Bellefleur (32 page)

From time to time, however, he did suffer intrusions. It seemed to him that the intruders—trappers, hunters primarily—followed close upon one another’s heels, and that he had little time to himself to bask in the mountain’s holy solitude, and to feel himself refined into a pair of eyes only—a pair of eyes and a self that was so thin, so pure, it possessed the brittleness of a sheet of translucent ice—as God intended. (For why otherwise had God called Jedediah Bellefleur up into the mountains, except to purify him of the heat of creation?—the frenzy of lust, the madness of groveling about in the flesh, bodies writhing upon bodies in a futile attempt to annihilate their aloneness? Why otherwise than to save him from his brothers’ fate, and his father’s repulsive fate, sinking ever more hopelessly into the quagmire of the senses? For though his brother Louis was married, and God was said to look with favor upon husband and wife, and to consider them one flesh in holy union, Jedediah knew very well that God recoiled with distaste from the baser instincts, and dwelled in His inviolable magnificence high atop Mount Blanc where no living thing could survive.)

Jedediah lived on lower ground, however. And so human beings interrupted his peace. If he heard them coming he naturally hid, but what could he do if they took him by surprise! Once the mountain spirit that amused itself by taking the shape of, and mimicking the voice of, Louis’s child-bride was teasing him with one silly fanciful thing after another—in a high-pitched disingenuous girl’s voice chiding him for having trapped a raccoon for food, such a pretty creature, such an adorable face, and so very nearly tame—and so very
fatty!
—ugh, how could he eat such meat!—how could
he,
prim passionless monkish Jedediah, bring himself to eat such meat!—and he had been so distracted, so anxious lest he succumb to the spirit’s torment and begin to answer back (which, sadly, he often did—and nothing delighted the mountain spirits more than to trick a human being into conversing with them
as if they existed
), that he had not heard or even seen an outlandish little party of visitors: a group of some six or seven girls, about the age of his sister-in-law (whose name he had forgotten, but he remembered that she was sixteen and
very
young for her age), dressed in woollen shorts that fell just to the knee, and heavy-knit socks, and hiking boots of a kind Jedediah had never seen before, and enormous bulky-knit jackets in a variety of bright colors. The girls’ cheeks were apple-red; they were out of breath because of the altitude, but obviously in excellent health; their braided hair bristled with exuberance. Jedediah disguised his surprise and dismay, and put aside his hoe (for it was a warm June day, one of the first warm days of the year, and he was going to set down a garden, potatoes mainly, despite the thin pebbly inhospitable soil), and offered the little party water, tinned meat, dried fruit, chunks of black bread grown stale and hard but nevertheless edible if soaked in gruel—all that he had, in fact—for the girls
had
come a great distance, and it might be said that they were his guests so long as they remained on the mountain. But the leader of the hiking party thanked him, and accepted only water, which the girls drank with evident delight, passing Jedediah’s battered tin cup from hand to hand, and giggling at him over the rim. They might have been sisters, they so resembled one another: bright dark eyes, dark brown bangs that fell low over their foreheads, cherry-red lips.

For some reason he did not want them gone quickly. When hunters and trappers and even Mack Henofer dropped by, it was obvious from Jedediah’s curt, brusque manner and his near-muteness and the way he stared stonily at the ground that he wanted them gone as quickly as possible—he found that he could breathe only with difficulty in their presence—he
detested
it that these crude men should presume to offer him whiskey and tobacco as if they pitied him. (And of course Mack Henofer, who brought him unwanted supplies and letters and gifts and news from back home, and who even offered him bits of gossip about Jean-Pierre that were considered, on lower ground, marvelously scandalous, could never quite comprehend Jedediah’s disdain.) But he halfway regretted it when the girls, after resting no more than ten minutes, went on their way again, thanking him in unison, and breaking into song as they hiked away without once glancing back. (Jedediah’s keen ears picked up their song even as they trudged out of sight. He thought it wonderfully charming, if simple-minded, and wondered if it was a popular tune of the day down below:

I’ll be no submissive wife

No, not I; no, not I

I’ll not be a slave for life

No, not I; no, not I

Think you on our wedding day

That I said, as others say

Love and honor and obey

Love and honor and obey

No no no no no no

No no no, not I

I to dullness don’t incline

No, not I; no, not I

Go to bed at half-past nine

No, not I; no, not I

No no no no no no

No no no, not I.)

He was hurt to discover that they hadn’t drunk the water he had offered them—they had done no more than pass the tin cup around, raising it to their lips, and pretending to drink. For days afterward he heard their singsong voices, wafted back to him by the mountain winds,
no no no no no no, no no no not I.

