Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He stamped about, a thickset, muscular man, graying, ruddy-faced, somewhat short of breath. His stomach strained against the attractive blue-gray material of his officer’s shirt; his booted heels came down hard in the moist soil. Long ago he had shaved off his beard (for it displeased his mistress Rosalind) but now an irregular patch of gray stubble covered his jaw and a good deal of his cheeks.

  It was absurd, this business about the pond. There had never been a pond here. Ewan remembered quite clearly a pond over back of the apple orchard, in which he and his brothers had played as children—that pond still remained, probably—but he hadn’t the energy to search for it.

  Nor, curiously, had he the energy to search for Raphael. After losing Yolande, and then Garth . . .

  He stared down at the moist marshy earth beneath his feet. It was just a meadow, good grazing land, rich with grass, probably fertile beneath. If it were fifty years ago they would plow it up and plant it, possibly in winter wheat; but now everything was changed; now. . . . He could not remember what he had been thinking.

  FOR A LONG while Leah’s and Gideon’s strange little girl (about whom her grandmother Cornelia said with a mysterious smile, Ah, but Germaine isn’t as odd as she might be!) refused to walk on the lawn, even in the walled garden where she had always played. She wept, she began to scream hysterically, if someone tried to lead her out; the graveled walks were all right but the lawns terrified her. If it was absolutely necessary that she cross a lawn, why then Nightshade (who did not at all mind the task, and reddened, like a proud papa, with pleasure) had to carry her.

  But aren’t you a silly, willful girl, Leah scolded. And all because of some nonsense about your cousin Raphael. . . .

  The little girl frequently began to cry at the very mention of that name, and so the others, even Leah, soon stopped pronouncing it in her presence. And very soon they stopped pronouncing it at all: for, it seemed, young Raphael had simply vanished: there was no Raphael.

  The Purple Orchid

  It was shortly after the agreement with International Steel, involving the mineral-rich land around Mount Kittery, that Leah’s manservant Nightshade, grown conspicuously taller (though in fact the droll little man was simply straightening: his spine, while still misshapen, twisted queerly to one side, was gradually becoming erect) brought his mistress, one morning, a florist’s box containing a single purple orchid of exquisite loveliness. It was also somewhat oversized, being about a foot in diameter.

  But what is it? Leah cried, staring.

  If you will allow me, Miss Leah, Nightshade murmured, taking the flower out.

  An orchid, Leah whispered. Is that thing an orchid.

  A very beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. He spoke with sudden passion, as if he had sent the mysterious flower. (In fact there was no envelope, no card, attached. And the delivery man had had no idea, of course, who was responsible.)

  A very beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. As you can see.

  Leah stared at it. She took it from him. It was odorless, and weighed nothing. And it was beautiful: purple and lavender and creamy-lavender, and a rich midnight-blue purple; and a purple so dark, so glistening-dark, it appeared to be black.

  Leah stared at it for so long that her servant, waiting at her elbow, became uneasy. Miss Leah, he said gently, shall I bring a vase—? Or would you like to wear it in your hair?

  Leah, holding the orchid, did not hear.

  Though it is a large flower, Nightshade said, in his deep, guttural, passionate voice, I believe it would look most charming . . . most charming . . . in Miss Leah’s hair. I could, you know, fix it there myself. You needn’t call one of the girls. Miss Leah . . . ?

  Without thinking Leah began to shred the delicate fluted petals with her thumbnail. How lovely the colors were—purple and lavender and a creamy-pale lavender that was almost white—and a rich, rich midnight-blue; and a glistening-dark purple that might have been black. How delicate, how airily delicate, the white pistil, the dark trembling stamens, which protruded so far, and dissolved into dust on her fingers! Seven stamens on seven thin stalks: soon broken and crumbled away to nothing.

  Ah, Leah cried, what am I doing—!

  For without thinking she had quite destroyed the lovely flower.

  TAKE THE SILLY thing away and throw it in the garbage, she said, a minute or two later, and don’t interrupt me again this morning, Nightshade. You really know better.

