Belle Cora Page 21

  Matthew went. When he returned, I changed out of the torn and bloody skirt and into the clean one he had brought, which looked nothing like the one I had been wearing; I could only hope that no one would notice. He cleaned the floor. We resumed our work. I imagined having the courage to get close to Matthew, perhaps by promising to let him have me again, and when he was near enough, slamming the nails of the corn-sheller deeply into his neck and killing him. The picture kept coming unbidden into my mind while I went on numbly scraping the dry ears on the nails and beadlike kernels of dried corn dropped from my hair.

  When we were done, I wrapped the rags and my bloody skirt in a bundle and walked back to town. As I left the farm, I passed Lewis. He was carrying a couple of dead birds. When he saw my face, he asked me what the matter was, and I made myself smile and told him that it was nothing important.

  At the Hardings’ house, I washed as thoroughly as I could with a basin and ewer. I was afraid of what might be said or guessed if I had a bath in the middle of the week.

  XXI

  ON ONE EXCUSE OR ANOTHER, I put off spending time with Jeptha. I thought that if I gave myself some time I would begin to feel better, or at least find it easier to conceal my emotions, but after a week had passed, my misery had only grown.

  Jeptha came by on my day off, wanting us to go in the fields to kiss and tease each other. I used the excuse of a sudden chill in the air—it was now October—and said I wanted to walk in town, by the millrace. He was going to fight Matthew in a few days, he told me. It was to occur in the field behind the tavern. I became so upset that I felt almost too weak to walk.

  I did not think he would be hurt. Matthew kept his bargains. I knew, though, that I must not be present at the fight. If I saw Matthew, my feelings would betray me.

  On Monday, the day of the fight, I told Mrs. Harding I would do the wash as usual. I put on an old wrapper, and boiled water in a great kettle in the yard. I lifted and stirred the clothes with a paddle. Often when I performed this chore, one or more of the Harding boys would come out to watch me. When it was William and Miles, who spent much of the year away at school, they disguised their interest as friendliness and propped up this illusion with chatter. Richard, the dolt, would simply stare like a starved dog. As a rule I found this annoying. Now I did not think I could abide it, and I was glad that Richard wasn’t there that day.

  Richard was watching the fight. When I was hanging the wash, he rushed into the backyard, excited, to tell me of the great upset. Matthew—overconfident, Richard supposed—had missed blow after blow and hadn’t ducked when he should have, and finally he had taken one to the chin. He had lain on the grass until someone threw a bucket of water on him, and he had admitted that Jeptha had won, and said he was sorry for what had happened to William Jefferds and was of the opinion that nothing like that would happen again, which was understood to be as close as he could come to admitting he had done it and had been justly punished.

  Matthew and Jeptha had shaken hands. I kept picturing that. A crowd consisting mostly of people who had placed bets carried Jeptha through town and toasted him in the tavern and the store. As will happen when the favorite loses, a few malcontents voiced the suspicion that Matthew had bet against himself and thrown the fight, but Richard said he didn’t believe that, even though he’d lost a dollar. Abruptly he interrupted his own account of events to ask why I didn’t look happier.

  “I don’t hold with fighting or gambling,” I said.

  The crowd had wanted to take Jeptha to the Hardings’ house to see me. He wouldn’t let them, thankfully. But he came alone later. Mrs. Harding, looking through the window, told me to stay where I was, and she opened the door herself. She congratulated him and invited him for dinner. I saw immediately what this would mean. It would be me, Jeptha, Mr. and Mrs. Harding, and Richard at the long table set for company, while Richard and Mr. Harding described the fight from their point of view, and Jeptha from his point of view. It was impossible. I could not bear it. But I could not avoid it.

  He was dusty and sweaty, with a red spot above his right eye from some glancing blow that Matthew had given him to make the fight look real. His eyes sought the additional fillip of my approval as Mr. Harding pounded his back, asked to see the hands that had done such impressive work, and told Jeptha he guessed that in the future, whenever warnings of sinners’ fates in the afterlife proved unavailing, he could persuade them with the more immediate threat of “the damage those iron fists could do! Yes, sir!” He asked me, “What do you think of your seminarian now, little lady?”

