Bellefleur (60 page)

IT WAS SHORTLY
after Lord Dunraven departed for his journey by train across the continent (and it rather amused the Bellefleurs that their English guest hadn’t any notion of how wide the continent was, and couldn’t seem to grasp its dimensions even when they were explained to him), that Vernon was brutally attacked by a group of Fort Hanna men one Saturday night, in a tavern in the very worst waterfront area of the city.

Everyone in the family remarked on how Vernon had changed, since the baby’s death: after several days of lethargic depression, during which he had refused to eat, he emerged from his untidy room with his beard trimmed short, and his mismatched eyes glaring. The room stank of smoke—he had, he said, burnt all his papers—his old poems—notes for poems—even some of his books. All
that
was over.

He read them fragments of new poems, but his voice was so harsh and impatient, and the poems so jumbled—about the “fall” of God, the “divorce” between man and God, God’s wickedness, God’s ignorance, man’s lonely lofty supremacy, man’s duty to rebel, the stupor of the masses, the mud-devouring lot of the masses—that no one could follow, and the children, once embarrassed by their uncle’s effusive goodness, were now embarrassed (and somewhat frightened) by his anger. At the very dinner honoring Lord Dunraven’s departure, which Cornelia had planned with care, and which was held in the large dining room with its elegant murals, tapestries, and chandeliers, and the exquisite though rather heavy German furniture, Vernon distressed them all by insisting upon reading a poem-in-progress he had begun that afternoon, up in the cemetery. He stood at his place and read from scraps of paper that trembled in his hands, and then he looked up, fixing his gaze upon the ceiling, and recited from memory, all sorts of incoherent lines—some of them about the Noir Vulture, some of them about the baby’s death, but many of them about unrelated things: God’s betrayal of man, man’s subservience, man’s ignominious groveling nature, his selfishness, venality, cruelty, cowardice, and lack of pride. And some of the lines clearly alluded to a certain family who had, he said, exploited tenant farmers and servants and laborers, and the land, and
must
be stopped. . . .

“If that wasn’t
poetry
the bastard was reciting,” Ewan said, afterward, “I would have smashed his ugly face in.”

In the days that followed the Bellefleurs learned, from a variety of sources, including a scandalized Della, that Vernon was wandering the countryside again—turning up at a Baptist church picnic in Contracoeur, at the old White Sulphur Springs Inn, in the village, in Bushkill’s Ferry (where he evidently got hilariously drunk), as far away as Innisfail and Fort Hanna—eager to talk to anyone, young or old, who would listen. Where in the past he rarely drank, and then only shandygaffs (a drink beloved of many Bellefleur children, but only so long as they were children), now he tried to drink whatever other men were having—beer, ale, whiskey, gin—and paid for numerous rounds, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life. With his newly trimmed beard and his jabbing forefinger and a dramatic, harsh urgency to his voice he commanded attention as he had never commanded it before, though when his audience discerned the nature of his words—when they realized he was no longer exactly
nice,
and they couldn’t either laugh at him comfortably, or like him—they grew uneasy. What had happened to Vernon Bellefleur, the “poet”! Even the word
love
evoked a cynical curling of his eyebrows.

In Contracoeur he harangued his bewildered listeners on the subject of their servile natures: if they gave their immortal souls up to that fiendish God, why naturally they would be soulless! On the rotting veranda of the White Sulphur Springs Inn he read in a trembling voice of man’s contemptible failure to realize his destiny in the
flesh
and in
history,
and alarmed several of his listeners—elderly retired smalltime farmers and merchants—who, not hearing altogether correctly, believed he was reading off a proclamation of war. In the very village itself, so close to the manor, and almost completely owned by his family, he spoke sardonically of the Bellefleurs, and chided the villagers for their passivity. Why, for decades, in fact for centuries, had they endured their lowly positions?—why did they allow themselves to be exploited? They were slaves—they were parasites—they weren’t
human.
To the Bellefleurs’ tenant farmers he spoke in a similar vein, and did not appear to notice his listeners’ resentment. At Innisfail and Fort Hanna he read lengthy impassioned sections from a poem-in-progress called “The Mud-Devourers,” which evidently accused the masses of men of complying with their own degradation, and of being, in fact, grateful for it: Any compromise, he thundered, so long as it brings a cessation of conflict! It was no wonder God treated mankind as He did, grinding the masses of men beneath His heel and exacting from them all sorts of groveling pious declarations of love. . . .