Another visitor who had also taken him by surprise (the mountain spirit had been laughing warmly at him for picking weevils out of his oatmeal one by one, and setting them free—why didn’t he simply dump all the oatmeal down into the river, why didn’t he, come to think of it, drag everything out of his cabin, all his supplies, and his bedding, and even the little stool he had put together with such difficulty, and toss it all over the side!—what a lark!—and how
good
he would feel afterward!—for didn’t Christ say give up all you have and follow Me!) was a very tall man in his early thirties, perhaps, with silvery brown hair that fell to his wide shoulders, and tanned, leathery skin that appeared to glint with tiny crystals of salt, and a long straight beak of a nose, and long eyes in which the iris floated rather like a tadpole, with a tadpole’s minuscule curl of a tail. A remarkable man, more than a head taller than Jedediah, and obviously very strong—he carried a knapsack and camping equipment as if they weighed next to nothing—but gentle, soft-spoken, excessively courteous. He accepted a bowl of mushroom-milk soup from Jedediah, and warmed himself at Jedediah’s hearth, but seemed more interested in querying Jedediah about the region: for he was a cartographer by profession, and was involved in an ambitious project that would take many years to complete, the fastidious mapping of the region traversed by the Nautaugamaggonautaugaunagaungawauggataunauta. So, taking notes in pencil, he interrogated Jedediah about streams and runs and trickles, and lakes on higher ground, and ponds no matter how small, and mountain trails long ago grown over since the first explorers had passed. He spread out his elaborate parchment maps for Jedediah to examine; he was clearly proud of them, and anxious lest they get too close to the fire, or Jedediah happen to touch them by accident. “Nothing matters so much as learning the precise contours of the earth on which we live,” he told Jedediah in his soft, calm voice. “That is our way of learning God.” It pleased Jedediah, but rather puzzled him, that the tall man should show no curiosity at all about
him.

And then there was Mack Henofer. Too frequently—every six or seven months, or was it once a year—there was Mack Henofer, always when Jedediah least expected him. He was a trapper who lived on the eastern slope of Mount Blanc, alone as Jedediah was alone, but clearly not self-sufficient: for he went eagerly to the settlement at distant Contracoeur, where he traded his pelts for cash, and then to the towns to the south, to Fort Hanna and Innisfail and even to faraway Nautauga Falls, which Jedediah only dimly remembered. It was said of Henofer that he had come to the New World as an alternative to prison in Newgate, and that he had left Manhattan Island for the north country as an alternative, quickly chosen, to conscription in the army; he had left the Lake Noir region, again quickly, as an alternative to marriage. Jedediah knew little about him, and never inquired after him except to express the hope, in a rushed courteous murmur, that Henofer was in good health. He was certainly a spy of Jean-Pierre’s, and may even have wished to cajole Jedediah into attending to a number of his trap lines, but Jedediah could tolerate him for brief periods of time, and never showed his anger.

(How often Henofer arrived, how frequently was he underfoot! One day in the mountains is all days, all days are one, a single seamless fluid passing of the sun across the sky, moment by moment, quickly, as one breathes, now it is daybreak, now it is the tide of noon, now it is midafternoon, now the sun begins to sprawl as it sinks, now it is dusk—no more than a few moments—now it is night: and one sinks into the oblivion of sleep, into the same dark the sun has penetrated. The days passed so rapidly and there was Henofer, once again, grinning apologetically at Jedediah, showing his blackened teeth and sometimes the tip of his red tongue which Jedediah imagined, but knew he only imagined, to be subtly forked. He was
always
hallooing for Jedediah from the clearing, he was
always
making himself at home in the cabin, content to wait for days until Jedediah returned.)

