Bellefleur (14 page)

The mountain’s voices, the mountain’s music. . . . From time to time it was alarmingly clear. But there was nothing human about it, perhaps because, at this height, nothing
could
remain human: Mount Blanc was more than fourteen thousand feet high, Jedediah must have climbed to a height of at least six thousand feet, without quite knowing what he had done. There was no other direction for him except upward.

The rainbow quivered, almost visible. Jedediah stared at it, shading his eyes. Perhaps it was not there. Perhaps the high thin air had begun to affect his brain. The wailing of the spirits—but of course there
were
no spirits—was not self-pitying or heavyhearted, nor did it seem to be addressed particularly to
him.
It was all about him, on all sides. Though he trembled with cold he was not frightened, for he knew, he knew very well, that there were no spirits in the mountains, not even in the highest and most remote of the mountains, it was simply the river’s torrential roar and the high altitude that made him dizzy, and caused his thoughts to come falteringly, like little pinches.

That day, he had been walking for ten hours. His legs ached, the heel of his right foot throbbed with pain, yet he felt elated: despite the invisible creatures beckoning to him on the farther shore, tempting him to believe in them, he felt quite jubilant.

“My name is Jedediah,” he cried suddenly, cupping his hands to his mouth. How forceful his voice was, how young and raw and yearning! “My name is Jedediah—will you, allow me to enter your world?”

Great Horned Owl

I
n the spring of 1809, after the last snowfall in early June, Louis Bellefleur set out to find his brother Jedediah, who had been gone three years. He could not accept it, that Jedediah had become a recluse, one of those eccentric mountain hermits about whom so many stories were told (told and retold and embellished and pondered over, in country stores, in taverns, in depots, in trading posts, in the offices of coalyards and granaries where, in winter, their stocking feet brought up close against the red-warm curving bottoms of wrought-iron stoves, men gathered to talk and sip cheap mash whiskey—for there was always a crock of whiskey nearby, even on the counters of general stores, and a ladle for customers who could not be bothered with glasses—and repeat stories they’d heard months or even years and decades previously, laced with hilarity, or malice, or envy, or simple frank astonishment at the pathways others’ lives took). Louis knew approximately where Jedediah was camped, since a half-dozen men had met with him up beyond Mount Beulah, and two or three had actually talked with him and handed over to him the letters and provisions and small gifts (a handknit sweater, woollen socks and mittens, a fur-lined hat, all Germaine’s work) Louis had sent. These hunters and trappers, eccentric men themselves who might disappear for months at a time, brought back conflicting reports of Jedediah Bellefleur, which left Louis greatly disturbed. One trapper swore that Jedediah’s beard fell to his knees and that he looked like a man in his sixties; another claimed that Jedediah had shot at him as he approached his cabin, and screamed that he was a spy or a devil, and that he should go back to Hell where he belonged. Another report had Jedediah lean and muscular and bare-chested and dark as an Indian, not especially friendly, or interested in news of his father or brother or sister-in-law, or even his two very young nephews (which hurt Louis’s feelings tremendously: Jedediah
must
be interested in his nephews!), but quietly hospitable, willing to share his supper of rabbit stew and potatoes with his visitors, provided they said grace with him, on their knees, for what seemed like a very long stretch of time. Still another report, which Louis and Jean-Pierre both discounted at once, had Jedediah living with a full-blooded Iroquois squaw. . . .

When Louis located his brother’s shantylike cabin—built on a wide rocky ridge on the side of Mount Blanc, some hundred or more feet above a narrow, noisy river, and facing Mount Beulah some miles to the east—it did not surprise him, though it rather discouraged him, that Jedediah was not there. Not only not there, but he had, evidently, run off only a few minutes before: a fire was burning in a tiny crude fireplace dug into the earthen floor, an old leather-bound Bible Louis recognized as having belonged to their mother was lying opened on a stoollike table, some greasy potatoes, still warm, lay on a flat wooden plate—for Louis, perhaps?—who
was
famished from the hike, but mildly nauseated by the odor of the cabin; and in any case he had brought along his own provisions, smoked ham and cheese and Germaine’s whole-wheat bread. “Jedediah? It’s Louis—” So he stood in the doorway of the cabin, crouching, shading his eyes, calling for long minutes at a time, though he knew that Jedediah knew who he was, and had deliberately fled, and was at this very moment (Louis could almost
feel
it) watching him from higher up the mountain or from across the river. “Jedediah! Hello! It’s me, it’s Louis! It’s no one to harm you! Jedediah! Hello! It’s your brother Louis! It’s your
brother
—” He shouted until his throat was raw, and tears of despair and rage stung his eyes. That sly little
bastard,
he thought. To make me yell like a fool. To make me
care.

