Belle Cora: A Novel (28 page)

First came a mild joke. A boy named Solomon Cole performed the feat of memorization that earned him his fiftieth ticket. Jefferds grasped a fat tome, telling Solomon that he had well earned the right to his own private copy of this holy book and he should let no one take it from him, should take it into his heart and be guided by it; he handed it to the boy in view of the class. It developed gradually that a switch had occurred, and in lieu of the Old Testament the nearsighted Jefferds had handed Solomon a copy of
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
, an illustrated guide to fornication, which passed from hand to hand among the older boys. Somehow a beautiful mint-new presentation copy had been obtained for the occasion; it had been inscribed, “With love and best wishes, to Solomon Cole, from William Jefferds.”

Everyone not a member of the Free Will Baptist church enjoyed this joke. Nothing was done, even by the elders of Jefferds’s own congregation, who could not be certain who the culprit was. No one had been hurt.

A month later, Jefferds was attacked by a pair of dogs while he walked on the main road near the millrace. Some spectators figured out that what the dogs were really after was Jefferds’s coat—blood was seen dripping from the pockets—and shouted for him to remove it; which he did, and then watched the dogs tear apart the coat in an effort to get at the raw meat stuffed in its lining.

The moment I heard about the incident with the coat, I knew that
Lewis was responsible. We had just done a slaughter, and I had seen him tuck away the lungs.

I didn’t like seeing my brother become a hooligan. The next chance I got, I told him that I knew, and that I’d keep his secret, but that if he and Matthew started trying to outdo each other in nastiness they were bound to go too far. He looked stonily back at me. My word had no weight with him anymore. I was now merely a despised member of the other sex. Anyway, I was Jeptha’s sweetheart, and Jeptha was a sneak; Jeptha was a fast talker who had taken up religion because it was his ticket out of Livy.

Besides that, though Lewis didn’t mention this and I didn’t know it, there were already certain rumors about me in the town, and they had reached Lewis by this time.

My aunt was more distressed than anyone when she heard about the dog and the coat, but had no idea who might be responsible until Bill Dodge and Jonathan Wakeman, two church elders, appeared at her door asking to speak to my uncle. Then she guessed everything. She had Elihu get Matthew from the fields, and since his sense of honor did not permit him to run, he sat at the kitchen table under the glare of Dodge and Wakeman while my aunt told him that he had disgraced the family. He said he hadn’t done what they thought he’d done. My aunt said, “Then you put someone up to it.”

Matthew said he hadn’t.

She told the elders, “It isn’t like Matthew to lie.”

Dodge said, “Matthew, do you know who did it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Will you tell us?”

“No.”

“Was it Lewis?”

Matthew didn’t answer, and though I wasn’t there, I imagine his face showed what he thought of people who would ask him to tell a tale on his own kin.

My aunt wept. My uncle took Matthew to the barn and whipped him, though it was like whipping a statue, and when he found Lewis, he gave Lewis a whipping that meant just as little. The next time we were together, Lewis accused me of telling what I had seen him do.

“I would never tell on you, Lewis. I’m loyal to you. I’ll always be loyal.” He screwed up his face in disgust and walked away.

Colonel Ashton gave Jefferds another coat, newer and warmer than the one he’d lost to the dogs, and he accepted it with a humility some people found contemptible.

It was from Jeptha, on one of our walks, that I first heard about the next and last of these incidents. Since the beginning of the year, Jefferds had been boarding with Alvin Walters, and each morning he took a constitutional in the forest of honey locusts on the property. One morning, on a path that had been perfectly firm beneath his feet the day before, the leaves turned out to have been a thin covering over a two-foot-deep cavity filled with muddy water. He sprained his ankle. His spectacles fell off, and when he was struggling to get out, he broke one of the lenses with his elbow. From the high branches of the tall, crooked trees came the laughter of the boys who had prepared the trap.

He couldn’t see much, but he knew who two of the boys up there had to be.

“It’s your uncle’s fault,” said Jeptha, who had been calm when he began recounting the incident but became angry as he told it. “No: it’s your aunt. She took away Elihu’s pride, and his revenge was to let Matthew run wild, and now look at him.” He walked on a little. “I whipped him once.”

