Belle Cora Read online

  Aunt Agatha apologized to me. “I tried to love you for my sister’s sake when you first came here, Arabella. But your father’s death got between us, and your sharp tongue, and I lost my temper with you.” She begged me to forgive her. I said I did.

  When it was Matthew’s turn, I twisted my hands together as he apologized to his mother for grieving her with his fighting and for showing disrespect to the pastor. At last he said, “Lewis, I have to tell you about me and your sister.”

  I stood up. “Stop him. That’s between him and me.”

  “Arabella, please,” said my aunt.

  I pulled my shawl around me and walked out to the yard, where the rain had stopped and a purple evening was settling in regardless of our opinions. The mud was so thick that my steps nearly pulled my shoes off; the wind pushed my skirt against my legs and loosed a spray of water droplets from the leaves of the apple trees. The sun, couched royally in the clouds, shed a ruddy glow on distant fields where the corn had been left for the crows to harvest.

  When I came back in, I could see that they had been waiting for me.

  “Lewis has forgiven Matthew,” said Aunt Agatha.

  Had he? I could not read his face. Elihu stared at the ground. Agnes looked unsurprised. Evangeline looked placid, as always. Sometimes I envied Evangeline.

  “Lewis,” said my aunt, “are you sorry for anything you’ve done?”

  “No, ma’am,” said my brother, and he would not say another word.

  We sang hymns. We took turns reading from the Bible. Every now and then, one or more of us went outside to look up. It grew dark. We lit lamps. Midnight came and went. Evangeline fell asleep at the table. Lewis went up to bed.

  At last it was dawn again; the rooster crowed, the cows lowed, we milked them into buckets, and Aunt Agatha began the washing she’d put off. Uncle Elihu hitched the oxen to the wagon, and the girls accompanied him into the cornfields to search for ears of corn the hogs and the crows had left us. Lewis and Matthew were not on the farm, and Elihu swore (using initials, “D-it to H!”), assuming they had gone into town to amuse themselves. We all worked in silence until well after noon, when we broke for dinner.

  A little after we had eaten, a wagon came up the drive. It was the owner of a neighboring farm, Barnabas Welch, and his son Elias. Stretched out on his back on the wagon’s floor was Matthew, with two bloody wounds on his head, his right leg broken (so a doctor later determined) twice above the knee and once below it, his left leg broken below the knee, and both kneecaps shattered.

  Though Matthew was never able to remember the incident that had crippled him, a note found in his trouser pocket explained a good deal, and I learned more later. Lewis, the night before, had put a note in Matthew’s hand that said to meet him at the Muskrat Pond, “if bye sum chans the sun duz us the faver of risin 1 mor time.” Matthew, no doubt assuming that he was being challenged to a fight over me, went to the appointment, probably planning to talk Lewis out of it. Though Lewis was formidable for a boy his age, he was no match for Matthew and would have lost a fair fight with him.

  It was not a fair fight. As soon as Matthew arrived at the Muskrat Pond, a rock whizzed by his head; and when he turned to see who had thrown it, another rock passed his ear. A third struck him full in the brow; and when he was still reeling, a blow from the end of a rude club knocked him unconscious. He was woken by the pain, as the same weapon broke bones in his legs, and he lost consciousness again.

  Then Lewis departed—“leaving him for dead,” everybody put it, but that wasn’t accurate. Except for the two that had felled him in the first place, there was not a single blow above mid-thigh. Lewis had done exactly what he had planned to do.

  Barnabas’s five-year-old daughter, Betty, found Matthew, or perhaps it is truer to say the dog found him, and Betty went over to see what was fascinating the dog. She was startled, but got over it and went on playing for another hour at what she considered a safe distance before she wandered home and happened to remember and told her mother about the scary bloody man she had seen asleep in the woods by the pond.

  By this time, Lewis had stolen a horse from another farm; it wandered back to its owner the next morning. My uncle, going to Patavium to fetch a doctor, told the justice of the peace what had happened, and it was soon learned that Lewis had taken a stage to Rochester. A horseman was sent to stop the stage, but Lewis, with a three-hour head start, got to Rochester first, and there the trail went cold. The electric telegraph had been invented that very year. Had it come ten or twenty years earlier, perhaps Lewis would have been caught—or perhaps he would have been shrewd enough to modernize his tactics. For 1844, the ones he used were sufficient.

