Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  A pity her lover was late. A pity he couldn’t hear Yolande singing the rousing “When the Boys Come Home” with which the music hall program had ended: the girls high-stepping, in white boots, with red-white-and-blue streamers across their breasts, and high fur hats that might have been made of ermine.

  Then she broke off, since she’d forgotten the words. It was such an old song. What did she want with an old song. She took off her hat and sailed it onto the grass and, shaking her hair vigorously, gave her lips that poutish smile Aunt Leah used so frequently, while her eyes—but ah! her eyes were so much more powerful than Yolande’s—widened mischievously. Even when she sang to the darling new baby, even then her face was so, so . . . but Yolande’s face was narrower, smaller . . . her lips weren’t so full . . . perhaps she only made herself ridiculous, imitating her aunt? And then she did not even like Leah. Decidedly, she did not like Leah. She wanted to snatch that baby out of Leah’s arms and sing to it in her own voice, in her own way,

  Sleep, baby, sleep,

  Thy father watches the sheep,

  Thy mother shakes the dreamland tree,

  And down falls a little dream on thee. . . .

  Her voice was husky, wispy, melancholy. She wondered—could it be trained? The lighthearted dancing-about songs called forth a high girlish voice, and made her want to dance energetically about; but the lullaby called forth a different voice. Which was nicer, Yolande wondered; which would her lover prefer. . . . ?

  She sang the lullaby again, rocking an imaginary baby in her arms. A single tear rolled down her cheek. Her blue eyes glittered and her lips trembled with an emotion she could not disguise; but there was no one to observe.

  Or was there someone nearby . . . ?

  She broke off the lullaby and glanced around with a half-smile on her lips, for it was possible that . . .

  “Who’s there?” she called out gaily.

  A mild wind blew through the topmost branches of the pines so that the cones stirred and winked.

  She danced about in circles until she was breathless, and then threw herself down on the sun-warmed grass, and closed her eyes, and felt within seconds how her lover approached her, crouching over her, the hairs of his mustache drawing near. . . . Ah, what if his kiss tickled! “Doesn’t such a thing tickle,” she had asked Irma, and both girls had collapsed in a fit of giggling, burying their overheated faces in the pillows of Irma’s bed.

  But she must not giggle now. She wasn’t a child. The moment was sacred. Her lover (whose eyes were very dark and moist, whose mustache was small, trim, neat, and gave off an odor of wax) was simply bending over to kiss her, as lovers do, as men do, it is really quite commonplace, it is not at all unusual, nothing frightening. . . . But it might tickle.

  She had expected another lover, a young man whose family owned a large farm on the Innisfail Road, ah, what was his name, how strange, how very strange, she was losing his name, though it was a name she murmured to herself a dozen times each day, what was that young man’s name . . . She was expecting, perhaps, her uncle Gideon: sometimes just as she sank into sleep his lips brushed against hers: they were often in a sleigh hitched to Jupiter, flying across an ice-bound Lake Noir beneath a full moon, Gideon in the remarkable fur coat—made of muskrat pelts as darkly lustrous as mink—he had had fashioned for himself some years back, as a playful match to Leah’s ankle-length Russian sable. His expression was stern, he did not smile, in fact he looked through her as he usually did around the house, and yet—suddenly—wonderfully—he leaned over to her and brushed his lips against hers—

  She shivered. Her eyes were not simply closed, but shut tight. Her lover was leaning over her. His eyelashes curved upward, his skin was a faint olive color, he gave off an air of profound, slack melancholy, he was no one she had ever seen before.

  “Mother,” Yolande would ask Lily that very day, “doesn’t a kiss tickle, now tell me the truth!”

