Bellefleur (72 page)

The poor woman broke off, too moved to continue. After some minutes she asked, in a quavering voice, that Raphael join her in prayer—that they kneel together on the floor of his study, and beg God to forgive them their sins. The white race, she whispered, wades knee-deep in blood.

Raphael took off his pince-nez, sighing, and laid them on his desk, but did not kneel. He did not move from his chair. He said, before Fredericka could repeat her request,
Those
Indians have been dead a long time.

LOUIS’S WIFE GERMAINE,
now a woman of thirty-four, with a plump, ruddy, pretty face and hair that frizzed in humid weather, read, in her stumbling way (for she had never
entirely
learned to read) newspapers and magazines that came into the house, usually by way of her father-in-law, who traveled about so restlessly; and she always read Harlan Bellefleur’s terse letters to Louis, for fear they might contain passages the children, or at any rate the fifteen-year-old Arlette, should not see. . . . For instance, in the Colorado Territory U.S. soldiers, led by Colonel J. M. Chivington, attacked a settlement of friendly Indians camped outside the walls of Fort Lyon, murdering six hundred of them in a day (most of them women and children), and mutilating and scalping them as well: some of the soldiers cut out the genitals of women and girls, and stretched them over their saddle bows, or wore them in their hats while riding in the ranks. . . .

Think if Arlette should happen to read of such a thing! Germaine said to her husband. Her full, broad cheeks had turned beet-red; her mouth was a tiny damp hook of consternation. Why, that shouldn’t be talked about! That isn’t—that isn’t
nice,
she whispered.

ONE FINE OCTOBER
day a flotilla of steamboats and canalboats appeared from the west, to celebrate the opening of the Great Canal. The Great Canal was nearly four hundred miles long and had taken eight years to complete, and all along its banks, on this day, crowds of cheering spectators awaited, and cannons were fired, and firecrackers were set off. In the villages and towns church bells rang as if it were a crazed Sunday.

The
Chancellor Livingston,
a steamboat, was the flagship of the squadron, and a fine trim ship it was—decked out in red, white, and blue streamers, and carrying the most fashionable of passengers. Another handsome ship was the
Washington,
carrying naval, military, and civil officers and their guests. There were, in addition, some twenty-nine sailing ships, schooners, barks, canalboats, and sailboats, each receiving cannon salutes from the forts they passed. A canalboat called the
Young Lion of the West
was bedecked with flags and banners, and carried on board, to the spectators’ delight, two eagles, four raccoons, a fawn, a fox, and two living wolves. The
Seneca Chief,
a barge drawn by four powerful white horses, bore two fawns, two live eagles, a single brown bear, a young moose, and two Senecan Indian youths in the costume of their dusky nation.

ONCE UPON A
time, the children were told, there was a family named Varrell.

Where did they come from, so many of them?

It was said they bred like rabbits, or aphids.

They must have sprung out of the earth, or maybe crawled out of the Noir Swamp. The men were trappers, Indian traders, peddlers, farmers on small scrubby good-for-nothing soil. . . . No, they were really trash. White trash. They lived common-law back in the woods, and beat their wives and children. They were notorious drunkards and bullies and law-breakers. Horse theft, arson, tavern brawls, backwoods murders that went uninvestigated. (If the Varrells killed people like themselves, or killed one another, why would Chautauqua authorities intervene? Besides, it would be dangerous to intervene.)

Even their moonshine, customers complained, was inferior. When it wasn’t outright poison.

Involved in the lynching of the Indian boy were Reuben, Wallace, and Myron Varrell; their ages were forty-six, thirty-one, and twenty-two. And there were other Varrells in the Lake Noir settlement—by some estimates as many as twenty-five.

Where did they come from, so many of them, in a generation or two? Men with hard flat faces, unkempt hair and beards, eyes the color of chill swamp mist . . . ? Their crimes were of two types: one committed surreptitiously, often by night; the other committed boldly, even self-righteously, in public, frequently with the help of others. Some of the Varrells had of course been killed in brawls, and many of them had been badly beaten (and even crippled: Louis Bellefleur had witnessed, from the street, the drunken melee that erupted at a wedding party in a Fort Hanna hotel that resulted in Henry Varrell’s broken spine—Henry being young Myron’s father); a number were imprisoned at Powhatassie; but most of the time they ran off unapprehended, and witnesses did not care to testify against them. A Varrell girl had married into the family of a Bushkill’s Ferry justice of the peace, and Wallace, even with his record of arrests (for fighting, arson, and petty theft) was a sheriff’s deputy. . . . Reuben, who dared to strike Louis’s horse, and who shouted drunkenly for him to go on home, had worked on the Great Canal and was said to be half-crazy as a consequence of heatstroke suffered one sweltering August day. He and his common-law wife had been arrested, but never tried, for the malnutrition death of a ten-month-old baby. . . . So Reuben
should
have been in prison at the time of the lynching.