Louis examined carefully the hard-packed dirt floor of the cabin, but found nothing. He then examined his brother’s bed (a plain cornhusk mattress, no longer fresh, bumpy and uneven and stale-smelling and probably bug-ridden, and covered with a heavy, soiled brown blanket that looked like a horse blanket, complete with leather straps and buckles), and the Bible with its worn leather binding and its thin, gilt-edged pages and the small fussy Gothic type that looked so familiar but which annoyed Louis, the very sight of which annoyed Louis (had Jedediah, his own brother, become a religious fanatic?—had he hidden himself up in the mountains like one of those Old Testament prophets who hid themselves in the desert, maddened with God, touched by God’s fire, ruined forever for the world of man?)—though he forced himself to glance at the opened pages, in case they held a message he must decipher. (The Bible was open to Psalms 91–97.
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. . . . He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.
)

He went outside and called again. There was a faint echo, and another. “Jedediah? Jedediah? It’s your brother. . . .” He walked about the rocky clearing, careful not to lose his balance. Jedediah had built the cabin here, evidently, so that he could look out upon Mount Beulah—one of the highest peaks in the Chautauquas, and topped at all times with snow. A beautiful site but impractical. Windy on even this June morning. Dizzying. Blinding. A hundred feet below was the river, which bore little resemblance to the wide, brown-tinted stream of the Valley; the sound of its rapids was thunderous. Louis squatted at the cliff’s edge and stared down. Crashing water, wild white spray, boulders and petrified logs and pockets of scummy froth. The granite beneath his feet vibrated. His teeth and skull began to vibrate.

“Jedediah? Please . . .”

Jedediah was watching him. He knew, he could feel it; but he could not determine where Jedediah was. Behind him . . . in front of him . . . slightly above him . . . to the right, or to the left . . .

“Jedediah? I’ve come to bring you news. I haven’t come to do you harm. Do you hear? Jedediah? I haven’t come to do you harm but only to say hello, to shake your hand, to see if you’re well, to bring you news. . . . How are you? You’re alone, eh? Did you trade off your horse?”

He turned suddenly, to stare up beyond the cabin. But there were only tall massed trees. Pines and hemlock and mountain maple. Stirred by the wind. But unmoving, really; utterly empty.

“Jedediah? I know you’re nearby, I know you’re listening. Look—” And here, for some reason, he tore off his red neck scarf and waved it frantically. “I
know
you’re watching. At this very moment you’re watching.”

Strange, that his younger brother should fear him. Jedediah, so far as he knew, had always liked him; at any rate he had always
obeyed
him, more or less, just as he had obeyed the old man. A quiet, small-framed, docile young man. With that narrow squeezed face, rather homely, self-conscious, weak. Something of a coward. And stubborn too, in his quiet way. Limping since the riding accident when he’d been six or seven; self-conscious because of the limp, which was pronounced when he was tired. Poor child. Poor little bastard. . . . But now he had outfoxed Louis by running away after Louis had hiked two days and a morning to find him.

“Jedediah!”
Louis shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth.

He was a thickset, porcine young man, a week from his thirtieth birthday. His jaw was broad, his nose rather long and full, with dark flaring nostrils; his red-brown beard was clipped short and blunt. When he shouted his eyes bulged and veins in his forehead and neck grew prominent.

He straightened; his knees had begun to ache. With fastidious, self-conscious movements he retied the red scarf about his neck. (Germaine had made the scarf. Which Jedediah might guess, if he was watching closely.) As if conversing quite ordinarily with his invisible brother he said, “Well, the news back home is mostly all good. I can’t complain. In my last letter—which I know you got, Jedediah, I
know
you got—though you couldn’t be troubled to reply, not even to let us know that you’re in one piece or not—let alone to congratulate us: there’s not just little Jacob now, he’s already two and growing every day, getting into everything, there’s Bernard, just three months old, the apple of his mamma’s eye and quite a howler, there’s the baby Bernard too, as well as Jacob—and you haven’t seen either of them, let alone be their godfather—but I’m
not
here to chew you out, I didn’t climb fifty miles up into these goddamn mountains for
that. . . .
Well, in my last letter I told you about Germaine and the babies and the addition to the house, and did I tell you about Pappa and his friends and the Cockagne Club—they bought into a steamboat, one of those gambling boats—floating casino—and of course there’s plenty of drinking, and women too—and the Methodists in the Valley are up in arms—they’re taking some petition or something to the
governor
—but Pappa isn’t worried, why
should
he be worried—he’s buying into a spa at White Sulphur Springs, and maybe into a coach line to connect it with Powhatassie too, but I don’t know the details yet—it depends upon a loan and you know Pappa never talks about his business until it’s settled and no one can cheat him—”