  Town notables who had gotten word that Jeptha was here kept coming to pay their respects and to enjoy Mr. Harding’s liquor. They toasted our health and urged Jeptha to drink, but he was still a Baptist and had to refuse. I was not offered whiskey. I had been given it as medicine sometimes during childhood illnesses. I resolved to put its reputation as an anodyne to the test just as soon as I was alone.

  At least the noise and commotion in the house made it easy to disguise my feelings. The things these people wanted me to say were all simple and obvious. It is very superficial, the manly world of good fellowship and cheers and toasts.

  Only Mrs. Harding noticed my discomfort. “Is something wrong, dear?” she asked quietly. I had an answer prepared. I whispered it in her ear. I said “my friend” had come. She whispered back, “Oh my goodness, and we’ve made you work so hard today.” (That was empty talk: my monthly pains never caused her to lighten my work.)

  In any case, it was plausible, what I had told her, because she knew when my time usually came—it usually came about now. But it had not come. And it did not come.

  XXII

  THREE WEEKS LATER, IT STILL HAD NOT COME, and there were other signs which I had learned from Anne and from girls at school. I knew right away. There was comfort only in sleep. My waking hours were filled with disgust and panic. My wish to believe it wasn’t true warred with the practical need to find a solution. I had to be rid of this baby. It was like a second rape happening inside me. And whatever else it might mean to tell Jeptha, I knew he would never countenance abortion: he would consider it murder.

  Every day, usually in the morning, I threw up. Once, while I was preparing breakfast, the urge came upon me so quickly that I had barely time to find a pail. Mrs. Harding was there, and she felt my pulse and told me to lie down, and she looked at me. “If I knew what you had, I would know what to give you.” That gave me hope. Over the years, she had accumulated a great store of patent medicines. I had looked through them already, not finding what I wanted, but perhaps it existed just the same.

  Later, when I was scrubbing the floor, she asked me how I was feeling now.

  “Tolerable,” I answered.

  “I’m so glad. This sickness of yours: it seems to come and go.”

  She looked at me appraisingly. My breasts had already started to get larger. She had four children. Perhaps she knew already.

  Still later, we were baking pies, and apropos of nothing, she said, “Belle, is there anything you want to tell me? If there is, you needn’t be afraid. I won’t judge you.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Harding,” I said, steeling myself. “Mrs. Harding, you are the doctor in your family, with many remedies at your disposal.”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I have a woman’s complaint. I was wondering if you have anything for menstrual regularity.”

  “Oh dear,” she said after a brief pause; how surprised she really was I could not tell. “But you said—three weeks ago—that your friend had come.”

  “I was mistaken.”

  “Oh my goodness.” She had understood my request immediately. “No, dear. No, I don’t have anything like that.”

  “I was wondering if you could get something, from a friend or from a store: a store in Patavium, not in Livy. I would be very grateful. I know you want to help me.”

  She shook her head. “I can help you. I can talk to your aunt. Mr. Harding can talk to Jacob Talbo
t, and Jacob will talk to Jeptha, who is an honorable young man, and it will all come out right, and we’ll forget that you said what I think you just said.”

  “Mrs. Harding, you know what I’m asking you. I hate asking it. But I have to. Do you think you could help me with medicine?” To eliminate any possible doubt of my intentions, I named the remedies I had seen in newspaper advertisements and at the general store.

  The temperature lowered abruptly. “Mercy, you aren’t short of information.”

  “Girls talk about these things.”

  “Do they. Well, I hope you haven’t shared your wisdom with Eva.”

  “No,” I said, hurt that her mind would turn this way when I was in trouble.

  “And Patavium. That’s good. You can’t get it yourself without spilling the beans. If I got it here, they might still think of you, so you say Patavium. That shows thinking ahead; yes, it shows very clear thinking. I’m not sure I admire it.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Mrs. Harding! I have no one to turn to. I can’t ask my aunt for help. She wouldn’t understand.”

  Mrs. Harding wiped her hands and led me to a chair at the table. “I don’t mean to be harsh. I just don’t hold with what you’re asking. It’s a sin worse than the sin it tries to hide, and apart from that, those potions, when they work at all, are dangerous. It’s bad enough you got into trouble while you were living here. I’m going to be blamed for that anyway. Dear, it’s not so bad as you think. I’ll talk to your aunt. You talk to Jeptha. He’ll do what’s right, and you’ll be happy again, much sooner than you think.”

