Belle Cora Page 19

We never said that we knew Agnes was cheating, so she never had to admit it. We simply began paying her less and less attention. Once, she screamed and my aunt came rushing, certain that her daughter was dying after all. The second time, she didn’t come. At last Agnes rose from her bed and responded with wan, weak, soulful looks to our inquiries about her health. But she knew she had lost her last chance of having Jeptha. Out of the corner of my eye, as months passed happily for me, I was aware of a time of profound misery for her, followed by a time of keeping company with other boys, so that she seemed to admit she was licked.

  XVIII

  THE ILLNESS AND THE DEATHS had left both Jacob and Jeptha profoundly troubled. Jacob brooded on his faults, prey to a gnawing and basically superstitious conviction that his irreligion had brought this evil upon his family. Jeptha, who had less to reproach himself with, was overcome with a consciousness that all daily certainties rest on nothing, and life is mystery upon mystery, and it was futile to look for honey in the forest and gold in the mountains while the most elementary questions were in doubt. One day, walking in the woods alone, he heard himself say, “O God, I’m lost; find me.” He had a feeling of a hand falling on his shoulder; a profound peace and certainty, such as I only wish I could feel, came over him, and the very next thing he wanted to do was to tell everyone—me first of all—about the wonderful thing that had happened to him, and that it could happen to them, too. He turned his attention to his father, the father whom he had once meant to drive from the house as soon as he was capable of it. He told Jacob that it was all right—God had forgiven him already. Within a week, they were both baptized by William Jefferds.

  It was understood that Jacob’s conversion had to mean total abstinence from drink. Men who make such promises often backslide. So did Jacob, and when drunk he was as bad as ever.

  Afterward, he was remorseful. “It wasn’t me. It was the demon that got into me. Blame the demon.”

  The next time his father came home in this condition, Jeptha barred all the doors of his house against him and told him to sleep it off in the barn.

  “I’m your father,” bellowed Jacob. “Honor thy father!”

  “My father?” asked Jeptha. “My father warned me about you. He said you were a demon. You crawl inside him through the neck of a whiskey jug.”

  And Jacob replied: “I’ll show you a demon! Just let me in there!”

  The month was January, cold though not freezing; it began to rain. Jacob raved like King Lear, demanding that the wind blow him into oblivion so as to rebuke his unnatural children, calling heavenly judgment down on the whole family, and then switching to tears and swearing that he felt the return of his fever and he guessed he was dying. Eventually, he left. Jeptha stood vigil all night.

  In the morning, a sober Jacob appeared, with hay and feathers in his hair. Jeptha let him in, saying, “There was a demon here last night. He tried to get into our house.”

  Jacob said, “This ain’t right. I said I was going on the wagon, and I am, but if I slip that’s between me and the Lord. You’ve got to be punished.”

  Jeptha followed him to the woodshed and took ten strokes meekly, and no more was said. A week later, Jacob came home drunk again, and the whole scene was replayed without the rain. In the morning, Jeptha quietly accompanied Jacob to the woodshed, but this time it was different. The switch fell to the straw. Jacob sat on a woodpile, palm on his pulsing brow. “Oh Lord, where is this going, where are we all going? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Tell me what to do, Jeptha.”

  Jeptha took thought, while his father waited patiently, and at last he said, “You’ve got to be a strict Christian now. It’s what you meant to do when you joined the church. But the devil keeps whispering in your ear, saying it was just the shock of Lionel and Becky and you would get over it, and you kind of hope he’s right, since being a Christian means giving up some comforts. But the devil is a liar. And you don’t believe a word he says, and he’s not your friend anymore, you hate him now. I can tell because otherwise you wouldn’t have asked my opinion when you knew just what I was going to say.”

  A week or so after that, Jeptha and I met near my uncle’s place, at the Muskrat Pond; we often went there. I had arrived first, and he walked toward me through the dappled light, and when a bright patch lit his face I cried, “What’s wrong? Is everyone all right?” because he looked so distressed.

