Belle Cora Read online

THE NEXT MORNING, SHE SAID THAT we should all be kind to each other today, in respect for the Lord’s Day. We dressed for church. When my aunt saw me in the frock I’d made with my grandmother, she got a pained look on her face and said it was very pretty, it was too pretty, and the two of us went through my trunk until we found a frock that would draw less attention to me. I knew she was right—even at nine and with no experience of country people, I knew as soon as she spoke that I could not walk into their unpainted church dressed for a ball.

  Matthew got the wagon ready, and my uncle drove us to the Free Will Baptist church. At the end of the journey, it stood just past a hilltop, and to spare the horses we got out and walked. I saw the spireless roof first, then the rest of the small building appeared, step by step and log by log; last came the short log sections it was perched on. Free Will Baptists, famous for adding foot washing to the customary Baptist ordinances, endured a lot of mockery from members of other churches, and the greater number who had no church. But worldly ridicule is a glory to the devout.

  Outside the church, the several small families that made up the congregation were gathering, farmers and farmers’ wives, and their children, all in the best and cleanest of their drab homemade clothes. The grown-ups made a dignified effort not to stare at the new arrivals, and children were cuffed and scolded for their curiosity. As the animals chewed on the tops of the fence posts or nibbled the grass, my uncle introduced us to the neighbors piecemeal, several times repeating, with slight variations, “These are my wife’s sister’s children you probably heard of. This here’s Lewis. This here’s Arabella.” A sort of line began to form of people waiting to meet us, and with an expectant feeling I noticed Jacob and Jeptha, the two already known faces, waiting behind the family my uncle was talking to. A woman—skinny, with hollow cheeks and raw eyes—rested a hand briefly on Jeptha’s shoulder. His mother, I guessed. Near him stood a girl I assumed to be his sister, cheerful and fresh-looking but with the gait of an old man—she dipped an extra inch on every other step—and in her hand was a cane. Jeptha was looking at me. With an admirable economy of motion, so that he did not seem to be working, he kept me in view as people passed between us. My uncle noticed that I was looking past the family he was introducing at the moment. His buttonhole eyes quizzed me, and my aunt said, “Oh, she’s noticing Jacob and Jeptha; she’s met them before. She met them at the store. She don’t mean to be rude to you, Thomas, do you, Arabella?” and I said no, and was forgiven. I knew that Agnes’s eyes were on me.

  “This is Mr. Talbot, children, who you met at the store. And this is Mrs. Talbot.” I greeted them, and Lewis greeted them. As when I had seen them in the store, the father and the son shared a quality of unusual alertness. The boy’s alertness was curious and playful. The father’s had soured into a threat. But just now he was a Sunday version of himself and greeted me with absentminded gravity. The wife must have been pretty once. I smiled at her and received a blank stare in return. Then came Jeptha, who said, quickly, “Hi, Agnes, Matthew, Evangeline,” giving them about equal weight, it seemed to me, and he nodded to Lewis, and said to me, “Here we are again,” and quickly introduced us to the lame girl, Becky, his sister, to his three-year-old sister Ruth, and to his brothers Ike and Ezra, and then we all went into the church, which was dark and drafty. The floor was made of rudely sawed half-logs, with wide cracks between some of them, and on some days one caught glimpses of animals skittering in the crawl spaces below.

  As we walked to our family’s benches, Agnes said she guessed that Horace had been right, and that Jeptha liked me.

  “I don’t care about boys,” I declared.

  The minister, William Jefferds, was a frail-looking little man in his thirties with thin sandy hair, narrow shoulders, small hands, and sad eyes behind wire-rimmed D-shaped spectacles. Titus whispered that Jefferds was also the schoolteacher. He looked too weak to do either of his jobs, but it turned out that he made good use of his frailty. People heeded his soft voice as one would attend a dying man’s last words, while he delivered the gentlest and most terrifying hellfire sermon I had ever heard.

