Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And you ask us to believe, the young man drawled, smiling as he looked about the courtroom, at the twelve men in the jury box, and the judge, and the spectators crowded into the rows of seats, you ask us to take seriously, Mrs. Bellefleur, an accusation that by your own account must be judged as frankly dubious . . .

  As if sharing his clients’ guilt the attorney was edgy, bold, arrogant, even indignant. He had learned a trick of smiling very faintly just after he made a statement he considered outrageous: smiling faintly, with his head lifted in mute astonishment. And you ask us . . . And you ask the court . . . He must have taken elocution lessons, he projected his thin, reedy voice with such confidence; and his small portly body with its melonlike belly was always perfectly erect.

  His questions then fastened upon Jean-Pierre and Louis. But especially Jean-Pierre. The Onondagan woman Antoinette who had died along with the others—what was her relationship, if any, to the family? Wasn’t she, the attorney asked with a mocking hesitancy, a particular friend of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s . . . an intimate friend . . . who had shared the Bellefleurs’ household for years . . . ? At first Germaine did not reply; she stared at the floor, and her face appeared to thicken. Then she said in a slow voice that the woman kept to her part of the house. They rarely spoke. They rarely saw each other. . . . In a louder voice, somewhat bitterly, Germaine said that of course she hadn’t approved, not with the children, but what could she do . . . what could anyone do . . . that was the old man’s way . . . he did what he wanted . . . and even Louis wouldn’t stand up to him . . . though she hadn’t asked him to, because . . . because he would have been angry . . . because he always took his father’s side against anyone.

  Might the killings, the attorney asked, have had anything to do with the Onondagan woman? With the fact that she was living common-law with Jean-Pierre Bellefleur . . .

  Germaine, hunched forward, appeared to be thinking. But she did not reply.

  Mrs. Bellefleur, isn’t it possible that . . .

  Baffled, the creases deepening beside her mouth, Germaine shook her head slowly. She seemed not to comprehend the line of questioning.

  A young Onondagan woman, your elderly father-in-law with his innumerable . . . his innumerable, shall we say, former business associates . . .

  And then there were questions about Jean-Pierre’s various activities since his years in Congress. The many acres of wilderness land he had accumulated, under several names (a fact that appeared to surprise Germaine, who stared at the attorney in bewilderment), his part-ownership of Chattaroy Hall and the coach line from Nautauga Falls to White Sulphur Springs and the Gazette and the steamboat and the Mount Horn logging company that had filed for bankruptcy and . . . and hadn’t there been a large fertilizer sale . . . a hoax . . . reputedly Arctic elk manure . . . many wagonloads of . . . And during Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s last term in Congress hadn’t there been the sensational exposé of La Compagnie de New York . . .

  So the questions came, one after another. Germaine tried to answer. I don’t know, she said haltingly, shamefully, I don’t know, I don’t remember, they never talked about business, I don’t know. . . . And then abruptly she was being interrogated about the night of the murders again, and the masks. Hadn’t she been terrified, hadn’t she been confused, wasn’t it even the case that, according to her own admission, she had been unconscious most of the time the men were in the house . . . ? How, if the men had been masked, had she recognized their faces?

  And she hadn’t been a witness to the others’ deaths. Only to Louis’s. In the other wing of the house Jean-Pierre Bellefleur and the Onondagan woman had been killed, quite some distance away; and in the parlor and kitchen the children. So she hadn’t witnessed those murders. She couldn’t possibly have known what was happening. Or who the murderers were. She claimed to have recognized voices but how could she possibly have recognized voices. . . . The murders had been committed, the young man claimed, in a high ringing voice, by strangers. It was quite plausible that they were thieves, attracted to the Bellefleur home because of its size and the reputation of old Jean-Pierre; or that they were Indians, furious at the Onondagan woman for her relationship with the notorious Jean-Pierre; or that they were—and this was most likely—enemies of Jean-Pierre’s who wished him dead for reasons having to do with his discreditable business practices. Mrs. Bellefleur in her deranged state may have convinced herself that she heard familiar voices . . . or she may even have wanted (for reasons it would be indelicate to explore) to accuse the Varrells and Rabin because of the long-standing enmity between her family and them. . . .