  We sat on a log and he said, “Pa’s giving Ike the farm. Leaving it to him.”

  “Oh no,” I said; I knew he had planned all his life to farm; he was the eldest and good and could be relied on not to kick his brother out anyway.

  “They want me to be a preacher. They talked to William Jefferds. They want me to study with him and, when he thinks it’s right, to go away to school. He thinks he can get a Home Missionary Society to pay for it. At a seminary in New Jersey.”

  He had told them that it was wrong, that he had never wanted to be anything but a farmer, and he was needed here—they couldn’t spare him. But it wasn’t true anymore. Times were better, the farm was no longer in danger, and Ike was old enough to help as Jeptha used to. As to Jeptha wanting to be a farmer, he had only wanted that so he could save his family from Jacob; and he had just done that—not with a lifetime of toil, as he had expected to, but instantly, by means of a miracle.

  We sat side by side on the fallen oak, and I looked at him. It made perfect sense to me; it was like a puzzle solved. His serious mind, his fervor, his willfulness, his love of justice, his homely eloquence were like parts of a new engine which seem merely curious until they are assembled and the machine begins to do the work for which it was designed. His vocation was so perfect, it was all by itself an argument for purpose in the world. But for me it created a couple of problems.

  In the months since his conversion, he had told me many times that he would make a Christian of me. The first or second time I had said lightly, “What do you mean? I am a Christian,” and he had touched my arm and, with surprising vehemence, insisted, “No, Arabella, you’re not. But you will be. Because I won’t rest until you are.”

  I had looked at it from every angle, and I did not see how I could be saved, and though I was happy in those days, still, distantly, it bothered me that there should be this lie between us, that he must want to save me, and I must pretend it was possible.

  Now I put my hand on his, and he brought my palm to his mouth and kissed it and put it against his cheek. “They won’t let you come along,” he said. “I asked. They won’t pay for two.”

  “I know,” I told him. “We can wait. I’ll stay here. I’ll save money for us.”

  I reminded him that Mrs. Harding, whose husband owned the flour mill and the distillery, had agreed that this year I should become her hired girl and move into her house in town. A salary went with the job, and I was thrifty.

  He said that he felt like a fraud, he couldn’t measure up to people’s ideas of him, and he hated to be under an obligation to a bunch of strangers—what if he wanted to change his mind later?

  I saw that he really wanted to go. He wanted to see the world and exercise his talents. And it would get me out of Livy at last.

  “I’ll wait,” I said. “I’ll wait. They’re right. You’re wasted here.”

  I didn’t say, “God wants you to go.” He would have known I didn’t mean it. Nor did I say, “Become a preacher someplace where people are civilized, and I will be a perfect imitation of a preacher’s wife.”

  XIX

  JEPTHA DID NOT KNOW WHEN EXACTLY he would be sent away. There would be at least a year of private study with William Jefferds. We spent as much time as we could in each other’s company. I lived for the moment and was happy.

  That spring I went to work as a hired girl for Mrs. Harding, sparing me the daily irritations of life with my uncle’s family, where I must listen to Agnes brag unconvincingly about her sweetheart of the moment as she hatefully jerked the slop from the spoon to my bowl, and Agatha wonder out loud when “
that foolish boy” (meaning Jeptha) would come to his senses (Agnes looking daggers at Agatha, for making her feel worse); where Matthew, now sixteen, quite handsome, utterly repulsive, had begun to look at me in a hungry way that made me feel uncomfortable. Going away from this house also meant seeing less of Lewis, but we had grown so far apart that it made hardly any difference.

  Together with their ten-year-old daughter, Eva; their three sons, William, Richard, and Miles; and now with me, Mr. and Mrs. Harding lived on the town’s nicest street, in a pretty two-story house full of polished furniture, glass, mirrors, carpets, a grandfather clock, a cookstove, a pianoforte, and many books, including (as I have mentioned already) those my aunt sold to the peddler in 1838. The miller was an important man in Livy. His wife, with money to buy novels and the leisure to read them, was a much more agreeable woman than my aunt, although, I realized fairly quickly, she did not like to be inconvenienced. She professed herself an admirer of my grandfather, for his efforts on behalf of abolition, and I believe that she liked the idea of an association with the granddaughter of a famous man.

