Because the next day was wash day. And wash day needed bucket after bucket of water to fill the big copper kettles, to boil the wash.

  “You Irish?” said Lavinia as they wrung out Mr. Kigley’s shirts.

  Bridie nodded.

  “I’m American,” said Lavinia. “American is better than Irish.”

  This was certainly not true, but Bridie wasn’t going to get in a fight about it. Not out here in the middle of nowhere, with nobody on her side.

  “Was you in the famine?” said Lavinia.

  In the famine. As if it was a place people visited. Bridie nodded, briefly, and brushed a fly off her face.

  “I heard about them coffin ships,” said Lavinia. “Did you come over in one of them?”

  Again, a brief nod. Bridie didn’t want to think about it, much less talk about it to someone who thought Bridie’s life story was some sort of entertainment.

  “What was it like?”

  “Just a ship,” said Bridie.

  Lavinia narrowed her eyes, suspecting she wasn’t being treated with the honor she was due. “Did your parents die in the famine?”

  “Mm-hm,” said Bridie. Her father had, anyway. She gathered up a pile of wrung-out shirts and took them over to spread on the ground.

  Her father, and her brothers, and now there was only Bridie left.

  * * *

  The Kigleys didn’t let Bridie sit at the table with them at meals. She had to wait and eat the leftovers.

  This didn’t bother her. It was a nice change from the long, silent table in the poorhouse, waiting for grace before they were allowed to touch their spoons and then all slurping away at once.

  And she was careful to cook enough that there would be plenty left over. She brought up salt pork from the barrels in the cool, earth-smelling cellar. She cooked salt pork with beans, and salt pork with cornmeal, while the flies buzzed around. Sometimes she made hasty pudding.

  She cooked potatoes, too. Eating potatoes while people in Ireland were still starving for lack of them made her feel awful.

  She didn’t mind where she had to sleep; a straw pallet in a corner of the kitchen. She didn’t mind that the barn cats sometimes wandered in and shared it with her. She didn’t even really mind being awakened by flies crawling on her face. At least, not much.

  She didn’t mind the work, because it was about the same as the poorhouse in that respect.

  No, the thing she minded most was Lavinia.

  It started that first day, when they were doing the wash. Bridie went to feel the clothes, to see if they’d dried yet. She found herself grabbing a stiff, child-sized pair of breeches.

  She stared at them in dismay. The Kigleys did not have a son. These tiny breeches could only belong to Mr. Kigley, and they had been full-sized going into the wash.

  Bridie knew she hadn’t thrown these breeches into the boiling water. Lavinia must have done it.

  When Lavinia came out to feel the clothes too, a look of sheer terror flew across the girl’s face. Bridie felt sorry for Lavinia, for about a second.

  Then Lavinia said, “Look what you did! Idiot! You shrank Papa’s trousers!”

  “I did not! You were the one who put—”

  “Mama! The poorhouse girl shrank Papa’s trousers!”

  Mrs. Kigley came surging out of the house, grabbed Bridie by
the arm, seized up the stick used to stir the laundry, and began belaboring Bridie with it.

  “I didn’t!” Bridie yelled, ducking.

  “Do you know how long it took me to card the wool”—SMACK!—“spin the wool”—SMACK!—“weave the cloth”—SMACK!—“sew the—”

  “It wasn’t me!” Bridie screamed, struggling as the blows rained down on her. “It was Lavinia!”

  “It was not! It was not! Liar!” Lavinia danced around the melee.

  “Was too!” yelled Bridie.

  “You think I’d believe”—SMACK!—“a poorhouse brat”—SMACK!—“over my own daughter?”

  Bridie managed to break free. She ran to the barn, where she hid in Dobbin’s stall and fumed.

  Later, when Mr. Kigley came in from the fields, he saw what had happened to his trousers.

  He held up the tiny trousers, his two fingers spreading the waist to the full distance of ten inches or so. And Bridie felt a sudden pang as she thought how her own father would have made a joke of this, would have said they were bríste for a leprechaun. He would have waggled his fingers and made the pants dance, and laughed at his loss.

