Belle Cora: A Novel (29 page)

There was silence for a long time, and at last I said, “I’ll give you ten dollars.”

He pretended to consider this. “No. I don’t want your money. This is an affair of honor.” More silence, more work. “Suppose you give me a kiss. Then I could go easy on him.”

More time passed, too much time. “You’re a pig.”

Perhaps here I began to be afraid.

“Maybe. That’s a whole other discussion. But what about the kiss? On the lips?”

“I’m your sister.”

“You’re my first cousin. Nobody’ll know. It won’t hurt Jeptha,
unless”—he gave a smile which in another context, from another person, would have been suave and charming—“unless you like it too much. Do you really care about him? Come on.”

He went on like that; finally, I asked if he was serious. He said yes.

“Just a kiss,” I said. As soon I said it, I knew it had been a mistake. He nodded. “Come on,” he said, walking toward the hay. Did he expect me to lie down there with him? I shook my head. He stood by the hay. “I’m waiting.” I walked halfway there. He smirked and walked the rest of the way. I knew already that I was in trouble. Whenever I thought about it later, I would identify this as the moment when I knew the nature of the danger I faced. In my reconstruction of the event, I would change course, slip past him, and run to the ladder, and in some versions he would grab my elbow and in others I would hit him with the corn sheller. But I did not run. I let him kiss me. He bit my lip and said, “Open your mouth,” and, thinking that he would not honor the bargain unless I did, I obeyed him. He thrust in his tongue, tasting of whiskey and chewing tobacco. I tried to draw away. He pulled up my skirt and reached between my legs. While I struggled to free myself, and he expended what was, for him, a very moderate amount of strength in preventing my escape, he talked about my unkindness. “You’re killing me,” he said. “Oh Jesus, you’re killing me, you’re a killer, I can’t stand it, don’t do this to me.”

“Stop it, Matt—what are you doing?” I said, but I didn’t shout. I felt already that I had a secret to keep. We fell, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. This time I yelled. His hand covered my mouth. I renewed my struggles. For him that just meant a barely noticeable increase in the force needed to restrain me.

“Let me. You’ll like it. You’ll see you will. I’m better than your preacher boy. Better than those Harding boys.” I saw his mistake and tried to tell him that I was a virgin. He kept his hand over my mouth.

My whole body was pounding like a heart; I had all of my strength to use at once; I used it, and the effect was negligible. With my free hand, I pulled his hair and tried to poke a thumb in his eye. His movements were methodical and unhurried—a good workman doing an honest job for the devil. He took his hand away from my mouth and used his own mouth to smother my cries. He pushed my dress and my petticoats up to my waist, driving his knees between my legs, and spread his knees, forced my legs open. I felt his hand between us, moving his own clothes. One
hand covered my mouth again as he spat into the other; then his mouth returned, and at the same moment his prick tore through my flesh, overriding the great
No
within me. Then came the drilling, and the sad, sickening rhythmic riding, each thrust a separate renewal of his triumph and my defeat, the relentless repeated delivery of the message that it was to be his way, not mine. I felt as we do when we fall in a dream, a fatal fall, and we have no choice but to wake if we can. I was a worm in a bird’s beak. I had wandered down the wrong path, and I was to be nourishment for another creature. This was what it had all come to. This was what I had been headed for from the moment my mother had died.

I lay beneath him like a rag doll. After he had finished, he kissed me, told me that I was wonderful, and that he meant to be very good to me. He was going to treat me like a queen. He talked like that until he noticed the blood on my skirt, and perhaps he remembered the moment when he had encountered an obstacle that had not barred the way to the womb of either Mrs. Caroline or Penny Jackson. He was smart. He got the idea at last. “Oh,” he said.

I was distant from myself, as people are at such times, hearing myself speak without advance warning of the words. I did not know whose will moved me now. “I can’t be seen like this. People would guess.” I told him to go into the house and where to find another skirt, and some rags and a bucket, and not be seen. He must not be seen.

“I didn’t know,” he said. He looked contrite. I believe, from the way he behaved then, that he had not planned to rape me. He had planned to seduce me, buy me, or blackmail me, whichever method got the desired results. He had gotten carried away.

“No one must know,” I told him.

“I swear,” he said. “I’ll swear any way you like, on anything you like.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but later, on thinking back, I realized that he had been prepared for a Tom Sawyer ritual, to draw blood from his finger. I did not have the presence of mind to think that Matthew had committed a crime and was afraid of being found out. All I could think was that this must be kept a secret.

On one point I was clear. It wasn’t the rupture of the hymen before marriage that ruined a girl; it was other people knowing. No one would ever think the same of me after they had learned of this. They might pity me, if they believed me. In any case, I would be held in contempt. Jeptha
would marry me anyway, supposing he survived the attempt to kill Matthew that would follow my telling him. But we would always have this between us. I couldn’t endure that. He must not know. Whether I was really naïve enough to believe that his
ignorance
of what had happened would not stand between us, or whether I had an inkling that it would, I cannot recall, but in any case I would have believed that his ignorance of it could never be as dangerous to us as his knowledge. I had suffered a small wound, an invisible puncture. Why should I let it change my life? The safest thing would be for no one to know.

