Belle Cora: A Novel (15 page)

After an excruciating silence, Horace decided to laugh; the others joined him; and I laughed last, having no idea what I was laughing about, or what, really, had just occurred.

Pat asked what it had been like on the canal, and for a few minutes Horace and the hands carried the conversation. Sam had worked as a porter on the canal. Pat had been a docker in New York, where he lived on Baxter Street, and he had heard of Godwin & Co.

“The Godwin warehouse is the tallest building in the city,” said Lewis.

Everyone stopped chewing.

“Jesus,” said Matthew.

“Matthew,” said my aunt.

“Did you hear what he said?”

“Matthew, it would be a shame if this got you a licking,” said Elihu.

“The old one was burned up in the Great Fire,” Lewis went on, and he proceeded to say more words in a row than he had spoken since his arrival. “I saw it burn. I helped to empty it.” In fact, he had arrived when the old warehouse was in ashes. “The new one is seven stories high. We went up to the top right after it was built. It was like a mountain. We could see the ships. We could see north past the edge of the city. We were looking down on the churches. Robert put me on his shoulders. I used to go up there all the time.”

He’d been to the roof only once.

“Lewis, don’t talk about the warehouse anymore,” said Horace.

“Why not?”

“It’s bragging, Lewis.”

“But it’s true,” said Lewis, taking the silence for fascination. And he told them that oftentimes he used to kill pigs by dropping rocks from the top of it.

Then there was more silence, which my cousin Titus was the first to break. “Arabella, how did your pa come to pass on?”

“He took ill while traveling. He was on his way to Cincinnati.”

Horace abruptly began questioning Elihu about the farm, its soil, trees, crops, weather, and pests. He said that he had grown up on farms in Connecticut and Vermont where the harvest had declined each year. It was only later, when he used an idle afternoon in the city to attend a New-York State Agricultural Society lecture, that he learned in what contempt Englishmen held American farming. We bought too much land to work well. Our way with manure was too unsystematic. We should pen our animals and plant Swedish turnips. The British loved to slander our country. Yet Horace guessed that if he were ever to farm again he would try some of their methods.

Elihu inclined his head and squinted. “A lecture in the New York—what?”

“State Agricultural Society.”

“Well, sir, you got me beat there. I ain’t never been to one of
their
lectures.”

Horace chuckled, since a joke had been intended. Elihu, whose smile ceased to put one at ease, inquired, “What’s funny?” and Horace, in the depths of his good nature, found the will to say that he, Horace, was funny, for trying to teach farming to a farmer.

After the meal, my uncle told Titus to meet him on the porch. As we were helping with the dishes, we heard my uncle speaking, each word accompanied by a muffled blow and a cry of pain. “Children.” Thwack. “Will.” Thwack. “Learn.” Thwack. “To.” Thwack. “Listen.” Thwack. “To.” Thwack. “Their.” Thwack. “Elders.” Thwack. As though she were imparting a great secret, Evangeline told us that Titus was being whipped. When I asked why, she said she didn’t know.

Horace and the hands slept on the other side of the house. My aunt and uncle slept in a small bedroom downstairs. The children slept in the loft, a room with a big floor but low, slanting ceilings. The whole house was really very small. Sounds carried easily in it, and we could always hear the rhythmic creak of the bed when my aunt was fulfilling her marital obligations, but we were spared this on our first night.

When we were up in the loft, I saw the trunks that Sam and Pat had brought up there after supper. They contained things that country children might never have seen. “See what we’ve brought from New York,” I
said, and, gratifyingly, my cousins crowded around a trunk. I spoke more freely with my aunt and uncle gone. I showed them the illustrations in Buffon’s
Natural History
, my dress shoes, my seashell collection. I told them that, each day on the piers in New York City, barges many times larger than this house unloaded great mountains of oysters. I showed them a lace collar my grandmother had given me. I remarked on a difference between New York City and Livy. In Livy, from what I’d heard, you went to Colonel Ashton’s store for everything. But in New York City, a five-block district was devoted just to the sale of carpets, and another neighborhood to ropes and other nautical things, and another to butchering, and another to carriages. I told them about Moving Day. In New York City, most people rented their homes, and the leases ended on the same day, and every first of May the streets were clogged with wagons heaped with people’s belongings. But my grandfather owned our house. We had never moved, until recently.

As I spoke I thought of Rebecca, my schoolmate, who had overawed me with her experiences of mountains, racetracks, and panoramas. As Rebecca was to me, I was to my cousins. I had seen more of the world. I had an advantage, and I could subdue them, as Rebecca had subdued me. This could help reconcile me to the small house, the bad food, the loutish manners, and whatever other disappointments awaited me here.

Evangeline, curiously turning an oyster shell and making parts of it glisten in the candlelight, asked, “Did you bring any oysters with meat in them?”

Agnes said, “Don’t be silly, Evangeline. Oysters would not keep on such a long journey.” She looked at me with a tiny smile, that we might sigh together over Evangeline’s incorrigible ignorance.

I was going to do just that—I should have—but then I had a bright idea. “Actually, oysters can be dried. Some people like them that way,” and I added airily: “I wish I had thought to bring some.” Evangeline’s expression rebuked Agnes—see, her question had
not
been stupid!—and Agnes’s face fell, and I had a tiny suspicion that I had just made an error.

“What a fancy name you have, Arabella,” said Agnes. “That’s not a Bible name, is it?”

“It’s a name in my grandfather’s family,” I said.

“It sounds Spanish. It makes me think of a fine Spanish lady who wears black lace and has servants.”

