Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  It was a stupid mistake, but there was no room for clear thinking in the tiny space left over by the immense realization: Agnes knew. She would not have dared to hint that I was pregnant if she thought that Jeptha and I were having relations. She knew Jeptha; she knew that if he thought he had gotten me pregnant he would have married me, which was the last thing she wanted. She had to believe that we were saving ourselves for the wedding day. And how could she know? I could not imagine Mrs. Harding betraying my trust so soon: it was not in her interest. Agnes’s information had to have come from Matthew. Perhaps when I had sent him back to the house to fetch my clothes, Agnes had seen him, and asked him to explain what he was doing, and then or later she had interrogated him—she could have threatened to bring my aunt into the matter—and he had confessed, and included the crucial detail that there had been blood, that I was a virgin. She could not, it was true, be perfectly sure that Jeptha and I had not had relations since then; with an iron will and no heart, I could have seduced him the very next day, as I had nearly seduced him just a little while ago. Perhaps she had not thought of this, or perhaps she had sufficient insight into my nature to realize how unlikely it would be, or perhaps she simply gambled that we had not. She had always been brave. She pounced on my error. “I guess from seeing you do it. She saw you do it in a pail twice, and one time she only heard.”

  Feeling the heat in my face, and knowing its color betrayed me, I admitted that I had been feeling unwell, probably from something I had eaten; I had denied it because I had not wanted to worry my aunt; but I was better now.

  Agnes said she could see that—in fact, I seemed to be gaining weight. Today I am experienced enough to know that it could not have been true, but by saying it Agnes made her point very clear to all of us. I felt as if I were ten pounds heavier than I had been three weeks ago, and I think that in the eyes of the others at that prayer meeting I looked it. I could think of nothing to say in reply, except that she was mistaken, I was not heavier, but I was well, thank you, I was very well. The pastor arrived, and there was praying, singing, and Bible study. When I had the courage to glance at Jeptha, he was already looking at me. I turned away. My heart was drumming, drumming, drumming.

  XXIII

  I TOLD MRS. HARDING I HAD TO GO HOME for a few days to help on the farm.

  My aunt, who had heard the dogs bark at my approach, stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a rag, as I walked up to the house. There was no ease between us; nor was there much of a struggle anymore. We were just sick of each other.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I need to talk to you alone.”

  If you are wondering how I could bear to tell my aunt of my predicament, and what I intended to do about it, remember that I was desperate. She had not been my first choice. But I knew, at least, that I could trust my aunt with my secret, because it was Matthew who had made me pregnant, and I knew that she would believe me when I told her how it had happened, and I knew that she would do anything within her power to prevent that from becoming known.

  We went into the kitchen and sat. She offered me Souchong tea and a piece of bad bread. I drank the tea, but though very hungry I refused the bread: I was fasting. Between sips, very quietly, I told my aunt that I needed some medicine to restore my menstrual regularity. She looked at me blankly. Then she understood. “Oh dear,” she said, putting down the bread. “Oh my goodness. Well, I won’t judge you. You took a chance. You’ll have to pay. I can’t do what you’re asking.”

  “Yes, you can. You will.” I told her what had happened, sparing her nothing.

  “No,” she said. The word was half denial, half dismay. “Oh my Lord,” she said, “oh my Lord, if this comes out. You’re lying, aren’t you? Oh Lord, I hope you’re lying.”

  I let my eyes answer. “If I’ve got to have this baby, I’ll make sure Jeptha knows how it happened. Everyone will know what kind of a family this is.”

  “Oh mercy!” She put her head in her hands. Her shoulders heaved. After a while, she looked up, her face red and wet. “You shouldn’t have let him be alone with you.”

  The urge to strike her made my arm twitch. When I was sure that my voice would not shake, I said, “Help me get rid of it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t? Didn’t you hear what I told you?”

  “It’s in the Lord’s hands. You’ve been hurt, I see that, and you’re going to be hurt more, and I guess we all are, but I’m not going to go against God.” I stood up. “Where are you going, Arabella?”

