Belle Cora Page 16

  My strongest, sweetest memories of the farm are of that first year, when I was in despair. Living without hope from moment to moment, I absorbed new sensations defenselessly, like a much younger child. It all spoke to me in some ancient, inhuman language, trying to convey an urgent message I was too ignorant to decipher. Or so it seemed: really that was just how it beguiled my attention while it sank barbed hooks into me that could never be extracted. 1838! How I despised it! How often have I longed to be back there again!

  XV

  I KNOW A MAN WHO HAD a colossal stone mansion dismantled to be taken by sea from New York to California, with every block labeled and numbered so that the house could be reassembled at its destination. Whenever in my life I have moved a great distance to a new place and new circumstances, I have felt like that house. I seem to have spent some time in pieces, waiting for certain parts to arrive by separate ships or trains, and some pieces never come and are lost to me forever. But gradually I am put together; I remember who I am, what I need, and what I must do to take care of myself.

  Slowly, and in a fumbling, semiconscious way, I sought out whatever in Livy would help make the place bearable. Thus, whenever anything had to be carried to or fetched from Melanchthon’s farm, I asked to be sent on the errand, happy to go where I would be given something good to eat and I could see little Susannah, who worshipped me, and where the story of my letter to my grandfather (told to them by my aunt in the expectation that they would share her outrage) was an occasion for laughter. Though she could not say it outright, I knew that Anne was delighted that I had derided my aunt’s cooking, the well-known wretchedness of which it was forbidden to mention.

  Everything was more comfortable on Melanchthon’s farm. The barn was bigger. The crops grew in straighter rows. The fences had posts. Anne had been raised in the country and knew which wild herbs could lend variety to dishes, and that strawberry leaves were good for the bladder and nettles good for ague and one should drink sassafras tea in the spring in order to thin the blood, which grows dangerously thick each winter.

  She always delayed me, taking an apparently selfish pleasure in my company. She had me fetch the herbs and measure out the flour, and claimed to be very impressed, and by how quickly I learned the name and purpose of a plant or the ingredients of a dish. “Now you can teach your aunt to make this one,” she would say.

  On the way back one day a voice from the sky called out to me. I looked up and saw Jeptha sitting in the top branches of a great old maple tree. He was directly over my head; for a moment when I regarded him from that unusual angle his face seemed to be gripped, as in a vise, by the soles of his bare feet. “Do you dare?” he called down to me. “No. You’re just a girl. I’ll come to you.”

  “Wait,” I said. I jumped twice and on the third jump managed to claw my way up to the lowest branch. All the boughs nearest the ground were too thick to grip with one hand. A fatal fall seemed possible. Yet the higher I climbed the safer I felt because the branches were closer together, easy to grip, and made a sort of cage whose bars would catch me if I fell. I found a crook of branches to sit in just a few feet below the crook where Jeptha sat.

  The young branches up this high were springy and when there was a wind, the trunk itself swayed a little.

  “That was fast,” said Jeptha, grabbing my hand to help me up at the end. He was smiling for a moment, and I glimpsed the narrow gap where a tooth was chipped. Letting go of my hand, he swept back his limp black hair which had fallen over his eyes. For a while we discussed my bravery. Then I asked how his family was. I asked hesitantly—it seemed like a weighty question—and he hesitated, too, before saying, “Good,” and a moment later, as an afterthought, “As good as they know how to be.”

  The conversation came to halt, and I felt as I had felt in the general store half a year earlier, not knowing what to say next. The training in manners I had received in my mother’s house had emphasized being seen and not heard, keeping valuable objects safe, and being generally convenient for my elders and my relations, nothing at all in the ladylike art of using questions to draw boys out. I did not think it would do to be flirtatious, to ask him, for example, if he had really been showing off for me that first day I arrived, nor did I feel sure enough of my ground to be very serious and ask him if he really meant to drive his father from the house one day. Yet there had to be talk. “We saw you in church the first day,” I said. “Then we didn’t see you there again, other Sundays.”

