Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  From the first it was clear that something was wrong, alarmingly wrong: for how could so blond and pale-skinned a child, with such fair blue eyes, and such an upturned nose, and so gracefully Caucasian an air be a half-breed? Gideon grumbled that they might as well take her, she couldn’t hope for much of a life in the Indian village, and one more child wouldn’t matter to the Bellefleurs; she was about Christabel’s age anyway; and Leah would probably be delighted. Ewan grumbled that the castle was overflowing with children already, sometimes it seemed to him that there were more children running up and down stairs, and playing hide-and-seek in the cellar and in the stables and barns, and rummaging about in rooms that were out of bounds, and causing a general commotion, than any of the adults could actually account for. . . . Who was going to feed all these children, Ewan wanted to know. And now that Leah had had a new baby Lily was whining and nagging to have another baby herself: where would it all end?

  “Poor thing, she isn’t destined to any happiness up here in the mountains,” Gideon said. “So I don’t see, Ewan, that we have any choice.”

  Standing in the mud behind Goodheart’s Lodge, staring at the twin nags and the child, who stared back at them impassively, the brothers were suddenly sober. The rain had taken on a chill that would drop to freezing by sundown, though it was late July.

  “All right, then,” Ewan said angrily. “Whose will she be? Yours?”

  “Ours,” said Gideon.

  SO FAR AS they could learn Little Goldie had no last name, or could not remember it. She spoke in harsh, thick consonants, her head bowed, her small chin pressed against her throat. A fine, soft, pale skin, lightly freckled as if dusted with pollen; waist-length blond hair that, though unwashed and hanging in greasy snarls, was nevertheless disquietingly beautiful.

  The brothers stared at her. There was something about her pert oval face, her snubbed nose, her bright brown eyes . . . Her manner that was at the same time diffident and imperious, frightened and sullen . . .

  A beautiful child. But only, after all, a child.

  They set out in the rain from Paie-des-Sables, Gideon in the lead with Little Goldie perched before him, shivering beneath a waterproof cape held over her head like a hood. When they stopped to make camp, shortly before sundown, at nine in the evening, the rain had turned to snow flurries. “You’ll be warm, you can wrap yourself in this blanket,” Gideon said. “And they’ve given us plenty to eat.” (Stringy smoked ham, several loaves of dark bread, odd-shaped hunks of goat’s cheese, and a half-dozen cans of pork and beans. Goodheart had slipped a carton of eggs into Ewan’s saddlebag at the last minute, but most of the eggs were broken when they unpacked.)

  Gideon and Ewan were too weary to talk with Little Goldie, who lay curled in her blanket by the fire, staring sightlessly into it; they hadn’t the spirit even to talk with each other. They passed a bottle back and forth in silence, and Gideon’s mind swung loose: he saw again Meldrom Lake from the window of the Swiss chalet and regretted violently that he had left; he saw again his host and his host’s guests in their boats, fishing for bass, and this time it seemed to him that one of the younger guests, a blond, bearded man who had made little effort to speak with Gideon or Ewan, had not only the profile but the manner, the inimitable air, of Nicholas Fuhr. Gideon shuddered. He wanted to protest, but could not speak. In the meager fire there danced certain obsessive figures: Leah with her grotesque swollen belly and her balloonlike legs, Gideon’s son Bromwell with his wire-rimmed glasses and his prim, priggish, old-mannish expression, Gideon’s mistress Garnet who reached out for him with her scrawny arms, her mouth shaped into an anguished, silent, maddening O of desire. (Leave me alone, Gideon whispered. I don’t love you. I can’t love anyone but Leah.) Dwarfing the others suddenly was the new baby Germaine, her cheeks pudgy and flushed with the delicate pastel coloring of a peach, her eyes uncannily bright. It occurred to Gideon that he had dreamt of Germaine at Meldrom’s camp, the night before he and Ewan slipped away, and that she had something to do with their escape. How strange! He must ask Ewan if he had dreamt of her too—

  His head jerked up suddenly. There was a commotion nearby. He had fallen asleep by the fire, his forehead on his knees, and he woke to a hellish sight—his brother Ewan crouched atop Little Goldie, grinding himself into her, one big hand covering her mouth and nose so that she was unable to cry out. Gideon screamed for him to stop. He jumped to his feet and grabbed his brother by the hair and wrenched him away from the child.

