The Servant's Quarters

Lyrics

Forty-eight degrees on a winter morning.
Smells like starch and yesterday's cabbage.
And soot, always soot.
This is the engine room.
Not the one with the boiler.
The one with the people.

Thirty-six inches of pine and horsehair.
Elizabeth Smith slept here.
Or tried to.
Her name is in the ledger, age 34 in 1900.
Four hooks on the wall for the uniforms.
One is bent.
The enamel washbasin has a crack on the left rim.
A map of a life you can hold in your hand.

And the brass bell waits over the door.
A nerve ending tied to a panel in the pantry.
Twenty-two rooms that can call you away.
Twenty-two wires to pull you from a dream.
The house breathes in, and you exhale service.

The ledger is neat, but the margins are wide.
A line for J. Mendez, a ranch hand from somewhere else, paid in 1897 and then gone.
A line for 'infant, female, 3 weeks'.
No name.
No 'Mrs.' for the under-butler's wife.
Just ghosts in the ink, sleeping in the next narrow room.

And the brass bell waits over the door.
A nerve ending tied to a panel in the pantry.
Twenty-two rooms that can call you away.
Twenty-two wires to pull you from a dream.
The house breathes in, and you exhale service.

After 1902, they added a new button.
'False alarm'.
A child upstairs pulled the cord seventeen times in an hour.
Just to see what would happen.
A joke that ran down the wire, a ghost in the machine that made someone run up the stairs, again, and again.

The bell is silent now.
The hook is still bent.
Bessie's stone at Riverside, carved in 1927.
It says 'faithful service'.
That's all it says.
The crack in the basin is filled with dust.
The house holds its breath.