Bellefleur (77 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
The vibrating in the engine became a knocking. How crudely they had tampered with the automobile, Gideon thought contemptuously. He pressed down on the accelerator. In a moment the highway would straighten and he could speed along it at a hundred miles an hour, at 110, all the way to Innisfail. The knocking was a heart gone wild. Desperate and baffled. He took no pity, but continued to accelerate.
He had wanted to take his little daughter with him, just for a ride. He saw her so rarely. He loved her, but saw her rarely. She held back shyly as if intimidated by his manner (he was boisterous, uncharacteristically cheerful) but would surely have consented to ride with him, had Lily not said, with surprising bluntness: No. You drive too fast. We know about you. You’re a marked man, like my husband.
Leave the child alone.
(Because Germaine’s mother was ill Lily was taking care of her. Feeding her peanut-butter cookies, and sourdough bread with plum jam. They were making shell jewelry. Stringing pretty pale blue and cream-colored shells on lengths of twine, to make necklaces; one of them was going to be a birthday present for Germaine. Did he know her birthday was coming up in a few days . . . ? No, he hadn’t known.)
Still, Gideon said aloud, she
is
my daughter. I had a right to her, if I insisted.
He was taking the turn onto the old Military Road when something happened: it was as if he’d driven over an enormous sheet of metal, there was such a crashing deafening sound. His foot flew to the brake and the automobile began to skid, the rear wheels yearned to change places with the front, then he was rushing through a shallow ditch, then into some bushes, through the bushes and into a barbed-wire fence, through the fence, heaving and bucking, into a cornfield. He was thrown against the windshield, then against the door, and the door came open, so he found himself finally, after many confused minutes, on the ground, in the cornfield, dripping blood into the dirt. He groped about for Germaine. For his little girl. Where was she?—had she been thrown clear? (For he thought, irrationally, that the car would explode.)
Germaine? Germaine? Germaine?
A
nd then, quite abruptly, on the eve of Germaine’s third birthday (a still, airless, humid night of oddly varying temperatures, unilluminated by any moon or stars) an event took place that altered everything: the strike was averted; the fruit pickers returned to work (docilely, near-silently, and for their last year’s wage); a bumper crop of peaches, pears, and apples was harvested; and Leah, after weeks of despondency, of being someone other than
Leah,
was wakened from her trance.
And all because of Jean-Pierre II.
When grandmother Cornelia, happening to glance out an upstairs window early in the morning (just before seven: the poor woman rarely slept later), saw her elderly, infirm brother-in-law making his way unsteadily toward the house, on a graveled walk that paralleled, at a distance of some twenty yards, the garden wall, she knew at once—without having seen, yet, the stained hog-butchering knife he carried close against his body—that something had happened. For he had, to her knowledge, never left the castle before. (No one had dared tell her of his appearance at Ewan’s party.) And there was something about the mere sight of him, down there, in the early morning, italicized by his black frock coat and his starkly white hair against the damp green of the lawn, that struck her as unnatural.
She hurried immediately to Noel, and roused him from his heavy slumber. (For he had drunk himself to sleep, the night before—sick with worry about the hospitalized Gideon, and about the rotting fruit.)
“You’d better go downstairs. I think. At once. I
think.
I can’t tell you why,” she whispered, pulling at him, thrusting his eyeglasses at him, “but I think . . . I’m afraid . . . , Your brother Jean-Pierre . . .”
“What? Jean-Pierre? Is he ill?” Noel cried.
“Yes, I think he must be,” Cornelia said.
Hiram too saw him, from
his
bedroom window: for Hiram had been unable to sleep except in patches during the long airless night. His brain had churned with images of mounds of rotting fruit, and the spectacle of his family’s public humiliation (there would be another auction, strangers would tramp mud through the downstairs rooms of the castle, this time even the buildings would be sold—and for a mocking pittance), and the horror of his only son’s death, which he had not had time, yet, to completely grasp. (Thrown by the family’s lifelong enemies into a filthy river, his wrists and ankles bound, like a dog!) And now with Gideon hospitalized in the Falls, with multiple fractures and a concussion . . .
