Bellefleur (21 page)

The Vial of Poison

G
ermaine’s grandfather Noel Bellefleur carried with him, in secret, for more than fifty years, a vial of about two inches in length, encrusted with tiny cheap-cut rubies and diamonds (or perhaps they were colored glass and rhinestones), filled with cyanide. No one knew of the vial of poison: not even Noel’s wife, not even his mother. He carried it with him at all times, except when he slept, and even then it was never more than a few yeards away, hidden in a drawer. When, in later years, he and Cornelia no longer shared a bed, and occasionally—on account of his harsh snoring, Cornelia claimed—did not even share a room, he began to keep the vial beneath his pillow. For safekeeping, he thought. Waking in the night after a disturbing dream, or after no dream at all, he would reach under his pillow anxiously and there it was—the tiny object, stone-studded, its roughness pleasurable to his fingertips, warmed by his presence.

From time to time he unscrewed the minuscule cap, and sniffed at the contents, his eyes hooded. The poison smelled wonderfully astringent. As quick, as surprising, as mothballs or ammonia or skunk: odors he halfway liked, in their mild forms. He might even shake the white crystals out on a surface and examine them. Did poison, even so marvelously effective a poison, lose its miraculous power to kill, after a period of time . . . ? Though there were innumerable reference books in his grandfather’s library which he might have consulted, though he might even have inquired, casually, of his grandson Bromwell (who, at this time, when Germaine was only an infant, had acquired a remarkable library himself, and never exactly with anyone’s permission: the child simply ordered whatever he liked—a complete set of the
World Book,
volumes on biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even a telescope kit that came in a large packing case to the depot in Bellefleur, where Gideon went, mystified, to pay $400 for whatever it was his headstrong little boy had ordered
now
), and though he might certainly have asked Dr. Jensen, who dropped by frequently at the house, to check on Leah and her new baby girl, he said nothing to anyone—the poison was his secret, sacred to him, unutterable. From time to time he simply changed the vial’s contents, filling it with “fresh” cyanide.

Noel Bellefleur in his old age had the shrewd, rather raffish appearance of an osprey surfacing from brackish water, a squirming fish in its beak. There was something blurred and soiled about him. His nose had a slight knob in it, his cheeks were relatively unwrinkled but very shiny, the scar from an old war wound gleamed boldly on his forehead like a third eye: an eye more clearly defined than his own eyes, which, behind the lenses of his glasses, were gauzy, unfocused, as if set in water. He limped badly, and with what appeared to be a deliberate awkwardness. He wore shapeless outfits at home—trousers that drooped on his somewhat shriveled haunches, and white shirts that, not tucked into his belt, were allowed to billow out, roomy as nightshirts or a servant’s smock. Even when he appeared in public his linen was never very clean. Germaine was to think of him as birdlike, indeed—a hook-beaked bird in an untidy nest. One would not have been surprised to see feathers and down clinging to him. When he troubled to shave, which was infrequently, he did a poor job of it, and sometimes appeared in the breakfast room bleeding from a half-dozen tiny nicks, indifferent to, sometimes angered by, his family’s protestations. Once every several months a barber was driven to the manor from Nautauga Falls, to tend to both Noel and his elderly mother Elvira (who received the man in the privacy of her room). If Noel was a thin, watchful, rakish old bird, his wife Cornelia was a plumped-out guinea hen, still an uncommonly attractive woman with small, pretty hands and feet, and snow-white hair that was perfectly and stiffly groomed at all times.

Like birds the two pecked at each other, from time to time, impatiently, irritably, but without violence. If Cornelia had known of the secret vial she would have exclaimed: “That crazy old fool is doing it to spite me—he wants to humiliate
me.
He’ll swallow cyanide and leave me behind and everyone will point me out: that’s the woman whose husband committed suicide to escape her!”

