Bellefleur Page 10

  He was still staring at her, his lips parted in a queer half-smile. She could see a fine film of perspiration on his forehead.

  “. . . did you ask? If I cried?” he said hesitantly.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t exactly . . . I didn’t exactly hear, Leah. You were saying something about . . .”

  “I wasn’t saying anything,” Leah murmured.

  “Just now when I sat down, I thought I heard you say . . .”

  “But I didn’t say anything!” Leah cried, her face burning. “I said only Sit down, sit down and stop squirming around and pour us both some ale, that’s all I said, didn’t I?—Christabel?—Raphael? You’ve been here all the time, you’ve heard everything I said—”

  Vernon’s fuzzy blue eye remained fixed on her. It was a most unnerving moment. Leah’s usual brash confidence failed her, she found herself pleating her skirt, staring down at her nervous fingers. “What’s this nonsense about crying!” She laughed. “I never said anything about crying.”

  “You didn’t, that’s true,” Vernon said slowly, “and yet I . . . I seem to have heard . . . I seem to have heard you . . . your voice. . . . It was very distinct, Leah. But . . . but . . . I know you didn’t say anything,” he finished lamely.

  “I certainly didn’t. I’ve just been sitting here, dying of thirst, trying to get comfortable. Raphael, hon, will you pass us that bowl of nuts? I’m famished, I feel faint.”

  Vernon stared down at the black ledger on his knees as if he had never seen it before. He was clearly rattled, and Leah suddenly wished him away. Oh, for God’s sake get out of here! Get out of my drawing room! Let me gorge myself on nuts, let me drink ale until I drop off, why the hell are you sitting there like a fool! I don’t love you, no woman could possibly love you, you’re a clown, a scarecrow, you aren’t even a man, why don’t you gather up your asinine verse and get out of here.

  He jumped to his feet so abruptly that he hadn’t time even to grab the ledger.

  His expression—stricken, withered, deeply wounded—cut Leah to the heart.

  “I—I—I’ll leave,” he said in a faint, broken voice. “I won’t bother you again.”

  “But, Vernon—”

  He backed away, blinking rapidly. Now not even his good eye had the power to keep her in focus.

  “But, Vernon, what on earth is wrong— What is wrong—” Leah said guiltily.

  He backed away, stepping onto the children’s checkerboard, so that both Christabel and Raphael exclaimed irritably, and then he nearly staggered into the firescreen, all the while mumbling a disjointed apology, and assuring Leah that he would never bother her again.

  “But, Vernon, I never said a word,” Leah cried.

  In her distress she managed to get to her feet, shifting her weight forward. For a moment she swayed as if she were about to fall. But her thick, strong legs held, and by leaning slightly backward she regained her balance. But by this time Vernon had fled to the door.

  “Vernon, my dear— Vernon— Oh, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t say it—”

  But he fled, shutting the door behind him.

  Leah began to cry, it was all so unfortunate, such a misunderstanding, she had been unconscionably rude, and to a man who clearly adored her—who adored her, unlike Gideon, without any hope of possessing her—

  “Aunt Leah, why are you crying?” Raphael asked, astonished.

  Her own little girl was staring at her too. “Mamma—?”

  Ah, she was becoming eccentric like the rest! The children would soon be giggling over her, whispering about her behind her back. Yet she could not stop crying. The child in her womb gave one of his little nudges, squeezing her bladder.

  “I’m not crying,” she said angrily.

  When Gideon came home she was to say in the lightest possible voice that she had badly hurt poor Vernon’s feelings; but Gideon, exhausted from his trip, and deeply discouraged by the negotiations, mumbled a near-inaudible reply. He was lying flat on his back, fully clothed, one arm over his forehead. Leah was to say, again lightly, that she had had an uncanny experience the night before: she had hurt Vernon’s feelings—

  “Yes. You said,” Gideon murmured.

  —had hurt his feelings without saying a word. As if, somehow, her thoughts had had the power to travel to him, to communicate themselves to him. Which was of course impossible.

  “Yes. It’s impossible,” Gideon said, without taking his arm from his face.

  IT WAS IN early April, when the sky had been overcast for nearly a week, and a harsh percussive rain hardened suddenly into hail, and rang out against the castle’s innumerable windows, that Bromwell got to his feet at the conclusion of a gin rummy game, and, taking a small notepad out of his pocket, read off figures and statistics in a rapid voice, so excitedly that Leah could not follow. “Bromwell, what is this?” She laughed.

  The other children, who must have known what Bromwell was about, watched Leah closely. Christabel had shoved three or four fingers into her mouth. Raphael, the oldest of the children in the drawing room, stared at his aunt without smiling; his expression was guarded. (For some months now Raphael had been behaving peculiarly. No one could say what precisely was wrong, not even his mother was comfortable enough with him to inquire, and even Ewan was in the habit of staring at him with a barely concealed shudder: for there was something uncanny about his stealthy manner, his great dark bruised-looking eyes, his air of gazing at the others as if he were in another element, distant from them, undersea, inaccessible.) Jasper and Morna giggled in the same furtive high-pitched way, which Leah found quite exasperating.

  “What is going on?” Leah cried.

  “For a while, Mamma, we were certain you were cheating,” Bromwell said. Though still a very small child—Christabel had begun now to outgrow him, and he would never catch up—he had the air of an adult man, standing with one forefinger upraised. The thick lenses of his glasses distorted his eyes subtly, and Leah, staring at him, could not have said what color his eyes were; it struck her dizzily that this pompous child was no one she even knew. “. . . must admit that I was of that party, at first. But then I made it a point to observe closely. To observe at each game. Beginning, as I’ve said—” and here he glanced at the notepad again—“on New Year’s Day. So I have a complete record, up to the present time. You must have noticed, Mamma, how often you’ve been winning games with us?”

  “Have I?”

  “You’ve won nearly every game. Gin rummy, checkers, Parcheesi, war. Hasn’t it struck you as odd?”

  “But I’ve been playing with children, dear.”

  “That has nothing to do with it, Mamma,” Bromwell said emphatically. “I can beat Uncle Hiram at chess three games out of five now.”

  “You can? Really? But since when, Bromwell?”

  “Mamma, don’t distract us. The issue is—are you aware, Mamma, that you have powers?”

  “That I have—what?”

  “Powers.”

  Leah stared from one child to another. Her little girl had closed her eyes tight and squinched up her face, and Raphael smiled a tiny embarrassed smile. “. . . Powers?” Leah said faintly.

  “You direct the cards. No matter who shuffles and deals, no matter how assiduously we try to prevent it—you direct the cards. They fly out to you. I mean, the good cards, the desirable cards.”

  “Oh, Bromwell, what nonsense!” Leah said.

  “But it’s true, Mamma.”

  “It certainly isn’t true!”

  “Bromwell is right, Aunt Leah,” Raphael said softly. “The cards seem to . . . jerk out of my fingers when I deal. Certain cards. If I try to keep them back they cut me, their edges are very sharp. . . .”

  “Raphael, that isn’t true,” Leah said, biting her lips. She threw herself back on the couch and clasped her hands over her stomach, as if to hold it in place; though it was quite difficult, she brought her ankles together and pressed her feet hard against the floor. The nasty little children
would not get at her. “You’re just . . . you’re just spinning tales. Because you play games poorly, and you think that if someone beats you consistently it’s because she is cheating. . . .”

  “Not cheating, Mamma,” Bromwell said quickly. “No one has accused you of cheating.”

  “The cards fly to me, you said. . . . Ah, what utter nonsense! What insulting nonsense!”

  Christabel began to cry, without opening her eyes. “Mamma, don’t be mad,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”

  “My own children accusing me of cheating!” Leah shouted.

  Grandmother Cornelia entered the room, her white hair curled and impeccable about her cheerful, malicious, red-withered-apple of a face. Quite clearly she had been eavesdropping in the corridor. “What’s this, Leah, dear? What’s this?”

  “The children say that I cheat, because I win all the games,” Leah said contemptuously. Her skin fairly glowed with indignation: the firelight cast bronze and gold upon it, so that even the near-invisible white lines about her enormous eyes were illuminated. “They accuse me of influencing the cards.”

  “And the checkers too, Aunt Leah,” Morna said daringly. “And the dice.”

  “But it isn’t cheating, Mamma,” Bromwell said. He tried to take her hand but she drew away, and then slapped at him. “Mamma, please, you’re so emotional, didn’t I explain it all? My statistics, and the odds against your winning, which are incredibly multiplied with each new game—and yet you continue to win. Look, I’ve made up a graph. It’s possibly a little too complicated but I felt the need to superimpose graphs of the others’ games too, and the ratio of your winning to their losing in terms of points, and all of it in relationship to the frequency of playing itself—see, Mamma? It’s all perfectly objective, there’s no room for prejudice or emotion, really! No one is accusing you of—”

  Grandmother Cornelia took the notepad from the child’s fingers and peered at it through her bifocals. “. . . accusing Leah of cheating . . . ?” she muttered.

  Leah snatched the notepad away and threw it into the fire.

  “Why, Leah!” Grandmother Cornelia said. “Of all the rude behavior . . .”

  “I could wish you all in hell,” Leah said, clutching at her belly, tears now streaming down her plump cheeks. “I could wish the nasty lot of you in this very fireplace, in these very flames!”

  “Mamma, no!” Bromwell shouted.

  “Mamma, no! Mamma, no!” Leah said in a mocking voice.

  “But no one has accused you of—”

  “You don’t love me,” she said, weeping freely. “Not you or your father or anyone. You don’t love me, you’re jealous of the baby, you know he’s going to be so beautiful, so strong, he won’t have weak eyes and he won’t be disloyal to his mother—”

  Lily appeared, poking her head through the doorway. And behind her was Aveline, in a woollen dressing gown. And there was Della, awakened from her afternoon nap, her gunmetal-gray hair lying flat and thin on her head. “Is it her time? Is she having contractions?” Della asked. Leah could not determine if her mother was annoyed, or merely excited.

  “Oh, go to hell, the lot of you!” Leah screamed.

  She shut her eyes tight, and rocked on the chaise longue, gripping her belly, gripping the child in her womb, who quivered with life—with wild, elastic life—and in that instant she saw, behind her eyelids, the orangish-green flames of hell that licked joyously at everything within their reach. Yes. To hell. No. Not yet. Yes. I hate them all. . . . But no. No. No.

  And when she opened her eyes there they were, still: Della and Cornelia and Aveline and Lily and the children, staring at her, unharmed.

  The River

  Thousands of feet up in the mountains the Nautauga River begins, beyond Mount Blanc, beyond Mount Beulah, above Tahawaus Pass in the northwestern range, in a nameless glacier lake scooped smoothly out of granite, no more than forty feet at its widest.

  Here, the river springs down out of the lake, five feet wide, only a few inches deep, transparent, plummeting wildly, falling downward, always downward, crashing and breaking across heaped-up boulders, catching the sunlight and fracturing it into a million dizzying bits of light, always rushing impatiently downward. Mile after mile it falls, year after year, joined by smaller streams—some of them little more than rivulets trickling snakelike across slabs of rock—a spider’s web of tributaries that, drawn powerfully together, become a torrential river, a true river, crashing over ridges of rock, falling many feet, giving off icy steam and spray and a deafening thunderous roar that can be heard for miles. At one point the river rushes through a steep canyon, and changes color: suddenly it is magenta, russet, orange-red: and always its roar is deafening: and always it gives off clouds of mist that drift heavily upward, so that waterfalls appear to fall from midair, suspended between the canyon walls.

  When Jedediah came to the edge of the cliff, limping with exhaustion, his horse stumbling beside him, he felt for a terrifying instant the enormity of his mistake—the enormity of all human error—but the thunderous sound rose to engulf him, making his skull and teeth vibrate, and his vision misted over, and his thoughts were swept away.

  “My God—My Lord and my God—” he whispered.

  But his words were swept away.

  It was late afternoon. Shapes tinged with orange danced on the farther cliff, graceful and splotched with sun. Jedediah wiped his face, drew his sleeve roughly across his eyes. Ghosts, demons, spirits of the mountains? For four days he had heard their whispers, their dovelike cooing, their lewd cries, and he had told himself that he heard nothing. But there were shapes on the other side of the river, dancing in the rainbow-wet light. They were iridescent, they quivered with joy.

  From somewhere higher up the mountain a rock plunged, unloosing a small avalanche of rocks and pebbles and dirt. Jedediah gripped his horse’s reins tight. Moisture gleamed on his face like droplets of perspiration. . . . Then the avalanche was over. The loose stones had fallen hundreds of feet down into the river and had sunk without a sound.

  In his saddlebag, along with his bedding and other light provisions, he had a leather-bound Bible that had belonged to his mother. In it, in the Gospels, he might read of the casting-out of devils; he might read once again of the powers promised to those who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who sought to come unto the Father by way of Him. But for the moment he could not move. He stood, gripping his horse’s reins, staring across the river at the queer stunted pines that appeared to be growing out of solid rock. A near-invisible rainbow arched above them.

  The mountain’s voices, the mountain’s music. . . . From time to time it was alarmingly clear. But there was nothing human about it, perhaps because, at this height, nothing could remain human: Mount Blanc was more than fourteen thousand feet high, Jedediah must have climbed to a height of at least six thousand feet, without quite knowing what he had done. There was no other direction for him except upward.

  The rainbow quivered, almost visible. Jedediah stared at it, shading his eyes. Perhaps it was not there. Perhaps the high thin air had begun to affect his brain. The wailing of the spirits—but of course there were no spirits—was not self-pitying or heavyhearted, nor did it seem to be addressed particularly to him. It was all about him, on all sides. Though he trembled with cold he was not frightened, for he knew, he knew very well, that there were no spirits in the mountains, not even in the highest and most remote of the mountains, it was simply the river’s torrential roar and the high altitude that made him dizzy, and caused his thoughts to come falteringly, like little pinches.

  That day, he had been walking for ten hours. His legs ached, the heel of his right foot throbbed with pain, yet he felt elated: despite the invisible creatures beckoning to him on the farther shore, tempting him to believe in them, he felt quite jubilant.

  “My name is Jedediah,” he cried suddenly, cupping his hands to his mouth. How forceful his voice was, how young and raw and yearning! “My name is Jedediah—will you,
allow me to enter your world?”

  Great Horned Owl

  In the spring of 1809, after the last snowfall in early June, Louis Bellefleur set out to find his brother Jedediah, who had been gone three years. He could not accept it, that Jedediah had become a recluse, one of those eccentric mountain hermits about whom so many stories were told (told and retold and embellished and pondered over, in country stores, in taverns, in depots, in trading posts, in the offices of coalyards and granaries where, in winter, their stocking feet brought up close against the red-warm curving bottoms of wrought-iron stoves, men gathered to talk and sip cheap mash whiskey—for there was always a crock of whiskey nearby, even on the counters of general stores, and a ladle for customers who could not be bothered with glasses—and repeat stories they’d heard months or even years and decades previously, laced with hilarity, or malice, or envy, or simple frank astonishment at the pathways others’ lives took). Louis knew approximately where Jedediah was camped, since a half-dozen men had met with him up beyond Mount Beulah, and two or three had actually talked with him and handed over to him the letters and provisions and small gifts (a handknit sweater, woollen socks and mittens, a fur-lined hat, all Germaine’s work) Louis had sent. These hunters and trappers, eccentric men themselves who might disappear for months at a time, brought back conflicting reports of Jedediah Bellefleur, which left Louis greatly disturbed. One trapper swore that Jedediah’s beard fell to his knees and that he looked like a man in his sixties; another claimed that Jedediah had shot at him as he approached his cabin, and screamed that he was a spy or a devil, and that he should go back to Hell where he belonged. Another report had Jedediah lean and muscular and bare-chested and dark as an Indian, not especially friendly, or interested in news of his father or brother or sister-in-law, or even his two very young nephews (which hurt Louis’s feelings tremendously: Jedediah must be interested in his nephews!), but quietly hospitable, willing to share his supper of rabbit stew and potatoes with his visitors, provided they said grace with him, on their knees, for what seemed like a very long stretch of time. Still another report, which Louis and Jean-Pierre both discounted at once, had Jedediah living with a full-blooded Iroquois squaw. . . .