  Revenge

  Once upon a time, the children were told, a man rode through the main street of Nautauga Falls attired in such handsome clothes, and mounted upon a horse of such exceptional grace and beauty, that all who happened to gaze upon him were stopped in their tracks, and spoke of the sight for years afterward. He was a deeply tanned man of indeterminate age, no longer young, in a suede suit that closely fitted his tall, slender body, with a high-crowned wide-brimmed black wool hat, and a black string tie, and smart lemon-yellow gloves, and leather boots with a pronounced heel: quite clearly a stranger, from another part of the country. And what a handsome man he was, everyone agreed.

  Did they know he was Harlan Bellefleur, come to revenge his family’s deaths? Did they recognize his Bellefleur profile, no matter that he wore a Western hat, and no longer spoke like a native of the Chautauquas?

  In any case they sent him to Lake Noir, to the Varrells. And not a single hand was raised against him when, the following day, he shot down in cold blood (for so the greedy newspapers termed it, cold blood) four of the five men who had been accused by his sister-in-law of having murdered his father, his brother, and his brother’s children.

  There, that’s done, Harlan was reported to have said, with a disdainful smile, when the last of the Varrells, Silas, lay dead. With a meticulous sense of style (for indeed he was being watched, indeed there were numerous witnesses) he then turned to walk away.

  THAT, THE CHILDREN were told, was revenge. Not just the acts, the murders, themselves: but the style as well.

  Nothing is quite so profound as revenge, they were told. Nothing quite so exquisite. When Harlan Bellefleur rode into town and hunted down his family’s murderers and shot them one by one, like dogs—!

  The taste of it. Of revenge. Honey-rich in the mouth, it was. Unmistakable. The lurching of your heart, the powerful intoxicating waves of blood coursing through your veins, a raw clamorous yearning tide of blood. . . . Unmistakable.

  (BUT HOW UGLY, revenge. The very thought of it. Animals tearing at one another. The first blow, and then the next, and the next, and the next: the sickening quaver of the knees, that tarry-black taste at the back of the mouth. . . . So Vernon Bellefleur thought, alone amid the excited children. He must have been a child, among them; at any rate he was in disguise as a child. Then. In those blurred interminable days long ago. Revenge, the others whispered, laughing aloud with the sheer nervousness of certain thoughts. Ah—revenge! If only we had lived then.)

  BUT HOW EXQUISITE it was, really. There was nothing like it. No human experience, not even the experience of passionate erotic love, could match it. For in love (so the more articulate Bellefleurs speculated) there is never, there can be never, anything more than the sense, however compelling, that one is fulfilling oneself; but in revenge there is the sense that one is fulfilling the entire universe. Justice is being done by one’s violent act. Justice is being exacted against the wishes of mankind.

  For revenge, though it is a species of justice, always runs counter to the prevailing wishes of mankind. It makes war against what is fixed. It is always revolutionary. It cannot exert itself but must be exerted; and exerted only through violence, by a selfless individual who is willing to die in the service of his mission.

  Thus Harlan Bellefleur, hawk-faced Indian-red Harlan Bellefleur in his black Stetson, on his sleek brownish-gray Costeña mare, riding into Nautauga Falls one fine May morning in 1826. . . .

  (VENGEANCE IS MINE, sayeth the Lord. So Fredericka insisted, arguing with Arthur. For John Brown was a murderer, wasn�
�t he, no matter that he imagined himself in the service of the Lord? And Harlan Bellefleur as well. A murderer in the face of the Almighty.)

  DR. WYSTAN SHEELER COULD not have known, nor could Raphael Bellefleur have explained (lacking, as he did, any sense of the interior life—which he would have considered merely weakness), but, some seven decades after Harlan appeared on his high-stepping mare, Raphael was to subside into that cynical, dispirited melancholy, and order himself skinned for a drum, partly as a consequence of certain events that had happened before his birth.

  What rage he felt, and what shame—! Though without exactly feeling anything. For Raphael had no conscious memory of having been told (by neighbors?—by classmates?—certainly not by his parents, who never spoke of the past) about the Bushkill’s Ferry massacre and the trial and Harlan’s sudden reappearance; he had, indeed, very little conscious memory of himself as a child.

