Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  To know, to love, and to serve. But before all these, to look.

  So he knelt on his ledge in a muttered frenzy of prayer so passionate the mountain spirits did not dare approach him, not even to jab him under the arms or between the legs, or to blow into his ears; he knelt, and clasped his hands before him, and bowed his head, as one must. And he prayed and waited, and prayed, and waited, and again he prayed, throughout the night, and waited, waited, praying all the while, as indeed he had been praying for years, without counting the seasons, without knowing the seasons, praying and waiting, waiting and praying, praying, for he was Jedediah, waiting, always waiting, patient for too long, humble in prayer, humble in waiting, God’s servant, God’s child, an emaciated bearded hollow-eyed creature whose breath stank and whose body was crusted over with a film of grime that only a hard-bristled brush might erase.

  That night, that terrible night, Jedediah knelt on his ledge on his mountain and whispered to God to show His face, for it was the last time he would grovel before His indifference: and his voice rose as if dislodged from him, as queer needle-sharp pains passed through his stomach and abdomen, leaving him chilled, then perspiring, then chilled so suddenly and so thoroughly his body shook. O God my God, he whimpered, bent forward, steadying himself with both hands on the rock until the pain subsided. Then he began again, speaking in a normal voice. Quickly and rationally. As if nothing were amiss. As if conversing, merely conversing, with God. With God Who was Himself rational, and Who listened with infinite patience and concentration.

  Then suddenly the pain returned, but now it was one, then two, then three fist-sized rocks edging sideways, to the left, through his guts.

  He could not believe the pain. It soared beyond what one could measure. A cry was torn from his lips but it was a cry of sheer surprise, for the pain itself could not be uttered.

  O my God—

  Swift as a knife blade something pierced his belly, slicing down through his abdomen, the very pit of his abdomen, which had come alive with agony. It writhed, it coiled, it had come alive, furiously alive, as Jedediah clutched at himself, staring sightless at what would have been the sky. He could not, he could not believe, he could not believe the pain, he was now whimpering like a child, as something bubbled and swelled to bursting, swelling larger and larger, to bursting, in his guts. What was happening—! What must he do—! His numbed fingers tore at his frayed belt and at the buttons of his trousers, and he managed to lower his trousers, despite the agony that had doubled him nearly in two, for it was quite simply an attack—an attack of the flu—a sudden diarrhea—a storm erupting in his body that had nothing to do with him.

  O God, help—

  He had lowered his trousers just in time: his insides voided themselves hotly, splattering on the sacred rock, and the stench that arose nearly overpowered him.

  Squatting, he hobbled away, his trousers caught about his ankles, his body covered with a thin fine stinging film of sweat. He could not believe, he could not believe . . . The agony in his belly bubbled again, and swelled, swelled to the size of a watermelon, and he began to groan as much in terror of it (for it was alive—it was not him, it was alive) as in pain. Gaseous balls pushed their way through his intestines until once again his insides gave way, and the storm was unleashed: more violent, more pitiless, than the first.

  His face was afire. The pores stung with tiny flames. Every quill of hair arose, in astonishment. God, he begged, what is happening—

  He tried to rise, to straighten, so that he might flee this despoiled place. But a convulsion ran through him. He clutched at his belly, falling forward. And on his hands and knees, his trousers still caught about his ankles, he crawled a few yards . . . until another convulsion ran through him, rattling the teeth in his head. He was chilled, he was freezing, yet at the same time a furious flame passed over him, and his mouth was suddenly so dry he could not swallow. Foul air was released: so very foul, so inestimably foul, that his lungs closed; he could not breathe.

  His guts were livid with pain. Coils and writhings. He squatted, his head clenched between his hands, and rocked back and forth in his agony, waiting. But though he was sick, unutterably sick, the poison would not pass from him. God, God, he begged, but nothing at all happened: he merely waited, his outspread fingers pressed against his burning cheeks. He was a child, an infant, an animal stunned with pain.

  Nothing mattered now except voiding himself: emptying his guts of the lavalike mass packed inside him.

  Tears ran down his face. His body too wept—his torso, his thighs. Something hellish had sprung into life inside his very being and he could not, he could not free himself of it, he was subordinate to it, humiliated, craven, waiting half-naked to be delivered. He would have uttered God’s name except the suffering was such, so suddenly, that he could not grasp any word: language dissolved into sheer animal sounds. He wept, he whimpered, he cried aloud. He rocked on his poor shriveled haunches.

