Bellefleur Read online

  When Louis located his brother’s shantylike cabin—built on a wide rocky ridge on the side of Mount Blanc, some hundred or more feet above a narrow, noisy river, and facing Mount Beulah some miles to the east—it did not surprise him, though it rather discouraged him, that Jedediah was not there. Not only not there, but he had, evidently, run off only a few minutes before: a fire was burning in a tiny crude fireplace dug into the earthen floor, an old leather-bound Bible Louis recognized as having belonged to their mother was lying opened on a stoollike table, some greasy potatoes, still warm, lay on a flat wooden plate—for Louis, perhaps?—who was famished from the hike, but mildly nauseated by the odor of the cabin; and in any case he had brought along his own provisions, smoked ham and cheese and Germaine’s whole-wheat bread. “Jedediah? It’s Louis—” So he stood in the doorway of the cabin, crouching, shading his eyes, calling for long minutes at a time, though he knew that Jedediah knew who he was, and had deliberately fled, and was at this very moment (Louis could almost feel it) watching him from higher up the mountain or from across the river. “Jedediah! Hello! It’s me, it’s Louis! It’s no one to harm you! Jedediah! Hello! It’s your brother Louis! It’s your brother—” He shouted until his throat was raw, and tears of despair and rage stung his eyes. That sly little bastard, he thought. To make me yell like a fool. To make me care.

  Louis examined carefully the hard-packed dirt floor of the cabin, but found nothing. He then examined his brother’s bed (a plain cornhusk mattress, no longer fresh, bumpy and uneven and stale-smelling and probably bug-ridden, and covered with a heavy, soiled brown blanket that looked like a horse blanket, complete with leather straps and buckles), and the Bible with its worn leather binding and its thin, gilt-edged pages and the small fussy Gothic type that looked so familiar but which annoyed Louis, the very sight of which annoyed Louis (had Jedediah, his own brother, become a religious fanatic?—had he hidden himself up in the mountains like one of those Old Testament prophets who hid themselves in the desert, maddened with God, touched by God’s fire, ruined forever for the world of man?)—though he forced himself to glance at the opened pages, in case they held a message he must decipher. (The Bible was open to Psalms 91–97. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. . . . He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.)

  He went outside and called again. There was a faint echo, and another. “Jedediah? Jedediah? It’s your brother. . . .” He walked about the rocky clearing, careful not to lose his balance. Jedediah had built the cabin here, evidently, so that he could look out upon Mount Beulah—one of the highest peaks in the Chautauquas, and topped at all times with snow. A beautiful site but impractical. Windy on even this June morning. Dizzying. Blinding. A hundred feet below was the river, which bore little resemblance to the wide, brown-tinted stream of the Valley; the sound of its rapids was thunderous. Louis squatted at the cliff’s edge and stared down. Crashing water, wild white spray, boulders and petrified logs and pockets of scummy froth. The granite beneath his feet vibrated. His teeth and skull began to vibrate.

  “Jedediah? Please . . .”

  Jedediah was watching him. He knew, he could feel it; but he could not determine where Jedediah was. Behind him . . . in front of him . . . slightly above him . . . to the right, or to the left . . .

  “Jedediah? I’ve come to bring you news. I haven’t come to do you harm. Do you hear? Jedediah? I haven’t come to do you harm but only to say hello, to shake your hand, to see if you’re well, to bring you news. . . . How are you? You’re alone, eh? Did you trade off your horse?”

  He turned suddenly, to stare up beyond the cabin. But there were only tall massed trees. Pines and hemlock and mountain maple. Stirred by the wind. But unmoving, really; utterly empty.

  “Jedediah? I know you’re nearby, I know you’re listening. Look—” And here, for some reason, he tore off his red neck scarf and waved it frantically. “I know you’re watching. At this very moment you’re watching.”