  She began giggling and could not stop. Her eyes flew open, there was no one above her, she sat up, flushed, giggling so that her shoulders shook. . . . At a carnival in Powhatassie some years ago she and her friends had gone to the very exhibit their parents had forbidden them to see, the Exotic Wonders of the New World, and what sights!—what sad fraudulent sights! Dodo, the bird-faced boy with his absurd plaster beak and his slightly crossed eyes, pretending to screech while beneath the platform (Yolande claimed she could practically see it) some fool sawed away at a fiddle. Myra the Elephant Girl, really a middle-aged woman, lardy and obese, with grotesquely swollen blue-veined legs and feet the size of hams in cloth slippers. The Whipsnake Man, whose skin glinted all over with silver-gray-blue scales: even between his toes, as he solemnly revealed to his audience. A frizzy redheaded beanpole with a concave chest and legs and arms so skinny the joints looked enlarged many times, a squat toadlike creature with Tartar eyes whose specialty was scooping up insects (but were they really insects, as one of Yolande’s friends whispered, maybe they were just raisins) on his rather broad tongue, a grizzled old drunk pretending to be legless (Ambrose the Veteran of Three Wars). . . . What nasty ugly things! And most of them were frauds, obviously. (You don’t want to waste twenty-five cents on anything like that because, for one thing, it’s all fake, Ewan had told the children.) Most ludicrous of all was a thing in a foot-high jar, the Hermaphrodite Baby, a creature with a single head and torso, and only two spindly arms, but burdened with an extra set of legs and private parts that grew out of its stomach. . . . The girls backed away from the exhibit, one or two even shielded their eyes with their fingers, but Yolande, poking them, said, “Oh, that’s some stupid little old rubber doll they stuck in there—!” as they ran giggling out into the sunshine.

  The attack of giggling passed. She felt suddenly tired. It was time to return home before anyone missed her.

  “All right then for you, if you’re not coming,” she said sullenly. “Next time I won’t come.”

  SO SHE HEADED back to the house, walking quickly, her gaze fixed on the mossy needle-strewn ground. The forest had darkened, the air was pine-sharp but melancholy, it seemed later in the day, perhaps she would be late for lunch . . . ? Though she knew the way home very well, and prided herself on her sense of direction, somehow she took a wrong turn, and passed a fallen, badly decomposed white pine she remembered having seen some fifteen or twenty minutes before. “Oh, hell, now what a silly goose you are,” she muttered. So she strode off in the right direction, her head down, the straw hat clamped to her head (for it was being knocked off repeatedly by low-hanging branches that sprang out when she least expected it, and several times a malicious branch nearly poked her in the eye), and after a maddeningly long while she emerged from the forest . . . but she was at the edge of the cemetery instead of the park . . . so once again she must have turned herself around without knowing it.

  “Oh, what is the matter, how can I be so . . .”

  Her face went red as if she suspected someone was watching, and laughing at her distress. There was nothing to do under the circumstances but indicate that she fully realized how silly she was: imagine, getting lost in her own woods, winding up in the cemetery instead of near the house! But at least she was no longer lost. If she took the long way around, and followed Mink Creek to the lake, she would have no difficulty getting home; though she would probably miss lunch.

  She climbed the hill to the cemetery, and as she swung her legs over the fence (which badly needed repairing—you’d think with all the purchases and fuss of the past few months, Leah in command, throwing money about, someone would have suggested that the cemetery be looked into) she was certain—she was certain—that someone watched her.

  It might have been great-grandmother Elvira prowling about the graves with her watering-can and clippers, or it might have been aunt Della, or even grandfather Noel; it might have been some of the younger children, though they were forbidden to play here; possibly the gardener, or one of the groundsmen, though everyone complained that these men had
gotten so lazy over the years, they not only didn’t do all their duties but didn’t exactly know what they were. . . . But no one called out to her, no one greeted her. “Why, Yolande! What are you doing here . . . ?”

  Slowly and self-consciously Yolande climbed the hill, noting with a pang of guilt the gravestones in this older section of the cemetery, tilted and weather-streaked. The babies’ markers were especially sad: they were so small, so flat: and there were so many of them. (There were so many Bellefleurs. More dead than living. Far more dead than living—obviously!—though Yolande had never thought of it before.) She could hear them whispering meanly as she passed: Who is that silly goose of a girl, who is she to think so well of herself?—imagine, being vain, with her snarly hair all cockleburrs, and her skirt grass-stained, and that fancy straw hat dented at the crown—and she isn’t pretty if you study her profile, her nose is too long and her chin is too sharp—

  “I’m sorry,” Yolande whimpered.

