Bellefleur (15 page)

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

T
he 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 men 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.)

And there was the time, when Gideon was a boy of fifteen, and he and Nicholas and Ewan and Raoul were allowed to accompany their fathers to a horse race in Kincardine, and afterward, at an inn, the men gambled with the inn’s proprietor and certain of his customers that they could distinguish not only the make of liquor served them in unidentified glasses, but its proof; they challenged the Kincardine men to a contest in which the blends were broken down, and the years given, and even (Noel was especially adroit at this, having practiced so assiduously) the place of origin. As soon as Noel Bellefleur sniffed his first drink, and sipped it, and set it down calmly on the bar and announced: “Ninety proof. Sixty-five point five percent rye at five years old, twenty-five percent bourbon at six years old, the rest some good sour spirits . . . most likely from Hennicutt County, Kentucky; yes, Hennicutt County, on account of their kegs being all center-cut maple, and impossible to miss—” why, the Kincardine men naturally wanted to withdraw their bets, but it was too late.

And there were times, many times, when a fair amount of money changed hands around poker tables, at all-night sessions. At Bellefleur Manor; at the White Sulphur Springs Inn which was, for a while, the most famous watering place in the mountains, and drew numerous Southern plantation owners and their families; at the rambling wood-frame Innisfail Lodge, before it caught fire and burned to the ground (“But it was, of course, heavily insured,” men said simply, meaning no criticism of the Bellefleur owners); in private camps and homes. Poker, billiards, iceboat racing. For a while, glider-racing. (But a disastrous accident, resulting in the deaths of two young men, one of them a cousin-twice-removed of Noel’s, put an end to these contests.) Money changed hands with great alacrity and excitement. Money, and occasionally horses, and even land. If the women knew (and all the women disapproved, some of them—like Cornelia and Della—most angrily) they said very little; for what was to be done . . . ? The Bellefleur men were rich, they had a passion for gambling, they were famous in the mountains for their reckless, inventive challenges, and for their courtesy and grace in defeat (which was infrequent enough: for they were amazingly lucky), what was to be done to prevent them from their play . . . ? After all, they controlled the fortune.

Horse racing was far more public, of course. Most of the betting was public. Men rode their own horses, they were acquainted with nearly everyone involved, the races (at the Powhatassie fairgrounds, at the Derby track, across the state in Port Oriskany where competition was most severe) were events of great local significance; and so it would have been thought rather eccentric if an owner did not naturally bet on himself. The women still disapproved, but less vehemently. Upon occasion they even allowed themselves to be caught up in the fever of the races: for betting on horses wasn’t an idle pastime, like betting on the April morning when ice-locked Lake Noir would finally crack, or betting on who might wrestle whom to the dirty floor of a riverside tavern, or who could shoot a shot glass off the head of a retarded boy who worked for some tavern keeper—it had to do with an owner’s pride in his horse and in his own performance. It had to do with pride in one’s blood, in one’s
name.

GIDEON WAS ASTOUNDED
by his wife’s suggestion.

“But why now?” he said.

Leah gazed at him thoughtfully, her eyes half-closed. She was sitting in an oblong of sunshine, near the old sundial at the very center of the garden. Though she was no longer quite as beautiful as she had been—it was mid-July, the baby was due at any time, her eyes were ringed with fatigue and her skin had lost its superb glowing health, and she wasn’t able to carry the extraordinary weight of the unborn child with nearly as much style as
previously
—she had had Garnet Hecht help her fashion her hair in the heavily ornate manner in which she’d worn it as a bride (copied from an inept but charming portrait of Raphael Bellefleur’s beautiful young English wife Violet: the back hair arranged in a glossy chignon, two distinct bands of hair tied tightly with a velvet ribbon, its ends hanging down loose; a narrow braid over the crown of the head; and, in addition to
that,
wavy bangs brushed low over her strong, intelligent, somewhat crinkled forehead) and she was wearing a white crocheted shawl over a gown of coarse, knobby material, ochre mixed with green, which Gideon had never seen before. As a consequence of a disagreement that had taken place between them several days ago—Gideon had not liked Leah’s retort to an innocent-seeming question of his mother’s about the condition of Bromwell’s health—Gideon faced his wife with his hands self-consciously on his hips, his knees slightly bent in horsey fashion, his eyes narrowed.

