Bellefleur (10 page)

After a short while Mahalaleel was not content with sleeping at the foot of the bed, curled up on the turquoise and cream-colored brocade cover (which he had already soiled somewhat, with his hairs, and dirty feet); during the night he made his way on tiptoe, walking with extreme delicacy for so large a creature, to lie between Leah and Gideon. Gideon was never certain when Mahalaleel made his move, but it was during a period of Gideon’s deepest, most intense sleep, so that he was never awakened, and at dawn he would discover himself pushed far to the right side of the bed, crowded out by that damned Mahalaleel.

“Tonight he sleeps in the kitchen,” Gideon said.

“He sleeps
here,
” Leah said.

“He belongs in the barn with the other animals!”

“He belongs
here,
” Leah said.

And so they disagreed, and quarreled frequently, but Mahalaleel continued to sleep with them, leaving his multicolored hairs everywhere—even, Gideon might discover to his fury, in his eyelashes, or in his beard. He had to excuse himself from a conference with his father, his uncle Hiram, Ewan, and a bank officer from Nautauga Falls, because something had worked its way in his eye and his eye was watering and tears were streaming down his cheek: of course it turned out to be a cat hair.

He recalled Mahalaleel’s appearance, that rainy night. A rat, really. An opossum. With that skinny ugly tail. He
might
have stomped it to death right there in the foyer, and Leah could not have stopped him, and no one would really have blamed him. Now it was too late: now, if Mahalaleel disappeared, Leah would grieve over him. (She wasn’t herself these days—hadn’t been herself for months—too easily brought to tears, to rage, to a black dispirited mood.) Leah would know of course that Gideon had done it and she would never forgive him.

So Mahalaleel continued to sleep in their bedroom, and at dawn Gideon would wake with a start to see the cat gazing unperturbed at him, no more than six inches away. The creature’s eyes were golden-green and flawless, like jewels; there was something fascinating about them. Gideon knew better, he knew that animals hadn’t any grasp of their own being, they did not, after all,
create
themselves, yet he could not tear his eyes away from the cat’s. The silky fur, soft and rising cloudily, revealing in a single ray of sunshine all sorts of amazing improbable colors—not only an eerie crystalline dove-gray, and an ivory-white, but saffron, and russet, and gold, and even a sort of lavender-green; the subtle misty design hidden in the layers of fur and fluff—vaguely tigerish, rainbow stripes of every variety of width and depth of coloring; the pert, rather snubbed grape-colored nose with its sharply defined nostrils (so sharp they looked, even at close range, as if someone had outlined them in black ink with a fine-tipped pen); the silvery-white whiskers which measured, according to Gideon’s son Bromwell, nine inches from tip to tip, and were always straight and bristling with cleanliness; the tip of the tongue, so damp and pink, which often protruded slightly, just a fraction of an inch, between his front teeth in the morning—a sign of lazy contentment, of absolute satisfaction. Gideon’s public attitude toward his wife’s pet continued to be one of indifference or disdain: he was a horseman, after all, like his father, and had never fussed much over dogs, not even the finest hunting dogs on the estate. So he ignored Mahalaleel downstairs. But sometimes in private he
almost
admired the creature. . . . He stared at its calm unblinking uncanny eyes, and it stared back at him, showing the tip of its tongue, its big knobby oversized feet sometimes beginning a little dance: kneading at the very pillow on which Gideon’s head lay: sheathing and unsheathing those great curved claws.

ONE MORNING GIDEON
awoke very early to see Leah sitting up in bed, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, in untidy strands across her breasts. The cat lay slumbering between them, an enormous patch of warm shadow. Before Gideon could speak Leah reached out to grasp his shoulder, and then his forearm; her grip was surprisingly hard. He dreaded what she might tell him. And yet it turned out to be the best possible news: she was certain, she claimed, that she was pregnant.

“I feel something there. I’m not imagining it, I
feel
something, it isn’t even like the other time, it’s something quite different—quite distinct. I can
feel
that I’m pregnant. I
know.
”

And so she was pregnant, indeed. And so Germaine came to be born.

