Belle Cora: A Novel (18 page)

The older children went to school from mid-November to mid-March, half as long as school had lasted for me in New York City. There was also a summer session, taught by the sawmill owner’s daughter, for children under eight years old; it was attended mostly by the town children who lived near enough to walk to the school by themselves.

On the way, my cousins told me about the teacher, Mr. Jefferds, whom I had already met in his capacity as pastor of our church. Everything they said would turn out to be very important, but of course I didn’t know it, so I didn’t give it much of my attention. I had been punished with no supper the night before, and was still hungry after breakfast. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to eat one of the potatoes now. Would I regret not having it at recess? Would Agnes or Evangeline report that I had eaten the potato prematurely, and if so, would that be grounds for a punishment? I thought mainly about this as Evangeline said that Jefferds was an exceptionally kindly teacher who only beat the children if they were bad, and he gave out tickets for special feats of learning; when you had fifty tickets, you were rewarded with a pocket-sized New Testament or, if you already had that, an Old Testament.

Titus said that Mr. Jefferds had no house of his own, and boarded for a few months at a time with the families of the students; he was always given the best food and the chair nearest the fire, because he was a mine of information and a fount of wisdom. He had studied in a college somewhere. Agnes, too, produced careful evidence that Jefferds was a fine man.

We walked on then in silence for a few minutes. Fearing ridicule almost more than a whipping, I wondered if I would be mocked should I
ask whether eating the potato early was a punishable offense. Farm gave way to forest. When Matthew spoke, I realized they had all been waiting for him to speak. “Bill Jefferds is a beggar. That’s all he is. Teaching school is a government job. Preachers ain’t supposed to have government jobs. People round here overlook it. Why do you think they do that?” he asked, pitching a stone at a bird’s nest in a birch tree, swearing when he missed it, and trying again while we waited for him. He answered himself: it was because Jefferds, who had to rest for a moment after he climbed the two steps to his pulpit, was unfit for man’s work. “It’s teach school or starve.” The nest came down. Matthew walked on, picking it apart. “Folks round here are too honest to understand somebody like him.”

These were already more words than Matthew had ever before spoken to me, and the tirade continued until we had reached our destination. I had never heard a child voice so much contempt for a grown man, let alone his family’s pastor.

The schoolhouse was the one-room edifice, as plain as the house a child draws, that we see nowadays on the cover of piano sheet music for songs that mention hickory sticks and girls in calico. It had a long, pitched roof and a smoking chimney. It had once been painted red. At places that got extra wear, like the doorway, and places that for some reason got the brunt of the weather, the gray wood showed through; and the unpainted planks of the walls inside were dark with soot from the fireplace and dirt from the hands of children. There were brass hooks on the back wall for our coats, in case it should ever get warm enough for us to remove them, and an odd assortment of benches, tables, and desks, and planks and old barrels that could be assembled into makeshift desks. There were shelves, also assorted, which, when new, had lived in the houses of the miller, the storekeeper, and the sawmill owner, and there were pupils of ages ranging from eight to sixteen.

Jefferds called the roll, naming me among the “G”s as Arabella Godwin, and pausing to tell the class that they had probably heard I was the cousin of the Moody children, come here to live here with them. I looked around and I noticed Agnes staring at Jeptha. I also noticed—and the significance of this observation sank in slowly—that at least four other girls, two of them pretty (one a fourteen-year-old with hips and a bosom), were variously smiling at Jeptha, or casting sudden glances and then looking away in pretended indifference. When Jefferds got to
the “T”s and Jeptha answered, Agnes watched me. I was going to look at my desk, but I decided that would be strange in itself, and I looked at him. As he said, “Here,” he turned to smile at me. I tried to harden my heart against this smile, but I felt a renewed shock at his simple good looks. Then Jefferds called out, “Rebecca Talbot.” My eyes sought the girl and a few seconds later, the cane. She was a little older than Lewis, a skinny girl with a plump, round, freckly face, a faded cotton dress, and a woolen shawl. According to Titus who was proving to be the only safe source of information in my uncle’s house, this was her first year in the winter school. She was very talkative, always immediately in conference with other girls as soon as the teacher was absent. Everyone treated her kindly, although sometimes Matthew said unpleasant things about her to get a rise out of Jeptha. With Becky as the pretext, Jeptha and Matthew had fought three times. Each time, Matthew had been the victor.

