Bellefleur (81 page)

His birch raft, partly dismantleed by the strangers’ children, lay shipwrecked on a little island of bulrushes; as he approached, barefoot, his feet sinking in the warm squishy black mud, several bullfrogs croaked in alarm and leapt away, and a single black duck flew up, flapping its wings in terror.

But you needn’t be frightened of
me,
Raphael wanted to cry.

He sat cross-legged on his raft, gripping his ankles. For a long time he surveyed his little kingdom and the emotion he felt was bewilderment rather than dismay.

Bewilderment shading into fear.

For of course the pond was dying.

But: but still there was life. Life remained. Life on all sides.

Diving beetles and water striders and water scorpions and dragonflies and snails and slugs and loosestrife and floating pondweed and wild celery and fanwort and mud minnows and mushrooms looking solid and resilient as if they were made of rubber, though they would crumble at the gentlest touch. Richer than ever were the tussock sedges, and the trillium with its shiny red berries, and the spongy bright mosses that had no names. There would always be plankton, algae, scum, there would always be, Raphael reasoned, leeches.

He inclined his head sharply—had he heard a sound? a small voice?

The pond’s voice?

He listened for a long time, trembling. Many years ago—he could not have fathomed how many, in human time—but perhaps it was only the week before last, in the pond’s time—that voice, refined to pure sound, had soothed him and buoyed him up and saved his life. The Doan boy—had that been his name?—ugly name!—
Doan
—but now all the Doans were gone—gone, scattered, their shanty of a house razed, the barns and outbuildings gone—the Doan boy had tried to kill Raphael but he hadn’t succeeded: and on that day, at that hour, the pond had made itself manifest to him. It took him into its depths, it embraced him, whispered his name which was not
Raphael,
which had nothing to do with
Raphael
or
Bellefleur.

Come here, come here to me, I will take you in, I will give you new life. . . .

In recent years Raphael’s mother Lily had become “religious.” (So the mocking Bellefleurs spoke of the change in Lily—“She’s become ‘religious.’ And can’t you guess why!”) She had tried to take the children to church with her but of course Albert had refused, laughing, and Vida went no more than twice, claiming that it was all so slow and dull and the boys her age not at all interesting, and the girls frankly insipid; and Raphael too had refused, in his shy, stubborn, speechless way. But Christ offers us everlasting life, Lily said, vexed and frowning, her voice doubtful. Raphael, don’t you want—aren’t you afraid not to want—
everlasting life?

But the pond spoke more clearly. Because it did not use human words at all.

Come to me, come here to me, I will take you in, I will give you new life. . . .

IN A TRANCE
Raphael stretched out upon his raft. Ah how rich, how voluptuous, the odor of decay! He inhaled it deeply. He could not get enough of it. For months, perhaps even for years, he had been smelling this rich ripe rotting odor, this swampy stench, without knowing what it was. Only that it was different from the odor of fresh water. Fresh water and sunlight and wind. Mink Creek’s white-water rapids a few miles away, which he had seen years ago. (But perhaps Mink Creek too was drying up? Perhaps—so the rumors flew—the Mount Kittery mining operations had killed it?)

Raphael did not know. The world beyond the pond, stretching out on all sides of the pond, had no interest for him. It existed; or perhaps it did not exist; he could not know. It was not
his.

Decay . . . rot . . . decomposing logs and aquatic plants . . . fish floating belly-up . . . a certain queer beauty to their placidity. (And he saw now that the bass had died. Perhaps it had been dead for days.) For a long while he had been smelling the odor of decomposition without knowing what it was, and he had grown accustomed to its richness, its suggestion of night, a secret nighttime maintained in the day, in defiance of the sun’s rude health. The sun had one sort of knowledge but the pond had another.
Come to me, come here to me, sink into me, I will take you in, I will protect you, I will give you new life. .
. .

The Rats

M
ultitiered and ambitious were plans for the expansion of the Bellefleur empire that autumn, and numerous too were the unexpected plums fate tossed into the family’s lap—for instance, quite without intending it (for she
was
still a young girl) Morna caught the eye of Governor Horehound’s eldest son, at a charity ball at the governor’s mansion, and the young man was ardently courting her; and one fine October day the Bellefleurs received word that Edgar Schaff had died suddenly of heart failure in Mexico City, and that his fortune, including Schaff Hall, was to fall to his wife, under the terms of his generous will (for the poor distraught man had never altered the will, despite Christabel’s disappointing behavior, as if he had believed he might, after all, persuade his straying wife to return home with him).

