Bellefleur (6 page)

He prowled about, sniffing, and suddenly his thoughts were on the Bellefleur girls he had seen the week before, on horseback, trotting along the old Military Road. Two young girls, not quite his age, one with long curly wheat-colored hair: he knew their names were Yolande and Vida, and he had wanted to shout at them,
Yolande, Vida, I know who you are!
but of course he had remained hidden. Last May he had spied upon the Fuhr wedding in the village, at the old stone church, and he had seen, in the midst of the milling crowd of gay, well-dressed men and women, Gideon Bellefleur and his wife Leah: Leah, full-
bodied
and arrogantly beautiful in a turquoise dress, her chignon visible beneath a stylish cartwheel hat, Leah who was taller than most men, much taller than Johnny’s father. . . . Johnny drew nearer, staring. No one noticed him, or so it seemed: why would those well-to-do people notice
him:
and so he stared and stared at Leah Bellefleur, who carried a cream-colored parasol which she spun, restlessly, between her gloved fingers. He could hear—he could
almost
hear—the woman’s low husky teasing voice. She had drawn slightly away from the others, she and one of the Fuhrs, and they were talking and laughing together in a way that made Johnny’s heart contract, for he wanted—he wanted—
Leah,
he might have shouted,
I know who you are! We all know you!
The young man with whom she was speaking was nearly as tall as Gideon. He was fair-haired, beardless, quite handsome, and though he laughed and joked with Leah he was also staring at her with an emotion Johnny could well comprehend. It gave Johnny pleasure to carry the Bellefleur woman’s image with him, and to subject it, in the privacy of the night, to certain fitting tortures: tortures with hog-butchering knives, branding irons, and whips (the very whip, an old buggy whip, his father used on Johnny and his brothers, having stolen it from the Bellefleur stable years ago): just what she deserved.

A flicker began to shriek and he resisted the impulse to run wildly out of the cemetery. He
did
trot downhill, now in a hurry to leave, but the fence, the iron fence, the spikes . . . He found an opening and jammed himself through, whimpering, on all fours, his scrawny tail trembling close to his haunches.

He did not believe in spirits, not even in Bellefleur Cemetery. Not during the day.

Now in the near distance the castle floated. Bellefleur Castle. The coppery roofs, the pink-gray towers. Vapor rising from the dark lake. And behind the monstrous house the sky was marbled blue and white, harsh glaring colors.

He paused, staring. He was breathing hard: the shrieking bird had frightened him though he knew better.

Bellefleur Castle. Larger than he remembered. Still, it could be destroyed. It could be burnt. Though it was built of stone it could be burnt, from the inside perhaps. Even if the stone itself would not burn the insides would burn—the fancy woodwork, the carpets, the furnishings.

A bomb might be dropped from high in the air. In a magazine that was nearly all photographs he had seen pictures of flaming cities in black and white, he had seen and admired the helmeted young pilots smiling out of their cockpits, looking his own age. There were the castle, the old stone barns, the garden behind its high secret wall, the curving white-gravel drive lined by trees whose names Johnny did not know. . . . Ah, but nearer him were old wood-frame sheds, used long ago for hop drying, now overcome with trumpet vine and ivy, their roofs nearly rotted through and about to collapse;
those
buildings would burn.

He trotted downhill and found himself approaching the creek again. It had twisted about, and now ran through pastureland; in some places its red-clay banks were more than six feet high, in other places—where cattle came to drink—they sloped down gradually into the water. A
Posted: No Trespassing
sign caught his eye. Though he could not decipher the words, could not have named the individual letters, he understood the message.

“Bellefleur,” he whispered.

