Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But I wasn’t mocking anyone, Raphael protested.

  Mink Pond. Where the very air was gentle with listening. Should he whisper aloud it heard him, it did not question or challenge his words, it was his secret, his alone. He sometimes crouched for hours in the waist-high rushes, watching dragonflies and fisher spiders and whirligig beetles, which were tireless. That they existed struck him from time to time as extraordinarily amazing. And that he existed in the same world as they . . . His mind drifted free of shore. It skittered across the surface of the water with the insects, or sank slowly to the bottom of the pond, darkening as it sank; but he felt no apprehension with the approach of this darkness, which was so different from the darkness of his room in the manor with its high ceiling and drafty windows and odor of dust and anger. Is there anything in the world you love more than that pond of yours, Raphael’s mother Lily asked him, stooping to kiss his warm forehead, not guessing the truth that lay hidden in her words: just as the leopard frogs lay hidden in the grasses at the very edge of the pond, and leapt noisily into the water when he approached.

  YET IT HAPPENED, one cold October afternoon within a week of Mahalaleel’s arrival at the manor, that Raphael nearly drowned in his pond.

  Nearly was drowned, that is. For he was set upon, as he lay dreaming on his raft, by a boy named Johnny Doan whom he hardly knew.

  The Doan boy was fifteen years old, from a family of eight children who lived on a five-acre farm several miles south of the main Bellefleur property, on the outskirts of the little village of Bellefleur (which was hardly more than a railroad depot and a few stores, since the granary had closed down). Many years ago the Doans—women and children as well as men—labored in Raphael Bellefleur’s enormous hop fields; indeed, they were brought to the Nautauga Valley for that reason, along with other workers, and housed in barracks-style buildings with tin roofs and only the most rudimentary kind of plumbing, at the edge of the fields. At one time, at Raphael’s peak, he employed more than three hundred workers, and drew a crop from over six hundred acres—it was said in the state (not altogether truthfully) that the Bellefleur hop plantation was the largest in the world at that time. Raphael himself took pride in the quality of his hops, which he claimed was far more subtle than that of hops planted on lower ground (in Germany, for instance), and in the discipline with which his foremen treated the workers. I am not here on earth to be loved, he frequently told his wife Violet, but to be respected. And so indeed he was not loved by his workers, or even by his foremen, or managers, or distributors, or associates, or the three or four other extraordinarily wealthy landowners in the Chautauquas—but he was certainly respected.

  Hop-growing days in the Valley were long past, but a considerable number of the descendants of the Bellefleur workers were scattered throughout the region. Some worked at the big canning factories in Nautauga Falls and Fort Hanna, where tomatoes, pickles, peas, and various citrus fruits underwent processing; the Bellefleur family owned part of Valley Products, the largest company. Some worked at odd jobs and seasonal labor, and could always rely upon welfare and unemployment insurance in the cities, while a number had done fairly well for themselves, acquiring over the years small farms of their own—though these farms did not generally encompass the richest valley land, which was owned by the Bellefleurs or the Steadmans or the Fuhrs. Some of the descendants of Raphael Bellefleur’s workers were now under contract to Noel Bellefleur and his sons, as tenant farmers; or they worked in sawmills and granaries in Innisfail and Fort Hanna; or, like the Doans, they hired themselves out for harvesting, or fruit picking, or day labor of one kind or another (the digging of irrigation ditches, the construction of outbuildings), though Gideon Bellefleur preferred to import workers from the South, or from Canada, or even from one of the Indian reservations, since he had come to the conclusion recently that local labor could not be relied upon. If a worker did not work a full day, he would not receive a full day’s wage. A man who contracts to do a job and doesn’t pull his own weight is a common thief, Gideon often said. The Doans also tried to make a living from their scrubby little farm, growing wheat, corn, sickly-looking soybeans, and raising a small herd of cows. They had no idea of how to keep the topsoil from drying out and blowing away, or perhaps they had no interest in such things, so naturally their farm was turning to dust and in another few years they would be unable to pay their mortgage and the farm and the farm equipment (such as it was) and the house (a two-story shingle-board shanty with a tarpaper roof, and bales of hay dragged untidily up against the cement-block foundation, for warmth over the long winters) would be sold at auction, and the Doans would disappear into one of the cities to the south, perhaps Nautauga Falls, or Port Oriskany, and no one would hear of them again. . . .

  Johnny Doan was the third of five boys, and despite the poor diet of fatty meat and starches and refined sugar Mrs. Doan fed them he had grown to the size of a mature man by the age of fifteen. His wide shoulders were always slumped, and he carried his rather small head somewhat forward, so that he appeared to be staring suspiciously into the dirt. He lazed about his father’s farm, dull-eyed, weasel-faced, his pale limp hair falling across his forehead, a filthy gray cotton cap with the initials IH (International Harvester) loosely set upon his head. Whenever anyone outside the family greeted him he revealed tobacco-stained teeth in a quick, half-mocking smile, but he never replied; it was thought by some that he liked to play dumb, and by others that he was slightly retarded. Of course he had been allowed to quit the county school at the age of thirteen, in order to work for his father.

