Bellefleur (28 page)

Only aunt Veronica did not appear in the garden. For she was in perpetual mourning, it was said, and allowed herself to emerge from her suite of rooms only at night, and then of course the baby was put to bed.

Sunshine, bumblebees, mourning doves pecking eagerly at crumbs, scattering into the air when Germaine approached, waving her arms. The big cat Mahalaleel flopping onto the grass and rolling over onto his back, so that Leah or one of the children might rub his stomach. (How quickly one of his invisible nails could catch in someone’s skin!—it was always an accident, and there was always a tiny drop of blood.) Dragonflies, crickets, rabbits startled out from bushes, garter snakes, black-capped chickadees. The remains of a box-hedge maze, in which the children ran wild, pretending to be lost. There was a dying monkey tree someone had shipped back from South America, and a Russian olive, no longer flourishing, planted, according to family tradition, by aunt Veronica’s lost love. There was a gigantic cedar of Lebanon with more than thirty limbs, each the size of a tree of ordinary proportions. There were, at the rear of the garden, wych-elms, silver firs, white spruce. And ivy and climbing roses that grew where they would, choking out other plants.

The garden, where Leah scribbled drafts of letters, bent over an old lap desk she’d found in an attic: to attorneys, to judges, to the governor of the state. Scribbled her letters, or dictated to Garnet Hecht. (By way of Elvira she learned that Jean-Pierre had been fearful for months that something terrible would happen to him—he hadn’t any enemies of his own but the family had enemies, and it was well known that the Varrell brothers had planned some sort of attack; by way of Jean-Pierre’s brothers Noel and Hiram she learned in some detail of the judges’ prejudices—the first judge, Phineas Petrie, who had handed down the sentence of life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years in a voice, witnesses claimed, of unctuous cruelty, had a history of disliking the Bellefleurs because, decades earlier, a young Petrie soldier and a young Bellefleur soldier had gone off together on the Big Horn Expedition of 1876, the Petrie boy under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Custer and the Bellefleur boy under the command of General Terry, and one had perished and the other had survived; the judge who heard the first appeal, Osborne Lane, had been rejected by a beautiful young woman who later became involved with Samuel Bellefleur, and so naturally he detested the very name Bellefleur; and the judge who heard the second appeal, and who dismissed it so rudely, was an old political rival of Senator Washington Payne’s—the senator having been financed generously by Bellefleur money, or so rumor had it.) Leah read off her letters to the children, and sometimes stopped in midsentence, and crumpled the stiff sheets of stationery and threw them to the ground. “I am the only one who cares any longer,” she said angrily. “The rest have given up! They should be ashamed of themselves,
Bellefleurs
who have
given up!
”

IT WAS IN
the garden, half-dozing in the slanted honey-warm sunshine, that Leah recalled Germaine’s birth: no more than an hour of labor, and then the miracle of the baby, put into her arms, nursing vigorously at once; and Gideon at her bedside gripping her hand. You were the easiest of all, Leah murmured. You were no trouble at all. Why I hardly
bled. .
. .

Now there was a mossy stripe on her belly. And her belly, her waist, her thighs, were flaccid. And her breasts drooped. But she was losing weight gradually, already her ankles and calves were back to normal, and her face showed only a few lines of strain. How good you look, Leah, people said. And to Gideon: How beautiful your wife looks. . . . (And Gideon smiled stiffly and thanked them, for what else could he do?)

The garden, the hum of insects. Mealtimes, naps. Kittens rolling and tumbling underfoot. A game of peek-a-boo around the sundial, around the lonely towering statue of Hebe. Under the low-hanging branches of the cedar of Lebanon. (Where, one morning, they discovered a partly devoured opossum Mahalaleel had dragged over the garden wall.) Leah ripping open envelopes, letting them fall to the terrace floor. Leah calling impatiently for one of the servants. Leah bumping her nose against the baby’s pug nose, or wiping the baby’s mouth, or sauntering about with the baby on her hip, listing to one side. Leah shaking the rattle—of carved hardwood, with coral and silver ornamentation—that was aunt Veronica’s present to Germaine. Or blowing up a red balloon and allowing it to streak away, fluttering, falling to the grass as Germaine squealed. Leah hauling Germaine up, out of the brittle dead leaves in the old fountain, her voice ringing, Now what have you done, for God’s sake, do you want to blind yourself?—as the baby cried.