  I went out and climbed the maple tree we used to hang the hogs from when we butchered them. Standing on the almost horizontal limb, which bore groovelike marks from the ropes that were so often slung over it, from five feet up, I jumped. My skirts puffed open; my bottom hit the ground hard and the back of my head after it. I climbed up and jumped again. I sat on the ground, waiting for my body to react.

  My aunt had come out of the house by now. “Arabella, what are you doing?” I looked up at the tree. The stumps of the lower limbs, cut close to the tree, had long ago been painted black with tar, and the bark ringing those cut ovals had bulged so much over the years that they looked like lips. I had once thought of them as a choir, but now they were screaming. I wrapped my arms around the tree, stepped on those lips and climbed again. “Stop it, Arabella! You’ll hurt yourself! It’s wrong, it’s a sin, stop it!” she cried, but her shout did not sound entirely convincing. I think her feelings were mixed. The sin horrified her. But she would have liked me to succeed.

  This time I fell forward and hurt my knee and my wrists. The possibility of spraining my ankle made me stop. Rising to my feet, I thought of Anne. Could she help me? Her views on bedroom matters were broad and easygoing. But I knew that she would not lightly countenance abortion. To win her cooperation, I would have had to break her heart—she adored Matthew.

  So I decided first to try Titus, who was boarding with a family in Patavium so that he could clerk in the dry-goods store. It was eight miles away, and I thought I had just enough day left to walk it.

  The road had two names. In Livy it was called the Patavium Road. In Patavium it was called the Livy Road. When I’d gone about two miles, a farmer gave me a ride in his wagon, which had no springs or straps. It was a very bumpy ride. Maybe that would do it.

  THE STORE WAS OPEN, and Titus was in an apron, all smiles and smart patter for the customers. When he saw me, he yelled a few words to his boss and took me to a tavern a few doors down the street. We talked inconsequentially for a few minutes. At last, with a shrewd look, he asked me why I had come to see him, and I told him everything.

  His eyes welled with tears, and I regretted that we were in a public place. “I wish he wasn’t my brother.”

  I swallowed, waited until I could speak without choking, and then told him my plans regarding the little creature inside me. He said very simply that he could help, if I was sure that this was what I wanted to do.

  I FORGET WHETHER IT WAS THEN or the next day that Titus warned me—in any case, many weeks too late—that Agnes had been spreading the rumor I was granting the freedom of my person to Mrs. Harding’s sons. She spread it by pretending to quash it. Whenever she heard my name come up in conversation, she would leap to my defense. The things that were being whispered about me were not true. What things, Agnes?

  I remembered that Matthew had said he was better than Miles, Dick, or William. I asked Titus, “Have you told anyone but me about this?” He said he hadn’t. I said, “Keep it mum. That way I can threaten Agnes with you telling your mother.”

  If there was a hell, I wouldn’t have hesitated to send her there. But Titus, in a discussion that did not concern Agnes, had assured me there was no such place. Recently, he had become a Universalist, like his employer. Universalists believed that everyone would be saved. God was not a torturer, they said. To hold simultaneously that God is omnipotent and benevolent, and yet punishes people eternally, was just illogical
. I don’t know why I was never tempted to become a Universalist, since it would have comforted me about my father. Perhaps it seemed too good to be true.

  That night, after closing the store, Titus took me to the house where he was boarding. I met the owner, his wife, and their pretty daughter. I saw that she and Titus were sweet on each other, and they were lucky, lucky, lucky. I stayed the night, and in the morning, Titus handed me a bag containing a bottle of Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills. He said that I should be alone when I took them, but not too far from help, because I might get very sick—if I could wait a few days, he could arrange to be with me. I told him I could not bear to wait. He said that he did not want to scare me, but he had heard that it hurt like hell. He had heard that women had died from taking it. That whenever a woman took one of these pills she was rolling the dice.