In his underclothes, not yet shaven, Hiram peered out the window and adjusted his glasses as the dark figure hobbled into sight. At first he believed it must be a sleepwalker, a fellow sufferer: for the man made his way with such vague groping steps, his head tilted back as if he were making no attempt to see the ground at his feet. (And indeed he walked blindly. Now on the graveled path, now on the grass, now stumbling through the narrow border of phlox and coral bells.) It was some minutes before Hiram recognized his brother Jean-Pierre. And then, like Cornelia, he knew something had happened.
“I hope he didn’t . . . That fool . . . !”
Young Jasper saw the old man, alerted by the nervous whimperings of his dog, who slept at the foot of his bed; and great-grandmother Elvira, who arose each morning promptly at six, and fussed about preparing, for her bridegroom (whom she had begun to refer to, secretly, silently, as “Jeremiah,” though to his face she called him only “You”) a breakfast of fresh peaches and cream, and honey toast, and good strong black coffee; and Lily saw him, going to the window to see what it was, down on the lawn, that so drew the interest of her little niece Germaine (for the child had crept out of bed, her curls atangle, her pudgy fingers stuck in her mouth, and now she knelt on the velvet window seat and stared and stared at her great-uncle who was making his way to the rear of the house, his head flung nobly back, something glinting in his hand); Raphael may have seen him, for the boy slept lightly, and was uneasy these days because his pond—lovely Mink Pond—had been invaded by the fruit pickers’ children, who loved to splash and belly-dive and paddle in it, meaning no harm, of course, intending no serious harm, but trampling down the cattails and the flowering rushes nevertheless, and tearing out by the roots the lovely waxed water lilies; of course Raphael had avoided the pond for days, and could not hope to return until the intruders were banished, or went, at last, to work in the orchards. And some of the servants must have seen him. The kitchen help, and Edna, and Walton; though of course they were to say nothing, and immediately averted their eyes, when they recognized both Jean-Pierre II and what he carried in his right hand, half-hidden alongside his leg. Nightshade, however, sighting the old man from a distance, had both the wit and the audacity to hurry upstairs to his mistress’s chambers: for
she,
he knew, must be told.
“Miss Leah! Miss Leah! Arouse yourself! Come quickly! Mr. Jean-Pierre has made his move!”
So the hunched-over little man whimpered and whined, rattling his lady’s doorknob in a frenzy of concern, until, at last, after many minutes, after
many
minutes, during which he alternately begged and commanded her, and punctuated his words with spasmodic sobs, the door was unlocked: the door was actually unlocked: and a slack-faced blinking Leah stood before him.
(She had wakened from her hideous trance. Or had been awakened. And was soon to forget, with merciful completeness, its claustrophobic calm, its sickly peace. She would never suffer such an uncharacteristic episode again. Interpreting it, afterward, she would say, frowning, so that those sharp, rather poignant lines appeared between her anxious brows, that her “black mood” had been nothing more than premonitory. It had no reference to her, to her own life, certainly not to the Bellefleur affairs as a whole; it had reference only to Jean-Pierre’s extraordinary behavior that August night. She had sensed something would happen—she had, somehow, known it would happen—but had been powerless to prevent it—like Germaine—for Germaine, too, “saw” things yet could not prevent them or even comprehend them—and so she had fallen into a black pit of a mood, quite helpless: but then of course she had been freed. Once the horror had taken place, once it was
there,
in the world, quite naturally she was freed.)
DURING THAT NIGHT,
or, more precisely, from about 2:00
A.M.
until after six, Jean-Pierre II had managed, despite his palsied hands and his weak legs and the difficulties he must have confronted, wandering in the starless dark, in an unfamiliar corner of the estate, to slash the throats not only of Sam and his lieutenants, and the dozen or so men who most vehemently supported him, but some eight other people, seven men and one woman. (It was generally thought, afterward, that he had slashed the woman’s throat in error, having mistaken her—she was hefty, a light down grew on her face—for a man.)
In a faint feeble voice that trailed off Jean-Pierre said only that the workers were evil . . . they weren’t penitent . . . they had to be dealt with
immediately
. . . they had to be prevented from further insulting their betters.