Jedediah

J
edediah: 1806. A pilgrimage into the mountains. In his twenty-fourth year. I will be a guide if necessary, he told his angry father, I will live absolutely alone for one full year, he told his skeptical brother, please don’t worry about me, don’t think about me at all.

Jedediah Bellefleur, the youngest of the three sons of Jean-Pierre and Hilda (who had fled her husband in 1790, and lived now in seclusion with her wealthy elderly parents in Manhattan), relatively slight-bodied for a Bellefleur, particularly for one who wanted to explore the western range by himself. No more than five feet six inches tall in his thick-heeled leather boots. No more than 130 pounds in weight, at the time of his departure. (When he returned—ah, when he returned!—he barely weighed one hundred pounds. But that was much later.) Unlike his brothers Louis and Harlan, and certainly unlike his notorious father, Jedediah was soft-spoken and reserved; his silence was sometimes mistaken for aloofness, even for contempt. He had a narrow triangular face surrounded by sprigs of dark electric hair which was always unruly, as if stirred by inordinately restless thought. Jean-Pierre had forced him to ride as a very small child and in a freakish accident (the normally tractable gelding had been panicked by the smell of blood on someone’s clothes: it was November, it was pig-butchering time) he was thrown, and badly hurt, and as a consequence would walk with a slight limp his entire life. If he was bitter—but of course Jedediah was not bitter—if he even contemplated bitterness toward his father, he did not show it: he had learned shrewdly not to show anything of his secret life to his father.

Yet it was not his father Jedediah was leaving; nor was it—he was
certain
—his brother’s young wife, about whom his thoughts circled obsessively. If he meant to run away from Germaine he might have gone anywhere, he need not have exposed himself to such hardship. (And in a sense Jedediah hardly saw his sister-in-law now. Hardly “saw” her after the wedding ceremony and the wedding party—held unwisely at the Fort Hanna Inn, a noisy brawling tavern on the river in which Jean-Pierre had invested some of his money, and which was ideally suited for all-night drunken parties from which, early in the evening, tiresomely respectable guests fled, and native Indians—Indian women, that is—might be welcomed in, immune from state and county laws governing their presence in establishments that served alcoholic refreshments; and, some days later, the housewarming party which the young couple bravely gave (for it was not only the groom’s father who had gotten so shamefully drunk at the wedding party, and offered to fight the Fort Hanna Inn proprietor who, he said, was cheating him of “thousands of dollars of revenue,” but the bride’s father as well—an Irishman named Brian O’Hagan who made do in the wilderness by trapping beaver, and speculating in land rumored to be rich in silver and gold along the Nautauga River—“rumored,” that is, by the very people who wanted to unload their land) in the handsome log house with its wide veranda and several fieldstone fireplaces the old man was giving them as a wedding gift—after these incidents Jedediah did not really “see” Germaine at all. He carried her image about with him, effortlessly, and helplessly, and at odd unanticipated times—while kneeling in prayer on the floorboards of his bedroom, while struggling to saddle the small-bodied but uncannily strong roan mare he intended to take with him on his pilgrimage, while washing his face at dawn, bringing pools of icy water against his sleep-seared eyes—he might sense her presence, as if she had come up quietly beside him, and was about to lay her hand on his arm.

Germaine O’Hagan was sixteen years old. Louis was twenty-seven. She was no taller than a child, quick and dark and lithe and very pretty, with self-consciously “gracious” movements she had learned from observing ladies at church; when in the presence of the Bellefleurs she stood very straight, her small hands clasped together just below her breasts, her eyes wide and dark and intense. She was not intimidated, though she might have been surprised, by Jean-Pierre’s boisterous charm—his exaggerated compliments which always sounded mocking when addressed to women, and which were, indeed, viciously mocking when addressed to his wife; his airy theatrical mannerisms; his spinning out of farfetched “frontier” tales learned in private clubs in Manhattan, and around mahogany tables on Wall Street, in the feverish years of his “rise”; and his careless tactless familiarity with the country’s ruling families, and with Washington politicians, generally known as contemptible
but
possessing devilishly admirable traits not unlike those attributed to Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, a duke’s son after all, himself. She was not intimidated, not even alarmed, since her
own
father—! Ah, yes, her own father. Who was still trying to sell Jean-Pierre shares along the Nautauga. Who bathed twice a year—in May, and then again in September, before the first frost.

