Jeptha confined himself to water, saying, “I got religion,” which I took for a joke: I knew from our one conversation at school that Jeptha was an infidel, like his father. “But don’t let me stop you, Matt. Agnes, give Matt some more of the creature.”
“You want me to, Matt?” asked Agnes.
Matthew ignored her, asking Jeptha: “You think if I’m corned and you ain’t it’ll help you out later on?”
Jeptha said firmly, “I’m counting on it.”
Matthew looked at him with pity. “I could whip you with ten drinks in me.”
“Why don’t you show me?”
Before Matthew could reply, Agnes filled his cup; Matthew stared down at it and looked up at his sister.
Jeptha said, “You could lick me corned? No fooling? Is that true? Show me.”
“Getting me corned will make it worse for you,” Matthew explained in a patient tone. “If I was corned and I tried to bloody your nose, I would hit you too hard and break it. If I was corned, I might bust you up so bad nobody could fix you.”
“You’re scared to hurt me? That doesn’t sound like you, Matthew. I don’t believe it. Does anybody believe it?” Jeptha asked the other children at the table; and they all said no, and the hands, Pat and Sam, shook their heads, too. “Look around you, Matt. They know you, too,” said Jeptha. “They know what you’re like. They’re begging you. Drink up. Unless you’re scared that if you drink you won’t be able to beat me.”
Matthew did look around. Everyone was nodding and saying, “Go on,” and “Have another, Matt.”
My aunt was staring at us from the next table. Children and men fell into guilty silence, expecting her to scold them for urging her son to drink. But she said, “Maybe they’re right, Matthew. Have some more. Show them you’re not scared.” She announced generally, “Let nobody call my son a sissy.”
Matthew certainly must have realized that his mother was hoping that whiskey would make him lose, thereby turning him against whiskey. Nevertheless, he raised the cup, absorbed its contents, and slapped it down to the table defiantly.
Whereupon Agnes did something that made me admire her despite myself. Locking eyes with Jeptha, she refilled Matthew’s cup. We all stared at him, and he drank.
His footsteps were extremely deliberate as he and Jeptha made their way to a grassy patch between the back porch and the garden and took off their jackets, while the fathers and mothers and children gathered, including Mrs. Talbot, Becky, assorted other members of the large Talbot brood, my uncle Elihu’s brother, Melanchthon, whose farm lay half a mile from ours, and his wife, Anne, and Agnes, her lips compressed, her hands alternately making fists and claws.
Matthew and Jeptha used to be great friends, according to Titus. They had hunted together, played Indian and mumblety-peg, dug for gold, and competed with each other in feats of skill, endurance, and daring. This had ended abruptly a year and a half ago, with Matthew giving as the reason that Jeptha had too weak a character to face up to his, Matthew’s, superiority, and Jeptha giving as the reason that he had gotten tired of hearing Matthew talk about himself.
Jake was shouting at Jeptha, “What’s the matter with you? He’s whupped you twice already, you little girl, ain’t you learned your lesson?” As the fight progressed, and Matthew kept swinging and missing, Jake’s cry changed to “Sock him, you goddamned dancer!” And when Jeptha had Matthew’s head in his arm and Matthew’s face was as red as a tomato, it was “Rip him up, damn you! He whups you now, I’ll whup you worse!”
Jeptha, straining and grimacing, asked, “Are you licked? Say you’re licked.”
Matthew sagged within Jeptha’s clutches. He seemed almost to fall asleep. Suddenly he struggled again—a ruse—it didn’t work.
“Are you licked?” Jeptha repeated.
“No, he ain’t licked!” screamed Jake. “Do him so he knows it, you fine lady in white gloves and petticoats. You got him. Put him to some use!”
My uncle looked at Jake without speaking. My uncle’s brother, Melanchthon, said, “It’s all in fun, Jake.”
At last, Matthew admitted defeat. Jeptha let him up. They shook hands. Matthew, in speech that was not slurred but showed effort, every word an accomplishment, said, “Well, you’re … you’re … famous. Famous now. Licked … Matt Moody. When he was so corned he couldn’t … stand, hardly, but … it’s a … Not nobody can never take that away from you. But next time we scrap …” He seemed to lose his train of thought.
