Bellefleur (80 page)

Clouds drifted idly downward out of the night sky, below the icy peaks of the mountains, down, downward, below the timberline. As mists rose from secret steaming rivers. The bowels of the earth, hidden from sight. In all this, Jedediah noted, there was a willful absence, for God refused to show His face. Though his servant Jedediah had been kneeling in expectation for many seasons.

God, you would not force me to beg. .
. .
You would not force me to grovel. .
. .

Aurora borealis, seen always for the first time. A stilled frenzy of light. What had its beauty, its unfathomable incalculable beauties, Jedediah wondered spitefully, to do with God? Did God, indeed, dwell in that beauty? In that “sky”?

The northern lights faded. Eventually the pitch-dark night returned, and obliterated all memory. Spirits, hidden by the mists, roamed freely. Did as they chose. Mocking, jeering, fondling one another’s bodies. The most intimate caresses. The most obscene whispers.

Was God there, Jedediah wondered. In that? In those creatures?

He had climbed back into the sky, after months of wandering as a penitent. All that he had seen—the men and women he had encountered, and had tried to convince of God’s love—the actions God had forced him to take, often against his own wishes: all closed over now, and was obliterated, for the Holy Mountain had nothing to do with the flatland. Memory sank. The past closed over. Only Jedediah remained. And God.

Sin, Jedediah saw, tugged more powerfully at God than love. Sin demanded that God show His face while love, mere love, begged.

Sin. Love. God.

But as he was God’s servant he could not commit sin. God gave him no freedom. He wondered, kneeling, in his night-long vigil, if he was then incapable of love.

Even his fury for the demon who had ousted Henofer’s soul from his body swiftly died. For Henofer, no doubt, had complied in that obscenity. He was not to be pitied. The demon, cast out of his body, had probably slipped away under cover of the ravine’s shadows, and the turbulence of the stream. It would push its way into another body and soon be at home. The smugness of evil, Jedediah thought. While I kneel on this ledge. Begging. My joints are stiff and my bones ache and there are such sharp stinging pains in my belly that I want only to double up, to grovel in Your sight. . . . Which would please You, wouldn’t it!

. .
. Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my father’s children. .
. .
O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation. Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me. .
. .
And hide not thy face; for I am in trouble; hear me speedily. Draw night unto my soul, and redeem it. .
. .

Hide not thy face.

Hide not thy face.

IT WAS SHORTLY
after Jedediah’s return to his cabin on Mount Blanc (which he saw, without emotion, had been left untouched—his enemies were too clever to step unwittingly into the traps he had fashioned for them), in a weatherless calm that belonged as easily to late winter as to late fall, that he took upon himself the task, the great task, the fearful task, the task for which he had come to the mountains so very long ago, despite the ridicule of his family: to look upon God’s face.

To know, to love, and to serve. But before all these, to
look.

So he knelt on his ledge in a muttered frenzy of prayer so passionate the mountain spirits did not dare approach him, not even to jab him under the arms or between the legs, or to blow into his ears; he knelt, and clasped his hands before him, and bowed his head, as one must. And he prayed and waited, and prayed, and waited, and again he prayed, throughout the night, and waited, waited, praying all the while, as indeed he had been praying for years, without counting the seasons, without knowing the seasons, praying and waiting, waiting and praying, praying, for he was Jedediah, waiting, always waiting, patient for too long, humble in prayer, humble in waiting, God’s servant, God’s child, an emaciated bearded hollow-eyed creature whose breath stank and whose body was crusted over with a film of grime that only a hard-bristled brush might erase.

That night, that terrible night, Jedediah knelt on his ledge on his mountain and whispered to God to show His face, for it was the last time he would grovel before His indifference: and his voice rose as if dislodged from him, as queer needle-sharp pains passed through his stomach and abdomen, leaving him chilled, then perspiring, then chilled so suddenly and so thoroughly his body shook.
O God my God,
he whimpered, bent forward, steadying himself with both hands on the rock until the pain subsided. Then he began again, speaking in a normal voice. Quickly and rationally. As if nothing were amiss. As if conversing, merely conversing, with God. With God Who was Himself rational, and Who listened with infinite patience and concentration.

Then suddenly the pain returned, but now it was one, then two, then three fist-sized rocks edging sideways, to the left, through his guts.

