Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  We did all this, the two of us, ignoring the rest of our patients. There was no one to question what we did, as we discovered when we finally turned our attention to other members of the family. Not one had been spared to help the others; they could not rise to use a chamber pot or look out the window; they did not notice us until we were right over them, and then they did not know who we were.

  The remedies of the times, which we had brought with us, were tinctures and decoctions of herbs that had been discovered to make you sweat, or puke, or belch, or empty your bowels, or make your heart beat faster, and they were useless now, because all these reactions had been produced already by the disease, and the family’s garments and bedding were soaked with the results.

  The services we had performed for Jeptha, we performed for the rest of his family. It took us most of the day. To ease the suffering of the cows, we milked them; we put some of the milk in the creek, in jugs, to keep it cold, and used some of it to make clabber. We went to the toolshed, found shovels, and buried Lionel, including the finger Zeke had vomited, in the family plot, which held a stillborn baby and a grandmother who had come with the family to Livy ten years ago and died the first year. We buried him deep and piled stones on the grave, so the dogs and the pigs couldn’t dig him up. It was dark by then, and Becky had died, but we were too tired to bury her. We put our ears to her chest to make sure there was no heartbeat, and closed her eyes, and left her in her bed, locking the doors to keep the animals away. Believing that contagion was carried by the poisoned air in the house, and that we were more susceptible to it when sleeping, we spent the night in the barn.

  Agnes said her prayers out loud, with her usual exhaustive specificity and precision. She prayed that no others would die. Speculating that the disease had been sent for a good purpose, she expressed the hope that the deceased were already in heaven and the survivors, chastened, would turn their hearts toward Jesus.

  I prayed that Jeptha would live and that no one I loved would get sick. I didn’t make a list, even in my mind—God was supposed to know, maybe better than I did.

  In the morning, we washed Becky, put her in a relatively new-looking dress that we guessed was hers. We wrapped her pale, damp fingers around the hickory cane Jacob had carved for her, buried her without a coffin, and piled her grave with stones. We washed the linen and the clothes in boiling water. We milked the cows. We killed and cleaned a chicken, made broth and spooned it into the mouths of our patients. In the afternoon, my aunt came and was alarmed to see how bad the sickness was, saying that we were both very good children but we were taking a terrible risk. She tried to make us come back with her, but not very hard. We told her that we felt fine; we had already taken the risk, and we were all right. We must be immune.

  The crisis had passed for most of the family. After another day, the survivors began to recover—all except Jeptha, who breathed in short gasps, and sweated, and spewed up any food we managed to get into him. I became so angry that at last I directed my prayers to Satan. “Take Agnes instead of Jeptha,” I told the devil (I prayed aloud, but in a whisper, and alone). And just in case the universe was as unjust as I was beginning to suspect it was, and Agnes was destined for heaven, I added that he could have my soul when the time came.

  The next morning, Jeptha was sitting up in bed. Jacob told him about Lionel and Becky. “They’ve passed,” he said with unaccustomed gentleness.

  “Take me to the graves,” said Jeptha. Agnes and I, though we had washed every inch of him, turned modestly away as, dressed only in his shirt, he staggered to a chest of drawers and put on his trousers. He walked slowly, barefoot, his father—who was much less weak—leading him, walking not too far ahead, until they reached their destination.

  “That’s Lionel,” said Jake. “That’s Becky.”

  “Becky,” said Jeptha, looking down at the heap of stones. He nodded, and was quiet, and looked as if he had thoroughly adjusted to the new situation. He stood like that for about ten seconds while we all waited respectfully, and then, suddenly, his jaw began to shake, and as though she were not buried in the ground at his feet but lost in the woods somewhere, he shouted, “Becky! Becky, where are you?”

  His father said, without very much conviction, “She’s in heaven.”

