Bellefleur Read online

  “Bellefleur!” he whispered a third time, leaning forward to spit into the water.

  If the boy hadn’t begun to cry, if he hadn’t begun to gasp and whimper and cry like a baby, Johnny might have shown mercy, but he did cry, and lay so limply on his side, as if someone had really hurt him, that the flame rose again in Johnny’s belly, whipping up to the back of his throat. He shouted, throwing another rock, and another, and another—and when he paused, blinking sweat out of his eyes, he saw with amazement that the boy was gone: he must have fallen over the side of the raft, and sunk into the pond.

  Johnny stood for a moment, staring. He held the last of the rocks in both hands; he could not think what to do with it. Half consciously he reasoned that if he let it drop, it would splash him. . . . But then his pant legs were wet anyway. . . . But if the boy climbed over the side of the raft he would need it to throw at him. . . . But maybe the boy had drowned. . . . Maybe he had killed him. . . .

  “Hey. Bellefleur,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. He did not speak loudly enough to be heard, even if the boy had surfaced. His voice was cracked and uncertain, as if he had not spoken for some time, and the effort pained him. The back of his throat was raw, as if he’d been shouting. “Bellefleur . . . ?”

  It might have been a trick. But the boy did not surface. The pond looked fairly deep, its ripples were widening and sprawling out, a few water beetles, terrified by the commotion, were now coming back, and the birds’ silence was filled in by a squirrel’s furious scolding.

  Johnny Doan backed away, and let the rock fall to the ground, and turned to run. He was just a boy, a boy with a flushed face and wet overalls and an old cloth cap on his head. The cap flew off, but he missed it at once, and stooped to pick it up, and jammed it hard on his head, pulling it down over his forehead. So he left no evidence behind. So he ran away from Mink Pond, and made his way out to the Innisfail Road some miles to the west, and arrived back at his father’s farm by supper time; and though his jaw trembled faintly and his eyes filled with moisture that was not tears he was drunk with exhilaration, and could not stop grinning.

  “Bellefleur,” he whispered, wiping his nose with the side of his hand, and giggling softly. “You see what we can do!”

  The Bellefleur Curse

  According to mountain legend there was a curse on Germaine’s family. (But it wasn’t merely a local legend: it was freely alluded to in the state capital five hundred miles away, and in Washington, D.C.; and when Bellefleur men fought in the Great War they claimed to encounter soldiers who knew them by name, by reputation, and who shrank away in superstitious dread—You’ll bring misfortune on all of us, they were told.)

  But no one knew what the curse was.

  Or why it was, or who—or what—had pronounced it.

  THERE’S A CURSE on us, Yolande said listlessly on the eve of her running away. There’s a curse on us and now I know what it is, she said. But it was to Germaine she spoke, and Germaine was at that time only one year old.

  There is no such thing as a curse, Leah said. If we want to hold onto our sanity we have to cleanse ourselves of these ridiculous old superstitions. . . . Don’t ever say such things in my presence! (But this was much later. After her pregnancy with Germaine, after the birth of Germaine. As a young girl and even as a married woman Leah had frequently behaved in a superstitious manner, though she would have been angry if anyone in the family had taken note.)

  The older Bellefleurs—grandfather Noel, grandmother Cornelia, great-grandmother Elvira, aunt Veronica, uncle Hiram, aunt Matilde, Leah’s mother Della, Jean-Pierre, and the rest—and of course all the dead—knew very well that there was a curse; and though as younger men and women they might have excited themselves speculating on the nature of the curse, at the present time they were silent on the subject. You can embody a curse without being able to articulate it, uncle Hiram said not long before his death. Like a silver-haired bat carries the distinguishing marks of his species on his back.

  Gideon once said, with a thoughtfulness uncharacteristic of him, that the curse was a terribly simple one: Bellefleur men die interesting deaths. They rarely die in bed.

  They never die in bed! Ewan said with a boastful laugh. (For he planned not to die—however and whenever he died—in any sort of bed.)

  Bellefleur men die absurd deaths, grandmother Della said flatly. (She was thinking, perhaps, of her husband Stanton’s death, one Christmas Eve long ago: and of her own father’s death; and there was great-grandfather Raphael, who died of natural causes, but had determined by the terms of his will that his body be grotesquely mutilated after his death.) The men die absurd deaths, Della said, and the women are fated to survive them and mourn them.

