Belle Cora Page 10

  The boy, Jeptha, was handsome, with black hair that looked as if it had been cut with the help of a bowl, and quick, alert blue eyes. I supposed him to be about a year older than I was. His shirt was a butternut color. His homespun woolen trousers had rolled cuffs and were held up with suspenders, all worn and soiled. In his right hand he carried a broad-brimmed straw hat. When his father’s bargain with the storekeeper had been concluded, he put the hat on his head so as to leave his hands free and took a handful of broken crackers from a barrel, while Jake went to another barrel, from which a drinking cup hung on a string. Jeptha, after a nervous glance at the colonel, reached out and touched Jake’s elbow. “Pa.” Jake tried to box Jeptha’s ears. Jeptha skipped out of reach with a calm skill that spoke of long practice, and when he had reached a place of safety, he turned around and watched his father. Putting down the sack, Jake spat a slimy wad of chewing tobacco into his hand, twisted the spigot cock, filled the cup, drank, refilled the cup, and took another. His face ruddier than it had been a moment before, he shoved the tobacco back in his mouth and wiped his hand on his pants.

  The whole scene made a strong impression on me, but what I thought back on later—even more often than I remembered the missing fingers and the caved-in mouth, respectively, of the two idlers on the porch—was the look of pure disgust, strangely mature, very wrong for his age, that took possession of the boy’s face while he watched his father drink, together with a weariness as if he had lived a hundred years and spent all of it in the company of this man.

  Horace introduced himself to the colonel and asked for directions in the New England manner, as a hypothesis: supposing a body wanted to go from here to the Moody farm—given that set of circumstances—how might he get there?

  Jeptha asked us where we were from.

  “New York.”

  “We’re in New York.”

  “New York City.”

  “You’re going to Elihu’s farm. We heard about you.”

  “What did you hear?” I asked.

  He looked at a loss for a moment, then said irrelevantly, “I been to Rochester.” When he spoke, I noticed a triangular bit of blackness caused by a slender chip in one of his top front teeth.

  “We were just in Rochester,” said Lewis.

  For the moment, we were all overtaken by shyness and just listened to Horace talking to Jake and the colonel. Jeptha stared at me; it seemed like a friendly stare, but it made me a little uncomfortable. His eyes, bluer and purer every time I noticed them, had a searching gaze that made me feel a little more important when they looked my way, and challenged me to be as interesting as they seemed to find me. They were too much for me. I looked away, as if suddenly very curious about the highly miscellaneous collection of goods on the shelves and the big black cast-iron pipe of the iron heating stove. When I looked back, the boy was facing the other way, at the shelves, making Sherman’s Worm Lozenges feel important and challenging them to be better worm lozenges, and I found, a little to my surprise, that I was disappointed. “How’d you chip your tooth?” I heard myself ask, just to receive again the scrutiny I had rejected before. He turned. For a while the eyes wore an empty, abstracted look, as though he had forgotten where he was and who he was. “Fell on a rock,” he said finally, reaching out his hand to offer us each a couple of broken crackers. We took them and began to chew with murmurs of appreciation they did not deserve.

  Horace came up to us, saying, “It’s easy,” meaning the way to my uncle’s farm, and he tipped his hat again as we left. It seemed to me that his speech and his manners, the way he moved and stood, had changed in many small ways. He was acting like a man from the country.

  As we were moving off in the wagon, Horace said, “Look at Romeo,” just as I noticed Jeptha walking back and forth atop the fence, with his arms spread for balance. Twice the boy shot glances our way, though this obviously made the trick harder to do.

  “He wants us to see,” I said.

  “No. He wants you to see,” said Horace. In other circumstances this might have pleased me; just then I was detached from my emotions. While my mind stored away innumerable observations, mostly what I felt was the strangeness of everything.

  THE ROAD THAT RAN BESIDE THE STREAM was lined with birches whose slender trunks resembled naked white arms with too many elbows. Our progress dragged the sun winking rapidly through the trees; every so often a bright ray would break through unimpeded and blind me. The whine of hidden insects grew slowly louder and slowly faded away. We came to plowed land and pastures with haystacks. “Maybe your uncle’s fields,” Horace speculated.

