Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I will have Henry follow you, if you like. On foot or on horseback. And then if you get lost, or injure yourself . . .”

  “Who are our enemies, Father?” Vernon said. Though he faced his father boldly he could not prevent his eyes from squinting; and this was a mannerism that particularly annoyed Hiram. “It doesn’t seem to me . . .”

  “Our enemies,” Hiram said, “are perfectly visible.”

  “Yes—?”

  “They’re everywhere, don’t be an idiot. That pretense of yours of being halfwitted, a poetic genius touched by God—!”

  “I’m not a poetic genius,” Vernon said, his face going brick-red. “You know perfectly well that I have only begun, I am in my apprenticeship, I have many, many years to go. . . . Father, please don’t distort everything! It’s true that I am a poet and that God has touched me . . . God dwells in me . . . and I, I . . . I have dedicated myself to poetry . . . which is the language God uses in speaking to man . . . one soul addressing another. . . . You must know how I am groping and blundering, how I despair of creating anything worthy of God, or even of being heard by my fellow man, what a perpetual mystery poetry is to me: is it a way of coming home, a way of coming back to one’s lost home? Sometimes I understand so clearly, in a dream, or when I’m half-awake, or, this morning, feeding Germaine in the garden, when she stuck all her fingers in her mouth and spat out her mashed apricots in my face and shook all over with laughter at the look of me, and I found myself staring right into her eyes, and laughing too, because . . . because . . . some barrier had been crossed, some wall between our souls had been . . . It’s as if there is an envelope between us, a membrane, nearly transparent, do you see, Father, between your soul and mine, as we stand here talking, and mere words will not penetrate it . . . though we try, God knows we try . . . but . . . but sometimes a gesture, an action, a certain way of speaking . . . a way of speaking which is music or poetry . . . which can’t be willed, or learned . . . though it can halfway be learned. . . . Sometimes, Father, do you see,” he said, his words tumbling over one another slapdash and desperate, and his eyes narrowed nearly to slits in the face of Hiram’s stony silence, “do you see. . . . It . . . it can. . . . Poetry. . . . I mean our souls. . . . Or was I talking about God, God speaking in us . . . in some of us. . . . There is a place, Father, there is a home, but it isn’t here, but it isn’t lost either and we shouldn’t despair, poetry is a way of getting back, of coming home. . . .”

  Hiram had turned partway aside, so that his injured eye, his clouded eye, faced Vernon. After a long moment he said, in an uncharacteristically patient voice, “But there is a home, Vernon. Our home. Here. Right here. Exactly—precisely—here. You are a Bellefleur despite the misfortune of your mother’s blood, and you live here, you feed upon us, this is your home, your birthright, your responsibility—and no amount of that high-toned babble can alter what I say. You are a Bellefleur—”

  “I am not a Bellefleur,” Vernon whispered.

  “—and I ask you only not to bring more ridicule on our name.”

  “I am not a Bellefleur except by accident,” Vernon said.

  Hiram stood quietly. If he was upset he gave no indication: he did no more than tug at his cuffs. (Every day, even in the depths of winter when the castle was snowbound, Hiram dressed impeccably: in custom-made suits, in dazzling white shirts which he sometimes changed by midafternoon, and again by dinner; he wore a variety of vests, some of them colorful; and always his watch and chain; and gold or jeweled cuff links. Though he had suffered all of his life from a curious sort of malady—sleepwalking—he gave every impression of being not only in excellent health, but of being in supreme control of himself.)

  “I fail to understand what it is you’re saying, Vernon,” Hiram said softly.

  “I don’t want to antagonize you, Father, but I must—I must make it clear—I am not a Bellefleur, I am only myself, Vernon, my essence is Vernon and not Bellefleur, I belong to God, I am God, God dwells in me, I mean to say—I mean that God speaks through me—not always—of course—but in my poetry—when my poetry is successful— Do you see, Father,” he said, so nervous, so excited, that flecks of saliva appeared on his pale lips, “the poet knows that he is water poured into water, he knows that he is finite and mortal and may drown at any time, in God, and that it’s a risk to summon forth God’s voice—but the poet must accept that risk—he must take the chance of drowning in God—or whatever it is—I mean the poetry, the voice—the, the rhythm— And then he isn’t whoever people say he is, he doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t belong to anyone except that voice—and they cannot claim him—they dare not claim him—”

  Hiram turned suddenly, and struck Vernon across the mouth.

