She was so surprised, she did not even yank her arm out; she simply moved it a few inches away. And lay there, frozen, her eyes opened wide in the dark.
And then, after a few seconds, she felt the softness again . . . she felt the tickling again . . . as the thing crawled over her hand. She lay motionless, waiting. It was going to sting. She knew it was going to sting. That piercing needlelike thrust. . . . But it simply remained there, on the back of her hand. A mouse? A baby mouse? Leah had, of course, seen innumerable baby mice, and it always distressed her when the cats tormented them, when they ran about blindly, squealing, squeaking for life; even baby rats were darling creatures. But a mouse beneath her bed? Mice in the room? Rats?
She drew her hand cautiously away. Where was that slipper. . . . If she acted quickly enough perhaps she could crush the thing before it escaped. . . .
But with remarkable alacrity, and a kind of grace that seemed almost human, the thing leapt back onto her hand and began to make its way, slowly, as if aware of her apprehension, up her arm . . . very slowly up her arm . . . its delicate legs brushing against the delicate hairs of her arm. . . . Staring at the faintly moonlit ceiling Leah lay paralyzed, and thought, as the creature fumbled a little by the crook of her arm, that it would now fall off: it couldn’t get a toehold: it would fall off and she would scramble out of bed, on the other side of the bed, and scream for help. But the creature did not fall off. It simply turned, and made its way up to her shoulder, at the same slow, deliberate pace, as if it were fully conscious of her, and able to read her thoughts.
Leah did not dare move. Odd, that her heart continued to beat calmly, that she did not fly into a panic. She was an unusually strong-willed, even stoic child, and felt contempt for the “ladylike” girls at the academy, but there had been times—once, when Angel reared back from a copperhead, and again when a boy, younger than Leah, started inexplicably to sink, to drown, while swimming in Lake Noir—when she had lapsed into a state of sheer brainless panic. And she had a bad temper: she was a most moody, mercurial child: sometimes, Della shouted, she was possessed of a demon, and only a good exhaustive beating would cure her. But that night as Love crept delicately along the smooth skin of her upper arm, to pause at her shoulder, its thin legs poised like a dancer’s, its keen sharp eyes fixed intelligently upon her, Leah did not panic, did not babble out for help, though she wanted, ah, how very much she wanted, to cry “Faye, help me! Faye, do something! Get a shoe, get a boot, hit it, please, crush it, please!”—she did not succumb to the terror she felt, but lay motionless, hardly breathing.
And in the morning, at dawn, when the room finally grew light enough for her to see (for the feathery weight on her shoulder, so close to her ear, though unmoving, apparently unthreatening, did not allow her to sleep: she even began to imagine she could hear it breathing), she turned her head slowly, her eyes narrowed, her lower lip caught hard in her teeth—and there it was: there, the handsome spider: hardly more than spider-sized at the time, but remarkably sleek, with tiny beadlike eyes, and hair of burnished black, so fine, so thick, as to resemble fur.
“Why, you’re a spider,” Leah whispered in amazement.
LOVE, A SECRET from Faye for a brief while, and from the other girls for several weeks, grew rapidly. His favorite foods were bits of other insects mashed around in sugar-milk, and very tiny bits of meat. (A silver-dollar-sized piece of fatty beef, smuggled upstairs in a napkin from the dining hall, would keep Love engrossed for days.) From the very first Love was keenly sensitive to his mistress’s moods, and if she was tearful he would rub against her ankle, like a cat, and scuttle up her to nuzzle against her neck and cheek; if she was nervous he would crawl rapidly about the walls, spinning out abortive webs, the strands of which fell loose, swaying, responsive to the slightest movement of the air. When Leah was in high spirits Love kept his distance, with an almost resentful dignity: he spun his fascinating web in a high corner of the room and perched in its center, watching her, censorious, immobile, offended. At such times Leah would clap her hands and call him, her cheeks flushed, her eyes gleaming with the wildness of it—that she, Leah Pym, had a spider for a pet!—a sleek handsome black hairy-legged yellow-beady-eyed spider for a pet.
