Belle Cora: A Novel (22 page)

I crumpled the letter and dropped it. I took it up and smoothed it out and read it again. I sat on the floor and put my arms around my shins and wept and rocked. My aunt came up the ladder and asked me what was wrong. “Have you had bad news?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “A friend of mine has died. In New York. A dear friend.”

“How very sad. May I see the letter?”

“No—if you don’t mind—please—you would not be interested.”

“A letter from York? From your grandfather? Let me be the judge. I
would love to read it. We have such a hunger for news here. Oh, please let me read it, dear.”

I shook my head.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve read it. Your uncle and I read it.”

She was smiling. She had been playing with me. I had never before known her to deploy studied cruelty. By nature, she was all too direct. But I had wounded her pride, as she had wounded mine, and we were teaching each other subtlety. “It’s plain enough what you did. You wrote a letter to show us, and another to show him. What was in it we can guess from what he wrote back.” The thought of it made her flush. I was afraid she would strike me, but she unleashed her anger in words, as harsh as she knew how to make them. “If only he had come! I would have told him that you were the most ungrateful child in all creation. I’d have
begged
him to take you. Please, take her! Please, don’t leave this wicked girl here to poison this good family with her dishonesty and her spite! When we gave you a home, an orphan child with nothing! Oh, you’re a snake in the grass! I’m glad you’re not one of mine!”

She was shouting. Everyone in the house heard her. They knew everything.

SO I REMAINED. THE SPRING BLOSSOMS CAME
, and I was there to be intoxicated by their perfumes, like a girl in a melodrama drugged by the villain. Later, during the prolonged emergency of haying time, I took bread and water to the store clerks and tavern workers who had left their accustomed tasks to swing the scythe. I ran barefoot down the dry path to the pond and watched the widening rings my toes made in the water, repeatedly tearing and mending a reflection of surrounding pines, while a dragonfly, like a liberated compass needle, with lacy wings and queer jeweled eyes, darted over the rippling green scum to hide among the cattails and shadows and reflections.

There were moments of peace working beside my aunt Agatha. We forgot to dislike each other. She taught me the old songs she had learned during a temporary patch of security in her nomadic New England girlhood, songs about wars and shipwrecks, men who died for love, and women ruined by men who had said they were dying for love.

I remember standing on the back porch throughout the three-act
drama of a summer storm, beginning with the sporadic knock of the shutters and the springy dancing of the trees. Clouds dimmed the universe, rain hissed, lightning cracked the sky, illuminating wheat field, cornfield, fence, pasture. I jumped back at the voice of God. One by one, expanding pillars of light poked through the clouds, like phases in the building of a temple, touching a corncrib, a row of sodden haycocks, a stand of oaks.

My strongest, sweetest memories of the farm are of that first year, when I was in despair. Living without hope from moment to moment, I absorbed new sensations defenselessly, like a much younger child. It all spoke to me in some ancient, inhuman language, trying to convey an urgent message I was too ignorant to decipher. Or so it seemed: really that was just how it beguiled my attention while it sank barbed hooks into me that could never be extracted. 1838! How I despised it! How often have I longed to be back there again!

XV

I KNOW A MAN WHO HAD
a colossal stone mansion dismantled to be taken by sea from New York to California, with every block labeled and numbered so that the house could be reassembled at its destination. Whenever in my life I have moved a great distance to a new place and new circumstances, I have felt like that house. I seem to have spent some time in pieces, waiting for certain parts to arrive by separate ships or trains, and some pieces never come and are lost to me forever. But gradually I am put together; I remember who I am, what I need, and what I must do to take care of myself.

Slowly, and in a fumbling, semiconscious way, I sought out whatever in Livy would help make the place bearable. Thus, whenever anything had to be carried to or fetched from Melanchthon’s farm, I asked to be sent on the errand, happy to go where I would be given something good
to eat and I could see little Susannah, who worshipped me, and where the story of my letter to my grandfather (told to them by my aunt in the expectation that they would share her outrage) was an occasion for laughter. Though she could not say it outright, I knew that Anne was delighted that I had derided my aunt’s cooking, the well-known wretchedness of which it was forbidden to mention.

Everything was more comfortable on Melanchthon’s farm. The barn was bigger. The crops grew in straighter rows. The fences had posts. Anne had been raised in the country and knew which wild herbs could lend variety to dishes, and that strawberry leaves were good for the bladder and nettles good for ague and one should drink sassafras tea in the spring in order to thin the blood, which grows dangerously thick each winter.

She always delayed me, taking an apparently selfish pleasure in my company. She had me fetch the herbs and measure out the flour, and claimed to be very impressed, and by how quickly I learned the name and purpose of a plant or the ingredients of a dish. “Now you can teach your aunt to make this one,” she would say.

On the way back one day a voice from the sky called out to me. I looked up and saw Jeptha sitting in the top branches of a great old maple tree. He was directly over my head; for a moment when I regarded him from that unusual angle his face seemed to be gripped, as in a vise, by the soles of his bare feet. “Do you dare?” he called down to me. “No. You’re just a girl. I’ll come to you.”