  It would have gone against his temperament to rage or threaten even if he had had the strength for it. He merely explained the situation. He began with the pain. “Think how it hurts when you burn your finger or your arm. This burning is over the whole body. And it never stops. Hell is full of screaming. It would be terrible just to hear it, but maybe the damned don’t notice, since they’re screaming themselves.”

  He talked as if he were warning us against skating on a pond where the ice had broken and drowned children several years in a row. There was no censure, only dismay that in this day and age, when everything was so well understood and it was obvious what needed to be done, so many people still chose damnation. Before long, his frail voice was being joined by quiet weeping and moaning from quite a few of the men and women on the hard rough benches around me, and he began to address us by name. “Jenny Williams, do I see a tear in your eye? Are you beginning to think it over?” “John Lenox, I believe you hear me.” And me: “Arabella, new to our village, so much has changed for you of late. Lean on Jesus, Arabella. He was there in New York. He is here in Livy. He’ll be with you today and tomorrow. He will never leave you. He will never die.” I gasped, feeling as if he had reached into my chest and grabbed my heart.

  If this had been all he said, I could have accepted the invitation to be comforted, and I suppose that, at least for a time, I might have become a very religious girl. But as I was just becoming aware, there was an obstacle, and I could never get around it.

  THAT AFTERNOON, MY AUNT, wanting to show me some special favor, asked me to help her with dinner. We peeled potatoes, and after a while I asked her, “Do you think my papa is in heaven?”

  There was a long pause, and she said, very quietly, “I hope so.”

  “But what do you think? Do you think he’s in hell?”

  “You mustn’t say such things. We don’t know. He could be in heaven. We can hope it.”

  “But, you think, probably not.”

  “I would never say such a thing.”

  “You say my mama’s in heaven, you’re sure about her. I need to know what to picture when I think of my papa. Is he above me or below me?”

  She seemed to be looking for an answer in the potato peels. “I asked the minister, and he said he’s never read or heard in so many words that a man who takes his own life can’t be saved. So there’s room for us to hope, and that is what we ought to do.”

  “My papa was a good man.”

  “Nobody said he wasn’t.”

  “He was kind to us, he only drank to be sociable, he worked hard, he walked with my grandpa along the waterfront handing out Bibles to the sailors and the dockers.”

  “Remember him that way. Oh, what a terrible thing. I am sorry for him.”

  “He wasn’t a Baptist.”

  “That’s no matter, so long as he accepted God’s grace.”

  Keeping my voice steady, and squinting at a dark spot in the potato in my hand, I said, “I don’t think he did.”

  My aunt didn’t reply. It was perfectly clear that she didn’t think he had, either.

  The plan had gone awry. We would not all be together in the afterlife. I would never be able to think of my dear mother in heaven looking down at us adoringly, without thinking also of my father burning and screaming below us.

  XI

  MY NEW FAMILY WOULD HAVE DENIED that they intended from the first to think badly of me. And there would have been some truth in their answer. No doubt had I arrived knowing where the root cellar was and how to do half a dozen farm chores, they’d have been pleasantly surprised. As it was, I confirmed their direst suspicions. It was their politely unspoken belief that no one in New York City did honest work. My uncle knew—he had been there three times. If further proof was needed, just look at me—a girl of nine who had spent her whole life learning to put on the airs of a lady.

  I had always
thought of myself as a diligent little helper in a sober evangelical family, and one does not quickly abandon such a notion; still, I soon stopped defending my previous existence. To mention New York seemed always to mean saying things like “We went by omnibus,” and having to explain to unsympathetic listeners what that was, and being asked how much it cost to ride in one. It meant admitting that my mother wore kid gloves whenever she went out, and that most of our washing was done by a woman who lived across town and whose name I didn’t know. It meant saying that every time I had left the house I used to see strangers, because there were too many people in the city for me ever to know them all. It meant learning that there was something very wrong about my inability to appreciate the wickedness in such a state of affairs.

  The girls were given charge of my farm education, a plan that put too much power in Agnes’s hands: it was her way to leave crucial elements out of her instructions, and watch while I made mistakes for which she knew I would be punished.