  Strange, that his younger brother should fear him. Jedediah, so far as he knew, had always liked him; at any rate he had always obeyed him, more or less, just as he had obeyed the old man. A quiet, small-framed, docile young man. With that narrow squeezed face, rather homely, self-conscious, weak. Something of a coward. And stubborn too, in his quiet way. Limping since the riding accident when he’d been six or seven; self-conscious because of the limp, which was pronounced when he was tired. Poor child. Poor little bastard. . . . But now he had outfoxed Louis by running away after Louis had hiked two days and a morning to find him.

  “Jedediah!” Louis shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  He was a thickset, porcine young man, a week from his thirtieth birthday. His jaw was broad, his nose rather long and full, with dark flaring nostrils; his red-brown beard was clipped short and blunt. When he shouted his eyes bulged and veins in his forehead and neck grew prominent.

  He straightened; his knees had begun to ache. With fastidious, self-conscious movements he retied the red scarf about his neck. (Germaine had made the scarf. Which Jedediah might guess, if he was watching closely.) As if conversing quite ordinarily with his invisible brother he said, “Well, the news back home is mostly all good. I can’t complain. In my last letter—which I know you got, Jedediah, I know you got—though you couldn’t be troubled to reply, not even to let us know that you’re in one piece or not—let alone to congratulate us: there’s not just little Jacob now, he’s already two and growing every day, getting into everything, there’s Bernard, just three months old, the apple of his mamma’s eye and quite a howler, there’s the baby Bernard too, as well as Jacob—and you haven’t seen either of them, let alone be their godfather—but I’m not here to chew you out, I didn’t climb fifty miles up into these goddamn mountains for that. . . . Well, in my last letter I told you about Germaine and the babies and the addition to the house, and did I tell you about Pappa and his friends and the Cockagne Club—they bought into a steamboat, one of those gambling boats—floating casino—and of course there’s plenty of drinking, and women too—and the Methodists in the Valley are up in arms—they’re taking some petition or something to the governor—but Pappa isn’t worried, why should he be worried—he’s buying into a spa at White Sulphur Springs, and maybe into a coach line to connect it with Powhatassie too, but I don’t know the details yet—it depends upon a loan and you know Pappa never talks about his business until it’s settled and no one can cheat him—”

  Louis’s throat ached from the effort of speaking in order to be heard over the river. He paused, conscious of his brother watching him. But where was he, in what direction . . . ? Jedediah might be crouched behind one of those immense boulders farther up the mountain; a sudden movement and a landslide might start, and Louis could be killed. Then again Jedediah might even have climbed a tree. “Don’t you even care about Pappa, Jed?” Louis said softly. “Pappa and Germaine and Jacob and Bernard. . . . Germaine says you won’t see your family again alive, you won’t see your little nephews, she told me to beg you to come back . . . but she said it would be useless. . . . But if I could actually see you, if I could reason with you, I can’t believe that it would be useless.”

  As soon as he paused the great silence returned. It seemed to roll in upon him from all sides, but especially from the river’s deep canyon and the immensity of Mount Blanc. My brother has gone mute in his solitude, Louis thought. He has gone mad. But it was annoyance Louis felt, and he could not keep it out of his voice: “Don’t you even care about Pappa, Jed? Your own father? He’s getting to be an old man—he’ll be sixty-five, I think, sometime this year though I’m not really supposed to know—don’t you even care?—he’s aging no matter how he disguises it, and he misses you; he says every day how he misses you. The message he sent with me was just—he misses you, and wants you back. He isn’t angry. He reall
y isn’t angry. For one thing there’s the Cockagne Club taking up so much of his time, and he’s spending a lot on clothes again, and has his hair dressed and dyed whenever he’s in the city, and he’s been outfitted with new teeth—they gleam like ivory, maybe they are ivory—Germaine says they don’t suit him but how can anyone speak to Pappa, especially about something so intimate?—you know how sensitive he is, how proud—”

  Again he fell silent, beaten back and defeated by the river’s noise; and by the oppressive silence of the mountains. He was unaccustomed to being in the wilderness by himself: if he went hunting or fishing, which he did fairly often, he was always in the midst of a lively company of men his own age. They were serious about hunting, and Louis considered himself one of the finest hunters, one of the very finest marksmen, in the mountains; but they were also serious about drink and food and one another’s company. The solitude of the mountains, the queer unnerving relentless beauty . . . which was a kind of ugliness . . . baffled him. That his young brother should hide away here was an alarming riddle. Don’t you know you’re a Bellefleur! Louis wanted to shout in disgust. You can’t just hide away from blood ties, from your obligations. . . .

