Bellefleur (89 page)

“Selfish Germaine!” Leah was saying, giving her a shake. “Selfish! Nasty!
Traitorous!
Aren’t you? You know you are!”

The Vanished Pond

W
here, everyone wondered, was poor Raphael . . . ?

The undersized child with his pale, clammy skin, and that furtive expression tinged with a melancholy irony, the son of Ewan’s who could not possibly
be,
Ewan thought, his son, or the son of any Bellefleur, was seen less and less frequently that summer until, finally, one morning, it was discovered that he had simply vanished.

Raphael, they called, Raphael . . . ?

Where are you hiding?

At family gatherings Raphael had always been distracted and reluctant, and he was so frequently absent (he hadn’t, for instance, gone to
Morna’s
wedding) that it was several days before anyone actually
missed
him. And then only because one of the upstairs maids reported to Lily that his bed hadn’t been slept in for three nights running.

They went in search of him to Mink Pond, of course. Albert led the way, shouting his name. . . . But where was Mink Pond? It seemed, oddly, that Mink Pond too had vanished.

By midsummer the pond had shrunk to a half-dozen shallow puddles, grown over with grasses and willow shrubs; by late summer, when Raphael was discovered missing, nothing remained but a marshy area. It was a meadow, really. Part of the large grassy meadow below the cemetery.

Where
was Mink Pond, the Bellefleurs asked in astonishment.

A low-lying marshy ground, where bright mustard grew, and lush green grasses, and willow trees. It gave off a rich pleasant odor of damp and decay, even in the bright sunshine.

We must be standing in it, they said. Standing on it. Where it once was.

But looking down they saw nothing: only a meadow.

Raphael, they cried. Raphael. . . . Where have you gone? Why are you hiding from us?

Their feet sank in the spongy earth, and their shoes were soon wet and muddy. How cold, their surprised wriggling toes . . . ! Germaine ran and chattered and giggled and slipped and fell but immediately scrambled to her feet again. Then they saw that she wasn’t giggling: she had begun to cry. Her face was contorted.

Raphael! Raphael! Raphael!

In Lily’s arms she hid her face, and pointed toward the ground.

Raphael—
there.

AFTER A SEARCH
of many hours, up along Mink Creek (which had narrowed to a trickle of peculiar rust-tinged water that smelled flat and metallic) and back through the cemetery into the woods, and a mile or two into the hills, they returned to Mink Pond again—to what had been Mink Pond—and saw that their footprints were covered over, in rich green grass.

Raphael? Raphael?

Was
there a pond here, really, one of the visiting cousins asked.

It was here. Or maybe over there.

Here, below the cemetery.

By those willows.

No—by that stump. Where the redwings are roosting.

A pond? Here? But when? How long ago?

Only a week ago!

No, a month ago.

Last year.

They wandered about, calling Raphael’s name, though they knew it was hopeless. He had been so slight-bodied, so furtive and pale, no one had known him well, none of the children had liked him, Lily wept to think she hadn’t loved him enough—not
enough
—and now he had gone to live beneath the earth (for, after Germaine’s hysterical outburst, Lily was never to be placated, or argued out of her absurd conviction) and would not heed her cries.

Raphael, she called, where have you gone? Why are you hiding from us?

EWAN, HEARING ABOUT
the pond, and his little niece’s words, went out to investigate. But the pond of course was gone: there
was
no pond.

He stamped about, a thickset, muscular man, graying, ruddy-faced, somewhat short of breath. His stomach strained against the attractive blue-gray material of his officer’s shirt; his booted heels came down hard in the moist soil. Long ago he had shaved off his beard (for it displeased his mistress Rosalind) but now an irregular patch of gray stubble covered his jaw and a good deal of his cheeks.

It was absurd, this business about the pond. There had never been a pond here. Ewan remembered quite clearly a pond over back of the apple orchard, in which he and his brothers had played as children—
that
pond still remained, probably—but he hadn’t the energy to search for it.

Nor, curiously, had he the energy to search for Raphael. After losing Yolande, and then Garth . . .

