Four Corners to My Bed

This is just a heartbreaking, beautiful story from a No Dull Life book I am working on. My client—we’ll call her “Bridget”—had a hard childhood. By the time she was six years old, her father had been sent to prison and her mother had begun spending almost every day and night at the tavern, leaving Bridget to care for her three younger siblings. Finally, the State removed the children from their home, placing the younger two in foster care and the older two with grandparents. Bridget had every reason to turn her back on her mother and harden her heart to protect herself . . . but that’s not what she did:

For Bridget, the hardest thing about living with her grandparents was that she missed her little brother, Michael, and little sister, Marilyn, almost more than she could bear.  She knew the direction from Bluff Avenue in which Michael and Marilyn lived, because on the rare occasion that her mother would visit and take her and Marty for a ride, Debra would point at a brick house on Washington Avenue—only a couple of miles away—and say, “That’s where Michael and Marilyn live.”  Bridget also knew generally where her mother’s favorite tavern was.  At night, when Bridget and Marty were falling asleep in the twin bed they shared in their grandmother’s bedroom, they would say their prayers and then Bridget would direct her brother to look after either their mom, in the one direction, or Michael and Marilyn, in the other.  If Marty was to sleep facing the tavern, she would sleep facing in the direction of Washington Street in order to keep Michael and Marilyn safe.  And if she woke up in the night and Marty was looking in the wrong direction, she would kick him and wake him up so that he could turn over and go back to carrying out his watch.

This ritual helped.  So did saying prayers; Bridget knew “Four Corners to My Bed.”  Her mother had taught her to pray sometime after her father went away and before she stopped coming home—Bridget thinks Debra must have learned the prayer from the orphanage, because Big Grandma never said prayers with the kids and didn’t go to church.  Bridget held onto that gift for the rest of her life, because it was the best thing she ever got from her mother.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on.

Four corners to my bed, Four angels round my head,

One to watch, and one to pray, And two to bear my soul away.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.