  “I’ve come so far, I’m exhausted, I want only to see you and embrace you, I am your brother,” Louis said, looking helplessly around, turning, his arms outstretched, his face reddening with anger he dared not show. If only he might clasp hold of Jedediah’s skinny hand, if only he might seize him . . . why then perhaps he wouldn’t let him go: he’d bring him back to Lake Noir tied and trussed if necessary. “Jed? Can you hear me? Are you watching? You don’t mean to be so cruel as to let me make a fool of myself like this, after so many hours of hiking, and I’m getting a little short-winded, I guess—Germaine thought it was dangerous of me to go alone but, you know, I wanted to be alone—out of respect for you—out of love for you—I could have come with a few other men, and even some dogs, that kind of thing, you know, and we could have sniffed you out pretty easily, and tracked you down, and in fact Pappa has had that idea from the first, a few weeks after you left—he interpreted your going away as an insult to him, you know—which it is, really—in a way—it’s an insult to all of us— You know Germaine wanted you to be Jacob’s godfather, and then she wanted to name the new baby after you, because she said maybe you’d want to return and see him, but I said no, under no circumstances, he’s already been gone three years when he promised to return in one, he doesn’t respect and honor his blood ties, he doesn’t love any of us—not even his father. And you know there are obligations, Jedediah, that come with Pappa’s land and investments. We are doing quite well, and next year should be the most exciting year yet, with the White Sulphur Springs hotel, and the coach line, and if that scheme for a railroad actually goes through, or even some halfway decent roads—why, we’ll be able to clear half the timber in the mountains, clear it and get it to market, Pappa owns thousands and thousands of acres of good timber but he hasn’t had much luck yet in getting it out—just those little operations around the lake, and they’re mainly played out now, just stumps and scrub trees and witchhobble, worthless land, he can’t even sell it to some fool settlers because it would be too hard to clear, and he had some bad luck, a fire over toward Innisfail, thousands and thousands of trees he was planning to cut down— He needs you to help him, Jedediah; he needs both his sons; he told me he’s disinherited Harlan, and if you don’t come back and don’t show any respect or love or common humanity he will certainly disinherit you— Are you listening? Goddamn you, are you listening?”

  Louis was suddenly conscious of his brother watching him, from the rear of the little cabin, no, it was from above the cabin, in the air; in a tree. He stooped to pick up his shotgun. (He had taken off his backpack, and laid it and the gun down near the cabin door, as soon as he arrived in the clearing.) His face pounded thickly with blood. He hurried forward, the gun raised, one eye half-shut. Ah, yes! There! A movement in the lower limbs of one of the tall pines! But it was only a bird. A great bird.

  Louis stared, his pulses beating. Perched haughtily on a limb, gazing without expression down at him, was an owl—a great horned owl—one of the largest Louis had ever seen. From the ground it looked as if it might measure thirty or more inches in height, and its face, its squat neckless head, was colossal. The stiffly erect ear tufts, the strong clawed feet grasping the limb, the great staring eyes fixed in their sockets and outlined boldly in white and black, as if with a painter’s brush. . . . The stillness of the creature as it gazed upon him with its intelligent, somewhat skeptical yellowish eyes in which the black iris floated; the alarming arrogant beauty of the thing. . . .

