Belle Cora: A Novel (61 page)

FIVE WEEKS LATER THE SHIP WAS BREATHING
like a live creature beneath us. I sat on a barrel, Jeptha at my feet. A three-legged dog was pursuing a wispy hare across the sky when we heard a voice shout “Land Ho! Land Ho!” Murmuring “At last,” Jeptha lifted me off the barrel. All around us men were shaking themselves out of their torpor, dropping the journals they had been writing in and the cards they had been gambling with, rising and stretching their limbs: all sorts of men—carriage-makers, coopers, farmers, clerks; a schoolteacher, a homeopath, a small-town mayor, a daguerreotypist, a traveling lecturer on animal magnetism; the man who had not left his stateroom until the third week, the man who only talked about how thrifty his little wife back home was, the man who had dreamed last night of drinking fresh water from a cold stream. Several climbed into the rigging for a better view. The rest swarmed to the side, and those with the best eyesight discerned a strip of blue one shade paler than the ocean and one shade darker than the sky. For five weeks they had had nothing to feed their eyes but this ship and the water around it, and they studied that faint line with a good deal more interest than it deserved.

For two days, the blue line grew and acquired details, eventually yielding to our starved eyes a clump of strange bald mountains set like monstrous eggs in a colossal nest of greenery; a cliff-top fortress; church spires; paradisiacal islands; terra-cotta roofs of white villas among orange and banana trees—wonder on wonder, until our patriotism was offended. “To think that all this was given to the heathens,” murmured George Ewell, the reformed drunkard, about to be tested by a wicked port city full of brothels and grog shops. With Jeptha’s help he had been good, for the first time, at sea. Could he be good on land, too? He didn’t think so. We must let him stay near to us. We must help him. We promised him we would, although the truth was, we wanted desperately to be alone.

It had been crowded aboard that heaving ship, and belowdecks, where
Jeptha and I spent our nights. It had been dark, cramped, filthy, and heavenly. For weeks we had walked in a protected sphere of our own, invulnerable to every care or danger, indifferent to every other human being. Other passengers stared, amused, envious, as we fed each other the dreadful food (usually a pasty hash of soaked biscuits and bits of preserved codfish) and poured the stale water down each other’s throats as if under the misapprehension that it was wine. We noticed other people only when it came time to quench our desire for each other: then, each night, we confronted the sobering fact that the California Missionary Committee had not purchased the stateroom we had been promised; for sleep we had just two narrow shelflike berths, one over the other, amid a hundred such berths, all occupied by men. For privacy we had darkness. A greasy cleat had torn a wide rent in my traveling dress when we were two days out and everyone was seasick, and the replacement buttoned in the back, so each night, when the time came, I would whisper from my shelf to his above me, “Dress me”—it would not do to be overheard by all these men saying, “Undress me.” He would come down, undo the buttons, and shuck me of my clothes, either slowly and teasingly, or quickly, with imperious impatience, as the mood took him. Later, as we caught our breath, we would begin to hear the snores and coughing all around us. Then we would rummage under my bunk for a secret jar of plum preserves and sit face to face. I would slip a plum into his mouth. He would slip a plum into my mouth.

After about twelve days out, Jeptha recalled that we were missionaries. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his arm around me, he made the acquaintance of the other passengers and talked religion to them. He held services each Sunday on the quarterdeck, on rainy days beneath a canopy. The pious men were drawn to him immediately, and they seemed to feel that he ought to have been satisfied with their company, but Jeptha insisted on preaching to the unbelievers, too, and in the three weeks between this decision and the sighting of the Brazilian coast, he had made eight converts and given each of them a dunking in the ocean. The most impressive of these acts of reclamation, a soul snatched directly out of the devil’s claws, was Ewell, who had been sent to California by his father in a last, desperate effort to make a man of him, or maybe just to be shut of him. Care had been taken to keep his baggage free of stimulants, but he had managed to find plenty of liquor aboard the ship. In
those days, the scent of him used to linger in a room long after he had left it: but not anymore.

Now Jeptha stood behind the nervous Ewell and clapped his right hand on his shoulder, while with his left hand he blew me a kiss. “We’re not worried about you, are we, Arabella?” he said, and I murmured that it was not my husband who had taken Mr. Ewell in hand; it was God Almighty, who never leaves us. But we would help him, too.

Within sight of Rio, there were frustrating delays, boardings by inspectors and agents. At last, in the morning, Captain Stormfield assembled us and sternly repeated the date and time of day by which we must return to the
Juniper
or be left behind.

Jeptha, his arm around my waist, whispered, “Tonight in a bed.”

We went ashore in a
falua
, a boat with a lateen sail and oars. A Negro at its helm commanded four rowers of his race: half naked, sweat-spangled, faces scarred into beadlike designs. Near shore, the water was full of refuse. A rower invited me to hop on his back, but Jeptha took off his boots, rolled up his trousers, and carried me himself.

