Bellefleur (92 page)

Alone. Alone and floating, drifting. In absolute solitude. Above the mist-shrouded mountains, through languid strips of cloud, now at 4,000 feet, slowly and lazily climbing, so that not only the checkerboard of fields below faded from sight but the vision of the runway which had so haunted Gideon during the first several weeks of his training had vanished as well: obliterated by the immensity of the sky, which took in everything, swallowed up everything, without a ripple.

At such times, in such isolation, Gideon experienced without emotion certain flashes of memory. Though perhaps they were not memories so much as mere spasms of thought. He heard, or almost heard, voices. But he did not answer them. Sometimes two spoke at once: Tzara instructed him to give the trim crank a turn or two, Noel boasted half-drunkenly of the Rosengarten property, the very last jigsaw puzzle piece, some 1,500 acres of devastated pine forest the Bellefleurs were soon to acquire. (And this would be the final purchase. It would regain for them all of Jean-Pierre’s lost empire.) Leah spoke, taunting him, using words he had never heard from her—your bitches, your sluts,
aren’t
they fortunate to have you as a lover!—and then pleading with him, and complaining of the most petty things (for it quite infuriated her, that great-grandmother Elvira and her elderly husband
had
moved across the lake to aunt Matilde’s, and now they would refuse to be dislodged, the three of them, and Leah’s plans for a handsome new camp would have to be postponed until the old people died—but when would that be, Leah cried, your people live so long!). There was Ewan wanting to talk with him about the children. Their children. Ewan uncharacteristically grave. Half-drunk, of course, and smelling of ale when he belched, as he frequently did, but grave: distressed. Not only Albert’s accident with the new Chevrolet—that little fucker, Ewan groaned, he must have been going over ninety when he sideswiped the truck—
over ninety
on that dirt road!—but the others as well. For Albert wasn’t seriously hurt, Albert would recover, he would recover and buy another car, but what of Garth who had moved away and betrayed his family, what of Raphael whom no one had loved, what of Yolande . . . ? And what of Gideon’s own children?

The voices, the faces. Gideon did not resist them, nor did he accept them. He never answered their accusations. He never sympathized. . . . There was his little girl Germaine gazing upon him with an odd sullen weariness. In recent months she had lost something of her spirit: her eyes were no longer so bright, her movements so quick: she was, Gideon halfway supposed, no longer a child. An unfamiliar face, floating close beside him. But of course it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was
his
—his child’s.

But do you believe that, Gideon?—so Leah mocked bitterly. That she is yours? That she is anyone’s?

(For Leah, impulsive queenly Leah, had begun to notice the child’s change as well. Evidently Germaine shrank from her with increasing frequency, would not allow Leah to stare into her eyes, was rebellious and willful, and burst into foolish tears at the slightest provocation. She can’t help me any longer, Leah said dumbly, she won’t help me, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what is happening. . . . )

But she
was
a child, still. Not yet four years old.

FACES, VOICES, THE
wave-upon-wave of the air, bucking slightly now that he had again leveled, at an altitude of 4,500. Beneath him nothing existed. Colorless banks of mist, said to be cloud. A chill wind from the right—the north—and soon he must turn 180 degrees—turn and bank carefully—holding his position firm as the waves of air, grown suddenly more violent, sought to throw him about. But he would not return just yet. He had—hadn’t he?—a great deal of time. The fuel tanks had been full at takeoff. He had all the time he required. Gideon, the voice cried plaintively, and then, mischievously, Old Skin and Bones!

He smiled, slightly. He surprised himself, smiling. But of course he was utterly alone in the cockpit and not even Tzara was beside him any longer. Gideon, the woman cried, Gideon don’t you love me, Old Skin and Bones don’t you love me, don’t you understand who I am . . . ?

He turned quickly to her, and caught only a glimpse of her gloating shadowy face. But he
did
know who she was.

The Jaws . . .

O
ne after another the two-year notes were signed, with most of the estate as collateral. The mines were depleted: the timberlands which had seemed inexhaustible were razed: though the Bellefleur farms produced more wheat, alfalfa, soybeans, and corn, and far more fruit, than their competitors in the Valley, the market was poor and would continue to be poor because of extraordinary harvests everywhere in North America: and so Lamentations of Jeremiah, baptized Felix (but long ago, long ago, in happier times) grew desperate.