  Jeptha turned on him, his lips curled with some strange, combustible blend of grief, fury, helplessness, and disgust. “Heaven? Where’s that?” He laughed. “Heaven?” He marched a few steps closer to his father and began to strike Jacob with his fists. “I’m gonna tear you in two, you worthless son of a bitch. Heaven—I’ll show you heaven, you damned killer. I’ll send you to heaven, you evil bastard.” We shouted variously “No” and “Don’t” and “Jeptha” and moved to pull him off his father, but Jacob shook his head to signal us to leave them be as Jeptha struck his father with all the force he could deploy just then, which was about as much as would be available to a two-year-old child. Jacob took it, methodically and patiently deflecting the blows aimed at his face. At last they gripped each other like a couple of exhausted boxers and fell to their knees.

  AFTER ABOUT A WEEK, the rest of the Talbot family recovered, and we went home, with their thanks and blessings. Mrs. Talbot, though still shaky, insisted on making us a meal and fixing us two baskets full of Indian pudding and dried fruit and salt pork to take home with us. “You’ve been a ministering angel,” she told Agnes. She did not say that to me. The distinction she made between us, her persistence in it even fresh from the rim of the grave, would have been comical if she hadn’t just buried two of her children. “I don’t reckon I’ve ever known any girl so good and brave.” And glancing at me and back to Agnes meaningfully, she said, “You’re not only good yourself, you make other people good!”

  Why did Jeptha’s mother hate me? I’m still not sure I know. I never learned it from him, because he loved her too much to understand her. My current theory is that she disliked anything that was a challenge to her mind, which included anything the least bit foreign, and like a child she thought that whatever displeased her was wicked.

  Agnes and I walked home in silence. Ten yards from our door, Agnes dropped her basket and collapsed. I dragged her to her feet. We walked with her arm over my shoulder. My aunt, who had been working in the garden, was running toward us when, a few feet from the door, Agnes suddenly bent over and vomited her breakfast in the grass.

  I heard my aunt shout, “Oh no, O precious Lord, please, no.”

  In the days that followed, as Agnes, despite our best efforts, fell away from us, I hardly knew what to feel or to wish for. Certainly I hated her. If ever, in all the time we’d known each other, she had shown me the slightest kindness, it had been only a feint or a temporary expedient in a larger plan to harm me. I had often wished her dead—I had prayed for it only a few days ago—but now I feared the power of my wish, and I nursed her diligently, spooning broth into her, cleaning her, and sitting up with her when my aunt could not.

  As for my aunt, she kept up an appearance of calm and good cheer when she was near Agnes, but when we were downstairs she gave in to despair, often calling on God to explain why this was happening, and why of all people to her daughter. “Why Agnes?” she kept saying. Once—when we had been talking about Agnes’s condition and whether some swallow of broth that had stayed down could be considered a sign of recovery—my aunt remarked, “It’s certainly a wonder you didn’t come down with it.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve been lucky.”

  We were chopping vegetables. Evangeline, Lewis, Matthew, and Titus had all been sent to Melanchthon’s farm until the danger passed. My uncle stayed during the day to do farm work, but at my aunt’s urging he, too, slept at Melanchthon’s house.

  “Oh, you both took a terrible chance, I shouldn’t have let you. What a mystery sickness is. Remember how sickly you were when you arrived? We thought sure that you and Lewis would both perish before another year went by.”

  “I didn’t know you thought that, Aunt Agatha.�
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  I knew just what she had in her mind. She knew she shouldn’t say it; it would be wrong and pointless. But she ached to.

  “We did. Remember, it was why you came. Because the two of you had that dry cough. And were both so undersized, and narrow-breasted, and your poor mother had only just died. But here you are, a fine-looking, lovely girl, and safe after being put next to a sickness that felled a whole family and killed two of them in the wink of an eye, and is on its way to …” Here she began to sob again. “O precious Lord, why? Why?”

  Later that evening, as we sat beside Agnes’s bed, the theme was renewed. “Why, Lord? Why Agnes? Why my Agnes?”

  “Why not me?” I said finally.

