Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But white-haired Jedediah, distant as always, as if his soul abided still in the mountains, merely nodded vaguely and turned away. It was his affliction—or perhaps his pretense of an affliction—to be nearly deaf. Father, Raphael cried, his heart knotted in his chest, my son has gone over to the blacks . . . !

  The Mud-Devourers

  It was on the airless sultry eve of Germaine’s second birthday, in the midst of a prolonged heat wave (of some twelve days’ duration, with midday temperatures as high as 105 degrees, a record in the Chautauqua region) that Vernon Bellefleur, angular and impatient and bullying, in his “new” poetic voice, with his beard trimmed cruelly short so that it hardly resembled a beard and his long hair tied at the nape of his neck with a soiled red scarf, so antagonized a group of men at a Fort Hanna tavern that they turned upon him in drunken fury, and threw him into the Nautauga River to his death. Or so it must have been: for how could Vernon, his wrists and ankles bound with clothesline, Vernon who had, alone among the Bellefleur children, never learned to swim, prevent himself from drowning in those swift deep waters—?

  The summer, the terrible heat, the busyness of the castle, comings and goings, the death of Cassandra, the surprise of Lord Dunraven’s visit (and he had promised Cornelia that he would return, after his journey to the West Coast, to spend a few more days at the castle before leaving for England), Leah’s and Hiram’s and young Jasper’s frequent trips to distant cities: too much, the older Bellefleurs murmured, simply too much was happening. There was the distressing change in Vernon, after the baby’s funeral; there was Ewan’s campaign for sheriff of the county, which he had begun lazily enough, with a cynical good humor, for certainly he didn’t care—how could a Bellefleur care about such an office?—but which, as the weeks passed, came to seem more important. There was the problem of Gideon. (But, in Leah’s presence, of course there was no “problem”—simply that he was frequently away, absent for days at a time.) There was the sharp disappointment of the rejection, from the governor’s office, of Jean-Pierre’s formal request for a pardon (and attached to the rejection was a hand-written, and entirely gratuitous, note to the effect that the “original sentence” was “lenient enough”—a remark that infuriated Leah, who vowed she would get her revenge on Grounsel someday.) There was the surprise of a peculiar (and not very literate) letter of many pages from the elderly Mrs. Schaff, addressed to Cornelia, complaining bitterly about her “headstrong” daughter-in-law who was “already exhibiting, at her tender age, the vices of her ancestors”: Cornelia read certain selected passages to the family, who reacted with uproarious laughter, and then again with resentment, and still again with baffled rage. (Christabel, questioned by both her mother and Cornelia, claimed she hadn’t any idea what old Mrs. Schaff meant. “Maybe because my knees hurt when we kneel for prayer, and sometimes I wriggle around, and once I snuck a rolled-up scarf to kneel on,” Christable said, tears in her eyes.) There was the surprise, which should have been a pleasant one though in fact it greatly disturbed the family, of young Bromwell’s good fortune—but perhaps “good fortune” was the wrong term: he had published a thirty-page essay in a magazine no one had ever heard of, The Journal for the Study of Time, an essay whose meticulous graphs, charts, formulae, data, and vocabulary attested to an extraordinary intellect (a biographical note on Bromwell spoke of him as the youngest contributor in the publishing history of the magazine). The only member of the family who even attempted to read the essay was Hiram. “The boy certainly shows promise,” he said evasively. “There’s probably little reason for me to continue tutoring him in mathematics. . . .”

  A more pleasant surprise was Lord Dunraven’s extended visit. He was, he claimed, absolutely enchanted by the mountains and the wilderness land and the innumerable lakes: it struck him as astonishing that the Bellefleurs lived in so paradisaical a world, and lived in it so . . . so . . . unself-consciously, so naturally. Noel took him fishing along the north shore of Lake Noir (ah, that lake, that sinister lovely lake!—there was nothing like it in all of England, or even in the Scottish highlands), and there were frequently little fishing and hunting expeditions on higher ground, though it was observed that Cornelia’s cousin, while in every respect in excellent health, and certainly, at the age of forty-two, in the prime of life, and certainly enthusiastic, tired more easily than the other men; once he fell asleep, or slipped into a stupefied unconsciousness, on the walking horse Noel had selected for him, and they had to secure him to the saddle and the horse’s neck with rope. But he loved, he said repeatedly, the mountains—how high were the Chautauquas?—and the air was so fresh, the mountain lakes so beautiful—at least in the wilderness land the Bellefleurs showed him (for of course, elsewhere, there were ugly razed acres, and streams fouled by mills and factories, some of them owned by the Bellefleurs themselves). Noel answered vaguely, not quite knowing what he meant, that of course the mountains were beautiful but they had been, he thought, somewhat higher in the past, during his boyhood: he didn’t know, maybe ten thousand feet or so, the highest peak . . . ? “Ah, there is nothing like that in my country,” Lord Dunraven said, smiling sadly.