  I had never taken Mrs. Harding’s careless assurances of fondness for me at face value, but now I gave them rather more credit than they deserved. “Mrs. Harding, it’s not Jeptha’s baby,” I confessed. Immediately I felt her grip on me loosen, and I hastened to add: “It’s my cousin Matthew’s. He forced himself on me. He took me by force.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  I pulled away from her. “Did you hear what I told you?”

  “Don’t assume that tone with me. I’m not your aunt.”

  I was amazed. I had taken a risk telling her. I had decided to tell her only if I had no other way of gaining her cooperation. I had not anticipated that she would doubt me.

  I understood her perspective a little better when she asked, “Are you sure it was your cousin? Maybe it was Jeptha.”

  “I was a virgin.”

  This would have been a sharp rebuke if she could be sure it was true. But girls in my position often lie.

  I told her how it had happened. When I was done, she looked at me sympathetically. “Let me show you something,” she said, and I waited in the kitchen while she fetched an old book. Its cracked leather covers were falling away from the binding in disintegrating flaps; the insides of the covers were lined with paper in a pattern of marble. I had never seen it before, despite having cleaned every inch of Mrs. Harding’s house with an eye out for books of every kind. Yet it was a book I had heard about. It was Aristotle’s Masterpiece.

  We sat down at the table with the heavy volume between us. “This,” said Mrs. Harding, “is the book that they tricked poor Mr. Jefferds into giving to young Cole. It was not written for boys to snigger over. It is a serious book for married women.”

  She turned the pages. I saw woodcuts of women’s bodies; of the baby in the womb. She turned the book around and pointed to a sentence: “The greater a woman’s desire for copulation the more subject she is to conceive.”

  Her finger moved lower down the page, to a passage that told me that it is when a woman achieves rapture during intercourse that her egg descends, this egg that, fertilized by a man’s essence, makes her conceive.

  “What you have told me simply cannot be. A woman can be taken against her will, but if it is entirely against her will, no child comes of it. So the attentions of your cousin cannot have been entirely unwelcome to you. It is simply against nature.”

  There was silence, and at last I said, “The book is wrong.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I take the word of a book written by physicians over the word of a country girl who has gotten herself into a fix.”

  Probably she just thought I was lying; in any case, I believe, knowing her and knowing more of life now than I did then, that her first thought was of herself. Her mind leapt forward; she pictured me dead from taking an abortifacient, followed by an investigation in which it was discovered that she had helped me obtain it. I know moral considerations had nothing to do with her refusal, because she did not hesitate to advise me of other ways to bring on a miscarriage. She phrased her advice coyly. She allowed that she “had heard” of certain things being done by certain girls in like circumstances. They went into the woods and did violent exercises: jumping vigorously up and down and touching their buttocks with each leap. Or they jumped down from a height, or did heavy physical labor, or fasted. She had heard of such methods. How effective they were she did not know.

  Human nature was certainly quite varied, Mrs. Harding noted. She had heard of cases in which an unscrupulous woman, pregnant by a man she could not or would not marry, persuaded another man to sin with her, to fool the second man into thinking the child was his, so he would marry her. So it was rumored. She supposed such things happened.

  DECEIVING JEPTHA, I TAUGHT MYSELF SKILLS that would serve me well in my later profession. I had no appetite for him. My body disgusted me. Even washing myself was a grim matter. But, staring Jeptha in the eye with a look that said I was imparting a great secret, I drew his fingers to the buttons of my blouse. I pulled his head to my breasts and dragged his hand under my skirt. By and by I whispered, “I’m tired of waiting.”

  We were in a clearing by the edge of the Muskrat Pond, on sloping ground strewn with oak leaves, twigs, and pine needles. The winds up high must have been stronger than they were down here: clouds kept covering and uncovering the sun swiftly, and the light kept changing, as if the sky were a great wheel of fortune. A spider had built its web in the branches of a fallen tree just beyond Jeptha’s shoulder, and when a breeze blew, parts of the web would move suddenly into the light, showing the tiny bundles of silk-wrapped flies. I felt something round and hard under my back, and I kept trying to shift away from it without breaking the spell I was trying to cast.