  “Yes!” cried my aunt—in a whisper, so as not to disturb Agnes. “Oh, God forgive me, yes! Why not you? Miserable and hateful and envious, when you can’t be happy anyway. Living off other people’s lives, wishing you were Anne’s daughter, and Jeptha’s wife, which you’ll never be, not even if the Lord takes my sweet Agnes. Why?”

  “Oh,” I said, my tears surprising me with the news that I wasn’t beyond caring what she thought. “Oh. Well, now I know, then. Oh, I hope there’s a heaven! I hope there’s a heaven, so your sister can see how you treat her daughter!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Aunt Agatha, “I want you to be all right, of course I do, but I love my daughter, and she’s dying—oh, dear Lord—and I’m beside myself.”

  I couldn’t bear these feelings. I reached for her. She held my face against her dried-up bosom and sobbed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Falling to her knees, she meshed her bony fingers in a white-knuckled tangle of prayer. I saw her homely face and puffy eyes from God’s perspective, and had a sort of religious vision, of all the faces—black, white, young, old, plain, pretty, simple, smart—looking up at Him, begging for justice, mercy, fair winds, rain, victory, long life, quick death.

  “Dear Lord,” she implored Him, “whatever I’ve done, don’t judge me this way.”

  A DAY OR TWO AFTER THIS CONVERSATION, we heard the dogs barking and the rumble of a wagon, and went out to see Jeptha, his mother, and his father coming up the dusty road, bringing more food and the offer of their labor and such encouragement as they could dredge out of the depths of their grief. Jake was quiet and gentle.

  We stood around Agnes’s bedside. She seemed to recognize him for a moment, but then she mistook him for Elihu: “Papa, where’s Jeptha? Why doesn’t he come?”

  Jeptha looked down at her, saying, “I’m here, Agnes, I’m Jeptha,” and squeezed her hand, and he looked at my aunt with an expression that, though correct in its way, was hard to read, and did not look like grief.

  My cousin shivered and clawed the air; she clutched Jeptha’s hand while calling him “Papa,” “Matthew,” and “Titus.” At last she fell back with a sigh and slept. My aunt gave a cry and put her hand to her mouth, while Agnes murmured his name in her sleep. “Well, maybe sleep will mend her,” he said. “Let’s leave her, Arabella.”

  I followed him out of the house, and there was a moment when he looked at me as though he were about to say something important—some deep truth he had learned from his ordeal—but then decided the time wasn’t ripe for it and remained silent. I was curious, but cautious enough to let him bide his time. We strolled about the farm, gathering eggs in the barnyard, milking the cows, and doing other odd chores that were not strenuous, and at last we just ambled around the place with no pretense of being useful. His movements were tentative; he seemed to look about him with unhurried appreciation, like someone returning home after a lapse of years; and I saw him as more precious for having almost died. I remembered having touched his nakedness. At fourteen years old, he was already taller than his father. Years of toil outdoors had given him plenty of lean, hard muscle. Altogether, he had more than his share of animal attraction, and I was just old enough to feel it.

  When I alluded delicately to Becky and Lionel, he shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it. Suddenly he said, “She’s not dying. Agnes.”

  “What? But she—?”

  “It’s a humbug. Watch her, you’ll see.”

  “But she’s spitting up her food.”

  He nodded. “She must be starving.”

  I thought about this for a moment and realized that he must be right. She had been pretending from the start. For vomiting, she’d had ipecac. She’d had a wide choice of purges, diuretics, diaphoretics, and stimulants among the other medicines we’d brought to the Talbots. When the Talbots came to our house, she had dropped all but the most decorative symptoms; she couldn’t bear to be disgusting in front of Jeptha. That was her error. With his intimate knowledge of the sickness, he had seen through her charade.

  This, I assumed, was what he had wanted to tell me. I thought of Agatha. “Jeptha, we must go back and tell my aunt right away.”

  He gave me a measuring look. “I knew you’d say that.” He meant that I was good, and despite all the bitterness in my heart, and the little matter of having pledged my soul to the devil, I felt just then that I was good. “We’ll tell her—just not yet, okay?” he continued, and I nodded, realizing that he had still had something to say or at least a task to accomplish on our walk.