  That had been Bridie’s father. This was Mr. Kigley.

  He threw the ruined trousers aside and reached for a leather strap that hung beside the fireplace. And he turned on his wife. And he raised the strap.

  “It wasn’t me!” Mrs. Kigley cried, throwing up her arms to protect her head. “It was—”

  “IT WASN’T ME!” shrieked Lavinia, and ran out the door as the strap cracked down across her mother’s back.

  “It was the poorhouse girl!” yelled Mrs. Kigley.

  And Mr. Kigley turned on Bridie. The look in his eyes was terrible, like a mad animal. Bridie curled up into an egg on the hearth, her knees against her chest and her face in her knees, and hugged herself tight and waited for it to be over.

  After that, she knew what her real job in the Kigley household was. It was to take the blame.

  The next morning, Bridie woke up early. She brushed away the ashes on the banked kitchen fire and blew on the embers until a red glow squirmed through them. She added water to the pot from a bucket she’d brought in last night. She swung the pot across the fire.

  Then she went to the door and looked out.

  The gray morning mist reminded her of Ireland. There, the potato plants had been planted right across the yard and up to the cottage door. Here, the big vegetable garden was on the other side of the farmyard, behind its wooden fence. Lavinia had weeded it last night, while Bridie was making dinner.

  Through the fog she could make out something moving in the vegetable garden. Had some animals gotten through the fence? Or was it birds?

  And, by the way, why were there no hogs in the farmyard?

  Bridie felt a jolt of alarm.

  She ran across the farmyard as fast as she could, her bare feet squelching in the cold mud. The garden gate was open. Her heart sank.

  The vegetable garden—what was left of it—was full of hogs.

  Bridie yelled at a hog whose mouth was full of turnip greens. It chewed and stared at her. The other hogs went on munching.

  Bridie kicked the hog. She shoved. She hollered.

  She didn’t stop to think that the hogs were bigger than her and could be dangerous. She was only thinking about the vegetables. She knew what could happen to a family whose crops failed.

  She rushed around the garden, kicking and yelling and waving her arms, chasing and shoving the hogs toward the garden gate.

  “What is the meaning of this!”

  Bridie looked up over the rump of a black-and-white-spotted hog she was trying to shove through the gate. She saw Mrs. Kigley, with Lavinia close behind her.

  “The hogs got into the garden!” said Bridie, stating the obvious.

  “Why did you let them, you fool?”

  “I didn’t! Lavinia left the—”

  “I did not! It was the poorhouse girl!” shrieked Lavinia.

  Then Mr. Kigley came running out of the house. Lavinia and Mrs. Kigley took one look at his red, furious face and fled.

  That left Bridie, facing a raging Mr. Kigley, with only a hog between them.

  Bridie turned and ran across the ruined garden and clambered over the picket fence on the far side. She ran barefoot through the fields until she came to a creek, and then she dived down the bank and peered up, through a clump of tall grass, to see if Mr. Kigley was chasing her.

  He wasn’t. She stayed there, hiding, and gradually the soft sound of rushing water calmed her down. At last she saw him leave with Dobbin and the wagon…going to get more vegetable seeds, maybe.

  * * *

  Other things happened in the following days. A rope broke, and one of the firkins of butter cooling in the well fell down and was lost. One of the cats threw up on a wheel of cheese in the cellar. It was always Bridie’s fault.

  Bridie tried to think what to do. If she ran away to the poorhouse—assuming she could even find her way there—then the Fitches might just send her back here. Children were supposed to expect to be thrashed now and then. Most grown-ups regarded it as a good thing, an important part of a child’s education.

  Could she get the Fitches to understand that this was different—the maniacal look in Mr. Kigley’s eyes, the way his wife and daughter cringed from him, the way they blamed everything on Bridie?

  No. Probably not. Mrs. Fitch might understand, if she had the time to listen as she rushed from one duty to another, but Mr. Fitch probably would not, and it would be his opinion that mattered.

