Bellefleur (25 page)

(Odd, that Della and Leah came so frequently to Bellefleur celebrations. It seemed they were
always
underfoot, and Leah was even bold enough, once or twice, to bring her hairy little pet along. Though Della detested her wealthy relatives she always accepted their invitations to weddings and christenings and holiday gatherings because she felt that they did
not
really want her and were counting on her refusal—and why should she give them that pleasure? “For my sake, Leah, behave like a young lady,” she always said; but when, inevitably, Leah behaved quite badly, she never seriously scolded her afterward. “You’ve got
their
blood in you, after all,” she would say apathetically.)

Leah was sixteen years old when, diving from a granite cliff into Lake Noir, and swimming, through a chilly September rain, halfway across the choppy lake, she caused her cousin Gideon to fall irrevocably in love with her. He halfway knew he had been falling in love with her for years, by degrees, and that astonishing sight—the husky, strapping, deeply tanned girl in the green one-piece bathing suit, diving without hesitation into the water some fifteen or twenty feet below, every muscle beautifully coordinated—was nothing more than a final blow. Leah swam as strongly as Gideon himself, her heavy dark hair wound about her head like a helmet, her face pale and stubborn with effort. He had wanted—but had been unable—to run off the cliff and splash down beside her. He had
wanted
to pursue her and overtake her and turn it all into a boisterous joke. But he hadn’t moved, he had simply stood there, staring, watching that body sleek and forceful in the water as an eel’s, in the grip of an emotion in which love and desire were so inextricably braided that he was left quite literally breathless.

(Much later, when Noel closeted himself with his son, and pleaded and reasoned and shouted with him, and even dared to lay hands on him, Gideon’s only response was a baffled, sulky, “Well, I don’t
want
to want her, not only is she a cousin of mine but she’s a daughter of that insufferable old bitch! What do you think, Pappa, do you
think
I want any of this?”)

As a fairly young girl Leah attracted suitors, some of them, like Francis Renaud and Harrison McNievan, a decade or more older than she; and of course there were a number of boys Gideon’s age who were very interested in her. But all were intimidated by the spider Love. There were tales—not, in fact, very exaggerated—of the girl’s wanton cruelty in allowing Love to clamber across a visitor’s shoulders, and even to sting upon occasion. (You would have thought, people murmured, that the Pym girl would have respect for poor Harrison—with his arm crippled from the War, not to mention all the land he inherited!) At the age of seventeen and eighteen Leah enjoyed a perverse popularity in the region, despite her frequent and quite open disdain of men, and her skittish, even priggish behavior when she was alone with a man. It might have been her very nervousness she wished to disguise, by outlandish requests (she commanded Lyle Burnside to fetch a silk scarf of hers that had blown—or had she allowed it to blow?—down a steep cliff along the Military Road) and girlish pranks edged with malice (she agreed to meet Nicholas Fuhr on Sugarloaf Hill one summer day, and sent a fat, somewhat retarded half-breed girl instead) and sudden, inexplicable outbursts of temper (at a wake—of all places!—she turned to Ewan Bellefleur, who had been eying her with an unsubtle smile, and accused him of being wicked, of gambling and wasting money, of being unfaithful to his fiancée (whom at that time Leah had never met: she knew only that Ewan was marrying into a Derby family of surprisingly modest wealth), and of having fathered illegitimate children—an attack that amazed Ewan, not because it touched upon anything he might be in a position to deny, but because it was so unprovoked: hadn’t his look of frank, appreciative interest in his cousin at all
flattered
her?).

“That’s Della’s work,” Ewan was told. “The woman wants to poison her daughter against all men, but especially against Bellefleur men.”

The ugliest—or was it the most amusing?—episode involved a young man named Baldwin Meade, who was rumored to be related, distantly, to the Varrell family, once numerous in the Valley, before the notorious feud with the Bellefleurs in the 1820’s killed off so many on both sides. It might have been that Leah was attracted to Baldwin Meade
because
of this connection, for what would infuriate her wealthy relatives more than a liaison with one of their enemies?—even if the feud was long dead, and hardly more than a source of embarrassment to all. (Though this was not exactly true. Ewan and Gideon and Raoul had sworn, as boys, to revenge themselves if and when the occasion arose: for, rejecting the state’s claim that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II had murdered two Varrells that night at Innisfail, along with nine other men, they calculated that six Bellefleurs had been killed to a mere three or four Varrells, which seemed to them monstrously unjust.)

