Belle Cora Read online

  Jeptha

  It was too awful for tears. It made me dizzy. I cried out Mrs. Harding’s name as if the house were on fire. She came. I asked her if she had spoken to Ephraim when he brought the letter. She said she had. Did Ephraim say where Jeptha was? I asked. Yes, she said, he had taken a coach to Rochester; he was taking a cheap, circuitous route to the seminary. “Isn’t that what he told you in the letter?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Harding, he’s given me up! He thinks I deceived him!”

  “Oh dear. Oh, he can’t mean it!”

  “Do you think so, Mrs. Harding?”

  “I’m sure he’ll change his mind. How could he give up a lovely girl like you?”

  She knew as well as I did what could make a pretty girl unsuitable for marriage. All the same, I threw my arms around her and wept. I’d have wept on the breast of a dressmaker’s dummy for an instant of motherly comfort, and to delay the time when I must walk away from this house and face whatever in the world came next.

  We then heard the brass knocker on the front door. “Don’t, Arabella,” said Mrs. Harding, as I ran down the hall to get it. Such was my desire for it to be Jeptha, here to beg my forgiveness, that at first I did not see that standing before me was Emily Johnson, a bucktoothed girl whom I knew from school. She was dragging a trunk.

  Behind me, Mrs. Harding said, “This is unfortunate.”

  “Mrs. Harding said to come at noon,” Emily explained.

  “I’ll get my things,” I told Mrs. Harding.

  MY LEFT HAND GRIPPED THE HANDLES of two carpetbags. In my right I carried a leather portmanteau that had traveled with me to my uncle’s farm when I was nine years old. I walked down to Mill Race Street, past neat two-story clapboard houses, past dogs, past children who knew my name and would soon be telling their mothers they had seen Arabella Godwin leave Mrs. Harding’s house with all her things.

  I took familiar shortcuts through the fields to Melanchthon’s house, and wept in Anne’s embrace, giving her a selective account of my troubles that excluded the rape and the pregnancy. I told her that Agnes had spread lies about me, and that I could not bear to go back to the farm, because Agatha always took Agnes’s side, and that Jeptha and I had quarreled over that. Anne disliked Agnes, and she believed me, though probably she knew I wasn’t telling her everything. She said that I could stay.

  Melanchthon brought another bed into Susannah’s room. That night, after my dreams woke me, Susannah came and asked me why I was crying. “I had a bad dream,” I told her. I fell asleep at dawn, and Anne let me go on sleeping that first day.

  I HAD ALWAYS FELT UNDERSTOOD BY JEPTHA. It had been the first thing I loved about him, and it was a riddle and a torment that he could have believed the things he said in that letter; that he could have been so sure of them that he would go without hearing me out. His first accusation (“I know about the baby you tried to make me think was mine”) was, of course, no more than the truth. I saw that my furtive behavior in the weeks since the rape, the great fact hidden from Jeptha, would have prepared him to doubt me. I had been deceiving him since then. But what in all the years before that could have persuaded him I was essentially a deceiver and there was something false in me at the core? I have given the question a great deal of thought over the years. I believe now that it was religion that came between us. We began to part the moment he was saved, for that was when I began to hide many of my thoughts and feelings from him, and he began to blind himself, incompletely, to uncomfortable truths about me. My falseness was on display for a whole year, in every one of those prayer meetings, every time he preached a sermon to me from the trees, and every time he talked to me about his deepest feelings, which I pretended unconvincingly to share.

  WHEREVER I WENT, THERE WERE LOOKS; everyone seemed to know that I had been in a fix, and gotten myself out of it somehow; and that this was why I had been fired, and why Jeptha had left me. How much of the story came from Mrs. Harding, or Agnes, or Mrs. Talbot? It made me feel ill to think about it. In any case, I was disgraced, and because I didn’t deserve it, I believed that it could be undone. I had a sense of justice.

