Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  FROM THAT MOMENT ON (and thus well before Matthew made himself into a legend by beating John Miller and every older Miller boy, including the seventeen-year-old), Matthew and my brother were inseparable. Matthew taught Lewis to shoot, and with Elihu’s gun the two of them pursued the bounty the town put on rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and other such small enemies of the farmer. On rainy days they played marbles. “Damn you to hell, you little thief!” Matthew would say. “Titus, look what he’s doing to me; tell me how he’s cheating!” Lewis generally won, and Matthew would howl in outrage and my brother would laugh as he used to when I tickled him.

  It had been noticed by this time that Lewis had remarkable eyesight and dexterity. He could hit a bottle with a stone from twenty feet. He could thread needles more easily than any of the women, and he used to do us this service until Matthew wondered out loud if we would succeed in making a girl of him.

  When the winter school session started in November, Matthew walked in with his arm around Lewis and said that they probably all knew Lewis had licked Tom Miller, almost two years older than him, but maybe they didn’t know that in addition he had the sharpest eyes in the county, and if anyone doubted it, come tomorrow with some marbles.

  Lewis began to eat more and to fill out and grow again. He spent less time with me. I despised his new hero—I found Matthew unpleasant personally as a bully and a braggart, and I disliked him on principle; I associated him with everything I hated about the farm. But I could not deny that Lewis was better off. New York City, Bowling Green, Mama, Papa—if he could forget all that, why should I stop him?

  XVI

  HE COULD FORGET. I COULD NOT—or would not, if there is a difference. Years went by, and still I refused. Anything good in this place was an exception: exiled here, like me. True, Jeptha was here, and he was good. But he was mistreated and made to work like a beast. That proved me right. I preferred Melanchthon’s farm to my uncle’s farm, any town to any farm, Patavium to Livy, Rochester to Patavium, New York to Rochester, and Paris to New York. I was not always consistent in these views, but when I remembered, these were my convictions. I preferred the rich to the poor. “We’re just as good as they are” was the motto of my uncle’s family. I hoped it wasn’t true.

  Like the slender paths etched by rain as it slides randomly down a hill, which numberless later storms carve into gullies, ravines, and canyons, the little choices of the first year gave a lasting shape to our lives. As 1838 gave way to 1839 and 1840, Lewis drew closer to Matthew, who was permitted to run wild; so Lewis ran wild, too, and heeded me less and less. Agnes and I worked side by side, hating each other and mooning over Jeptha, and the grown-ups laughed at our feelings. “What do you want from that boy?” my aunt inquired of us both. Once—in a sort of pitying tone, as if she were trying to cure me of a delusion—Agnes explained to me that I couldn’t possibly love Jeptha, it made no sense, because I did not love what he loved. I did not love this place. I came here ruining all their innocent fun with my distaste. With my mind twisted by my city upbringing, I noticed only the ugly side, the trivial blemishes of honest, simple things. This idea hurt, because there was truth in it. Agnes and Jeptha had lived here as long as they could remember, and they had deep feelings for every little island in the pond, every gnarled old tree or old gray shack collapsing into the stream. I wished I could feel that way. I wished that Jeptha could make me feel such things.

  So things stood, with no showy changes but countless infinitesimal preparations of the kind that make an old tree suddenly topple, roots and all, three days after a heavy rain. Two hired hands, neither of whom had ever talked much, were replaced by another pair, one of whom was very chatty and full of himself, and then he left, and sometime later the other, quieter one left as well. Things broke and were mended. Shoes wore out. Bones lengthened. A little family calling themselves the Boston Traveling Wonder Show parked their caravan on the green behind the livery stable, exhibited a fake mummy, an octopus in a jar, and a hollow elephant, sold pamphlets about Egyptian mummies and elephants, and moved on. A cow with a biblical name wandered off and froze to death and we ate it all winter. One day after school Jeptha handed me volume one of Peter Simple, by Captain Maryatt. On the flyleaf, the name “Frank Godwin” had been crossed out, and under it was written “Mrs. Adelia Harding.” The peddler had sold all of my old books to Mrs. Harding, the miller’s wife. “Come with me,” said Jeptha, and we walked to Mrs. Harding’s house, and over the years she let me borrow all my old books and many others, one by one.