  He became pensive, and was quiet so long that I was going to tell him it wasn’t important. But then he said, “We just came that one day to get a look at you and Lewis. We don’t do a lot of church. Pa’s not much on church.” He stopped awhile and then went on as if he were telling a funny story: “Pa says he’s waiting for the sects to settle their differences, so he can know just exactly what we all need to do to get into heaven. He tells Ma, don’t worry, he’s sure they’ll get that chore done any day now.” I couldn’t tell from the way he said it what he thought of this idea, which I understood as a way to mock religion, and was clever, but also mean to his mother, for whom I harbored a mixture of pity and contempt. I hesitated to ask, but Jeptha answered my unspoken questions: “Ma prays for him, I wish he would go for her sake.” After another silence he added, “Other than that, and maybe seeing you there, I’m not much on church either.”

  “Neither am I,” I blurted out, realizing only then that it was true, and why, and I became a little sad, thinking of my own father, just at the start of his eternity of burning.

  Maybe noticing the change in my mood, Jeptha suddenly asked, “What’s an omnibus?” I told him, and he asked me to describe it in greater detail until he had a clearer picture of it in his mind. “And how many stories were there in your house?” and I told him three, and he asked how many people there were in New York City, and I told him what I had learned at the school behind the Union Presbyterian Church, that it was a quarter of a million, and Jeptha said, “Liar, you’re lying.”

  I could feel my features rearranging themselves into impassivity, as they had learned to do when it was important that other people’s opinions cease to matter. Then I saw his surprise and remorse and understood that it would never have occurred to him to think anything bad of me, and cutting to the heart of it he said, “They call you a liar much in that house? Elihu? Agatha? Agnes?”

  So he knew.

  “Not in so many words. Mostly with silences. Changing the subject.”

  “Well, they—that’s a shame. You know, I feel sorry for them. They don’t know what they’ve got. They’re just ignorant, I guess. If they don’t hurry they’ll never get to understand you at all.”

  I noticed the funny way he put that, if they don’t hurry. “They don’t want to understand me. They’re in no hurry.”

  “Well, I am. I’m ignorant too, but at least I’m curious.” He pulled a leaf off a nearby branch and dropped it, and I watched it whirl out of sight below us. “I see you, I’m thinking, there’s the girl from York, she’s seen things I can’t even picture. What yokels we must look like to her.”

  Feeling that I had been released from a vow of silence, I accepted what I took as his invitation to tell him some of the things I’ve told you, but in reverse order, beginning with complaints about my aunt, and the incidents of the letters and the books which Aunt Agatha had sold to the peddler. I told him about the exhaustive and detailed nature of Agnes’s prayers; we both laughed at that. I told him how I had learned of the manner of my father’s death, and he said—about the suicide—that he had heard and it was a very sad thing to happen, and a hard thing for me to have to go through. He had used almost exactly the same words my aunt had used, but the effect on me was completely different: from him it was a comfort. Then narrating mostly backward but with some loops through time, I told him about my grandfather and grandmother, Mrs. Fitch’s lie about Cincinnati—we discussed the human weakness which had led her to tell that lie, and others to endorse it, when they knew I
was bound to find out the truth as soon as I reached Livy—and what my father was like, his humor, his sadness, and about my mother’s death (the subject of the books came up again, which made me mention Agatha again), and then the Great Fire of New York and Frank’s death. It was amazing to me to realize how much there was. It all seemed to come back in the telling, and with it a great part of my forbidden self was restored to me, making me feel stronger and braver. At a certain point, when talking of my mother, I fell silent to keep from crying, Jeptha asked me, “How much did those books your aunt sold weigh?” and when I answered that they’d been too heavy for me to lift all at once, he said pensively, “They could be in town somewhere. He wouldn’t want to make his horse carry them all across the state. He paid more for them than he would have got from Colonel Ashton”—that is, at the general store—“so he probably had a customer in mind. Somebody in town.” He thought more, and said, “There aren’t more than five people who could afford them.”