  They don’t die absurd deaths, they die necessary deaths, uncle Hiram said pedantically. (For he himself had escaped death innumerable times—in the Great War, and in countless accidents over the years, suffered as a consequence of his sleepwalking affliction, which no physician could cure.) Everything that transpires in this universe transpires out of necessity, however brutal.

  It was pointed out that great-great-great-grandfather Jedediah, whom everyone considered a saint, died an extraordinarily peaceful death within a few years of his wife Germaine: he simply dropped off to sleep on the eve of his 101st birthday, in the simple bed with the pine posts and the old horsehair mattress he insisted upon, in the servants’ wing (his narrow, rather dark room had been intended as a valet’s room, but he insisted upon having it—the handsomer, more pretentious rooms made him uneasy); his last words, though cryptic, The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured, were nevertheless uttered with a beatific smile. And there was a Bellefleur named Samuel, a son of Raphael’s, who disappeared in one of the castle’s more spacious rooms—and he too was never found. (He was spirited away in the Turquoise Room, now called the Room of Contamination, and shut off forever from the Bellefleur children who would have loved to explore it.) A long time ago there were whispers that great-aunt Veronica had died, after a lengthy wasting illness, during which her beautiful complexion grew waxen, and her eyes became luminous in their shadowed sockets; but the rumor was obviously absurd because great-aunt Veronica was still living, in superb health, even somewhat plump in recent years, and marvelously youthful for her age. Among the women, Raphael’s unhappy wife Violet did die an unusual death, it was thought for love: she simply walked into Lake Noir one night when Raphael was away and no one was attending her: and her body was never recovered. And there were, of course, the early, unfortunate deaths—Jean-Pierre and his son Louis, and Louis’s three children, and his brother Harlan, about whom so little was known; and Raphael’s brother Arthur, the diffident, stubborn Arthur, who died in an attempt to rescue John Brown; and there were others, innumerable others, most of them children, who died of diseases like scarlet fever and typhoid and pneumonia and smallpox and influenza and whooping cough. . . .

  Or was the curse, as Vernon thought, something very simple . . . ?

  What is gained will be lost. Land, money, children, God. (But—skinny and agitated and chronically unhappy, with his beard so scant and prematurely grizzled, and his love for Leah never declared, and his black ledgerbooks (taken from old Raphael’s desk) filled with sloping smudged scrawls that he claimed was poetry, and would transform the world one day, and expose his family for the tyrants they were—what did cousin Vernon know? So no one listened, or half-listened and waved him away with an impatient wave of the hand. His father Hiram was most impatient of all, for Vernon had turned out not quite right: his blood was all his mother’s, and she had failed disastrously as a Bellefleur wife, and was best forgotten. After she ran away from the manor, many years ago, Hiram, uncharacteristically silent, and extremely ill-tempered, had fashioned for her a two-foot marker of cheap granite, Eliza Perkins Bellefleur, May She Rest In Peace, set down in the corner of the cemetery, on a downward slope, given over to Queenie, Sebastian, Whitenose, Chinaberry, Sweetheart, Bitsy, Love, Pegs, Mustard, Buttercup, Horace, Baby
, Daisy, Bat, Pinktail, and others: the children’s various pets: dogs, cats, a turtle, an unusually large and attractive spider, a raccoon with gentle manners, a gray fox cub that did not live to maturity, and a bobcat cub that experienced the same fate, and even a redback vole, and a near-odorless skunk, and several rabbits, and one snowshoe hare, and at least one handsome ring-necked snake. Of his mother’s position in the Bellefleur Cemetery—but of course it was only a symbolic position, the woman wasn’t actually buried there, she wasn’t actually dead—Vernon prudently declined to speak.)

  But then perhaps the curse had something to do with silence. For the Bellefleurs, Leah’s mother Della often said, would not speak of things that demanded utterance. They spent time at foolish activities like fishing and hunting and games (how the Bellefleurs loved games!—games of any kind—cards, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, chess, their own flamboyant variants of checkers and chess, and other games invented by them during the long iron-hard mountain winters; and every variant of hide-and-seek, played with manic enthusiasm in the labyrinthine recesses of the castle—a reckless activity, as it happened upon one occasion that a Bellefleur child, decades back, ran to hide somewhere in the cavernous cellar, and was never found despite days of frantic searching; nor did his poor bones ever turn up) with the abandon of very small children grasping and clutching at things only to throw them immediately aside, as if time were an unfathomable, inexhaustible pool instead of something like old Raphael’s once-famous wine cellar, which was quickly depleted in the years following his death and the decline of the Bellefleur fortune. They chatter about inconsequential things, Della said bitterly, and frequently; she lived most of the time across the lake, in a red-brick Georgian house at the very center of the village of Bushkill’s Ferry, and though her family could not discern her house across the miles she could discern theirs very easily: indeed, the eye always leapt to Bellefleur Manor on its hill, there was no escaping the castle, even at twilight when the sun’s slow slanting orange-red rays illuminated it, and the lake itself began to sink into its uncanny darkness. They chatter about pork roasts and candy apples and antler spreads, Della said, while everything falls in pieces around them. They go tobogganing on Christmas Eve and one of their people is killed and the next day they open their presents as if nothing had happened, and they never speak of it, they refuse to speak of it. (But her husband, Stanton Pym, who did indeed die in a tobogganing accident, hardly six months after the marriage, and when poor Della was four months pregnant with Leah, had never been considered one of their people: so perhaps Della’s charge was unwarranted.)