He
must
have grown desperate, his sons reasoned, for why otherwise would he have consented to enter into a partnership with Horace Steadman of all people—Horace whom the Steadmans themselves mistrusted?

“He’s essentially an innocent man,” Noel said slowly.

“He’s innocent, yes. And extraordinarily ignorant,” said Hiram.

“You shouldn’t say such things about our father, it isn’t proper,” said Noel irritably. And then, with an impatient gesture: “It isn’t good luck.”

In their father’s presence they said little, for though Jeremiah’s reserved, rather shy manner, coupled with the lurid white scar on his forehead (his only “badge of honor,” to use his curious expression, from the war of his young manhood, in which so many of his contemporaries died), gave him an air of vulnerability, they were restrained by a natural Bellefleur reticence: natural, at any rate, between father and sons. After the debacle, after Steadman’s flight to Cuba, each accused the other of having humored the old man.

Young Jean-Pierre, dabbing after-shave cologne on his smooth white skin, offered no opinion whatsoever. His sensibilities had been so shattered by his father’s failure—so Elvira was to charge, hysterically—that he
hadn’t
any opinion. And he couldn’t possibly have acted of his own free will that terrible night at Innisfail, no matter what the jurors charged.

The night he was swept away in the flood, poor Jeremiah had been goaded, against his own nature, into drinking far more than he ordinarily allotted himself. For as the raindrops thickened and began to pelt the windows, as the afternoon prematurely darkened, he found himself thinking of the silver foxes he and Steadman had raised—the 2,300 silver foxes he and Steadman had bred, giddy with expectation, quite certain that they would become millionaires within two or three years. (For so they’d been convinced, by the silver-fox breeder who had sold them the original foxes.) And then, and then . . . And then, incredibly, one terrible night, the creatures had somehow broken through their close-meshed wire fences to tear one another to pieces. Jeremiah, even in wartime, had never seen anything like it. He had
never
seen anything like it. Why, the creatures were cannibals, they were monsters, they appeared to have devoured, or attempted to devour, their own offspring—! Acres of carcasses. Bloody strips of flesh, and muscle fibers, and the ravens and grackles and shrikes picking at their eyes, a sight too hellish to be borne. Jaws devouring jaws . . . And then, the next day, to learn that Horace had taken what remained of the money (hardly more than $500, in Jeremiah’s vague estimation) and fled to Cuba with his fifteen-year-old mulatto mistress, about whom everyone had known except Jeremiah . . . !

“You’ve failed once again and this time you have humiliated us all,” his wife Elvira screamed. She hit at him with her small fists, and her face looked wizened, and he was struck by the realization that though she might never love him again he would continue to love her, for he had pledged himself to her, for as much as they shared of eternity.
Her
detesting
him
did not free him from his pledge. “When your father was living I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him,” Elvira wept, “because of his thinking, his terrible tireless
thinking,
but now that you have taken his place, now that you have so inadequately taken his place, ah, how I wish he were still here!
He
would have known Steadman for the villain he is, and
he
would have known better than to breed those hideous cannibals!”

“But they didn’t
appear
to be cannibals,” Jeremiah protested softly, backing away from his wife’s blows. “You yourself said, dear, didn’t you say, they were so beautiful, they possessed so unearthly a—”

“And now there will be an auction, won’t there! A public auction! Of our things! Of your father’s precious things! And all the world will trample our gardens and lawns, and track mud onto our lovely carpets, and everywhere people will laugh at us, and talk will surface once again of the curse—”

Jeremiah, backed against a fireplace, tried to take hold of his wife’s wrists; but though she was a small woman, and her wrists were touchingly slender, he could not hold them still. “But there is no curse, dear Elvira—”

“No curse! You, of all people, to claim that there’s no curse!”

“The very notion of a curse on the family is a profanation, a blasphemy—”

“How else to explain these catastrophes?” Elvira cried, turning away from him to hide her face in her hands. “From the very start . . .”