  We recognized the house from a picture my uncle had drawn in a letter Horace had shown us several times on our long journey. It was really two adjoining houses, each one story plus a loft, made of unpainted clapboard, a pale gray tinted pink by the sunset. On the broad acres behind it stood a small barn, sheds, a woodpile, some huts on tall legs that I came to recognize as corncribs, a privy, and a big, well-fenced vegetable garden. I noticed a large maple whose lower limbs had been lopped off, leaving scars like a chorus of thick-lipped caroling mouths. All other trees originally found on the spot had been exterminated. There were, however, five apple trees in the part of the backyard nearest the house. As I learned later, each stood on a former location of the privy, which was moved whenever the pit beneath it filled up.

  It all looked miserably haphazard, even in the picture, which did not show the stains under the windows from the pouring out of slops, the stumps grown over with fungi, the scummy puddles, the powdery wooden ash-hopper, the handmade wheelbarrow tipped over in the tall weeds, the pigs that lumbered toward the back of the house when we came near, or the large dog snarling and curling its dark-purple lips.

  Horace, having prepared himself on the colonel’s advice, threw the dog a piece of sausage, which the animal caught and sucked into itself noisily. He let the dog lick his hands. He scratched behind its black ears and tugged its loose neck, saying, “Good boy. Yes. Yes. Meet Lewis. Meet Arabella,” until the animal permitted us to approach the house. Horace knocked, waited, lifted a wooden latch, pulled, and peered within. “Hello?” He tried the other side of the house and came back. “We’ll wait inside.” We went in, followed by the dog. The front room, so low that Horace could have touched the rafters, contained a long table, stools and chairs, rag carpets, a hearth with a banked fire, and a shelf with lamps, almanacs, and the family Bible, in which Horace showed me the names of my aunt and uncle and cousins. I felt uneasy, being in the house and examining the Bible of people I had never met.

  Horace started dragging our trunks from the wagon and into the house, and under his supervision Lewis and I brought in the lighter baggage.

  Presently, we heard the sound of wheels and hooves. We went to the door. A woman and two girls were coming up the road in a wagon.

  Horace turned to us. “Stay here a moment. I’ll prepare them to meet you.”

  What did he mean, prepare? They had been prepared with letters, hadn’t they? Perhaps it had to do with some country custom unknown to me.

  The wagon stopped a bit short of the house when they saw him. I could not hear what was said. It looked like an argument. The woman put her palm to her forehead, then flung it out and spoke to Horace; there was a fierce expression on her face. Turning her head, she spoke as fiercely to the children. Then she lifted the reins and drove the rest of the way to the house. The children jumped out of the wagon and stood back, while my aunt got out, walked nearer to the house, and put her hand over her heart. “Arabella? Lewis? Come here, children,” she said.

  She knelt to put her face level with ours and reached out slowly to touch my cheek, and then Lewis’s cheek, as if in amazement. “Look at you! Each the living image of my poor sister.” Her voice was raspy. “Agnes, Evangeline, say hello to your cousins.”

  I decided with relief that the hard look had been just for her own children, who must have done something wrong. With us her expression was gentle. That was go
od. In every other respect, her face disappointed me. I had known better than to tell Horace about my childish daydream that my aunt and uncle would turn out to be my parents in a new guise; still, it had seemed not impossible that my mother and her sister might be as alike as twins. My aunt would be my mother restored to me in a rustic form; I would know then that everything was for the best and as God had planned it.

  This hope was now dashed in every possible way. Where my mother had been fair, my aunt was dark, with black hair; where my mother had been small, my aunt was tall, and would have been taller still but for a noticeable twist in her spine. Her face was narrow and masculine, with a high brow like that of a balding man, a long, large nose, and deep lines flanking the mouth, which was wide with thin, tight lips. Her appearance labored under the additional burdens of a protuberant mole the size of a pea and several more the size of mustard seeds on her cheeks, and short chin-whiskers. Her clothes were of manufactured cloth, rudely sewn. She was homely even for an overworked country wife.