“Because . . .” Leah said slowly. “
Because
. . .”

Her darkened, hollowed eyes gave to her tired face something of the glimmer of a death’s-head: but she had looked, in the last weeks of her pregnancy with the twins, very much like this, and Gideon steadfastly refused to become alarmed. His manner was guarded, his jaw rigid. He had not broken down during their quarrel, he had not burst into helpless, enraged tears, wanting both to pummel the woman and to embrace her, and so the crisis seemed to him past, and he
would
not succumb. He preferred today’s slow, dreamy, drawling voice to her usual nervous, strident voice, though it seemed to him extraordinarily arrogant of her to have sent poor frightened Garnet Hecht (all elbows and skinny legs and flyaway hair, her pretty face distorted when she merely gazed upon Gideon, with whom, as Leah so mockingly said, even in Garnet’s presence, she was piteously in love) to summon him into the garden to speak with her—as if she were royalty, and he one of her subjects. She sat on a cushion on one of Raphael’s thronelike granite chairs, beside the rusted, useless sundial (which, shadowless, gave no time), both arms resting lightly on the mound in her lap, which always seemed about to move, to shift its position, her pale swollen legs clumsily outstretched, her swollen feet in brocade slippers Cornelia herself had made for her; she sat there, immobile, imperious, monumental in her very weight, gazing at her husband with her head tilted back, so that her eyes were hooded and she seemed to be peering at him from a distance. A month-old kitten, gray-and-white-striped, hardly more than a potbellied ball of fluff with big ears and a pert erect tail, played with the hem of her skirt and had even begun to tear the material; but Leah did not notice.

Gideon waited. His knees were really trembling, slightly; imperceptibly; he had come close to breaking down several days ago, he had wanted very badly to bury himself in her, sobbing, demanding—demanding that she return to him, as she’d been: his fierce virginal bride whose very soul, like her lean, hard, skittish body, had been tightly closed against him so that he had had to conquer it, and conquer it, and again conquer it; and she had dissolved into tears of love for him; for
him.
But now . . . Now the woman was so wonderfully, so arrogantly, pregnant, what need had she for him?—what need had she for a husband? Other people only distracted her from her ceaseless brooding, her obsessive concern with her body and its urges and sensations. Months ago Leah had confessed to Gideon, in a puzzled voice, groping for the correct words, that nothing was so real to her now as certain flashes of sensation—tastes, colors, even odors, vague impulses and premonitions—which she interpreted as the baby’s continuous dreaming, deep in
her
body. (Our son, Leah said, our son’s dreaming that pulls me down into it, the way an undertow might pull you down into the lake even when the surface of the water appears to be calm. . . . )

“Because,” Leah said, the skin about her eyes crinkling, “it seems to me necessary.”

She had summoned him to her, when she knew—she must have known—that he and Hiram were leaving that morning for New York; she had summoned him to her to suggest that he place a number of bets, with different parties, on himself and his stallion, for next Sunday’s race at Powhatassie.

“Necessary?”

“I can’t explain.”

They had not made love for many months. Only dimly, sadly, could Gideon remember: but then it was wisest not to remember. She had expelled him from her bed out of a nervous, and certainly premature caution. (Dr. Jensen himself had assured Gideon that lovemaking, at least of a gentle sort, would not be at all injurious to the unborn child, up until the very last month or two. But that had been before the child had grown to so prodigious a size.) Even as an adult, as the father of children, Gideon could not
quite
determine how a man might deal with a woman whom he could not make love to, and consequently disarm; for it seemed to him that a woman, even a relatively plain, unassertive woman, had all the advantage . . . all the power. He could not have said what this power was, where it presides, how precisely it might touch a man, but he knew its sinister strength.