Bellefleur (82 page)

He then sat back to wait.

But there was little waiting: within a half-hour the rats appeared.

From out of cellars, walls, closets, cupboards, from out of drawers, from out of haylofts, from beneath floorboards, from inside overstuffed cushions and pillows, from out of the larder, from out of Raphael’s leather-bound library, came the rats—squeaking, clawing, their eyes glittering, mad with thirst. Some were more than a foot long, some were pink hairless babies. All ran, scuttling crazily, tumbling over one another, scrambling, screeching, their toenails clicking on the floors, their whiskers abristle. How thirsty they were! Desperate with thirst! Mad! Maddened! They fought one another viciously to get to the water, and plunged headfirst into it, and in their maniacal eagerness to drink some of them were actually drowned. What a screeching and a squeaking! No one had ever heard anything like it before.

Streams of rats and mice and shrews, jostling one another blindly, thumping about inside walls until, finding a hole or a soft spot, they pushed through with their heads, and forced their way out, and ran to the water. . . . The Bellefleurs, astonished, climbed atop furniture, even crouched on the dining room table of the Great Hall, staring at the writhing jabbering creatures. So many! Who would have thought there were so many! And how violently thirsty they were, how greedily they drank, drank and drank and drank, as if their thirst could never be quenched! No one had ever seen anything remotely like it before.

And then, after a brief time, the convulsions began.

The living bodies bloated, second by second, balloonlike, and soon they were flinging themselves about, rolling over and over, screaming and clawing and slashing. They writhed, they foamed at the mouth. Their legs paddled crazily. Their high-pitched squeals grew ever more frantic until the Bellefleurs, panicked, had to press their hands over their ears to keep from screaming themselves.

How strange a sight, how hideously fascinating, the creatures’ swollen bodies! Stomachs bloated white, the skin stretched to bursting; legs flailing about as if they were drowning; stiffening tails. Death leapt invisibly from one to the other, touching a whiskered chin here, a balloon-stomach there, until, after some time, after many minutes of agony, the last of the beasts lay still. Now their tongues protruded, and were also bloated; and very pink. In death the larger of the creatures resembled human infants.

Nightshade, wearing thigh-high fishing boots, walked among them gingerly, picking them up one by one by their tails and putting them in gunnysacks. If a rat was not yet
entirely
dead Nightshade stepped on its belly, pressing down firmly, with immediate results. (Some of the Bellefleurs hid their eyes. Others gazed upon the horror as if they could not turn aside. A few had grown deathly ill, but were incapable of vomiting: they merely stared, helpless, too weak to move.) Though Nightshade worked quickly and efficiently, and though not one of the rodents resisted him, or crawled away to hide, the task took him a considerable period of time.

Each of the gunnysacks held between fifty to one hundred rodents, depending upon their size. (The Norway rats were, of course, enormous, but the shrews were smaller than mice.) And there were thirty-seven sacks all told.

Thirty-seven sacks!

Leah said, when Nightshade approached her, bowing, rather pale from his day-long exertions, that she would have liked him to have
warned
the family; of course they had had no idea so many rodents lived in the castle. It was rather upsetting, she said, in a voice that faltered, it was rather upsetting . . . for the older Bellefleurs especially. All that scrambling and squeaking and jabbering, and those hideous, agonizing deaths! It had been quite repulsive, really. “If only you had warned us, Nightshade,” Leah said.

Nightshade bowed even lower. After a long moment he dared raise his eyes to the hem of her skirt. “But Miss Leah is not displeased, is she?” he whispered.

“Oh—well—
Displeased!
” She halfway laughed.

“Perhaps I acted imprudently,” Nightshade murmured, “but the rats
are
dead. As you have seen.”

“Yes. Indeed. As I have seen.”

“And so—Miss Leah is not displeased with me?”

“I suppose not. I suppose you’ve done a good job.”

“A good job?”

“—excellent job,” Leah said faintly. For a moment she felt nauseous: the walls and ceiling reeled, and a rich dark dank odor wafted to her from the hunched-over little man. “Still,” she said, “we were all so taken unawares—we would have thought, you know, that our cats—”

“Ah, well,” said Nightshade with a sudden wide smile, stretching from ear to ear, “
your
cats—! Not, you know, with
these
rats.”