  Up on the path she paused to catch her breath. It was a handsome path—pink cockleshells mixed with white gravel—but crabgrass and wild barley had poked through and were taking over. “I don’t know why, I really don’t know why, it isn’t better kept up here,” Yolande murmured. “But I promise I’ll speak with them. There seems to be more money now, maybe it’s only a matter of time until they get around to here. . . . No, I really don’t know why, but you shouldn’t blame me!”

  Some distance away a figure stepped from behind a tree, where he must have been pressed flat, to behind one of the large tombs: but no, it was a shadow, it must have been a shadow, that tree was so narrow no one could have hidden behind it. Yolande circled the tomb, her heart pounding, and saw that no one was there.

  “Well—that’s silly! I call that absolutely silly,” she said.

  The dead were stirring to consciousness of her. She felt their vexation, their sleepy cranky curiosity: Who is she? Which one of us is she? When she had been very little the family had driven out to the cemetery more frequently, every Sunday in good weather, to trim the grass around certain graves, to plant annuals—geraniums, marigolds—and Yolande and the other children were given special tasks: Yolande remembered having to pick aphids off roses, wonderful big-blossoming white and red and yellow roses. (But where were the roses now?—only a few straggly climbers, overgrown, their petals tiny and anemic.) Dandelion, crabgrass, barley, wild oats, bittersweet nightshade with its small red berries. Goldenrod, of course—especially along the fence—growing as tall as five feet. Barnyard grass, gone to seed, beginning to burn out. The more recent graves were still in fairly good condition, but even here the geraniums were drying away, the clay pots were cracked or overturned, the frequent American flags, stuck into the ground, were faded and frayed: “Oh, I don’t know why,” Yolande whispered, “but you shouldn’t blame me! I promise I will come back tomorrow and tidy things up. Not today, I feel so tired today, but tomorrow. I won’t even start with people I know like Uncle Laurence and Great-aunt Adah, I’ll begin with the very oldest corner, with the babies, I’ll put flowers by the babies’ graves first of all, the poor things don’t even have any names to be called by. . . .”

  A sound behind her, like a chuckle. She turned at once, blinking.

  No one. Nothing.

  A pair of nuthatches fluttered into view, and began pecking at a sycamore. Though Yolande knew it must have been the birds she said, nevertheless, in a hoarse brave voice: “Albert, is that you? Albert? Or Jasper? Garth?”

  She was not going to run out of the cemetery, she walked along without haste, pausing at the great mausoleum near the front entrance. It was overgrown with English ivy and the colored marble eyes of the four attendant angels had grown dim, but it was still an impressive structure. Fifteen feet high, with graceful Corinthian columns, made of white Italian marble . . . designed by and made to order for great-great-grandfather Raphael. . . . Yolande had been told the name of the queer jackel-headed god that guarded the tomb, but she could not remember it now. He had grown smaller over the years but his rude grin had become even more lascivious. “Are you some sort of angel,” Yolande whispered. “I’m glad I won’t have to be buried in here, with you out front.”

  Actually, there was room in Raphael’s mausoleum. There was a great deal of room. How ironic it was, how angry it must have made the old man, that no one lay in there but Raphael himself!—and then (so it was said) only part of him. (For there was a family tale, which Yolande had never believed for five minutes, that the Civil War cavalry drum kept on one of the landings of the unused central staircase was fashioned out of great-great-grandfather Raphael’s skin! A clause in the crazy old man’s will had insisted that his heirs have him properly skinned, and the skin treated, and made into a drum to be used daily to call the family to dinner or what not. . . . Such wild fanciful things like this that Yolande tried to keep secret from her girl friends, for fear they would think her as peculiar as her family.) But part of Raphael was buried inside, at least. Perhaps he sensed her nearness, and would have liked to speak to her . . . or was he in a perpetual black mood since none of his plans had worked out . . . ?

  “I’m sorry,” Yolande said. “I hope the rats haven’t gotten inside here, then what would you do?” She pressed her forehead against the marble, and felt how pleasantly cool it was. (She had a headache suddenly, and the marble soothed it; or did the touch of the marble cause the headache, which came so abruptly . . . ?) “Someone should clean this for you. The birds have made such a mess in all this fancy carving, it’s a good thing you can’t see it! And it wasn’t a good idea, maybe, to give the angels colored eyes, it makes them look . . . it makes them look a little demented, like they’re about to spring into the air and flap away.”

