Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (17 page)

No, I did not have a quarrel with Old Abby—Mrs. Abby Bridewell—on the evening of April 11. Yes, was there fitting a dress from six-thirty to close on eight. It was a taffeta with a lace collar and bead work on the bodice. We did not exchange sharp words then, or any time. She was exacting and particular, but no more so than most.

What I said to Mrs. Ord when I met her as I was leaving was generalities. I'd lost a thimble and pricked my finger, and I was tired out. With dressmaking in general. I didn't mean it personal about Mrs. Abby Bridewell. I liked her well enough.

No, I did not notice any bruises on Mrs. Bridewell. She did not mention bruises to me. Did not seem upset to me. She said she wanted the dress quick as she could get it . . . they all do.

Should think I would have noticed bruises when she tried on the dress, yes. Well, mostly I was pinning up the hem. She did not say anything to me about leaving Quahog Point. She seemed all right when I left the house.

That was when Mrs. Ord went in.

Statement of Walter Jones, age thirteen:

My name is Walter Jones. I am an orphan. I was bound out to Senator Bridewell by the Milk Street Orphans' Home, Boston, October 1910. He placed me in his mother's home to help with the chores. I worked in the stables, fetched wood, tended the yard, shoveled snow, and helped in the kitchen.

They sent me to the Quahog School. I was put back a year . . . the sixth grade. I did not like the school. Senator Bridewell promised me a new corduroy suit, but I did not get it. I had the back room behind the washroom . . . me and Cudworth had it. He's the hired man. He was good to me. He would take me with him to the motion picture show when the old lady let us go.

She promised us we could go Monday night, but we had to stay in on account of Senator Bridewell was there and we had to help in the kitchen at suppertime and after. Cudworth didn't want to, but she said we could go Tuesday.

We went Tuesday night. The dressmaker had been there right after supper, and then Mrs. Ord came to call. Mrs. Ord was there chatting with the old lady when we left the house. Didn't hear what they said. I was with Cudworth in the kitchen.

Went to the Scenic Palace. It was a two-reeler and we laughed. About this cowboy named Alkalai Ike. There was another two-reeler about a man who came home and found his wife sitting on the knee of a salesman. They had a big fight and he hit him with a chair. After that they had Lamont's Cockatoos, which was a bird act with white parrots. Then we went to the Center Ice Cream Parlor, and walked home.

I didn't see what time it was. There was a light in the parlor window. Cudworth and me thought the old lady was waiting up

for us to give us some chore. We went around back and in by the kitchen door. Didn't make a light. Didn't want her to see us. It had gone cold and windy, and Cudworth didn't want to get called to build a fire. We went quietly to our room in the back so as she wouldn't hear us.

I went straight to bed.

I think Cudworth went straight to bed.

In reconstructing Cudworth's inquest statement, the present writer had some difficulty in visualizing the deponent. Nowhere could I dredge up a description of the witness, who was delineated simply by age and by occupation as "hired man."

He was from somewhere "up coast." Had been some months in the Bridewell employ. Who pays much attention, after all, to a plodding figure in overalls as common to the rural scene as a pitchfork and a manure shovel? I finally settled on a cloddish young man with a sheaf of hair over one eye and a bandana slouching from hip pocket. Unless addressed, he wears the vacant expression one sees on the aimless idler who can spend an afternoon whittling a stick.

However, from Cudworth's subsequent statements in court and elsewhere—statements which remain on available record—one can construe the substance of what he must have said at the Coroner's inquest.

Q. State your name and occupation.

A. Name's Cudworth. Hobart Cudworth. I'm the old lady's hired man. ... Or I was.

Q. On the evening of April 11 you went to the moving pictures with Walter Jones?

A. To the Scenic Palace.

Q. Was anyone there at the Bridewell house when you left to go to the pictures?

A. A woman was there. Mrs. Ord.

Q. And earlier in the evening?

A. The dressmaker.

Q. Tell us if you noticed any trouble between Mrs. Abby Bridewell and either of those ladies.

A. Trouble? Didn't notice any. I was with Walter in the kitchen. Since supper. . . .

The old lady had not wanted much supper, so they'd had oatmeal. He, Cudworth, was fed up to the scuppers with oatmeal at the Bridewell place. They ate all right when Earnest or Lionel Bridewell were at the house, but half the rest of the time it was oats. Cudworth had finally told the old lady he wasn't a horse. No, they hadn't quarreled about it. But because of the grub, he had several times offered to quit.