“You don’t mean that.” I had been afraid of this. “You’re strong, but you can’t beat him. That other time, you were children. You used his vanity. That won’t happen again. Besides, now you’re a Christian, you can’t. It’s against your principles.”

I looked at him, at his penetrating blue eyes, at his brow that with advancing adolescence had acquired a hawkish, feral ridge, and at the shoulders and arms which mattered to me not for the damage they might inflict on a foe, but for their beauty, and because of the way they felt pressing against me and gripping me, and because they were his. Today Matthew had no match in Livy. He knocked out teeth and broke jaws. And Matthew was envious of Jeptha and hated him, and would have loved to have him at his mercy. It made me sick to think of it.

Jeptha was as annoyed as a young fellow is bound to be when his sweetheart worries that another man is too strong for him. “I’m not stupid, Arabella. It will be a last resort. But if it comes to that, I’ll pray and use strategy, and we’ll see.”

I kept telling him he was supposed to turn the other cheek, and he
kept telling me not to worry, but I knew what was in his mind. He ached to punish Matthew, and his pride told him that he could do it, and I wished I could believe it.

True to his word, though, he did not resort to fighting first. First he complained on Jefferds’s behalf to my uncle Elihu. Elihu said that he would whip Matthew. Jeptha said that wasn’t enough: Matthew must make a public apology and pay for the spectacles.

I was not there, but it was all reported to me in detail, by more than one party to the conversation.

“I’ll put it to him,” said Elihu with a smile. “But I don’t know as I can make him if he don’t want to. Matt can be awful stubborn. Maybe you can make him.”

Jeptha, who was perhaps a trifle angry, angrier than he knew, at this point—I was angry when my uncle’s words were quoted to me—said, “Let’s both ask him. And if he refuses, why, then, you should do it for him. You should make restitution. It could be a great lesson for him.”

Now Elihu was angry. “What are you talking about?”

“You should humble yourself, and make a public apology to Mr. Jefferds, who is your minister, and has humbled himself before
you:
he’s washed your feet, I’ve seen him do it. You should insist on paying for his broken spectacles, and you should say it’s to make up for the shame your son and your nephew have brought upon you.”

“Now, see here, I’ve heard you out. Don’t make me lose my temper. Nobody can even prove Matthew did this.”

“Yes, but we know he did. Of course nobody blames you. That’s what’ll make it work. That’s how you’ll be able to get through to Matthew and Lewis. A thing like that could turn them both around. It could save them, and Jefferds himself would bless that hole he fell in and see the Lord’s work in it, since it brought two erring souls to Jesus!”

Now, I am well aware that many of us who are not actually in the grip of religion have a distaste for talk like this. We prefer the citizen who angrily demands his rights to the preacher who, when he wants something, ropes your immortal soul into the argument. We are pleased when we find out that such men are hypocrites. So it is necessary for me to say that I loved this boy and knew him well, and though he had the zealotry of a recent convert and inevitably fell short of the perfection he aimed at,
he was being as sincere as he could bring himself to be. It was his duty to interfere with people’s souls.

And if you think about it, his proposal made sense. It was what a better man than Elihu would have done. For Elihu to become a better man was a tactfully unmentioned opportunity in this plan. But if there are any forty-two-year-old men capable of taking such advice from a sixteen-year-old boy, my uncle wasn’t one of them. Instead, his face turned colors and he shouted, “Leave my house!” When he reported the conversation to my aunt, she said Jeptha was right, but he wouldn’t budge, and when the church elders came again, he said he had intended to whip Matthew, but now, because of Jeptha’s insolence, he wasn’t going to do a thing.

SO, FINALLY, LIKE THE YOUNG HERO
in a boy’s adventure story, Jeptha challenged my cousin Matthew, the town bully, to a fight. I learned about it first from Matthew, on the day I hate to speak of, the day I have dreaded speaking of as I have watched its steady, unrelenting approach in these confessions.

Agnes and Evangeline were in the house with Aunt Agatha, carding and spinning. Titus was in Patavium, where he now had a job as a clerk in a dry-goods store. Matthew and I were shelling corn in the barn. With Mrs. Harding’s permission, I had come home especially to assist with this chore. Lewis was supposed to help us, too, but he didn’t show up, and when I asked Matthew why, he said he had told Lewis that he needn’t: he could hunt for nests or shoot birds, and Matthew would do his share of the work.