On no day of school do we learn more than on the first day of silent panic among strange faces and unknown tacit rules, and it was on my first day in that unpainted one-room schoolhouse that I learned why Matthew hated Mr. Jefferds. The puzzle was solved all at once when, an hour after the roll was taken, I watched my cousin struggle, at the teacher’s insistence, with two short paragraphs in the second-year reader. Matthew, who was big and strong and not stupid, the cock of the walk in every situation but this one, began to stammer. His face went red. For five minutes he writhed within the mild teacher’s invisible talons. Released, he seemed to fall from a height and flop lifeless onto his desk. This black magic was in evidence in any encounter with books, writing, or numbers, all winter long. From a sense of duty, maybe—an honest desire to teach the smart boy who might succeed if he tried harder—Jefferds called on Matthew more often than he called on other children. I saw my cousin dread the moment and seethe with fury afterward. He was sure that the weakling in the D-shaped spectacles was deliberately humiliating him out of envy for his health and vitality. No one had ever hurt him like that. He never forgave it.

ONE DAY, TWO WEEKS LATER
, Jefferds cleared his throat and announced that it was recital time. Lifting up his spectacles, he brought a ledger an inch from his nose and squinted at it in a way that was always included
in the comical imitations done by the boys who rushed to sit at his desk whenever he left the room. “Ephraim Towne. Step up, Ephraim.”

A skinny red-haired boy in homespun woolen trousers of a faded brown with ragged cuffs, and a homespun shirt in a faded blue, quietly rose from his desk, walked to the front of the room, and stood with his back to the fire. “Wait a moment, Ephraim,” said Jefferds, squinting at the list again. “Children, as some of you may realize, this is no ordinary recital. Ephraim has forty-nine tickets carried over from last year, entitling him to”—more squinting—“a copy of the New Testament when he earns his fiftieth.”

He was telling them nothing; even I knew. Titus had reminded me of it this morning—in a whisper, out of Matthew’s hearing—as we were washing up: poor Ephraim Towne’s excellent memory, of which he was justly proud, had gotten him into a pickle. For, if Ephraim earned his fiftieth ticket, his second reward, after the New Testament, was to be a beating from Matthew on the way home. If the future resembled the past, Matthew would take the book away from him. He would not keep it—he was no thief—and according to his odd but rigid sense of what was fitting, he couldn’t destroy it, because it was Scripture. However, he could put it at the end of a high limb on a tree Ephraim wasn’t brave enough to climb, or just under the roof of a notably bad-tempered farmer’s barn, or some other amusing place. Matthew bullied wittily, denying his victims the consolation of considering themselves his intellectual superiors. His bullying was no impulsive product of his hurt feelings. It was a policy.

“I can’t help feeling sorry for Ephraim,” said Titus. He said it not as someone protesting an injustice but as someone noting the sadness of life. Matthew and Titus were very different, with different views, and at home they often quarreled; but outside things were different. Titus was small for his age, and he was considered fortunate to have Matthew for a brother.

Usually, I sat near the front of the drafty little schoolhouse, to be nearer the fire, and the better to be seen by the myopic Jefferds, who complimented my reading and spelling and penmanship and let me help the slower children with their work. But on this particular day, I had come in last and was in the back, with a good view of the whole room. I saw Ephraim’s tension as he prepared to recite, and I saw enough of the faces of the assorted other pupils to get a general idea of which ones pitied
him, which took a cruel pleasure in his predicament, and which ones just marveled at his temerity, as I did.

“We wait, Ephraim,” said Jefferds. “We’re waiting.”

Staring over our heads at the knotty horizontal planks on the back wall, Ephraim recited the poem about the amazingly dutiful boy “on the burning deck,” who remains in that unenviable predicament awaiting instructions from his father, who, in fact, is dead.

As he came to the end, Ephraim hesitated. He will forget, I thought. Who could blame him? Then he looked at Matthew and—immobile save for his fiercely straining lips—flung each word like a missile: “ ‘But the noblest thing that perished there / Was that young, faithful heart!’ ” Children cheered, hooted, stomped, and drummed. “Well done, Ephraim,” said Jefferds, handing him the book. “You’ve earned this. We can all learn from the courage of the boy on that ship.” Matthew’s friends made throat-cutting gestures. Matthew just shook his head sadly, as if disappointed in Ephraim and regretting the stern disciplinary measures that awaited them both. Jeptha’s back was to me, and I could not see his look. Titus wore a faraway, daydreaming expression.

