Belle Cora Page 20

  I didn’t like seeing my brother become a hooligan. The next chance I got, I told him that I knew, and that I’d keep his secret, but that if he and Matthew started trying to outdo each other in nastiness they were bound to go too far. He looked stonily back at me. My word had no weight with him anymore. I was now merely a despised member of the other sex. Anyway, I was Jeptha’s sweetheart, and Jeptha was a sneak; Jeptha was a fast talker who had taken up religion because it was his ticket out of Livy.

  Besides that, though Lewis didn’t mention this and I didn’t know it, there were already certain rumors about me in the town, and they had reached Lewis by this time.

  My aunt was more distressed than anyone when she heard about the dog and the coat, but had no idea who might be responsible until Bill Dodge and Jonathan Wakeman, two church elders, appeared at her door asking to speak to my uncle. Then she guessed everything. She had Elihu get Matthew from the fields, and since his sense of honor did not permit him to run, he sat at the kitchen table under the glare of Dodge and Wakeman while my aunt told him that he had disgraced the family. He said he hadn’t done what they thought he’d done. My aunt said, “Then you put someone up to it.”

  Matthew said he hadn’t.

  She told the elders, “It isn’t like Matthew to lie.”

  Dodge said, “Matthew, do you know who did it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Will you tell us?”

  “No.”

  “Was it Lewis?”

  Matthew didn’t answer, and though I wasn’t there, I imagine his face showed what he thought of people who would ask him to tell a tale on his own kin.

  My aunt wept. My uncle took Matthew to the barn and whipped him, though it was like whipping a statue, and when he found Lewis, he gave Lewis a whipping that meant just as little. The next time we were together, Lewis accused me of telling what I had seen him do.

  “I would never tell on you, Lewis. I’m loyal to you. I’ll always be loyal.” He screwed up his face in disgust and walked away.

  Colonel Ashton gave Jefferds another coat, newer and warmer than the one he’d lost to the dogs, and he accepted it with a humility some people found contemptible.

  It was from Jeptha, on one of our walks, that I first heard about the next and last of these incidents. Since the beginning of the year, Jefferds had been boarding with Alvin Walters, and each morning he took a constitutional in the forest of honey locusts on the property. One morning, on a path that had been perfectly firm beneath his feet the day before, the leaves turned out to have been a thin covering over a two-foot-deep cavity filled with muddy water. He sprained his ankle. His spectacles fell off, and when he was struggling to get out, he broke one of the lenses with his elbow. From the high branches of the tall, crooked trees came the laughter of the boys who had prepared the trap.

  He couldn’t see much, but he knew who two of the boys up there had to be.

  “It’s your uncle’s fault,” said Jeptha, who had been calm when he began recounting the incident but became angry as he told it. “No: it’s your aunt. She took away Elihu’s pride, and his revenge was to let Matthew run wild, and now look at him.” He walked on a little. “I whipped him once.”

  “You don’t mean that.” I had been afraid of this. “You’re strong, but you can’t beat him. That other time, you were children. You used his vanity. That won’t happen again. Besides, now you’re a Christian, you can’t. It’s against your principles.”

  I looked at him, at his penetrating blue eyes, at his brow that with advancing adolescence had acquired a hawkish, feral ridge, and at the shoulders and arms which mattered to me not for the damage they might inflict on a foe, but for their beauty, and because of the way they felt pressing against me and gripping me, and because they were his. Today Matthew had no match in Livy. He knocked out teeth and broke jaws. And Matthew was envious of Jeptha and hated him, and would have loved to have him at his mercy. It made me sick to think of it.

  Jeptha was as annoyed as a young fellow is bound to be when his sweetheart worries that another man is too strong for him. “I’m not stupid, Arabella. It will be a last resort. But if it comes to that, I’ll pray and use strategy, and we’ll see.”

  I kept telling him he was supposed to turn the other cheek, and he kept telling me not to worry, but I knew what was in his mind. He ached to punish Matthew, and his pride told him that he could do it, and I wished I could believe it.

  True to his word, though, he did not resort to fighting first. First he complained on Jefferds’s behalf to my uncle Elihu. Elihu said that he would whip Matthew. Jeptha said that wasn’t enough: Matthew must make a public apology and pay for the spectacles.