  My girl cousins, who now approached, were much better looking. Agnes, who was my age, had dark hair like her mother but all the beauty her mother lacked, with delicate symmetrical features, perfect skin, and large liquid brown eyes, her mother’s eyes, which looked lovely when set in Agnes’s face—in fact, I realized when I saw them in Agnes, they were my mother’s eyes. Evangeline, eight, was ruddy, with an upturned nose; her plump body seemed boneless, her movements languid.

  My aunt said that she and the girls had been out to visit the ailing Mrs. Lyall, whose husband had died last year. The men and the boys were out cutting timber, she said, and they would be home soon, and we should pardon her because she had to get dinner ready. I asked if there was anything I could do, and she said, “No, bless you.”

  “Surely not,” added Agnes, eyes melting with sympathy, “after your hard trip, and with your illness.”

  They had been told we had come here for our health. Horace said, “They’re not sick now. But they have come a long way.”

  We sat down at the long table. Horace, to make the conversation go, asked Agnes and Evangeline about the farm, the neighbors, and the schoolteacher. Evangeline answered in detail, Agnes briefly. From Evangeline I learned that there were two hired hands on the farm. They had helped with the harvest, and they were staying on in the winter to cut trees and make charcoal, being paid just in room and board.

  To help with the talk, I asked, “Why?”

  “To help us,” explained Evangeline.

  “But why just for room and board?” I asked. “Why don’t they want money?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” said Evangeline, and she looked at her sister. “Why don’t they want money, Agnes?”

  “I guess because times are so hard,” said Agnes.

  Evangeline explained, “It’s because times are hard.”

  “So they are willing to work for any crust they can get, poor souls,” added Agnes, and Evangeline’s mouth formed a little “o” of belated understanding.

  “We stopped at the store in town before we came here,” Horace informed them. “Lewis and Arabella met a boy who was there with his father, and they had just traded a load of staves, and when we left the boy was showing off for Arabella.”

  There was an immediate change in Agnes’s expression, and I knew—how, I cannot say—that she had an idea who this boy was, and didn’t want him to show off for me. “No, he wasn’t,” I said firmly.

  “He was walking on a fence. He picked the place where we were sure to see him, didn’t he, Lewis—Lewis, what was his name?”

  “Jeptha,” said Lewis.

  “Oh, Jeptha,” said Evangeline. “We know him.”

  “Evangeline, we should be helping Mama,” interrupted Agnes.

  “Mama said to talk to them,” said Evangeline.

  “We’ll all talk more later,” said Agnes. They got up—Agnes grim, Evangeline sullen—and the two sisters began setting the table with ill-assorted plates and cups and utensils.

  From the porch came male voices and a great deal of stamping and gurgling. My aunt hastened out. We heard her say, “The children,” among other words I could not make out, after which the men and the boys tromped heavily in.

  My aunt said, “Father, my sister’s children have come.” That she should repeat what she had just said in the other room struck me as odd at the time, and in my memory the scene has a queer formality, like a diplomatic ritual. The meeting had been made official.

  My uncle Elihu nodded, looking at us with strange, tiny eyes for several uncomfortable seconds, and then he said: “We’re glad you’ve come to live with us, children. I guess it will take some time for you to get used to our ways when you’ve been raised another way, and maybe you’ll miss some things, but by and by you’ll learn, and you’ll get the idea that we’re not so bad here after all.”

  What kind of man was he? It was too early to tell. All I knew so far was that his head looked small because his features were too large for it. His mouth, nose, and ears were terribly crowded in each other’s company. The eyebrows and eye sockets were big, too, but at the eyes themselves the generosity stopped; they were like two blind buttonholes, robbing him of the warmth that sometimes saves homely faces. He had an odd, hip-jutting gait, and at some later date—I do not remember when it was or who told me—I learned that he had broken his leg once, and it had not been set properly.