  This was the source of my second great error, after my decision to permit myself to be alone with Matthew. Instead of taking the stage out of Patavium, going to New Jersey, and meeting Jeptha face to face, I stayed at Melanchthon and Anne’s house, and took thought, and formed what I considered a more intelligent plan. I would write to Jeptha, telling him everything. When he received my letter, either he would come here to kill Matthew or he would leave Matthew to God’s vengeance and send for me. He would send for me, of course, with a letter. What a wonderful letter that would be! It would make me clean again. I could wave that letter in front of everyone’s face: I would show it to Mrs. Harding, I would show it to Agnes, I would show it to Colonel Ashton.

  I could not get Jeptha’s address from his family; they hated me. So I did what seemed logical. I visited Jeptha’s good friend and guide, William Jefferds.

  He had moved again by then, to the farmhouse of Nathan Cole—father of Solomon Cole, the boy to whom Jefferds had once mistakenly handed Aristotle’s Masterpiece in place of the Old Testament.

  Solomon’s mother answered the door. Time crept as the expression on her homely face went from surprise to pity, and I saw that she belonged to the small class of Livy’s women who were inclined to forgive a young girl’s weakness. When I said I wanted to talk to William Jefferds, she fetched him and tactfully left us alone in the sitting room. He asked after my health and my family’s health, and at last he said, “Why have you come to me, Arabella?”

  In the presence of the good man, I broke down and told everything, except for one thing—I did not tell him about Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills; nor had I told Jeptha about them in the letter.

  The top of Jefferds’s head had gone completely bald by this time. He wore his stringy hair long at the sides, and with the spectacles he looked like a sort of underfed Benjamin Franklin.

  He nodded and murmured sympathetically while I told my story, but was silent for some time afterward. At last I asked, “Mr. Jefferds? What is it?”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you have the letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  From his words, I did not know whether he meant to read it or merely to hold it, but I didn’t ask; I just gave it to him. It was a relief to put myself in his hands. He stroked the folded pages and wax seal pensively with his dry little fingers. “You’re not looking forward to bringing this letter to Colonel Ashton,” he said, looking from the letter to me. I felt his gaze in the new way that I had come to feel people’s gazes since my disgrace. “Everyone in the store staring at you. And they would ask the colonel who the letter was addressed to, and he might tell them, or he might not, but he would tell his wife, and she’d talk, and maybe they’d find something wrong in it, and anyway they’d be talking about you again, when you’d hoped the talk had died down.” This was rather more than I wanted to hear from him, but it was all accurate. There was no postal box in those days, nor was there any post office in our little town. There was only the general store. The contents of a letter might be private, but everything else about it would be noticed and widely discussed. After a while he said, “I’m writing to Jeptha. I’ll include your letter with mine.”

  I went back to see him every few weeks, giving him more letters, and asking if he had heard. I attended school and bore the stares of my classmates because Jefferds might have wonderful news for me. And one day he summoned me to his desk at the end of class and said: “Jeptha has written. See me in Cole’s house.”

  When I got there, he showed me a page of a long letter. Jeptha had numbered it page 3 on one side and 4 on the reverse. It described the habits of other boarders in the minister’s house. There was a part about a girl his age, pious, pretty, and “unspoiled.” Then this: “As to Arabella, I ask that you do not write to me about her any more, & I ask that you do not encourage her. I’ve heard
what she has to say, & I’ve heard what you have to say; I’ve closed that chapter. She ought to do the same.”

  After that, I went a little mad. In this, by coincidence, I was not alone.

  XXIV

  FOR THIS WAS THE YEAR OF FERVENT HOPE, when, all around the country, people were gazing up at the sky, waiting for the world to end. My aunt was among the most passionate believers, convinced that Jesus would come back, as Millerites were learning to say, no later than October 22, 1844. If, so far, she had failed to do her duty by me—failed to turn me into someone she could admire, failed to protect me from Matthew—she could make it all right by saving my soul. Unpleasant as she supposed it must be for me to return to the farm, I must not be left with a family of worldly Presbyterians. She and Elihu went together to Anne and Melanchthon’s house to demand that I be returned and have a chance of being saved.