  I set out on the Livy Road, carrying in a carpetbag a wide-necked brown bottle that contained three large pills, each one supposedly sufficient for the purpose, and a jug of water. The day was sunny. I passed farmhouses, smokehouses, horses, pastures. As soon as I came to wild land, I walked into it, pulling my skirts up above the brambles, stumbling, my sick fear growing. The ground began to rise. I sat on an old musty log, the remnant of a forest giant torn from the side of a little hill. Its mighty roots, raised higher than its branches, were twisted, clenched, and hairy, clutching hunks of clay and stones. The violence with which that massive tangle had been torn from the earth spoke to me more plainly than words. I leaned my palm on the peeling bark. A chunk of the log gave way, and I saw tiny white larvae tunneling through the pale, mushy wood. I took the bottle from the carpetbag. I thought of myself lying there beside the log, eaten by insects, to be found months or years later, next to a carpetbag and a bottle of Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills.

  Slapping bits of leaf and bark and tiny white eggs from my clothes, I got up and went back to the road and started walking; a little sooner than the last time, a wagon came along and gave me a ride the rest of the way. I went through the house, passing my aunt in the kitchen, and took the pill with a cup of water on the back porch. I came back in and told her that I was tired and was going to rest upstairs for a few hours. She watched mutely while I dragged some worn-out sheets, a bucket of water, a basin, and a ewer up to the loft where I had spent the waning years of my childhood. I lay on my old straw bed and waited.

  These medicines could not be advertised for their real purpose then, and are no longer available today. They were made of plants that had been discovered, by trial and error—at God knows what price in suffering to the experimenters—to cause the strong muscle contractions by which women give birth. Physicians and midwives sometimes used them to induce labor in women past their time. Those of you who know that the pains of childbirth are caused mainly by these same muscle spasms will understand that it was impossible to keep entirely quiet. I moaned and begged God for mercy. I bled, not knowing if this was the result I intended or the beginning of a foul, ignominious death.

  When it was over, I washed myself and wrapped everything in a bundle, which I handed to my aunt. She took it without a word. “Get me something to eat,” I demanded. She slapped together one of her revolting stews, and for once I liked the taste. It tasted like being alive.

  “Arabella,” she said, to get my attention, while I was eating.

  “What?”

  “Now that you’ve done what you wanted to do, you don’t need any other folks to know, do you?”

  It was the last thing I wanted, but I liked having her beg me, so I didn’t answer.

  “It would break Elihu,” she said. “It would break him. And just think what it would do to Lewis.”

  “Oh yes, Lewis. Lewis.”

  I could not decide which would be harder to bear, discovering how Lewis would react to the news of what his hero had done, or letting him go on as Matthew’s dog.

  I TOLD MY AUNT I DID NOT FEEL strong enough to go back to town; I’d spend the night here. “I want him kept away from me. I don’t want to see his face. Tell him I’m here and keep him away.” She did it. She told him to stay away, and his readiness to comply was a sort of confession, as I pointed out to my aunt.

  After lying upstairs reading until the light dimmed, I went down to help her serve supper. I didn’t have to help, she said.

  “Oh, but I want to.”

  I served each family member individually. Agnes was solicitous about my health, wondering if I should be working so soon after having been so sick earlier in the day.

  “I feel much stronger, thank you, Agnes.”

  “I was so worried; I thought you were dying.”

  “Oh dear, that must have been so distressing for you. You have such a good heart, Agnes.”

  “Thank you, Arabella.”

  “I picture your heart sometimes.”

  “Where’s Matthew?” my brother Lewis asked of us generally.

  “In town,” said my aunt, and I could see that Lewis was bewildered and hurt because Matthew hadn’t asked him to come along.

  Elihu and Evangeline continued feeding obliviously.

  We went to bed and prayed aloud, one after another. Agnes prayed in her usual highly specific fashion, leaving God very little room for initiative, treating Him as a sort of unimaginative factotum who has to be reminded flowers must grow up and rain fall down, and provided with very exact instructions concerning the management of the farm. I prayed that Agnes be given greater understanding. Not long after she fell asleep, she was woken by pains so unexpected that they startled her almost as much as they hurt her. “Mama!” she cried weakly. “Evangeline!”

  Evangeline was still snoring, so it was left to me to go to my cousin’s aid.

  “What ails you, dear Agnes?”

  “These pains! Fetch Mama!”

  I sat looking down at her moonlit face. Soon, with her quick mind, she understood. “You’ve poisoned me. You killed your baby, and now you’re killing me.”

