Belle Cora: A Novel (16 page)

I supposed these insinuations about my mother were retribution for
correcting Agnes about oysters and the
Mayflower
and the
Arbella
. “My mama was pretty before illness took away her beauty, but she wasn’t vain. Nobody said that. My papa had one of these made of himself, too, for her to carry. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Oh my,” said Evangeline, as if I’d said something shocking.

“Dear Evangeline, please do remember your promise,” said Agnes enigmatically.

My aunt cleaned and baked and had us fetch this and mix that, but mainly asked that we stay near so that she could hear the talk. Agnes and Evangeline told me about life in Livy. I told them about New York City.

Evangeline was amazed at everything, yet somehow not very interested. Agnes made many comments, of four general types. First, she supposed that
some
people would disapprove of the waste, frivolousness, or impiety shown by my report of city life. Second, she hoped that the country was not going to bore me. Third, whenever I mentioned my mother, she’d give me a big helping of false pity. Fourth, the next time I spoke of my father her hand flew to her mouth, and my aunt gave her a stern look.

At last there came a time that afternoon when I mentioned my grandfather’s warehouse. I remember that, before I spoke the words, I knew they would make something bad happen. I spoke against my better judgment. Lewis had been exaggerating when he said he went up there all the time, I said. He’d only been up there once. But it really was the tallest building in New York City, and he really had dropped a rock from it and accidentally killed a pig that was walking below.

My aunt wiped her hands with a cloth. “Belle, come up with me.” I followed her to the loft. She sat on the edge of my low bed, her knees raised awkwardly high, as she invited me to sit beside her. The bulk of her, the moles and blemishes scattered across her face, the stench of lard and sweat emanating from her clothes repulsed me and I struggled not to show it. But more than anything I was frightened. I knew that she was about to tell me something terrible.

“Someone should have told you; they
promised me
they would tell you. Until that man Horace stopped us in the wagon yesterday, we thought you were told. You can’t talk about your grandpa’s warehouse: you must never mention it again. You can’t keep saying your pa got a fever on a business trip to Cincinnati. You can’t because it ain’t true, and everybody knows what really happened. It was put in the newspapers, and folks
know about it because your grandpa is talked of for his crusades against drink and slavery and Sabbath breaking, and I—foolishly, vainly, I bragged about my sister’s connection to him. And now you’re to be punished for my vanity, because folks
know
. Your pa took his own life. The way he did it was by jumping from the top of that warehouse. It was a terrible thing for him to do, and a terrible thing for you to have to hear, and for me to have to be the one to tell you—oh my Lord, how bitter this is for me.”

She tried to embrace me, but I flinched and turned away.

There was more. “He left a note,” my aunt said. “He asked forgiveness. He took the blame on himself—I don’t know who else he thought we’d blame—but since he left a note we know that he meant to do it. It was no accident: he jumped. We know it. Everybody knows it, so you have to.”

She reached for me again. Again I jerked away from her. She said, “Belle, where are you going?” I did not know myself, nor can I report to you how it felt. I was not aware of being in myself, feeling myself, making decisions. It was a discovery to me that I was throwing on my coat and rushing down the ladder, past Agnes and Evangeline, out to the porch, down the steps, past the privy, the chicken shack, and the orchard, and across a gully by means of a ramshackle bridge made of two weathered gray planks with holes where knots had fallen out, and out into the brown fields that were full of stubble and decaying stumps.

The sky was white. I ran until I looked back and the house was small. A little farther on, the ground rose, and I was in rolling country dotted with mounds of hay. The grade of the land fell again, and when I looked back there wasn’t any house. I was panting among rotten pumpkins. Collapsing, turning brown, they were oozing black juice, and I wondered why whoever had planted these pumpkins hadn’t come back to harvest them. I supposed he had killed himself. I heard a scratchy voice calling my name, but again I ran.

She must have run, too, because she caught up with me. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Where do you think you’re going?”

“Go away. You’re not my mother.”

“Who said I was? Your mother’s in heaven. I’m your aunt.” She knelt and put her hands on my shoulders. She had hurt me and I wanted to hurt her. “You won’t do. You have a man’s face and a crooked back. I can’t stand to look at you.”