“What?” said Jeptha impatiently, as if he could not bear to waste another minute of his life on Matthew. “You were saying. Next time we scrap. What?”
He was angry, I realized.
“I won’t drink,” said Matthew, and he looked around, doggedly explaining, “He got the bulge on me ’cause Agnes—she was in it with him, got me corned.”
“Temperance,” said Melanchthon genially. “Lesson to us all.”
Jeptha had his back to Jake, who stepped forward to put an arm on his son’s shoulder, possibly in congratulation. As though a spring had been released, Jeptha turned and knocked his father’s hand away. Jake laughed. “Ooh, ooh, the taste of blood.” Jake stood in a boxer’s pose. “Go to it, killer.”
“One day,” said Jeptha.
“Jeptha,” said his mother. “You won. Don’t spoil it.”
“Oh, let him be a man, Marm. Come on, boy. I’m corned, ain’t I? That helps you, don’t it?”
Jeptha shook his head. “Not one day when I’m old enough to beat you.”
“Jeptha, you stop,” said his mother sharply.
Jeptha shook his head. “One day when I’m old enough to run the farm.” He slapped his palms back and forth as if he were getting rid of some dirt. “You can go live in town and drink away your days; I’ll pay for the drinks.” His father looked astounded. “I can hardly wait,” Jeptha said, and walked off. Becky followed him with her irregular step through the frosty weeds. “Jeptha!” she called after him. “Jeptha, don’t be mad. Jeptha, be happy you won.” Agnes followed Becky and caught up with her, and they walked together.
“Come back, you ungrateful pup,” Jake gasped, looking as if the wind had been knocked out of him. The disrespect of Jeptha’s outburst, directed at a grown man, a father, who was known to have a violent temper, shocked everyone who had heard it, including me. It was a much bigger thing than the fight which had preceded it. Jake started off after his son, but his wretched wife grabbed him around the waist, virtually leaping upon him, saying “Please, Jake.” He shook free of her. He pulled his arm back as if to strike her, and stopped, and we all knew it was our presence that stopped him. “I kill myself,” he growled, “break my back, work my hands raw, die every day for all of you. And who is he, goddamnit? What’s he ever done?”
Before this, sometimes when I was in my straw bed but not yet asleep, and the memories of my day offered nothing else to comfort me, I thought of a friendly glance this boy had tossed in my direction. Now I was glad he had not been hurt or shamed. I hoped his father would not hurt him later. But most of all I wished that, like Agnes, I had thought of a way to help. I had seen nothing to do but fret, and a girl who despised me had shown me wrong. I felt as insignificant as they all kept insisting I was.
LATER IN THE DAY, THERE WAS MORE butchering and salting, and in the evening, more feasting and drinking, and games, including wrestling and cards. Jacob and Melanchthon told funny stories which I have heard many times since then, in which Yankee farmers, by pretending to be simple, get the better of crafty storekeepers, city folk, and educated fools.
Melanchthon stayed overnight with Anne and two of their several children. Melanchthon, eight years older than Elihu, was an instructive contrast to his brother. He had been in Livy twice as long. His farm was bigger. He was a bigger man in the community. Outwardly he was a larger, older version of my uncle, with the same crowded face and buttonhole eyes, but the better you knew him, the more different he seemed, and he made a point of establishing an acquaintance
quickly. Soon after we met, he told me in a whisper to keep an eye on a broom whenever a woman entered a chamber. If it moved even slightly, she was a witch. Thereafter, he winked at me and glanced at the broom whenever any female entered, including my aunt, Agnes, Evangeline, and his own wife, Anne, and daughter, Susannah, and I laughed in spite of myself.
I had heard it said that he knew the secrets of Indian medicine and had once cured a bewitched butter churn by dropping a silver dollar into it. When he arrived that morning, my aunt had extracted a promise from him to help her find a missing shawl. It was his unofficial duty to recover lost articles, using a forked stick with which in past summers he had led moonlight quests for gold, on the south sides of the local eminences that best qualified as mountains.