  By some unspoken agreement we began talking quite pleasantly about miscellaneous trivial matters. Jeptha was one of those rare people who have already in childhood much of the personal force that will fall to their lot as grown men, and his mind was agile, and when we were talking I felt smart. We discussed the city and the country, oyster barges, canal boats, and steamboats, the funny way his four-year-old sister Ruth had looked after a harmless mishap, and a remark that his sister Becky had made when a potato had come out of the ground with the face of George Washington, and then, after asking me if I could keep a secret, but otherwise very casually, as if merely to explain more about Becky, he told me why she walked the way she did. When she was three years old, Jacob (drunk, frolicsome) had tossed her so high that her head hit a rafter, and after that she limped but she did not know why; she had forgotten; and I was not to tell her or anyone else. Then not giving me time to respond to this he said that he had become very interested lately in the art of following bees to locate their hives, and that was what he had been doing today (having convinced Jake that they could make a good profit on the honey at the general store). “And that was what I was up to when this tree came by.” Then he looked around and said it was pretty here, wasn’t it?

  I said without thinking, “I pray every night that tomorrow someone will come to take me back where I came from.”

  And he shot back, “I’m going to pray twice as hard the other way,” just as quickly, testifying not merely to the rapidity of his thought processes but to the settled nature of the feeling he had just expressed. And just like that, I was home, as if my grandfather had come for me after all and placed me in this tree, which was home because this boy was in it. That was the moment Jeptha said, “Let’s never keep any secrets from each other,” and I nodded vigorously and agreed, though I knew that at some time in the last half-hour, whether it was when he had asked me what an omnibus was, or said that he pitied my uncle’s family for their inability to appreciate me, or when he had applied his mind to the problem of finding the current owner of my books, or told me about how his father had hurt his sister, or maybe just before that when he had mentioned the potato with the face of George Washington, I had come to love him, and I would wait for the right time to tell him, and it might not be for years.

  I felt that it was all going to come out right. I had been worried and anxious for no reason, because it turned out that I was lucky—some people just are!—and in the end good things were going to happen to me.

  A balmy breeze arose, bearing summery scents of grass and pine and unseen unnamed herbs and making the leaves hiss and the branches sway. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again there he was, looking down at me, his lank black hair fallen over his brow again. I saw that he was taking pleasure in the sight of me. That’s right, I thought, I’m pretty. I’m so glad that I’m pretty.

  We stayed in that tree, away from our chores long enough to be scolded when we got back, and there was a moment at parting when if we were older there might have been a kiss. But instead our hands brushed for a second, and I went home with my face flushed and my heart telling me that it was there, right there in my chest, and it had been there all along.

  At night, on my straw bed, and at milking time and when I was weeding the garden, I went over our conversation again and again, until it was worn out, like an old rag. Weeks became months, and I did not see him again. There was no school, and in three seasons out of four, Jeptha spent all day and much of the evening at his work. The hour in the tree had been a stolen one. On Jake’s farm, half the land was good only for rye, which did not fetch a high price even when times were good. Year by year, he fell a little further in debt to the miller and the storekeeper, who were beginning to treat him as if he were their shiftless employee, and whom he hated more than anyone else in the world. To free himself from this bondage, he made barrel staves and butter firkins, cleared other men’s land, broke their oxen, and did other piecework. He drove himself like a dumb brute, and Jeptha worked beside him. Whenever Jeptha took a moment for himself, his father would tell him that, thanks to his selfishness, they might lose the farm; and it was very nearly true. Every ounce of effort the family could put forth was necessary.

  I grasped some of this at the time—I knew at least that Jeptha had to work a great deal—but I still wondered why he didn’t make more of an effort to see me again.

  Perhaps it was Mrs. Talbot. My aunt sometimes sent Agnes on errands to the Talbots’ farm, and once, when I asked if I could go along, Agatha said, “Better not, Arabella. Mrs. Talbot hates you like poison.”

