Belle Cora: A Novel (26 page)

When I alluded delicately to Becky and Lionel, he shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it. Suddenly he said, “She’s not dying. Agnes.”

“What? But she—?”

“It’s a humbug. Watch her, you’ll see.”

“But she’s spitting up her food.”

He nodded. “She must be starving.”

I thought about this for a moment and realized that he must be right. She had been pretending from the start. For vomiting, she’d had ipecac. She’d had a wide choice of purges, diuretics, diaphoretics, and stimulants among the other medicines we’d brought to the Talbots. When the Talbots came to our house, she had dropped all but the most decorative symptoms; she couldn’t bear to be disgusting in front of Jeptha. That was her error. With his intimate knowledge of the sickness, he had seen through her charade.

This, I assumed, was what he had wanted to tell me. I thought of Agatha. “Jeptha, we must go back and tell my aunt right away.”

He gave me a measuring look. “I knew you’d say that.” He meant that I was good, and despite all the bitterness in my heart, and the little matter of having pledged my soul to the devil, I felt just then that I
was
good. “We’ll tell her—just not yet, okay?” he continued, and I nodded, realizing that he had still had something to say or at least a task to accomplish on our walk.

I asked him about
A View of the Hebrews
, the book I had seen him reading on the way to the lake. It propounded the theory that a race of civilized, Christian Indians used to live right here, where we stood, until they were exterminated overnight by the savage, pagan Indians, five hundred years before Columbus. We discussed the idea as today young people discuss the possibility of life on Mars. I asked him again if he thought that Jesus would return to judge the world in 1843, he said that, though it went against common sense, common sense was no use for this kind of problem. “Common sense is all about what usually happens.”

Remembering the pie Agnes had given him, I asked him what kind of pie he favored, rhubarb, or apple, or blueberry, or cherry, and he said he liked apple best but he liked variety, too. And so, having disposed of the end of a civilization and the destruction of the world, we talked of pies—whether a pie made from dried apples could ever be made as good as a pie of fresh apples, or whether it should be regarded as a different sort of pie, with its own excellence—and you might be surprised to know what a pleasant conversation it was, despite the idiocy of the topic.

It was unnecessary, but I had to say it: “She didn’t bake that pie. Not if it was good. Agnes can’t bake. Someone else must have done it for her.”

He looked at me curiously and then said, “I want to show you something,”
taking my hand and pulling me through the broad leaves of the ripening corn, past a place where the rows, fairly regular until then, were interrupted by a stubborn old stump my uncle had not yet gotten around to removing. There we stopped, a little breathless. Suddenly he leaned in, grasped me firmly by the shoulders, and kissed my lips—before letting me go and taking a step back to watch me, as though now it was his turn to wait, and my turn to act. It was hard to think or talk with my pulse loud in my head, my mouth remembering his mouth, wanting to cry, wanting to shout, greedy for another kiss. Then a great joy flooded through me, and I kissed him. We wrapped our arms around each other. We kissed and stopped and kissed more and stopped. We didn’t open our mouths. There was only the dead-on pressure of our lips, until, by a lucky accident, we learned that brushing lips side to side could be pleasant, and we sought that pleasure over and over. For the moment, it was actually too much. We stopped, brows touching, faces flushed. We were short of breath, as if the kissing had exhausted us.

WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE HOUSE
, I was a person clothed in glory, lit from within, perfected, enjoying the illusion of absolute invulnerability that comes only in the first flush of requited love: Jeptha loved me! Nothing could hurt me or stand in my way. I had no quarrel with the world. Every sorrow I had experienced in my life until now had only prepared the way for this moment, for the express purpose of making it sweeter, like the rough jokes that some fellow’s friends might play on him just before he opens the door to where everyone is waiting to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” I did not hate anyone. I wished only that all these silly fools could be happy, and I thought they all could be—they had only to seek my guidance. I knew all about happiness.

When I told my aunt about Agnes, I expected her to be angry with me for calling her angel a liar, for implying that Agnes had deliberately put her through this hell. But there was no anger. That Agnes might live—nothing else mattered. She seized the hope desperately.

We stood around Agnes’s bed, wondering how we could ever have been fooled. Later in life, I saw such illnesses in plays. Agnes gasped musically, arched her back in pretty paroxysms, and freed her hands from the sheets to make interesting gestures. Her arms stretched upward toward
unseen angels. In intervals of lucidity, she planned her funeral, gave away her possessions, and delivered deathbed advice.

She asked for Jeptha, who said, “I’m here.”

“No, you’re Papa.”

He insisted, “I’m Jeptha, don’t you know me, Agnes?” and he winked at me. I assume that, not really being in a delirium, she noticed and knew the game was up, which must have been horrible for her.

Deception was the mode of our humor in those days, as you know if you have read Barnum’s
Life
. We liked stories of elaborate “humbugs,” uproarious then, tedious now, and liked to recognize them in real life, so even Jeptha could enjoy Agnes’s folly for short periods. Then, remembering Lionel and Becky, he would tire of the charade.

We never said that we knew Agnes was cheating, so she never had to admit it. We simply began paying her less and less attention. Once, she screamed and my aunt came rushing, certain that her daughter was dying after all. The second time, she didn’t come. At last Agnes rose from her bed and responded with wan, weak, soulful looks to our inquiries about her health. But she knew she had lost her last chance of having Jeptha. Out of the corner of my eye, as months passed happily for me, I was aware of a time of profound misery for her, followed by a time of keeping company with other boys, so that she seemed to admit she was licked.