The tenant farmers were slaves, and the mill and factory workers were slaves. Their eagerness to sell themselves (and to sell themselves cheaply) made them subhuman; yet they hadn’t the dignity of animals, and none of the healthy instincts of animals. The workers, if organized, could bring the owners to their knees if they tried, but of course they were too cowardly to try: their initial attempts at unionizing, some years ago, were such ghastly bloody failures they shrank back from even
thinking
of such things. Sometimes he spoke directly, stabbing at the air with his bony forefinger; sometimes he read or recited his poetry, which was not at all “poetic,” but punctuated with harsh, ugly, frequently shocking images—jaws devouring jaws, wormlike men crawling on their bellies, tides of ants rushing into a stream to be swept away, creatures who devoured filth and declared it manna, the Son of God as a babbling idiot. In Innisfail, at a volunteer firemen’s picnic, he so outraged a small gang of mill workers that it was only through the intervention of an off-duty state trooper (a boyhood acquaintance of Ewan’s) that he was taken forcibly away, and saved from a probable beating.

But there was no one to intervene, no one to save him, when, on the following Saturday night, at the Fort Hanna tavern near the old drawbridge, he somehow got into a quarrel with a number of young men. (One of them was said to be Hank Varrell, another was a Gittings boy—though, afterward, no eyewitnesses officially identified them, or were even willing to offer descriptions.) How Vernon managed to get to Fort Hanna when he had been sighted in the Falls earlier that day; why he sought out that particular tavern, frequented by men who worked at the Bellefleur mill, and who had, at one time, been under his “management”; why he insisted drunkenly upon addressing the men in the most intimate and provocative terms (he referred to them as
brothers
and
comrades
), no one knew. “He talked like a preacher,” someone said. “He was so certain of himself—he was even
happy
—right up until the end.”

That day the temperature had climbed above 100 degrees, and an airless stagnant heat seemed to radiate out of the earth itself. Though the tavern was on the Nautauga River, the river at this point was unspeakably filthy, and gave off a sulfurous stink that burnt the eyes. There had been a rumor for weeks, still unsubstantiated, that the mill might be closed down, and naturally the men were angry, and naturally they queried Vernon about it; but he denied that he was a Bellefleur, he denied that he knew anything, and insisted upon charging the men with their own predicament.
They
had destroyed the river,
they
had destroyed their own souls . . . ! “And I don’t exempt myself from you,” Vernon cried passionately. “I am of the same species as you! I too have devoured mud and called it manna!”

How the men managed to drag Vernon off, and to tie his hands and feet together with clothesline (clothesline stretched between two scrubby trees in a backyard adjacent to the tavern), without exciting the attention of anyone who might have called the police, how they managed to carry him up the steep, debris-cluttered hill to the road, and onto the bridge (which was fairly busy on a Saturday night), no one was able to explain. Evidently he put up a violent struggle, kicking and thrashing about, so that one of the young men suffered a badly cut lip, and another a cracked rib; evidently, at the very moment they dropped him over the side of the railing, he was screaming defiantly at them. It was said that he fell like a shot, sank, surfaced again some distance downstream, still screaming, wildly pumping his arms and legs, and, in the midst of a ferocious outcry, again disappeared from view. It was said that, afterward, as the young men ran away, wiping their hands, laughing, one called out to the others, “That’s what we do to Bellefleurs!” and another, unidentified, said, “That’s what we do to
poets.
”

BOOK FOUR
Once Upon A Time
. . .

Celestial Timepiece

S
erendipity
and
Felicity
and
All-Hallows-Eve
and
Wonder-Working Providence
and
Celestial Timepiece
were the names of the massive wool-and-feather-lined quilts Germaine’s aunt Matilde made. The quilts grew slowly as Germaine watched, very slowly, square by square, as aunt Matilde talked with grandfather Noel and Germaine, her stubby fingers working constantly. Months passed, and years.
Glass Garden
and
Gyroscope
and
The Dance
(a dance of merry skeletons) and
The Bestiary
and
Noir Swamp
and
Angels.
They grew square by square, eventually spilling to the floor and hiding aunt Matilde’s feet.