It was in the garden one May morning, when Gideon was leaving for a five-day trip to the Midwest, in connection with a number of horses he was selling, that Leah first brought up the subject of his uncle Jean-Pierre, who must be released from prison, and the necessity of regaining all the land—
all
the land—the Bellefleurs had lost. Gideon was bent over the baby’s cradle, one forefinger gripped by the baby’s surprisingly strong fingers; he made a grunting sound that might have been an assent.

“Then you’ll help me? Gideon?” Leah said.

She moved to slide her arm around his waist, then hesitated. Gideon was staring at his daughter’s greeny-hazel eyes, that so powerfully seized him: that seemed almost to grip him, to fix him where he stood. He had never quite comprehended the fact of the twins, the fact that
he
had fathered Christabel and Bromwell, and it was beyond him, it was dismayingly beyond him, that
this
baby was his as well. Of course it was all ordinary, even routine, he had even helped choose her name, everyone had behaved matter-of-factly about the birth (he knew of course about the difficult labor, he knew nothing about the birth itself), these things happened all the time, it was better to let the mind skate lightly over them, not to puzzle or brood. . . . When he pulled his finger away the baby’s grip tightened.

“Ah, she’s strong! She’s wonderful, she’s so quick!” Gideon laughed. “She’s
strong.
”

“You’ll help me?” Leah said.

Straightening, Gideon brushed his hair back from his forehead with both his hands, in a brusque movement, and smiled toward Leah without exactly looking at her. “Of course,” he said, “whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want . . . ?” Leah said, sliding her arm around his waist.

“Whatever, whatever, whatever,” Gideon said, backing away.

Bloody Run

O
n the bluff above Lake Noir where wild lilac grew in the midst of second-growth pines, beside the foot-wide Bloody Run (in early June still fed by melting snow on higher ground, and plunging with an eerie guttural music down the bluff’s granite outcroppings, in a half-dozen frothy cascades, to the dark water ninety feet below), on the very earth where once, on other June evenings, others, other Bellefleurs, love-sickened or love-obsessed or loveless, stood to gaze across the lake’s moody planes to the forest on the far shore and the crescent of Silver Lake in the distance, luminescent even when the moon was smothered by cloud—on the very soil, tufted with wild grass and saxifrage and clover, where Jean-Pierre Bellefleur in his middle years stood dreaming of a girl, a girl’s face, he had not seen for three decades, and Hepatica Bellefleur first succumbed to the embrace of that swarthy bearded man, now nameless, who courted her with such vigor and eventually won her, to the misfortune of both, and Violet Odlin Bellefleur, pregnant for what was probably the tenth time (there were so many brief pregnancies, so many miscarriages, and several infants dead at birth or surviving only a few days, she had not only lost count but considered it part of her obligation as a wife and as a dutiful obedient Christian to withhold from any activity so conscious as counting), walked in the moonlight, restless, murmuring aloud, occasionally punctuating the low-throated noise of Bloody Run by peals of girlish laughter, as she rehearsed not the vigorous rejection of Hayes Whittier’s proposal to her, which was so inevitable, so ineludible, she need not have groped after the words, but the acceptance which she knew she would not give (no matter that her rejection would destroy for the second time her husband’s hopes for the governorship, and perhaps his spirit as well—Violet
was
a virtuous wife, incapable of imagining herself otherwise), and Veronica Bellefleur strolled in secret with that Swedish nobleman who called himself Ragnar Norst and who explained away his dusky complexion and his dark liquid thick-lashed eyes by alluding merrily to some “Persian” blood on his mother’s side of the family, and Ewan Bellefleur lay vigorously upon one or another of his anonymous girls, in the heat, the near-maniacal obsessive heat of his precocious and prolonged adolescence, which was quite a serious matter to Ewan most of the time and to his innumerable hapless girls all of the time, and Vernon Bellefleur wandered and was to continue to wander, a book in one back pocket, papers inked with ideas for poems, stray words that struck him as musical, first lines of love sonnets—in whose convoluted syntax his cousin Gideon’s wife was to emerge as one
Lara,
the supreme and unearthly love of the poet’s life, the only reason for the poet’s life—in his other pockets or in hand, growing moist in hand, as insomnia and dread of sleep compelled him to climb up along Bloody Run though he was quickly breathless, and beggarlice and burdocks stuck to his trouser legs, and his heart contracted with the knowledge that all that he did was futile, and Yolande, unknown to him, was to walk, in the sunshine, half-dreaming of—of who?—of what?—sometimes the seductive image of her reverie possessed a face, a man’s face, her uncle Gideon’s?—or the face of a stranger?—or that of a young man from a cattle farm on the Innisfail Road whom she rarely saw; and sometimes the image wasn’t a man’s face at all but her own, uncannily transformed, shining with unexpected ethereal beauty like that of a May poplar (supreme in its golden-green-radiant glory for a few days, before the other trees come into leaf), not only shining but somehow magnified, her face spread out semitransparent against the lake, the forest, the sky itself, arching over
her
as she paused intoxicated with the promise of—the heady rich seductive promise of—of whatever it was—whatever it would turn out to be, that image worthy of Yolande Bellefleur’s devotion: here the lovers pressed mutely together, ground themselves helplessly together, clutching each other, whimpering,
Don’t move, don’t move,
for if nothing happens, if nothing actually happens and no seed is released then Gideon hasn’t been unfaithful, not precisely: and there will be no consequences.