He had surrendered the hog-butchering knife at once to grandfather Noel, amiably. It was a wicked long instrument with a slight curve, and it seemed to have been recently sharpened. But it was, of course, badly stained and scarified, from all the use to which the old gentleman had put it. Noel took it soberly, a handkerchief protecting his hand.
“We must, I suppose,” he said, licking his lips, “wake Ewan.”
So one of them—it was Jasper, barefoot, bare-chested, wearing only white summer trousers—ran upstairs to Ewan’s apartment. And rapped loudly on the door. (For, since Ewan did not arrive at his office in the Falls until 10:00
A.M.
, he generally slept until eight, and did not like his sleep disturbed.)
When Jasper told Ewan what had happened, and that they had calculated, from the old man’s incoherent murmurings, that anywhere from five or six to twenty or more people had been murdered, Ewan’s great shaggy head shot forward from his shoulders, and his sleep groggy eyes, threaded with blood, opened and narrowed and opened again in a matter of seconds.
He asked Jasper to repeat what he’d said.
How
many . . . ?
Then he said, his chest heaving with a sigh, “I
thought
that’s what you said, my boy.”
It was as Nightshade had said: Jean-Pierre II had made his move.
C
ontrary to rumor, and to her husband’s embittered and reiterated conviction, it was not the Hayes Whittier episode that plunged Violet Bellefleur into a dreamy melancholy that ended with her taking her own life (for so the expression went: one “took” one’s own life, as if one were “taking” another person’s fur muff or an undeserved extra slice of fruitcake) one chilly September night; it was not even the neurasthenia brought on, or exacerbated, by her numerous pregnancies and miscarriages. Nor was it the unfortunate woman’s perversity. (“Perversity” being her husband’s term. Raphael came to employ it more and more frequently as the years passed, for it helped to explain, and to condemn, his sister Fredericka’s passion for an imbecilic Protestant sect; his brother Arthur’s inexplicable willingness to die—as indeed he did, at Charlestown, while attempting to kidnap John Brown’s corpse so that it might be spirited away to the North where partisans planned on reviving it with a galvanic battery; the behavior of his sons Samuel and Rodman; the political climate of the era; and the oscillations of the world market for hops, which, when it favored him, was “healthy,” and when it failed to favor him was “perverse.”)
Nor was it love. Not love in any commonplace sense. For love between a man and a woman not related by blood would necessarily have to be erotic; and there was no provision, in Violet’s world, for erotic love outside marriage. And she was of course married. She was extremely married. She would not have thought, as a young girl in her parents’ home in Warwick, that one could be so
extremely
married.
Tamás too was married—or had been. Though he looked so young, and had so naïve, so uninstructed a manner. They said his wife had run away from him after their ship from Liverpool landed in New York (they had come to Liverpool from London, to London from Paris, to Paris from Budapest, where they had both been born); then again they said his wife had refused to sail with him, and had stayed behind. In one version overheard by Violet (who never, really
never,
eavesdropped on anyone, let alone her domestic help) the young woman had betrayed him with other men because she was ashamed of his “stammer.” In another version, no less plausible, his “stammer” had been caused by her betrayal. Violet noted, without caring to interpret the fact, that in her presence Tamás’s difficulties with speech were such that he appeared to be on the verge of strangulation, and went an alarming beet-red; so it was no wonder that he soon ceased to speak at all, and, if it was necessary to communicate with her about the clavichord he had been hired to build, he left notes, or inquiries with the servants. He never had the opportunity to speak with Raphael, nor did he see him more than two or three times, always at a distance, for of course Raphael had not directly hired him. It is probable to assume that the shy young man with his prominent Adam’s apple and his tight-fitting clothes and, of course, the embarrassing stammer (though Violet’s personal physician, Dr. Sheeler, believed it was a speech impediment) would have been terrified of the master of Bellefleur Manor. That he, Tamás, presumed to entertain certain feelings—certain unmistakable feelings—for the master’s young wife: that he dared simply to
think
of her as he worked lovingly on the clavichord: all this would have been as outrageous to Tamás as to Raphael Bellefleur himself.