“Why do you take Germaine over there, to that woman’s house,” grandmother Cornelia asked irritably. “Matilde is hardly a good example, is she?”

“An example of what?” Noel asked.

“Leah doesn’t like it,” Cornelia said.

“Leah hasn’t time to know about it,” Noel said.

Yet they came often, to Raphael Bellefleur’s “camp”—a half-dozen log cabins on the lake shore, many miles from Bellefleur Manor. Family legend had it that Matilde had moved there long ago out of sheer
spite
: she had failed to be a Bellefleur, had failed to attract a suitable husband, and so she simply withdrew into the woods. But grandfather Noel told Germaine that that wasn’t true. Matilde had moved across the lake because—because she had wanted to.

“Can I live here too?” Germaine asked.

“We can visit,” grandfather Noel said. “As often as we like.”

Germaine rode her new pony Buttercup, and Noel rode his high-headed but lazy old stallion Fremont. And they did come
almost
as often as they liked.

Great-aunt Matilde was a large-boned woman who sang as she worked, and had a habit of talking to herself. (Sometimes Germaine heard her:
Now where did I put that spoon, now what are you devils doing on that table!
) If she was lonely at the camp she never indicated it: on the contrary, she was the happiest Bellefleur Germaine knew. She never raised her voice and she never threw anything down in a rage and she never strode out of a room weeping. The telephone never rang—there was no telephone; letters came rarely; though the family strongly disapproved of Matilde they let her alone. (She was “strange,” she was “headstrong,” the Bellefleurs said. She was “stubborn” because she insisted upon her solitude, and making quilts and rugs for a living. Social gatherings did not interest her, not even weddings and funerals!—and she insisted upon wearing trousers and boots and jackets, and in the old days, as Lamentations of Jeremiah’s daughter, she had even insisted upon working with the farm laborers; an eccentricity for which the female Bellefleurs never forgave her. She should have been born a man, they said contemptuously. She should have been born a dirt-poor farmer living on the side of a mountain; she doesn’t deserve the name
Bellefleur.
)

But they let her alone. Perhaps they were afraid of her.

So she worked on her quilts, happy in her solitude, and grandfather Noel brought Germaine over to visit, and they spent wonderful long afternoons: Germaine was allowed to help Matilde sew, and Noel settled by the fire, his boots off and his stockinged feet twitching with pleasure, a pipe clamped between his teeth. He loved to gossip about the family—the schemes Leah had!—the woman was ingenious—and Ewan’s behavior—and Hiram’s problems—and what Elvira said to Cornelia—and what Lily’s growing children were up to: the children were all growing up so
quickly.
Matilde laughed, but said little. She was deeply absorbed in her work. Noel complained of the swiftness of time’s passing but Matilde could not agree. “Sometimes I think time hardly passes at all,” Matilde said. “At this end of the lake, at least.”

The quilts, the enormous wonderful quilts!—which Germaine would remember all her life.

Serendipity:
six feet square, a maze of blue rags, so intricate you could stare and stare and stare into it.

Felicity:
interlocking triangles of red, rosy-red, and white.

Wonder-Working Providence:
a galaxy of opalescent moons.

Made for strangers, sold to strangers, who evidently paid a good price for them. (“Why can’t we buy one of them,” Germaine said to her grandfather, “why can’t
we
take one of them home?”)

Celestial Timepiece
was the largest quilt, but Matilde was sewing it for herself—it wasn’t to be sold: up close it resembled a crazy quilt because it was asymmetrical, with squares that contrasted not only in color and design but in texture as well. “Feel this square, now feel this one,” Matilde said softly, taking Germaine’s hand, “and now this one—do you see? Close your eyes.” Coarse wool, fine wool, satins, laces, burlap, cotton, silk, brocade, hemp, tiny pleats. Germaine shut her eyes tight and touched the squares, seeing them with her fingertips, reading them. Do you understand? Matilde asked.