But in fact Noel had acquired the precious little object when, as a boy of seventeen, he had suffered, perhaps even more painfully than Hiram and Jean-Pierre, his father’s protracted humiliation: the decline of the family’s fortune, the selling-off of land, the dismantling of old Raphael’s railroad (the wonderful little cars, even the ties, were sold for scrap metal!—and the furnishings, which no one wanted, were stored in one of the unused hop barns, where rain soon destroyed them), the desperate attempt to make quick money by raising foxes. . . . “What now, what next,” Hiram muttered, with a sigh like a thud, and Noel, unable to spend
all
his time with his horses, began to lie about the house, a skinny, loose-jointed boy, listless, overtaken by a Bellefleur malaise as severe as any, feeling too weak, too miserable, to raise a finger. In those days Jean-Pierre, named appropriately for old Jean-Pierre, was his mother’s darling, spoiled and capricious and very good-looking, with dark curls and dark, cunning, puppyish eyes, and he was somehow able, despite the Bellefleurs’ financial problems, to spend a great deal of time playing cards in the Falls, and in certain notorious riverfront taverns: twenty years old to Noel’s seventeen, he would nevertheless (being guileless, and infinitely good-natured) have brought his younger brother along on his expeditions, in order to snap him out of his “mood”; but Noel always refused. He did acquire from Jean-Pierre, however, who had won it at poker, the bejeweled little vial. “It’s for smelling salts or something,” Jean-Pierre said, tossing it to Noel. “Maybe opium.
I
don’t have any use for it.”

“Cyanide,” Noel said at once.

“What?” asked Jean-Pierre, smiling. “
What
did you say?”

He hid the little vial away and showed it to no one. Once it was filled with poison it acquired a peculiar life or spirit of its own—quite as if it were another Bellefleur, another member of the family—but at the same time it was indisputably
his.
Suicide, Noel thought dreamily, as a boy in his late teens and then in his early twenties, ravaged by lurid violent fantasies of sex which of course he could not control, suicide, just the thought of it, the thought of escape, why is it so luxurious . . . ?

Often he fingered the vial, safely hidden in his trouser pocket. While enduring conversations in the drawing room with his female cousins and aunts, or sitting through interminable dinners. Suicide, the thought of it, the luxurious thought of it, why did he smile so suddenly, his delight raying across his face? For of course he never intended to use the cyanide. Never. But the
thought
of it, the
feel
of the vial, were most satisfying.

(In the family there were legends of odd “suicides.” Noel’s grandmother, for instance, who drowned in Lake Noir . . . and his own father, perhaps, Lamentations of Jeremiah, who insisted upon going out in a murderous storm though everyone in the family tried to stop him: wasn’t that a kind of suicide, really? Strangest of all was the contrived death, the “assassination” of President Lincoln, an intimate friend of grandfather Raphael’s—or so family legend would have it, and Noel, being skeptical,
did
have his doubts. But it was generally believed in the family that Lincoln had arranged for his own “assassination,” so that he could retire from the world of politics and strife and domestic pain, and live out the remainder of his days as a special guest at Bellefleur Manor. The poor man had come to abhor his life with its public and private burdens, and its very real crimes (so many thousands of men killed in the war, which no notion of political justice could ever absolve, and hundreds of civilians imprisoned in Indiana and elsewhere, without due process of law—simply at
his
imperial command). Lincoln had, it was said, so despaired of life that he wanted only to tear a hole in the earth’s side and plunge through and lose himself forever. . . . And so, by means of a plot Noel had never quite understood, which was completely financed by Raphael Bellefleur and perhaps even imagined by him, the public Lincoln had been “assassinated” so that the private Lincoln might live. Of all the forms of suicide, Noel thought,
that
had the most style.)

AT THE FUNERAL
for the poor Fuhr boy, killed in that freak accident, Noel, possibly the most intoxicated mourner present (though his own son Gideon was well fortified by whiskey—it was just that, Noel thought resentfully, Gideon was
young,
and could hold his alcohol with as much control as Noel had once had), fingered in secret the precious vial, and gave himself up to thoughts of death.