  He had taken his own savings, about fifty dollars, and $130 from the old sock where Matthew kept his money, and twenty dollars from a tea box where my aunt kept hers.

  The savagery of these events frightened me. I feared that Lewis would be caught, or killed for the money, or would starve when it ran out. I was afraid that the family’s grief and wrath would turn on me as the cause of Lewis’s crime and perhaps its instigator, or simply as his sister, available to be punished.

  Because of all that, at first I wished that he hadn’t done it. Nothing in particular changed my mind. Yet a moment came, a day or two after it happened, when, with the whole house in profound gloom, I began to weep in joy and gratitude.

  TWO WEEKS WENT BY, DURING WHICH we should have starved were it not for Melanchthon, whose wagon came up the dirt road daily. On one of those trips he said, “Let me talk to Arabella alone.” Agatha and Elihu left us, Elihu taking with him the smoldering, stupid hate that had been his predominant mood ever since Matthew’s broken body had been brought back to the farm. (“Why did we ever take them in?” was his constant refrain now.)

  We went into the kitchen, where we both sat on straight-backed chairs, and Melanchthon rocked his chair back onto two of its legs. When he was thinking, he had a habit of pinching his nose. “Went to Rochester last week,” he began. “Went there about some wheat, but I had you in mind. Had a talk with a man there about you.”

  He waited, smiling falsely. I looked at his big ears and eyebrows and enigmatic buttonhole eyes. He was one of those men who are always genial, not because they love everybody, or because they are afraid of a fight, but because they are game players and see no advantage in showing their emotions. At last I said, “Oh? What about me?”

  As if he were revealing a wonderful surprise, he said, “A job! The man was a mill agent, you see, for the Harmony Manufacturing Company in Cohoes, which is a canal town near Albany. You passed through it on the way to Livy when you first came here. They have a big falls. Do you remember it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Guess it’s a long time ago for you. Anyway, they make cloth, with machinery, and young farm girls mind the machines, and they want twenty new girls. I asked the man, what’s it like at your factory, and he said, well, had I ever heard of Lowell, it was like Lowell. Did you ever hear of Lowell, Arabella?”

  “Yes.”

  I had read about the Lowell mills in Mrs. Harding’s copy of Charles Dickens’s American Notes. The fame of Massachusetts’s cotton mills had reached Dickens before he left England. They were regarded as a social experiment. The mill girls—healthy, unspoiled, well paid—lived in clean boarding houses supervised by respectable matrons. In the sitting room, where there was a piano, the girls read books from a circulating library. They went to lectures given by famous transcendentalists and phrenologists. They produced a literary magazine. They were a rebuke to British manufacturing, with its subhuman proletariat doomed to toil a lifetime on a diet of gruel and gin.

  I told Melanchthon some of this. He said he had little time for reading, but it sounded like Mr. Dickens had given a favorable report of conditions at Lowell, and, well, the Harmony Manufacturing Company in Cohoes had been started with the example of the Lowell mills before it, and was run along similar lines, paying the same handsome wage
. If I didn’t like it, I could always come back here.

  “I could always come back,” I echoed him, trying to imagine that. Not yet sure how I felt about Melanchthon’s proposal, I heard myself ask, “When would I go?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I wanted it to be that very day.

  XXVI

  ONE RAINY DAY IN THE 1880S, ON THE VERANDA of a Western hotel where I had nothing to do but develop an appetite for dinner, I happened to pick up a two-year-old copy of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. My eyes were drawn to a line in the table of contents; soon I was reading with deep emotion. The article told what had become of the three daughters of Thomas McCormick, owner of Harmony Mills in Cohoes, New York, who had died before his children were grown. It seemed that they had all married titled aristocrats, becoming the Marchioness de Bretevil, Lady Gordon Cumming, and the Countess de Miltke. The cost of the jewels, the number of the servants, the acreage of lawn around the three stately mansions—the author breathlessly imparted this information; then, in a queer little spasm of socialism, and with amazing ignorance of modern manufacturing, he noted that the fortune that had purchased the names of three impecunious foreign noblemen had been “spun by the nimble fingers of immigrant factory girls.”