  “Ewan, Ewan, what have you done?” Gideon said. “Dear Christ—what have you done?”

  But Ewan was too groggy, too confused, even to defend himself. He simply crawled away, half-undressed, and hid beneath his sleeping bag like a guilty child. And Little Goldie, though sobbing, the whites of her eyes showing crescent-thin beneath her eyelids, was too exhausted to respond to Gideon’s questions. She was asleep again within half a minute, and Gideon, gazing upon her, thought it must be for the best—even if Ewan had injured her, even if she were bleeding, a few hours’ deep sleep would give her strength.

  That was the first night. On the second night, camped beside a small, compact glacier lake, Gideon stationed himself between Little Goldie and Ewan (who had been silent for most of the day, meekly contrite), and again he sat gazing into the fire where there danced demonic figures: his wife, his children, his mistress, his father, his mother, Nicholas Fuhr on his prancing stallion, Goodheart’s grandfather with his wrinkled fig of a face and his eyes beadily wise. . . . A female figure beckoned to him lewdly. Its pale hair fell untidily to its waist; its small breasts were exposed, showing tiny, hard, perfect nipples. Though his bones ached from the ride along the mountain trails and from the damp, cold air, though he did not want to be drawn to her, Gideon nevertheless crawled on his knees to the figure . . . which turned out to be much more wiry and combative than he had imagined. . . . Eyes shut, head ringing with an urgency that was more anger than lust, Gideon groped to silence the screams, pressing the palm of his hand hard over a mouth and part of a nose. Be quiet. Be quiet or I’ll hold your head underwater.

  He was wakened by his brother’s incredulous shouts. Ewan had hold of him by the hair, and was wrenching him off Little Goldie, who struck at him with her tiny fists and babbled in a language he could not comprehend. “Gideon, for God’s sake! Gideon,” Ewan said, dragging him backward. He tripped and fell, and Ewan fell also, and they lay for a while in the mud, breathing heavily, not looking at each other. Then Ewan whispered: “My God, Gideon. You.”

  He began to sob. His chest and throat were wracked with sobs. What he must do: stumble to his feet and run to the lake and throw himself in the clear, freezing water, and let his clothes soak and grow heavy until he sank, until his body was dragged to the bottom of the lake, and his thick shaggy hair and beard were weighed down, and his eyes bulged sightlessly, and no one knew where he lay, and no one knew his name, and his place in the family cemetery lay vacant forevermore. . . . He must stumble to his feet and run down to the lake, no matter how his brother tried to dissuade him. . . .

  But instead he fell asleep.

  And woke before dawn, to see Ewan just returning from the lake where he had splashed water onto his face and chest.

  “Good morning, Gideon,” Ewan said in a queer elated voice.

  They looked at the child, bunched up in her soiled blanket, her freckled face wan and pale, almost nacreous, yet eerily charming—a snub-nosed doll’s face, innocent as Christabel’s. Her thin breath, drawn irregularly through her strawberry-pink lips, made a faint rasping sound. She slept deeply and placidly as an infant, and it was entirely possible that she would remember nothing.

  “Still,” Ewan said reluctantly, “we should drown her.”

  Gideon rubbed his face with both hands, and yawned so violently that his jaws cracked. A loon was calling on the lake, invisible, answered at once by another loon. The odor of fresh pine pervaded everything. Gideon’s bones were sore, his head ached from the ugly raw drea
ms that had careened through it, his eyes wanted to roll back into his skull, recoiling from the sight of the wretched child; yet he felt a prick of elation. “We should, yes,” he said.

  Ewan remained standing, his feet apart, his flannel shirt unbuttoned to the waist; and Gideon remained sitting, his knees now drawn up to his chest. When he returned to the manor, he thought dreamily, after having been gone so very, very long, he would order a steaming hot bath drawn for himself, and he would take a bottle of rum into the bath with him, and one or two of his father’s Cuban cigars.

  Little Goldie was sleeping by the burnt-out fire, a strand of snarled, greasy hair fallen across her forehead.

  “But, being Bellefleurs,” Ewan said, sighing, “we won’t.”

  “We can’t,” Gideon said quickly.