Louis’s throat ached from the effort of speaking in order to be heard over the river. He paused, conscious of his brother watching him. But
where
was he, in what direction . . . ? Jedediah might be crouched behind one of those immense boulders farther up the mountain; a sudden movement and a landslide might start, and Louis could be killed. Then again Jedediah might even have climbed a tree. “Don’t you even care about Pappa, Jed?” Louis said softly. “Pappa and Germaine and Jacob and Bernard. . . . Germaine says you won’t see your family again alive, you won’t see your little nephews, she told me to beg you to come back . . . but she said it would be useless. . . . But if I could actually see you, if I could reason with you, I can’t believe that it would be useless.”

As soon as he paused the great silence returned. It seemed to roll in upon him from all sides, but especially from the river’s deep canyon and the immensity of Mount Blanc. My brother has gone mute in his solitude, Louis thought. He has gone mad. But it was annoyance Louis felt, and he could not keep it out of his voice: “Don’t you even care about Pappa, Jed? Your own father? He’s getting to be an old man—he’ll be sixty-five, I think, sometime this year though I’m not really supposed to know—don’t you even
care?
—he’s aging no matter how he disguises it, and he misses you; he says every day how he misses you. The message he sent with me was just—he misses you, and wants you back. He isn’t angry. He really isn’t angry. For one thing there’s the Cockagne Club taking up so much of his time, and he’s spending a lot on clothes again, and has his hair dressed and dyed whenever he’s in the city, and he’s been outfitted with new teeth—they gleam like ivory, maybe they
are
ivory—Germaine says they don’t suit him but how can anyone speak to Pappa, especially about something so intimate?—you know how sensitive he is, how proud—”

Again he fell silent, beaten back and defeated by the river’s noise; and by the oppressive silence of the mountains. He was unaccustomed to being in the wilderness by himself: if he went hunting or fishing, which he did fairly often, he was always in the midst of a lively company of men his own age. They were serious about hunting, and Louis considered himself one of the finest hunters, one of the very finest marksmen, in the mountains; but they were also serious about drink and food and one another’s company. The solitude of the mountains, the queer unnerving relentless beauty . . . which was a kind of ugliness . . . baffled him. That his young brother should hide away here was an alarming riddle. Don’t you know you’re a Bellefleur! Louis wanted to shout in disgust. You can’t just hide away from blood ties, from your obligations. . . .

“I’ve come so far, I’m exhausted, I want only to see you and embrace you, I am your brother,” Louis said, looking helplessly around, turning, his arms outstretched, his face reddening with anger he dared not show. If only he
might
clasp hold of Jedediah’s skinny hand, if only he
might
seize him . . . why then perhaps he wouldn’t let him go: he’d bring him back to Lake Noir tied and trussed if necessary. “Jed? Can you hear me? Are you watching? You don’t mean to be so cruel as to let me make a fool of myself like this, after so many hours of hiking, and I’m getting a little short-winded, I guess—Germaine thought it was dangerous of me to go alone but, you know, I wanted to be alone—out of respect for you—out of love for you—I could have come with a few other men, and even some dogs, that kind of thing, you know, and we could have sniffed you out pretty easily, and tracked you down, and in fact Pappa has had that idea from the first, a few weeks after you left—he interpreted your going away as an insult to him, you know—which it
is,
really—in a way—it’s an insult to all of us— You know Germaine wanted you to be Jacob’s godfather, and then she wanted to name the new baby after you, because she said maybe you’d want to return and see him, but I said no, under no circumstances, he’s already been gone three years when he promised to return in one, he doesn’t respect and honor his blood ties, he doesn’t love any of us—not even his father. And you know there are obligations, Jedediah, that come with Pappa’s land and investments. We are doing quite well, and next year should be the most exciting year yet, with the White Sulphur Springs hotel, and the coach line, and if that scheme for a railroad actually goes through, or even some halfway decent roads—why, we’ll be able to clear half the timber in the mountains, clear it and get it to market, Pappa owns thousands and thousands of acres of good timber but he hasn’t had much luck yet in getting it out—just those little operations around the lake, and they’re mainly played out now, just stumps and scrub trees and witchhobble, worthless land, he can’t even sell it to some fool settlers because it would be too hard to clear, and he had some bad luck, a fire over toward Innisfail, thousands and thousands of trees he was planning to cut down— He needs you to help him, Jedediah; he
needs
both his sons; he told me he’s disinherited Harlan, and if you don’t come back and don’t show any respect or love or common humanity he will certainly disinherit you— Are you listening? Goddamn you, are you listening?”