  Lord Dunraven was of somewhat less than average height, at least by Bellefleur standards, but he carried himself well. His good-natured face was frequently illuminated by crinkling smiles that quite changed his appearance: he was capable of looking, even with the bushy graying hair that receded so sharply at his temples, like a much younger man. His cheeks seemed permanently windburned, with an attractive ruddy blush; his eyes were clear and kind; his manner, though highly studied and self-conscious, was graceful. If the Bellefleur children mocked him behind his back (Dunraven’s accent, they thought, was hilarious) they nevertheless came to like him a great deal, and Germaine was especially fond of him. (Poor Germaine!—not only had she lost her baby sister Cassandra, but her father was rarely home, and now even cousin Vernon, who had always spent so much time with her, was never around.)

  Lord Dunraven, Eustace Beckett, owned a large country estate in Sussex, and a town house in Belgravia; his fortune was modest by Bellefleur standards, but he had been his father’s only heir, and lived comfortably. On the single occasion he managed to speak with Garnet, after the terrifying scene on the beach (about which no one knew, for of course Lord Dunraven respected the young woman’s privacy, and her obvious sorrow) he explained to the unhappy girl that he was an “amateur” at life and sometimes felt, despite his age, and the frequency of deaths in his family, that he hadn’t yet begun to live. And he smiled his tentative hopeful smile, and gazed upon her with such frank childlike tenderness, that Garnet turned away in confusion, and murmured an excuse—for she had to escape his presence—she could not bear his kindness, and the memory of that shameful scene on the beach. (After Garnet fled to Bushkill’s Ferry Lord Dunraven made polite, casual inquiries about her, but of course no one told him about Cassandra; though they did allow him to know, obliquely, that the young woman’s family background was somewhat common. Nevertheless Lord Dunraven wrote to Garnet, and even sent her flowers upon at least one occasion (so Della reported), and spoke of her with an unembarrassed warmth that indicated his ignorance of his own feelings. She had, he supposed, many admirers? . . . a girl of such quiet charm and beauty . . . a girl of such delicacy. Perhaps she was even spoken for? Well, said Cornelia flatly, perhaps.)

  IT WAS SHORTLY after Lord Dunraven departed for his journey by train across the continent (and it rather amused the Bellefleurs that their English guest hadn’t any notion of how wide the continent was, and couldn’t seem to grasp its dimensions even when they were explained to him), that Vernon was brutally attacked by a group of Fort Hanna men one Saturday night, in a tavern in the very worst waterfront area of the city.

  Everyone in the family remarked on how Vernon had changed, since the baby’s death: after several days of lethargic depression, during which he had refused to eat, he emerged from his untidy room with his beard trimmed short, and his mismatched eyes glaring
. The room stank of smoke—he had, he said, burnt all his papers—his old poems—notes for poems—even some of his books. All that was over.

  He read them fragments of new poems, but his voice was so harsh and impatient, and the poems so jumbled—about the “fall” of God, the “divorce” between man and God, God’s wickedness, God’s ignorance, man’s lonely lofty supremacy, man’s duty to rebel, the stupor of the masses, the mud-devouring lot of the masses—that no one could follow, and the children, once embarrassed by their uncle’s effusive goodness, were now embarrassed (and somewhat frightened) by his anger. At the very dinner honoring Lord Dunraven’s departure, which Cornelia had planned with care, and which was held in the large dining room with its elegant murals, tapestries, and chandeliers, and the exquisite though rather heavy German furniture, Vernon distressed them all by insisting upon reading a poem-in-progress he had begun that afternoon, up in the cemetery. He stood at his place and read from scraps of paper that trembled in his hands, and then he looked up, fixing his gaze upon the ceiling, and recited from memory, all sorts of incoherent lines—some of them about the Noir Vulture, some of them about the baby’s death, but many of them about unrelated things: God’s betrayal of man, man’s subservience, man’s ignominious groveling nature, his selfishness, venality, cruelty, cowardice, and lack of pride. And some of the lines clearly alluded to a certain family who had, he said, exploited tenant farmers and servants and laborers, and the land, and must be stopped. . . .