  Any day now, it was going to be too late for the doubters. Christ would appear in the sky. The righteous dead would arise in a wondrous spectacle of yawning graves and sprung coffin lids. Skeletons would fly off the shelves of medical schools; scattered atoms would abandon their present work in the stems of flowers and the bellies of worms to reflesh the bones. Living men would be yanked out of the fields they were sowing or threaded spinelessly through windows that had suddenly opened themselves and be lifted to the clouds, while 99 percent of the human race remained below to burn. After certain complications and delays whose purpose is obscure, the saved would enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven, while the damned were tortured forever in a lake of fire.

  Would the saved be happy? If so, surely there would have to be something very wrong with them. We were reminded constantly that husband would be torn from wife, brother from sister, mother from child. When a child has a toothache, the mother suffers with him, yet the saints rejoiced while their children burned. It was hard to imagine such people, so very good, yet disloyal to the profoundest human tie. To save them, God had changed the most essential thing about them. Whom, then, had He saved?

  If these paradoxes ever troubled my aunt’s meditations, she brushed them aside. She had no choice. She was desperate. Her son had raped her niece, who had then murdered their unborn child. Things were so bad that only the Second Advent could save the family. There would be our happy ending, the sweeter for having come on the heels of despair. She never dared in my presence to call Matthew’s crime a blessing in disguise, but that it would be was clearly her fervent hope. He was skulking around the farm in misery. He avoided Lewis. He felt sinful. He was ripe for salvation. The rest of us, whether we knew the ugly secret or merely sensed the wrongness in the house, were unhappy, too: and that, too, she was sure, would bring us all joy in the end.

  With the rest of us adrift and rudderless, she bent us to her will. That winter, she dragged us to a big revival meeting in a great hall in Lockport. We were all exposed to the oratorical powers of the celebrated preacher Elon Galusha, himself recently converted to Millerism; one after another, Matthew and Elihu wept for their sins and were saved.

  As for me, I did not know what I believed anymore. I wanted not to feel and not to think. I went where I was taken and did as I was told.

  As a proof of his conviction, Elihu harvested only so much of the crop as we needed for our own use until the return of Jesus on October 22, 1844. All the pests that are a torment to farmers seemed to realize that a special feast had been prepared for them, and they came in greater numbers than I had ever seen before; whenever I walked through the corn, dozens of startled black crows rose skyward, noisily beating the air.

  Lewis was the only one among us who was sure that my aunt was wrong. It was a common sight that year to see him pitching stones at a row of sticks on a log behind the house. Each throw demonstrated his view of the matter. Down they’d come, one after another, and the last stone he threw would be his killing stone, a fragment of the rock he’d killed a pig with from the top of my grandfather’s warehouse so long ago.

  Sometime in July, I watched from the back porch while Lewis knocked the whole row down. He retrieved the sticks and sat down on the log. I sat beside him. “What’s wrong, Lewis?” I said, petting the dog. “Lewis, do you think about Papa much anymore?”

  “Get off,” he said, and put sticks everywhere on the log, excepting the space I occupied. He walked back to the porch and began once again to throw the stones. One flew over my head. “You want to hurt me, Lewis?” Another. “You don’t need stones to hurt me. Lewis, you’re the only creature left on this earth who can hurt me anymore.” I stood up. I spread my arms out. “Go on. Show me what you can do.”

  He pulled his arm back. I saw what was in his hand. The killing stone.

  “Do it,” I said. “I want you to.”

  He pocketed the stone and walked away.

  XXV

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1844, the day the world was to end, dawned cloudy.

