Belle Cora: A Novel (33 page)

FOR THIS WAS THE YEAR OF FERVENT HOPE
, when, all around the country, people were gazing up at the sky, waiting for the world to end. My aunt was among the most passionate believers, convinced that Jesus would come back, as Millerites were learning to say, no later than October 22, 1844. If, so far, she had failed to do her duty by me—failed to turn me into someone she could admire, failed to protect me from Matthew—she could make it all right by saving my soul. Unpleasant as she supposed it must be for me to return to the farm, I must not be left with a family of worldly Presbyterians. She and Elihu went together to Anne and Melanchthon’s house to demand that I be returned and have a chance of being saved.

Any day now, it was going to be too late for the doubters. Christ would appear in the sky. The righteous dead would arise in a wondrous spectacle of yawning graves and sprung coffin lids. Skeletons would fly off the shelves of medical schools; scattered atoms would abandon their present work in the stems of flowers and the bellies of worms to reflesh the bones. Living men would be yanked out of the fields they were sowing or threaded spinelessly through windows that had suddenly opened themselves and be lifted to the clouds, while 99 percent of the human race remained below to burn. After certain complications and delays whose purpose is obscure, the saved would enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven, while the damned were tortured forever in a lake of fire.

Would the saved be happy? If so, surely there would have to be something very wrong with them. We were reminded constantly that husband would be torn from wife, brother from sister, mother from child. When a child has a toothache, the mother suffers with him, yet the saints rejoiced while their children burned. It was hard to imagine such people, so very good, yet disloyal to the profoundest human tie. To save them, God had changed the most essential thing about them. Whom, then, had He saved?

If these paradoxes ever troubled my aunt’s meditations, she brushed them aside. She had no choice. She was desperate. Her son had raped her niece, who had then murdered their unborn child. Things were so bad that only the Second Advent could save the family. There would be
our happy ending, the sweeter for having come on the heels of despair. She never dared in my presence to call Matthew’s crime a blessing in disguise, but that it would be was clearly her fervent hope. He was skulking around the farm in misery. He avoided Lewis. He felt sinful. He was ripe for salvation. The rest of us, whether we knew the ugly secret or merely sensed the wrongness in the house, were unhappy, too: and that, too, she was sure, would bring us all joy in the end.

With the rest of us adrift and rudderless, she bent us to her will. That winter, she dragged us to a big revival meeting in a great hall in Lockport. We were all exposed to the oratorical powers of the celebrated preacher Elon Galusha, himself recently converted to Millerism; one after another, Matthew and Elihu wept for their sins and were saved.

As for me, I did not know what I believed anymore. I wanted not to feel and not to think. I went where I was taken and did as I was told.

As a proof of his conviction, Elihu harvested only so much of the crop as we needed for our own use until the return of Jesus on October 22, 1844. All the pests that are a torment to farmers seemed to realize that a special feast had been prepared for them, and they came in greater numbers than I had ever seen before; whenever I walked through the corn, dozens of startled black crows rose skyward, noisily beating the air.

Lewis was the only one among us who was sure that my aunt was wrong. It was a common sight that year to see him pitching stones at a row of sticks on a log behind the house. Each throw demonstrated his view of the matter. Down they’d come, one after another, and the last stone he threw would be his killing stone, a fragment of the rock he’d killed a pig with from the top of my grandfather’s warehouse so long ago.

Sometime in July, I watched from the back porch while Lewis knocked the whole row down. He retrieved the sticks and sat down on the log. I sat beside him. “What’s wrong, Lewis?” I said, petting the dog. “Lewis, do you think about Papa much anymore?”

“Get off,” he said, and put sticks everywhere on the log, excepting the space I occupied. He walked back to the porch and began once again to throw the stones. One flew over my head. “You want to hurt me, Lewis?” Another. “You don’t need stones to hurt me. Lewis, you’re the only creature left on this earth who
can
hurt me anymore.” I stood up. I spread my arms out. “Go on. Show me what you can do.”

He pulled his arm back. I saw what was in his hand. The killing stone.

“Do it,” I said. “I want you to.”

He pocketed the stone and walked away.

XXV

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1844
, the day the world was to end, dawned cloudy.

The sky was white. There were no shadows. Nature had a washed-out look. Some of the colors had been removed, and I wondered if this was how it would be done. Stealthily, no angels or trumpets, no wrath or judgment—a simple undoing. Things would disappear by categories. First certain colors. Then the fish. On the farm, we wouldn’t notice it. Suddenly no birds; we might realize it after a while. Next, plant life vanishes, leaving the dry, brown earth and the rocks and the sky. Small animals and insects, suddenly uncovered, creep over the rocks awhile and then they, too, are gone. God takes our clothes. We’re all naked, as we were in Eden. He takes away the air and watches our silent agony. We cannot gasp or beg for mercy. In time, we stop moving. He walks away in despair. Why did He do it? Why, why, why, why, why? He takes a last look at the miniature, the picture of His dead wife, and, crouching for a moment, lays it down on the roof. He rises to his feet, looks over the edge, and jumps.

THE COWS WERE LOWING
. They needed relief, so we milked them. To show our faith, we did not use a pail, but let the milk spurt onto the ground.