I saw the pain wash across her gaunt features, followed by anger, and
was simultaneously gratified and frightened. “I’m sorry for you,” she said steadily. “I don’t want to punish you when you’ve just had a bad shock, but you can’t talk that way to me.”

I had taken a scary step away from the good girl I considered myself to be. A part of me wanted to fall sobbing onto her narrow bosom and be comforted. How many times I’ve wished I had—as I would have, if only she had waited a moment longer. But she tried to hurry it; like an impatient lover, she tried to pull me toward her; and I rebelled. “Leave me alone,” I said. She persisted. I spat in her face.

She stared at me, dumbfounded. Then she released me, and one of her hands returned with a wallop on the jaw that made my head ring. She had swung wide, using her strength and weight, and with an empty look on her face she pulled her arm back and let loose a second blow, which knocked me to the ground.

“No dinner
and
no supper,” she said, gasping. “You’ll spend the rest of the day upstairs, thinking about what you’ve done. Now get up and walk ahead,” she pointed. “That way. That’s home now.”

I got up and walked where she pointed; my head throbbed, and I was shaking. There had been no punishments like this in Bowling Green. This was life from now on. I was astonished that things could have gone so wrong between us so quickly, and wished that the last few minutes could be undone. Buried beneath it all, coloring everything, was a vision of my father hurling himself down from the roof of my grandfather’s warehouse.

“I blame my sister,” I heard her say from behind me. “She knew she was dying. Why didn’t she prepare you better? How could she have spoiled you so?”

I turned to tell my aunt that she was wrong—that my mother had devoted her life to making me a welcome presence in the houses of my relatives.

“No sass,” said my aunt. “No sass from you.”

IN THE LOFT, I THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER
looking down upon me: Had she seen the slaps? Then she had seen me spit in my aunt’s face. What did she think of my aunt? What was her opinion of me?

I looked out the window. I thought of crawling out on the roof and
escaping—it wasn’t high. But where would I go? I decided to wait until everyone was asleep. I would take Lewis with me. We would bring food. We would walk to Rochester. We would beg at the farmhouses on the way, and I could get a position as a servant somewhere—I knew how to cook, clean, mend, and sew, and I had good manners, and I didn’t eat very much. When we had enough money, we’d take the canal back to Albany and the steamboat down to New York City, to my grandparents’ house, where they would be grateful to see that we were still alive, for by then they would have heard of our disappearance.

I knew when they told Lewis about my father. I heard him shouting, “You’re lying! You’re a liar!” and I heard my aunt say, “Titus, get me a switch,” and a scuffle, probably Lewis running and being caught.

It was his second switching in one day. He, too, was sent to bed without supper, and we weren’t allowed to speak to each other.

After sundown, the others came up to the loft. They had been forbidden to speak to us. Matthew and Titus played with marbles, by candlelight, and said only things like “Lucky shot,” and “You cheated.”

Then my aunt came in and told my cousins to leave. She sat down with us on the bed, saying, “We’ve made a bad start. There’s no excuse for the way you two have acted today, and I—and you made me lose my temper. But you’ve been punished, and I forgive you. And you have to forgive me, because we can’t go on this way.”

I mumbled insincerely that I forgave her. She had us both kneel beside the bed with her and ask God to help us to be better children.

THE NEXT MORNING, SHE SAID THAT
we should all be kind to each other today, in respect for the Lord’s Day. We dressed for church. When my aunt saw me in the frock I’d made with my grandmother, she got a pained look on her face and said it was very pretty, it was too pretty, and the two of us went through my trunk until we found a frock that would draw less attention to me. I knew she was right—even at nine and with no experience of country people, I knew as soon as she spoke that I could not walk into their unpainted church dressed for a ball.

Matthew got the wagon ready, and my uncle drove us to the Free Will Baptist church. At the end of the journey, it stood just past a hilltop, and to spare the horses we got out and walked. I saw the spireless roof first,
then the rest of the small building appeared, step by step and log by log; last came the short log sections it was perched on. Free Will Baptists, famous for adding foot washing to the customary Baptist ordinances, endured a lot of mockery from members of other churches, and the greater number who had no church. But worldly ridicule is a glory to the devout.

