Bellefleur (64 page)

Where Henofer would have laughed his wheezy blustery laugh, the demon, again pretending to be frightened, stared at Jedediah and moved his lips silently. A prayer to the Devil, perhaps, but Jedediah did not draw away.

You can’t live on this mountain. This is a Holy Mountain, Jedediah said calmly. Henofer might have welcomed you—probably did—probably invited you to stay the night and drink with him and listen to his foul disgusting stories—yes?—but he never understood the nature of this mountain and he deserved to die. But
you:
you can’t stay here. God will not tolerate it.

Henofer’s lips parted in a queer gaping grin. It was not
Henofer’s
smile but the demon’s, and it bore no resemblance at all to the old man’s.

You aren’t well, Jedediah, the demon said. And then tried to offer him a drink—asked him to come inside that shanty, and have a drink—but God distressed him at that moment with a fit of coughing that left his blubbery lips wet with dark spittle.

Jedediah stood his ground, waiting. Though he harbored no fear of the Devil his insides were trembling and he had to fight the desire to join old Henofer in that wracking terrible cough.

The hound began to bay, its stump of a tail flopping about.

Jedediah wondered—Was there a demon, a dog-demon, coiled up inside that sorry creature?—would it too have to be destroyed? Or was the dog untouched, deemed by the Prince of Darkness as too lowly to be contaminated?

THOUGH GOD REFUSED
still to show His face to Jedediah He made it known that Jedediah was the means by which His message would be broadcast.
The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured.
And again, louder, in a terrible bugle-blast of a voice:
The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured. So the Lord God has spoken.

As penance for having raised his voice on the Holy Mountain Jedediah was to wander for an unfixed number of days, or weeks, or months—God would instruct him more specifically—and if his camp should be destroyed, if wild creatures should devour his vegetable garden and thieves break into his cabin and plunder it, and set fire to it, God’s will be done.
The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured.

There was a paradox in God’s teaching. For though Jedediah had been chosen (and, again, it was difficult to discern God’s wrath from His love) nevertheless he was forbidden to leave the mountains: he must, for instance, never leave the sight of Mount Blanc. When he lay down to sleep, having resisted sleep for as long as possible (for that too was part of God’s instruction), he must face the mountain; and when he opened his eyes in the morning the mountain must be the first thing he saw—the first image to fill his stupefied consciousness. On those mornings when the great mountain was obscured by mist Jedediah lay paralyzed, blinking as if the entire world had vanished in his sleep.

He preached to the few people he encountered. Trappers like old
Henofer
; a party of hunters (how smartly dressed they were, how costly their shotguns and rifles and gear must have been!—they smiled upon Jedediah pityingly, yet with a kind of courteous patience; but their Indian guide—a tall big-stomached Mohawk who wore a white man’s hat and carried a rifle heavy with silver ornamentation—fixed him with an unmistakable contemptuous stare); a settlement of four families on the south bank of the Nautauga, near a nameless crossroads (they frowned and grinned and jabbered at
him,
finally, in a foreign tongue, which he knew was not French, and which he could not hope to comprehend without God’s grace). He approached a contingent of soldiers walking in loose columns along a dusty road, but they had no time for him, and their officer playfully—it may have been
seriously
—aimed his rifle at Jedediah’s feet, and bade him begone into the woods before an “accident” took place. Nor had he any more luck with a group of men, working with oxen and mules, who appeared to be digging a canal from east to west, out of nowhere and into nowhere, a ludicrous blasphemy in the sight of God (for why build a canal when the mountains were so richly veined with lakes and rivers?—why disfigure God’s landscape on a human, vainglorious whim?)—many of the men did not understand English, and even those who seemed to be speaking English did not understand Jedediah, and soon grew impatient with him, and drove him back into the woods with rocks and chunks of mud and obscene taunting shouts. All these humiliations Jedediah endured for God’s sake, and in full expectation that God should someday soon reward him. For he was, after all, God’s servant: all that had been Jedediah Bellefleur was swallowed up in God.

