Belle Cora: A Novel (30 page)

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 Talbot, 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 barely 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.”

Feeling the heat in my face, and knowing its color betrayed me, I admitted that I had been feeling unwell, probably from something I had eaten; I had denied it because I had not wanted to worry my aunt; but I was better now.

Agnes said she could see that—in fact, I seemed to be gaining weight. Today I am experienced enough to know that it could not have been true, but by saying it Agnes made her point very clear to all of us. I felt as if I were ten pounds heavier than I had been three weeks ago, and I think that in the eyes of the others at that prayer meeting I looked it. I could think of nothing to say in reply, except that she was mistaken, I was not heavier, but I was well, thank you, I was very well. The pastor arrived, and there was praying, singing, and Bible study. When I had the courage to glance at Jeptha, he was already looking at me. I turned away. My heart was drumming, drumming, drumming.