Well, she wasn't too hard to work for. Now and then she'd come through with time off. Like the evening of April 11 when she let him and Walter go to the Scenic Palace. It seemed as though she wanted them to go. She gave him, Cudworth, fifty cents. He went to the parlor to get it.

Yes, she was in the parlor talking to Mrs. Cornelia Ord. He didn't hear what they'd been talking about. Just heard the voices after Mrs. Ord came in. He didn't know anything about the old lady being upset that night. Did know she'd started to pack some things. Day before, she'd asked him to fetch a trunk down from the attic. Didn't tell him she was going away anywheres. Thought she was packing stuff he'd have to carry back up to the attic.

Well, there had been kind of a row on Sunday. Heard Senator Earnest Bridewell yelling at his mother. Goddaming and the like. Lionel Bridewell had been there for the weekend. They were both cussing each other. Something about a will.

No, it wasn't unusual. All winter, every time they were at the house, it was like that. Senator Earnest stayed over till Monday after Lionel Bridewell left on the evening boat. Monday noon there'd been another row. The Senator wanted to know why she had sold three carriage horses a while back. She wouldn't tell him. They really had it out.

Nobody at the house with the old lady all day Tuesday, so far

as he, Cudworth, knew. He spent most of the day in the barn. Grooming the black mare and such.

What time did he and Walter Jones leave for the pictures that evening? Well, they left the house at eight-fifteen. Looked at the time because the show began at eight-thirty; they had just time to get there if they ran part way.

As it was, they were late. Got there when a sign was on the screen: Ladies Please Remove Your Hats. They saw a comedy Western and a Nestor Picture. Stayed till it was over. Went down the square for sundaes and a malted milk. Walked home. Hurried. Windy and turning cold. Must have got there about eleven. . . .

Q. Did you see Mrs. Abby Bridewell when you got there?

A. Didn't see her. Saw a light in the parlor, so we went around to the back. Thought she had company, maybe.

Q. Did you hear anyone in the parlor? Any voices?

A. Didn't hear nothing but wind whooping around the house. . . .

Had tiptoed into the dark kitchen with Walter Jones. Had gone straight to bed—the cot next to Walter's. Had set the alarm for five-thirty. Didn't hear it. Overslept. Woke up at five of six. . . .

So much for the hired man's deposition concerning his knowledge of events just prior to, and on, the evening of April 11. Hobart Cudworth, age 22, was not the brightest witness in the Bridewell case.

But Cudworth was certainly one of the more important. As will be seen, he allegedly found and reported what the Coroner would have referred to as the "corpus delicti."

If the testimony Cudworth eventually uttered under oath was reliable, he roused from his cot at six A.M. This was the morning of April 12, 1911. A day beginning like all days. Gray mist silhouetting the window shutters, and the cubby in semi-darkness.

Cudworth did not provide the detail, but one can imagine him sitting there in the chill gloom, half awake, bitterly resenting the forces which have boosted him out of the quiltings of warm slumber. Perhaps subconscious habit. Perhaps a distant rooster. He wouldn't know. He sits there, chin on chest, somnambulistic, while sleep flows from him. He groans. Scratches under an arm. Then, opening an eye, sees the tin alarm clock. Do Jesus! The old lady will be up and give him what for. He grabs for his denim overalls.

Tucking in a shirttail, he hikes for the kitchen. Good—it's still dark and the house is asleep. He pauses to put a kettle on the oil stove beside the range. Then, quietly opening and closing the kitchen door, he slips out to the porch. He notices that the wind expired sometime during the night. The morning is deathly quiet —so absolutely still that he can hear the faint, far hornblowing of fishing boats off the harbor. The garden is cobwebbed in mist, the house wrapped in a cocoon of vapor.

Cudworth hastens to the facility at the end of the yard. After answering what he will describe in public as a "call of nature," he tangents to the pump near the grape arbor. There he pats icewater on his eyes, rubs his hands in his hair, wipes them on his shirt. Ablutions thus completed, he hustles back indoors to escape the chill fog.

The kitchen is cold, gray-dark. Cudworth concentrates on the range. He places kindling in the firebox, douses kerosene on the kindling. Then, as gently as possible, he dumps in the coal. He is still "trying not to wake up the old lady."