They could shoot someone like him, if they wished. Out of anger or out of sport. If they wished. If they caught sight of him. There were rumors, ugly tales: wandering dogs shot, fishermen who ignored the posted signs shot at (so Dutch Gerhardt claimed, though he had been fishing Bloody Run high up the mountain, on Bellefleur property, yes, but miles from the house). . . . And then, five or six years ago, when a number of the fruit pickers in the Valley talked of striking, and the young man from downstate who had worked at organizing them and had made so many angry speeches was found badly beaten, blinded in one eye, in a field overlooking the Nautauga River. . . . When Hank Varrell, a friend of Johnny’s nineteen-year-old brother Eddy, made a remark about one of the Bellefleur women—a girl from Bushkill’s Ferry, a distant relative—it somehow got back to the Bellefleurs, and Gideon himself sought Hank out, and would surely have killed him if other people hadn’t been
present
. . . . Johnny shook himself awake. He had been walking along, staring at the ground. When he looked up he saw the pond: he saw sunshine slanted through hemlocks and the golden leaves of mountain maple, reflected in the pond: and he saw the child on the raft, stretched out on his stomach, one finger dipped in the water. He saw the pond and the child at once.

Dark, fine-looking hair. The Bellefleur profile, recognizable even at a distance of some yards: a long Roman nose, deep-set eyes.

“Bellefleur,” Johnny whispered.

Already he staggered from the weight of the rocks. Three or four in his overall pockets, others held clumsily in his arms. He threw the first of them before he called out—but even then he did not speak: the sound was a cry, a jeer, a shriek, mere noise, not quite human.

The boy’s head whipped about. His expression showed an utter blankness of astonishment, beyond fear, beyond even surprise. Johnny ran to the edge of the pond, shouting, and threw another rock. The first had missed, the second struck the boy on one shoulder. That Bellefleur face: Johnny would know it anywhere though this particular boy was small-bodied, and his skin had gone dead-white. Bellefleur! How’d you like your face smashed! How’d you like your fucking head held underwater!

The boy cried out, one hand upraised, and it made Johnny want to laugh—did he think he could protect his precious little face?—his face that was small and delicate as a girl’s? Johnny splashed into the pond and threw another rock, grunting. It missed the boy, it did not even cause much water to fly up, Johnny felt a flame in his belly and groin, he would kill the little bastard, he would show him and all the Bellefleurs— Another rock, a smaller rock, struck the boy on his forehead and knocked him backward; and immediately a stream of bright red blood appeared; and Johnny hesitated, standing now in water up to his knees. His jaw had begun to tremble. He was panting, his shoulders raised and curiously hunched.

“Bellefleur!”
he whispered a third time, leaning forward to spit into the water.

If the boy hadn’t begun to cry, if he hadn’t begun to gasp and whimper and cry like a baby, Johnny might have shown mercy, but he
did
cry, and lay so limply on his side, as if someone had really hurt him, that the flame rose again in Johnny’s belly, whipping up to the back of his throat. He shouted, throwing another rock, and another, and another—and when he paused, blinking sweat out of his eyes, he saw with amazement that the boy was gone: he must have fallen over the side of the raft, and sunk into the pond.

Johnny stood for a moment, staring. He held the last of the rocks in both hands; he could not think what to do with it. Half consciously he reasoned that if he let it drop, it would splash him. . . . But then his pant legs were wet anyway. . . . But if the boy climbed over the side of the raft he would need it to throw at him. . . . But maybe the boy had drowned. . . . Maybe he
had
killed him. . . .

“Hey. Bellefleur,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. He did not speak loudly enough to be heard, even if the boy had surfaced. His voice was cracked and uncertain, as if he had not spoken for some time, and the effort pained him. The back of his throat
was
raw, as if he’d been shouting. “Bellefleur . . . ?”

It might have been a trick. But the boy did not surface. The pond looked fairly deep, its ripples were widening and sprawling out, a few water beetles, terrified by the commotion, were now coming back, and the birds’ silence was filled in by a squirrel’s furious scolding.

Johnny Doan backed away, and let the rock fall to the ground, and turned to run. He was just a boy, a boy with a flushed face and wet overalls and an old cloth cap on his head. The cap flew off, but he missed it at once, and stooped to pick it up, and jammed it hard on his head, pulling it down over his forehead. So he left no evidence behind. So he ran away from Mink Pond, and made his way out to the Innisfail Road some miles to the west, and arrived back at his father’s farm by supper time; and though his jaw trembled faintly and his eyes filled with moisture that was not tears he was drunk with exhilaration, and could not stop grinning.

“Bellefleur,”
he whispered, wiping his nose with the side of his hand, and giggling softly. “You see what we can do!”