  Then again the curse might have been that the Bellefleurs were so hopelessly, and at times so passionately, divided on all subjects. Germaine’s uncle Emmanuel, whom she saw only once in her life, and who appeared in the Valley only rarely, and never predictably, since he professed a violent dislike for what he called “city life” and “overheated rooms” and “women’s talk,” included on all his maps of the region the original Indian name for the area—Nautauganaggonautaugaunnagaungawauggataunagauta—which meant, in essence, for it could not be literally translated, a space-in-which-you-paddle-to-your-side-and-I-paddle-to-mine-and-Death-paddles-between-us. Those silly Indian names, the Bellefleur women said, why couldn’t they say directly what they mean, like us? Emmanuel’s reverence for the Indians and the local Indian culture (which could hardly be said to exist any longer since the treaties of 1787 had banished all Indians from the mountains and the fertile farmland along the river, and a few thousand of them lived in a single reservation north of Paie-des-Sables) was mocked by most of the family, who did not know quite how to interpret it. Emmanuel was, of course, “strange”—but that did not entirely explain his affection for Indians, and his even greater affection for the mountains. He was a throwback to Jedediah, evidently—and perhaps to Jean-Pierre himself, who had degenerated to the point of taking on a full-blooded Iroquois squaw as his mistress, shortly before his death. (But had Emmanuel ever “known” a woman? His brothers Gideon and Ewan loved to discuss this subject, indeed it was one of their few safe subjects, and while Gideon believed firmly that of course Emmanuel must have had sexual experience, Ewan liked to add that it mightn’t necessarily have been with a woman: whereupon both brothers laughed loudly. Of their oldest brother Raoul, who lived one hundred miles to the south in Kincardine, and whose sexual life was so bizarre, they rarely spoke.) So the Bellefleurs, Emmanuel once said, were always at war: they had the disposition of minks: and he wanted no part of their curse. (But then it was said of Emmanuel that he himself was under a curse or an enchantment, so how could he presume to judge others?)

  Long before Germaine’s brother Bromwell fled Bellefleur and made his name—his name—in the vast shadowy world south of the mountains he liked to pronounce, with his child’s unself-conscious authoritative lisp, that a “curse” was unlikely; but if indeed one could chart the undulating pattern of something that resembled a “curse” through generations of the same family, no doubt it could claim some scientific validity: as genetic inheritance, not as superstitious crap. For Bromwell, clerkish and prematurely balding, even as a small child, with his delicate wire-rimmed glasses and his austere pale forehead with its armor of hard, flat bones knit worriedly together, and his small slender fingers that were always twisting about a finely sharpened pencil, had the theatrical flair of selecting the absolutely right wrong word: of awakening his listeners (whose eyes sometimes glazed over, for who can tolerate fifty-minute lectures on the improbable nature of “infinity,” or the rather monotonous mating habits of algae, or the earth’s subtle gravitational pull on the sun—as an analogue, the waspishly brilliant child would quickly make clear, to the theological notion of God’s dependence upon his only free-thinking creature Man—who, even among the hard-of-hearing, sweet-faced, pious old widows and grandmothers and aunts of the manor, could tolerate such observations from a child not yet ten years of age?) with a sudden razor-like thrust of vulgarity, which always confirmed his listeners’ uneasy judgment that he was not only brilliant (as they halfway suspected Hiram’s gangling son Vernon was, despite his eccentricity) but also correct.