  The sky was white. There were no shadows. Nature had a washed-out look. Some of the colors had been removed, and I wondered if this was how it would be done. Stealthily, no angels or trumpets, no wrath or judgment—a simple undoing. Things would disappear by categories. First certain colors. Then the fish. On the farm, we wouldn’t notice it. Suddenly no birds; we might realize it after a while. Next, plant life vanishes, leaving the dry, brown earth and the rocks and the sky. Small animals and insects, suddenly uncovered, creep over the rocks awhile and then they, too, are gone. God takes our clothes. We’re all naked, as we were in Eden. He takes away the air and watches our silent agony. We cannot gasp or beg for mercy. In time, we stop moving. He walks away in despair. Why did He do it? Why, why, why, why, why? He takes a last look at the miniature, the picture of His dead wife, and, crouching for a moment, lays it down on the roof. He rises to his feet, looks over the edge, and jumps.

  THE COWS WERE LOWING. They needed relief, so we milked them. To show our faith, we did not use a pail, but let the milk spurt onto the ground.

  We bade a solemn farewell to the dogs and the horses and oxen, and then we walked to Anne and Melanchthon’s family to urge them one last time to ready themselves. We passed Harmon Chase’s house; the whole family was standing on the roof. We passed a churchyard where a crowd had gathered to watch the graves open. On the way back from Melanchthon’s farm, where no minds had been changed, it rained, and when we got back, we changed into our second-best clothes. It was chilly. We put logs on the fire and huddled near it. We were profligate with the wood. Soon the sap was sizzling, and the young logs sank abruptly into their cradle of glowing twigs.

  Elihu sat on the rocker, sucking bits of his last earthly meal from between his crooked teeth. Lewis sat on a high stool, his hair defiantly uncombed. Matthew’s black hair gleamed with grease. The women all looked ready for church. I thought how astonishing it was that every living creature had its own private thoughts and desires and importance.

  My aunt kept saying that at the last minute Titus would come.

  “We must apologize to each other,” she said. “If we have anything on our conscience, any secret wrong, we must confess it and ask each other’s forgiveness.”

  Agnes began, admitting that she had paid Evangeline (in chores and in cash) to put the pebbles in a batch of bread I had made and to thwart me in other ways. “I did it because I could see that from the first you had set your cap for Jeptha, and would do anything to get your way, and I did not know how to save him.”

  This broke through my protective stupor. “So—you did it to help Jeptha.”

  “Belle,” said my aunt, “please, let Agnes apologize without interruption. Whatever you think she’s done to you, forgive her. Don’t meet this day with bitterness in your heart.”

  “I want to forgive her, but her confession has to be complete. Agnes, Titus told me that you defended me against the charge that I was selling my favors to the Harding boys.”

  “That’s right, Belle, I defended you.”

  “Didn’t you start defending me before anyone accused m
e?” I asked. She looked like a saint on stained glass, but I noticed that my aunt and Evangeline were watching her, too, and perhaps I had made them wonder. As if this were a matter that concerned only women, Lewis, Matthew, and Elihu went on studying the fire.

  “I see why you’ve been angry with me, Belle,” said Agnes. “It must be very distressing for you to believe such a thing.” My aunt nodded to herself, agreeing.

  I looked up, wishing Jesus would lift Lewis and me through the roof and leave the rest of them behind, yelling at Him that He had made an awful mistake.

  “Forgive her, Arabella,” said my aunt. “Forgive her, for your salvation.”

  “Suppose I forgive her just for what she’s confessed. I can’t very well forgive what hasn’t been confessed.”

  “Good,” exclaimed my aunt, as if a bargain had been struck, binding no matter what the spirit of it had been, and it was my turn. My confessions were more substantial than Agnes’s. “It was I who put Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills in your supper, Agnes. I knew you wouldn’t like them. Can you forgive me? You do forgive me, don’t you?”

  Evangeline confessed that she had let her secret parts be touched almost daily by Lucas, a hired hand who had been with us from haying time in 1841 to the spring of 1842, and she had touched Lucas’s secret parts. The other hand, Mike, had found out and threatened to tell if she didn’t do bad things with him, too, but she wouldn’t, because she didn’t love Mike. In the middle of this confession, Elihu began to moan with his head in his hands. Evangeline put her arms around him. He turned away, saying she’d broken his heart. My aunt demanded that they reconcile, and grudgingly he said he would try to forgive her.