  At last, like the old tree that falls, the thawing river that suddenly cracks, the small hidden preparations announced themselves in the great sudden rearrangement.

  In 1841, when Jeptha was fourteen and Agnes and I were thirteen, a religious revival swept the state, running like an electric current to light up all the big canal towns to the north. That summer, my uncle’s family and several other families of the community went by wagon train to a big camp meeting on the shore of Canandaigua Lake. Other wagons from towns along the way joined ours, until it began to seem like a great exodus or heavenly migration, and we all felt that something important was happening.

  From the moment I had heard of the camp meeting—or, rather, from the moment I had realized that Jacob meant to take his family to it (as many profane people always did, and they were very welcome to come; otherwise, who would there be to convert?)—I had seen it as an opportunity to be with Jeptha again and again, on the two days it would take us to get to the lake and the two days it would take to get back, and the three days in between. The flaw in my plan was of course that it was Agnes’s plan as well. Now we both gazed on the object of our desire: he sat at the back of the wagon just ahead, eating an apple while reading, with mildly comical absorption, a book he had borrowed from William Jefferds. Jeptha had become a great reader. Since his labor was needed during the day, he went without sleep and read at night. He collected oily pine knots to burn for their light; he would never have been so wasteful as to use candles.

  At the moment he seemed to prefer the book to either of us. We looked away, pretending indifference so as to avoid being teased by the boys, but it was useless. They made their jokes. We ignored them, convinced our rivalry was as serious as anything in life can be. Often, like this, our thoughts marched to the same drum, as we daydreamed side by side of the same blessed consummation with the same innocent absence of detail.

  Agnes at this age was lovely, with smooth, pale skin enlivened by a stylish sprinkling of freckles. She had long eyelashes, glossy coppery hair, rosebud lips, and the tender start of bosom and hips. My shape was less advanced. Everyone said I was pretty. Everyone said she was pretty. How pretty? I couldn’t find within myself an unmoving plumb line to use in measuring this quality of such awful consequence to me.

  At camp, after we had pitched our tents, Agnes brought a small pasteboard bandbox, which she had somehow concealed from us, to the tent of the Talbots (across the street from our own in the orderly little tent village we had created) and presented them with a rhubarb pie she had made in secret at the widow Lyall’s. They each had a slice, and I heard Mrs. Talbot say pointedly that it would be a lucky man who came home to baking like that every day. Agnes’s meager talents in the kitchen were a theme of humor to everyone who knew her, something odd was happening, it seemed to me, since I considered all this as we sat on rough logs in the open air, while up on the speaker’s stand the preacher, who if he had been born in another part of the world could have made his fortune as an opera singer, explained with a piteous, whimpering note in his voice what a long time eternity was, and how much the damned regretted their ignorant mockery of men like him.

  The camp stood on a gently sloping covert by the lake. Wavy bars of light, reflected off the water’s steady shoreward movement, licked the trees and the canvas tents and the clothes and faces of the congregation in tremulous, glimmering upward strokes, so that they seemed already as immaterial as they would be in heaven. “A wicked and
adulterous generation.” The ululating voice cleaved the sweet air. “Oh, ye hypocrites,” the minister groaned, and I thought about baking and bosoms.

  By and by the shimmer faded, clouds gathered, the rain came, and everyone ran for the tents. It rained all afternoon and all night.

  The next day was clear. We stood for hours in the mud, or sat on wet logs and slapped our necks and arms to kill mosquitoes, while listening to speakers of varying ability. The most eagerly anticipated was a Millerite. Around fifty years later, I was astounded to realize that the Millerites had been forgotten, their shame lived down at last, though, as always, the world abounds with such people. I don’t recall whether I first heard of them before or after I came to Livy. I know this was the first one I ever saw.