  At last, red-faced, his voice sounding strange, he said rather grimly, “We could be seen here. Let’s go into the cornfield.”

  We got up. I glanced at the ground and saw the acorn that had troubled me. We walked, his arm around my waist, into the tall corn that had been left standing for the pigs to forage on. I lay down on my back again. It was damp here, too, and the sun emerged from a cloud and stabbed my eyes, and I shut them, while he stepped out of his trousers. Then we heard dogs barking and children’s voices coming closer. I opened my eyes, saw his rampant nakedness, which I had washed once when he was near death. Now it was in quite a different mood; the first I’d seen in this condition, and it was large and clumsy, as prototypes so often are. Hastily he hopped on one leg at a time, getting into his trousers. He pulled me to my feet, and we walked out of the cornfield feeling as shamed as Adam and Eve. Except, too bad for me, Jeptha had not yet partaken of the apple. He said, “We were lucky, lucky. We won’t attempt that again.”

  “Then let’s get married,” I dared to say at last.

  As though there were not very much at stake—for him there wasn’t, he didn’t know I was pregnant, he didn’t know I was in trouble, for him I seemed to be saying that we should marry now to enjoy each other’s flesh—he smiled, and pulled a stray hair away from my face, and kissed my cheek. “Sweetheart, you have my promise: we will marry. But to marry now, and do such things we almost just did, night after night, would not be wise: a baby would come of it, and we would have to change all our plans. I’m going away.” He was supposed to set off in only two weeks, to a seminary in New Jersey. In partial payment for his education, he would be a church sexton and tutor. “I’ll have bare
ly enough for one to live on.”

  “Leave me here in Livy until you can afford me; I’ll stay with Mrs. Harding.”

  “It wouldn’t be just you and me, not for long. Soon there would be three.”

  Still I pressed my point: marry now. He said neither yes nor no.

  He seemed cooler to me the next time we met.

  We went to a Millerite prayer meeting in a back room of the Presbyterian church. Agnes was there, with her beau, George Sackett. George was the sawmill owner’s son. He was tall and thin, with sharp lines already etched on the sides of his mouth, so that he resembled a life-sized wooden puppet. He was very religious.

  Agnes, who did not love George Sackett, rushed up to me and embraced me. “My dear sister, how are you feeling? Have you walked far? I’ve been so worried about you.”

  George Sackett and a few others were looking at me for my reaction to this, and I suspected that I had walked into an ambush.

  “I’m fine, there’s nothing to worry about. And how are you feeling, Agnes?”

  “Tolerable, thank you. But are you really fine, or just being brave? Mrs. Harding’s daughter said you puked three times last week. In the mornings, like Ma when she was first carrying Hosea.” Hosea was the child who had died in infancy a few years before I came to Livy.

  I did the first thing that came into my head, and denied it. “Does she say that? I don’t know where she can have gotten that idea.”

  It was a stupid mistake, but there was no room for clear thinking in the tiny space left over by the immense realization: Agnes knew. She would not have dared to hint that I was pregnant if she thought that Jeptha and I were having relations. She knew Jeptha; she knew that if he thought he had gotten me pregnant he would have married me, which was the last thing she wanted. She had to believe that we were saving ourselves for the wedding day. And how could she know? I could not imagine Mrs. Harding betraying my trust so soon: it was not in her interest. Agnes’s information had to have come from Matthew. Perhaps when I had sent him back to the house to fetch my clothes, Agnes had seen him, and asked him to explain what he was doing, and then or later she had interrogated him—she could have threatened to bring my aunt into the matter—and he had confessed, and included the crucial detail that there had been blood, that I was a virgin. She could not, it was true, be perfectly sure that Jeptha and I had not had relations since then; with an iron will and no heart, I could have seduced him the very next day, as I had nearly seduced him just a little while ago. Perhaps she had not thought of this, or perhaps she had sufficient insight into my nature to realize how unlikely it would be, or perhaps she simply gambled that we had not. She had always been brave. She pounced on my error. “I guess from seeing you do it. She saw you do it in a pail twice, and one time she only heard.”