Belle Cora: A Novel (27 page)

Now I put my hand on his, and he brought my palm to his mouth and kissed it and put it against his cheek. “They won’t let you come along,” he said. “I asked. They won’t pay for two.”

“I know,” I told him. “We can wait. I’ll stay here. I’ll save money for us.”

I reminded him that Mrs. Harding, whose husband owned the flour mill and the distillery, had agreed that this year I should become her hired girl and move into her house in town. A salary went with the job, and I was thrifty.

He said that he felt like a fraud, he couldn’t measure up to people’s ideas of him, and he hated to be under an obligation to a bunch of strangers—what if he wanted to change his mind later?

I saw that he really wanted to go. He wanted to see the world and exercise his talents. And it would get me out of Livy at last.

“I’ll wait,” I said. “I’ll wait. They’re right. You’re wasted here.”

I didn’t say, “God wants you to go.” He would have known I didn’t mean it. Nor did I say, “Become a preacher someplace where people are civilized, and I will be a perfect imitation of a preacher’s wife.”

XIX

JEPTHA DID NOT KNOW WHEN EXACTLY
he would be sent away. There would be at least a year of private study with William Jefferds. We spent as much time as we could in each other’s company. I lived for the moment and was happy.

That spring I went to work as a hired girl for Mrs. Harding, sparing me the daily irritations of life with my uncle’s family, where I must listen to Agnes brag unconvincingly about her sweetheart of the moment as she hatefully jerked the slop from the spoon to my bowl, and Agatha wonder out loud when “that foolish boy” (meaning Jeptha) would come to his senses (Agnes looking daggers at Agatha, for making her feel worse); where Matthew, now sixteen, quite handsome, utterly repulsive, had begun to look at me in a hungry way that made me feel uncomfortable. Going away from this house also meant seeing less of Lewis, but we had grown so far apart that it made hardly any difference.

Together with their ten-year-old daughter, Eva; their three sons, William, Richard, and Miles; and now with me, Mr. and Mrs. Harding lived on the town’s nicest street, in a pretty two-story house full of polished furniture, glass, mirrors, carpets, a grandfather clock, a cookstove, a pianoforte, and many books, including (as I have mentioned already) those my aunt sold to the peddler in 1838. The miller was an important man in Livy. His wife, with money to buy novels and the leisure to read them, was a much more agreeable woman than my aunt, although, I realized fairly quickly, she did not like to be inconvenienced. She professed herself an admirer of my grandfather, for his efforts on behalf of abolition, and I believe that she liked the idea of an association with the granddaughter of a famous man.

It was agreed, between Mrs. Harding and my aunt, that in the winter I would continue to attend school, and I would work on my uncle’s farm whenever there was a special need. In the meantime, I wore dresses Mrs. Harding had ordered for me, imitated her finishing-school manners, and read my way through her library. In all my dealings with my employer, there was an extra dollop of the hypocrisy that lubricates the gears of everyday life. She said I was “like a daughter,” but worked me as hard as
any of her previous girls. I understood her, so my feelings weren’t hurt. She did like me a little, and she was nice to me so long as I did my job, and I had far more freedom than I would have had if she had really considered me a member of her family.

I had more freedom to be with Jeptha. As time went by and our young bodies began to strain against the limits we set them, we did everything permitted to Baptists, and such further indiscretions as young Baptists have been known to commit with subsequent apologies to the Lord. We could not go to dances; dancing was immoral. We went to prayer meetings, and Jeptha visited with me in Mrs. Harding’s sitting room.

On my day off, or when I was wanted at my uncle’s farm, I arranged to meet him in the woods or the fields. Sometimes I would sneak out after dark. I had a room of my own on the ground floor, making it easy. We met in places where we had no other company than livestock, mice, squirrels, and insects. We kissed standing up against the boughs of trees, and lying down in the grass, torturing each other deliciously, stimulating each other to the verge of the act we considered irrevocable. Sometimes we twined our legs together, and as if by accident there would be contact and even a degree of friction between our lower limbs and the parts of our bodies never mentioned by the major Victorian novelists. Once, when he was lying on his back, I straddled him with my legs. He seemed, for a moment, astonished at my shamelessness. I leaned over him so that my bosom was an inch from his chest. Though we had embraced tightly many times before this, there was something different, infinitely naughty and lubricious about this delicate nearness.