XVIII

THE ILLNESS AND THE DEATHS
had left both Jacob and Jeptha profoundly troubled. Jacob brooded on his faults, prey to a gnawing and basically superstitious conviction that his irreligion had brought this evil upon his family. Jeptha, who had less to reproach himself with, was overcome with a consciousness that all daily certainties rest on nothing, and life is mystery upon mystery, and it was futile to look for honey in the forest and gold in the mountains while the most elementary questions
were in doubt. One day, walking in the woods alone, he heard himself say, “O God, I’m lost; find me.” He had a feeling of a hand falling on his shoulder; a profound peace and certainty, such as I only wish I could feel, came over him, and the very next thing he wanted to do was to tell everyone—me first of all—about the wonderful thing that had happened to him, and that it could happen to them, too. He turned his attention to his father, the father whom he had once meant to drive from the house as soon as he was capable of it. He told Jacob that it was all right—God had forgiven him
already
. Within a week, they were both baptized by William Jefferds.

It was understood that Jacob’s conversion had to mean total abstinence from drink. Men who make such promises often backslide. So did Jacob, and when drunk he was as bad as ever.

Afterward, he was remorseful. “It wasn’t me. It was the demon that got into me. Blame the demon.”

The next time his father came home in this condition, Jeptha barred all the doors of his house against him and told him to sleep it off in the barn.

“I’m your father,” bellowed Jacob. “Honor thy father!”

“My father?” asked Jeptha. “My father warned me about you. He said you were a demon. You crawl inside him through the neck of a whiskey jug.”

And Jacob replied: “I’ll show you a demon! Just let me in there!”

The month was January, cold though not freezing; it began to rain. Jacob raved like King Lear, demanding that the wind blow him into oblivion so as to rebuke his unnatural children, calling heavenly judgment down on the whole family, and then switching to tears and swearing that he felt the return of his fever and he guessed he was dying. Eventually, he left. Jeptha stood vigil all night.

In the morning, a sober Jacob appeared, with hay and feathers in his hair. Jeptha let him in, saying, “There was a demon here last night. He tried to get into our house.”

Jacob said, “This ain’t right. I said I was going on the wagon, and I am, but if I slip that’s between me and the Lord. You’ve got to be punished.”

Jeptha followed him to the woodshed and took ten strokes meekly, and no more was said. A week later, Jacob came home drunk again, and
the whole scene was replayed without the rain. In the morning, Jeptha quietly accompanied Jacob to the woodshed, but this time it was different. The switch fell to the straw. Jacob sat on a woodpile, palm on his pulsing brow. “Oh Lord, where is this going, where are we all going? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Tell me what to do, Jeptha.”

Jeptha took thought, while his father waited patiently, and at last he said, “You’ve got to be a strict Christian now. It’s what you meant to do when you joined the church. But the devil keeps whispering in your ear, saying it was just the shock of Lionel and Becky and you would get over it, and you kind of hope he’s right, since being a Christian means giving up some comforts. But the devil is a liar. And you don’t believe a word he says, and he’s not your friend anymore, you hate him now. I can tell because otherwise you wouldn’t have asked my opinion when you knew just what I was going to say.”

A week or so after that, Jeptha and I met near my uncle’s place, at the Muskrat Pond; we often went there. I had arrived first, and he walked toward me through the dappled light, and when a bright patch lit his face I cried, “What’s wrong? Is everyone all right?” because he looked so distressed.

We sat on a log and he said, “Pa’s giving Ike the farm. Leaving it to him.”

“Oh no,” I said; I knew he had planned all his life to farm; he was the eldest and good and could be relied on not to kick his brother out anyway.

“They want me to be a preacher. They talked to William Jefferds. They want me to study with him and, when he thinks it’s right, to go away to school. He thinks he can get a Home Missionary Society to pay for it. At a seminary in New Jersey.”

He had told them that it was wrong, that he had never wanted to be anything but a farmer, and he was needed here—they couldn’t spare him. But it wasn’t true anymore. Times were better, the farm was no longer in danger, and Ike was old enough to help as Jeptha used to. As to Jeptha wanting to be a farmer, he had only wanted that so he could save his family from Jacob; and he had just done that—not with a lifetime of toil, as he had expected to, but instantly, by means of a miracle.

We sat side by side on the fallen oak, and I looked at him. It made perfect
sense to me; it was like a puzzle solved. His serious mind, his fervor, his willfulness, his love of justice, his homely eloquence were like parts of a new engine which seem merely curious until they are assembled and the machine begins to do the work for which it was designed. His vocation was so perfect, it was all by itself an argument for purpose in the world. But for me it created a couple of problems.

In the months since his conversion, he had told me many times that he would make a Christian of me. The first or second time I had said lightly, “What do you mean? I
am
a Christian,” and he had touched my arm and, with surprising vehemence, insisted, “No, Arabella, you’re not. But you will be. Because I won’t rest until you are.”

I had looked at it from every angle, and I did not see how I could be saved, and though I was happy in those days, still, distantly, it bothered me that there should be this lie between us, that he must want to save me, and I must pretend it was possible.