  After introducing the hired hands (Sam, a Bohemian; Pat, an Irishman), my uncle introduced our boy cousins. Neither took after his parents, for both were handsome. Matthew, the elder, and the bigger of the two, was eleven, with dark hair and brown eyes. Titus, ten, had sandy hair.

  A little later, as, with heads bowed and fingers interlaced, we asserted our sinfulness and gratitude, I was acutely conscious of the strong body odors which surrounded me. Everyone bathed less often back then, but farmers, despite their strenuous duties, less often than merchants.

  Supper was corn bread, dry and gummy by turns, and tasting faintly of soap, and a greasy stew with salt pork, potatoes, and turnips, a vegetable that up till now I had been permitted to forgo. I ate it, and I told my aunt that the supper was delicious. To make me agreeable and pleasant in the homes of my relations had been my mother’s life work.

  They all used the knife to spear and convey food to their mouths. My uncle, who had bad teeth, often found it necessary to claw a trapped morsel free with his index finger, and whenever he drank water, he sloshed it around before swallowing. The boys, to my astonishment, were each permitted one gulp from the whiskey jug.

  I looked at Horace, and he winked. I smiled to show he needn’t worry about me.

  “What’s your secret?” asked Elihu, smiling, with the knife before his mouth.

  “Secret, sir?” asked Horace.

  “You and my niece traded a wink. What’s the secret?”

  “Well, sir, you’ve found us out. We have a secret sign between us; I was to wink if I thought that this was a fine farm and a fine family and she and her brother were going to like it fine here.”

  “Well, I’m glad we passed your little test,” said Elihu, still smiling.

  After an excruciating silence, Horace decided to laugh; the others joined him; and I laughed last, having no idea what I was laughing about, or what, really, had just occurred.

  Pat asked what it had been like on the canal, and for a few minutes Horace and the hands carried the conversation. Sam had worked as a porter on the canal. Pat had been a docker in New York, where he lived on Baxter Street, and he had heard of Godwin & Co.

  “The Godwin warehouse is the tallest building in the city,” said Lewis.

  Everyone stopped chewing.

  “Jesus,” said Matthew.

  “Matthew,” said my aunt.

  “Did you hear what he said?”

  “Matthew, it would be a shame if this got you a licking,” said Elihu.

  “The old one was burned up in the Great Fire,” Lewis went on, and he proceeded to sa
y more words in a row than he had spoken since his arrival. “I saw it burn. I helped to empty it.” In fact, he had arrived when the old warehouse was in ashes. “The new one is seven stories high. We went up to the top right after it was built. It was like a mountain. We could see the ships. We could see north past the edge of the city. We were looking down on the churches. Robert put me on his shoulders. I used to go up there all the time.”

  He’d been to the roof only once.

  “Lewis, don’t talk about the warehouse anymore,” said Horace.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s bragging, Lewis.”

  “But it’s true,” said Lewis, taking the silence for fascination. And he told them that oftentimes he used to kill pigs by dropping rocks from the top of it.

  Then there was more silence, which my cousin Titus was the first to break. “Arabella, how did your pa come to pass on?”

  “He took ill while traveling. He was on his way to Cincinnati.”

  Horace abruptly began questioning Elihu about the farm, its soil, trees, crops, weather, and pests. He said that he had grown up on farms in Connecticut and Vermont where the harvest had declined each year. It was only later, when he used an idle afternoon in the city to attend a New-York State Agricultural Society lecture, that he learned in what contempt Englishmen held American farming. We bought too much land to work well. Our way with manure was too unsystematic. We should pen our animals and plant Swedish turnips. The British loved to slander our country. Yet Horace guessed that if he were ever to farm again he would try some of their methods.

  Elihu inclined his head and squinted. “A lecture in the New York—what?”

  “State Agricultural Society.”

  “Well, sir, you got me beat there. I ain’t never been to one of their lectures.”

  Horace chuckled, since a joke had been intended. Elihu, whose smile ceased to put one at ease, inquired, “What’s funny?” and Horace, in the depths of his good nature, found the will to say that he, Horace, was funny, for trying to teach farming to a farmer.