The city was reached by great stairs that put us abruptly in the middle of everything: hackney coaches, carriages, omnibuses, men in foreign uniforms, women walking with platters of fruit on their heads, a man in a metal mask—scenes that would have been strange to us even if our receptiveness to every novelty had not been heightened by our long confinement aboard the
Juniper
. Fifteen barefoot Negro coffee carriers, big men clad only in short white pantaloons, rounded a corner at a trot, each with a sack balanced on his head. The leader carried a flag and a rattle. We passed a boy about four years old. Our necks all swung to keep him in view a little longer, as though we’d seen an elf or a fairy—so they really existed, this fabled other order of humanity, the race of children!—and I thought of Frank.

Ragged, underfed-looking porters took our bags without permission, for all we knew stealing them, and—waving their bony arms and pointing—led us to the Custom House, a stately domed building swarming with soldiers and clerks. It was going to take hours. With a secret anxiety, I told Jeptha that I could not bear to wait here doing nothing, and I volunteered to go to the General Post Office, where we expected to find letters waiting for us: mail came by steamboat, much faster than by sail, and friends and relations back home had been told to send their first
letters here. I offered to retrieve mail addressed to several other passengers as well. There would be newspapers, too, and that worried me. Mary Dunn (the wife of a Fulton Street fishmonger now turning miner, and the only other woman among us) insisted on going.

In the Correio Geral, the letters were piled randomly in heaps behind a counter. I positioned myself near a stack of
New York Couriers
. My worry must have shown. “Is something wrong?” Mary asked.

I shook my head perhaps a little too emphatically, and, feeling that there was a risk in reading the newspapers with such fascination under Mary’s scrutiny, I did it anyway, murmuring, “I ought to be ashamed of myself, Jeptha would scold me, but before I left I was following the story of that mysterious murder in Bloomingdale. Perhaps it is solved by now.”

After all, it would be absurd for her to imagine the preacher’s wife was the murderess. I had nearly persuaded myself it wasn’t true.

Days were missing from each paper, but between the
Courier
s and the
Heralds
I had almost the first two weeks since our departure. If the mystery had been solved, or even if there were any promising clues—if the victims were identified, and one of them had bragged to a friend that he knew something an unusually young parlor-house madam would pay to keep quiet—both newspapers would be sure to mention it. But there was nothing. As I thumbed through issue after issue, I was relieved to watch the story sink from the front page to the inside pages, from a column to a paragraph, until it drowned in the ooze of local history.

“Did they find out?” asked Mary.

“It seems they’ve given up,” I said in a disappointed tone, and we began looking for letters addressed to the several passengers whose mail we had agreed to retrieve. We made piles; there were many, more than we had money to redeem. Jeptha and I had four: one addressed to me, one for us both, and two for Jeptha only. His father had written him from Ohio. One letter had no return address: I recognized Agnes’s special round loops and capital “T”s. The letter for both of us was from Solomon Godwin.

I gripped these letters in my hand, and considered. Sometimes Mary talked to Jeptha. “The gall of this woman,” I said, waving Agnes’s letter.

“What? Who?”

“The woman Jeptha kept company with before me. She’s written to him, and has not put her name to it. If I didn’t know her handwriting, I
would not have known, I might never have known. That is to say—I only hope he would have told me. Mary, might I ask you for a favor?”

She put a fist in front of her pursed lips and made a little gesture of turning a key. Begging her pardon, I crossed the room to read in the light of a deeply recessed window.

The letter that was addressed to me alone was from Anne. I expected it to contain news of Frank. If any mishap had befallen him, this letter would tell of it. For a moment, I stood judging myself. Exactly how bad a mother was I? Was I heartless enough to open my enemy’s letter to my husband before the letter that might inform me that my son had been bitten by a snake and died? I opened Anne’s letter first.

She knew it would be awkward for me to receive mail that Jeptha could not read, and had the elementary cunning to assure me first that everyone was well, and to congratulate me on my marriage and tell me other news, before adding, “Maybe you would like to know how Frank, the orphan you brought to us, is adjusting to his new home.” Then she described his growth and health and latest accomplishments and adventures in a detail that might be attributed to her own doting enthusiasm.

Perhaps it was disgusting of me in view of what I had done about Frank, the thousands of miles I was willingly putting between us, but in fact I hung on every word I ever received about him. I pictured him as he was when I saw him last: the dimpled elbows and the sweaty sweetness of his neck; his cries and babbling and chubby thighs. When Anne alluded delicately to his unnatural quietness in the first week after his arrival, I felt as sorry for both of us as if we had been separated by some tyrant’s decree and not my own free actions. I got a lump in my throat over the news that he was climbing stairs and going into closets. He had bent a silver fork double, such was his immense strength, and was not afraid of anything except all dogs other than the two family dogs. My baby, my boy, my little man!

I experienced all those thoughts and emotions without for a second forgetting the letter from Agnes. And at last I opened it.