We bade a solemn farewell to the dogs and the horses and oxen, and then we walked to Anne and Melanchthon’s family to urge them one last time to ready themselves. We passed Harmon Chase’s house; the whole family was standing on the roof. We passed a churchyard where a crowd had gathered to watch the graves open. On the way back from Melanchthon’s
farm, where no minds had been changed, it rained, and when we got back, we changed into our second-best clothes. It was chilly. We put logs on the fire and huddled near it. We were profligate with the wood. Soon the sap was sizzling, and the young logs sank abruptly into their cradle of glowing twigs.

Elihu sat on the rocker, sucking bits of his last earthly meal from between his crooked teeth. Lewis sat on a high stool, his hair defiantly uncombed. Matthew’s black hair gleamed with grease. The women all looked ready for church. I thought how astonishing it was that every living creature had its own private thoughts and desires and importance.

My aunt kept saying that at the last minute Titus would come.

“We must apologize to each other,” she said. “If we have anything on our conscience, any secret wrong, we must confess it and ask each other’s forgiveness.”

Agnes began, admitting that she had paid Evangeline (in chores and in cash) to put the pebbles in a batch of bread I had made and to thwart me in other ways. “I did it because I could see that from the first you had set your cap for Jeptha, and would do anything to get your way, and I did not know how to save him.”

This broke through my protective stupor. “So—you did it to help Jeptha.”

“Belle,” said my aunt, “please, let Agnes apologize without interruption. Whatever you think she’s done to you, forgive her. Don’t meet this day with bitterness in your heart.”

“I want to forgive her, but her confession has to be complete. Agnes, Titus told me that you defended me against the charge that I was selling my favors to the Harding boys.”

“That’s right, Belle, I defended you.”

“Didn’t you start defending me before anyone accused me?” I asked. She looked like a saint on stained glass, but I noticed that my aunt and Evangeline were watching her, too, and perhaps I had made them wonder. As if this were a matter that concerned only women, Lewis, Matthew, and Elihu went on studying the fire.

“I see why you’ve been angry with me, Belle,” said Agnes. “It must be very distressing for you to believe such a thing.” My aunt nodded to herself, agreeing.

I looked up, wishing Jesus would lift Lewis and me through the roof
and leave the rest of them behind, yelling at Him that He had made an awful mistake.

“Forgive her, Arabella,” said my aunt. “Forgive her, for your salvation.”

“Suppose I forgive her just for what she’s confessed. I can’t very well forgive what hasn’t been confessed.”

“Good,” exclaimed my aunt, as if a bargain had been struck, binding no matter what the spirit of it had been, and it was my turn. My confessions were more substantial than Agnes’s. “It was I who put Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills in your supper, Agnes. I knew you wouldn’t like them. Can you forgive me? You do forgive me, don’t you?”

Evangeline confessed that she had let her secret parts be touched almost daily by Lucas, a hired hand who had been with us from haying time in 1841 to the spring of 1842, and she had touched Lucas’s secret parts. The other hand, Mike, had found out and threatened to tell if she didn’t do bad things with him, too, but she wouldn’t, because she didn’t love Mike. In the middle of this confession, Elihu began to moan with his head in his hands. Evangeline put her arms around him. He turned away, saying she’d broken his heart. My aunt demanded that they reconcile, and grudgingly he said he would try to forgive her.

Aunt Agatha apologized to me. “I tried to love you for my sister’s sake when you first came here, Arabella. But your father’s death got between us, and your sharp tongue, and I lost my temper with you.” She begged me to forgive her. I said I did.

When it was Matthew’s turn, I twisted my hands together as he apologized to his mother for grieving her with his fighting and for showing disrespect to the pastor. At last he said, “Lewis, I have to tell you about me and your sister.”

I stood up. “Stop him. That’s between him and me.”

“Arabella, please,” said my aunt.

I pulled my shawl around me and walked out to the yard, where the rain had stopped and a purple evening was settling in regardless of our opinions. The mud was so thick that my steps nearly pulled my shoes off; the wind pushed my skirt against my legs and loosed a spray of water droplets from the leaves of the apple trees. The sun, couched royally in the clouds, shed a ruddy glow on distant fields where the corn had been left for the crows to harvest.

When I came back in, I could see that they had been waiting for me.

“Lewis has forgiven Matthew,” said Aunt Agatha.

Had he? I could not read his face. Elihu stared at the ground. Agnes looked unsurprised. Evangeline looked placid, as always. Sometimes I envied Evangeline.

“Lewis,” said my aunt, “are you sorry for anything you’ve done?”

“No, ma’am,” said my brother, and he would not say another word.

We sang hymns. We took turns reading from the Bible. Every now and then, one or more of us went outside to look up. It grew dark. We lit lamps. Midnight came and went. Evangeline fell asleep at the table. Lewis went up to bed.

At last it was dawn again; the rooster crowed, the cows lowed, we milked them into buckets, and Aunt Agatha began the washing she’d put off. Uncle Elihu hitched the oxen to the wagon, and the girls accompanied him into the cornfields to search for ears of corn the hogs and the crows had left us. Lewis and Matthew were not on the farm, and Elihu swore (using initials, “D-it to H!”), assuming they had gone into town to amuse themselves. We all worked in silence until well after noon, when we broke for dinner.

A little after we had eaten, a wagon came up the drive. It was the owner of a neighboring farm, Barnabas Welch, and his son Elias. Stretched out on his back on the wagon’s floor was Matthew, with two bloody wounds on his head, his right leg broken (so a doctor later determined) twice above the knee and once below it, his left leg broken below the knee, and both kneecaps shattered.