  He was fat and red-faced, so unlike my idea of a preacher that when he mounted the speaker’s stand I expected to hear an announcement about the cooking arrangements. In the high, piercing tones some men use to grip a crowd’s attention, often repeating key phrases to give everyone a chance to hear, he told us about William Miller, a farmer, but in his spare time a Bible scholar, who had delved deeply into the book of Daniel, in which the Second Advent of Jesus is prophesied. Miller’s research led him to a conclusion he found unwelcome, because it meant he would have to turn himself into an object of public mockery. But the facts were there for anyone to see who knew how to do arithmetic and knew the Bible to be the word of God.

  “And what was it, this discovery that made William Miller go from church to church and city to city in the hope that other people would lift off his shoulders the awful burden of warning mankind? Many of you have heard of it, and think that it must be the ravings of a madman. He says that the world will end in 1843. We have, according to this farmer, two years before everything is to perish in a great fire the like of which no man has ever seen, and none to be saved except by the blood of Jesus. So this man William Miller says. Why should we believe him? Why should we take his word?

  “Because it isn’t just his word,” he said, holding up the Bible.

  The crowd took his meaning. There was a murmur of approval.

  “It’s based on the word of God, whose prophecies have come true, one after another, confounding the deists and the mockers time and again throughout history.”

  If you were willing to entertain the idea, it was thrilling. I looked around. I saw hope on my aunt’s face. Elihu had that friendly set of mouth that on him represented small-minded skepticism about another man’s claim to superior knowledge of any kind. Becky, who was in everything except her walk an ordinary, shallow girl, living for everyday amusements, wore a look of polite attention appropriate to church. Every time I saw her I thought of what Jeptha had told me about the reason for her limp, and that she didn’t know, and I wondered what she would think, what she would do, were she ever to learn the truth. Jeptha looked interested.

  There were small-town folk and farm folk, babes in arms, old people whose memories stretched back to the eighteenth century. The poor were among them, and the sick, the twisted, with canes and ear trumpets, people who had been carried to the spot in wicker chairs, people who could certainly use a new body in a new world.

  You feel superior? Go ahead, but remember that it was 1841, not 1908. The cosmos under discussion was smaller than the one we inhabit today. We knew nothing of the recent geological discoveries proving that mountains take millions of years to form, and though we had heard that the earth turned, only half of us believed it, and we had no idea of how big or far away the stars were. Most of all, we were Christians, and the Second Coming was as much a part of our creed as the crucifixion and the resurrection. Anyone not prepared to call the Bible a fairy tale had to take this question seriously.

  We listened. After an unavoidably complicated explanation of Miller’s system of biblical prediction, the speech became a terrific hellfire sermon in which not only the torments of the damned but the pathetic ordeal of the poor earth itself was evoked in merciless detail. The sun would turn black. The moon would fall out of the sky. Everything would burn. Everyone would burn. Unless, by then, they had been saved.

  By and by, a murmur passed through the crowd, and sporadic conversions began like popcorn when it first starts to exhibit its magical response to heat: a shout of “Hallelujah!” somewhere, followed, seconds later, by sobbing and wailing, and then six yards away a man falls to his knees, and somewhere else a woman shouts, “Thank you, Jesus!” and after an interval a man says, “O Lord, You’ve found me,” and another woman starts to jerk and tremble, and soon these things are happening with greater and greater frequency, until seemingly the whole assembly is popping off in paroxysms of joy. But always in the end there remain a few hard kernels, roasted but not popped—who knows why?—and I was always one of those.

  MY AUNT FOUND PLENTY OF CHORES for us to do, plenty of cooking and washing, and digging ditches to keep the rain from flooding the tents. Agnes and I raced each other through them, hoping to finish fast enough to give the winner a precious half-hour alone with Jeptha.

  Each of us had her moment. I found Jeptha not far from his tent, sitting on a wide old stump, cleaning the family’s shoes with a twig—there had been so much mud after the rain. I stood watching until he asked me to join him, and we talked about the end of the world. We talked mostly about what had been asserted, not the likelihood of it, until I dared to ask him if he thought that William Miller was a humbug.

  “Probably,” he said. “Such people usually are.” His glance was contemplative, taking in my face and my hands folded on my skirt, and my feet, as if they had some bearing on the subject, and I really thought that at last we were getting somewhere. Then we heard a rustle of wet leaves. “Oh, look,” he said brightly. “It’s Agnes.”