  He also mentioned the other famous thing about Cohoes, the mastodon skeleton found there in 1866, when the foundations of Harmony Mill No. 3 were dug. Beside photogravures of the heiresses, their homeliness testifying to the majesty of Harmony Manufacturing, was a picture of the mastodon.

  Did I want to show the magazine to the ladies fanning themselves and nursing iced drinks beside me; did I think of saying, “I used to work at that mill”? Did I imagine their reactions? I don’t recall. Probably I just laid the newspaper in my lap and let the memories return. They come readily enough now. I remember walking on the high ground. I must have walked hundreds of times over the hidden fossils. Tall, slim poplars shimmered whenever breezes turned their double-hued leaves. Men were fishing with poles and nets. I could hear the honks of geese. I could hear the mighty rush of the falls, audible all over town to anyone standing out of doors. That is, I could hear it when I first arrived, but later, after many days at the factory, I heard only the noise from the system of shafts and belts that transmitted water power to the looms. Even when the wheels had been disengaged I heard them. It would take half of Sunday for the hallucination to fade, and when I laid my head on the Harmony Manufacturing Company’s pillow, in a room I shared with seven other women, in the bed I shared with one of them, I’d start hearing it again in anticipation of Monday. I’d hear them even amid the whimpers and hastening breaths of my bedmate, little Jocelyn—pleasing herself, under the counterpane, in blithe indifference to anyone’s opinion.

  In my time, the factory girls were all natives, mostly farm girls from New England and upstate New York. Jocelyn arrived after I had been at the mill for about three months. When I first saw her, she was stepping from the rear of a covered wagon owned by the Harmony Manufacturing Company, which owned almost everything in Cohoes. Her arms held a cloth-covered bandbox that contained all her possessions. Onto the bandbox her mother had sewn a card with the name “Martha Hale,” for that was Jocelyn’s name then. She wore a gingham dress, yellow with green dots. She was pretty, and beginning to have a shape, but small for her age, fourteen. She struck me as very much on her own in the world, and I could not have been more correct: among the paltry collection of personal oddments in her bandbox was a legal paper which bore the signature of her mother, declaring that she was “emancipated,” and didn’t have to give her wages to anyone, and no one had to support her. Soon after arriving in Cohoes, Martha had made a discovery made by many another American girl from the country: that she could change her name for the cost of mailing a letter to the state legislature, and after being assured that it would not undo her emancipation, she took the name Jocelyn, which I had suggested. I had read it in a novel.

  Not all the girls shared their beds. I had been asked when I first arrived whether I would be willing to, and I had said yes. It was a small imposition, and in any case I did not care very much what happened to me in those days. There were only two people in the world whom I loved—Lewis, a fugitive, who might be dead for all I knew, and Jeptha, whom I tried fruitlessly to forget. It was a relief to be among strangers. In my best mood, I was a mildly curious spectator of my own life, wondering what would happen to me next. They put the new girl with me, and the light had hardly been put out when she began to touch herself. I grunted to show that I was awake, and that I considered her behavior unseemly. She went on. I grunted again. She went on; I did not care enough to make more of a fuss than that, and she simply could not be embarrassed. She had no more shame or conscience than a cat.

  I grew to appreciate this quality in Jocelyn. I had been involved, from the moment I went to live at my uncle’s farm, in an endless argument as to whether I was a good girl, whether I was hardworking and dutiful or lazy and envious, and whether I was being judged fairly. At the mill, no one knew of my reputation in Livy, but most of the girls, or at least many, would have shunned me if they ever did find out. I knew from the very first that Jocelyn would not have cared about any of that, and when at last I told her—when I was sure she would keep a secret whose gravity she was unable to feel—there was great relief for me in the telling. She responded by telling me of how she had lost her virginity in her hometown, to a much older boy.