  At least the Kigleys had only taken Bridie on trial. They’d be taking her back to the poorhouse in another ten days or so. All she had to do was survive until then.

  She was lying on her pallet in the kitchen, trying to get to sleep, when she heard Mr. Kigley’s voice in the next room.

  “Girl’s working out pretty well,” he said.

  Just in a normal tone of voice. Just as if he’d never swung a leather strap at anyone.

  “She does as she’s told,” said Mrs. Kigley.

  Nothing about the hogs or the shrunken trousers. Nothing about any of the other things Lavinia had done and then blamed on Bridie.

  I bet they know it’s Lavinia, thought Bridie, infuriated.

  “Reckon I’ll have her indentured to me,” said Mr. Kigley, in a satisfied tone.

  Oh, no.

  Disaster.

  Bridie lay awake for hours, thinking what to do. If she left now, if she ran back to the poorhouse—

  Mr. Fitch would say it was good that she was going to be indentured. He would approve. After all, the poorhouse was too crowded as it was. He needed to get her off his hands.

  No good.

  Then it occurred to her—her indenture would have to be drawn up and signed, wouldn’t it? Surely the Kigleys would have to take Bridie along to get the indenture made. And then, in front of the people in the courthouse—would there be a judge?—and Mr. Fitch and everybody, if she absolutely refused, then surely they’d have to listen to her…wouldn’t they?

  This thought kept her going for another two days. Then matters came to a head.

  Lavinia broke a dish. And she blamed it on Bridie. And Mrs. Kigley told Mr. Kigley, and he picked up his strap with murder in his eyes, and Bridie ran.

  She ran out to the barn, and she ran past Dobbin’s stall, and she climbed the ladder into the hayloft and squeezed in among the bales of hay and hid.

  She heard the sound of someone coming up the ladder, and she guessed it was Mr. Kigley. She squirmed deeper into the summer-smelling hay. If he pulled the bales away, and found her, she didn’t know what she’d do…but she wasn’t going to let him hit her with that leather strap again. She’d jump out of the hayloft before she’d do that.

  She hear
d him go back down the ladder again. And then she heard the sound of hammering.

  She stayed where she was for what seemed like hours. The hay poked through her dress and got in her eyes. Her legs were stiff and cramped from standing perfectly still. There was no sound except for Dobbin stomping in his stall below, and the hum of crickets coming through the wide window of the hayloft.

  At last, she crept out from among the hay bales. Flies landed on her. She brushed them away.

  She went to the ladder to look down to the barn below.

  There were boards nailed across the opening. She couldn’t get down the ladder. She was trapped.

  Bridie went to the hayloft window. It wasn’t really a window, but more of a wide, open doorway, through which hay was pitched up from the top of a wagon. It was about fifteen feet to the ground.

  Too far to jump.

  Dusk came creeping in, the late, summer dusk, and then it was night. Bullfrogs croaked and the tiny peeper frogs screeched. When it was too dark for her to be seen, Bridie sat in the doorway and watched the stars spread across the sky, hundreds and then thousands of them, reaching to the far horizon. She tried to think what to do.

  The sky clouded over. The stars disappeared, and a soft rain began to fall.

  Morning would come, and the Kigleys might let her out, or they might not. Either would be bad.

  Her trial period would be up in another week. She might have a chance to get away then. But what if Mr. Kigley killed her before then? That was starting to look like a real possibility. Bridie imagined Mrs. Fitch writing the date of Bridie’s death in parentheses in her ledger, and waiting for the ink to dry, and closing the book.

  No doubt the sheriff would come out and investigate. There might even be a trial, and Mr. Kigley might hang. That wouldn’t do Bridie any good, though.

  There was nothing for it. She was going to have to run. And not back to the poorhouse; that would be the first place the Kigleys looked.

  She’d go to Seneca Falls, and then she’d figure out what to do. Starting from Seneca Falls, you could go anywhere.