  I asked him about A View of the Hebrews, the book I had seen him reading on the way to the lake. It propounded the theory that a race of civilized, Christian Indians used to live right here, where we stood, until they were exterminated overnight by the savage, pagan Indians, five hundred years before Columbus. We discussed the idea as today young people discuss the possibility of life on Mars. I asked him again if he thought that Jesus would return to judge the world in 1843, he said that, though it went against common sense, common sense was no use for this kind of problem. “Common sense is all about what usually happens.”

  Remembering the pie Agnes had given him, I asked him what kind of pie he favored, rhubarb, or apple, or blueberry, or cherry, and he said he liked apple best but he liked variety, too. And so, having disposed of the end of a civilization and the destruction of the world, we talked of pies—whether a pie made from dried apples could ever be made as good as a pie of fresh apples, or whether it should be regarded as a different sort of pie, with its own excellence—and you might be surprised to know what a pleasant conversation it was, despite the idiocy of the topic.

  It was unnecessary, but I had to say it: “She didn’t bake that pie. Not if it was good. Agnes can’t bake. Someone else must have done it for her.”

  He looked at me curiously and then said, “I want to show you something,” taking my hand and pulling me through the broad leaves of the ripening corn, past a place where the rows, fairly regular until then, were interrupted by a stubborn old stump my uncle had not yet gotten around to removing. There we stopped, a little breathless. Suddenly he leaned in, grasped me firmly by the shoulders, and kissed my lips—before letting me go and taking a step back to watch me, as though now it was his turn to wait, and my turn to act. It was hard to think or talk with my pulse loud in my head, my mouth remembering his mouth, wanting to cry, wanting to shout, greedy for another kiss. Then a great joy flooded through me, and I kissed him. We wrapped our arms around each other. We kissed and stopped and kissed more and stopped. We didn’t open our mouths. There was only the dead-on pressure of our lips, until, by a lucky accident, we learned that brushing lips side to side could be pleasant, and we sought that pleasure over and over. For the moment, it was actually too much. We stopped, brows touching, faces flushed. We were short of breath, as if the kissing had exhausted us.

  WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE HOUSE, I was a person clothed in glory, lit from within, perfected, enjoying the illusion of absolute invulnerability that comes only in the first flush of requited love: Jeptha loved me! Nothing could hurt me or stand in my way. I had no quarrel with the world. Every sorrow I had experienced in my life until now had only prepared the way for this moment, for the express purpose of making it sweeter, like the rough jokes that some fellow’s friends
might play on him just before he opens the door to where everyone is waiting to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” I did not hate anyone. I wished only that all these silly fools could be happy, and I thought they all could be—they had only to seek my guidance. I knew all about happiness.

  When I told my aunt about Agnes, I expected her to be angry with me for calling her angel a liar, for implying that Agnes had deliberately put her through this hell. But there was no anger. That Agnes might live—nothing else mattered. She seized the hope desperately.

  We stood around Agnes’s bed, wondering how we could ever have been fooled. Later in life, I saw such illnesses in plays. Agnes gasped musically, arched her back in pretty paroxysms, and freed her hands from the sheets to make interesting gestures. Her arms stretched upward toward unseen angels. In intervals of lucidity, she planned her funeral, gave away her possessions, and delivered deathbed advice.

  She asked for Jeptha, who said, “I’m here.”

  “No, you’re Papa.”

  He insisted, “I’m Jeptha, don’t you know me, Agnes?” and he winked at me. I assume that, not really being in a delirium, she noticed and knew the game was up, which must have been horrible for her.

  Deception was the mode of our humor in those days, as you know if you have read Barnum’s Life. We liked stories of elaborate “humbugs,” uproarious then, tedious now, and liked to recognize them in real life, so even Jeptha could enjoy Agnes’s folly for short periods. Then, remembering Lionel and Becky, he would tire of the charade.