  Now his entire body ached. Now his soul fled his body, affrighted. His torso was slick with sweat, his thighs and bony hips, his slender, hard, tensed legs. He must free himself and yet he could not. The bubbling swelling pain grew larger, there was a terrible pressure inside him, yet he could not defecate, he could not free himself, he had no control.

  Then, suddenly, the pressure rose until it forced itself out of him, erupting with a vicious unearthly heat. And again the sacred rock was splattered with his sick, watery, abominable feces.

  Scalding-hot, and a hideous odor. He had never known such an odor in his lifetime.

  Panting, he crawled away. He crawled blindly. The pressure had subsided, his bowels felt empty, suddenly his fever was gone and he shivered with cold, his teeth chattered with cold, he had wanted to return to his cabin but the cabin was behind him, he was crawling instead to a narrow stream that trickled down from the mountain, so that he might wash—so that he might cleanse himself.

  He plunged his hands and face into the icy-cold water.

  Now the cold shook him, now the cold passed through him, so that his entire body was wracked with shivering. He must get to his cabin. He must get there, and sleep, in the safety of his cabin, by his fire, and in the morning he would be restored to himself, and his soul would have returned to his body. . . .

  He gathered strength. And tried to stand erect. Slowly. Shakily. But a faint tinge of pain, or was it merely the expectation of pain, frightened him, and he froze, bent, crouched low as an animal. Ah, God no, no, it could not be happening again.

  But it happened again. Another diarrhetic spasm. Another ferocious loosening of his bowels, so that the scalding watery excrement ran down his thighs and legs. Then there were great soft chunks. Coils, streams. So sick. So sick. The stench was overwhelming, he felt faint, he was in danger of fainting. . . . Swift excruciating knife blades of pain. So that his body twisted as if desperate to escape. But it could not escape for the hell was within it.

  His eyeballs went blind. His mind was an utter blank. Not a thought remained, not an image, not the feeblest of desires. He had become sheer sensation, an animal crouched on the mountainside, given over wholly to the flesh. Where Jedediah had been now only streams and coils of scalding excrement remained.

  And so the night passed. The interminable night.

  Hour upon hour. The spasms in his belly, followed by bouts of faintness and shivering, when he lay on the ground, too weak to crawl back to his shelter. Then another spasm, another explosive liquid-hot attack: his bowels rumbling with a foul gaseous thunder: his body wracked with pain. Hour upon hour upon hour. No end to it. No mercy. During periods of relative lucidity his mind called forth appalling images of food: food devoured and digested: devoured and digested and turned to excrement, to be voided with rage. He had imagined, these past years, that he had fasted; he had brought his body’s humiliating needs under the dominion of his will; but in reality he had gorged like any animal. He had stuffed himself, ravenously, wishing to turn everything into food to be diges
ted in his entrails. And now he must suffer for it.

  . . . Another sudden contraction of the bowels. A lightning-flash of pain. And though he would have believed, had he been capable of thinking, that his poor writhing body was by this time purged, there was another, still another, explosive outpour . . .

  He gagged. He wept. He hid his face.

  Such pain. Such sickness. Horror. Stench. Helplessness. Shame. Hour upon hour. Jedediah who was no more than this, all along. He saw that his entire lifetime, not simply these years on the mountain, had been nothing more than an organism’s process, an ongoing ceaseless remorseless insatiable process—the gluttonous ingorging of food, the digesting of food, the voiding of food, writhing, seething, bubbling with its own ferocious life, not his, nothing human, nothing with a name, to which, nevertheless, the name Jedediah had been given. What a mockery, that endless stream of food and excrement, given a human name! So much was packed up inside him. Hellish. Burning. And were there worms in his guts, were there thin white slugs crawling dazed in the liquid shit he had voided all across the mountainside . . . ?

  He had not the courage to look. Though of course he had looked, without seeing. And the excrement was alive with them. Of course. The excrement was them, as it was himself.