Outside the church, the several small families that made up the congregation were gathering, farmers and farmers’ wives, and their children, all in the best and cleanest of their drab homemade clothes. The grown-ups made a dignified effort not to stare at the new arrivals, and children were cuffed and scolded for their curiosity. As the animals chewed on the tops of the fence posts or nibbled the grass, my uncle introduced us to the neighbors piecemeal, several times repeating, with slight variations, “These are my wife’s sister’s children you probably heard of. This here’s Lewis. This here’s Arabella.” A sort of line began to form of people waiting to meet us, and with an expectant feeling I noticed Jacob and Jeptha, the two already known faces, waiting behind the family my uncle was talking to. A woman—skinny, with hollow cheeks and raw eyes—rested a hand briefly on Jeptha’s shoulder. His mother, I guessed. Near him stood a girl I assumed to be his sister, cheerful and fresh-looking but with the gait of an old man—she dipped an extra inch on every other step—and in her hand was a cane. Jeptha was looking at me. With an admirable economy of motion, so that he did not seem to be working, he kept me in view as people passed between us. My uncle noticed that I was looking past the family he was introducing at the moment. His buttonhole eyes quizzed me, and my aunt said, “Oh, she’s noticing Jacob and Jeptha; she’s met them before. She met them at the store. She don’t mean to be rude to you, Thomas, do you, Arabella?” and I said no, and was forgiven. I knew that Agnes’s eyes were on me.

“This is Mr. Talbot, children, who you met at the store. And this is Mrs. Talbot.” I greeted them, and Lewis greeted them. As when I had seen them in the store, the father and the son shared a quality of unusual alertness. The boy’s alertness was curious and playful. The father’s had soured into a threat. But just now he was a Sunday version of himself and greeted me with absentminded gravity. The wife must have been pretty once. I smiled at her and received a blank stare in return. Then came Jeptha, who said, quickly, “Hi, Agnes, Matthew, Evangeline,” giving them
about equal weight, it seemed to me, and he nodded to Lewis, and said to me, “Here we are again,” and quickly introduced us to the lame girl, Becky, his sister, to his three-year-old sister Ruth, and to his brothers Ike and Ezra, and then we all went into the church, which was dark and drafty. The floor was made of rudely sawed half-logs, with wide cracks between some of them, and on some days one caught glimpses of animals skittering in the crawl spaces below.

As we walked to our family’s benches, Agnes said she guessed that Horace had been right, and that Jeptha liked me.

“I don’t care about boys,” I declared.

The minister, William Jefferds, was a frail-looking little man in his thirties with thin sandy hair, narrow shoulders, small hands, and sad eyes behind wire-rimmed D-shaped spectacles. Titus whispered that Jefferds was also the schoolteacher. He looked too weak to do either of his jobs, but it turned out that he made good use of his frailty. People heeded his soft voice as one would attend a dying man’s last words, while he delivered the gentlest and most terrifying hellfire sermon I had ever heard.

It would have gone against his temperament to rage or threaten even if he had had the strength for it. He merely explained the situation. He began with the pain. “Think how it hurts when you burn your finger or your arm. This burning is over the whole body. And it never stops. Hell is full of screaming. It would be terrible just to hear it, but maybe the damned don’t notice, since they’re screaming themselves.”

He talked as if he were warning us against skating on a pond where the ice had broken and drowned children several years in a row. There was no censure, only dismay that in this day and age, when everything was so well understood and it was obvious what needed to be done, so many people still chose damnation. Before long, his frail voice was being joined by quiet weeping and moaning from quite a few of the men and women on the hard rough benches around me, and he began to address us by name. “Jenny Williams, do I see a tear in your eye? Are you beginning to think it over?” “John Lenox, I believe you hear me.” And me: “Arabella, new to our village, so much has changed for you of late. Lean on Jesus, Arabella. He was there in New York. He is here in Livy. He’ll be with you today and tomorrow. He will never leave you. He will never die.” I gasped, feeling as if he had reached into my chest and grabbed my heart.