  “Show Arabella how we harvest carrots,” said my aunt one day. Under Agnes’s direction, I removed the straw and rags covering a patch of late carrots. The ground was hard this time of year. I softened it with water. I tugged. The wilted tops broke off in my hands. Agnes took note of this in her melodious voice (the sound of which, just saying, “Looks like rain,” could make my spine straighten with alarm). “Dear Arabella,” she added, “it was all right to use all the water, if you felt that you must, but be more careful with the tops of the carrots.” To prove that it was not true when they said, “Your help makes it take longer,” I clawed the ground, tugging the pale cones. A few broke in the soil. In my haste, I ended up leaving a few of the tips in. “Arabella,” said Agnes, “it is true that there are plenty of carrots to eat now, but, come spring, how sorely we should miss the broken piece left in the earth to rot.”

  She left me. The dogs sniffed the vegetables. I threw sticks to distract them. Into the fraying straw basket went straight and crooked carrots, forked carrots with two tapering legs like armless little men, twisted, fibrous, wrinkled, bewhiskered carrots. My spirits rose. I had always been a competent little girl. I could make biscuits. I could sew a straight seam. Why shouldn’t I learn to do this well?

  “I know you’re impatient, Arabella,” said Agnes, who had returned, “but wouldn’t it have been better to give the young ones a chance to grow tall like their cousin carrots? When you were in New York City, daydreaming of your trip on a steamboat, my mother and I toiled over these plants, and it seems a shame that this will be all we get when with a little patience there could have been so much more.” In my confusion, I began to put them back. “No, Arabella. The carrots won’t grow now.”

  She never dropped her ladylike pretense that she had my best interests at heart, and even more than it infuriated me, this accomplishment amazed me: it was so much more than I could have done in her place. I was a simpler person than she was. I knew it, because I could think of nothing to say to hurt her. I simply wished her dead.

  “Come,” she said. I followed her to the creek, which was low this season, with its sources in the mountains frozen. Mossy roots poked from the banks. Clear water ran in rivulets and tiny whirlpools. I wished I were one of the blobs of shadow that hurried downstream, stretching and folding athletically over thousands of round and oval stones.

  We washed the carrots. When we took them to the porch for drying, Agnes reported, “I fear the carrots won’t last till May. Arabella got impatient and pulled the little ones.” Evangeline, who was scrubbing—or, rather, gently stroking—the inside of a milk bucket, gave a cry of dismay. My aunt remarked that patience was a virtue, and when I objected that Agnes hadn’t told me not to pull out the little ones, everyone looked flabbergasted by the idea that there existed in the world a person who had to be told such a thing. Agnes merely nodded and said, “Of course, Arabella is right. I should have told her. Punish me, Mama!” but my aunt said that I was the one who needed to learn.

  She added that because Agnes had defended me, supper would not be withheld; there would be only the stick. “Arabella, your hands.” And only three strokes: “Don’t. Waste. Food.” Which was preferable, you’ll agree, to a wordier message, such as “This. Will. Teach. You. Not. To. Pull. The. Carrots. Out. Of. The. Ground. Before. They’re. Ready. You. Naughty. Girl.” There had been sentences of such savage prolixity that I still felt them when I lifted my palms to receive the next day’s lesson.

  Evangeline’s tutelage was easier to bear. She would throw her head back to howl out my mistakes—“Mama! Arabella almost let Shadrach”—a pig—“into the cider barrel! She would have done it, but I stopped her!”—but she explained every step clearly. She was literal-minded, and I don’t believe she ever had any particular feeling about me one way or another.

  THE FIRST TIME AUNT AGATHA GAVE ME a shirt to mend, I went to work with a gathering confidence that improved my spirits, for in New York City I had learned to sew quite well for a girl my age, and I had by this time quite forgotten that I was good at anything. When I announced as calmly as if it were nothing special that I was done, Agnes said, “Let me see. Yes. I see. But let us not trouble my mother with it now, Arabella. I’ll show it to her later.”

  Night fell. We all sat by the fire, and my aunt, who was in the rocker, praised my sewing and showed it to the family. Each one gripped the shirt in turn, expressing tepid approval or sullen indifference, and at last I had an opportunity to admire my own work; I took it nearer the fire. But what was this?