To crown his accomplishments, Anne, Melanchthon’s second wife, was young, pretty, and friendly to me. It did not take me long to wish that Horace had driven half a mile farther and left us at Melanchthon’s farm instead of his brother’s. As it was, just to know that these people existed gave me a bit of extra strength. Even here in this wilderness—where, clearly, I did not belong, where I had been sent by an error which could yet be rectified—even here, so far from civilization, there was another way to live, another way to think, another opinion to have about the merits of Arabella Godwin.
Their six-year-old daughter, Susannah, let me brush her hair. When I told her that New York City was on an island, she asked me whether it was tethered to the ocean’s bottom by a stem, like a water lily, or stuck fast, like a boulder. I showed her the miniature of my mother, my Sunday frock, my seashells, and the pictures in Buffon’s Natural History.
In the morning, I helped the grown women cut the cold fat and melt it in the big black kettle to make lard. Later, when Susannah and I were walking near the creek, we heard my aunt cry out from the other side of the house and ran, thinking someone was hurt, but it had been a cry of joy: with the help of his dowsing stick, Melanchthon had found her shawl in a pile of leaves behind a corncrib, where it must have been dragged by a dog, or perhaps by one of the very pigs whose hindquarters were hanging in the smokehouse.
XIII
BY FEBRUARY, THE BIG ROUND OF VISITS to other farms that had accompanied slaughtering and shelling and threshing was over and forgotten, and we lived on cornmeal and salt meat. On one of those cold, monotonous days when drifts from the previous week’s snow lay against the barn as high as the windows, we came home from school to learn that a peddler had been to the house. He had been a peddler of the middling class, the kind that had no wagon, but a poor overburdened nag to carry his whole stock of goods, and the products of my aunt’s trading with him included Souchong tea, spices, belt buckles, and presents for the children. For Lewis, a whittling knife; for me, pencils and paper.
I was, I will not say touched, but taken aback, that she had thought of me, that she had made this kind gesture.
A few days later, when we were by the fireside—I was sewing, my aunt was spinning—Lewis asked me to read to him from Peter Simple, one of Frank’s books, which neither of us had looked at in a long time. We haggled for a while and at last agreed that I would read to him if he ate two slices of bread cut to the thickness of the widest part of my thumb. He crammed the food into himself and went to the loft to the trunk of books.
“It ain’t here,” Lewis shouted from the loft.
An odd look crossed my aunt’s face. I climbed the ladder. The trunk was not quite empty: Advice to a Young Married Woman was there, The Whole Duty of Woman, and Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions, my Bible, and my diary. But the five books by Captain Marryat, the dozen by Scott, and the thirty-six volumes of Buffon’s Natural History were all gone.
The peddler. The trading, the tea, the little presents. We had been in Livy four months by then, and I had learned to know my aunt—no great feat, she wasn’t complicated, only my resentment of her prevented me from knowing her completely. I knew what had happened to those books, or at least I suspected: what she had done was so enormous, in my eyes, that it was hard to believe. Though I had hardly glanced at them since I had come here, they were precious. I was proud to own them; they represented New York City and civilization. They had all been gifts, and on their flyleaves my brother Frank, my brother Robert, and my mother had written their names in their own hand, turning the books into relics and heirlooms. My mother had given me some of those books on her deathbed, and my aunt knew it, because I had told her. It was a crime.
“Wait up here,” I told Lewis, and I went down the ladder. “Aunt Agatha, do you know where my books are?” A few seconds went by, filled with the motion of her foot on the treadle and the airy whirring of her wheel. “Do you know, Aunt Agatha?” Still no answer.
“Come to the kitchen with me,” she said, halting the wheel, and I followed her. “We’ll have some tea and apple cheese, just us,” she said. She put up a kettle in the kitchen fireplace for hot water, prepared some Souchong tea, cut some of her dense, soggy bread, and opened a crock of thick brown apple cheese; she didn’t begin speaking again until we were both seated on stools and facing each other at a small table.