Thick-chested, with spindly legs, and a moth-eaten woollen cap pulled low on his forehead in all weathers, Henofer was an emissary of Jean-Pierre’s but—as he made repeatedly clear—he considered himself a friend of Jedediah’s first. “Both of us have come to live in the mountains to get away from those—” and here he sometimes groped for the correct words, or spat out a shocking obscenity—“and we have to be loyal to each other. That’s all there is to say.” Yet it wasn’t, for once his tongue was loosed he could talk for hours, gobbling up all the food poor Jedediah felt obliged to offer him (which frequently included the delicious dried apricots and raspberry, marmalade, and strawberry preserves Louis’s wife had just sent, and strips of salt-dried beef, and nuggets of caramel candy), telling him all the unwanted gossip, items not likely to have found their way into the letter Louis had sent (for Louis wrote to Jedediah faithfully, though it had been a very long time since Jedediah had troubled to reply). The settlement at Lake Noir was growing rapidly, according to Henofer, and there were boundary disputes and duels; men killed in tavern fights; trouble with Indians and half-breeds; lynchings of Indians and half-breeds; a rowdy poor-white family named Varrell who lived in the foothills but were moving one by one into the settlement; envy and resentment at the way Jean-Pierre and Louis were buying up land and fencing it off; and resentment too at certain of Jean-Pierre’s schemes—he had recently made a fair amount of money by selling a number of wagonloads of something he called Arctic elk manure, to downriver farmers who had settled on poor soil, and needed their land rejuvenated by a “high-nitrogen” substance. . . . And Henofer even presented Jedediah with tiny perfumed envelopes in which his sister-in-law had slipped, for what reason Jedediah could not fathom, babies’ curls. The first curl was pale brown, the second a very light blond, the third dark brown. So there were, now, three babies. Louis and his wife had had three babies. And Jedediah had two nephews and a niece—Jacob and Bernard and—what was the girl’s name—Arlette?—Arlette. Of course they must be beautiful children. Of course Jedediah was happy. It was all God’s wish, wasn’t it, God’s plan. But
why
did Louis’s wife send Jedediah those silly little curls? He did not know how to respond and so he made no response at all; he threw the curls into the fire.

Dear God,
he prayed,
please grant me my own life. My wholeness in Thee. My salvation. My freedom from them .
. .
from her.

And then Henofer would leave, finally, having nothing more to say, and Jedediah frequently wept with the sheer bliss of aloneness. For he knew that God would not show His face to him unless he was utterly alone.

HE CALLED OUT,
and waited, trembling, to hear the echo.

But there was no sound except the river. The river, and the birds’ stray shrill senseless cries.

Is someone there,
he called, cupping his hands to his mouth; but there was no reply. . . .
Why do you torment me,
he called, more softly,
why do you mock me when I utter God’s word. .
. .

Yet there was only silence, and even the mountain spirit who so merrily plagued him was absent. He was entirely alone. He knew himself alone. Yet if he spoke in God’s word, if he raised his voice to utter Christ’s teaching, in a voice of brass, he knew the mocking echo would return: he knew that whoever tormented him would begin again.
Why do you mock me, why do you hate me,
Jedediah whispered, standing on his windy ravine and casting his gaze about as far as it would go,
who are you
. . .
? Are you someone sent by my father, or someone in the hire of Satan, or someone I have inadvertently wronged during my life down below
. . .
?

Nothing, no sound. No movement in the sky that arched above Mount Blanc except the ceaseless motion of the clouds, and the quick darting flight of a sparrow hawk, intent on prey too small for Jedediah’s eye to perceive.

In the Nursery

A
t the age of seventeen, when he fell so tumultuously in love with the Bellefleurs’ adopted daughter Little Goldie, Garth was nearly as tall and as broad-shouldered as his bearish father Ewan, and possessed of an even more irascible temper: when friends forcibly restrained him from accepting the malicious bet of a daredevil diver at the Nautauga Falls fairground one summer when Garth was fourteen (the daredevil, Flaming Pete McSweet, dove into a ten-foot canvas tank from a one-hundred-foot tower that swayed in even the mild breezes of August, to the awe and delight of his hushed audience, and though it was his practice to plunge through the air livid with orange-red flames he was willing to allow the brash Garth Bellefleur to dive without setting himself on fire—and odds, in Garth’s favor should he win, were a very generous fifty to one) he turned on them wildly, beating one into unconsciousness, dislocating another’s jaw, seizing another in his massive arms and picking him up from the ground and squeezing until the boy (who was hardly frail himself) shrieked for him to stop. When Ewan found out about the incident—the bet rather than Garth’s assault on his friends—he was furious, and dragged the boy out into one of the empty hop-curing barns, shouting that he had nearly made an ass of himself, he had nearly allowed some son-of-a-bitch con man to trick him into breaking his neck, and in public to boot, and that if he was so thick-skulled, so stupid, he had better stay home where the women could watch him. Garth’s chagrin, and his awe of his father, made him cringe before Ewan’s rage, and meekly accept, some half-dozen whiplashes on his back, buttocks, and thighs. He even wept, alone in the barn afterward; or at any rate he was wracked with loud, hoarse, tearless sobs that left him exhausted and weak as an infant.