THE JAWS DEVOUR,
the jaws are devoured.
But the forces of darkness did not want this message taught. And so Jedediah was aware of God’s enemies, and of his own father’s spies, watching him from the shadows at the edges of clearings, from behind rocks, from inside crude rotting shelters that appeared to be abandoned but which he dared not approach, not even in the most ferocious of rainstorms. Sometimes it was unclear, which were God’s enemies and which were his own: his father (whose name Jedediah had temporarily forgotten though he could see, in his troubled dreams, the wicked old man’s face as vividly as if it floated before him) was perhaps an enemy of God, but then he had always seemed too caught up with the vanities of the world, too
busy,
to care enough about God to actively oppose him: or was this merely an aspect of the old sinner’s cunning? It was true that he had repudiated Roman Catholicism when he repudiated his homeland, and his mother tongue, and set his face to the West, and he had sloughed off this corrupt devil-ridden religion as easily as if he had done no more than wash his hands; and of course that must have pleased God. But he had erected no other belief in place of Catholicism, so far as Jedediah knew. He worshipped money. Political power, gambling, land speculation, horses, women, businesses of one kind or another—Henofer had told him many things, Jedediah remembered very little—but in the end only money, everything was transformed into money: money was his God. And was that God identical with Satan himself?

The old man, the wicked old man, wanted Jedediah to return to the flatland. So that he might marry, and propagate his kind; so that he might, like his brother Louis, bring sons into the world, to continue the Bellefleur name, and the Bellefleur worship of money. (Which was—or
was
it?—
identical
with the worship of Satan.) Sometimes, Jedediah rather wearily thought, the money-worshippers were too obsessed with their struggles to devour one another to think, even, of the Devil—they would have had no time for Mammon himself.

Still, there were enemies, enemies whose faces he never saw, but whose presences he sensed: at times, on windless nights, he could even hear their breathing. Shadows at the edges of clearings . . . shadows that came to life, stirring grouse and pheasants into terrified flight, sending rabbits across Jedediah’s panicked field of vision. . . . Behind each of the larger pines a man might easily hide, if he were very cautious, and when Jedediah turned his back he might lean out to stare at him. These spies were probably in his father’s pay. For it was not
logical,
Jedediah supposed, after long brooding, that mere strangers should care so much about him; and if there were devils (though could there, on the Holy Mountain, even in sight of the Holy Mountain, be devils?—would God permit such a blasphemy?), devils of course were bodiless, or so Jedediah understood, and would not need to hide behind trees or rocks.

That a devil might force himself
into
a man’s body, and dwell inside that body, and wreak evil from within it—Jedediah hadn’t comprehended at that time.

So he feared the presences, and traveled at night in order to confuse them, and hid during the day, as best he could (for sometimes he was overtaken by a painful hacking cough that seemed to be tearing his lungs out, and surely the creatures who spied upon him heard); and he tried to keep his heart alive with a constant prayer to God which his lips uttered at all times.
My God, my Lord and my God, blessed be Thy name, blessed be Thy kingdom, and Thy will, and Thine enemies ground underfoot. .
. .

One day, someone whispered in his ear, close against his ear, breathing warmly and tickling with her tongue, one day, Jedediah, you know what’s going to happen?—they’re going to jump at you from behind, and overpower you, no matter how you struggle and howl with rage, and they’re going to carry you back down to home—hanging from a pole, maybe, like a gutted deer—and you’ll wake up on a floor with them standing around gaping and grinning at you—poking you with a foot—Is
that
Jedediah Bellefleur who climbed into the sky looking for God—! Why, isn’t he a sight, now! Scrawny and puny and sick and lousy (for you
do
have lice, that’s a louse at this very moment crawling up the back of your neck!) and worm-ridden too (for you
do,
you know, have worms—you might not like to think of it, and you surely refuse to examine your hard little bloody droppings, but even so, my boy, even so!)—
isn’t
he a sight—as if any self-respecting God would give a good goddamn for
him.
And would any woman marry him? Have babies by him? Oh, what a joke! God’s been laughing up His sleeve for eighteen years now! And she skittered away, shrieking with laughter, before Jedediah could lay hands on her.