  It was agreed, between Mrs. Harding and my aunt, that in the winter I would continue to attend school, and I would work on my uncle’s farm whenever there was a special need. In the meantime, I wore dresses Mrs. Harding had ordered for me, imitated her finishing-school manners, and read my way through her library. In all my dealings with my employer, there was an extra dollop of the hypocrisy that lubricates the gears of everyday life. She said I was “like a daughter,” but worked me as hard as any of her previous girls. I understood her, so my feelings weren’t hurt. She did like me a little, and she was nice to me so long as I did my job, and I had far more freedom than I would have had if she had really considered me a member of her family.

  I had more freedom to be with Jeptha. As time went by and our young bodies began to strain against the limits we set them, we did everything permitted to Baptists, and such further indiscretions as young Baptists have been known to commit with subsequent apologies to the Lord. We could not go to dances; dancing was immoral. We went to prayer meetings, and Jeptha visited with me in Mrs. Harding’s sitting room.

  On my day off, or when I was wanted at my uncle’s farm, I arranged to meet him in the woods or the fields. Sometimes I would sneak out after dark. I had a room of my own on the ground floor, making it easy. We met in places where we had no other company than livestock, mice, squirrels, and insects. We kissed standing up against the boughs of trees, and lying down in the grass, torturing each other deliciously, stimulating each other to the verge of the act we considered irrevocable. Sometimes we twined our legs together, and as if by accident there would be contact and even a degree of friction between our lower limbs and the parts of our bodies never mentioned by the major Victorian novelists. Once, when he was lying on his back, I straddled him with my legs. He seemed, for a moment, astonished at my shamelessness. I leaned over him so that my bosom was an inch from his chest. Though we had embraced tightly many times before this, there was something different, infinitely naughty and lubricious about this delicate nearness.

  According to Saint Paul, he courted damnation even by thinking of me the way he did, and he considered himself a hypocrite for meeting me this way. Sometimes, when his conscience got the better of him, he would say I ought to hate him, because if we died tomorrow we were both going straight to hell, and he would have been the murderer of my soul. “We’ve got to stop,” he’d say, his hair falling over his forehead, his hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes gripping my eyes, brimful of lust and remorse, looking as though he could devour me and yet so worried about my fate that I could not help but surrender my will to his—though my virtue was dear to me, I would have done whatever he asked without question. “I’ve decided,” he said. “We’ll stop.”

  For a week or so, we would stop. Then, without a word, he would take my hand and lead me into the woods.

  The next day, perhaps, we would attend a prayer meeting, hear a lecture on Adventism, and learn the exact date on which, according to William Miller’s calculations, all good Christians would be taken into the sky to be spared the burning of the earth. Dozens of households in Livy, including my uncle’s, found Adventist newspapers waiting for them each week at the general store. From the newspapers we knew this wasn’t just a fancy of farm people. It was the talk of the whole country, which made it all seem more real.

  As 1842 became 1843, the time of Jeptha’s departure was postponed and the time of Miller’s prophesy neared, and its implications began to sink in. I looked about me at the world as you would look at a man of whom the doctor had just said that, despite outward appearances, he had a bad heart and could drop dead any minute. Nursing calves, freshly painted signs, new straw hats and the girls who had just plaited them would never live to be old.

  People believed or did not according to the way it made them feel. Jeptha, though he could not simultaneously be a Baptist and scorn the Second Coming, pointed out that these predictions had been made many times before, that according to the Bible we knew not the hour, and anyway—as his teacher, William Jefferds, often said—we were all, in any case, always supposed to be ready to die and face God’s judgment. But really, like me, he did not believe or want to believe, because he looked forward to our life together here on this planet.