Ephraim hovered over the book until Jefferds, perhaps to answer nature’s call, left the room for a few minutes. Gazing out of one of the schoolhouse’s small windows, Titus said he saw a dog with a rabbit, and the rabbit’s guts were hanging out, and most of the children rushed to that side of the room. I didn’t want to see rabbit guts, so I was in my seat when Ephraim rose a little later than the others, leaving the book behind. I saw Jeptha pass Ephraim’s desk and stuff the book into his trousers. On his way to the window, he turned to me and put his finger to his lips.

I was confused. Jeptha’s theft of the book contradicted everything I had learned so far about the politics of the little schoolhouse. The boys were divided into three stable factions: one gathered around Matthew, another around Jeptha, and a third consisted of the Miller brothers, who were fearless because they were so numerous: four in the school that year, and in addition the seventeen-year-old, who had graduated the previous year, and the seven-year-old, who would enter it next year. Ephraim belonged to Jeptha’s faction: why should Jeptha steal his book? It wasn’t until Ephraim got back to his seat and raised no alarm about the missing book that I understood: Jeptha had taken it, with Titus’s help and by
prearrangement with Ephraim, to keep it out of Matthew’s hands. It was to be expected that Jeptha would help Ephraim: they were friends. That Titus should take the risk of thwarting his brother was more surprising.

Later, while we trotted home through the cold, Matthew went off in the direction of Ephraim’s house. “Did you tell?” Titus asked me when Agnes was out of earshot. I shook my head, and he patted my arm, and I was grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to prove that I was someone who could be trusted to keep a secret.

Well after bedtime, Matthew came up to the loft, carrying a candle and a hunk of bread, and after pulling Titus from his bed he proceeded to recite a new chapter in his, Matthew’s, continuing saga: how Ephraim, in a cowardly attempt to evade his fair punishment, had taken a detour through Norris Woods and the Muskrat Pond, and Matthew had tracked him like an Indian, noticing broken twigs, pausing to listen for the sounds of crackling beneath Ephraim’s worn-out shoes, which left a slightly different pattern depending upon whether Ephraim had been running, walking, leaping, or standing still in terror so great that it stopped his mind and he was just a passive vessel of fear. Matthew knew how to walk on springy matted leaves and hard roots so that he left no track. Thanks to such astounding feats of woodcraft, he had caught up with poor Ephraim, who was by then half frozen, so really it was a rescue. “You’re lucky I found you,” Matthew had said, giving him a sound drubbing, after which they both felt better, because of course, Matthew reminded us, there is no licking worse than the fear of a licking in those foolish enough to fear them. But Matthew had not recovered the testament.

Titus and Matthew huddled around the candle. The rest of us watched.

“Why not?” asked Titus innocently.

“He didn’t have it. He had another boy hold it for him.”

“That was smart. Did he say who he gave it to?”

“Well, he didn’t want to say. He didn’t say at first. But after a while, I guess he changed his mind, and then he did say. He gave it to Jeptha.”

“I guess it was too late by then to catch up with Jeptha,” said Titus.

“Yup,” said Matthew. Then his arms moved. Titus, expecting it, ducked and ran for the ladder. Matthew cornered him near a dresser.
Soon Matthew had one of Titus’s arms behind his back and was tugging it upward while Titus winced and cried out: “Stop it, Matt! I didn’t do nothing! Stop it!”

“ ‘Look everybody—dog with a rabbit,’ ” Matthew murmured. “Teach you to take sides against your own brother.”

“Uncle Elihu, Matthew’s hurting Titus!” I called, out of friendliness to Titus, but also lest under torture he name me among the other conspirators. My uncle shouted out for them to stop. He climbed to the loft and, talking as if they were equally responsible, said that if they didn’t settle their differences peaceably they would both get a licking worse than they could give each other. And while they were on the subject, Matthew was owed a licking for coming home too late to do his chores. He would get it tomorrow. (But he didn’t. My uncle made little effort to hide his preference for Matthew.)