She said that she was going to explain about the books. I must be patient and hear her out. (Although it seemed to me that I suffered in silence, I was notorious in the family for my interruptions, arguments, and excuses.)
“Some of the books you kept in your trunk were not good books for a young girl to read. I know you don’t mean to do wrong by it, but many a girl has been led to ruin by novels. I guess your mother thought that there are differences between one novel and another and that these ones were all right. But she’s not here now. I’m looking after you now, and I can’t raise my own girls one way and you another. So that’s why the peddler got those. Now, just wait awhile before you interrupt. The other books, by the Frenchman, were not for girls of any age, and especially not one apt to get consumption if she does brain work. It wasn’t your mother’s idea for you to have those; it was your brother Robert’s, as you told me, and I guess he didn’t know any better. I’ve looked at them.” She spoke as if she had taken a great risk herself in doing that much. “They’re books for a professor or a doctor, not a girl in delicate health.”
I had plenty to say, but I held it back. I wish you to appreciate the effort it took for me not to object or reason or protest but instead to wait—to behave as coolly as my clever enemy, Agnes, some of whose traits I coveted.
It was a long time ago. I suppose I was angry, but what I remember best is my delight. She had done something wrong, and I could make her feel it.
Finally, she said, “Do you want to ask me something?”
A few more seconds passed. “You never told me you thought that way about the books.”
“I didn’t want us to argue,” she said, as if that was a perfectly ethical explanation.
“You never told me not to read them.”
“If you read in them somewhat before I had a chance to get rid of them, it wouldn’t matter so much. It’s reading them daily that makes the danger.”
“Why do you send me to school if brain work is bad for me? Why do you have me learn Bible verses on Sunday? Learning Bible verses is much harder than just reading Buffon, I think. I think that, to preserve my health, I had better stop going to school, and be excused from learning verses by heart.”
“Are you sassing me?”
“Oh no, Aunt Agatha. I would never sass you.”
She didn’t know. Sarcasm was not a weapon in her arsenal. She knew of its existence, but she really didn’t understand it.
“You need to go to school to learn to write and figure, and you need to study the Bible for your salvation. Reading the Frenchman’s book stirs you up to no purpose.”
I nodded, and, to convince her that there were no hard feelings, I asked, “Could you tell me about the trading you did, so that when I’m grown I’ll know how to trade with peddlers?”
“Of course,” she said, and, warily at first but with gathering ent
husiasm, proud of the bargain she’d made, she told me that the peddler had offered her twenty-five cents per book, but she had said she couldn’t part with them for less than a dollar. They had eventually agreed to a half-dollar each; he had wanted to pay less for each volume of Buffon, since it was really only one long book, but she had not fallen for that, and she had held out for the full eighteen dollars for the Buffon. (I saw the sum impressed her.) He had offered her banknotes. She had insisted on real clinking coins. Five dollars and fifty cents of the total for Buffon and the other books were expended for the whittling knife, the pencil and paper, and other items, including the tea we were sipping. She had come away with all of that, plus twenty-one dollars in cash.
We sipped the tea and ate the bread, and she smiled sweetly at me, happy it had worked out so well and I had not made too big a fuss.
“This is good,” I said. “Thank you, Aunt Agatha.”
“You’re welcome.”
I let her love me a little more, and then I said, quietly but distinctly, “He cheated you,” and I watched the smile fade.
“You’re not old enough to know if that is true.”
“My brother Robert told me what I should get for the books if I ever sold them. Not less than fifty dollars. They were a gift to him from my grandfather. He’s going to be awful disappointed when I write to him that you sold the books without asking my permission, and how you let that man make a fool of you. I’m afraid he’ll get angry, and if I know Robert, he’ll be mean about it.”
“That’s enough, Arabella.”
“Yes, ma’am, but let me tell you about Robert. He’s an awful snob. These ignorant back-country Jonathans, he’ll say, of course if they had a book the first thing they’d do is sell it, and they’d get cheated because they don’t know the value that civilized people set on books. If they did, why, they wouldn’t be ignorant.”
Robert, I must tell you, had never mentioned what I might get for the books.
Belle Cora: A Novel Page 14