The Bellefleur Curse

A
ccording to mountain legend there was a curse on Germaine’s family. (But it wasn’t merely a local legend: it was freely alluded to in the state capital five hundred miles away, and in Washington, D.C.; and when Bellefleur men fought in the Great War they claimed to encounter soldiers who knew them by name, by reputation, and who shrank away in superstitious dread—You’ll bring misfortune on all of us, they were told.)

But no one knew what the curse was.

Or why it was, or who—or what—had pronounced it.

THERE’S A CURSE
on us, Yolande said listlessly on the eve of her running away. There’s a curse on us and now I know what it is, she said. But it was to Germaine she spoke, and Germaine was at that time only one year old.

There is no such thing as a curse, Leah said. If we want to hold onto our sanity we have to cleanse ourselves of these ridiculous old
superstitions
. . . . Don’t ever say such things in my presence! (But this was much later. After her pregnancy with Germaine, after the birth of Germaine. As a young girl and even as a married woman Leah had frequently behaved in a superstitious manner, though she would have been angry if anyone in the family had taken note.)

The older Bellefleurs—grandfather Noel, grandmother Cornelia, great-grandmother Elvira, aunt Veronica, uncle Hiram, aunt Matilde, Leah’s mother Della, Jean-Pierre, and the rest—and of course all the dead—knew very well that there was a curse; and though as younger men and women they might have excited themselves speculating on the nature of the curse, at the present time they were silent on the subject. You can embody a curse without being able to articulate it, uncle Hiram said not long before his death. Like a silver-haired bat carries the distinguishing marks of his species on his back.

Gideon once said, with a thoughtfulness uncharacteristic of him, that the curse was a terribly simple one: Bellefleur men die interesting deaths. They rarely die in bed.

They never die in bed! Ewan said with a boastful laugh. (For
he
planned not to die—however and whenever he died—in any sort of bed.)

Bellefleur men die absurd deaths, grandmother Della said flatly. (She was thinking, perhaps, of her husband Stanton’s death, one Christmas Eve long ago: and of her own father’s death; and there was great-grandfather Raphael, who died of natural causes, but had determined by the terms of his will that his body be grotesquely mutilated after his death.) The men die absurd deaths, Della said, and the women are fated to survive them and mourn them.

They don’t die absurd deaths, they die necessary deaths, uncle Hiram said pedantically. (For he himself had escaped death innumerable times—in the Great War, and in countless accidents over the years, suffered as a consequence of his sleepwalking affliction, which no physician could cure.)
Everything that transpires in this universe transpires out of necessity, however brutal.

It was pointed out that great-great-great-grandfather Jedediah, whom everyone considered a saint, died an extraordinarily peaceful death within a few years of his wife Germaine: he simply dropped off to sleep on the eve of his 101st birthday, in the simple bed with the pine posts and the old horsehair mattress he insisted upon, in the servants’ wing (his narrow, rather dark room had been intended as a valet’s room, but he insisted upon having it—the handsomer, more pretentious rooms made him uneasy); his last words, though cryptic,
The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured,
were nevertheless uttered with a beatific smile. And there was a Bellefleur named Samuel, a son of Raphael’s, who disappeared in one of the castle’s more spacious rooms—and he too was never found. (He was spirited away in the Turquoise Room, now called the Room of Contamination, and shut off forever from the Bellefleur children who would have loved to explore it.) A long time ago there were whispers that great-aunt Veronica had died, after a lengthy wasting illness, during which her beautiful complexion grew waxen, and her eyes became luminous in their shadowed sockets; but the rumor was obviously absurd because great-aunt Veronica was still living, in superb health, even somewhat plump in recent years, and marvelously youthful for her age. Among the women, Raphael’s unhappy wife Violet
did
die an unusual death, it was thought for love: she simply walked into Lake Noir one night when Raphael was away and no one was attending her: and her body was never recovered. And there were, of course, the early, unfortunate deaths—Jean-Pierre and his son Louis, and Louis’s three children, and his brother Harlan, about whom so little was known; and Raphael’s brother Arthur, the diffident, stubborn Arthur, who died in an attempt to rescue John Brown; and there were others, innumerable others, most of them children, who died of diseases like scarlet fever and typhoid and pneumonia and smallpox and influenza and whooping cough. . . .