(The difficulty here was, as Leah pointed out, that Christabel was still in hiding, presumably with her lover Demuth, and even the Bellefleur-hired detectives couldn’t find her. They too had traced her to the Mexican
border
—but then they couldn’t find her. How could the Bellefleurs get hold of the Schaff estate, if Christabel didn’t come forth to claim it in person? And the Schaffs, of course, headed by that dragon of a matriarch, had lost no time with grief, and were already contesting the will. For Schaff, intoxicated with a passion more befitting a far younger bridegroom, had left Christabel
everything
—the newspapers; the investments; the estate; Baron Schaff’s priceless antiques, memorabilia, and special collections; and some 60,000 acres of strategically located wilderness land.)

And Ewan, after the temporary setback in August, when he had had to arrest his own uncle for murder, was now more popular than ever: a series of blitzkrieg gambling raids throughout the county, including a highly publicized one at Paie-des-Sables (where, it was disclosed, half-breed Indians were coolly cheating naïve white boys of their entire life savings and even their automobiles and farm equipment) had netted for the county extraordinary sums of money and even a considerable supply of guns, rifles, ammunition, and explosives, which would be put to good use. And Gideon, though he had recovered rather slowly from his accident, had roused himself into action by selling off the rest of his cars, and negotiating with the owner of a fair-sized airport in Invemere (some seventy-five miles northeast of Lake Noir) for a partnership of some kind: a procedure that worried the more conservative members of the family, who gravely distrusted airplanes, but pleased Leah immensely.

There were important changes being made at the Bellefleur farms, under Noel’s supervision: the old barns were razed and new barns with smart aluminum roofs were built; there were automated silos, bulk tanks, hundreds of arc lights; henhouses operated by batteries in which as many as 100,000 Rhode Island reds lived out their lives in tiny cages, fed special grain to increase both their capacity for egg-laying and the size of their eggs; under the dry-lot system, dairy cows now lived
their
entire lives in concrete enclosures, receiving feed (mainly alfalfa) from an overhead conveyor. Despite the enormous cost of the investments in this new equipment the family would be saving, year by year, the burdensome cost of their hundreds of unreliable tenant farmers and farmhands—under a near-automated system only a few “farmers” need be retained; and Albert had expressed an eagerness to oversee the entire operation. “If only we could get rid of the
smell
of those creatures too,” Aveline was heard to say. She meant of course the animals.

Naturally there were minor frustrations, for things did not
always
go well. There was, Leah knew, a certain perversity in the fabric of the world. She and Lily had groomed Vida, sweet little Vida, for the eye of the governor’s son, but he had preferred Morna, and now Aveline was queening it over them; Leah’s plans for a handsome new camp on the fifty-acre site across the lake, where aunt Matilde lived in willful squalor, were temporarily stalled—but only temporarily—by the crazy old woman’s refusal to move; and Garth, Little Goldie, and their infant son had left the stone cottage in the village, shortly after the “difficulties” with the fruit pickers (for so the events of late August came to be known within the family), to live in another part of the country. Garth claimed that he wanted a farm of his own, in Iowa or Nebraska; he and Little Goldie wanted to live somewhere where no one knew the name
Bellefleur.

(“All right, then, but don’t you come begging back here, don’t you come crawling back to
me!
” Ewan said. He was so deeply wounded by Garth’s decision to move away that he would not even shake hands with him, on that last day; he refused even to glance at Little Garth, though Little Goldie held the squirming infant up to his grandfather for a goodbye kiss. “Don’t you come back here, my boy, because we aren’t going to let you in! Is that understood?” Ewan cried. Garth merely nodded, forthrightly, as he backed away. He and Little Goldie had traded in the yellow Buick for a small van, which was now packed with their household items.)

So there were minor disappointments, minor frustrations. But in general, even the pessimistic Hiram had to agree, things were going very well indeed: for quite apart from the Schaff windfall they now owned slightly more than three-quarters of the original property, and the rest was certain to be theirs within a few years.

“But we must concentrate on what we’re doing,” Leah said frequently. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to become distracted.”