“Come here! Now you come here!” she cried, bringing her palms smartly together. “Don’t you want to be fed all day? Don’t you give a damn? You, Love! You pay attention to me!”
But Love would not be commanded, nor could he be wooed. He came to his mistress only when the spirit moved him: sometimes surprising her by leaping from the wall onto her head and burrowing into her hair (on Sundays and on Wednesday evenings when dining was “formal,” Leah and Faye prepared each other’s hair, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes impatiently: Leah’s dress-up hairdo was quite elaborate, involving not only a heavy chignon but several brands and braids of hair wound about her head, and full, fluffy, wavy bangs that nearly obscured her eyebrows: and it was invariably into that charmingly pretentious hair arrangement that the mischievous Love insinuated himself, a minute or two before the bell rang to summon the girls downstairs), and, more frequently, scuttling up her stockinged leg to her underpants of cotton wool and burrowing inside them and crawling, flattened, sly, across the swell of her stomach, while she squealed and slapped at him and jumped about the room trying to dislodge him—knocking over her desk chair, the tea things, the water basin, poor Faye’s potted fern, the stack of kindling wood beside the little fireplace. And there were times—especially after she had returned to Bushkill’s Ferry, and home, and Love was much larger, having grown to the size of a sparrow—when Love sensed that her mind was elsewhere as she fed or stroked him, and, in a sudden ill-natured frenzy, stung her most cruelly on the back of the hand, or the breast, or even her cheek. Leah’s scream, her shock, her sudden childish tears, somewhat placated him at such moments. “Oh, that hurt, that hurt, why did you do that, oh, you did that deliberately, you calculated that, don’t you love me?—haven’t I been good to you? Do you want me to take you out to the woods and turn you loose? Don’t you love me?” Leah whispered.
THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG Leah Pym and her gigantic black spider, incorrectly said to be a black widow spider, became quite notorious in the Valley. Very few people had actually seen the spider, and fewer yet had seen it perched upon her shoulder like a tamed bird, or nestled in her hair; but everyone had an opinion about it.
When the girl first returned from the academy at La Tour—appearing, unannounced, at her mother’s door, tearful and weakened and alarmingly thin (for she had lost a considerable amount of weight, having succumbed to a terrible melancholia that not even contempt for her classmates and her teachers and the headmistress could dissipate) it was said that she had contracted some deathly illness, down in the flatland. (La Tour was one hundred or more miles to the south, a fairly prosperous commercial city of moderate size, on the Hennicutt River; mountain people claimed that the air in such low-lying places was foul, and that they had actual difficulty breathing it, through their nostrils especially, because it was so unpleasantly thick-textured.) It was whispered that she had had a disastrous love affair—with one of her teachers?—but were there men teachers at the Academy?—ah, but then perhaps poor Leah had been victimized by a woman!—and it was no wonder that Della, imperious closemouthed Della Pym, refused to discuss the situation. Word spread that the girl had behaved very oddly during her last weeks at the school: she had stopped eating; tore pages out of her diary and textbooks, and burned them; gave away clothing because it no longer fit her, being too loose; gave away jewelry; even a lovely mink hat that had been a present from her uncle Noel, about which she had always been rather vain. She had refused to go to chapel. Or to her classes. She had “pined away” for Bushkill’s Ferry, for Lake Noir, for the mountains. She had lost all interest in her sorrel mare, and was to leave Angel behind at the academy stable, when she left so abruptly. Strangest of all, the girl had a most unusual pet. . . .
This daughter of Della Pym’s, D
ella’s only child, born some five months after her father’s death, was known generally to be willful and vain and bad-tempered, though Della certainly had not spoiled her. One of Gideon Bellefleur’s earliest, fondest memories of his beautiful cousin had to do with a violent temper tantrum she threw at the age of three: something so maddened her that she stamped and kicked and threw herself about, and savagely ripped the front of her white satin dress with its Flemish lace collar and cuffs, and had to be carried out sobbing by one of the adults. Upon another occasion she sulked at the wedding of a cousin in Innisfail, and drank glass after glass of champagne, and challenged certain of her boy cousins to a wrestling match (which they wisely declined), and, gaily intoxicated, her long billowing skirts hoisted to midthigh, she waded in a brook and splashed about and refused to come back when her mother called her. She was then no more than eleven years old, but her hips had already begun to fill out, and her small breasts had a distinctly womanly fullness and softness to them, that made Gideon and his brothers quite uneasy. The incident ended abruptly when Leah stumbled back to shore, wet and breathless and white-faced, weeping, for reasons no one could comprehend, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” What it was the child did not want, no one knew, nor could she explain. “I don’t want to!” she sobbed, tears streaking her rounded cheeks; and Gideon, then a boy of fifteen, could do no more than stare.
(Odd, that Della and Leah came so frequently to Bellefleur celebrations. It seemed they were always underfoot, and Leah was even bold enough, once or twice, to bring her hairy little pet along. Though Della detested her wealthy relatives she always accepted their invitations to weddings and christenings and holiday gatherings because she felt that they did not really want her and were counting on her refusal—and why should she give them that pleasure? “For my sake, Leah, behave like a young lady,” she always said; but when, inevitably, Leah behaved quite badly, she never seriously scolded her afterward. “You’ve got their blood in you, after all,” she would say apathetically.)
Leah was sixteen years old when, diving from a granite cliff into Lake Noir, and swimming, through a chilly September rain, halfway across the choppy lake, she caused her cousin Gideon to fall irrevocably in love with her. He halfway knew he had been falling in love with her for years, by degrees, and that astonishing sight—the husky, strapping, deeply tanned girl in the green one-piece bathing suit, diving without hesitation into the water some fifteen or twenty feet below, every muscle beautifully coordinated—was nothing more than a final blow. Leah swam as strongly as Gideon himself, her heavy dark hair wound about her head like a helmet, her face pale and stubborn with effort. He had wanted—but had been unable—to run off the cliff and splash down beside her. He had wanted to pursue her and overtake her and turn it all into a boisterous joke. But he hadn’t moved, he had simply stood there, staring, watching that body sleek and forceful in the water as an eel’s, in the grip of an emotion in which love and desire were so inextricably braided that he was left quite literally breathless.
(Much later, when Noel closeted himself with his son, and pleaded and reasoned and shouted with him, and even dared to lay hands on him, Gideon’s only response was a baffled, sulky, “Well, I don’t want to want her, not only is she a cousin of mine but she’s a daughter of that insufferable old bitch! What do you think, Pappa, do you think I want any of this?”)
As a fairly young girl Leah attracted suitors, some of them, like Francis Renaud and Harrison McNievan, a decade or more older than she; and of course there were a number of boys Gideon’s age who were very interested in her. But all were intimidated by the spider Love. There were tales—not, in fact, very exaggerated—of the girl’s wanton cruelty in allowing Love to clamber across a visitor’s shoulders, and even to sting upon occasion. (You would have thought, people murmured, that the Pym girl would have respect for poor Harrison—with his arm crippled from the War, not to mention all the land he inherited!) At the age of seventeen and eighteen Leah enjoyed a perverse popularity in the region, despite her frequent and quite open disdain of men, and her skittish, even priggish behavior when she was alone with a man. It might have been her very nervousness she wished to disguise, by outlandish requests (she commanded Lyle Burnside to fetch a silk scarf of hers that had blown—or had she allowed it to blow?—down a steep cliff along the Military Road) and girlish pranks edged with malice (she agreed to meet Nicholas Fuhr on Sugarloaf Hill one summer day, and sent a fat, somewhat retarded half-breed girl instead) and sudden, inexplicable outbursts of temper (at a wake—of all places!—she turned to Ewan Bellefleur, who had been eying her with an unsubtle smile, and accused him of being wicked, of gambling and wasting money, of being unfaithful to his fiancée (whom at that time Leah had never met: she knew only that Ewan was marrying into a Derby family of surprisingly modest wealth), and of having fathered illegitimate children—an attack that amazed Ewan, not because it touched upon anything he might be in a position to deny, but because it was so unprovoked: hadn’t his look of frank, appreciative interest in his cousin at all flattered her?).