One June night, beside Bloody Run, on the hill above Lake Noir, and not for the first time in this secret place: Gideon and Garnet locked together, their straining bodies joined, wed, implacably fused together: Gideon whispering
Don’t move
like a prayer.

His eyes shut tight. Entering her, not breathing. Ah, the slightest move! The slightest error! She lies very still, gripping him. Breasts pressed flat against his chest. Unmoving, unprotesting. They must avoid the slightest friction. . . . He has forbidden her to say that she loves him, it is a wild little snarl of a song he doesn’t want to hear, any more than he wants to see her pale rose-petal of a face, bruised and torn and befuddled by the mere size of him, and what he must perform.
Don’t move,
he whimpers. Their heads are a few feet from Bloody Run but already they are unaware of the rivulet’s gurgling. They are unaware of the lake below, or the sky above, which is dissolving slowly in a rather chill ecstasy of moonlight. Naturally there will be consequences but the lovers are locked too fiercely together to comprehend even that they are locked together, that they belong in two separate bodies and that there is danger, grave danger, in what they are doing, impaled upon the moment, the present moment, the past and future forgotten: everything else forgotten.

Every part of his immense body, every cell, quivering, about to discharge itself. They must remain motionless and innocent as the dead. As figures on the tombs of the dead. Breathing slowed, slowed. A preternatural calm. They must.
Don’t,
he murmurs, his eyeballs aching, his hands fumbling to hold her still. (He feels her prominent pelvis bones against his thumbs.) That skinny little thing Garnet, who would be able to love such a skinny thing, isn’t she pathetic, of course I’m fond of her and she is pretty but isn’t she pathetic, so in love with
you. .
. . But then all the women are in love with Gideon Bellefleur aren’t they. . . .

Stop,
Gideon whispers.

He is so large, so swollen, so tense with this piercing, terrible pleasure, which wants only to shout madly and dispel the night, that the girl’s neck and backbone might easily snap; so he must hold himself as rigid as possible, his knees trembling with the unnatural effort, an icy sweat broken across his forehead and back. In his mind’s eye he sees, jumbled together with a dozen other things, two horseshoes where his jaws should be, pressing, pressing together with awful violence.
Stop. Wait. Don’t.
His ribs are steel bands that have begun to quiver so finely, so minutely, that they are in danger of shattering: it is almost intolerable that the girl’s stunned fingers should grope against them. His neck is a rod, his penis is a rod: his lungs contract with infinite cunning for if they swell suddenly all is lost: his eyes, held fast behind his glaring lids, have begun to bulge and are in danger of starting out of his head. His penis is a rod, an anguished rod, pushing slowly into the girl, pushing her down into the grass, into the earth, moment by moment, beat by beat. There is no stopping it. There is no stopping. But he whispers,
Stop
through his gritted teeth.