“Wait,” I said. I jumped twice and on the third jump managed to claw my way up to the lowest branch. All the boughs nearest the ground were too thick to grip with one hand. A fatal fall seemed possible. Yet the higher I climbed the safer I felt because the branches were closer together, easy to grip, and made a sort of cage whose bars would catch me if I fell. I found a crook of branches to sit in just a few feet below the crook where Jeptha sat.

The young branches up this high were springy and when there was a wind, the trunk itself swayed a little.

“That was fast,” said Jeptha, grabbing my hand to help me up at the end. He was smiling for a moment, and I glimpsed the narrow gap where a tooth was chipped. Letting go of my hand, he swept back his limp black hair which had fallen over his eyes. For a while we discussed my bravery.
Then I asked how his family was. I asked hesitantly—it seemed like a weighty question—and he hesitated, too, before saying, “Good,” and a moment later, as an afterthought, “As good as they know how to be.”

The conversation came to halt, and I felt as I had felt in the general store half a year earlier, not knowing what to say next. The training in manners I had received in my mother’s house had emphasized being seen and not heard, keeping valuable objects safe, and being generally convenient for my elders and my relations, nothing at all in the ladylike art of using questions to draw boys out. I did not think it would do to be flirtatious, to ask him, for example, if he had really been showing off for me that first day I arrived, nor did I feel sure enough of my ground to be very serious and ask him if he really meant to drive his father from the house one day. Yet there had to be talk. “We saw you in church the first day,” I said. “Then we didn’t see you there again, other Sundays.”

He became pensive, and was quiet so long that I was going to tell him it wasn’t important. But then he said, “We just came that one day to get a look at you and Lewis. We don’t do a lot of church. Pa’s not much on church.” He stopped awhile and then went on as if he were telling a funny story: “Pa says he’s waiting for the sects to settle their differences, so he can know just exactly what we all need to do to get into heaven. He tells Ma, don’t worry, he’s sure they’ll get that chore done any day now.” I couldn’t tell from the way he said it what he thought of this idea, which I understood as a way to mock religion, and was clever, but also mean to his mother, for whom I harbored a mixture of pity and contempt. I hesitated to ask, but Jeptha answered my unspoken questions: “Ma prays for him, I wish he would go for her sake.” After another silence he added, “Other than that, and maybe seeing you there, I’m not much on church either.”

“Neither am I,” I blurted out, realizing only then that it was true, and why, and I became a little sad, thinking of my own father, just at the start of his eternity of burning.

Maybe noticing the change in my mood, Jeptha suddenly asked, “What’s an omnibus?” I told him, and he asked me to describe it in greater detail until he had a clearer picture of it in his mind. “And how many stories were there in your house?” and I told him three, and he asked how many people there were in New York City, and I told him what
I had learned at the school behind the Union Presbyterian Church, that it was a quarter of a million, and Jeptha said, “Liar, you’re lying.”

I could feel my features rearranging themselves into impassivity, as they had learned to do when it was important that other people’s opinions cease to matter. Then I saw his surprise and remorse and understood that it would never have occurred to him to think anything bad of me, and cutting to the heart of it he said, “They call you a liar much in that house? Elihu? Agatha? Agnes?”

So he knew.

“Not in so many words. Mostly with silences. Changing the subject.”

“Well, they—that’s a shame. You know, I feel sorry for them. They don’t know what they’ve got. They’re just ignorant, I guess. If they don’t hurry they’ll never get to understand you at all.”

I noticed the funny way he put that, if they don’t hurry. “They don’t want to understand me. They’re in no hurry.”

“Well, I am. I’m ignorant too, but at least I’m curious.” He pulled a leaf off a nearby branch and dropped it, and I watched it whirl out of sight below us. “I see you, I’m thinking, there’s the girl from York, she’s seen things I can’t even picture. What yokels we must look like to her.”

Feeling that I had been released from a vow of silence, I accepted what I took as his invitation to tell him some of the things I’ve told you, but in reverse order, beginning with complaints about my aunt, and the incidents of the letters and the books which Aunt Agatha had sold to the peddler. I told him about the exhaustive and detailed nature of Agnes’s prayers; we both laughed at that. I told him how I had learned of the manner of my father’s death, and he said—about the suicide—that he had heard and it was a very sad thing to happen, and a hard thing for me to have to go through. He had used almost exactly the same words my aunt had used, but the effect on me was completely different: from him it was a comfort. Then narrating mostly backward but with some loops through time, I told him about my grandfather and grandmother, Mrs. Fitch’s lie about Cincinnati—we discussed the human weakness which had led her to tell that lie, and others to endorse it, when they knew I was bound to find out the truth as soon as I reached Livy—and what my father was like, his humor, his sadness, and about my mother’s death (the subject of the books came up again, which made me mention Agatha again), and then the Great Fire of New York and Frank’s death. It was amazing to me to
realize how much there was. It all seemed to come back in the telling, and with it a great part of my forbidden self was restored to me, making me feel stronger and braver. At a certain point, when talking of my mother, I fell silent to keep from crying, Jeptha asked me, “How much did those books your aunt sold weigh?” and when I answered that they’d been too heavy for me to lift all at once, he said pensively, “They could be in town somewhere. He wouldn’t want to make his horse carry them all across the state. He paid more for them than he would have got from Colonel Ashton”—that is, at the general store—“so he probably had a customer in mind. Somebody in town.” He thought more, and said, “There aren’t more than five people who could afford them.”