  Germaine interrupted. I know who they were, she said. I know. I was there. I heard them. I know them! I know! And then, rising, before the sheriff’s men hurried forward to restrain her, she began to scream: They did it! Them! Them there! Sitting over there! You know it and everybody knows it! They killed my husband and children! They killed six people! I know! I was there! I know!

  A LIGHT SNOW was falling very early on the May morning when Harlan Bellefleur managed to shoot and kill, within an hour and forty-five minutes, four of the accused murderers; the fifth, young Myron, was spared because in trying to escape from Harlan he not only turned his back to run but fell to his hands and knees and began to crawl, desperate as a maddened animal. And so Harlan, acting out of a sense of revulsion rather than pity, raised the barrel of his silver-handled pistol skyward, and did not fire.

  Old Rabin was shot just once, in the chest, as he opened the door to his shanty on the north shore of Olden Lake, in answer to Harlan’s loud knocking; Wallace and Reuben were killed on the main street of the village known at that time as Lake Noir; Silas was shot in the darkened back room of the White Antelope Inn, where he appeared to be awaiting Harlan (for by then—by midmorning—he had heard, of course, that Bellefleur was on his way), simply sitting hunched over in a cane-backed chair, weaponless. Harlan, euphoric from the morning’s activity, and followed by a small gang of admiring townsmen who urged him on, Now Silas, Silas is next!, kicked open the tavern door and strode into the building as if he knew beforehand that Varrell, this particular Varrell, would put up no struggle. Pity for the moronic Myron had weakened him but he would have no pity for Silas, cowering there in the dark, his breath audible at a distance of some yards, through a closed door.

  So you were found Not Guilty, Harlan laughed. And raised the pistol and fired point-blank into the man’s face.

  Unknown to Gideon . . .

  Unknown to Gideon, who was to become, as the summer deepened, more and more obsessed with flying (for now he had his pilot’s license, and had bought, at Tzara’s encouragement, a handsome high-winged cream-colored Dragonfly with a 450-horsepower engine that could cruise at exceptionally low speeds), unknown to Gideon, Old Skin and Bones (for so the young women affectionately called him—though they still feared him, somewhat), whose three or four hours of nightly sleep were titillated by lurching visions of the Invemere runway which he must bring his craft down to, in safety, despite the fact that the dream-plane rushed with such violence through the air and threatened at any moment to disintegrate, so that he woke grinding his teeth, on the very edge of screaming: unknown to Gideon, who imagined his fascination with the air to be, like his fascination with the Rache woman, quite unique—really quite unique in the history of his family—there were two distant cousins, as unknown to each other as they were to Gideon, who had, in their time (a time long past) lived out their devotion to flying.

  One assisted the elderly Octave Chanute in the late 1890’s, at his work camp on Lake Michigan, experimenting with gliders and eventually with biplanes; it was young Meredith Bellefleur, in fact, who built the first biplane with a compressed-air motor, with the glider as its foundation, and Bellefleur whom Chanute most praised. Hungry for more praise and evidently quite young, still (little is known of Meredith Bellefleur other than the fact that he moved away from his family at the age of seventeen, to “make his own way” in the world), Bellefleu
r then volunteered to fly one of the old man’s riskiest gliders, partly for the glory of it, partly because the contraption was so beautiful (it had ten wings, each seven feet long, rather like a crane’s wings, and a small kitelike wing directly over the pilot’s head, all painted a brilliant fearless red): but he was at the mercy of insidious wind currents that blew him, jerkily, in spasms, farther and farther out over the lake, until finally he was out of sight. . . . Octave Chanute mourned the loss of Bellefleur as he might have mourned the loss of his own son. The body was never found, nor was the prodigious glider’s wreckage washed ashore. I can’t help but think, Chanute frequently said, afterward, that young Meredith died happily. For to die like that . . . to die like that is surely a privilege.