He could not believe the pain. It soared beyond what one could measure. A cry was torn from his lips but it was a cry of sheer surprise, for the pain itself could not be uttered.

O my God—

Swift as a knife blade something pierced his belly, slicing down through his abdomen, the very pit of his abdomen, which had come alive with agony. It writhed, it coiled, it had come alive, furiously alive, as Jedediah clutched at himself, staring sightless at what would have been the sky. He could not, he could not believe, he could not believe the pain, he was now whimpering like a child, as something bubbled and swelled to bursting, swelling larger and larger, to bursting, in his guts. What was happening—! What must he do—! His numbed fingers tore at his frayed belt and at the buttons of his trousers, and he managed to lower his trousers, despite the agony that had doubled him nearly in two, for it was quite simply an attack—an attack of the flu—a sudden diarrhea—a storm erupting in his body that had nothing to do with
him.

O God, help—

He had lowered his trousers just in time: his insides voided themselves hotly, splattering on the sacred rock, and the stench that arose nearly overpowered him.

Squatting, he hobbled away, his trousers caught about his ankles, his body covered with a thin fine stinging film of sweat. He could not believe, he could not
believe
. . . The agony in his belly bubbled again, and swelled, swelled to the size of a watermelon, and he began to groan as much in terror of it (for it was alive—it was not him, it was alive) as in pain. Gaseous balls pushed their way through his intestines until once again his insides gave way, and the storm was unleashed: more violent, more pitiless, than the first.

His face was afire. The pores stung with tiny flames. Every quill of hair arose, in astonishment.
God,
he begged,
what is happening—

He tried to rise, to straighten, so that he might flee this despoiled place. But a convulsion ran through him. He clutched at his belly, falling forward. And on his hands and knees, his trousers still caught about his ankles, he crawled a few yards . . . until another convulsion ran through him, rattling the teeth in his head. He was chilled, he was freezing, yet at the same time a furious flame passed over him, and his mouth was suddenly so dry he could not swallow. Foul air was released: so very foul, so inestimably foul, that his lungs closed; he could not breathe.

His guts were livid with pain. Coils and writhings. He squatted, his head clenched between his hands, and rocked back and forth in his agony, waiting. But though he was sick, unutterably sick, the poison would not pass from him.
God, God,
he begged, but nothing at all happened: he merely waited, his outspread fingers pressed against his burning cheeks. He was a child, an infant, an animal stunned with pain.

Nothing mattered now except voiding himself: emptying his guts of the lavalike mass packed inside him.

Tears ran down his face. His body too wept—his torso, his thighs. Something hellish had sprung into life inside his very being and he could not, he could not free himself of it, he was subordinate to it, humiliated, craven, waiting half-naked to be delivered. He would have uttered God’s name except the suffering was such, so suddenly, that he could not grasp any word: language dissolved into sheer animal sounds. He wept, he whimpered, he cried aloud. He rocked on his poor shriveled haunches.

Now his entire body ached. Now his soul fled his body, affrighted. His torso was slick with sweat, his thighs and bony hips, his slender, hard, tensed legs. He must free himself and yet he could not. The bubbling swelling pain grew larger, there was a terrible pressure inside him, yet he could not defecate, he could not free himself, he had no control.

Then, suddenly, the pressure rose until it forced itself out of him, erupting with a vicious unearthly heat. And again the sacred rock was splattered with his sick, watery, abominable feces.

Scalding-hot, and a hideous odor. He had never known such an odor in his lifetime.

Panting, he crawled away. He crawled blindly. The pressure had subsided, his bowels felt empty, suddenly his fever was gone and he shivered with cold, his teeth chattered with cold, he had wanted to return to his cabin but the cabin was behind him, he was crawling instead to a narrow stream that trickled down from the mountain, so that he might wash—so that he might cleanse himself.

He plunged his hands and face into the icy-cold water.

Now the cold shook him, now the cold passed through him, so that his entire body was wracked with shivering. He must get to his cabin. He must get there, and sleep, in the safety of his cabin, by his fire, and in the morning he would be restored to himself, and his soul would have returned to his body. . . .

He gathered strength. And tried to stand erect. Slowly. Shakily. But a faint tinge of pain, or was it merely the expectation of pain, frightened him, and he froze, bent, crouched low as an animal. Ah, God no, no, it could not be happening
again.