He stared down at the moist marshy earth beneath his feet. It was just a meadow, good grazing land, rich with grass, probably fertile beneath. If it were fifty years ago they would plow it up and plant it, possibly in winter wheat; but now everything was changed; now. . . . He could not remember what he had been thinking.

FOR A LONG
while Leah’s and Gideon’s strange little girl (about whom her grandmother Cornelia said with a mysterious smile, Ah, but Germaine isn’t as odd as she
might
be!) refused to walk on the lawn, even in the walled garden where she had always played. She wept, she began to scream hysterically, if someone tried to lead her out; the graveled walks were all right but the lawns terrified her. If it was absolutely necessary that she cross a lawn, why then Nightshade (who did not at all mind the task, and reddened, like a proud papa, with pleasure) had to carry her.

But aren’t you a silly, willful girl, Leah scolded. And all because of some nonsense about your cousin Raphael. . . .

The little girl frequently began to cry at the very mention of that name, and so the others, even Leah, soon stopped pronouncing it in her presence. And very soon they stopped pronouncing it at all: for, it seemed, young Raphael had simply vanished: there
was
no Raphael.

The Purple Orchid

I
t was shortly after the agreement with International Steel, involving the mineral-rich land around Mount Kittery, that Leah’s manservant Nightshade, grown conspicuously taller (though in fact the droll little man was simply straightening: his spine, while still misshapen, twisted queerly to one side, was gradually becoming erect) brought his mistress, one morning, a florist’s box containing a single purple orchid of exquisite loveliness. It was also somewhat oversized, being about a foot in diameter.

But what is it? Leah cried, staring.

If you will allow me, Miss Leah, Nightshade murmured, taking the flower out.

An
orchid,
Leah whispered. Is that thing an
orchid.

A very beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. He spoke with sudden passion, as if
he
had sent the mysterious flower. (In fact there was no envelope, no card, attached. And the delivery man had had no idea, of course, who was responsible.)

A
very
beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. As you can see.

Leah stared at it. She took it from him. It was odorless, and weighed nothing. And it
was
beautiful: purple and lavender and creamy-lavender, and a rich midnight-blue purple; and a purple so dark, so glistening-dark, it appeared to be black.

Leah stared at it for so long that her servant, waiting at her elbow, became uneasy. Miss Leah, he said gently, shall I bring a vase—? Or would you like to wear it in your hair?

Leah, holding the orchid, did not hear.

Though it is a large flower, Nightshade said, in his deep, guttural, passionate voice, I believe it would look most charming . . .
most
charming
. . . in Miss Leah’s hair. I could, you know, fix it there myself. You needn’t call one of the girls. Miss Leah . . . ?

Without thinking Leah began to shred the delicate fluted petals with her thumbnail. How lovely the colors were—purple and lavender and a creamy-pale lavender that was almost white—and a rich, rich midnight-blue; and a glistening-dark purple that might have been black. How delicate, how airily delicate, the white pistil, the dark trembling stamens, which protruded so far, and dissolved into dust on her fingers! Seven stamens on seven thin stalks: soon broken and crumbled away to nothing.

Ah, Leah cried, what am I doing—!

For without thinking she had quite destroyed the lovely flower.

TAKE THE SILLY
thing away and throw it in the garbage, she said, a minute or two later, and don’t interrupt me again this morning, Nightshade. You
really
know better.

Revenge

O
nce upon a time, the children were told, a man rode through the main street of Nautauga Falls attired in such handsome clothes, and mounted upon a horse of such exceptional grace and beauty, that all who happened to gaze upon him were stopped in their tracks, and spoke of the sight for years afterward. He was a deeply tanned man of indeterminate age, no longer young, in a suede suit that closely fitted his tall, slender body, with a high-crowned wide-brimmed black wool hat, and a black string tie, and smart lemon-yellow gloves, and leather boots with a pronounced heel: quite clearly a stranger, from another part of the country. And what a
handsome
man he was, everyone agreed.

Did they know he was Harlan Bellefleur, come to revenge his family’s deaths? Did they recognize his Bellefleur profile, no matter that he wore a Western hat, and no longer spoke like a native of the Chautauquas?