  So the night passed, and the attacks came upon him, hour upon hour, without mercy. Until his pelvic bones jutted through his skin and his belly and abdomen were hollow and a thin, cold, morning breeze sifted through his pain-wracked head. There was not a word left, not a syllable, not a sound! The organism that was himself had not died, nor was it living.

  SO GOD SHOWED His face to His servant Jedediah, and forever afterward kept His distance.

  The Autumn Pond

  Whether on account of the extraordinary dryness of the season (for everywhere farmers lamented, and day by day the pine woods grew more brittle and more susceptible to fire), or whether it had something to do with the fruit pickers’ children romping and splashing and tearing in their brief delirium (for they had, Raphael discovered to his horror, not only torn out water lilies and cattails and marsh marigold: they had also littered the pond’s banks with the carcasses of hundreds of bullfrogs, which they had evidently caught by hand and dashed against tree trunks, or against one another); or whether, as rumor had it throughout the Valley, secret mining operations in the Mount Kittery area were having a deleterious effect upon streams in the foothills, including Mink Creek, which fed into Mink Pond; or whether it was simply the case that the pond was aging, and must, like all aging, dying ponds, begin to contract upon itself, choked with more and more vegetation (and he saw, baffled more than dismayed, how willows now grew nearly everywhere—they had marched across the pond and met in the middle and struggled for dominion of the rich mucky bottom, crowding out even the bulrushes), so that only small shallow regions of open water remained, hardly more than puddles, cut off from one another with creatures trapped inside them—a few pickerel, a water snake, the last largemouth bass, which must have weighed twenty pounds, but was beginning now to turn belly-up, and would die within a few days: or whether this was simply Raphael’s punishment for having loved something so much, so much more than his family: he did not know. But the pond was obviously dying.

  His birch raft, partly dismantleed by the strangers’ children, lay shipwrecked on a little island of bulrushes; as he approached, barefoot, his feet sinking in the warm squishy black mud, several bullfrogs croaked in alarm and leapt away, and a single black duck flew up, flapping its wings in terror.

  But you needn’t be frightened of me, Raphael wanted to cry.

  He sat cross-legged on his raft, gripping his ankles. For a long time he surveyed his little kingdom and the emotion he felt was bewilderment rather than dismay.

  Bewilderment shading into fear.

  For of course the pond was dying.

  But: but still there was life. Life remained. Life on all sides.

  Diving beetles and water striders and water scorpions and dragonflies and snails and slugs and loosestrife and floating pondweed and wild celery and fanwort and mud minnows and mushrooms looking solid and resilient as if they were made of rubber, though they would crumble at the gentlest touch. Richer than ever were the tussock sedges, and the trillium with its shiny red berries, and the spongy bright mosses that had no names. There would always be plankton, algae, scum, there would always be, Raphael reasoned, leeches.

  He inclined his head sharply—had he heard a sound? a small voice?

  The pond’s voice?

  He listened for a long time, trembling. Many years ago—he could not have fathomed how many, in human time—but perhaps it was only the week before last, in the pond’s time—that voice, refined to pure sound, had soothed him and buoyed him up and saved his life. The Doan boy—had that been his name?—ugly name!—Doan—but now all the Doans were gone—gone, scattered, their shanty of a house razed, the barns and outbuildings gone—the Doan boy had tried to kill Raphael but he hadn’t succeeded: and on that day, at that hour, the pond had made itself manifest to him. It took him into its depths, it embraced him, whispered his name which was not Raphael, which had nothing to do with Raphael or Bellefleur.

  Come here, come here to me, I will take you in, I will give you new life. . . .

  In recent years Raphael’s mother Lily had become “religious.” (So the mocking Bellefleurs spoke of the change in Lily—“She’s become ‘religious.’ And can’t you guess why!”) She had tried to take the children to church with her but of course Albert had refused, laughing, and Vida went no more than twice, claiming that it was all so slow and dull and the boys her age not at all interesting, and the girls frankly insipid; and Raphael too had refused, in his shy, stubborn, speechless way. But Christ offers us everlasting life, Lily said, vexed and frowning, her voice doubtful. Raphael, don’t you want—aren’t you afraid not to want—everlasting life?

  But the pond spoke more clearly. Because it did not use human words at all.

  Come to me, come here to me, I will take you in, I will give you new life. . . .