If Baldwin Meade was related to the Varrell family he certainly did not emphasize the fact, nor did he resemble them in the slightest: they had been swarthy, thick-chested, of no more than moderate height, with hirsute bodies, and beards that grew halfway up their faces; and it goes without saying that the Varrells, the Bellefleurs’ old enemies, were uneducated, crude, brutish, and inarticulate. (“Why, you look as if you’d just joined the human race a few weeks ago,” Harlan Bellefleur was heard to exclaim, in actual surprise, even as he raised his Mexican handgun to blow half the man’s face away; witnesses were struck by Harlan’s graceful manner, the way in which he
hesitated
before he pulled the trigger, as if the very idea, the very thought, that the man cowering before him wasn’t altogether human, held a profound significance he must contemplate—though not at the moment.) By contrast Baldwin Meade was tall, slender, clean-shaven, a cheerful if indiscriminate talker, and though his manners were about average for the mountains he was certainly not coarse, and took care never to use profanity or barnyard colloquialisms in the presence of those women designated as ladies. How, exactly, he behaved on that Fourth of July night, what sort of things he said to Leah, what sort of things he wished to do, or actually
did,
to Leah, no one knew: for the girl would never tell, and one could hardly bring the subject up with her mother.

Returning home from the band concert and the fireworks display in Nautauga Park, in a two-seater drawn by a roan gelding, driving in the dark along the Bellefleur Road, Leah and her twenty-six-year-old suitor must have quarreled somewhere between the intersection of that road and the Military Road, and the village of Bellefleur itself, for it was only a few hundred yards away from the old iron forges (once owned by the Fuhrs), near the crest of a very long, steep hill, that the young man was found the following morning. Not dead, but nearly so: delirious and raving and crying for his mother: his right arm and the right side of his face grotesquely swollen, watermelon-sized. Leah had driven the carriage back to Bushkill’s Ferry and had been considerate enough (for she always respected the needs of animals, even though horses no longer interested her) to unharness and feed and drench the gelding, and to stable him in the Pym’s old barn; she made no secret of the fact that the carriage was on her mother’s property, and left it in plain view, in the cinder drive, for any curious neighbor to see. But she never explained the incident, she shrugged and laughed and waved her arm, saying that people “exaggerated,” and if they really wanted to know why didn’t they ask silly Baldwin Meade himself? It was claimed by the men who brought Meade in, and by Dr. Jensen, who tended to him, that the poor boy had been copperhead-bit in three places, and it was extremely fortunate for him that he was found as early as he was, for by noon he would certainly have died. Copperhead-bit! people said. They pulled thoughtfully at their lips, they smiled slyly.
Copperhead!
Not likely.

WHEN GIDEON BELLEFLEUR
first visited Leah as a suitor, and not as a boy, or a boy cousin, he was humiliated and outraged by the fact that Leah, in an open-necked polka-dot sundress, her lovely hair all curling-iron ringlets and spit curls and waves clearly meant to emphasize not only her beauty but her arrogant confidence in that beauty, nevertheless received him in a dingy, musty side parlor of the old Pym house; and the enormous black spider was perched on her shoulder, on her very skin.

