The Trial of Lizzie Borden(16)

Even more surprising was Lizzie’s account of her actions during the second critical period of that morning, the interval between her father’s return at about 10:45 a.m. and the discovery of his body about an hour later. Shortly after Andrew’s return to the house, Lizzie said she decided to go to the barn for a sinker in advance of her trip to Marion on Monday. Incredulous, Knowlton asked: “It occurred to you after your father came in it would be a good time to go to the barn after sinkers?” Knowlton pressed her about her expedition: Did she have a hook or fishing line? If, as she explained, there was fishing line at the family farm, did she not expect to find sinkers there as well?

She insisted that she had said there were lines and “perhaps hooks” at the farm but “I did not say I thought there were sinkers on my lines.” She said she knew there was lead in the barn and had thought it might be fashioned into sinkers. On her way to the barn, she stopped under the pear tree for some pears. She then went to the upper story of the barn for the lead.

Knowlton summarized sarcastically: “[You] went to the second story of the barn to look for sinkers for lines you had at the farm, as you supposed, as you had seen them there five years before that time?”

Lizzie retorted: “I did not intend to go to the farm for lines. I was going to buy some lines here.”

Knowlton could not believe his ears: “What was the use of telling me a while ago you had no sinkers on your line at the farm?”

After more sparring about the fishing apparatus, Knowlton sought to reel in his catch. He inquired minutely about how exactly she spent the claimed fifteen to twenty minutes in the barn. He insisted that her search for the lead could only have taken a few minutes. Lizzie volunteered that she went over to the west window, straightened a curtain, and ate her pears. Knowlton asked: “Do you mean to say you stopped your work and . . . sat still and ate some pears?” Recalling Lizzie’s earlier testimony that she told Abby she would not eat dinner, he added sarcastically: “You were feeling better than you did in the morning . . . Well enough to eat pears, but not well enough to eat anything for dinner?” Knowlton concluded his questions about the barn, observing, “You have put yourself in the only place, perhaps, where it would be impossible for you to see a person going into the house?”

Knowlton’s incredulity may have arisen, in part, from a lack of understanding of the life of leisured women. Lizzie’s account of her activities seemed unfathomable to a man accustomed to a life of purpose. It was hard to imagine Knowlton tarrying to eat a pear while on the hunt for some object he needed. But was Lizzie’s progress around the house and out to the barn any more dilatory than that of other women of her station? One day was much like another. Would other women like Lizzie Borden be able to account for their time minutely even if their lives were of manufactured and restless activity?

Knowlton explored Lizzie’s knowledge of the Borden arsenal. (He helpfully mansplained the differences between a hatchet, “a short handled, wide bladed instrument,” and an axe, “longer handled and smaller bladed.”)

Lizzie said she “knew there was an old axe down [in the] cellar,” but disavowed knowledge of any hatchets. Knowlton then asked, “Can you give any occasion for there being blood on them?” Lizzie said that her father “killed some pigeons in the barn last May or June.” She thought “he wrung their necks.” But when she saw the dead pigeons in the house, she noticed a few were “headless.” She could not say whether the heads “were twisted off” or severed. She did recall that she had asked, “Why are these heads off?”

Before ending the day’s ordeal, Knowlton returned to the source of the discord in the Borden household. He sought “the particulars of that trouble that you had with your mother four or five years ago” about the Fourth Street house, formerly owned by Abby Borden’s father.

Lizzie gave an uncharacteristically loquacious response: “The stepmother, Mrs. Oliver Gray, wanted to sell it and my father bought out the Widow Gray’s share. She did not tell me and he did not tell me, but some outsiders said he gave it to her; put it in her name. I said if he gave that to her, he ought to give us something. Told Mrs. Borden so. She did not care anything about the house herself. She wanted it so this half-sister could have a home . . . And we always thought she persuaded father to buy it. At any rate, he did buy it and I am quite sure she did persuade him. I said what he did for her, he ought to do for his own children. So, he gave us grandfather’s house. That was all the trouble we ever had.” Knowlton replied mildly that she had still not explained the trouble between them. Perhaps he, the devout son of an itinerant minister, could not imagine that Andrew’s conveying a half interest in a modest house to his wife could cause the rift in the household, a rift that persisted until Andrew’s and Abby’s deaths. Lizzie replied, as if it were obvious, that “I said there was feeling four or five years ago when I stopped calling her mother.” And, she added tartly, “I told you that yesterday.” She then explained that her father bought the Ferry Street house “back from us some weeks ago. I don’t know just how many.”

Perplexed, Knowlton asked, “What do you mean by ‘bought it back’?”

Lizzie replied: “He gave us money for it.” Knowlton let the point drop.

Lizzie’s second day of testimony revealed how much the property dispute still rankled. In contrast to her terse answers to Knowlton’s other questions, she lost her verbal self-control when discussing the transfer. Moreover, the timing of Andrew’s repurchase of the Ferry Street house from his daughters was suggestive. He had transferred his interest in the house five years earlier. Could it be a coincidence that he would decide to buy it back from them a few weeks before he died? Might the cash have been intended to mollify his daughters in advance of changes to his will?