  THAT SUMMER, LEWIS ATTENDED SCHOOL in town with the younger boys, one of whom, Andy Miller, said, “Your pa jumped from a roof and is burning in hell for it.” They fought, and Lewis won decisively. However, as I have already mentioned, there were several Miller boys, each one larger than the next. When you beat one, you had to face the next older one. A few days later, Tom Miller waited outside the school to fight Lewis. Tom should have won, because Lewis had no more meat on him than a sparrow, but the fight ended with Tom on the ground yelling “uncle.”

  The following Sunday, when we were singing hymns in semi-darkness, sweat streaming down our faces, a murmur arose among the congregation. From a message passed by whispers, I learned that a crowd of children and a few grown-ups had gathered outside the church, and they included the whole Miller clan, waiting for us to come out so that John Miller, the next older Miller boy, could beat the tar out of Lewis. I touched my brother’s elbow. He made a little frown of indifference, as though it would be light work for him to beat this boy three years older, a head taller, and thirty pounds heavier than he. I said, “Well, I guess you’ll have to take your licks,” feeling bitter that every Miller got to be a bully just because he had five brothers.

  A half-hour later, we stepped, squinting, through the doorway. The sun pressed on my head like a hand. A boy sitting on a stump said, “This’ll be quick,” and another boy said, “If John lets it be quick.” Elihu squeezed Lewis’s shoulder, and Lewis, not looking up, nodded—they both knew Elihu could not interfere. The boy who had spoken last continued, “John likes to stretch these things out.”

  Then Matthew stepped beside Lewis and spoke, twice as loud as anyone else had: “Does he? What a coincidence. I’m like that, too.”

  There was an odd formality to the scene, like a historical painting of a probably apocryphal encounter of kings or generals, as the little mob made room for John to meet Lewis and ask him if he was “man enough.” And Lewis said, “Anytime.”

  Matthew said, “He was man enough to lick two Millers so far. Hey, Tom,” he called out to John’s brother, “how’s that ass you fell on twice, does it still hurt?” Children not of the Miller clan dared to laugh. “Did your ma make you a plaster, Tom?” Lewis was laughing, too.

  John said, “Go on, laugh, you little shit. Soon it won’t be funny.”

  Matthew said, “He’s little compared to you, John. But you’re little compared to me. And you know me, I like t
o leave a mark.”

  Agnes and Evangeline went home with my aunt and uncle in the wagon, but I couldn’t abandon my brother, so I followed the crowd to the field behind the livery stable.

  For a while it was a fight, with Matthew yelling out advice and encouragement to Lewis, but then, since no miracle occurred, it was just a beating, Lewis struggling helplessly in the older boy’s grip, and John pounding him in the ribs—“Laugh now. Ha ha ha!”—and grinding his face into the mud. “This will learn you to respect a Miller.”

  “Stop them,” I said to Matthew. I hit him in the arm. “Stop them. He’s licked.”

  He looked at me blankly, then turned and shouted, “That’s enough!”

  John didn’t stop. Titus and Matthew walked toward them, and Matthew yanked John by the hair. The other Miller boys moved in, snarling. “He’s licked,” said Matthew, putting his face next to John’s. “You can meet me here next Sunday, and since you made my brother taste the mud, you’re gonna eat it. You’re gonna chew it and swallow it.”

  “My brother,” he had called him. That was new. My brother.

  “Go on and make me,” said John, but he did not look confident.

  “No, you’re tired now,” said Matthew, helping Lewis up. “In a year or two you’ll whip him,” he told Lewis, and he mounted a stump and addressed the gathering. “What’s Lewis got to be ashamed of? Not one thing. John’s got fifty pounds on him, but did he complain? No, he stepped up like a man. So … that’s settled. Now let’s talk about John. I’m giving John a week to get his strength back. Next Sunday, rain or shine, I’ll be here to make him eat mud. Bring your friends. Bring your folks.” There was excited murmuring from his audience, and Lewis, oblivious to the dirt in his mouth and the blood running down his face, looked up at Matthew worshipfully.