Bellefleur (51 page)

So he chattered, pulling his filthy woollen cap down low on his forehead. He chewed tobacco and spat onto Jedediah’s hearth. Edgy, restless, he could hardly remain seated on the stump before the fire, but kept pulling at his cap and his beard, and looking around the cabin—staring and assessing and memorizing—in preparation for his report to the Bellefleurs down below. For of course he was a paid spy. And of course he knew that Jedediah must have known.

Nevertheless Jedediah remained courteous, for God dwelled with him; or at any rate the promise, the hope, of God dwelled with him. He was a Christian man, humble and soft-spoken and willing to turn the other cheek if necessary. He could not be stirred to anger by Henofer’s slovenly presence, or even by the obscene anecdotes he rattled off (a half-breed Mohawk woman raped by a small gang of Bushkill’s Ferry men, out by the lumber mill, and turned loose in the snow, naked and bleeding and out of her mind: the Varrells had their fun
there,
Henofer said, wiping his eyes), or boisterous farfetched tales of the war, which were sometimes meant to inspire mirth and sometimes patriotism. In Sackett’s Harbor, it seemed, five British ships with eighty-two guns began an assault against the
Oneida. .
. . After two hours of firing it was found that most of the shots on both sides had fallen short. Finally a thirty-two-pound ball was fired by the British, and struck the earth harmlessly, ploughing a deep furrow; and a sergeant picked it up and ran to his captain saying, “I’ve been playing ball with the redcoats. See if the British can catch back again.” And the ball was fitted into the American cannon, and fired back at the enemy, with such force that it struck the stern of the flagship of the attacking squadron, raking her completely, and sending splinters high into the air. . . . Fourteen men were killed outright and eighteen were wounded. And so the enemy retreated while a band on shore played, “Yankee Doodle.” What, Henofer asked passionately, did Jedediah think of
that?

Henofer would not be seeing Jedediah again until the following April. Which was a very long time away. Yet it came quickly: all too quickly. And Henofer returned, cheerful and garrulous as always, with more war news to which Jedediah did not listen. Or perhaps it wasn’t the following April but the very next week. Or the previous April. At any rate there was his halloo in the clearing, and his grizzled pitted face with the gap-toothed grin. (No matter that he must have known Jedediah was sabotaging his traps—springing some, opening others to take away the dead or dying or grievously wounded creatures to throw them down into the oblivion of the river.) It might have been the previous April, the April before the pane of stained glass was brought to Jedediah.

Time pleated and rippled. Since God dwelt above time, Jedediah took no heed of time. When he glanced back at his life—his life as Jedediah Amos Bellefleur—he saw how minute that life was, how quickly the mountains with their thousands of lakes swallowed it up.

HENOFER DISAPPEARED, GRUMBLING
at Jedediah’s silence. He took his revenge by lurking in the woods for days afterward, spying and taking notes. As a prank he left a wolf’s skull behind—hardly more than the jawbone, really—on Jedediah’s granite ledge, facing the Holy Mountain. Why he had done it Jedediah would never know.

Perhaps God had used Henofer to send a message . . . ?

Jedediah contemplated the thing, which was bleached white, and oddly beautiful. He saw himself snatch it up and throw it off the edge of the
mountain
—but, later in the day, it was on the stone hearth before his fireplace.

Are you testing me? Jedediah whispered.

Outside the cabin spirits hummed in their nervous high-pitched manner. Jedediah was able to ignore them, as he ignored the girl’s fingers poking and prodding inside his trousers.

God? Are you testing me? Are you watching? he called aloud.

The jaws, the clean white-bleached jaws. Ravenous appetite: God’s.

Jedediah woke, startled. He had been dreaming of an angry man, a man shouting and waving his fists at God. But the man was himself:
he
had been shouting.

To do penance he slept outside for several nights, naked, on the granite ledge. Beneath the freezing winking stars. He brought the jawbone with him because it was a sign, it had to do with his sinfulness, though he did not understand it.
Why am I here, what have I done, how have I displeased You?
he pleaded. But there was no reply. The jawbone was silent.