He had the fire reddening the iron lacework of the draft and the kettle steaming briskly by 6:15 A.M. He lit an oil lamp in a bracket by the stove. And he was-warming his hands at the range when his glance happened to wander to the other end of the kitchen.

"That," he said, "was when I noticed the cellar door standing open."

Q. Was it wide open?

A. No, only part open.

Q. What you'd call standing ajar?

A. I guess you'd call it that.

Q. What did you do then?

A. I went to close it.

Q. And—?

A. That's when I seen the old lady. She was lying down there at the foot of the steps.

Q. What did you do when you saw her down there?

A. I called out her name. Mrs. Bridewell! It occurred to me she might've had some sort of accident.

Cudworth's was a pretty good guess. In fact, it verged on the clairvoyant. Clinging to the door-handle, he peered down into the fusty gloom. When he could summon the wit to do so, he called out to the old lady a second time.

"Mrs. Bridewell!"

Abby Bridewell made no reply. At the foot of the steps she remained as inert as a bundle of laundry. She wore the black dress Cudworth had seen on her the previous evening. She lay stomach down, her hands pressed under her bosom, her feet together, toes pointing earthward—her body positioned like a barrel which had rolled down the steps and stopped, kerplunk, at the bottom. Her head almost touched the sidewall, and was askew, so that her right cheek pressed the basement floor and her face was toward the steps. Cudworth could see the left eye. He could also see the bloody smear on the left temple. And the leakage of blood from the nose.

Broken glass gleamed on the third or fourth step down. Halfway down lay an object which, at first glance, looked like a dead rat. Actually it was a rat—beauty-parlor colloquial for a pad of false hair.

Hobart Cudworth uttered something which was never officially reported, but was probably the equivalent of "Christamighty!" He backed away from the cellar door. Wheeled about-face. Ran. Or, to quote his testimony, "went for help."

Q. You did not touch the body?

A. Nossir. I didn't go down the steps.

Q. You say you went for help.

A. And that's the truth.

Q. Where did you go?

A. I went to fetch State Senator Bridewell.

I was unable to locate any account of what State Senator Bridewell was doing at the moment when Cudworth reached "the south side" with the news. Apparently Earnest was up and about, but had not yet breakfasted. Let us say, for the sake of visualization, that he was in an upstairs bedroom of his wife's farmhouse, stropping a razor.

On the washstand waits an ironstone bowl and a pitcher of hot water. In his pet shaving mug, a creamy fluff of lather. The Senator stops stropping, reaches for the mug, and applies a beard of cream to his chin and jaws. He then places a thin finger under his horseshoe mustache, delicately raises the mustache from his upper lip, and is leaning toward a mirror, with razor poised, when he hears the front gate slam. Rounding to a window, he sees Cud-worth, sweaty, gasping, jogging toward the side porch. If that was by chance the situation, the Senator may very well have nicked his chin in his hurry to finish shaving.

Cudworth did not at once deliver the news to Earnest Bridewell. In scanning the press accounts, I discovered a new character on the scene. This was Alvin Bridewell, either a foster son or a stepson—available records and local memories were not clear about the relationship. The matter is of no consequence. Neither was Alvin Bridewell. A youth in his late 'teens, he was a cipher who lived at the "south side place" with Earnest's vague wife. However, Cudworth summoned Alvin to the porch, and through this indirect medium the alarm was conveyed to the State Senator.

Of course, the word brought Earnest galloping to the door in a figurative, if not a literal, lather. "What is it? What's this about my mother?"

Cud worth gurgles and makes frantic gestures, pointing north. The long cross-country run—uphill over back roads and downdale through the neighboring orchard—has left him winded. But at last he blurts it out. "She's lying in the cellar. She's all blood!"

"Get the roan out of the stable! Hitch the buggy! You, too, Alvin. Damn it, don't stand there!"

Earnest rushes back into the house to get his coat. He shouts to his wife, "I got to go! It's ma!" He may have had a hangover that morning, for it would seem that he collided with a chair or something near the door. Then he slipped on the buggy step and bruised his knee. Cudworth would say he could not remember Earnest barking his kneecap. But Cudworth was holding the horse's head at that moment and he may have been too excited to notice anything. Later that morning, however, someone noticed that Earnest had a slight limp. And the same sharp pair of eyes noticed scratches (razor cuts?) on the Senator's chin.