  I was not there, but it was all reported to me in detail, by more than one party to the conversation.

  “I’ll put it to him,” said Elihu with a smile. “But I don’t know as I can make him if he don’t want to. Matt can be awful stubborn. Maybe you can make him.”

  Jeptha, who was perhaps a trifle angry, angrier than he knew, at this point—I was angry when my uncle’s words were quoted to me—said, “Let’s both ask him. And if he refuses, why, then, you should do it for him. You should make restitution. It could be a great lesson for him.”

  Now Elihu was angry. “What are you talking about?”

  “You should humble yourself, and make a public apology to Mr. Jefferds, who is your minister, and has humbled himself before you: he’s washed your feet, I’ve seen him do it. You should insist on paying for his broken spectacles, and you should say it’s to make up for the shame your son and your nephew have brought upon you.”

  “Now, see here, I’ve heard you out. Don’t make me lose my temper. Nobody can even prove Matthew did this.”

  “Yes, but we know he did. Of course nobody blames you. That’s what’ll make it work. That’s how you’ll be able to get through to Matthew and Lewis. A thing like that could turn them both around. It could save them, and Jefferds himself would bless that hole he fell in and see the Lord’s work in it, since it brought two erring souls to Jesus!”

  Now, I am well aware that many of us who are not actually in the grip of religion have a distaste for talk like this. We prefer the citizen who angrily demands his rights to the preacher who, when he wants something, ropes your immortal soul into the argument. We are pleased when we find out that such men are hypocrites. So it is necessary for me to say that I loved this boy and knew him well, and though he had the zealotry of a recent convert and inevitably fell short of the perfection he aimed at, he was being as sincere as he could bring himself to be. It was his duty to interfere with people’s souls.

  And if you think about it, his proposal made sense. It was what a better man than Elihu would have done. For Elihu to become a better man was a tactfully unmentioned opportunity in this plan. But if there are any forty-two-year-old men capable of taking such advice from a sixteen-year-old boy, my uncle wasn’t one of them. Instead, his face turned colors and he shouted, “Leave my house!” When he reported the conversation to my aunt, she said Jeptha was right, but he wouldn’t budge, and when the church elders came again, he said he had intended to whip Matthew, but now, because of Jeptha’s insolence, he wasn’t going to do a thing.

  SO, FINALLY, LIKE THE YOUNG HERO in a boy’s adventure story, Jeptha challenged my cousin Matthew, the town bully, to a fight. I learned about it first from Matthew, on the day I hate to speak of, the day I have dreaded speaking of as I have watched its steady, unrelenting approach in these confessions.

  Agnes and Evangeline were in the house with Aunt Agatha, carding and spinning. Titus was in Patavium, where he now had a job as a clerk in a dry-goods store. Matthew and I were shelling corn in the barn. With Mrs. Harding’s permission, I had come home especially to assist with this chore. Lewis was supposed to help us, too, but he didn’t show up, and when I asked Matthew why, he said he had told Lewis that he needn’t: he could hunt for nests or shoot birds, and Matthew would do his share of the work.


  Matthew was fond of Lewis, and might do him a disinterested favor sometimes, but this wasn’t one of those times. He wanted to be alone with me. I knew it, and I was nervous about it, but I couldn’t very well refuse to stand in the barn shelling corn with my cousin, out of a suspicion so base that I would be considered vile for uttering it. This was work, it was necessary, and there were no excuses for shirking it.

  I am reluctant to continue, which seems very odd, considering all I’ve done and had done to me, and that I’m up to the event that is supposed to excuse my crimes. For days now, as I’ve approached this incident, I’ve been going over it in my mind as I haven’t in half a century. I feel like an Egyptologist who has said aloud the ancient curse inscribed on the wall of a long-buried tomb, and the curse still works. I wish. I wish I had done things differently.

  Anyway, I let myself be alone with him, even though I found his company unpleasant. Lately, whenever I was around him, his eyes raked my form with a candid lust so disconcerting it could make me stumble. While his eyes took these liberties, he practiced gentlemanly manners that gave him excuses to draw his body nearer to mine. He would hand me my coat or lift me into a wagon.