  And so it was, and the next day we broke camp.

  XVII

  WE WERE A DAY FROM HOME when news traveled through the train that there was sickness in several of the families. “Camp fever,” we called it, blaming the decision to pitch the tents so near the lake. My uncle’s family was unaffected, but Jake and Becky stayed in their wagon when we stopped to cook by the roadside, and they were both said to be taking broth; a woman from another wagon who had brought some patent tonics along passed them to the Talbots. Agnes and I went to see. Mrs. Talbot, sitting at the reins, told us that Jeptha, too, was sick, and added, “Thank you, children, but don’t come nearer.”

  After the passage of so many years, it is difficult to remember what exactly Agnes and I had in mind when, two days after we got back, we went to look in on the Talbots. Certainly we did not yet realize how bad the sickness was. Had we known, it would not have stopped us, but we did not know. We brought food, sheets and pillows, bottles of patent remedies, and bags of dried herbs.

  The Talbots’ house was smaller and meaner than our own, and the family was larger. There were eight of them, counting the parents. Jeptha was the eldest child, and the other boys were Ike, Ezra, and Lionel, and the girls were Becky and Ruth. I don’t remember all of their ages, except for Lionel, who was not yet a year old and just beginning to walk and Becky who was twelve.

  Physicians in those days cast doubt on the very idea of infectious disease; it was an outdated notion. But country people, clinging stubbornly to ideas from earlier centuries, had no doubt that a great many illnesses were catching. We were quite sure that, whatever Jeptha’s family had, we could get it by being near them.

  We noticed that the oxen had not been unhitched from the covered wagon, and they had dragged it into the hayfield. The house stank like a corpse from as far as ten feet away. The front door was open. As we approached, the Talbots’ dog, Zeke, emerged. It made a sort of strangled bark and vomited. Agnes cried out. There was a baby’s finger in the vomit.

  “You’ll want to go back now, Arabella,” she said.

  I see that this remark is open to the charitable interpretation that she wanted to protect me. Don’t be fooled: it was just an insult. We were both happy to risk death for
the prize of being the one to nurse Jeptha from the brink of death, and if the other one died in the process, so much the better. She hesitated at the door. My desire to best her in everything gave me the strength to go in first. When I saw what was happening, I shrieked and looked around frantically for a weapon. My eyes lit on the fireplace; next thing I knew, I held a black iron poker in my two hands and I was swinging it onto the backs of the pigs, two of them, who were fighting over the half-shredded corpse of the one-year-old, Lionel. One pig gripped an arm, the other a leg. They had already gnawed at his face. I swung with all my force. With thwarted, outraged squeals, the pigs reluctantly lumbered away from their feast. Gasping, I thwacked them until they were out of the house. Agnes bolted the door, covered Lionel’s remains with an empty grain sack, and made sure that there were no other beasts in the house and no other door was open. While she was thus occupied, I climbed up a rickety ladder to the loft, weeping and murmuring, “Please, God, please,” and repeating Jeptha’s name. It was dark up there, and reeked of excrement and vomit and rotting meat, so that automatically I wanted to breathe through my mouth, and yet I made myself smell, because at the moment I couldn’t see, and smell was a valuable source of information. I banged into something, a bed probably. “Jeptha?” I cried, and listened, hearing Agnes busy below. “Agnes, be quiet—I can’t hear!” There was silence for a moment as she obeyed me, followed by steps and the sound of her own breathing and the creak of the ladder as she climbed it. I opened the shutters at one end of the loft, letting in a shaft of bright light full of lazily drifting dust motes. I turned to see Agnes moving to one of the beds, and I ran and got there just when she did; it was Jeptha’s bed.

  He had his coat on and was shivering violently, with hardly the strength to raise his eyelids to see us. His tongue was white and peeling, his skin dripping wet, his breath shallow; his clothes were drenched in urine and sweat, and he had retched and fouled himself. Frightened into a truce, Agnes and I worked cooperatively. We brought clean water and stripped him; asking silent forgiveness for taking this liberty with his nakedness—and looking away at first, but we then had to look to do the job properly—we washed him and dressed him. After a lengthy search through the house for linen, we changed his bedding.