In his wanderings, before he came upon Mack Henofer’s camp, and saw what had happened there, Jedediah suffered many ugly sights. One day he stepped out of the blazing tide of noon into the darkness of a forest that rose out of marshy, spongy land, and saw a cannibal Indian seated before a small fire, cross-legged, smoking a pipe, clothed in what appeared to be snakeskins—while all about him, in small tumbled-over mounds, were the skulls and bones of human beings. They were human bones, most assuredly they were human! And the snakeskins, Jedediah saw to his terror, were not skins at all but living snakes: living snakes that coiled and hissed about the brave’s powerful naked body. (The snakes appeared aware of Jedediah’s intrusion, but the Indian—vacant-eyed, expressionless, puffing soundlessly on his pipe—stared past him.) Long after Jedediah fled that hellish vision, for days and weeks afterward, he was to remember the horror of the
heaped-up
skulls and bones, and the thick-bodied hissing snakes, and most of all the Indian’s stony
impassivity
. . . . Hadn’t Jedediah heard, as a boy, that the cannibals among the Iroquois tribes had been exterminated, or converted to Christianity? And how was it possible that the Indian should be clad in
living
snakes?

(The evil of the pagan Indians, Jedediah thought, was an evil that came before the white man’s—before the white man’s evil, or his good. It came before history itself. Perhaps even before God.)

And one day he saw a doe beset by dogs, farmers’ dogs running loose in a pack, snarling and yipping in a frenzy as they tore her apart—tore at her immense swollen belly, where she carried a fetus that would have been dropped in a week or two: he saw, and he fled, covering his ears, his ceaseless prayer to God rising to an involuntary shout.
My Lord and my God, my Lord and my God, have mercy. .
. .

And strangest of all he saw, suspended in a dark swamp pond, fringed with rushes and cattails and water willow, a queer white floating face: a stranger’s face in which the eyes were so colorless as to be nearly indistinct; and the chin, beardless, melted away into nothing. A human face, yet with less substance than the skulls of the cannibal Indian. It was strange, too, that the pond should be so lightless, so brackish, since it was probably only a few feet deep, and fed by a fresh-running brook. But Jedediah could not see its bottom. He saw only the ghostly floating face with its weak melting-away chin and its helpless smudged eyes, and he drew back in revulsion as well as in alarm.

And then one day, without intending it, he came upon Mack Henofer’s campsite, and saw at once, in the first moment of the old man’s shouted greeting and the dog’s yipping, that Henofer had been plundered, his soul laid waste, his physical being taken over by a demon. How terrifying it was, to lift his eyes to Henofer’s and to see, not Henofer’s eyes at all, but those of a demon. . . .

“Jedediah! Jedediah Bellefleur!
Is
that you?”

He had known Henofer was a spy of his father’s, a paid spy, but he had found it in his heart to forgive him; for vengeance is God’s, after all. But now Henofer himself had been eradicated and what stared out at him from the old man’s rheumy eyes was not even human.

“Jedediah Bellefleur,” the demon crowed in triumph, before he understood that Jedediah had found him out, “aren’t you a surprise on this side of the mountain!—aren’t you a
sight!
Or is that even you, my boy? You look so different! My eyes, these days, they been giving me trouble—especially in the sun like this—Jedediah? Why don’t you answer? You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Hungry?
Is
that you, looking so strange?”

He extended a broad dirty hand for Jedediah to shake, but Jedediah stood his ground. I know who you are, he whispered.

The Death of Stanton Pym

I
n his smart little imported car, a two-seater Morris Bullnose with brass fixtures and aqua finish and aqua-and-orange spoked wheels, and its black convertible top rarely up, even in troubled weather (for he liked, the Bellefleurs saw, to be observed driving through Bellefleur Village on his way to the lakeshore road and the manor—Stanton Pym in a candy-striped sports coat and a pert straw hat with a red band, a bookkeeper’s son and a canal digger’s grandson courting in public the daughter of a man who, had he wished, might claim blood ties with one of France’s oldest noble families), maneuvering the sporty car with a boyish self-consciousness along the graveled curves, as if confident he were being watched by envious eyes. Della’s suitor appeared on Saturdays and Sundays and occasionally on Wednesday evenings to take her for long dusty drives around the lake, or to the Falls for dinner, or rowing on Silver Lake, or (on Wednesday evenings) to church services at the little white squat-steepled Methodist church on the Falls Road, or to the county fairgrounds where they might stroll hand in hand (so it was reported to the Bellefleurs) from one farm exhibit to another, and from one amusement to another, eating cotton candy and candied apples and hot buttered popcorn and drinking lemonade like any other young couple—except of course the match was doomed, and it was generally known that the suitor himself was doomed should he persist (but how
could
he, since he wasn’t a stupid young man?) in the courtship.