She was pregnant, after less than two months of marriage.

She was pregnant, a girl of sixteen who looked, even close up, like a child of twelve.

Jedediah had been planning to leave for years, he had been dreaming of the mountains, the high lake country, the solitude of balsam and tamarack and yellow birch and spruce and hemlock and tall white pines, some of them as thick as seven feet at the base, of surpassing beauty, and ageless: even before the most public of his father’s disgraces (the others, those that had broken his mother, were certainly worse), even before his brother brought home the little O’Hagan girl he claimed from the first he intended to marry—no matter that Jean-Pierre had plans for him, as he had plans for all his sons involving heiresses of Dutch, German, even of French stock, before the newspapers hawked the secrets of “La Compagnie de New York,” and even after: and then too, if he wanted simply to flee Louis and Germaine and the heart-stopping fact of their union, the fact that they shared the same bed night after night, now routinely, now without even self-consciousness (though Jedediah could not quite comprehend such an enormity) he might have followed Harlan out west, or settled in to work farmland along the Nautauga, since his father owned thousands of acres of land in the Valley and would have leased or sold it (he would not have given it, at least not until Jedediah married) very reasonably. But it was the north country he turned to. It was the north country he required. To lose himself, to find God. To ascend as a pilgrim, confident that God awaited.

I will be a guide if necessary, he informed his father, who was, at first, speechless with anger: for when the West Indies deal went through he would
need
men he could trust as overseers, who would not be timid about handling the slaves firmly. I will live absolutely alone for one full year, from one June to the next, he told his skeptical brother Louis, who was rather hurt—for he was extremely fond of Jedediah in his bullying negligent way, and it frightened him, initially, to contemplate life with the family so diminished. For
family
meant everything.

(First their mother had fled, after her nervous collapse. After their father had disgraced himself in public—or so it would seem, if one judged the situation not by the old man’s casual remarks but by the highly vocal remarks of others: Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s second term as a congressman had ended abruptly, attended by charges of scandal and corruption, but it was never clear exactly what he had done since so many other men were involved, businessmen and politicians alike, what with inadequate laws and governors famously “pliant,” as the expression went. After weeks of newspaper exposure of La Compagnie de New York, a shareholding organization for founding a New France in the mountains for titled French families dispossessed of their property by the Revolution, at three dollars an acre (Jean-Pierre and his partners had, of course, paid the state far less after
this
revolution, when great masses of wilderness land originally owned by the British or by British sympathizers reverted back to the government, and state land commissioners were authorized to sell as much of it as possible, in order to populate the north country, and to establish a buffer between the new states and British Canada)—after weeks of secret meetings—the presence of strangers in the Bellefleur household—Jean-Pierre’s alternating panic and crude blustering euphoria—somehow it came about that no formal indictments were made. None. Jean-Pierre and his partners and La Compagnie were not even fined. But by then Jean-Pierre’s marriage was over: though it could not be said that he missed his wife. And then, years later, Harlan had fled, taking with him a matched team of Andalusian horses, and wearing around his lean middle a money belt stuffed with cash and all that remained of their mother’s jewelry.)

And now Jedediah. Young Jedediah, who had always seemed so fearful of life.

“One year!” Louis laughed. “You really think you’ll stay up in the mountains
one year!
My friend, you’ll be back home by the end of November.”

Jedediah did not defend himself. His manner was both humble and arrogant.

“Suppose you stay too long, and the passes fill up with snow?” Louis said. “It will go to fifty-seven degrees below zero up there. You know that, don’t you?”

Jedediah made an indeterminate gesture. “But I must withdraw from this world,” he said softly.

“Must withdraw from this world!”
Louis crowed. “Listen to him talk—sounds like a preacher! Be sure you don’t withdraw altogether,” he said.

Jedediah tried to explain himself more systematically to Germaine. But the girl’s staring tear-filled eyes distracted him.