Fateful Mismatches

W
hen snow fell from the cavernous sky in angry swirls day upon day, and the sun but feebly rose at midmorning, and the castle—the world itself—was locked in ice that would never melt, then the children slept two or three in a bed, swathed in layers of clothing, with long fluffy angora socks pulled up to their knees; then there were, throughout the day, cups of steaming hot chocolate with marshmallows that, half-melted, stuck wonderfully to the roof of the mouth; afternoons of sledding followed by long lazy hours before the fireplace, listening to stories. What is the curse on the family, one of the children might ask, not for the first time, and the answer might be—depending upon who was there—that there was no curse, such talk was silly; or it might be that the nature of the curse was such (perhaps the nature of all curses is such?) that those who are burdened with it cannot speak of it. Just so, uncle Hiram liked to say, sadly fondling the tips of his mustache (which smelled so strongly of wax!), just so do creatures in nature carry the distinguishing, and sometimes magnificently unique, marks of their species and their sex, without ever seeing them: they pass through their entire lives without
seeing
themselves.

If uncle Hiram was morose and oblique, others—grandmother Cornelia, for instance, and aunt Aveline, and cousin Vernon, and sometimes even (when his breath smelled sweet with bourbon, and his poor misshapen foot ached so that, stretched out luxuriously before the huge fieldstone fireplace in the parlor, the second-warmest room in the house, he pulled off his shoe and massaged the foot and pushed it daringly close to the fire) grandfather Noel—were surprisingly generous with their words, and seemed to be drawn, perhaps by the high-leaping crackling flames of the birch logs, into disturbing labyrinthian tales the children perhaps should not have been told: wouldn’t have been told, surely, by daylight. But only if no other adult were present. Now don’t tell anyone about this, now this is a secret and
not to be repeated
—so the very best of the stories began.

The stories, it seemed, always had to do with “fateful mismatches.” (This was the quaint term employed by the older women—they must have inherited from their mothers and grandmothers. But Yolande quite liked it.
Fateful mismatches—!
Do you think, when we grow up, she whispered to Christabel, giggling and shivering, do you think that might happen to us?) While most Bellefleur marriages were certainly excellent ones, and husband and wife supremely suited for each other, and no one would dare question their love, or the wisdom of their parents in consenting to the marriage, or, in many cases, arranging for it—still—
still
there were, from time to time, however infrequently,
fateful mismatches.

Isn’t it strange, people said, that the Bellefleur stories are all about love going wrong?—when of course, most of the time, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things go perfectly well!

Noel laughed behind clouds of foul pipe smoke. . . . Yes indeed, he said, most of the time things go perfectly well. I’ve noticed that.

It was Yolande herself, at the precocious age of nine, who said, after having heard a fascinating (and convoluted: for it was necessarily expurgated for the ears of children) story about her father’s oldest brother Raoul, her uncle Raoul whom she had never once seen, who clearly lived in one of the strangest imaginable households, and lived in it happily enough—it was pretty little Yolande who exclaimed; “The curse on us is that we can’t love right!”

She was immediately hushed up. And cautioned never to say such a bizarre thing again, or even to think it. The very idea! Bellefleurs, after all, prided themselves on the depth and passion and longevity of their love. But to her brother Raphael she whispered, half in fear, “Oh, but what if it’s the truth—what if it’s the truth—and none of us can love right!” Her distress was such, one could not have said whether it was spontaneous or acquired; for even as a young child Yolande had been fond of exaggeration.

The trouble was, the tragedy was, no one cared to hear about the wonderful marriages. Wife and husband bound together for life, and happily; or at any rate not unhappily; who cared? In the midst of the children’s very world, for instance, there was the example of Garth and Little Goldie: forgiven almost at once for their recklessness in eloping, given a handsome little stone-and-stucco cottage on several acres of wooded land in Bellefleur Village, and the promise of as much financial support as Garth wished—though Garth, newly self-confident, and freed for the first time in memory of his waspish ill-temper, declared that he would earn every penny of the salary the family paid him for his help in managing the farms. There they were, two young people in love, handsome Garth and lovely Little Goldie, and everything had turned out well; but what was there to say about them?

By contrast, there was a great deal to say about love gone wrong.

And disagreements too. The children were awed by their elders quarreling among themselves, about who had loved whom most, or first, or why a love affair had gone wrong, whether it had been poisoned from within or without, whether it was part of the curse or just a bad
accident
. . . . Whether a love had been “tragic” or just plain “shameful . . .”