But it happened again. Another diarrhetic spasm. Another ferocious loosening of his bowels, so that the scalding watery excrement ran down his thighs and legs. Then there were great soft chunks. Coils, streams. So sick. So sick. The stench was overwhelming, he felt faint, he was in danger of
fainting
. . . . Swift excruciating knife blades of pain. So that his body twisted as if desperate to escape. But it could not escape for the hell was within it.

His eyeballs went blind. His mind was an utter blank. Not a thought remained, not an image, not the feeblest of desires. He had become sheer sensation, an animal crouched on the mountainside, given over wholly to the flesh. Where
Jedediah
had been now only streams and coils of scalding excrement remained.

And so the night passed. The interminable night.

Hour upon hour. The spasms in his belly, followed by bouts of faintness and shivering, when he lay on the ground, too weak to crawl back to his shelter. Then another spasm, another explosive liquid-hot attack: his bowels rumbling with a foul gaseous thunder: his body wracked with pain. Hour upon hour upon hour. No end to it. No mercy. During periods of relative lucidity his mind called forth appalling images of food: food devoured and digested: devoured and digested and turned to excrement, to be voided with rage. He had imagined, these past years, that he had fasted; he had brought his body’s humiliating needs under the dominion of his will; but in reality he had gorged like any animal. He had stuffed himself, ravenously, wishing to turn everything into food to be digested in
his
entrails. And now he must suffer for it.

. . . Another sudden contraction of the bowels. A lightning-flash of pain. And though he would have believed, had he been capable of thinking, that his poor writhing body was by this time purged, there was another, still another, explosive outpour . . .

He gagged. He wept. He hid his face.

Such pain. Such sickness. Horror. Stench. Helplessness. Shame. Hour upon hour.
Jedediah
who was no more than this, all along. He saw that his entire lifetime, not simply these years on the mountain, had been nothing more than an organism’s process, an ongoing ceaseless remorseless insatiable
process
—the gluttonous ingorging of food, the digesting of food, the voiding of food, writhing, seething, bubbling with its own ferocious life, not
his,
nothing human, nothing with a name, to which, nevertheless, the name
Jedediah
had been given. What a mockery, that endless stream of food and excrement, given a human name! So much was packed up inside him. Hellish. Burning. And were there worms in his guts, were there thin white slugs crawling dazed in the liquid shit he had voided all across the mountainside . . . ?

He had not the courage to look. Though of course he
had
looked, without seeing. And the excrement was alive with them. Of course. The excrement
was
them, as it was himself.

So the night passed, and the attacks came upon him, hour upon hour, without mercy. Until his pelvic bones jutted through his skin and his belly and abdomen were hollow and a thin, cold, morning breeze sifted through his pain-wracked head. There was not a word left, not a syllable, not a sound! The organism that was himself had not died, nor was it living.

SO GOD SHOWED
His face to His servant Jedediah, and forever afterward kept His distance.

The Autumn Pond

W
hether on account of the extraordinary dryness of the season (for everywhere farmers lamented, and day by day the pine woods grew more brittle and more susceptible to fire), or whether it had something to do with the fruit pickers’ children romping and splashing and tearing in their brief delirium (for they had, Raphael discovered to his horror, not only torn out water lilies and cattails and marsh marigold: they had also littered the pond’s banks with the carcasses of hundreds of bullfrogs, which they had evidently caught by hand and dashed against tree trunks, or against one another); or whether, as rumor had it throughout the Valley, secret mining operations in the Mount Kittery area were having a deleterious effect upon streams in the foothills, including Mink Creek, which fed into Mink Pond; or whether it was simply the case that the pond was aging, and must, like all aging, dying ponds, begin to contract upon itself, choked with more and more vegetation (and he saw, baffled more than dismayed, how willows now grew nearly everywhere—they had marched across the pond and met in the middle and struggled for dominion of the rich mucky bottom, crowding out even the bulrushes), so that only small shallow regions of open water remained, hardly more than puddles, cut off from one another with creatures trapped inside them—a few pickerel, a water snake, the last largemouth bass, which must have weighed twenty pounds, but was beginning now to turn belly-up, and would die within a few days: or whether this was simply Raphael’s punishment for having loved something so much, so much more than his family: he did not know. But the pond was obviously dying.