  It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that neither quite comprehended what had happened for several seconds.

  “I—I—I say only,” Vernon gasped, backing away, his hand pressed against his bleeding lip, “I say only that—that—that—man’s true home is elsewhere, I don’t dwell in this castle of pride and vanity, amid all these—these hideous possessions—I am not your son to order about—I am not your possession—I am Vernon and not Bellefleur—I am Vernon and not—”

  Like his son Hiram had a pink flushed face, and now it grew even pinker. With a gesture of familiar, resigned disgust, he simply waved his son out of the room.

  “You’re mad,” he said. “Go drown yourself.”

  “I am Vernon only and not Bellefleur and you dare not claim me as Bellefleur,” Vernon said, weeping, crouched in the doorway like a little old man; “you drove my mother from me with your Bellefleur cruelty, and you buried me alive with your Bellefleur insanity, and now you—and now— But you will not triumph— None of you will triumph— I know that you and the others are plotting something—you and Leah—even Leah—Leah whom you’ve corrupted with your talk of money, land, money, power, money, money— Even Leah! Even Leah!”

  Hiram waved him away with a magician’s calm disdain. His hands, like Vernon’s, were long and soft; but his nails were meticulously filed. “What do you know, my boy, of Leah,” he murmured.

  Paie-des-Sables

  On two midsummer nights in succession, camped by remote, nameless lakes somewhere south of Mount Kittery, Gideon and his brother Ewan underwent a peculiar joint experience—shameful, ugly, inexplicable, and above all distressing—which no one in the family was ever to learn about, and which the brothers themselves, almost as soon as they returned to Bellefleur Manor, were to forget.

  They had been weeklong guests at the enormous mountain camp of W. D. Meldrom, the State Commissioner of Conservation. (The Bellefleurs had been friends and business associates of the Meldroms for many years, going back to the lively days when Raphael Bellefleur gave so copiously to his fellow Republicans’ campaign funds; there had been a marriage or two between the families, not brilliant, but satisfactory to both sides, and great-grandmother Elvira’s brothers had, for some years, worked with the Meldroms on their logging operations in the northeastern-most corner of the state.) It was Gideon’s and Ewan’s mutual argument, put to Commissioner Meldrom discreetly but persistently, as they fished for bass, with light tackle, disguising their boredom (for there was no drinking at the Meldrom camp, and the lake was so richly stocked that with nothing more than a safety pin and a bit of worm—so Gideon contemptuously said—the clumsiest fisherman could catch, half-hour by half-hour, all the squirming wriggling ferocious three- and four-pound bass he might want), careful never to speak too emphatically, and never to allude to the Bellefleurs’ and the Meldroms’ arrangements in the past, that the current state law guaranteeing that the thousands upon thousands of acres of land owned by the state would be “forever wild” was impractical: wasn’t timber a crop like any other, shouldn’t it be harvested like any other?—weren’t those forests owned by intelligent and farseeing lumbermen like the Bellefleurs far healthier than the “wild” forests, which were vulnerable to beetles, locusts, diseases of all kinds, and fire
s sparked by lightning, and windstorms? Under the current state law, passed by a legislature swamped and intimidated by conservationists’ special pleading decades ago, after the Great War, it was even the case that diseased and decaying trees, even trees felled by storms, could not be removed from the forests; they were to remain where they had fallen, regardless of the hazard, and the waste, and the fact that privately owned woods (like those owned by the Bellefleurs and the Meldroms) were cut back carefully, in order to produce mixed hardwoods and conifers, of varying ages, with open spaces and trails, and as little witchhobble as possible. . . . What the brothers wanted were “managed cutting” privileges from the state, on the very land (though they certainly did not press this point) their family had once owned.

  Timber is a crop, and it should be harvested like any other, Meldrom said slowly, but over so prolonged a period of time, and with so many interruptions (Gideon and Ewan were quickly bored with the commissioner’s family, and with his other guests, most of whom were elderly and hard of hearing, and they found the three-hour dinners in the elegant “log” lodge, attended by innumerable servants, insufferable), that it seemed he must surely be saying something else too.