  Old Raphael’s plans hadn’t worked out, Yolande knew. He had wanted to be governor of the state . . . or senator . . . he had had, even, ambitions for higher office: Vice President, President. President of the United States! And of course his millions of dollars weren’t enough, he had always wanted more, he had wanted to be the first billionaire in this part of the world. You had to admire him, Yolande supposed. But she was just as glad he’d died many decades before her birth. There were already enough Bellefleurs for her to contend with.

  Great-grandmother Elvira had said once that no one had ever been so unfortunate as her father-in-law Raphael: everyone around him disappeared into thin air! So there was no one to house in the costly mausoleum after all.

  (His parents Jedediah and Germaine had already been buried, of course, and their grave marked with a handsome eight-foot granite stone; he could not unearth them and rebury them in the new mausoleum. And he did not care to unearth the Bellefleurs buried far across the lake, at the edge of Bushkill’s Ferry—the Bellefleurs who had been murdered in their beds, before his birth. That sordid incident angered him not just because members of his family had been killed, and killed by malicious cowards in the dead of night, but because—because there was an incontestable shame in it. However you interpreted the massacre it was the case that the murdered Bellefleurs had been bested.)

  How sad, Yolande thought, circling the mausoleum. Even if he had been a difficult man (and which Bellefleur men weren’t difficult?) he deserved to be buried with his loved ones close by. But it was a fact that he was alone: his wife had disappeared into Lake Noir, and her body was never recovered; his favorite son Samuel had disappeared in the very heart of the castle; and his youngest son Lamentations of Jeremiah was to be swept away in a terrible storm, only a few years before Yolande’s birth.

  “Oh!” Yolande cried. Suddenly, she felt the old man’s spite, emanating from the grave. A piercing needle-sharp pain ran right through her forehead. “Oh, how nasty.”

  SHE HURRIED AWAY and saw, through pain-quickened tears, the figure of a tall gangling boy in overalls and a gray cap a short distance away. Her first reaction was simple relief: so there was someone real, after all, and not a spirit! Then, seeing the boy’s derisive lopsided grin, and half
-recognizing him, she hesitated, and tried to call out, “Who are you, what are you doing in—” but the words wouldn’t come.

  He ducked away and hid behind a tombstone. That he would do such a thing—hiding from her even as she stared at him—was such a mockery, such a peculiar prank, Yolande felt almost faint. “Oh, but I know who you are,” she whispered, her fingers fumbling at the gold chain she wore around her neck, searching out the little gold cross. “Your name is . . . You live on . . . Your father is my father’s . . . How dare you hide on me!”

  One of the trespassers who so plagued grandfather Noel, one of the poachers, maybe, or someone fishing Mink Creek hoping none of the Bellefleurs would discover him. “I could have you arrested,” Yolande whispered. “You know you’re not supposed to be here, any of you.” Despite her jarring heartbeat she was not frightened; she was not going to be frightened on her own soil. And with the Bellefleur dead all around her as witnesses. But still she thought it most prudent to head for the front gate. For of course he wouldn’t follow her. He wouldn’t dare follow her. Even now he was hunched down behind that tombstone like an idiot, pretending she hadn’t seen him; pretending she didn’t know he was there. Oh, maybe he was retarded, there were so many of them in the area. . . .

  (Those tenant farmers and their broods of children! Illiterate louts. Savages. The men drank and beat their wives and children, the mothers drank and beat their children, the children ran wild—wouldn’t go to school though the Bellefleurs, nearly single-handedly, paid for the school and the books and the teacher’s salary—ran wild and set fires and injured one another, and what on earth could you do about it? The ugliest tales were told: the Varrells and the Doans and the McIntyres and the Gittings: a boy named Hank Varrell had doused someone’s collie with gasoline and set him afire because the other boy hadn’t believed him when he lied about some job or other he’d been promised in the city, and what was worse (so Garth said, Garth had been the one to tell Yolande about the incident) was that the sheriff hadn’t even been called, because people out there were afraid Varrell might set a human being on fire next time.)