  But he did not work for his father regularly. Nor did his older brothers. They drove about the countryside, when they could afford gas. They took odd jobs, but quit after receiving the first week’s wages. In his dirty bib overalls, shirtless, sometimes barefoot, or wearing old mud-splattered boots, Johnny Doan was a familiar figure in the village of Bellefleur; and he was sometimes sighted along country roads some miles from home, simply walking, alone, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his undersized head slightly bowed. Answering a complaint made by the father of a child attending the small public school in Bellefleur, the sheriff of Nautauga County drove out to the Doans’ one Sunday afternoon, and spoke with Johnny and his father (about, it was said, Johnny’s bullying of younger children), and after that Johnny rarely appeared in the village, though he was seen as frequently as ever walking the country roads, cutting through pastures, squatting by the sides of ditches, utterly alone, companionless, the gray cap perched atop his head, his expression flaccid and content. Hello, Johnny, a friend of Mr. Doan’s might call out heartily, d’you want a ride somewhere?—are you going somewhere?—slowing his car or pick-up truck so that Johnny might catch up. But the stained teeth showed themselves in an empty grin, and the blank brown eyes kept themselves blank, and Johnny never condescended to accept a ride. It might have been the case that he hadn’t any destination.

  One afternoon he threw the pitchfork down in the manure of the puddled barnyard, and walked away. Trotted away. Through his father’s scrubby pastureland where outcroppings of rock jarred the eye, through a neighbor’s cornfield, where dried stalks rustled with his passage, along a clayey dirt road lifting into the foothills. It was not the child Raphael Bellefleur he intended to injure, and not even the Bellefleur girls he wanted to spy upon—pretty Yolande, pretty Vida!—and Gideon Bellefleur’s wife, the one with the red-brown hair and the squarish chin and the high, heavy breasts, yes, that one!—nor did he want to encounter the Bellefleur boys, whom he wisely feared. It was the castle he wanted to see. He had seen it several times already, and he wanted to see it again. And the lake. All of the Bellefleur property was posted against trespassers and he wanted to trespass and so he trotted along through fields of wild grass and beggarweed and broom sedge and willow bushes, changing himself into a dog, his tongue lolling, his head carried slightly forward so that his shoulders hunched. It was a bright chilly October day. He came to Mink Creek and followed it downstream
for a while, not wanting to get his paws wet; fearing the swift current; excited by the hilly land on the other side. At last he came to a shallow bend, where Bellefleur children had placed large flat stepping-stones, and so he trotted across, and leapt to the other side. He was a long-tailed yellowish creature, part hound and part beagle. His tongue was a moist pink, his gums were a very dark grape. His teeth were stained brown but were still quite sharp.

  Bellefleur Cemetery atop a grassy overgrown hill. A wrought-iron fence, badly rusted. A pretentious wrought-iron gate, its bottom spikes stuck in the earth, unmoved for years. He lifted his left hind leg and urinated on the gate, then trotted inside and urinated on the first of the gravestones. Marble, angels, crosses, granite, moss and lichen and a small jungle of ferns. Earthenware crockery set atop graves. The dried carcasses of plants, flowers. He sniffed at a large square marker with a perfectly smooth, gleaming front and rough, irregular edges; but of course he could not read the legend. The long grasses stirred. There were hoarse whispers, there were muffled shouts. He was frightened but would not bolt. His shoulders lifted slightly, his nose sank to the ground, the skin over his prominent ribs rippled, but he would not bolt, the Bellefleurs would not scare him away. Instead he trotted deliberately to what looked like a small house: a temple some fifteen feet high, with four columns, and angels and crosses carved about its border, and another legend in foot-high letters which he could not read and did not wish to read, knowing it said no more than Bellefleur, and bragged of someone dead who would be resurrected. Johnny paused for a long minute to inspect a queer stunted figure with the head of a dog—was it a dog?—was the thing an angel?—guarding the entrance to the temple. He sniffed at it, and then lifted his hind leg again, and trotted contemptuously on.

  Near one of the freshest mounds he kicked over several clay urns, which broke into large startled pieces. He seized a tiny flag, an American flag, in his teeth, and tried to shred it. You see what I can do, he said. You see what the Doans can do. With one of the clay shards he tried to scratch his name on an ebony-black gravestone but the clay wasn’t sharp enough. He would need a chisel, and a hammer. . . .

  You see what the Doans can do!

  But suddenly he was frightened. He didn’t know if he had spoken aloud or not. It was difficult for him to determine what was shouted, what was whispered, what was only shaped in his own thoughts, silently, and maybe the Bellefleurs were listening, maybe one of their hired men was patrolling the cemetery and would fire upon him . . . ? The land was forbidden land as everyone knew. It was posted against all trespassers and there was a rumor that the Bellefleur boys shot at intruders with .22’s, just for the fun of it; and the county court would never convict them, the sheriff would never even arrest them. . . .

  He was frightened and angry too. First the wave of fear, and then a stronger wave of anger. He pushed at one of the old crosses; but he could not dislodge it. It was so old, the dates were 1853–1861, they meant nothing to him, really, except that the body beneath the sunken earth must be nothing more than bones, just lying there helpless gazing up at him, nothing more than bones, he giggled, exhilarated, and lifted his leg again to urinate. They said there were spirits but he didn’t believe in spirits. He didn’t believe in spirits in the daytime, and when the sky was clear.

  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.