In any case they sent him to Lake Noir, to the Varrells. And not a single hand was raised against him when, the following day, he shot down in cold blood (for so the greedy newspapers termed it,
cold blood
) four of the five men who had been accused by his sister-in-law of having murdered his father, his brother, and his brother’s children.

There, that’s done, Harlan was reported to have said, with a disdainful smile, when the last of the Varrells, Silas, lay dead. With a meticulous sense of style (for indeed he was being watched, indeed there were numerous witnesses) he then turned to walk away.

THAT,
THE CHILDREN
were told, was revenge. Not just the acts, the murders, themselves: but the style as well.

Nothing is quite so profound as revenge, they were told. Nothing quite so exquisite. When Harlan Bellefleur rode into town and hunted down his family’s murderers and shot them one by one, like dogs—!

The taste of it. Of revenge. Honey-rich in the mouth, it was. Unmistakable. The lurching of your heart, the powerful intoxicating waves of blood coursing through your veins, a raw clamorous yearning tide of blood. . . . Unmistakable.

(BUT HOW UGLY,
revenge. The very thought of it. Animals tearing at one another. The first blow, and then the next, and the next, and the next: the sickening quaver of the knees, that tarry-black taste at the back of the mouth. . . . So Vernon Bellefleur thought, alone amid the excited children. He must have been a child, among them; at any rate he was in disguise as a child. Then. In those blurred interminable days long ago. Revenge, the others whispered, laughing aloud with the sheer nervousness of certain thoughts. Ah—revenge! If only we had lived
then.
)

BUT HOW
EXQUISITE
it was, really. There was nothing like it. No human experience, not even the experience of passionate erotic love, could match it. For in love (so the more articulate Bellefleurs speculated) there is never, there can be never, anything more than the sense, however compelling, that one is fulfilling
oneself;
but in revenge there is the sense that one is fulfilling the entire universe. Justice is being done by one’s violent act. Justice is being exacted
against the wishes of mankind.

For revenge, though it is a species of justice, always runs counter to the prevailing wishes of mankind. It makes war against what is fixed. It is always revolutionary. It cannot exert itself but must
be
exerted; and exerted only through violence, by a selfless individual who is willing to die in the service of his mission.

Thus Harlan Bellefleur, hawk-faced Indian-red Harlan Bellefleur in his black Stetson, on his sleek brownish-gray Costeña mare, riding into Nautauga Falls one fine May morning in 1826. . . .

(
VENGEANCE IS MINE,
sayeth the Lord.
So Fredericka insisted, arguing with Arthur. For John Brown
was
a murderer, wasn’t he, no matter that he imagined himself in the service of the Lord? And Harlan Bellefleur as well. A murderer in the face of the Almighty.)

DR. WYSTAN SHEELER COULD
not have known, nor could Raphael Bellefleur have explained (lacking, as he did, any sense of the interior life—which he would have considered merely weakness), but, some seven decades after Harlan appeared on his high-stepping mare, Raphael was to subside into that cynical, dispirited melancholy, and order himself skinned for a drum, partly as a consequence of certain events that had happened before his birth.

What rage he felt, and what shame—! Though without exactly
feeling
anything. For Raphael had no conscious memory of having been told (by neighbors?—by classmates?—certainly not by his parents, who never spoke of the past) about the Bushkill’s Ferry massacre and the trial and Harlan’s sudden reappearance; he had, indeed, very little conscious memory of himself as a child.

(Though he
must,
he knew, have been a child—at least for a while.)

These were the things to be contemplated, over the years, at the periphery of his highly active life: the massacre, and the rescue of Germaine from the burning house, and the arrest of old Rabin and the Varrells, and the hearing, the indictment, the trial itself. . . .

Above all, this: his mother’s humiliation.

His mother Germaine, slow-speaking and easily confused, in the courtroom day after day, that late winter of 1826, before hundreds of curious staring strangers. Her humiliation there was more grievous, in a way, than the massacre itself, which was over so quickly. (It never ceased to astonish: six persons killed in a matter of minutes. So quickly!)