  “If that wasn’t poetry the bastard was reciting,” Ewan said, afterward, “I would have smashed his ugly face in.”

  In the days that followed the Bellefleurs learned, from a variety of sources, including a scandalized Della, that Vernon was wandering the countryside again—turning up at a Baptist church picnic in Contracoeur, at the old White Sulphur Springs Inn, in the village, in Bushkill’s Ferry (where he evidently got hilariously drunk), as far away as Innisfail and Fort Hanna—eager to talk to anyone, young or old, who would listen. Where in the past he rarely drank, and then only shandygaffs (a drink beloved of many Bellefleur children, but only so long as they were children), now he tried to drink whatever other men were having—beer, ale, whiskey, gin—and paid for numerous rounds, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life. With his newly trimmed beard and his jabbing forefinger and a dramatic, harsh urgency to his voice he commanded attention as he had never commanded it before, though when his audience discerned the nature of his words—when they realized he was no longer exactly nice, and they couldn’t either laugh at him comfortably, or like him—they grew uneasy. What had happened to Vernon Bellefleur, the “poet”! Even the word love evoked a cynical curling of his eyebrows.

  In Contracoeur he harangued his bewildered listeners on the subject of their servile natures: if they gave their immortal souls up to that fiendish God, why naturally they would be soulless! On the rotting veranda of the White Sulphur Springs Inn he read in a trembling voice of man’s contemptible failure to realize his destiny in the flesh and in history, and alarmed several of his listeners—elderly retired smalltime farmers and merchants—who, not hearing altogether correctly, believed he was reading off a proclamation of war. In the very village itself, so close to the manor, and almost completely owned by his family, he spoke sardonically of the Bellefleurs, and chided the villagers for their passivity. Why, for decades, in fact for centuries, had they endured their lowly positions?—why did they allow themselves to be exploited? They were slaves—they were parasites—they weren’t human. To the Bellefleurs’ tenant farmers he spoke in a similar vein, and did not appear to notice his listeners’ resentment. At Innisfail and Fort Hanna he read lengthy impassioned sections from a poem-in-progress called “The Mud-Devourers,” which evidently accused the masses of men of complying with their own degradation, and of being, in fact, grateful for it: Any compromise, he thundered, so long as it brings a cessation of conflict! It was no wonder God treated mankind as He did, grinding the masses of men beneath His heel and exacting from them all sorts of groveling pious declarations of love. . . .

  The tenant farmers were slaves, and the mill and factory workers were slaves. Their eagerness to sell themselves (and to sell themselves cheaply) made them subhuman; yet they hadn’t the dignity of animals, and none of the healthy instincts of animals. The workers, if organized, could bring the owners to their knees if they tried, but of course they were too cowardly to try: their initial attempts at unionizing, some years ago, were such ghastly bloody failures they shrank back from even thinking of such things. Sometimes he spoke directly, stabbing at the air with his bony forefinger; sometimes he read or recited his poetry, which was not at all “poetic,” but punctuated with harsh, ugly, frequently shocking images—jaws devouring jaws, wormlike men crawling on their bellies, tides of ants rushing into a stream to be swept away, creatures who devoured filth and declared it manna, the Son of God as a babbling idiot. In Innisfail, at a volunteer firemen’s picnic, he so outraged a small gang of mill workers that it was only through the intervention of an off-duty state trooper (a boyhood acquaintance of Ewan’s) that he was taken forcibly away, and saved from a probable beating.

  But there was no one to intervene, no one to save him, when, on the following Saturday night, at the Fort Hanna tavern near the old drawbridge, he somehow got into a quarrel with a number of young men. (One of them was said to be Hank Varrell, another was a Gittings boy—though, afterward, no eyewitnesses officially identified them, or were even willing to offer descriptions.) How Vernon managed to get to Fort Hanna when he had been sighted in the Falls earlier that day; why he sought out that particular tavern, frequented by men who worked at the Bellefleur mill, and who had, at one time, been under his “management”; why he insisted drunkenly upon addressing the men in the most intimate and provocative terms (he referred to them as brothers and comrades), no one knew. “He talked like a preacher,” someone said. “He was so certain of himself—he was even happy—right up until the end.”