  (Though he must, he knew, have been a child—at least for a while.)

  These were the things to be contemplated, over the years, at the periphery of his highly active life: the massacre, and the rescue of Germaine from the burning house, and the arrest of old Rabin and the Varrells, and the hearing, the indictment, the trial itself. . . .

  Above all, this: his mother’s humiliation.

  His mother Germaine, slow-speaking and easily confused, in the courtroom day after day, that late winter of 1826, before hundreds of curious staring strangers. Her humiliation there was more grievous, in a way, than the massacre itself, which was over so quickly. (It never ceased to astonish: six persons killed in a matter of minutes. So quickly!)

  His mother Germaine, in a shapeless black dress, twisting and pleating her skirt as she spoke. . . .

  Raphael wondered: Did she look over to the defendants’ table, did she look upon them, her family’s murderers . . . No doubt she would have found them, in the stark light from the courtroom’s high windows, quite ordinary men; diminished as much by their surroundings as by their guilt. Or did she keep her gaze stonily averted throughout the many days of the trial. . . .

  Yes, I recognized them, yes, I knew them, my husband’s and my children’s murderers. Yes, they are in this courtroom.

  THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE at Nautauga Falls boasted a sandstone façade and four “Greek” columns; it overlooked a handsome square, and the old county jail, at the square’s opposite end. The courthouse was, for its time, a spacious building, and accommodated more than two hundred spectators for what was known variously as the Bellefleur trial, and the Varrell trial, and the Lake Noir trial. (The Lake Noir district with its innumerable unsolved crimes—theft, arson, murder—had been notorious from the time of its first settlement in the mid-1700’s; and though the Bellefleur murders were considered excessive, and particularly hideous because of the fact that children were involved, the public, and the downstate newspaper reporters, tended to see them as representative of the region’s lawlessness—brutal, barbaric, but unsurprising.)

  Crowded into the courtroom’s pewlike seats were friends and neighbors of the Bellefleurs, and friends and neighbors and relatives of the Varrells, and others from the area who had not precisely chosen sides; and innumerable strangers—some having come to the Falls in horsedrawn wagons, others in handsome carriages. The poor had brought their own food and ate it outside in the square, despite the cold; wealthier parties were staying at the Nautauga House and the Gould Inn, or drove downtown from their estates on the Lakeshore Boulevard, curious to see the Bellefleur woman and the men, the dreadful men, who had murdered her husband and children. (Some of the well-to-do spectators had known, in their time, old Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, though few of them would have admitted it.) That a woman should be a witness to such horror, and yet survive. . . .

  Poor Germaine Bellefleur.

  That wretched woman.

  Newspaper sketches of Germaine Bellefleur showed a dark-eyed, staring, profoundly somber woman in her mid- or late thirties, with a somewhat thick jaw, and premature creases bracketing her mouth. She was not, opinion had it, pretty. Perhaps at one time, but not now: decidedly not now: wasn’t there even something stubborn and bulldoglike about the set of her mouth, and her eyes’ narrowed expression? Called to the witness stand, seated in the chair on its high platform, she looked smaller of build than she was, and her voice, faltering, had a nasal, sexless ring; it was decidedly unmelodic, and cost her sympathy. As she answered the prosecutor’s interminable questions, and, afterward, the defense attorney’s interminable badgering questions, it was observed how she twisted and pleated the skirt of her unflattering dress, and stared at the floor, as if she were the guilty party. . . . (The newspaper reporters were disappointed not only in Mrs. Bellefleur’s appearance, which lacked feminine grace, but in her testimony as well: it was so obviously rehearsed. For of course Mrs. Bellefleur, as well as the murderers themselves, and most of the witnesses, would not have dared speak in such a place, before a judge and jurors and so many spectators, without having memorized, like school children, their every word—with the consequence, as one correspondent for a Vanderpoel paper said wittily, that everyone, Mrs. Bellefleur as well as the accused murderers, and their neighbors, struck outside observers as belonging to one large dull-witted family, with the intellectual skills and manners of brain-damaged sheep. How graceless they all were!)