“That’s Della’s work,” Ewan was told. “The woman wants to poison her daughter against all men, but especially against Bellefleur men.”
The ugliest—or was it the most amusing?—episode involved a young man named Baldwin Meade, who was rumored to be related, distantly, to the Varrell family, once numerous in the Valley, before the notorious feud with the Bellefleurs in the 1820’s killed off so many on both sides. It might have been that Leah was attracted to Baldwin Meade because of this connection, for what would infuriate her wealthy relatives more than a liaison with one of their enemies?—even if the feud was long dead, and hardly more than a source of embarrassment to all. (Though this was not exactly true. Ewan and Gideon and Raoul had sworn, as boys, to revenge themselves if and when the occasion arose: for, rejecting the state’s claim that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II had murdered two Varrells that night at Innisfail, along with nine other men, they calculated that six Bellefleurs had been killed to a mere three or four Varrells, which seemed to them monstrously unjust.)
If Baldwin Meade was related to the Varrell family he certainly did not emphasize the fact, nor did he resemble them in the slightest: they had been swarthy, thick-chested, of no more than moderate height, with hirsute bodies, and beards that grew halfway up their faces; and it goes without saying that the Varrells, the Bellefleurs’ old enemies, were uneducated, crude, brutish, and inarticulate. (“Why, you look as if you’d just joined the human race a few weeks ago,” Harlan Bellefleur was heard to exclaim, in actual surprise, even as he raised his Mexican handgun to blow half the man’s face away; witnesses were struck by Harlan’s graceful manner, the way in which he hesitated before he pulled the trigger, as if the very idea, the very thought, that the man cowering before him wasn’t altogether human, held a profound significance he must contemplate—though not at the moment.) By contrast Baldwin Meade was tall, slender, clean-shaven, a cheerful if indiscriminate talker, and though his manners were about average for the mountains he was certainly not coarse, and took care never to use profanity or barnyard colloquialisms in the presence of those women designated as ladies. How, exactly, he behaved on that Fourth of July night, what sort of things he said to Leah, what sort of things he wished to do, or actually did, to Leah, no one knew: for the girl would never tell, and one could hardly bring the subject up with her mother.
Returning home from the band concert and the fireworks display in Nautauga Park, in a two-seater drawn by a roan gelding, driving in the dark along the Bellefleur Road, Leah and her twenty-six-year-old suitor must have quarreled somewhere between the intersection of that road and the Military Road, and the village of Bellefleur itself, for it was only a few hundred yards away from the old iron forges (once owned by the Fuhrs), near the crest of a very long, steep hill, that the young man was found the following morning. Not dead, but nearly so: delirious and raving and crying for his mother: his right arm and the right side of his face grotesquely
swollen, watermelon-sized. Leah had driven the carriage back to Bushkill’s Ferry and had been considerate enough (for she always respected the needs of animals, even though horses no longer interested her) to unharness and feed and drench the gelding, and to stable him in the Pym’s old barn; she made no secret of the fact that the carriage was on her mother’s property, and left it in plain view, in the cinder drive, for any curious neighbor to see. But she never explained the incident, she shrugged and laughed and waved her arm, saying that people “exaggerated,” and if they really wanted to know why didn’t they ask silly Baldwin Meade himself? It was claimed by the men who brought Meade in, and by Dr. Jensen, who tended to him, that the poor boy had been copperhead-bit in three places, and it was extremely fortunate for him that he was found as early as he was, for by noon he would certainly have died. Copperhead-bit! people said. They pulled thoughtfully at their lips, they smiled slyly. Copperhead! Not likely.
WHEN GIDEON BELLEFLEUR first visited Leah as a suitor, and not as a boy, or a boy cousin, he was humiliated and outraged by the fact that Leah, in an open-necked polka-dot sundress, her lovely hair all curling-iron ringlets and spit curls and waves clearly meant to emphasize not only her beauty but her arrogant confidence in that beauty, nevertheless received him in a dingy, musty side parlor of the old Pym house; and the enormous black spider was perched on her shoulder, on her very skin.
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