  He managed to get to his feet, pulling up on Ewan’s arm. How quickly he’d aged! He felt older and shakier than Noel. . . . Ewan was watching him closely, his eyes threaded with blood. For a long groggy minute the brothers could think of nothing to say to each other. Birds had begun to chatter: redwings, sparrows, thrushes. Something scuttled in the underbrush a few yards away. One of the swaybacked horses raised his head and neighed uneasily, and Little Goldie twitched inside her blanket, but did not wake.

  “Yes. I mean no. We can’t,” Ewan said, expelling all his breath.

  The Holy Mountain

  On his tremulous bony knees on a granite ledge maliciously ridged with razorlike shards of ice, his hands clasped tightly together, his head atop its long, very long slender neck drifting upward to the polar cap of the holy mountain Mount Blanc, his teary eyes half-shut against the wind that blasted out of a turquoise-blue sky, all clarity and innocence, he heard, beyond the shrill percussive rhythms of his own voice (which, so rarely raised, so rarely heard aloud except in impatient helpless moments when he quarreled with the mountain spirit who impertinently and unmercifully inhabited his clearing, if not always actually his cabin, in the guise of his brother’s young wife—for without Jedediah’s conscious choice he had begun, one night, to reply to the spirit’s flirtatious queries, and then to respond, sometimes with exasperation and rage, to its outlandish proposals: they should both strip naked and dive into the dark plunging water below!—they should howl and tear at each other and roll about the clearing, beneath the full moon!)—kneeling on his granite ledge, his head bowed, his voice ringing out as it did every morning as the sun rose, perhaps aiding the sun in its reluctant rising, he heard, half a heartbeat after each of his words, each syllable of his defiant words, an echo, a faint mocking near-inaudible echo in a voice utterly unknown to him: and immediately went silent.

  He waited, opening his eyes cautiously.

  In recent months, or was it recent years, Jedediah’s hearing had become increasingly acute. He could hear the cries of incredulous pain, needle-thin cries of pain, from the hemlocks cut down miles away, on lower ground: a piteous thing, he’d had to stop his ears with bits of rag, for the trees were not even dragged away, they were skinned in the forest where they lay and then left to suffer, their life’s consciousness easing from them slowly, as perhaps it eased into them slowly, and while their butchers took no heed, heard no sound at all, Jedediah was unable not to hear. His sharpened senses picked up the cries of small birds torn apart in midair by hawks, and rabbits seized by owls, and raccoons set upon by wolves; one especially frantic screaming brought him out of his cabin on a winter morning to see, far away, across the chasm, a thrashing furry creature the size of a fox hauled away in the talons of a gigantic bird—it had a naked red-skinned head but a heronlike beak, its feathers were evidently white, tipped with black as if with tar, its tail was long and pronged, extraordinarily long—an amazing predator Jedediah had never seen before and could not identify.

  He knelt, his head inclined to one side, his beard—which had evidently grown long again—he had trimmed it only the other day—brushing coarsely against his bare shoulder.

  Silence.

  God?

  Silence.

  . . . Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air. . . . Consider the lilies of the field. . . . Therefore take no thought, saying What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day . . .

  Again the echo. Faint, blithe, jeering. He heard it with a terrible clarity though his own voice did not weaken.

  Slowly he got to his feet, straightening himself with an effort. (His right knee ached nearly all the time now. He could not remember when it had begun: only the other morning, yet it had been with him always.) He shielded his eyes and looked from side to side, as far as his gaze would hook, down into the ravine that leapt with shadow and sunlight and boiling white foam, down the boulder-strewn hill to the pine forest; and up, slowly, reverently, to the very top of Mount Blanc. That timber died away as the mountain rose toward God, that snow and ice covered its very summit, seemed to Jedediah testimony of the mountain’s holiness. He could stare and stare across the windswept miles to the mountain until his eyes ached and his vision weakened, and feel that he had only begun to pay it homage. For wasn’t it likely that so sacred a place dispelled all evil. . . . Wasn’t it likely that Satan himself would cower before that brute glacial magnificence . . . ?