  “The old bastard wants a kickback, obviously,” Gideon said.

  “You think . . . ? But didn’t he make such a stink, a few years back, about Jarald and his gang, in the Game Commission . . . ?”

  “The problem is, how to determine what he’d accept, what wouldn’t insult him, but at the same time . . . at the same time, obviously, we have to think of ourselves, of how much we can afford,” Gideon said, yawning. Frequent yawns were, for Gideon, a way of both expressing and restraining anger; he sometimes yawned five or six times in a row, until his jaw cracked and tears spilled out of his eyes.

  The brothers were sitting sprawled on a plump-cushioned rattan sofa before a birch fire, drinking bourbon they had prudently brought from home, in the main room of their cabin—an eight-room Swiss chalet made of peeled and varnished logs, and decorated with a curious mixture of expensive imported furniture, custom-made “rustic” furniture done by cabinetmakers in the area, and backwoods things: chandeliers fashioned out of elk horns, tables made of similar horns and gun stocks, ashtrays that had once been hooves, pillows and wall hangings and rugs made of the skins of bears, panthers, bobcats, beaver. They were sitting in their underwear and stocking feet, staring listlessly into the fire.

  “Hiram,” Ewan said finally.

  “Oh, of course Hiram! . . . But Father sent us up here.”

  “We could discuss it with Hiram anyway. Father wouldn’t have to know.”

  “Hiram would tell him.”

  “Well, what do you think—? How much?”

  Gideon drained his glass. “I’m not thinking anything. I don’t think about certain things.”

  “It’s like a poker game,” Ewan said uneasily.

  “But it’s no fun,” Gideon said.

  The brothers sat for a while in silence. Gideon waited for Ewan to swing the subject around to their wives, as he so frequently did—not so that he might speak, stumblingly, of his increasing difficulties with Lily (who wanted to move out of the manor and live, as she put it, anywhere else), but so that he might query Gideon about Leah, in whom he was too interested; but when Ewan finally spoke it was to say, simply: “Shit.”

  AND SO THEY left the Meldrom camp before dawn of the next day, telling the servant assigned to them that they had been called back to Bellefleur by messenger. There was an emergency at home, one of their children was sick, would he please explain to Mr. Meldrom, and give him their apologies? It was unlikely that Meldrom would believe them but they didn’t care. “The hell with Meldrom.” Gideon laughed.

  Without needing to confer (for as soon as Ewan mentioned poker the night before, both brothers knew what they would wind up doing) they drove to Paie-des-Sables, where, at Goodheart’s Lodge, there was in fact a poker game going, and the brothers were immediately welcomed into it.

  Details of the subsequent seventy-two hours were unclear, and afterward neither Gideon nor Ewan quite remembered when, or even how, they lost not only all the cash they had brought with them, but their watches, their belts, and their beautiful leather boots, and their car (a plum-colored Pierce-Arrow with pale gray upholstery, bought and jointly owned by the brothers that spring, when Gideon finally overcame his revulsion for the money—for what he knew of the money—he had won at the Powhatassie race). In the early hours of the game Gideon was doing quite well; and Ewan not at all badly; but as time passed, as players left the table and other players appeared, one of them Goodheart’s grandfather (an aged, querulous, crafty, fig-faced half-breed, said to be part Algonquin, part Iroquois, and part Irish, with an absolutely toothless mouth and a vocabulary of no more than a dozen English words and a history—which neither Gideon nor Ewan took seriously, knowing how Indians confused dates or lied—of having been arrested for poaching on Bellefleur territory in the time of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur), and as the brothers drank what remained of their own bourbon and then kept pace, drink by drink, with their new friends, paying for most of the rounds, elated and boyish and noisy, and vastly relieved, as Gideon said, to be in the kind of poker game they could handle . . . somehow, somehow it happened, without their really gauging the extent of their losses, that they lost everything they had brought to Paie-des-Sables that was worth losing. And there was some question about Goodheart’s honoring their IOU.