  “You won’t die,” I said. “Now, be quiet.” I put my hand over her mouth and said, “You spread the rumor about me and the Harding boys. Titus told me. If you call Mama now, I’ll have to tell her why I’ve done this to you. Titus has promised to back me up. God knows how long it will take you to pull the wool over her eyes again—it would cause you no end of trouble. And what will you have gotten for it? Nothing. She hates me already. Now, I’ve just been through this thing, and it’s no picnic, but it only takes an hour or two, and then you’ll be right as rain.”

  I took my hand away, not knowing whether she would scream and shout for her mother again. But she didn’t, though her pains were obviously acute.

  As time went on, it seemed to get even worse. She ground her teeth so hard I thought she might break them. Tears streamed sideways, right and left, from her eyes. When the moon had gone a third of the way across the night sky, I said, “Maybe I gave you too much. It could be that you are going to die after all.”

  I hated her enough to be at peace with that idea.

  She began to pray, commending her soul to Jesus. The whole ordeal took her much longer than it had taken me, for some reason, and she was not really done until dawn and the rooster’s crow. She had fouled the bed, but there was no blood.

  “I bet you’d like to sleep,” I told her. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother would want to know why. You’d better get dressed. Oh, and clean yourself up.”

  “You’re going to hell, Arabella.”

  “I expect so. Maybe when I get there you can show me the ropes. Tell me how to pull the carrots, and which cow likes to put her tail in the milk.”

  THE DAY WAS CRISP AND CLEAR. I wore a yellow cotton traveling dress, a homespun woolen shawl, and a white bonnet. I carried a carpetbag and walked along the road to town like an innocent, apple-cheeked dairy maid. All was not well with me, and it would not be for a long time. But at least I did not have Matthew’s child in me.

  I walked up the slate walk of Mrs. Harding’s house. “Arabella,” she said with
a fraudulent smile, and I knew immediately that I had lost my position.

  She had me sit on the couch beside her and said I was a wonderful girl. She enjoyed my companionship. I would be a fine wife to the man of my choice one day. However, as I was perhaps aware, there was talk around town about me and her sons. She had thought the matter over while I was at my aunt’s house. She’d decided that, to put a stop to the gossip, I should absent myself from her house for the time being.

  “But, Mrs. Harding, that wouldn’t stop the gossip. That would just make everybody think it was true!”

  She knew that. She did not mean to fool me. She expected me to swallow the lie.

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Arabella. I’m sure you’re wrong. It’s you being in the house, such a pretty girl as you are, and the boys the age they are, that makes people talk. It’s probably best for you to be in a house where the children are younger.”

  I asked her if she knew of such a house. She said she would ask around. If she heard of something, she’d let me know. “That reminds me. Ephraim Towne was here and brought a letter for you from Jeptha.” Handing it to me, she suggested, “I think it is a very personal letter. Maybe you should take it with you.”

  I realized much later that she must have had a pretty good idea of the letter’s contents, and she wanted to be spared the hysterics she anticipated. I didn’t think of it then; I could only wonder why he would write me a letter, and why send Ephraim instead of coming himself. I felt sick. I felt a weakness in my wrists and elbows. It seemed to take all my strength to unfold the page. A few bits of red sealing wax fell on my skirt; a heavy clump of it stayed on the edge of the paper as I read:

  Dear Arabella,

  I know about the baby you tried to make me think was mine; I can’t excuse that, I could never forget it. You’ve It has wrecked things between us. I don’t know why you did it. I always thought that you really loved me even when you kept secrets but I guess that is a man’s vanity. I can’t bear to see you. I’m going a week earlier than I planned so I don’t have to see you. I would have given you my arm. I was such a dolt. I would have damned myself for you. You had me in your grip, you could have made me do anything, but now my eyes are opened. Go and marry Miles or Dick or whoever got you into trouble. Let there be a shotgun wedding and marry him and be a rich woman—be a rich, rich heartless woman and go straight to hell. I can’t believe how stupid I was. I wish I could rise above it. I can’t. You’ve torn my heart out. I’m like you now. Empty.