Everyone knew of the Onondagan Indian woman with whom Jean-Pierre lived for several years, and with whom he died, in Bushkill’s Ferry (her name was Antoinette—she had been baptized Catholic, and named for Marie Antoinette whose son, the Dauphin—King Louis XVII—was commonly believed to have escaped to the Chautauqua mountains); the match was considered a wicked one, though not half so wicked as it would have been had the old man actually
married
the woman. But few people knew of the much more shameful liaison Jean-Pierre began at the time of his wedding to poor Hilda Osborne, many years previously. He may have just returned from his honeymoon at the time (a two-month trip through the South, culminating with a grand ball in the newlyweds’ honor at Chapel Hall in Charlottesville, Virginia), or he may in fact have begun the liaison while still an engaged man: but the shame of it was, he took as a mistress a coarse lumber-camp follower named Lucille who had lived with a succession of men in the Lake Noir area, and so alternated his attentions between this woman in the country and his lawful wife Hilda in Manhattan (where they lived, supported by the Osborne’s generosity, in the palatial brownstone originally built by George Washington’s aide “Baron de Steuben,” and lavishly remodeled by the Osbornes), that the two women—so different in quality, in temperament, in beauty, in worth!—were made pregnant by him within the same week. Lucille—“Brown Lucy”—remained a shadowy, enigmatic
figure
—
perhaps
“Lucille” was not even her name—and it wasn’t known at what point in Jean-Pierre’s ambitious career he jettisoned the woman. As late as 1795, when Hilda first attempted to file for divorce, he was said to have been involved with a north country woman, presumably Lucille; there were children now—three or four, at least, all sons—but how (so Jean-Pierre as well as his sympathetic friends asked, laughing),
how
could one be certain whose sons were whose, when a woman of such promiscuous morals as this “Brown Lucy” was involved—! By the time Jean-Pierre ran for Congress in 1797 the woman had been dropped from his life, for pragmatic reasons. (And then, as he explained, when drunk, to anyone who would listen, even to his son Louis and his daughter-in-law Germaine,
he hadn’t loved her any more than he had loved the other one, his wife:
both women were desperate stratagems to keep him from throwing himself in the river or slashing his throat because the only woman he’d ever loved was lost to him when he was still a young man. . . . )

Of Harlan Bellefleur’s women little was known—he was said to have been involved, for a brief while, with the widow of a saloonkeeper somewhere in Ohio, and was said to have had, in unclear succession, not only a full-blooded Chippewa “wife” but a Haitian “wife” as well; and in the crumpled papers found on his person, after his death, there was a scribbled message for his “sole heir” in New Orleans, about whom no one knew anything—
except
that, as an officer of sorts alongside Jean and Pierre Laffite, in Andrew Jackson’s militia (made up of sailors, backwoods riflemen, Creoles, Santo Domingan Negroes, and Baratarian pirates), he had had occasion to spend some time in New Orleans in late 1814 and the early weeks of 1815. But it was doubtful, as Louis’s grieving widow said, that
Harlan
had left a “legitimate” widow, still less a “legitimate” heir.

Then there was Raphael, who sailed to England in order to acquire the right sort of wife: and returned with the frail young woman (eighteen at the time, to Raphael’s thirty-one) Violet Odlin, whose neurasthenia deepened with each pregnancy (there were ten in all—though only three live births). Perhaps the marriage was a good one. No one knew, since Raphael and Violet rarely exchanged a word in public; in fact, after some eight or nine years of marriage they were rarely seen together except at the most public, the most social, of events—at which they were extremely courteous to each other, with the graciousness normally reserved for strangers who
suspect
they will not get along, and who are accordingly all the more congenial. (Judging from the portrait that remained, Violet Odlin possessed a frail, faded, nervously intense kind of beauty, and her wedding dress with its hundreds of pearls and its eight-foot-long veil of Belgian lace had a waist so tiny—seventeen inches—that the young woman who had worn it must have been hardly larger than a child. Indeed, it was the only dress in the family that Christabel could wear for
her
wedding, and even then they had to squeeze her rather brutally into it.)