  Panting, Louis raised the gun higher and sighted the owl and made to pull one of the triggers. The owl did not move. It stared calmly at him, with Jedediah’s eyes: or was it simply Jedediah’s expression about the eyes: and the fairly small beak that looked like a human nose: and the knowingness of the thing, that recognized him, knew why he had come, had been listening intently to his secret thoughts, with that tranquil godly contemptuous look that had, of course, been Jedediah’s all along, even as a boy. Jedediah stared at him out of the owl. The owl was Jedediah. Which was why it showed no fear, why not even its softest, finest belly feathers rippled in the wind, and its tawny pitiless eyes did not blink. Louis struggled to hold the barrel of the gun aloft. But it was very heavy. He panted, he grunted, trying to pull one of the triggers. But his finger was numb. His finger was frozen. The right side of his face, and even part of his neck, had gone numb—frozen. And his right eyelid was suddenly heavy, paralyzed, unmovable.

  “Jedediah . . . ?” he whispered.

  The Uncanny Premonition Out of the Womb

  The Bellefleur curse, it was sometimes thought, had to do with gambling.

  A Bellefleur is a man, certain detractors said, not altogether fairly, who cannot resist a bet—no matter what the circumstances are, or how unfortunate the consequences.

  For instance, there was the time (in the early morning hours, after the festivities of Raoul’s wedding party) when the men made bets on a race across the southern tip of Lake Noir, Olden Pond, and all of Silver Lake: a night cruise of more than forty miles, with three difficult carries, more than six miles of dangerous current—all to be doubled before dawn. The winning canoe would share a thousand dollars between them and all that remained of the champagne in the manor. And so they raced—Noel Bellefleur and Ethan Burnside, Ewan Bellefleur and Claude Fuhr, Gideon Bellefleur and Nicholas Fuhr, Harry Renaud and Floyd Jensen. Though it was mid-July the first lake was veiled with a bone-chilling fog. And the water lilies and rushes in Olden Pond were far more numerous, and thicker, than anyone remembered. And the stream plunging down into Silver Lake was so violent that two of the canoes—Ewan’s, Harry’s—overturned.

  And so they raced, without the women’s knowledge. Through the mist, along the old pathways nearly impassable with witchhobble, taking turns shouldering their canoes, keeping up a good-natured drunken banter. If their arms ached, if their knees threatened to buckle, if they were fairly delirious with exhaustion when they returned (Ewan and Claude won, by at least a quarter-mile; next came Noel’s canoe; and then Gideon’s; and last of all Harry’s and Floyd’s) of course they did not say. And for years afterward they would brag of the night’s reckless race, though they tried, delicately, to make as little allusion to poor Raoul as possible; it became one of their tales—the summer night Ewan and Claude beat the others over to Silver Lake and back.

  Then there was the time, many years ago, when the men grouped themselves into two parties, and took on two remote ponds in the Mount Chattaroy area, where deer came to feed in great numbers (as tame as sheep, they were, so that a canoe could come up to within yards of even the most skittish doe) and on the very stroke of noon of July 31 (the leaders of both parties made certain that their pocket watches were synchronized, so that the “stroke” of noon would not be anticipated by one or the other) the slaughter began. The m
en allowed themselves a mere hour to float, since they hadn’t much need of venison, and in any case it would be too burdensome to tote both boats and baskets of meat out to the road from such remote ponds; whichever party killed the most deer was acclaimed the winner, and shared a considerable purse. (When there were wealthy hunters involved, friends of Raphael’s or, at a later time, Noel’s, the Bellefleurs naturally met and raised their bets; when the parties were comprised primarily of local landowners, the Bellefleurs courteously tempered their enthusiasm. One day long ago, when Gideon’s grandfather Jeremiah was himself a boy of about seventeen, it was said that $10,000 changed hands, to be divided among six men, including Raphael, who had organized the sport though he hadn’t much interest, so it was said, in hunting or deer or “sport” at all. . . . The number of slaughtered deer varied: in some versions it was eighteen, in others as high as forty. But since not even the bucks’ heads were toted back it must have been difficult to estimate with any accuracy.)