Bellefleur (16 page)

“You’ve never taken much interest in my horses before,” Gideon said stiffly. “You’ve always disapproved, like your insufferable mother, of such things as gambling. And now you seem to be giving me permission . . .”

Leah glanced down at the kitten, which had begun to attack her ankle; with an effort, fairly grunting, she stooped over to seize it by the scruff of its neck. In midair the tiny creature kicked and bleated. Gideon, staring at the kitten, at his wife, struck by her magnificent russet hair, which gleamed in the intense sunshine, was rocked with an emotion he could not comprehend. He loved her, he was helpless in the face of his love for her, yet this emotion seemed to encompass and swallow up even love. Like other Bellefleur men before him, like Jean-Pierre himself many decades before, Gideon looked upon a face so incontestably not his own, so distant from anything he might have dreamt, that he experienced it simply as fate.

“You don’t love me,” he whispered.

Leah did not hear. She dropped the kitten from a height of twelve inches or so and it immediately lay down and rolled over, showing its rounded, palely fuzzy stomach. It kicked frantically, pawing the air, though Leah’s hand was safely out of reach. “. . . before I was even born,” Leah said. “Your side of the family. Your father most of all.
Don’t deny it.
”

She was alluding to her own father’s death, one Christmas Eve many years ago. He had been killed in a tobogganing accident—it
had
been an
accident
—on one of the treacherous hills north of Mink Creek. Gideon made a gesture of impatience. They had discussed this incident many times and had come to the conclusion, which Gideon hadn’t at all forced, that Leah’s mother had imagined it all—a conspiracy against her young husband, a deliberate capsizing of the toboggan, Stanton Pym thrown against a tree and killed outright.

“. . . that night, don’t deny it. And the bets were collected,” Leah said. “At the very funeral they were collected.”

“I really doubt that,” Gideon said, his face burning.

“Ask my mother. Ask your own mother.”

“None of this has anything to do with
me,
” Gideon said. “I was a child of three or four at the time.”

“There was a great deal of betting on the toboggan race and perhaps on other matters too, that night,” Leah said. “And the bets were collected, at my father’s funeral.”

“You speak with such authority, but you really don’t know,” Gideon said uneasily. “You have only your mother’s word. . . .”

“Your side of the family has always gambled. It’s in your blood, it’s part of your fate. And so . . . And so it occurred to me, the other night, that the Powhatassie race might be an important event in our lives.”

“Did it!” Gideon said. But his mockery was so light, so diffident, that Leah did not detect it. “It occurred to you the other
night
. . . ?”

“What time is it?” Leah said, frowning. She turned stoutly to look at the sundial but it showed only a sliver of a shadow, a very pale gray. “I don’t have my watch. . . . You and Hiram are leaving now, aren’t you?”

“Why did this suddenly occur to you, after so many years?” Gideon said. He was still standing some yards from her; he had not come closer; quite deliberately he was keeping his distance. He could well imagine the fragrance of her gleaming red hair, and her body’s close secret sweetness. “You’ve always disapproved,” he murmured. “In fact you begged me not to race, when we were first married. . . . You were afraid I might be injured.”

“I’ve talked with Hiram,” Leah said. “You should be leaving now.”

Gideon did not hear. He said, in the same low voice, “You
were
afraid I might be injured . . . ?”

Leah’s gaze shifted. For a brief moment she said nothing.

“Ah, but you
weren’t
hurt, were you! All those years. . . . And before we were married. . . . The ice-racing, the diving, the swimming, canoeing at night, wrestling, boxing, all the dangerous things . . . the ridiculous things. . . . Things young men do. . . . You
weren’t
hurt,” she said faintly. “And you won’t be.”

“And I thought you and Della disapproved of the betting too. The principle of betting. Isn’t it dishonest, isn’t it sinful . . .”

“I don’t believe in sin,” Leah said curtly.

“I thought you were so fiercely moral, about dishonesty.”

“About telling lies. About being mean, and narrow-minded, and selfish. As for gambling—it isn’t very different from ordinary business investing, as Uncle Hiram has explained. I don’t think I quite understood before.”

“But now you understand.”

“I . . . I . . . I understand many things,” she said slowly.

The oblong patch of sunshine had grown wider, and more intense. Gideon stared, squinting at Leah. There was something she had said that disturbed him, but he could not grasp what it was; the very sight of her, the groping and yet magisterial tone of her voice, had begun to mesmerize him. “. . . many things?” he said.

“
His
dreams.
His
plans for us,” she whispered.

“
His
. . . ?”