She fixed her very dark blue eyes upon him with an almost mocking concentration as he spoke, but it seemed quite clear to Gideon, who blushed and stammered, that she was not really listening to his words. (Indeed, she was thinking, as she stared at her handsome cousin, with his thick dark hair that rose from his forehead like a brush, and his squarish jaw, and his eyes that were so prominent, almost bulging with—with what?—energy?—
excitement
?—that any other girl would fall in love with him, possibly in a matter of minutes, but that she was
not
such a girl. And she thought, lazily stroking Love’s hairy back, in order to placate him (for he seemed unusually agitated, she could feel his tiny heart beating), that though it might be amusing to appear to fall in love with Gideon Bellefleur, since it would outrage not only the Lake Noir Bellefleurs but, most of all, Della herself, such an antic might bring with it consequences she could not foresee. Gideon’s reputation was not so wicked as Ewan’s, but he was a gambler, and it was common knowledge that he and Nicholas and one or two other young men frequently raced their horses on outlaw tracks, and involved themselves with sluttish women back in the mountains, and over in Derby and Port Oriskany; and he had been very cruel to an acquaintance of Faye Renaud’s, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who had presumed, on the basis of two or three innocent outings, always in the company of others, that Gideon Bellefleur would soon be engaged to
her.
Still, there was the quite appealing fact that Gideon lived in the castle, and Della loathed the castle, and frequently made a show—a silly show, in Leah’s opinion—of actually shielding her eyes from it, on exceptionally clear days when its eerie sprawling coppery-pink shape appeared to float above the lake, far closer than, in fact, it was. And Leah was curious about the castle, for she’d seen, over the years, only the grounds, and the walled garden, and two or three of the larger downstairs rooms, which were really public rooms, open to any Bellefleur guest. She
wanted
—ah, how badly she wanted!—she could not resist wanting, despite Della’s warnings—to see every room, every cubbyhole, every secret passageway, every corner of that monstrosity. Gazing at Gideon her eyes misted over as she saw the two of them, Gideon leading her by the hand, descending the stone steps into the vaultlike cellar . . . where strands of cobweb would brush against their eager faces, and mice would scamper away in corners, and the air would smell of damp, of mildew, of rot, of pitch-black darkness itself, a darkness ten times black . . . and Gideon’s flashlight would dart about . . . and he would grip her hand hard if she stumbled . . . and if she began to tremble with the cold he would turn to her, and . . . ).

Gideon broke off in the middle of a sentence and said roughly that he didn’t want to bore her; he’d better be going. He had wanted to ask her to accompany him to Carolyn Fuhr’s wedding but she was clearly not
interested
. . . . “You keep petting that thing on your shoulder,” he said. “That ugly thing on your shoulder.”

Leah blushed, and brought Love into her lap, where she stroked his back and sides, and tickled his fat little belly, or bellies, with her forefinger. She and Gideon stared at each other for a full minute, and then she said, blushing even more deeply, “He isn’t ugly! How dare you say such a thing!”

Gideon got to his feet, with the graceful dignity of which he was sometimes capable, and made a mocking little bow with his head, and simply walked out of the parlor and out of the house and down the brick walk.

But at their second meeting he was again insulted, for this time not only was Love present (though not in his mistress’s lap or on her shoulder, but quivering at the center of a five-foot web spun out so recently, in a high corner of the room, that it glistened wetly, and possessed an almost icy, crystalline beauty—quivered, Gideon saw with disgust, as he greedily devoured bits of food placed in the web for him), but Della—Della with her cheerless bustle, her long black skirts that looked (as Cornelia said) as if they were fashioned out of feedbags!—Della with her dried-up prunish shrewd face, and her small head that seemed to be made of ill-fitting plates of bone, and her wasp’s smile, and her obvious gloating dislike of
him!
—was in and out of the room, bringing the young couple tea and stale chunks of carrot cake, and inquiring after Gideon’s family with a feigned courtesy, and sympathetic little moues when she heard that Noel had been laid up with the grippe, and Hiram had injured himself sleepwalking again, and the deer and porcupines were eating up everything in sight. Leah appeared to be somewhat more congenial on that afternoon, but it was difficult to tell: her dimpled smile, her calm level lovely dizzying stare, her erect posture, her strong hands clasped at her knees, her murmured assents: what, really, did they mean? Was she trying to signal Gideon, when Della’s back was turned?—or was she perversely trying to signal Della, while Gideon looked blankly on? And the huge ugly creature in the web, devouring
his
bits of carrot cake, and fairly shuddering with the ecstasy of eating. . . .

After less than an hour Gideon left the Pyms’, his face burning with frustration. He had managed to extract from his cousin a vague promise (retracted the very next day, by messenger) that she would accompany him to a lawn party at the home of the former senator, a man named Washington Payne; but he had the uncanny, maddening idea that she was not really
listening,
that she was not
aware
of him at all.