  Backcountry people. Hill people. “Poor whites.” (Despite the fact of the Bellefleurs’ vast property holdings, and Jean-Pierre’s numerous investments.) There was old Rabin with his sunken cheeks and near-toothless gums, his face wrinkled as a prune, and so ugly; and the Varrell men in the first suits and neckties they had ever worn—Reuben and Wallace and Silas, looking sick—and the boy Myron, who looked, now, not much older than seventeen, gazing about the courtroom with a vacuous half-smile. Old Rabin and the Varrells and Mrs. Bellefleur: weren’t they all Lake Noir people, weren’t Lake Noir people always involved in feuds, weren’t they all uncivilized, and hopeless . . . ?

  A LIFE, SEVERAL lives, reduced to a single hour.

  The terrible exhausting concentration of meaning: as if Germaine’s life had stopped, on that October night, along with the others’ lives. As if nothing existed apart from that time: not an hour, really, but considerably less than an hour.

  Will you please recount for the court, as clearly as you can, omitting no details, exactly what happened on the night of . . .

  The silence of the courtroom. Silence, interrupted frequently by waves of whispers. Ladies turned to one another, raising their gloved hands to shield their faces, and their words. Germaine broke off, confused. What she had said, what she was yet to say, what she had already said so many times, tangled together, like ribbons, like an unwisely long thread, and should she stop, should she snip the thread at once and begin again, or should she continue. . . .

  Please tell us, Mrs. Bellefleur, as clearly as you can, omitting no details . . .

  And so, again. Again. The halting procession of words. The sudden panicked realization that something had been forgotten: and should she pause, and return, stammering and blushing (for she knew very well, how could she fail to know, how pitying and contemptuous certain persons were of her, facing her hour after hour, how they judged her), or should she continue, repeating one thing after another, And then in the next room I could hear them with Bernard, I could hear Bernard scream, one set of words after another, as if she were crossing a turbulent stream on stepping-stones that threatened to overturn beneath her weight. She must keep going. She couldn’t stop. And yet—

  And you are absolutely certain, Mrs. Bellefleur, that you recognized the murderers’ voices. . . .

  And again, again, the names: the names that were like stepping-stones too: Rabin and Wallace and Reuben and Silas and Myron. (And though it occurred to her while she lay convalescing in a neighbor’s home that she knew, really, who one and possibly two of the others were, she could hear again their voices and recognize them, or almost recognize them, yes she really knew, she knew, it was a
dvised that she restrict herself to her original story, for the defense would surely interrogate her about “remembering” so many days after the fact.)

  The defendants at their table: coarse-faced, sullen, baffled men, three of them with whiskers that covered half their faces, the youngest, Myron, vacant-eyed, smiling at the judge and the jurors and the sheriff’s men as if they were old friends. (The Varrells’ attorney wisely kept Myron off the witness stand, for he would probably have confessed had he remembered the crimes. Myron, it was said, didn’t deal with a full deck now, and it might have been as a consequence of his amiable calfishness that, some months after the trial, he was to drown in a canoe accident on Silver Lake, in unremarkable weather.)

  Boldly and defiantly and with an incredulous little laugh deep in his throat the Varrells’ attorney (twenty-eight years old, an Innisfail boy with political ambitions) moved that the case be dismissed because of lack of evidence: for of course his clients had alibis, relatives and neighbors and drinking companions had from the very first supplied detailed stories of the men’s whereabouts on that night (absurdly detailed stories which newspaper reporters thought further proof of Lake Noir ignorance—a curious combination of naïveté and brutality), and in any case there was no proof, there was absolutely no proof, merely a confused and spiteful woman’s accusation. . . . How, the young man asked Mrs. Bellefleur, drawling her name as if he thought it somehow extraordinary, could she possibly ask the court to believe that in the confusion of the moment she could have recognized anyone? When, by her own testimony, the murderers were wearing masks?

  Certainly there was no proof. Not even circumstantial evidence. And his clients had alibis. Each of them could account thoroughly for that night, for every hour of that night. It was a single woman’s word against the word of dozens of others, each of whom had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth.