Bellefleur (94 page)

He recognized them, and seemed to be unusually clear-minded about the ward, the hospital, the delicate operation performed on his brain, and the circumstances of what he called his “misfortune.” But he spoke in a near-whisper, and his manner was contrite, even chastened; it alarmed his parents that he said not a single word about the attempted murder—he knew that someone had tried to kill him, certainly, but he showed no anger, no bitterness, not even any curiosity about the assassin’s identity. (The assassin was never to be found, though the sheriff’s office and the city police launched an extensive investigation. If only Rosalind had caught a glimpse of the man—! But of course she had not, nor had anyone in the building, including the doorman in attendance downstairs, seen him; and the gun—a quite ordinary .45 Colt automatic, found twenty floors below in the alley—proved to be untraceable.)

From the first, then, Noel and Cornelia had known something was gravely wrong. Of course they were grateful that their son had survived: how many men, even with the bodily constitution of a bull, like Ewan, could have survived five bullets in the chest (miraculously, they had passed through him, striking no vital organ), a cruel shoulder wound, and a bullet lodged in his skull . . . ? And he had lost so much blood, and had arrived in the emergency ward in an advanced state of shock. But the Ewan who regained consciousness, the Ewan who held their hands and comforted
them,
and spoke gently (and apologetically) to his wife, and wept with delight to see Vida and Albert, and was so courteous with the nurses . . . this Ewan was no one they knew.

He was soft-spoken, he was contrite, he blushed with shame over the circumstances of his “misfortune” (for he was never able to bring himself to do anything more than allude to Rosalind, and the penthouse apartment, and his life of “error”); only while in the convalescent home, when he was free to walk, with a cane, about the sloping lawns, in the company of one or two members of his family, did he bring up—and then hesitantly,
apologetically
—the experience he had had, and the necessity, now, for changing his life.

Of course, he said quietly, he would resign his office. Had already resigned, in fact. Knowing what he did about life—about the nature of sin—about the baptism of blood—and Our Saviour’s overseeing of every moment of our lives—he could not continue with his worldly occupation; even the very memory of it filled him with dismay. (That he had actually carried a handgun! That he had gloried in his rifles, automatics, shotguns! His soul was aggrieved.) Since he had no secrets from them or from anyone he was willing to show them the letter he had written to his former mistress, breaking off all further relations with her, and signing over the apartment to her for as long as she wished to have it—though he could not resist begging her to consider the self-defeating sinfulness of her ways, which might one day drag her down to Hell. His parents and his wife prudently disclaimed their right to read the letter, and it was sent by registered mail to Rosalind Max, who never replied. (Though of course she kept the apartment, and the car, and the rest of the gifts, including even the twin portraits.)

As time passed and he mended and grew strong Ewan was willing to talk more openly, and with a great deal of spirit, about his “baptism.” Evidently he had died, or almost died, and at the very moment of death, as he was about to pass over into the other world, Jesus Christ Himself had appeared, and called out sternly to him, for it wasn’t time yet for him to die, how could he die when he hadn’t fulfilled his task on earth!—and he had better kneel, and submit to baptism. So Christ Himself had baptized Ewan, and with Ewan’s own blood. (He had touched Ewan’s chest wounds, had even poked a forefinger near his heart, in order to bloody his hands for the baptism.) They were together a long, long time, Ewan on his knees, Christ standing before him, instructing him, not so much in the sinfulness of his past life—for Ewan knew very well, now, the scales had fallen from his eyes and he
knew
—as in the life ahead, which would be extremely difficult. He would meet resistance, especially from those he loved; especially from his family. (Even Lily, though “religious,” did not
really
believe.) But he must have courage. He must never slacken, he must forever remember the circumstances of his baptism, and Christ’s love, and though the world might mock him he must only go forward to meet his destiny and fulfill himself on earth.

They stared at him, speechless. Their faces lengthened with grief. Ah, Ewan! What has happened to Ewan!
Their
Ewan . . .

Lily wept, and collapsed again. She moaned in her delirium that that whore had murdered her husband: why didn’t the police arrest her and throw her in jail!
Of course
Rosalind Max had done the shooting
herself
. . . .
Everyone
in Nautauga Falls knew that.

Noel and Cornelia and Leah and Hiram had no idea what to think. Ewan
wasn’t
demented and yet he wasn’t sane; his brain evidently had
not
been damaged, and yet . . . Gideon visited with him only once, and came away shaking: with distress or rage, no one knew. Ewan had seized his brother’s hands and pleaded with him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour, and to accompany him, Ewan, on his pilgrimage to Eben-Ezer in the western corner of the state; he had pleaded with Gideon to cast off his worldly pursuits and devote himself to the Lord, before it was too late. For somehow it had come about—no one knew exactly how, nor could anyone at the Manitou clinic explain—that Ewan had met with a certain Brother Metz, who claimed to be a direct descendant of the German “saint” Christian Metz, who had founded the sect known locally as “True Inspiration” a century ago. The stooped, bearded, eagle-nosed old man
had
appeared at the clinic, and he and Ewan had spent several hours together in earnest discussion, on the veranda, but where he had come from . . . how he had known about Ewan . . . was to remain forever a mystery.

With tears in his eyes Ewan announced to his family that he would not be returning to Bellefleur Manor.

He had, he said, relinquished all his worldly goods, with the exception of $10,000, which he had given to Brother Metz’s community at Eben-Ezer, as soon as he was formally discharged from Manitou he was to journey, on foot, to the community, where he would live for the rest of his days. He might in time become a minister in the True Inspiration church, when Brother Metz deemed him worthy, but of course he had no plans, he had no ambition, whatever the Lord wanted of him would come to pass, and in that would reside his happiness. . . .

He would
not,
he promised, harangue his family about their misguided lives. The pursuit of money, the pursuit of power—the mad desire to amass the wilderness empire old Jean-Pierre had once owned, which had brought him to his doom—! No, he would not harangue; that was not the way of True Inspiration. One lived one’s life as a model of Christian virtue, just as Christ had lived His faultless life. So Ewan explained, gently. There would be no preaching except to those who wanted to believe.

His fellow policemen and his many acquaintances in the Falls assumed he was joking, until, one by one, they visited him. And came away, like Gideon, appalled. For Ewan Bellefleur
wasn’t
demented and yet he wasn’t sane. . . . Most baffling of all was his lack of interest in revenge. He didn’t appear to care about the progress of the investigation; he adroitly changed the subject when one of his lieutenants named certain names, suspects among Ewan’s numerous enemies in the county. Nor would he suggest names himself. (As for the theory that poor distraught Rosalind had had anything to do with the attempted assassination . . . Ewan simply shut his eyes and shook his head, smiling.) His associates were shocked at the change in him, and though they discussed it in detail, for weeks and months (indeed, the conversion of Ewan Bellefleur provided material for debate among people who barely knew him) they were never able to decide: was he midly insane, had the bullet damaged his brain, or was he far healthier than he’d ever been before, in his entire life . . . ? But it did seem perverse, even repulsive, they thought, that a former sheriff should have so little interest in apprehending a dangerous criminal.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,
Ewan whispered.

PRETTY VIDA IN
her white high-heeled pumps, her jaws moving surreptitiously as she chewed gum (her mother and grandmother thought such a habit, in a young lady, insufferably vulgar), sat in the tearoom of the Manitou clinic with its mirrors and ferns and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, asking Albert repeatedly if he could understand what was going on, if he
really
believed that strange, frightening man was their father. And Albert, baffled, resentful, restless, lit matches and dropped them burning into the ashtray and said with a shrug of his shoulders, It’s him all right, it’s him bullying us in a new way.

But I can’t
believe
it, Vida whispered.

It’s him, Albert said, wiping at his eyes. The old fucker.

AND ONE MORNING
in late summer, wearing a plain, inexpensive brown suit, tieless, with the collar of his white shirt worn on the outside of his lapels, and carrying a small canvas valise, Ewan Bellefleur checked out of the convalescent home unattended, and set out on his journey westward to Eben-Ezer (now called, in these fallen times, Ebenezer) some five hundred miles away. He was going on foot, like a pilgrim.

Most of the staff saw him off. A number of the nurses wept, for Ewan had been the best-loved patient they had had in years; several staff members vowed that they would come visit him, and in the meantime they would pray for their own enlightenment. Though red-faced and still somewhat stocky, with a broad, muscular chest that strained proudly against his shirt front, and small bright eyes encased in a galaxy of wrinkles, Ewan nevertheless exuded a remarkably boyish enthusiasm. About his gray hair, they claimed, a frail, pale, almost invisible aura radiated; or so it seemed, in the confused excitement of his departure.

The Brood of Night

I
t was a fear commonly shared by the Bellefleurs that great-uncle Hiram, afflicted as he was by a sleepwalking malady that admitted of no cure (from the age of eleven he had been subjected to every sort of treatment: strapped in his bed, forced to swallow pills, powders, and foul-tasting medicines, led through exhausting and humiliating exercises, pleaded with, “talked to,” forced to undergo, at White Sulphur Springs, a vigorous regimen of hydropathy under the direction of the famous society physician Langdon Keene—his “bodily poisons” were flushed away by enemas, wet packs, long soaks in the odorous waters, submission to waterfalls and cascades and other forms of “exomosis,” and all, alas, to no avail)—it was a fear certainly shared by Hiram himself—that he would one day succumb to a disastrous accident while groping about in his uncanny somnambulist’s stupor: but in fact the unfortunate man was to die fully awake, in the daytime, of a curious but
evidently
quite serious infection that grew out of a minor, nearly imperceptible scratch on his upper lip. It seems to have been the case, so far as anyone could judge, that his death at the age of sixty-eight had nothing at all to do with his history of noctambulism.

But how strange, how bewildering, his mother Elvira said (for she had, over the tumultuous decades, worried more than anyone else about Hiram’s affliction, which she saw to be a direct response to the child’s shame at his father’s financial blundering), how
absurd,
the elderly woman said, half-angrily, when they told her about his sudden death. “There’s no logic to it, no necessity, he simply died of anything at all—” she laughed—“when we had worried ourselves sick over him for almost sixty years. . . . No, I don’t like it. I
don’t
like it. Sixty years of carrying on like an idiot during the night and undoing the sense he made during the day and then to die of an infection that might have happened to
anyone.
There’s no necessity to it, there’s something vulgar about it, I forbid you to tell me anything more!”

And though her elderly husband, known vaguely among the Bellefleurs as the “old-man-from-the-flood,” and great-aunt Matilde (with whom the couple now lived, on the remote north shore of Lake Noir), grieved for her son’s surprising death, great-grandmother Elvira remained tearless and resentful, and
really
would not allow anyone to bring up the subject of Hiram and the last week of his life.

“There’s something hopelessly vulgar about accidental death,” the old woman said.

EVEN AS A
boy Hiram had been serious and hard-working, and he was, he suspected, often compared favorably with his shallow brothers Noel (who spent all his time with horses, as if mere
animals
could occupy the intelligent energies of an adult male) and Jean-Pierre (who, long before the fiasco at Innisfail, was a grave disappointment to the family); at the age of eleven he was already astute in business matters, and could not only discuss the various aspects of the Bellefleur holdings, including the troubling tenant farms, with the family’s accountants, attorneys, and managers, but challenge these gentlemen when it seemed to him they were mistaken. It was, in a sense, in defiance of his obvious talent that he chose to study classics at Princeton, where he was, surprisingly, an only mediocre student; and no one ever quite understood why he left law school so abruptly, in the spring of his first year, in order to return to Bellefleur. As a boy he had lightly mocked his family and their eccentricities, and spoke as if he wanted nothing more than to dwell hundreds—perhaps thousands—of miles away, in a “center of civilization” remote from the Chautauquas; but living away from the manor for even a few months greatly distressed him, and the bouts of sleepwalking grew so frequent (he was once discovered by a night watchman crawling on all fours on the ice-encrusted roof of Witherspoon Hall, at Princeton, and again stumbling into the waters of Lake Carnegie; he was quite seriously injured when, at about eleven o’clock in the evening, he walked, clad in pajamas and bathrobe, directly into the path of a horse-drawn carriage on muddy Nassau Street)—and the daytime anxiety so acute—that the family speculated he might simply be homesick, despite his angry disavowals. (For all his life, up until the very eve of his death, great-uncle Hiram was infuriated by anyone’s theories concerning him: his gray, intelligent, normally contemplative eyes narrowed, and his jowls quivered with rage, at the very suspicion that anyone, even a loved one, might be forming an opinion about him. “
I
am the only person qualified to know about myself,” he said.)