“But we haven’t been accursed,” Jeremiah said, smiling foolishly. “It’s entirely possible to interpret our history as being a history of—of blessedness.”

Elvira stumbled away, sobbing. She wept as though her heart would break: and Jeremiah was never to forget the pathos of the moment. For he had of course failed her, and he was quite conscious of having failed his father as well (whose presence filled the castle at certain troubled times, and whose skin, on that ugly drum, quivered slightly whenever Jeremiah passed near, whether in rage or in simple hope that he might draw his hand along it, it was impossible to know—for naturally Jeremiah did
not
touch it, or linger on the stairway landing), and of course his children, his innocent children, whose inheritance was dissolving away to nothing.

The catastrophe of the silver foxes; and the necessity to sign yet another of the two-year notes (for the extension of credit out of the largest Vanderpoel bank); and the necessity, at last, anticipated for so long, of auctioning off certain of their treasures. (And the paintings and statues and various art objects
were
treasures, as the appraisers declared: a pity that buyers found them not to their taste, and worth, on the auction block, in the remorseless clarity of a midsummer sun, less than one-third of their estimated price.)

Not long afterward Lamentations of Jeremiah rushed out into a rainstorm, thinking that he would save his horses—no matter that Elvira begged him to stay inside, and Noel himself attempted to keep him there by force. He
wanted,
he
yearned
. . . It was an almost physical craving, that he rush out of the relative comfort of his father’s house and into the violent storm, imagining that he heard the horses’ screams, and that only
he
could save them from the rising waters. “Jeremiah! Jeremiah!” Elvira cried, trying to follow him through the knee-high muck, until he outdistanced her, shielded by the dark. Ah, how badly he
wanted,
he
yearned,
he
must .
. .

Swept away, the current sucking his feet out from under him, knocking his head against an uprooted tree stump, swept away in the raging storm (in intensity hardly different from the storm that ruined Leah’s plans for great-grandmother Elvira’s hundredth birthday celebration), he had time only to realize, before his consciousness was extinguished, that it was his pony Barbary he had been seeking out in the flooded stable: Barbary, his lovely gray-and-white dappled Shetland pony with the large shining eyes and the long thick almost woollike hair, Barbary the companion of his childhood, the companion of his innocent days as Felix. Yet still he
wanted
to plunge into the storm, he
yearned
to submit himself to it, as if only so violent a baptism, far from the rude claims of
Bellefleur
and
blood,
could exorcise his memory of the foxes and their hideous bloody jaws.
I am not one of you, as you see,
the drowning man pleaded.

The Assassination of the Sheriff of Nautauga County

T
hat final summer it did seem as if Germaine was losing her “powers”—she had no foreknowledge, evidently, of her great-uncle Hiram’s death, and apart from a queer lethargy that gave to her small pretty face a somewhat leaden tone, and several sleepless nights preceding her fourth birthday, she seemed to have no clear sense of the impending catastrophe itself: the destruction of Bellefleur Manor and the deaths of so many members of her family.

On the morning of her uncle Ewan’s assassination, for instance, she exhibited no signs of distress. She had even, it seemed, slept very well the night before, and woke in an excellent mood. At the breakfast table on the terrace Leah watched her daughter covertly, listening as the child prattled on to one of the servants about a silly little dream she had had, or was it a dream one of the kittens (according to Germaine) had had—kittens with wings who could fly, and if they wished they could paddle on the lake, and everything was buttercup-yellow, and someone was passing around cupcakes with strawberry icing—and it occurred to her that her daughter was a perfectly ordinary child.

Bright, and pretty, and somewhat willful at times, and given to spells of bad temper like all children; and of course she was somewhat large for her age. But, really, any stranger would consider her nothing more than a normal child: which is to say an
ordinary
child. Her eyes which had once seemed to hold an amazing light within them now seemed to Leah merely a child’s eyes. And her rate of growth, so prodigious in the first two years, had certainly slowed, so that she was probably only an inch or two taller than the average four-year-old. It was true that she was unusually quick: she had taught herself to read somehow, and to do simple arithmetic, and she could, when she wished, reply to adult queries in an eerily adult manner. But her quickness, her intelligence, no longer struck Leah as exceptional. Set beside Bromwell, for instance . . .