  This attention from Matthew had several causes, some known to me at the time. My form was more mature, and my new clothes displayed it to better effect; also, now that I lived away from my uncle’s house, maybe I did not seem so much like a sister to him. I think I understood all that. What I did not know was that there was a rumor in town that I had granted my favors not only to Jeptha but to all three of the Harding boys, William, Dick, and Miles. It was said that they had given me or paid for the pretty dresses I went about in.

  Furthermore, Matthew himself had recently been initiated into the rites of Eros by Mrs. Caroline, a forty-year-old widow who had employed him in clearing land on her farm, and he had filled out the gaps in his knowledge with the help of Penny Jackson (also called “Five Penny Jackson”), who lived with four bastards in a shack downstream from the sawmill and would take any man to paradise in exchange for a bushel of corn.

  Hay blocked one of the two windows in the barn loft. As we moved about, we were sometimes in darkness, and sometimes in the glare from the other window. One moment I’d be peering into the murk, the next shielding my eyes. I heard the hard corn kernels falling through gaps in the floorboards. Matthew was spilling them. He was doing this job, for which he had contempt, in a state of moderate drunkenness.

  There were three corn shellers, one for Matthew, one for me, and one for Lewis. Matthew helped himself unthinkingly to the most productive and easy-to-use sheller, a machine with a wheel to turn. I had a board with the points of nails sticking out of it. Turning the wheel, his big hand in the light, his face in darkness, Matthew told me that Jeptha had challenged him to a fight, a formal fight, in front of witnesses on the green, and he wondered if I might have something to say about it. “He was always sly, your preacher boy. He can talk his way round almost anybody. Guess he got round you, didn’t he? But talk won’t help him now. This is stupid, taking me on like a man, when he could hide behind Jesus. I’m surprised at him. Remember when him and me scrapped that first year you came to Livy? And Agnes begged me to go easy on him.”

  He began to talk about what he might do to Jeptha. “I could gouge out one of his eyes. I could break an arm so it never set right. I’ve a mind to do something to him. Talking to Pa that way in front of Ma: ‘Go apologize for Matthew, humble yourself, be a great thing for all of you.’ That wasn’t right. I can’t just let it pass.”

  We both went on working; it took him a long time to say that much. He kept stopping, as if he were done with the subject, and then returning to it, as if he were merely thinking out loud. It was a way of working on my feelings, and it was very effective. I was uncomfortable. I was not yet afraid. At least, I don’t think I was, or why would I have remained? Some of it is not easy to remember.

  “Or,” he said finally, “I could go easy on him. I could make us come out about even. I could make it look like a tie. I could. I could make it a tie and not be hurt myself, and everyone would believe it. Even Jeptha would believe it. I’d have to swallow my pride. That would be hard.” In a little while, he went on: “You want me to do that?”

  Finally, I answered, “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Go easy on him.”

  “Go easy on him, huh?” He said it now as if it had been my suggestion. “You’d like me to go easy on him. Oh. Huh. Oh, I see. All right, but why should I do it?”

  There was silence for a long time, and at last I said, “I’ll give you ten dollars.”

  He pretended to consider this. “No. I don’t want your money. This is an affair of honor.” More silence, more work. “Suppose you give me a kiss. Then I could go easy on him.”

  More time passed, too much time. “You’re a pig.”

  Perhaps here I began to be afraid.

  “Maybe. That’s a whole other discussion. But what about the kiss? On the lips?”

  “I’m your sister.”

  “You’re my first cousin. Nobody’ll know. It won’t hurt Jeptha, unless”—he gave a smile which in another context, from another person, would have been suave and charming—“unless you like it too much. Do you really care about him? Come on.”

  He went on like that; finally, I asked if he was serious. He said yes.