  IN A TRANCE Raphael stretched out upon his raft. Ah how rich, how voluptuous, the odor of decay! He inhaled it deeply. He could not get enough of it. For months, perhaps even for years, he had been smelling this rich ripe rotting odor, this swampy stench, without knowing what it was. Only that it was different from the odor of fresh water. Fresh water and sunlight and wind. Mink Creek’s white-water rapids a few miles away, which he had seen years ago. (But perhaps Mink Creek too was drying up? Perhaps—so the rumors flew—the Mount Kittery mining operations had killed it?)

  Raphael did not know. The world beyond the pond, stretching out on all sides of the pond, had no interest for him. It existed; or perhaps it did not exist; he could not know. It was not his.

  Decay . . . rot . . . decomposing logs and aquatic plants . . . fish floating belly-up . . . a certain queer beauty to their placidity. (And he saw now that the bass had died. Perhaps it had been dead for days.) For a long while he had been smelling the odor of decomposition without knowing what it was, and he had grown accustomed to its richness, its suggestion of night, a secret nighttime maintained in the day, in defiance of the sun’s rude health. The sun had one sort of knowledge but the pond had another. Come to me, come here to me, sink into me, I will take you in, I will protect you, I will give you new life. . . .

  The Rats

  Multitiered and ambitious were plans for the expansion of the Bellefleur empire that autumn, and numerous too were the unexpected plums fate tossed into the family’s lap—for instance, quite without intending it (for she was still a young girl) Morna caught the eye of Governor Horehound’s eldest son, at a charity ball at the governor’s mansion, and the young man was ardently courting her; and one fine October day the Bellefleurs received word that Edgar Schaff had died suddenly of heart failure in Mexico City, and that his fortune, including Schaff Hall, was to fall to his wife, under the terms of his generous will (for the poor distraught man had never alt
ered the will, despite Christabel’s disappointing behavior, as if he had believed he might, after all, persuade his straying wife to return home with him).

  (The difficulty here was, as Leah pointed out, that Christabel was still in hiding, presumably with her lover Demuth, and even the Bellefleur-hired detectives couldn’t find her. They too had traced her to the Mexican border—but then they couldn’t find her. How could the Bellefleurs get hold of the Schaff estate, if Christabel didn’t come forth to claim it in person? And the Schaffs, of course, headed by that dragon of a matriarch, had lost no time with grief, and were already contesting the will. For Schaff, intoxicated with a passion more befitting a far younger bridegroom, had left Christabel everything—the newspapers; the investments; the estate; Baron Schaff’s priceless antiques, memorabilia, and special collections; and some 60,000 acres of strategically located wilderness land.)

  And Ewan, after the temporary setback in August, when he had had to arrest his own uncle for murder, was now more popular than ever: a series of blitzkrieg gambling raids throughout the county, including a highly publicized one at Paie-des-Sables (where, it was disclosed, half-breed Indians were coolly cheating naïve white boys of their entire life savings and even their automobiles and farm equipment) had netted for the county extraordinary sums of money and even a considerable supply of guns, rifles, ammunition, and explosives, which would be put to good use. And Gideon, though he had recovered rather slowly from his accident, had roused himself into action by selling off the rest of his cars, and negotiating with the owner of a fair-sized airport in Invemere (some seventy-five miles northeast of Lake Noir) for a partnership of some kind: a procedure that worried the more conservative members of the family, who gravely distrusted airplanes, but pleased Leah immensely.

  There were important changes being made at the Bellefleur farms, under Noel’s supervision: the old barns were razed and new barns with smart aluminum roofs were built; there were automated silos, bulk tanks, hundreds of arc lights; henhouses operated by batteries in which as many as 100,000 Rhode Island reds lived out their lives in tiny cages, fed special grain to increase both their capacity for egg-laying and the size of their eggs; under the dry-lot system, dairy cows now lived their entire lives in concrete enclosures, receiving feed (mainly alfalfa) from an overhead conveyor. Despite the enormous cost of the investments in this new equipment the family would be saving, year by year, the burdensome cost of their hundreds of unreliable tenant farmers and farmhands—under a near-automated system only a few “farmers” need be retained; and Albert had expressed an eagerness to oversee the entire operation. “If only we could get rid of the smell of those creatures too,” Aveline was heard to say. She meant of course the animals.