Matthew went. When he returned, I changed out of the torn and bloody skirt and into the clean one he had brought, which looked nothing like the one I had been wearing; I could only hope that no one would notice. He cleaned the floor. We resumed our work. I imagined having the courage to get close to Matthew, perhaps by promising to let him have me again, and when he was near enough, slamming the nails of the corn-sheller deeply into his neck and killing him. The picture kept coming unbidden into my mind while I went on numbly scraping the dry ears on the nails and beadlike kernels of dried corn dropped from my hair.

When we were done, I wrapped the rags and my bloody skirt in a bundle and walked back to town. As I left the farm, I passed Lewis. He was carrying a couple of dead birds. When he saw my face, he asked me what the matter was, and I made myself smile and told him that it was nothing important.

At the Hardings’ house, I washed as thoroughly as I could with a basin and ewer. I was afraid of what might be said or guessed if I had a bath in the middle of the week.

XXI

ON ONE EXCUSE OR ANOTHER
, I put off spending time with Jeptha. I thought that if I gave myself some time I would begin to feel better, or at
least find it easier to conceal my emotions, but after a week had passed, my misery had only grown.

Jeptha came by on my day off, wanting us to go in the fields to kiss and tease each other. I used the excuse of a sudden chill in the air—it was now October—and said I wanted to walk in town, by the millrace. He was going to fight Matthew in a few days, he told me. It was to occur in the field behind the tavern. I became so upset that I felt almost too weak to walk.

I did not think he would be hurt. Matthew kept his bargains. I knew, though, that I must not be present at the fight. If I saw Matthew, my feelings would betray me.

On Monday, the day of the fight, I told Mrs. Harding I would do the wash as usual. I put on an old wrapper, and boiled water in a great kettle in the yard. I lifted and stirred the clothes with a paddle. Often when I performed this chore, one or more of the Harding boys would come out to watch me. When it was William and Miles, who spent much of the year away at school, they disguised their interest as friendliness and propped up this illusion with chatter. Richard, the dolt, would simply stare like a starved dog. As a rule I found this annoying. Now I did not think I could abide it, and I was glad that Richard wasn’t there that day.

Richard was watching the fight. When I was hanging the wash, he rushed into the backyard, excited, to tell me of the great upset. Matthew—overconfident, Richard supposed—had missed blow after blow and hadn’t ducked when he should have, and finally he had taken one to the chin. He had lain on the grass until someone threw a bucket of water on him, and he had admitted that Jeptha had won, and said he was sorry for what had happened to William Jefferds and was of the opinion that nothing like that would happen again, which was understood to be as close as he could come to admitting he had done it and had been justly punished.

Matthew and Jeptha had shaken hands. I kept picturing that. A crowd consisting mostly of people who had placed bets carried Jeptha through town and toasted him in the tavern and the store. As will happen when the favorite loses, a few malcontents voiced the suspicion that Matthew had bet against himself and thrown the fight, but Richard said he didn’t believe that, even though he’d lost a dollar. Abruptly he interrupted his own account of events to ask why I didn’t look happier.

“I don’t hold with fighting or gambling,” I said.

The crowd had wanted to take Jeptha to the Hardings’ house to see me. He wouldn’t let them, thankfully. But he came alone later. Mrs. Harding, looking through the window, told me to stay where I was, and she opened the door herself. She congratulated him and invited him for dinner. I saw immediately what this would mean. It would be me, Jeptha, Mr. and Mrs. Harding, and Richard at the long table set for company, while Richard and Mr. Harding described the fight from their point of view, and Jeptha from his point of view. It was impossible. I could not bear it. But I could not avoid it.

He was dusty and sweaty, with a red spot above his right eye from some glancing blow that Matthew had given him to make the fight look real. His eyes sought the additional fillip of my approval as Mr. Harding pounded his back, asked to see the hands that had done such impressive work, and told Jeptha he guessed that in the future, whenever warnings of sinners’ fates in the afterlife proved unavailing, he could persuade them with the more immediate threat of “the damage those iron fists could do! Yes, sir!” He asked me, “What do you think of your seminarian now, little lady?”

Town notables who had gotten word that Jeptha was here kept coming to pay their respects and to enjoy Mr. Harding’s liquor. They toasted our health and urged Jeptha to drink, but he was still a Baptist and had to refuse. I was not offered whiskey. I had been given it as medicine sometimes during childhood illnesses. I resolved to put its reputation as an anodyne to the test just as soon as I was alone.

At least the noise and commotion in the house made it easy to disguise my feelings. The things these people wanted me to say were all simple and obvious. It is very superficial, the manly world of good fellowship and cheers and toasts.

Only Mrs. Harding noticed my discomfort. “Is something wrong, dear?” she asked quietly. I had an answer prepared. I whispered it in her ear. I said “my friend” had come. She whispered back, “Oh my goodness, and we’ve made you work so hard today.” (That was empty talk: my monthly pains never caused her to lighten my work.)

In any case, it was plausible, what I had told her, because she knew when my time usually came—it usually came about now. But it had not come. And it did not come.

XXII