  “Just a kiss,” I said. As soon I said it, I knew it had been a mistake. He nodded. “Come on,” he said, walking toward the hay. Did he expect me to lie down there with him? I shook my head. He stood by the hay. “I’m waiting.” I walked halfway there. He smirked and walked the rest of the way. I knew already that I was in trouble. Whenever I thought about it later, I would identify this as the moment when I knew the nature of the danger I faced. In my reconstruction of the event, I would change course, slip past him, and run to the ladder, and in some versions he would grab my elbow and in others I would hit him with the corn sheller. But I did not run. I let him kiss me. He bit my lip and said, “Open your mouth,” and, thinking that he would not honor the bargain unless I did, I obeyed him. He thrust in his tongue, tasting of whiskey and chewing tobacco. I tried to draw away. He pulled up my skirt and reached between my legs. While I struggled to free myself, and he expended what was, for him, a very moderate amount of strength in preventing my escape, he talked about my unkindness. “You’re killing me,” he said. “Oh Jesus, you’re killing me, you’re a killer, I can’t stand it, don’t do this to me.”

  “Stop it, Matt—what are you doing?” I said, but I didn’t shout. I felt already that I had a secret to keep. We fell, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. This time I yelled. His hand covered my mouth. I renewed my struggles. For him that just meant a barely noticeable increase in the force needed to restrain me.

  “Let me. You’ll like it. You’ll see you will. I’m better than your preacher boy. Better than those Harding boys.” I saw his mistake and tried to tell him that I was a virgin. He kept his hand over my mouth.

  My whole body was pounding like a heart; I had all of my strength to use at once; I used it, and the effect was negligible. With my free hand, I pulled his hair and tried to poke a thumb in his eye. His movements were methodical and unhurried—a good workman doing an honest job for the devil. He took his hand away from my mouth and used his own mouth to smother my cries. He pushed my dress and my petticoats up to my waist, driving his knees between my legs, and spread his knees, forced my legs open. I felt his hand between us, moving his own clothes. One hand covered my mouth again as he spat into the other; then his mouth returned, and at the same moment his prick tore through my flesh, overriding the great No within me. Then came the drilling, and the sad, sickening rhythmic riding, each thrust a separate renewal of his triumph and my defeat, the relentless repeated delivery of the message that it was to be his way, not mine. I felt as we do when we fall in a dream, a fatal fall, and we have no choice but to wake if we can. I was a worm in a bird’s beak. I had wandere
d down the wrong path, and I was to be nourishment for another creature. This was what it had all come to. This was what I had been headed for from the moment my mother had died.

  I lay beneath him like a rag doll. After he had finished, he kissed me, told me that I was wonderful, and that he meant to be very good to me. He was going to treat me like a queen. He talked like that until he noticed the blood on my skirt, and perhaps he remembered the moment when he had encountered an obstacle that had not barred the way to the womb of either Mrs. Caroline or Penny Jackson. He was smart. He got the idea at last. “Oh,” he said.

  I was distant from myself, as people are at such times, hearing myself speak without advance warning of the words. I did not know whose will moved me now. “I can’t be seen like this. People would guess.” I told him to go into the house and where to find another skirt, and some rags and a bucket, and not be seen. He must not be seen.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. He looked contrite. I believe, from the way he behaved then, that he had not planned to rape me. He had planned to seduce me, buy me, or blackmail me, whichever method got the desired results. He had gotten carried away.

  “No one must know,” I told him.

  “I swear,” he said. “I’ll swear any way you like, on anything you like.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but later, on thinking back, I realized that he had been prepared for a Tom Sawyer ritual, to draw blood from his finger. I did not have the presence of mind to think that Matthew had committed a crime and was afraid of being found out. All I could think was that this must be kept a secret.

  On one point I was clear. It wasn’t the rupture of the hymen before marriage that ruined a girl; it was other people knowing. No one would ever think the same of me after they had learned of this. They might pity me, if they believed me. In any case, I would be held in contempt. Jeptha would marry me anyway, supposing he survived the attempt to kill Matthew that would follow my telling him. But we would always have this between us. I couldn’t endure that. He must not know. Whether I was really naïve enough to believe that his ignorance of what had happened would not stand between us, or whether I had an inkling that it would, I cannot recall, but in any case I would have believed that his ignorance of it could never be as dangerous to us as his knowledge. I had suffered a small wound, an invisible puncture. Why should I let it change my life? The safest thing would be for no one to know.