  Equally privileged was another young Bellefleur man, from the Port Oriskany Bellefleurs, who were, in the words of the Lake Noir Bellefleurs, never anything more than “middle-class”—they owned a block or two of Port Oriskany, and had something to do with lake freighting, and their marriages were undistinguished. This boy, Justin, spent his summers in Hammondsport, working with Glenn Curtiss; the passion there was to build upon the Wright brothers’ invention, to surpass it, in as brief a time as possible, for of course there would be a great deal of money involved in airplanes—the future itself was contained in airplanes—and whoever built the most efficient and most practical model would be as wealthy, eventually, as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford themselves. Curtiss’s company turned out an early version of the June Bug in 1907, a charming little craft with a 40-horsepower engine and a chain-driven pusher propeller, capable of flying as fast as 35 miles per hour. Justin, then nineteen years old, was to fly the plane in the First International Aviation Meet in Reims the following year but an inexplicable accident—he had appeared to have taken off smoothly, into a firm, stable wind—resulted in his premature death. (Falling from a height of no more than forty feet, young Justin might have survived; but he suffered vicious lacerations from the propeller, which seemed to have gone berserk as the little craft crashed to earth.)

  In addition to the cousins Meredith and Justin, about whom so little was known by the Lake Noir Bellefleurs, there was a story—possibly legendary—about Hiram’s wife Eliza being carried off in a trim little seaplane, a surplus Navy vehicle, very early one morning before the household was awake: but whether the pilot was the woman’s lover, or whether he had, for totally incidental reasons, landed his plane on the lake in order to make a minor repair, and was then waved ashore by the distraught woman—no one knew. At any rate she did disappear, leaving behind her little boy Vernon, who was to mourn her forever. (Unless—and this is possible—Vernon was to meet with her in later years, far beyond the boundaries of the Bellefleur empire, and of this chronicle.)

  Unknown to Gideon too was the fact that Leah had been making surreptitious inquiries about the obscure Mrs. Rache for weeks (Who is this new “love” of Gideon’s? Old Skin and Bones, wouldn’t you think he might act his age! Who is the bitch’s husband? Do they have money? Where do they live? Does she love Gideon? What does she think of him?—of us?), but quite without success. Tzara would give out no information, and the airport’s mechanics knew nothing about her other than the fact (so frequently repeated, Leah grew cynically amused) that she wore tight-fitting trousers, men’s trousers with a zipper in front, and a tan leather jacket that came only to her waist, and goggles, and a leather helmet into which she heedlessly tucked her hair as she strode out to her favorite plane. So far as anyone knew she had never exchanged more than a half-dozen words with Gideon, who introduced himself to her one July afternoon as the airport’s new owner. (Startled at his voice, which came at her unexpected, and sounded—for poor Gideon’s voice had changed—both strident and thin, she had paused, and turned, but only from the waist, peering at him over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed behind the tinted lenses as if she fully expected to meet, in the shadow of the hangar, a stranger’s lustful stare: and in response to Gideon’s words she offered nothing of herself, not even a smile to acknowledge his hopeful smile, but asked only what the afternoon’s weather would be—was the wind going to change?—would there be a break in the cloud floor?)

  SOMETIMES IN THE Dragonfly, sometimes in a cream-and-red Stinson voyager, sometimes in a handsome Wittman Tailwind W-8 with a continental engine, Gideon raced with his newly acquired flying friends out of the Invemere airport, toward the Powhatassie, or westward into the Chautauquas (which were not nearly so dangerous to navigate as they appeared, for the highest peak, Mount Blanc, was only about 3,000 feet high), or southwest toward the great lurid oval of Lake Noir, or due south to Nautauga Falls where, if they liked, they might land at the Falls airport and spend an hour or two at the Bristol Brigand, a pub close by. Gideon enjoyed his new friends though he did not much believe in them. Perhaps he sensed that his life was running out—perhaps he sensed that he was being borne along by a quick, sullen, capricious wind that cared not at all for him—but he did not credit his friends (Alvin and Pete and Clay and Haggarty) with much substance. Two were former bomber pilots, and had flown many missions, and had survived, and a third—Pete—had even survived a crash-landing in a cornfield east of Silver Lake. They were excellent drinking companions; they loved to tell tales about flying, and to give Gideon pointers (for, in their boisterous company, he appeared somewhat subdued, and despite his emaciated frame and pouched eyes he appeared comparatively youthful) not only on flying but on life as well—even on women. (That Rache woman! Wasn’t she something! Ugly as hell! Ugly, yes! But, still—still.)