  “What is it, Arabella?” my aunt asked.

  “A mistake has been made,” I said. “This isn’t my sewing.”

  “What do you mean? Did you do the work I gave you?”

  “Yes, with brown thread. This is white thread. Someone has ripped out my work and done it over.”

  I said it without quite believing it, ready to be shown my error.

  “You must be mistaken,” said my aunt soothingly. “Who would do that? Why would they do it? Evangeline? Agnes?”

  Agnes bowed her head and murmured inaudibly.

  “Agnes?” my aunt repeated.

  Agnes showed us her glistening eyes. “It was I, Mama,” she confessed. “I know I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t want Arabella to get in trouble.” She turned to me and explained, “It was done so carelessly. You must learn to slow down a little and take more care.”

  My aunt said, “Agnes, you did wrong. Get me a switch.”

  We waited while Agnes hunted outside the house for a stick. She returned with one nearly as stout as the one I would have selected for her.

  My aunt told me, “I would never punish you for sewing badly, so long as you did the best you could. But you have to try and do your best. I’m surprised you didn’t learn to sew better in New York. You must ask Agnes to teach you.”

  ONE MORNING, MY EYES OPENED while the others were sleeping, and I thought of a way to show them all how wrong they were about me. I wrapped myself in the top blanket, while Lewis stirred and spoke in his sleep. (Once, I had heard him say, quite distinctly, “Broadway.”) My clothes were already on. I put on my shoes, collected the irons that had warmed our beds the night before, and climbed down the ladder to put kindling on the embers in the kitchen. When the flames were going, I added a log, put some potatoes in to roast, and heated up the fire in the sitting room. By then the others would be up.

  It was noticed, just once, that I had been the first awake—my aunt used my example as a means of rebuking the other children. I was gratified, but there were no more compliments. I kept doing it anyway. It felt good, it made me feel strong, to have the house to myself, the last of the night to myself.

  School began in November. I remember the first day best, though perhaps it is adulterated, as such memories often are with knowledge acquired later. At any rate, this is how I recall it. There was a short period, about three weeks, when it was cold but the cows still needed our attention in the mornings. A chalky shard of the moon sat in the sky over the
barn roof; a veil of frost turned weeds, sheds, and barrels a shade paler; and the frozen vegetation was springy under our feet. Steam rose from fresh dung the boys shoveled into a wheelbarrow, while the girls milked the cows, often dozing for a few seconds on the creatures’ warm bellies. Twice, after I had milked a full bucket, the cow stepped forward and flicked its manure-coated tail into the milk, ruining it, and I was whipped. It was both times the same hateful cow, with whose habits my cousins were familiar. We fed the chickens, took eggs from nests scattered all over the barn and the yard, and cleaned their shack. We cleaned our shoes with sticks and grass, washed our hands and faces on the porch, just with water (soap was for clothes; the one time I used it for my face, I was punished). Then we had a breakfast—which included milk until, in December, the cows dried up—and we walked to school with hot potatoes in our pockets.

  The older children went to school from mid-November to mid-March, half as long as school had lasted for me in New York City. There was also a summer session, taught by the sawmill owner’s daughter, for children under eight years old; it was attended mostly by the town children who lived near enough to walk to the school by themselves.

  On the way, my cousins told me about the teacher, Mr. Jefferds, whom I had already met in his capacity as pastor of our church. Everything they said would turn out to be very important, but of course I didn’t know it, so I didn’t give it much of my attention. I had been punished with no supper the night before, and was still hungry after breakfast. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to eat one of the potatoes now. Would I regret not having it at recess? Would Agnes or Evangeline report that I had eaten the potato prematurely, and if so, would that be grounds for a punishment? I thought mainly about this as Evangeline said that Jefferds was an exceptionally kindly teacher who only beat the children if they were bad, and he gave out tickets for special feats of learning; when you had fifty tickets, you were rewarded with a pocket-sized New Testament or, if you already had that, an Old Testament.