The thirty-seven gunnysacks, filled to bursting and smartly tied with rope, soon disappeared. What Nightshade did with them no one knew, nor did Leah want to ask.

The Spirit of Lake Noir

O
nce upon a time, the children were told in whispers, a terrible thing happened. It would have been a terrible thing had it happened to anyone; but it happened to
us.

On an October night in the year 1825, in the settlement beginning to be known as Bushkill’s Ferry—

BUT SHOULD THE
children be told, generation after generation?

Is anything gained? What is gained?

What is lost?

But they must be told!

But why must they be told, if it terrifies them?—if it makes the young ones whimper in their sleep, and the older ones restless with thoughts of revenge?

—IN THE SETTLEMENT
known as Bushkill’s Ferry, in the old log-and-brick house Jean-Pierre and Louis had built, six persons were murdered in cold blood, without warning: Jean-Pierre and his forty-year-old Onondagan mistress, Antoinette; and Louis (then forty-six) and his three children, Jacob, Bernard, and Arlette. Louis’s two dogs—a mongrel retriever and a collie with one clouded eye—were also killed, with clubs, and for some inexplicable reason (the killers later blamed the Lake Noir air) the retriever was crudely decapitated with a hunting knife. And then the house, sprinkled with gasoline, was set afire.

The five horses in the stable were spared.

It was on account of the fire—the murderers’ fatal blunder—that Louis’s wife Germaine was saved: she had been left for dead, and the fire naturally attracted neighbors, who broke in and rescued her. (An accident, really, that they located her at all, for she was lying where she’d fallen, against the bedroom wall, between the wall and the bloodsoaked bed where Louis’s badly mutilated body lay.)

So Germaine survived. Despite her injuries (deep cuts and lacerations on her face and torso, a broken collarbone, a cracked pelvis, a slight concussion), and the unspeakable terror she must have endured. As soon as she regained consciousness she cried out the names of the murderers—those five of the eight or nine she had recognized, despite their burlap masks and women’s clothing: the Indian trader Rabin, and the Varrells; Reuben, Wallace, Myron, and Silas. She was able not only to identify the men but to give testimony against them at their trial.

She was thirty-four years old at the time of the massacre, and she was to live, as another Bellefleur’s wife, for twenty-two more years. Unless she was pointed out
(That woman, you see, there, that woman is Germaine Bellefleur, her husband and three children were murdered before her eyes. .
. .
)
no one would have guessed that the stout, rosy-cheeked, graying woman had lived through such an ordeal: she seemed so ready to
smile.
Indeed, perhaps she smiled too frequently. Sudden noises always frightened her, of course, and she became hysterical if a dog’s baying continued for too long. But she appeared quite normal. She even had other children, three other children, as if to replace the ones she had lost. God sent you these children, it’s a sign from God, two boys and a girl, wasn’t it two boys and a girl you lost, people whispered, but Germaine did not reply. She did not say with a contemptuous laugh, What a fool you are, to talk of God!—my husband and I saw to these babies, and nobody else. She did not say, You dare not speak of my dead children, or of me; you know nothing about us. She nodded slowly as if thinking, and smiled her pleasant shadowless smile. There was an attractive brown mole beside her left eye.

DO YOU FORGIVE
those who have sinned against you? the minister asked.

Yes, said Germaine. And added in a low voice: Since they are all dead.

BUT SHOULD THE
children be told, generation after generation?

Vernon, a child of seven, held his ears. Did not want to hear.

But they must be told! They must understand the secret workings of the world—the fact that, once someone has injured you, he will never forgive you.

THERE WERE, NEVERTHELESS,
Bellefleurs who winced at the very mention of the name
Varrell,
not because they wanted vengeance (for the time for that was long past: weren’t most of the Varrells dead, and those who remained scattered and impoverished, mere white trash), but because they were ashamed of being linked to such primitive behavior. The old Lake Noir
settlement
—hunters and trappers and traders and lumbercamp workers—a single muddy street in which stray dogs prowled, and were shot for sport by men on horseback—kegs of corn-mash whiskey—the taverns—the drunken fistfights—the frequent stabbings and shootings—arson—crude bullying animal-men who were (so Raphael realized, years later)
almost
not to be blamed for their violent behavior since most of them, it seemed, were mentally impaired: they had the intelligence of eleven- or twelve-year-olds.