  SOMETIMES, LYING IN THE GRASS, we talked about the books we were reading. He would tell me about Hannibal and Cato, about the Crusades, about Cortés and Montezuma. I would narrate the story of The Last Days of Pompeii, a novel I was reading for the second time: it was set in that real Roman city in A.D. 79, the year when it was destroyed, buried, and preserved by the volcano which its citizens had been gazing at for as long as they could remember, thinking only that it lent variety to the view. I described the houses of the Pompeiians and the elaborate public baths where some of these people, who apparently never did any work, would while away their time. How civilized were these lives that had been snuffed out so suddenly! It was pleasant to talk about ancient cataclysms while safe in the crook of Jeptha’s arm, watching the squirrels and the birds, for whom history did not exist, hop about the branches of the trees above us. A world was lost in a day, and passing centuries had leached away the suffering, leaving only a strange beauty.

  “Well,” he observed, “that’s how it is with all the people of those times. Their world is gone.”

  We were quiet, until it occurred to me to ask, “Will it happen to us?”

  “What?”

  “Will we be buried under the years? Will people dig up our houses and say, Look how quaintly people lived back then?”

  He thought a bit, and then he sat up and leaned over me, his earnest face framed by the sky as if he were an angel. “We’re going to live in heaven forever.”

  “Will we be together there?”

  “Always. I promise. We will always be together.”

  XX

  “I HATE WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO LEWIS,” I told Jeptha one day, out of nowhere, and did not have to explain; he knew what I meant. My brother had become my cousin’s hound, and as Matthew ran wild, so did he. Under Matthew’s leadership, but with Lewis often showing initiative in wickedness to please his idol, the two of them became the town’s practical jokers—not the only ones, but the most daring and disrespectful. They tied a live cat by its tail to the ankle of the town drunk. They placed a whiskey jug and a piece of liver under the bench used every Sunday by Mrs. Harris, a pious and quarrelsome old widow, and when the congregation was singing, “How lost was my condition till Jesus made me whole,” a dog raced into the church and knocked over the jug in its eagerness to reach the meat.

  Everyone knew who perpetrated these crimes. Except for my aunt, whose life Matthew had made a misery for years, nobody cared, so long as the target was the town drunk and an unlikable widow. As time would show, however, the two were only practicing for an assault on Matthew’s real foe, William Jefferds. Matthew had never forgotten his old grudge against Jefferds,
who had come to stand not only for all the suffering my cousin had endured in the schoolroom, but for all the abstract forces Matthew opposed—for the sly triumph of the old over the young, for the curbing of masculine freedom, for his mother’s victory over his father, for effeminacy, civilization, and religion.

  Jefferds was a man with defenders, a teacher and the minister of the church Matthew himself had attended until announcing that he was done with church until his mother found a new minister. Matthew approached his degradation by stages.

  First came a mild joke. A boy named Solomon Cole performed the feat of memorization that earned him his fiftieth ticket. Jefferds grasped a fat tome, telling Solomon that he had well earned the right to his own private copy of this holy book and he should let no one take it from him, should take it into his heart and be guided by it; he handed it to the boy in view of the class. It developed gradually that a switch had occurred, and in lieu of the Old Testament the nearsighted Jefferds had handed Solomon a copy of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, an illustrated guide to fornication, which passed from hand to hand among the older boys. Somehow a beautiful mint-new presentation copy had been obtained for the occasion; it had been inscribed, “With love and best wishes, to Solomon Cole, from William Jefferds.”

  Everyone not a member of the Free Will Baptist church enjoyed this joke. Nothing was done, even by the elders of Jefferds’s own congregation, who could not be certain who the culprit was. No one had been hurt.

  A month later, Jefferds was attacked by a pair of dogs while he walked on the main road near the millrace. Some spectators figured out that what the dogs were really after was Jefferds’s coat—blood was seen dripping from the pockets—and shouted for him to remove it; which he did, and then watched the dogs tear apart the coat in an effort to get at the raw meat stuffed in its lining.

  The moment I heard about the incident with the coat, I knew that Lewis was responsible. We had just done a slaughter, and I had seen him tuck away the lungs.