  She did not strike me as stupid, but she could barely read, and in conversation it developed that she didn’t know that rivers empty into the oceans, or that the earth was round, or that there were more foreigners in it than Americans; she had never heard of Julius Caesar or William Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. Since she was careless, when I was around her I felt wise and prudent. I felt responsible for her.

  Jocelyn said that her father had been a teamster in Pennsylvania, regularly carrying beer to Philadelphia, and he used to take her along. Then he died in a terrible accident. The horses, frightened by the cracking of a walnut board while he was loading baggage, ran wild, and he was crushed by the wheels and caught by his belt and dragged along the highway for half a mile. His fellow teamsters helped her mother open a little store, where she sold candy, bread, kindling wood, and so on. The family lived in a back room. They took in washing and sewing and made straw hats, and still they had nothing. One day, a neighbor showed them an advertisement for millworkers. Jocelyn and her mother both applied, but her mother was rejected because she was blind in one eye.

  This was the story she told me first. A few weeks later, she admitted that her father was alive. He’d gotten better work in New Jersey, where he remarried without bothering to obtain a divorce. He had never taken Jocelyn to Philadelphia. But someone had, it seemed to me. She was well informed about the city’s amusements.

  She had come to me, this foolish pet, this empty-headed friend, about two weeks after I had received a terrible letter about Jeptha. It came from Anne, and it began with an apology for the pain she was about to inflict on me. Jeptha had married Grace, the minister’s pretty, unspoiled daughter in New Jersey. I remember holding this letter in my hand in the sitting room, and then finding myself upstairs, facedown on the hair mattress, crying my heart out, as though I had dematerialized in one place and reappeared in another.

  As much as I had grieved before, I had never thought I’d seen the last of Jeptha. And as you will learn, I had not. I write it here out of kindness, so you need not despair with me. But you must remember that I didn’t know this. I acted in the belief that we were separated forever, and I would never be accountable to him for my actions. Had I known the truth, I would have behaved with more discretion.

  A WEEK AFTER THAT, I RECEIVED a letter in Lewis’s hand, addressed to me in the care of the Harmony Manufacturing Company. It was posted from Rome, a town on the Erie Canal, about a hundred miles west of Cohoes.

  Dear Arabella,

  Sorry I had to leave without saying good-by & cood
not get you “news” befor. I hope I did not worry you to much. I am also sorry about Matthew not the sad thing that got done to him so I heer but that it did not get done much sooner. If you wood of told me it wood of got done sooner. In case you wonder I got your adres from paying a suprise visit to sumbody we know in Patavium. Rite now all my visits must be suprise. I will come to see you but just when I cant say. In the meen time do not worry about me. I am keeping body & soul to-gether by doing this & that. I toed a canal boat. I did ice mining on a lake. I cleerd a field for a farmer who cheeted me but later he sed he was sorry. Sum other jobs came my way wich I will tell you about by & by. I have made sum frends & am not in trubel. Dont tell anyone you got a leter frum me. I will visit when I can.

  Yr devoted brother,

  Lewis

  Where had he picked up such a fancy closing—“devoted brother”? Maybe he had gotten someone’s help. I loved those words: “devoted brother”—devoted. There had been two more letters since, both promising visits, both vague about the nature of his occupations. They were sacred to me.

  BEFORE DAWN A FACTORY BELL WOKE us. Most of us had grown up on farms and were used to working before breakfast. But this part was new: emerging from our boarding house under dimming stars to join other streams of half-dreaming girls summoned as if by an enchantment to the several doors of the long high brick factory building across the street. By five a.m. we had assumed our various duties in the picking room, the carding room, the spinning room, the weaving room, the cloth room. At seven the bells rang again; we ran back to our various boarding houses for breakfast. Mine was served under the supervision of Mrs. Robinson, a big, fleshy, red-faced woman, almost six feet tall, a widow, and a generous cook, whatever other complaints we had, we did not starve. We had to be back by seven thirty-five. Dinner—with its own bell—was from noon to twelve-thirty, also at the boarding house. Mrs. Robinson made hard-boiled eggs that we could carry with us if we had not had time to fill our stomachs.