According to Saint Paul, he courted damnation even by thinking of me the way he did, and he considered himself a hypocrite for meeting me this way. Sometimes, when his conscience got the better of him, he would say I ought to hate him, because if we died tomorrow we were both going straight to hell, and he would have been the murderer of my soul. “We’ve got to stop,” he’d say, his hair falling over his forehead, his hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes gripping my eyes, brimful of lust and remorse, looking as though he could devour me and yet so worried about my fate that I could not help but surrender my will to his—though my virtue was dear to me, I would have done whatever he asked without question. “I’ve decided,” he said. “We’ll stop.”

For a week or so, we would stop. Then, without a word, he would take my hand and lead me into the woods.

The next day, perhaps, we would attend a prayer meeting, hear a lecture on Adventism, and learn the exact date on which, according to William Miller’s calculations, all good Christians would be taken into the sky to be spared the burning of the earth. Dozens of households in Livy, including my uncle’s, found Adventist newspapers waiting for them each week at the general store. From the newspapers we knew this wasn’t just a fancy of farm people. It was the talk of the whole country, which made it all seem more real.

As 1842 became 1843, the time of Jeptha’s departure was postponed and the time of Miller’s prophesy neared, and its implications began to sink in. I looked about me at the world as you would look at a man of whom the doctor had just said that, despite outward appearances, he had a bad heart and could drop dead any minute. Nursing calves, freshly painted signs, new straw hats and the girls who had just plaited them would never live to be old.

People believed or did not according to the way it made them feel. Jeptha, though he could not simultaneously be a Baptist and scorn the Second Coming, pointed out that these predictions had been made many times before, that according to the Bible we knew not the hour, and anyway—as his teacher, William Jefferds, often said—we were all, in any case, always supposed to be ready to die and face God’s judgment. But really, like me, he did not believe or want to believe, because he looked forward to our life together here on this planet.

SOMETIMES, LYING IN THE GRASS
, we talked about the books we were reading. He would tell me about Hannibal and Cato, about the Crusades, about Cortés and Montezuma. I would narrate the story of
The Last Days of Pompeii
, a novel I was reading for the second time: it was set in that real Roman city in A.D. 79, the year when it was destroyed, buried, and preserved by the volcano which its citizens had been gazing at for as long as they could remember, thinking only that it lent variety to the view. I described the houses of the Pompeiians and the elaborate public baths where some of these people, who apparently never did any work, would while away their time. How civilized were these lives that had been
snuffed out so suddenly! It was pleasant to talk about ancient cataclysms while safe in the crook of Jeptha’s arm, watching the squirrels and the birds, for whom history did not exist, hop about the branches of the trees above us. A world was lost in a day, and passing centuries had leached away the suffering, leaving only a strange beauty.

“Well,” he observed, “that’s how it is with all the people of those times. Their world is gone.”

We were quiet, until it occurred to me to ask, “Will it happen to us?”

“What?”

“Will we be buried under the years? Will people dig up our houses and say, Look how quaintly people lived back then?”

He thought a bit, and then he sat up and leaned over me, his earnest face framed by the sky as if he were an angel. “We’re going to live in heaven forever.”

“Will we be together there?”

“Always. I promise. We will always be together.”

XX

“
I HATE WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO LEWIS
,” I told Jeptha one day, out of nowhere, and did not have to explain; he knew what I meant. My brother had become my cousin’s hound, and as Matthew ran wild, so did he. Under Matthew’s leadership, but with Lewis often showing initiative in wickedness to please his idol, the two of them became the town’s practical jokers—not the only ones, but the most daring and disrespectful. They tied a live cat by its tail to the ankle of the town drunk. They placed a whiskey jug and a piece of liver under the bench used every Sunday by Mrs. Harris, a pious and quarrelsome old widow, and when the congregation was singing, “How lost was my condition till Jesus made me whole,” a dog raced into the church and knocked over the jug in its eagerness to reach the meat.

Everyone knew who perpetrated these crimes. Except for my aunt, whose life Matthew had made a misery for years, nobody cared, so long as the target was the town drunk and an unlikable widow. As time would show, however, the two were only practicing for an assault on Matthew’s real foe, William Jefferds. Matthew had never forgotten his old grudge against Jefferds, who had come to stand not only for all the suffering my cousin had endured in the schoolroom, but for all the abstract forces Matthew opposed—for the sly triumph of the old over the young, for the curbing of masculine freedom, for his mother’s victory over his father, for effeminacy, civilization, and religion.

Jefferds was a man with defenders, a teacher and the minister of the church Matthew himself had attended until announcing that he was done with church until his mother found a new minister. Matthew approached his degradation by stages.