  That day the temperature had climbed above 100 degrees, and an airless stagnant heat seemed to radiate out of the earth itself. Though the tavern was on the Nautauga River, the river at this point was unspeakably filthy, and gave off a sulfurous stink that burnt the eyes. There had been a rumor for weeks, still unsubstantiated, that the mill might be closed down, and naturally the men were angry, and naturally they queried Vernon about it; but he denied that he was a Bellefleur, he denied that he knew anything, and insisted upon charging the men with their own predicament. They had destroyed the river, they had destroyed their own souls . . . ! “And I don’t exempt myself from you,” Vernon cried passionately. “I am of the same species as you! I too have devoured mud and called it manna!”

  How the men managed to drag Vernon off, and to tie his hands and feet together with clothesline (clothesline stretched between two scrubby trees in a backyard adjacent to the tavern), without exciting the attention of anyone who might have called the police, how they managed to carry him up the steep, debris-cluttered hill to the road, and onto the bridge (which was fairly busy on a Saturday night), no one was able to explain. Evidently he put up a violent struggle, kicking and thrashing about, so that one of the young men suffered a badly cut lip, and another a cracked rib; evidently, at the very moment they dropped him over the side of the railing, he was screaming defiantly at them. It was said that he fell like a shot, sank, surfaced again some distance downstream, still screaming, wildly pumping his arms and legs, and, in the midst of a ferocious outcry, again disappeared from view. It was said that, afterward, as the young men ran away, wiping their hands, laughing, one called out to the others, “That’s what we do to Bellefleurs!” and another, unidentified, said, “That’s what we do to poets.”

  BOOK FOUR

  Once Upon A Time . . .

  Celestial Timepiece

  Serendipity and Felicity and All-Hallows-Eve and Wonder-Working Providence and Celestial Timepiece were the names of the massive wool-and-feather-lined quil
ts Germaine’s aunt Matilde made. The quilts grew slowly as Germaine watched, very slowly, square by square, as aunt Matilde talked with grandfather Noel and Germaine, her stubby fingers working constantly. Months passed, and years. Glass Garden and Gyroscope and The Dance (a dance of merry skeletons) and The Bestiary and Noir Swamp and Angels. They grew square by square, eventually spilling to the floor and hiding aunt Matilde’s feet.

  “Why do you take Germaine over there, to that woman’s house,” grandmother Cornelia asked irritably. “Matilde is hardly a good example, is she?”

  “An example of what?” Noel asked.

  “Leah doesn’t like it,” Cornelia said.

  “Leah hasn’t time to know about it,” Noel said.

  Yet they came often, to Raphael Bellefleur’s “camp”—a half-dozen log cabins on the lake shore, many miles from Bellefleur Manor. Family legend had it that Matilde had moved there long ago out of sheer spite: she had failed to be a Bellefleur, had failed to attract a suitable husband, and so she simply withdrew into the woods. But grandfather Noel told Germaine that that wasn’t true. Matilde had moved across the lake because—because she had wanted to.

  “Can I live here too?” Germaine asked.

  “We can visit,” grandfather Noel said. “As often as we like.”

  Germaine rode her new pony Buttercup, and Noel rode his high-headed but lazy old stallion Fremont. And they did come almost as often as they liked.

  Great-aunt Matilde was a large-boned woman who sang as she worked, and had a habit of talking to herself. (Sometimes Germaine heard her: Now where did I put that spoon, now what are you devils doing on that table!) If she was lonely at the camp she never indicated it: on the contrary, she was the happiest Bellefleur Germaine knew. She never raised her voice and she never threw anything down in a rage and she never strode out of a room weeping. The telephone never rang—there was no telephone; letters came rarely; though the family strongly disapproved of Matilde they let her alone. (She was “strange,” she was “headstrong,” the Bellefleurs said. She was “stubborn” because she insisted upon her solitude, and making quilts and rugs for a living. Social gatherings did not interest her, not even weddings and funerals!—and she insisted upon wearing trousers and boots and jackets, and in the old days, as Lamentations of Jeremiah’s daughter, she had even insisted upon working with the farm laborers; an eccentricity for which the female Bellefleurs never forgave her. She should have been born a man, they said contemptuously. She should have been born a dirt-poor farmer living on the side of a mountain; she doesn’t deserve the name Bellefleur.)