  They drank, and returned to their planes, and taxied out the runway, and plunged into the sky, reckless and euphoric. Life was so simple, so extraordinarily clear as soon as one lifted into the air: it was only the earth that gave trouble.

  On July 4 Gideon and Alvin managed to fly their planes beneath the eight-span Powhatassie Bridge within sixty seconds of each other, and with only about four feet to spare; the other pilots, approaching the bridge, lost their courage, or frankly panicked, and flew over it to forfeit their bets. (The bets were small—$100, $150—and meant nothing to Gideon; but he had to be careful not to insult his friends.) On another occasion Gideon, Alvin, and Haggarty managed to “thread the needle” between two immense elms a quarter-mile beyond the Invemere airport, though Gideon was the only one to repeat the trick. How childlike they were, how sweetly exhilarated they felt! Life was so easy, so uncomplicated, there really was nothing to it, so long as one stayed in the air. . . . Another time, in mid-August, the men raced one another to Katama Pass nine hundred miles to the north, where the brother-in-law of one of them owned a fishing lodge. They were able to land, though not gracefully, on a stretch of unpaved highway.

  So Gideon had his friends, in whom he did not altogether believe.

  And he had Mrs. Rache: Mrs. Rache of whom he thought a great deal, but never with pleasure. (He had offered the woman, tauntingly, the Hawker Tempest. As a gift. Would you like it? Why then take it! You’re the only one who flies it out of this airport. . . . He had offered her the airplane but she hadn’t known how to respond. Reluctantly she turned to him, her hands on her hips, turning to stare at him, to assess him. She did not fear him as a woman might fear a man. She feared him, he saw, with a pang of excitement, as one man might fear another man—not knowing whether the offer was serious, or meant in jest. It would involve, after all—wouldn’t it?—property worth thousands of dollars.)

  Of course he tried to follow the Hawker Tempest. From time to time. Unobtrusively. When the mood was on him. He did not expect to keep the plane in sight for long, though it always alarmed him how quickly the fighter did disappear, banking to the west, climbing to 2,500 feet and then to 3,000 and higher. The Hawker Tempest had a 2,000-horsepower engine and could be flown hundreds of miles in a brief period of time, but Gideon had no idea where the woman took it, or even if she brought it to earth. He himself leveled out at about 2,000 feet and cruised at 145 miles per hour westward into the Chautauquas, his
excitement gradually waning (for the Rache woman was simply too fast for him). He had no destination and no sense of urgency; he hardly had a sense of being Gideon Bellefleur (and, yes, he knew he was frequently called Old Skin and Bones, and he did not really mind); once he was off the runway, once he cleared that line of sickly poplars he had acquired along with the mortgaged airport, nothing earthly mattered. Nothing weighed upon him seriously—certainly not his sentimental lust for a woman whose face he had never seen.

  ALONE. ALONE AND floating. Buoyed up by the ocean-currents of air, moving effortlessly, languidly. At seven to eight hundred feet his sense of the earth was already dissolved; he floated free, and even the window-rattling forward motion appeared to diminish. The takeoff and the initial climb were headlong plunges but once he was secure in the sky he felt the earth shift below him, quite harmless. Even the engine, throttled back to cruising speed, was quiet, hardly more obtrusive than his own heartbeat.

  Now what was the world and its claim upon him in this exhilarating sea of the invisible, this vertiginous wave-upon-wave of air upon which he floated, weightless, indeed, bodiless, flying not into the future—which did not, of course, exist in the sky—but into the obliteration of time itself? He directed his trim yellow lightweight plane away from time, away from history, away from the person he had evidently been for so many years: trapped inside a certain skeleton, defined by a certain face. Gideon, Gideon!—a woman called. Ah, what yearning in her voice! Was the woman Leah, was she his wife Leah, whom he loved so deeply, with so little sentiment, that there was rarely any need for him to think of her at all? Or was the woman a stranger? A stranger, calling him to her, forward to her?

  Gideon, Gideon—