“It’s English, I guess. The ship that first brought the Puritans to Massachusetts was the
Arbella
.”

“Aren’t you mistaken, Arabella?” Agnes asked as if she had caught me being naughty and was putting my little crime to me delicately.

“I don’t think I am.”

“If you think a little more, won’t it come to mind that the ship that brought the Puritans to America was the
Mayflower
?”

My other cousins were watching us with a sudden alertness which told me that it was dangerous to disagree with Agnes, but I could not, like Horace, efface myself to the point of saying the opposite of what I believed. “You’re right, Agnes. The
Mayflower
came before the
Arbella
. But my grandfather always used to remind us that the Pilgrims and the Puritans were not the same. The Pilgrims came on the
Mayflower
with Miles Standish. The Puritans came on the
Arbella
with James Winthrop. My grandfather used to tell us that every Thanksgiving. He always mentioned the ship, because of my name.”

I threw in my grandfather and Thanksgiving as a sop to Agnes’s pride. I didn’t know all this just because I had received a better education. I knew it for these special, personal, accidental reasons.

Agnes asked, “Are you sure, Arabella?”

“So I was told.”

“Is it likely, Arabella, that the Puritans, who set such store on simplicity, came on a boat with so fancy a name? How are we to explain that?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Could the explanation be that you did not hear correctly?”

Did she think she could bully me into saying there was no difference between Pilgrims and Puritans? Into the silence came Matthew’s derisive comment: “She’s talking about her own darn name, Agnes. How dumb would she have to be to be wrong about her own name?” Agnes didn’t answer, and he drove the point home: “Well, I guess you don’t know everything after all, do you, Agnes.”

WE KNELT BESIDE OUR BEDS
. They seemed to be waiting for me to start. I said the Prayer of Agur, which my mother had taught me long ago. I prayed to be given what I needed but not more than was good for my character.

Agnes’s prayer, which began after mine, was very long and specific.
She asked that Jesus lead Mr. Cooper and Mr. Talbot away from drink and ease Mrs. Slocum’s rheumatism; console Mr. and Mrs. Rawley for the death of their son by drowning last year; and that Mrs. Lyall, the sick widow, recover or be granted an easy passage to the arms of the Lord; that Josh Rowen leave off swearing; that the stony hearts of Henry Rowen, Mark Taylor, Becky Forrest, and twenty others she named, including her dear cousins Lewis and Arabella, be softened into such a consistency as would enable us to receive the Holy Spirit and the believer’s baptism; that the winter would not be too hard and the vegetables not run out early and the livestock not perish until the best time to slaughter them and that the meat would not spoil; that the cows keep giving good fat milk for a few more weeks, and come spring the maple sap be plentiful and sweet; that Sam and Pat be converted from popish idolatry; that the people of New York City have money again; that my grandfather’s business survive and he be furthered in his great work; that the Lord guide the counsels of President Van Buren and smite the enemies of the United States.

Was that how one prayed here? Must I learn to pray like that? To my relief, Evangeline’s prayers were short and the boys’ were piggish grunts. I thanked Agnes for mentioning Lewis and me. I tried to make a peace offering of my thanks. I knew I had offended her.

X

LEWIS AND I SLEPT THROUGH
the rooster’s crow. My aunt pulled us to our feet, and we piled on clothes, and the crimes that are rumored to occur on farms were actually perpetrated: hens were distracted with corn and robbed of their eggs, cows were milked, hay was forked, pigs were swilled, all before our breakfast of watery oatmeal. Only the milk was thick and good. We were each allowed one spoonful of molasses.

At breakfast, Lewis announced that Horace would be staying on as a hired hand.

“Am I?” said Horace.

“Horace, you like farming,” said Lewis. “You
told
me you did.”

“Lewis, you’re a fine, brave boy and you’re going to be all right. You’ve got a new family now. You’ve got your sister, and four cousins, and an uncle and an aunt who will be like a ma and a pa to you. You can write me letters, and I’ll write you back.”

“I don’t want any letter from you. I hate you.” He was crying now.

“Hush, Lewis,” said my aunt.

Horace picked him up. Lewis wrapped his arms around Horace’s neck. “Horace, don’t go. Don’t go, Horace. Don’t go.”

My uncle said, “That’s enough, Lewis. Let go,” but he wouldn’t, until my aunt peeled him off Horace and held him as he tried to twist away. The hands laughed. Horace looked sad. My aunt asked Titus to fetch a switch. Lewis sat, waiting sullenly, until Titus came back with a hard stick about the diameter of my index finger.

“Let me do it,” I said. “I always did it at home.”

My aunt looked at my uncle and then shook her head, and she gave him eight strokes on the bottom: “This. Is. To. Teach. You. How. To. Obey.”

She told me later she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame my mother for letting me punish my little brother. She had heard of such things in large families where the eldest children were almost grown, but she didn’t approve of it, and she was happy to take this burden off my shoulders.

LEWIS WENT UP IN THE LOFT SO
as not to see Horace go, but he seemed to recover later, and he tagged along when the men and the boys went out to the woods with the felling saw.

The house was quiet. I showed my aunt and Agnes and Evangeline some presents my grandmother had given me to give them, the factory-made buttons, ribbons, and pins that country women craved as much as did any naked islander who might swim out to meet Captain Cook. I showed them the miniature of my mother. My aunt sighed: it was just as she remembered her sister. Agnes said, “Oh, it is so lovely. Some would charge her with vanity for putting a man to the trouble of painting it, but what a providence to have it now. I’m sure Providence made her do it, even if it struck people as vain at the time.”