But where did they come from, so many of them? Breeding like rabbits or aphids? It seems they sprang from a single woman, a lumber-camp follower who passed herself off shamelessly as a cook. She lived right in the bunkhouse with the men. Migrated from camp to camp, from Paie-des-
Sables
to Contracoeur to Mount Kittery to the great pine forest east of Mount Chattaroy, season after season, bringing with her two or three squaws, a few white women, and a moronic baby-faced girl, grossly fat, who sucked her thumb and whimpered much of the time, when she wasn’t eating or being employed by the men. Where, exactly, this string of diseased whores came from, whether the Varrell woman (who treated them sternly but not unkindly) had brought them to the mountains, to the lumber camps, or whether they had simply happened to meet there and to team up, for safety’s sake, no one knew. The youngest and most attractive squaw, blind drunk on corn whiskey, tried to stab the foreman of the Paie-des-Sables camp to death, and did a fairly good job of it before his friends pulled her off; but in general the Varrell woman kept her girls under control. She was a tall, soft-bodied, good-natured woman with an agreeably ugly face and a nose that looked as if it had been broken. Already in her early thirties her stout legs were riddled with varicose veins, but as a girl, it was said, she had been
quite
attractive . . . at least to men in this part of the world, who might go for months without seeing a woman. She was foul-mouthed, blunt, frank, funny, and never wept. And never regretted anything.

She had one son, Reuben. And then another. And then another, and another, over a period of years. She left the lumber camps to live with a man; and then with another man; and then she wandered from town to town, living with her children when they were willing to take her in. In the end, it was said, she drank herself to death—and she wasn’t that old, really: probably in her late fifties. But women wore out quickly in that part of the world. (Germaine, Louis’s wife, believed she had once seen the old Varrell woman—that terrible creature—urinating in a public thoroughfare in Bushkill’s Ferry. What a sight! How shameful, for everyone to see! Germaine had tugged at her daughter Arlette’s arm, commanding her to hurry along, not to look back, but of course the willful girl
would
look, and even giggle in horror.)

It was commonly known, long before the lynching, that the Varrells resented Jean-Pierre because they believed he had “cheated” them of some land. (He had bought it from them. Had paid cash. Of course he hadn’t paid much but then they hadn’t expected much, had been in fact grateful for what they received.) They were jealous of him, as they were jealous of his son Louis, and of anyone in the area who appeared to be doing well—anyone who wasn’t in debt, or struggling to pay off two mortgages. If it appeared that a Varrell might be establishing himself in town, like Silas with his partnership in the White Antelope Inn, it invariably happened that the business went bankrupt or suffered, uninsured, a fire loss; or simply died a gradual death that was no one’s fault. The girl who had married into the justice of the peace’s family soon left the mountains with her husband, to stake out a claim in Oregon, and was never seen or heard of again. Myron, who had served in the state militia, was rumored to have been promoted through the ranks—he was a first lieutenant, or a captain, or a major—but one day he merely appeared back home, a civilian again, discharged, with a wormlike little scar on his right cheek and $35 severance pay and no explanations. He worked intermittently as a farm laborer, sometimes alongside the Indian boy Charles Xavier, whom he had always disliked. An Indian with a name like that!—pretending to be a Catholic convert, of all the outrageous things! It was an insult, the Varrells thought, for a white man to work alongside an Onondagan half-breed.

Charles Xavier was short for his age, and considered mildly retarded (he was an orphan, abandoned at birth, found wrapped in some rags in a Fort Hanna alleyway on a stinging-cold March morning), though his small, sturdy shoulders and arms were well developed, and he could work long exhausting hours in the fields or orchards without complaint. He was valued as a farmhand but not especially liked, even by the farmers’ wives who customarily took pity on him (for he
was
an orphan, and a Christian), since his narrow chin and dark scowling eyebrows and chronic silence gave him the reputation, possibly misleading, of being hostile even to friendly whites.

