Edith Cady

This is not a new piece, but it's one not everyone has heard -- or seen with the italics intact.  The italics are phrases that were lifted directly from the newspaper accounts of the event told therein.  Enjoy...

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It was May, 1940 and with the coming of warmer weather, Mrs. Cady had returned to her upstairs bedroom.  She had been accustomed to sleep in the lower floor when the weather was cold, but spring was in full bloom the night that he drove from his cabin…lifted his carefully-tended 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun and went to her home.  I do not know how deeply she slept, or what dreams she had, but it would seem she did not hear any sound as Morris picked his way up the stairs.  He had already unlatched a screen door and gained entrance to the first floor… 

Earlier that week, Morris visited Mrs. Cady and was warned by her to stay away.  But this night, the boarding house was quiet, and it seemed she had no reason to fear for her life.  Her boarders were sleeping in their rooms, two old-age pensioners who made their home with Mrs. Cady.  It is true that they lived in the sparsely settled Fox Hill section, but she was a native of Batchellerville.  She had always known the town and had lived there all her life.  On this night, however, that life would find its end…

Mrs. Edith Cady is Slain in Home.  The headlines sound cold, even now.  She was 61 years old and I can find no other records of her life or death.  Three yellowed newspaper articles pulled from an envelope in the attic of a house where my grandfather lived.  Mrs. Edith Cady was my second great grand aunt, the daughter of the late Stephen and Sarah Blodgett Cady.  Her sister, Sarah Cady, would marry my great great grandfather and continue the family tree through their daughter Blanche, who married my great grandfather.  They bore a son, who bore a son, who bore me. 

It is no doubt that family trees are webs of fascination and mystery, and as I build mine from the scraps of names and dates on a century’s worth of scattered pages, my mind keeps returning to Mrs. Edith Cady and what her life and death meant.  I try to imagine what it must have been like for her…

“I was awakened by a shot” one of the boarders told officials, and as he opened his door, Mrs. Cady fell out of her doorway onto the hall floor.  They found her murderer in her room, lying on a mattress on the floor after he turned his death-dealing shotgun upon himself.   There are precious few other details given.  Only dates and times, an incorrect list of Mrs. Cady’s survivors, and a brief comment that her death was the execution of a threat made a year ago, according to Dr. Eaton, the Saratoga County coroner, who heard it from Erwin Conklin of Northville.  Tantalizing details that tug at my imagination until I think I hear the sad voice of a woman who longs for a legacy beyond simply the victim.  Indeed more is told of his life than of hers; he is the lumberjack and World War veteran who creeps into house, shoots her out of jealousy, then wounds self.   I read over and over again that he lived at the boarding house for about two years subsequent to leaving his wife.  Two months prior to this fateful May night, he went to live in a cabin about two miles down the Fox Hill road.  I wonder why…just one question in a series of them that roll through my mind in an unending series of echoes.

I wonder who she was.  I wonder about her story.   Sometimes I imagine that she spurned his advances, uninterested in this day laborer who was sixteen years her junior.   I imagine he loved her, and yet she was aloof from him.  In her strong and willful way, she ejects him from her boarding house for some unknown transgression.  Aye, she is always strong in my mind…a woman of iron will who had no fear about living in the boarding house with just two octogenarians to keep her company.  She casts off his threats and refuses to change her life for his whims.  He is the spurned suitor struggling to control the blind rage of jealous rejection and carefully planning her death and his own.  Sometimes, the story moves from the heart to matters colder and sometimes more powerful.  Perhaps his jealousy was born from watching this fiercely independent woman succeed with no husband at her side.  For, in the manner of the time, she is called Mrs. at every instance, but no detail is given about whom she had once married and she retains her Christian name.  Even has my mind’s pen scrawls stories in the pages of imagination, I am confounded by the mysteries.  Her ghost dances alone, and I wonder if she perhaps never married at all, and only took the honorific to soothe judgmental sensibilities.  For I can also find no other mention of her daughter Mrs. George Edwards, of Gloversville or of the grandson and great grandson who survived her.  Burial was in the Edinburg cemetery, where ten years later, her brother was buried by her and despite the 24-hour vigil at the hospital as her killer lay languishing and the coroner’s plans to carry the investigation further before rendering a verdict, there are no other scraps of paper.  The story just ends.  But it will never end.