Matthew was fond of Lewis, and might do him a disinterested favor sometimes, but this wasn’t one of those times. He wanted to be alone with me. I knew it, and I was nervous about it, but I couldn’t very well refuse to stand in the barn shelling corn with my cousin, out of a suspicion so base that I would be considered vile for uttering it. This was work, it was necessary, and there were no excuses for shirking it.

I am reluctant to continue, which seems very odd, considering all I’ve done and had done to me, and that I’m up to the event that is supposed to excuse my crimes. For days now, as I’ve approached this incident, I’ve been going over it in my mind as I haven’t in half a century. I feel like an Egyptologist who has said aloud the ancient curse inscribed on the wall
of a long-buried tomb, and the curse still works. I wish. I wish I had done things differently.

Anyway, I let myself be alone with him, even though I found his company unpleasant. Lately, whenever I was around him, his eyes raked my form with a candid lust so disconcerting it could make me stumble. While his eyes took these liberties, he practiced gentlemanly manners that gave him excuses to draw his body nearer to mine. He would hand me my coat or lift me into a wagon.

This attention from Matthew had several causes, some known to me at the time. My form was more mature, and my new clothes displayed it to better effect; also, now that I lived away from my uncle’s house, maybe I did not seem so much like a sister to him. I think I understood all that. What I did not know was that there was a rumor in town that I had granted my favors not only to Jeptha but to all three of the Harding boys, William, Dick, and Miles. It was said that they had given me or paid for the pretty dresses I went about in.

Furthermore, Matthew himself had recently been initiated into the rites of Eros by Mrs. Caroline, a forty-year-old widow who had employed him in clearing land on her farm, and he had filled out the gaps in his knowledge with the help of Penny Jackson (also called “Five Penny Jackson”), who lived with four bastards in a shack downstream from the sawmill and would take any man to paradise in exchange for a bushel of corn.

Hay blocked one of the two windows in the barn loft. As we moved about, we were sometimes in darkness, and sometimes in the glare from the other window. One moment I’d be peering into the murk, the next shielding my eyes. I heard the hard corn kernels falling through gaps in the floorboards. Matthew was spilling them. He was doing this job, for which he had contempt, in a state of moderate drunkenness.

There were three corn shellers, one for Matthew, one for me, and one for Lewis. Matthew helped himself unthinkingly to the most productive and easy-to-use sheller, a machine with a wheel to turn. I had a board with the points of nails sticking out of it. Turning the wheel, his big hand in the light, his face in darkness, Matthew told me that Jeptha had challenged him to a fight, a formal fight, in front of witnesses on the green, and he wondered if I might have something to say about it. “He was always sly, your preacher boy. He can talk his way round almost anybody.
Guess he got round you, didn’t he? But talk won’t help him now. This is stupid, taking me on like a man, when he could hide behind Jesus. I’m surprised at him. Remember when him and me scrapped that first year you came to Livy? And Agnes begged me to go easy on him.”

He began to talk about what he might do to Jeptha. “I could gouge out one of his eyes. I could break an arm so it never set right. I’ve a mind to do something to him. Talking to Pa that way in front of Ma: ‘Go apologize for Matthew, humble yourself, be a great thing for all of you.’ That wasn’t right. I can’t just let it pass.”

We both went on working; it took him a long time to say that much. He kept stopping, as if he were done with the subject, and then returning to it, as if he were merely thinking out loud. It was a way of working on my feelings, and it was very effective. I was uncomfortable. I was not yet afraid. At least, I don’t think I was, or why would I have remained? Some of it is not easy to remember.

“Or,” he said finally, “I could go easy on him. I could make us come out about even. I could make it look like a tie. I could. I could make it a tie and not be hurt myself, and everyone would believe it. Even Jeptha would believe it. I’d have to swallow my pride. That would be hard.” In a little while, he went on: “You want me to do that?”

Finally, I answered, “Yes.”

“What?”

“Go easy on him.”

“Go easy on him, huh?” He said it now as if it had been my suggestion. “You’d like me to go easy on him. Oh. Huh. Oh, I see. All right, but why should I do it?”