She crossed her fleshy arms over her belly, protectively, rocking slightly forward.

“You must leave. You’ll be late for the train,” she said. “Come here, kiss me goodbye, you haven’t kissed me for so long. . . .”

In that moment her mood changed. And Gideon was unlocked. And came to her, dropping on one knee, his arms encircling her, rather roughly, his lips pressed against hers, at first timidly, then greedily, as he felt her strong arms close about him. Ah, how lovely it was to kiss her! Simply to kiss her! Her wide fleshy lips seemed to sting, her darting tongue made him dizzy, the weight of her body, the impulsive tightening of her arms, nearly caused him to lose his balance and topple into her lap. She was so large, so magnificent. She could draw him into her, and swallow him up, and he would shut his eyes forever, in bliss, in surrender.

After all, Gideon thought brokenly, I am the father.
I
am the
father.

Horses

I
t was on a nameless chestnut gelding of no great beauty or grace, but with a normally tractable disposition, short-headed, blunt-nosed, with a single white stocking on his left forefoot—won at cards with British officers not three weeks before the Golden Hill riot in January—that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, looking, with his smart three-cornered hat of black velvet, and his costly new leather boots, somewhat older than his twenty-six years, first saw Sarah Ann Chatham: at that time a girl of no more than eleven or twelve, small-featured, snub-nosed, with a lightly freckled oval face of disquieting beauty, and pale golden silky hair, and a bearing that was at once childlike and imperious; and . . . and even before the girl laughed and pointed at him (his mount, alarmed by an approaching stagecoach, was rising on his hind legs and whinnying piteously, and Jean-Pierre began to shout in French), showing her babyish teeth, pulling free of the hefty red-faced Englishwoman beside her (a nursemaid, a governess?—she was too ugly to be a relative)—even before Jean-Pierre, sitting in the cold brownish-yellow muck, had the opportunity to stare fully at her, he had fallen in love. . . . For the rest of his life he would recall not only the incredible shock of the cold, the muck, the graceless fall itself, and not only the beautiful, elated child’s cry in the instant before the servant hurried her along (for she had responded to Jean-Pierre’s accident as if it were an antic meant only to amuse, and only to amuse
her
), but the queer indecipherable joy of the moment—a joy that arose out of an absolute certainty—a sense that his fate was now complete, his life itself complete, laid out invisibly before him but laid out nevertheless, and awaiting his acknowledgment. He was in love. Pitched to the street, the object of amused derision (for others, too, were laughing openly: that he was so clearly French was naturally part of the joke), his dandyish clothes ruined; he was in love. All that, as a boy, he had been told and read of the New World—that native Indians of astonishing classical proportions lived here, and went nude even in winter, in forests of prodigious beauty and beside streams visibly crowded with salmon and trout (one had only to dip a hand-net in the water to capture them); that there were undefined, unimaginable monsters, some as tall as fifteen feet, that lived freely in the mountains, and made sporadic raids on the settlements, carrying off even adult men as prey; that there were, in certain areas, diamonds and rubies and sapphires and great blocks of jade in the soil, and silver and gold deposits of a lushness never seen before on earth; that there were fortunes to be made in a six-months’ space of time, and
never any regrets
—all these marvels paled beside the snub-nosed impetuousness of a girl he did not even know, at this time, was the youngest daughter of an ailing customs commissioner in New York, an officer of the Crown who, within the year, would evacuate his family home to England, and leave Jean-Pierre bereft forever.

(Of course there were other horses. Innumerable horses. Even an
albino
—of nearly as high a quality as Gideon’s famous Jupiter, decades later, with the same pinkish skin and white hooves, fifteen hands two inches in height, thirty-two inches from girth to ground, a dazzling snow-white horse that, seen, could not always be believed; even the matched Andalusians his malicious son Harlan was to steal from him one windy night. In the period of prosperity that came before, and led into, his catastrophic term in Washington as a congressman, Jean-Pierre began a rhapsodic memoir of his experiences with horses,
The Art of the Equestrian,
which, though never completed, was to appear in serial form in the small upstate newspaper he would acquire in the early 1800’s. There were other horses, many horses, just as there would be many women—a flood of women, in fact: but it was the nameless chestnut gelding he would recall, with ferocity and love: his first mount of the New World, the earliest of his innumerable prizes!)