On the day of the opening of the Great Canal, which ran, for some miles, parallel to the wide, rough Nautauga River, when church bells were ringing in villages and towns, and firecrackers and Roman candles were being set off, and cannon discharged from atop the walls of the old forts, it happened, certainly not by accident, that a corncrib silo belonging to a farmer named Eakins, who lived just off the old Military Road, caught fire; and because volunteer firemen were all at the canal opening festivities, miles away, the silo blazed like mad, and a nearby storage barn also caught fire and was lost. Indians were blamed because Eakins had had difficulty with a gang of threshers, all Indians, he had hired not long before, and had been forced to fire (they had started out industriously, but soon lost energy and interest)—but those Indians, those particular Indians, had vanished.

It then happened, miles away at Lake Noir, that a hay barn belonging to a brother-in-law of the former Indian trader Rabin caught fire—and at once Indians were blamed. Charles Xavier happened to be hurrying along the muddy main street of the village, and though he belonged, or half-belonged, to a tribe of Indians who were considered “allies” (though pitifully few in number these Onondagans had fought on the side of the locals against the British, in the recent war) he was seized at once, by a group of men, and hauled into the White Antelope Inn, where he was questioned about the fire for approximately two hours. The more frightened the boy became, the more excited and angry his interrogators; the more he protested, not only his innocence, but his very knowledge of the fire (a fire which hadn’t been, as everyone admitted, a very serious one), the more drunkenly ferocious the white men became. Old Rabin, Wallace, Myron, and a number of others, soon joined by Reuben, who was already drunk, and two or three of his friends; and men who drifted in off the street or who, having heard of Charles Xavier’s “arrest,” came running; and, just before the boy was hauled off to be hanged, the justice of the peace himself, a young-old man with a twitch beneath his left eye. His name was Wiley and since he had drifted over, years back, from Boston, he was considered a city man, and something of a cultured person, though the interests he pursued, in the Lake Noir area, were not very different, except in degree of intensity, from those pursued by most of the other male inhabitants. He drank, but hadn’t the capacity of the others; he played cards, but not with much skill; he had courted a woman who was being courted, from the other side, so to speak, by Wallace Varrell, and had been forced to back away. It was rumored that he accepted bribes but that was probably not the case, usually: he was simply intimidated by the defendants who came before him, or by their numerous relatives. A murderer might be sent away to Powhatassie, or even hanged, but the men who had arrested him, the witnesses who testified against him, and the judge himself, were often not likely to survive. So while it was true, as Louis Bellefleur charged, that Wiley was a coward, he was not an altogether inexplicable coward. . . .

Those were hard times to live in, the children were told.

But weren’t they exciting?—so the boys always asked. (For they knew, beforehand, what was coming: the lynching and burning of Charles Xavier; the angry public protesting of their great-uncle Louis; the “trouble” at the old loghouse in Bushkill’s Ferry; the arrival, on a beautiful high-headed Costeña mare, of Louis’s brother Harlan, who had disappeared out west almost twenty years before.)
Weren’t
they exciting? the boys begged.

WHEN WORD CAME
to Louis that the Varrells and Rabin and their friends were interrogating poor Charles Xavier, and had, evidently, extracted a confession from him, Louis rode off at once for town—no matter that Germaine forbade him to go (for she knew, immediately, that the half-breed boy was doomed—Indian lives were cheap in the mountains, though not much cheaper than white men’s lives), and his daughter Arlette threw a kind of tantrum, running alongside him as he trotted away on old Bonaparte, screaming for him to come back. At the age of fifteen Arlette was a head taller than her mother, and nearly as thick about the waist and hips; but her breasts were tiny and she often seemed, in jackets and pants and riding boots, as much a boy as her brothers. Her face was moon-shaped, a handsome golden tan, and she wore her dark hair—frizzy as her mother’s—as short as possible, though it wasn’t fashionable in those days for girls to wear their hair short. (Even her grandfather Jean-Pierre teased her, and complained to her mother. Didn’t she
want,
after all, to be a woman?) While Louis saddled his old stallion Arlette shouted incoherently—she wanted him not to go, or maybe she wanted to accompany him—wouldn’t he at least try to locate Jacob and Bernard, and
they
could accompany him—But Louis swatted her away, and did not trouble to reply. He couldn’t bear hysterical women. He couldn’t even listen to hysterical women.