Death. How suddenly it might come when you didn’t want it. How reluctantly it came when you did. Nicholas Fuhr was dead: he’d survived any number of riding accidents, and fistfights, and God knew what else: but suddenly he was dead, his poor body broken. There were a number of men Noel had wished dead in his time—the Varrells, of course, before they were murdered (and the blame placed wrongly on Jean-Pierre); one or two rivals for Cornelia’s hand; his nation’s wicked enemies in the war. But he had never killed anyone. Not even as a soldier. He would not have wished to actually kill anyone, to actually bring about a death, and it troubled him that perhaps, when the time came (and when might it come?—he was an old man now, his eyesight was failing, the lake salmon were fished out, Fremont was getting wobbly) he would be incapable of taking the cyanide he had hugged to himself for so many decades. . . . Odd, how his grandfather Raphael had continued living. An embittered old man. Still wealthy, but a failure: a failure at politics, a failure as a husband, and (so he thought, and said) a failure as a father. He certainly wanted to die, living in near-seclusion all those years, only his Honored Guest (some comradely political failure he’d picked up on his campaigning, some party hack he had, for reasons no one knew, become indebted to: the rumor, absurd of course, was that the bearded old man was Abraham Lincoln!) to keep him company, along with his books and journals. He
must
have wanted to die, Noel thought, yet he hadn’t had the courage, or the bitterness, to kill himself.

He,
Noel, would have the courage. When the time came.

But now he sipped whiskey, and brooded over the past, and found it too much trouble to bestir himself even to comfort Gideon, who badly needed comforting, like an overgrown child; he had told Gideon several times that the accident at Powhatassie wasn’t his fault, it certainly wasn’t his fault, he must forget it, or if he couldn’t forget it (Nicholas, after all, had been Gideon’s closest friend) he should try to extricate himself from it, in his memory—and above all he shouldn’t feel guilty for having won the race, which he and Jupiter deserved to win; or for winning all that money. (Not that Noel really knew how much money had been won. He half-suspected that Hiram had cleared a great deal, in secret; and he had a vague idea that Leah herself had done well.
He
had won a modest amount, only $6,000.) But he let Gideon go, and paid no attention to his wife’s querulous remarks, sipping whiskey, chewing on his cigars, rubbing the kittens’ heads roughly, and tickling their balloon-fat little bellies, thinking of the past, of all that had gone wrong: not only did things
go wrong,
Noel thought, bemused, they went into knots and snarls, tortuous as the eye-dismaying designs on one of his sister Matilde’s crazy quilts. (Which
were
crazy. All interwoven interlocked dizzying colors. Too much for his brain to absorb. Ah, his sisters Matilde and Della! It pained him to think of them. Perhaps he would not think of them. Della blamed him, unfairly, for her husband’s accidental death, and was not above whispering
Murderer
at him, nearly three decades later; she even blamed him—and this was a measure of the old woman’s
bullheadedness
—for the fact that Gideon and Leah had fallen in love, and insisted upon marrying though they
were
cousins. And Matilde. Perfectly lucid in conversation, good-natured and even good-humored whenever he visited her, but obviously insane—for why, otherwise, would the woman live up there north of the lake, in an old hunting lodge in what remained of a fifty-acre camp Raphael had built for wealthy guests (one of them was the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, who managed to hold his position, and his power, for more than three tumultuous decades; another was the industrialist Hayes Whittier, who exerted so much control over the Republican Party, and whose son—twenty-one years old, but with the physique of a ten-year-old—was dying of consumption: so it was Raphael’s idea that the north woods,
his
north woods, might save the boy)—why on earth would Matilde keep so stubbornly to herself, eccentric as any old mountain hermit, refusing his and Hiram’s money, growing her own vegetables and raising a few scrawny chickens, making a spectacle of herself in the village—in the village that bore her own family’s distinguished name!—by buying up rags and old clothes, and selling those crazy quilts, and occasionally eggs, home-baked bread, and vegetables? He would
not
think of her.)

Ah, but should he allow himself to think of Jean-Pierre?—at whose trial (in fact trials, since the first resulted in a hung jury) he had not merely fingered but actually grasped the poison vial, wondering if he should use it himself if Jean-Pierre was found guilty, or whether he should slip it to his brother. . . . But Jean-Pierre was too cowardly to take cyanide, just as he was too cowardly to have murdered ten or eleven men; he would have burst into tears, and possibly told their mother. And shame, anger, rage, had fueled Noel after the conviction, so that he hadn’t
wanted
to die, not even to escape the ignominy bruited about everywhere in the newspapers, and chuckled over by the Bellefleurs’ many enemies, who did not care that justice was being mocked so long as the Bellefleurs were wounded. He had not wanted to die but the little vial—its very existence, the fact of its promise—comforted him a great deal.