GOVERNOR HOREHOUND AND
his family and part of his entourage were invited to the castle for a week of hunting, as soon as deer season opened; and less than a week before the visit Nightshade approached Leah with a proposal. “As you know, Miss Leah,” he said humbly, “there is the matter of the rats.”

“The what?”

“The rats, ma’am.”

“The rats?”

“The rats, yes, ma’am. That live in the walls and the attic and the cellar and the outbuildings.”

Leah stared at her manservant. In recent months she had become so accustomed to the little man that she rarely noticed him—and now it alarmed her, the clever wizened face with its eyes like glass chips, and the dull shallow indentation on the forehead. Odd too was the wide lipless smile that appeared to stretch from ear to ear. Though Nightshade was not exactly smiling; one could not call it a smile. The children complained that he carried in one of his pouches a “made-up” animal, a mandibulate, fashioned out of bits of dried mice, beetles, newts, snakes, bullfrogs, baby birds, turtles, and other creatures, which he used to frighten them, though he always denied that was his intention. The thing was about the size of Nightshade’s fist (which was big as Ewan’s), and it gave off a queer sickish odor that was exactly like Nightshade’s odor.

Leah sent the children away, annoyed with their silly tales. She doubted very much that Nightshade had created his own dried animal, still less that he used it to frighten the children. And it wasn’t true that he smelled. She noticed nothing. In fact, in recent weeks it seemed to Leah that the poor hunched-over man had grown an inch or two taller; or, at any rate, his severely stooped posture had begun to correct itself. The good food he received in the castle, and the pleasant surroundings, and, perhaps, her frequent small kindnesses to him were having a salutary effect.

And now he came to her with a strange proposal: that she allow him to brew a concoction that would rid the castle once and for all of its rats. “Before Governor Horehound and his people arrive, Miss Leah,” he said softly.

“But we don’t have any rats,” Leah said. “Oh, perhaps there are a few—I suppose there are, in the outbuildings especially—in the old barns—and maybe in the cellar. And mice: I suppose there are mice.”

Nightshade nodded gravely. “Yes. There are mice.”

“But there aren’t enough, are there, to matter? If there were, we could call in a professional exterminator. But of course we have the cats.”

Nightshade’s lips twitched but he said nothing.

“Yet you say there are rats?” Leah said, growing somewhat irritated.

“Yes, Miss Leah. A concentration of rats.”

“And how do you know this? Have you seen them?”

“I am capable of certain judgments, ma’am.”

“Well—I would have thought our cats—”

Nightshade chuckled softly. “Not
your
cats, Miss Leah,” he said, “not
these
rats.”

SO HE BREWED
a special concoction of poison, with an arsenic base, on the kitchen stove. Two gallon-sized kettles were filled and allowed to simmer for several hours, until most of the liquid had evaporated. This particular poison, he assured everyone, attracted only rodents—and poisoned only rodents. Cats and dogs would not touch it, nor would children, under ordinary circumstances, be drawn to it. There was no danger whatsoever:
only
rodents would die.

“But we don’t have that many rodents,” grandmother Cornelia said stiffly. “I grant you there are field mice that turn up sometimes in the
cellar
. . . and of course in the barns. . . . And a rat or two, wood rats, I believe they are, nasty things, but not a problem, really. I
don’t
see that we require a mass extermination.”

“It does seem rather excessive,” uncle Hiram said.

“But now that Nightshade has made the poison,” grandfather Noel said, with a peculiar smile, “of course we must allow him to use it. Otherwise it will only go to waste.”

So very early the next morning, before most of the family had awakened, Nightshade crept about the castle and the outbuildings, sprinkling his poison crystals (which were a dazzling white) in every conceivable corner. He then filled buckets and pans with water, and carried them into the larger rooms of the castle, on all three floors; and he carried several heavy tubs of water into the cellar; and arranged others outside, in the shrubbery, among the ornamental trees in the garden, on the back steps. His furrowed, pasty-pale forehead was soon beaded with sweat, and his lipless smile was more pronounced than ever. As he toiled, the castle’s cats scurried away before him, or leapt onto high places, from which they watched him with bright narrowed eyes. One and then another of the dogs began to howl, but faintly, almost timidly. He took no notice of these creatures but arranged buckets, pans, pots, tubs, and even troughs of water, grunting as he worked.