  Once Jedediah had stood on his ravine ledge, shielding his eyes as he watched a sparrow hawk gliding and dipping downward, and a shot rang out—and a bullet passed close by his head. He had thrown himself on the rock at once. Without thinking—without having the time to think—he threw himself down, and lay flat for a very long time; and then, cautiously, his numbed lips shaping Dear God, have mercy, dear God have mercy, don’t allow me to die before You have shown me Your face . . . don’t make of my pilgrimage to Your kingdom a mockery, and my love for You a clumsy joke, terminated so abruptly by a meaningless accident, his arms and legs outspread, he had managed to crawl backward from the cliff, and to barricade himself in his cabin. (By that time he had strengthened the shantylike structure with heavier birch logs, and weatherproofed the roof; he had laid down floorboards; he had set two panes of glass in his windows, which were no more than a foot square; and he had built himself a sturdy oak door with an iron latch.) In the cabin he lay on his cornshuck bed, too weak for an indefinite period of time even to continue his prayer; and then he must have slept, for when he woke it was night and he was entirely alone and God allowed him to know that the danger had passed, and he was once more alone on the mountain, and no one would injure him; and his heart filled with elation like a child’s elation, when he learns that he is not to be punished, after all, but gathered in his mother’s arms, into her warm forgiving bosom.

  The next morning, quivering with his own defiance, Jedediah strode out to the cliff’s edge—and saw, after a few minutes, that he was entirely alone, and that God had not misled him. From that day onward no one had ever shot at him again.

  From time to time, however, he did suffer intrusions. It seemed to him that the intruders—trappers, hunters primarily—followed close upon one another’s heels, and that he had little time to himself to bask in the mountain’s holy solitude, and to feel himself refined into a pair of eyes only—a pair of eyes and a self that was so thin, so pure, it possessed the brittleness of a sheet of translucent ice—as God intended. (For why otherwise had God called Jedediah Bellefleur up into the mountains, except to purify him of the heat of creation?—the frenzy of lust, the madness of groveling about in the flesh, bodies writhing upon bodies in a futile attempt to annihilate their aloneness? Why otherwise than to save him from his brothers’ fate, and his father’s repulsive fate, sinking ever more hopeles
sly into the quagmire of the senses? For though his brother Louis was married, and God was said to look with favor upon husband and wife, and to consider them one flesh in holy union, Jedediah knew very well that God recoiled with distaste from the baser instincts, and dwelled in His inviolable magnificence high atop Mount Blanc where no living thing could survive.)

  Jedediah lived on lower ground, however. And so human beings interrupted his peace. If he heard them coming he naturally hid, but what could he do if they took him by surprise! Once the mountain spirit that amused itself by taking the shape of, and mimicking the voice of, Louis’s child-bride was teasing him with one silly fanciful thing after another—in a high-pitched disingenuous girl’s voice chiding him for having trapped a raccoon for food, such a pretty creature, such an adorable face, and so very nearly tame—and so very fatty!—ugh, how could he eat such meat!—how could he, prim passionless monkish Jedediah, bring himself to eat such meat!—and he had been so distracted, so anxious lest he succumb to the spirit’s torment and begin to answer back (which, sadly, he often did—and nothing delighted the mountain spirits more than to trick a human being into conversing with them as if they existed), that he had not heard or even seen an outlandish little party of visitors: a group of some six or seven girls, about the age of his sister-in-law (whose name he had forgotten, but he remembered that she was sixteen and very young for her age), dressed in woollen shorts that fell just to the knee, and heavy-knit socks, and hiking boots of a kind Jedediah had never seen before, and enormous bulky-knit jackets in a variety of bright colors. The girls’ cheeks were apple-red; they were out of breath because of the altitude, but obviously in excellent health; their braided hair bristled with exuberance. Jedediah disguised his surprise and dismay, and put aside his hoe (for it was a warm June day, one of the first warm days of the year, and he was going to set down a garden, potatoes mainly, despite the thin pebbly inhospitable soil), and offered the little party water, tinned meat, dried fruit, chunks of black bread grown stale and hard but nevertheless edible if soaked in gruel—all that he had, in fact—for the girls had come a great distance, and it might be said that they were his guests so long as they remained on the mountain. But the leader of the hiking party thanked him, and accepted only water, which the girls drank with evident delight, passing Jedediah’s battered tin cup from hand to hand, and giggling at him over the rim. They might have been sisters, they so resembled one another: bright dark eyes, dark brown bangs that fell low over their foreheads, cherry-red lips.