  So the curse was inherited in the blood; or it was breathed in with the chill, fresh, somewhat acrid piney air; or it was just a way of denying the strident rationalist claim that nothing, absolutely nothing—no God, no design, no destiny—sought to push its facial bones up hard against generations of perishable Bellefleur skin. Moving with a manicured fingernail a carved ebony draught, puckering and pursing his lips over the checkerboard, uncle Hiram liked to murmur that he, fallible as he was, blundering and groping (though in fact he was a shrewd, rather malicious checker player: he would not lose, not even to an ailing child) and half-blind in his right eye from an incident in the War which he refused to discuss (evidently he had left his tent, was sleepwalking his way toward the enemy trenches, when a great explosion of flame destroyed not only that tent and the young soldiers who slept within but some fifty-odd soldiers altogether—and Hiram Bellefleur was untouched save for a bit of fire which darted to his eye), fallible as he was and no more than a competent gamesman, he was nevertheless more astute than the God of creation, whom he contemptuously dismissed as senile: that God “existed” he had no doubt, for he was, surprisingly, one of the “religious” Bellefleurs, but this God was comically limited, and near worn-out, and hadn’t the spirit in recent centuries to meddle in the affairs of men. So the “curse” was just chance: and “chance” is just what happens.

  At such times Hiram might be playing draughts with Cornelia, or Leah, or one of the children—young Raphael, perhaps, who was so quiet, so unnaturally quiet, since his near-drowning in the pond (the circumstances of which he chose not to explain completely to the family). If Hiram was playing with one of the women she was likely to wave aside his fanciful remarks, to which she had probably not listened in any case; if he was playing with Raphael the child hunched his thin shoulders over the board, shivering, as if his great-
uncle’s words chilled him but could not be refuted.

  Yes, Hiram said with sardonic pleasure, the famous Bellefleur curse is nothing more than chance—and chance is nothing more than what happens! So those of us who aspire to some degree of control, let alone moral intelligence, cannot be victims of absurd grotesqueries like the rest of you.

  PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE family, however, even those who lived hundreds of miles away, in the flatland, and heard only the most oblique, most exaggerated rumors of the Bellefleur clan, never hesitated to speak of the Bellefleur curse, as if they knew exactly what they were talking about, and there was no mystery surrounding it at all. The curse on the Bellefleurs, it was said, was very simple: they were fated to be Bellefleurs, from womb to grave and beyond.

  The Pregnancy

  For a number of years Leah halfway thought there was a curse of some kind on her: she couldn’t seem to have another baby.

  Of course she had the twins. And had them within the first year of her marriage, when she was still nineteen. A nineteen-year-old mother of twins. (It just isn’t like you, Della in her mourning said primly; to do something so—well, extravagant: as if you were trying to please his side of the family.) She hadn’t wanted to marry, she hadn’t wanted to have a baby, but if it had to be, why, she was rather pleased with the fact of twins. In all the history of the New World Bellefleurs—some seventy-eight births (not all of them, of course, live births; and in the old days many infants died over the long winters)—there had never been a single instance of twins before.

  (Aunt Veronica remarked mildly, one night at dinner, playing with her food as she usually did by pushing it about her plate with a ladylike fastidious show of indifference—for she had been brought up in the days when ladies did not exactly eat in public, they reserved their grosser appetites for the privacy of their rooms—no matter that their generous figures belied their ascetic pretensions—Aunt Veronica lowered her eyes but sent her remark out in Leah’s direction, There were some sort of, I don’t know, twins or triplets or maybe more, born to my poor cousin Diana—she married some sweet boy in the Nautauga Light Guard but there must have been bad blood on his side of the family—the Bishops, they were—out of Powhatassie—they were something to do with banking—or had a big resort hotel on the lake, I don’t remember—anyway it’s long before your time and nobody remembers and nobody probably even remembers poor Diana: but she had twins, or triplets, or quadruplets, or whatever you call them, and they were all wizened and joined together in funny ways, a head to a stomach or two stomachs, and they didn’t have all their necessary parts or limbs, it was disgusting to see, but very sad too, of course, very tragic, I remember trying to console Diana and she just screamed and screamed and wouldn’t let anyone near and wanted to nurse the pathetic little things but of course they were dead, they never even drew breath, and everyone said, Oh, Lord wasn’t it a mercy!—and they presented some sort of theological problem too, I can’t remember exactly why—how did you baptize them, and how did you bury them—but in the end it must have been solved and I don’t know why I even bring the subject up, Leah, it doesn’t have a glimmer of a thing to do with you, does it?—the twins are so beautiful, and they’re absolutely separate, they weren’t joined together one bit, they don’t even count as the other kind of thing at all.)