  Gideon angrily shuffled and reshuffled the deck, demanding that another game begin at once. Ewan sat slumped in his chair, ashen-faced, scratching at his beard with dirty blunt fingers. It was another morning, fine and misty, raining intermittently; the floor of the tavern, made of rough-sawn wood, was littered with bottles, cigarette and cigar butts, tissues, napkins, crumpled-up cellophane wrappers, partly eaten sandwiches. Goodheart’s grandfather reappeared (he had slipped away the night before with $600 of Gideon’s money and $360 of Ewan’s, thanking the brothers profusely for their “kindness” and grinning a toothless grin that was meant, evidently, to be imploring) and Goodheart and the other men conferred with him, speaking in an Indian dialect that was mainly harsh throaty consonants, unintelligible to Gideon and Ewan. They stood some distance away at the bar, chattering, glancing at the brothers and even cupping their hands instinctively to their mouths in a crude, childish gesture of secrecy—as if Gideon or Ewan had the slightest notion of what their words meant.

  “Those fools,” Gideon said, shuffling the deck. “That old bastard. Him. I want another chance at him.”

  “They don’t want our IOU,” Ewan said groggily.

  “The half-breed bastards, they’ve got to accept it.”

  “They don’t want it, I can tell, the old son of a bitch is telling them not to take it. . . .”

  “We’ll buy this goddamn fucking place out from under them,” Gideon said. “Buy it and raze it. Run them off. Chase them back to the reservation.”

  “They’re afraid of us.”

  “Why the hell should they be afraid of us!” Gideon shouted, bringing his fist down on the table. “An IOU from a Bellefleur is worth more than cash from anybody else!”

  “. . . cheated. But I didn’t actually see,” Ewan said.

  “The hell they did, I would have seen,” Gideon said.

  Ewan brought his shot glass thoughtfully to his mouth, and clicked it against his teeth. “Maybe we should go home. Come back some other time.”

  “I’m offering these half-breeds an IOU for a thousand dollars and they’d better honor it or I’ll come back here and burn the place down, I’ll rip off their fucking ears, I’ll scalp them, the sons of bitches, it’s an insult, they can’t insult our name like that, I’m not going to sit still for that kind of thing,” Gideon said. He even made a move to rise, letting the cards fall onto the table; but some force, like a hand pressing against his forehead, held him back. He sat down again, heavily. “. . . that kind of thing. Fucking insult.”

  “They
’re afraid of us. They think we might—”

  “Think we might win everything back we lost, the buggers. I want that Pierce-Arrow back. I want it back and I’m going to get it, listen to those fools babble away, look at that old Indian crook, you’d think he was some sort of priest or medicine man or something, I want another chance at him, I want that car back, otherwise,” he said, rubbing roughly at his eyes, “otherwise there will be nothing left. . . . And you know who will give us both hell. . . .”

  “Lily hadn’t better give me hell,” Ewan said loudly. “She’s tried that once or twice already and she knows what happens. . . . Drove me wild, got me so I wasn’t able to see, shaking her until her teeth rattled. . . .”

  “You bastards had better sit down with us! You had better honor that IOU, and sit down, and get this goddamn game going!” Gideon shouted.

  But it looked as if there would be no game.

  But then it looked as if there might possibly be a game: if the Bellefleurs would settle for a somewhat different arrangement.

  Gideon and Ewan conferred, and came to the conclusion—a disgruntled conclusion—that they would accept the altered terms of the game: they would be given credit for $500, but the other players would put up, not cash, but two fine horses, complete with saddles, blankets, and camping equipment. (For how otherwise would the Bellefleurs get home?—they were many, many miles from home.)

  And so a new game was begun, and this time Goodheart’s grandfather was not so clever, and within an hour Gideon and Ewan had lost not a penny of their $500, and had in fact won the horses, the saddles, and the camping equipment, which consisted of a large but badly frayed and soiled canvas tent and two canvas sleeping bags, similarly soiled, and reeking of odors the Bellefleurs preferred not to interpret. The horses were swaybacked and knobby-kneed, a pair of geldings with stained teeth, but they looked, to Gideon’s bloodshot eye, halfway reliable; they would get Ewan and himself home; or anyway close to home. The surprise amidst the winnings was a very young girl, Little Goldie, who was said to be of mixed blood, and whose husbandless mother had run away a few nights earlier with a Canadian trapper.