In England, where Raphael was to search for five months before finding, in a quiet country village, the eighteen-year-old Violet Odlin, people frequently asked him about the “blood feuds” of his native country. Was it true, they inquired, that families warred against one another until, one by one, all their members were destroyed? Raphael answered stiffly that such behavior was eccentric even in the West—even in the Far West—where civilization had not yet firmly established itself. But most of the citizens of my native country, Raphael said, in an inflectionless voice from which all traces of a Chautauquan accent had been eradicated, are not, of course,
native
to the country.

VERNON HELD HIS
ears though the other boys mocked him. And afterward he dreamt he was in his closet, in the dark, and someone was searching for him, heavy-footed, speaking his name in a sly voice, Vernon, little Vernon, where are you, where are you, under your bedclothes? under your bed? or are you hiding in your closet? He had coiled upon himself to make himself as small as possible. And he
was
small—about the size of a cat. Are you in your closet, is that where you are?—so the voice ran on, and suddenly there was a terrible sound, as the prongs of a pitchfork came crashing through the door. And he screamed and screamed in his sleep and woke, screaming. (Though Arlette had not been stabbed to death in her closet. They had dragged her out, and she was to die, in fact, the most merciful of the deaths, in the kitchen of the old house.)

But the other boys, their faces dark with blood, prematurely adult in their anger, wanted to hear—wanted to hear—wanted to hear everything. And then they interrupted one another, shouting. Why hadn’t great-uncle Louis known this would happen! Why hadn’t he killed them first! Reuben and Wallace and Myron and Silas, and Rabin and his brother-in-law too, and Wiley, the “peace officer,” and the others—whoever they were— Why hadn’t he guessed what they would do, and killed them first, in secret? Hadn’t he a shotgun near his bed? Why did he believe, even for a confused half-minute, that there was a lawman among that party, with a warrant for his arrest? (There were things for which Louis Bellefleur was not altogether blameless. Fines, for instance, which he had refused to pay, just as his father had refused to answer a certain summons issued by the justice of the county court at Nautauga Falls, having to do with suspected fraud—since the heavily mortgaged Chattaroy Hall, at White Sulphur Springs, had burnt down not long before, insured for $200,000.) Why had the poor man
almost
raised his hands so that his wrists might be shackled—hadn’t he seen, despite his grogginess and the confusion of the moment (but it was thought too that he might be blind in his right eye, since the eyelid was always somewhat lowered, and the entire right side of his face was paralyzed) that the men who had broken into his house and into his bedroom, at two in the morning, were wearing masks, and women’s clothing?—and thigh-high rubber boots?

He had put up a ferocious struggle, the boys were told. Though at once his attackers took out their knives, and one appeared in the doorway with the pitchfork (Louis’s own pitchfork), and of course he was doomed.

But why hadn’t he killed them all
first!
the boys cried.

AT FIRST GERMAINE
said that the men had all worn women’s clothing. Then she changed her mind—she thought maybe they hadn’t—only three or four of them—coarse feed-meal skirts that fell just below their knees, revealing their boots. And had they
all
worn masks, burlap masks, with crude holes for eyes? She thought they had—or some of them—yes, they had—all of them—
all
of them. Because she hadn’t seen any faces. Their faces had all been hidden.

She told her story so many times, certain details dropped away, and others suddenly appeared, she stammered and went silent and began again, and wept, and lay back fainting on the pillows, and even those who knew very well what had happened at the Bellefleur home that night (and knew, even, who the unidentified men were) began to say that maybe she had made it up. Made up, that is, the murderers’ identities.

Here is a theory: complete strangers might very well have ridden up to the Bellefleur house under cover of darkness, having been attracted by its spruce-lined drive and its size (for it was by far the largest private home in Bushkill’s Ferry at that time), or by old Jean-Pierre’s reputation (by now
The Almanack of Riches,
though shamelessly derived from Franklin’s
Almanack,
had gone into its sixtieth printing; and the fire at the White Sulphur Springs spa had acquired a certain statewide notoriety; and Jean-Pierre’s oscillating fortunes at horse racing were a matter of common knowledge)—complete strangers, perhaps men from the city, might very well have committed the murders, intending to rob the family and changing their minds at the last minute; and Louis’s wife, so brutally beaten, and terrified, might have
imagined
she could recognize voices. . . .