Pepper, the young black gelding who threw Jedediah, and then stumbled backward over the screaming child, snapping his leg just below the knee, was another “good-natured” horse. After the accident Jedediah’s mother insisted that he be sold, or given away; but Jean-Pierre refused. It was hardly the horse’s fault, he said, that some contemptible fool in blood-stinking overalls and boots came too close . . . and it was hardly the horse’s fault that his boy hadn’t enough sense to grab onto a saddle horn. When, after the bone was set, and after, slowly, it mended, Jedediah still limped, it was often the case that his father asked him impatiently what was wrong. “Are you trying to reproach me?” he said. “You can walk correctly if you
try.
” Eventually the horse was sold when Jean-Pierre needed money quickly, and most of his property was tied up in complicated legal arrangements. But he was to remain in Jedediah’s imagination, in the dimmest, least fathomable region of his mind’s eye, for the rest of his life: a gigantic whinnying creature, utterly black, both wraithlike and portentous as stone, rising on his hind legs, careening backward, bringing down the incredible irrevocable
fact
of his weight on a child’s bare knee. In the delirium brought about by his solitude Jedediah would wake speechless from dream-visions in which the horse appeared—not as Pepper, not as one of his father’s horses, not even as a horse, but as an aspect of God Himself.

Then there was an ugly scrappy creature of uneasily mixed blood—Arabian, Belgian, saddle horse—Louis’s stallion Bonaparte, later called Old Bones. He was named not for the megalomaniac emperor but for his older brother Joseph who, traveling incognito as the mellifluous Count de Survilliers, acquired through Jean-Pierre’s Compagnie de New York some 160,260 acres of uninhabitable and unfarmable wilderness land under the mistaken impression that, as part of New France, it would prove a reasonable and even idyllic retreat for the defeated emperor himself, once he escaped Saint Helena. (Unfortunately, Napoleon was closely guarded on Saint Helena and his escape was never a possibility. And the 160,260 acres
were
uninhabitable, despite Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s hearty enthusiasm, and his dreams of roads, railroads, and even canals to come.) The elder Bonaparte was wall-eyed, and so was Louis’s stallion. But while the horse was, even in his prime, graceless and temperamental, he was also resilient, shrewd, and courageous, and as stubborn as his master. Perhaps to antagonize his father Louis liked to say that he wasn’t a horseman—wasn’t an
equestrian
—and ridiculed the cult of breeding Thoroughbreds. He had read in a newspaper that in the long run, over a period of many years and many races, Thoroughbreds did not make all that much
profit
for their owners.

It was the roan stallion Bonaparte Louis was riding that April afternoon in 1822 when he pursued the noisy hooting mob out of the settlement on the south shore of Lake Noir (not to be called Bellefleur for some years)—the mob, the laughing, frightened justice of the peace, and the doomed Indian boy himself (tied by a length of barbed wire to the saddle horn of a man named Rabin, an old Indian trader, and forced to run alongside Rabin’s horse). Louis shouted to the men that they might have the wrong person, they’d better let the boy stand trial, they’d better call in the sheriff and have an investigation—and one of the Varrells, a man Louis’s own age and approximate size, but with sharply slanted cheek-bones and dead-black straight hair, reached over, swaying drunk in his saddle, and struck Bonaparte’s neck with his fist. He shouted at Louis to get the hell home. The stallion whinnied in alarm and danced away, his great eyes rolling, but he did not rear back; and Louis, though astonished that anyone would have the audacity to strike out at him, was nevertheless clear-headed enough to do nothing more than settle his horse, and to resist returning the blow while he and Varrell were both on horseback. For he wanted, after all, to save the boy’s life. . . .

It was on a smooth-gaited, high-headed Costeña mare that Harlan Bellefleur appeared after years of absence, come home to revenge his family’s massacre: townspeople in Nautauga Falls eyed the remarkable horse, with its arched, muscular neck, its abundant gray mane, its dancelike gait—and most of all its handsomely attired rider, who wore lemon-yellow gloves and a floppy-brimmed hat of soft black wool—and murmured that they had never seen anything quite like it; it was something “foreign.” (Indeed the horse was Peruvian, sleek, dun colored, with bright, large, expressive eyes set wide in its head, and small ears, and a muzzle that was almost delicate. Harlan himself by this time looked more Spanish than French, and it was only when he leaned from his saddle to inquire courteously about directions to Lake Noir—or did he ask, bluntly, as some witnesses claimed, where he might find the Varrells?—that he seemed, by way of his somewhat nasal inflections, a native of the region: in fact, a Bellefleur. After his death the mare was confiscated by local authorities and disappeared only to turn up, a few months later, in the Tennessee stable of the notorious Reverend Hardy M. Cryer, soon to be Andrew Jackson’s “turf adviser.”)