This slow, grinding strain—years of suspicion, anger tamped down but never extinguished—pressed the family toward something no one could have foreseen, yet perhaps the house itself had always anticipated. The tension did not end with silence. It led, finally, to events unimaginable.
***
For my part, I was often taken on other outings through the years, carried into the woods abutting Watuppa Pond, or dragged across the rough paths near Collins Corner. The trips were never light. Firewood had to be gathered, stacked, and hauled, and the hunt demanded more than eyes and patience. Deer with glassy eyes, rabbits stiff with fear still clinging to their fur, and the occasional fox caught hungrily in the steel of a trap—all of it had to be cut apart, quartered, and loaded onto the butcher’s sled before we could return home. The work was bloody, the air thick with the iron tang of animal death, and I was there for it all.
One might wonder why I, small as I was, with a frame that never fully outgrew its own scrawniness, was brought along to such labors. Yet I never questioned it. I was made to be a helper. That was my role, and I bore it without protest.
I was not alone in this identity. My quasi-brothers were helpers, too, each bent toward a different kind of toil. One of us was tasked with killing fowl, merciless, and taking advantage of his sharp edge. Another, taller, with his back bowed and head heavy from endless digging, was passed among neighbors whenever there was need for earth to be broken. Together, we were a silent fraternity of service, bound not by blood but by use.
I remember one summer afternoon when my labor turned softer, when instead of blood and carcasses I found myself watching Lizzie in the backyard. I had helped build the pigeon coop that stood just beyond my door, a crude wooden frame that housed the small, cooing creatures. Lizzie cared for them with a tenderness I had rarely seen in her—hands gentle, voice quiet, her usual sharpness dissolved in the presence of those fragile wings. She lingered there, scattering feed, tilting her head to listen to the soft murmur of feathers brushing against one another.
It was then that the peace shattered.
Mr. Borden appeared suddenly, his shadow cutting across the yard like a blade. Without word or hesitation, he seized my tall brother, the one who had so often been driven into the ground, and dragged him toward the coop. Before Lizzie could react, the air filled with a flurry of wings and a terrible stillness after. One by one, the pigeons fell—every last bird dispatched with a swiftness that seemed both methodical and cruel.
Lizzie froze. For an instant, she seemed unable to breathe, as though the sight had driven the very air from her lungs. Then her shock gave way to fury. It was not the small anger of a child denied her way, nor even the sharp indignation of a grown daughter quarreling with her father. No, this was something else entirely—white-hot, searing, a fury that radiated from her in waves until it seemed the very dust in the yard trembled with it. I felt it in the air, in the earth beneath me. Every particle seemed infused with her rage, every atom stripped of oxygen by the intensity of her grief and outrage.
But Mr. Borden did not falter. He moved with the grim certainty of a man who saw no crime in what he had done. With my tall brother in hand, shallow burial pits formed in the hard ground, scraping soil aside to cover the small mounds of blood and bone. Lizzie’s fury stood in stark contrast to his indifference, yet he never once looked at her. Not a word passed between them. He finished his work, wiped his hands against his coat as though to rid himself of the stain of it all, and muttered under his breath, his voice low and hard:
“…that should keep the greedy vagrants from sneaking onto my property…”
With that, he stomped away, leaving behind only the raw earth, the silence of a daughter’s broken trust, and the faint smell of feathers and blood in the air. My tall brother, his work done, was thrown back into the shed without care.
I had seen death before—animals taken for food, labor that scarred hands and broke backs—but this was different. What I witnessed in Mr. Borden that day was not necessity but will. A cold, amplified certainty wrapped in the armor of property and control. For Lizzie, it was a wound that could not heal. For me, it was another mark in the long ledger of cruelty I had been forced to observe.
I turned the ferocity of that afternoon over in my head for days afterward, tasting it like metal on the tongue. Rage had a shape now—heavy, hot, dense—and I could not decide where it had come from. I had watched ire before: the butcher’s steady cleaving, the farmer’s impatient slaps, Mr. Borden’s cold indifference. But this—this surged differently, a white-hot animal that lived behind a face. I found myself wondering, with a chill that crawled along my spine, whether that level of wrath could live inside me.