Bellefleur (4 page)

AND IN THE
morning when Edna went into the kitchen, she took one look at the animal by the fire—she took a single look, and cried aloud, and ran to her mistress. For there slept on the hearth not the starved, contemptible, ratlike wretch of the night before, but an extraordinarily beautiful cat: an enormous long-haired cat with coppery-pink fur, puffed and silky, and an elegant plumelike tail, and stiff, long silvery whiskers that fairly bristled with life. “Mahalaleel,” Leah said, naming him at once, snatching at a sound she had never heard before—but somehow it was exactly right, it
was
exactly right—as if an imp had whispered it in her ear. (Later she was told
Mahalaleel
was out of the Bible, and she halfway wondered if the name was appropriate: for Leah was one of the Bellefleurs who prided themselves on their contempt for the Bible.) “Mahalaleel,” she whispered, “
aren’t
you a beauty. . . .”

The cat stirred luxuriously, and opened its eyes—pellucid, frost-tinged ovals in which black slits appeared to float, languidly—and made a gurgling sound of assent, as if it recognized her. Surely it did recognize her.

“Mahalaleel—?”

Leah knelt before him, lost in wondering. She made a gesture to stroke his head but he stiffened—his marvelous ears moved a small fraction of an inch back—and she hesitated. “Aren’t you a beauty after all,” Leah whispered, gloating. “Wait till the others see you!”

She commanded Edna to heat milk for him—no, not milk: cream: Mahalaleel must have cream. And fed him herself in a chipped Sèvres bowl. At last he allowed her to touch him, shyly at first, and then with more confidence. (Ah, if this enormous creature should turn on her, as an aged, half-blind hunting dog had once turned on her when she was a noisy little girl!—if he should become enraged suddenly, and rake her with those nails, and tear at her exposed flesh with those fangs! But it was a risk she took eagerly, her blood pulsing with a queer delirious pleasure.) She stroked the thick silky fur of his back, and even rubbed his head behind his ears, and tickled his chin, and pulled out a half-dozen stinging nettles from his fur, and rejoiced at the sudden purring sound, both guttural and crackling, he made deep in his throat. What a beauty! What a marvelous creature! When the rest of the family saw him they would be astonished! He finished the cream, and Leah scrambled to her feet to find him something more—cold roast beef, a cold chicken leg—and he devoured it with a fastidious zest that was a pleasure to see. His immense plume of a tail, in which hairs of myriad colors meshed—bronze, saffron, dove-gray, black, white, silver—rose slowly until it was erect, fairly quivering with delight.

Leah sat a short distance away, the skirt of her robe tucked about her ankles, her arms hugging her knees, staring. Mahalaleel must weigh thirty pounds, she estimated. And he was
not
part bobcat or lynx, he hadn’t any mixed blood, he was a purebred, as flawless an aristocrat as the Persian cat Leah had coveted many years ago, belonging to the headmistress at La Tour, where Leah had boarded as a schoolgirl. Girls who by docility or high grades or shrewd maneuvering found themselves favorites of Madame Mullein were allowed to stroke the cat’s head on certain occasions: but of course naughty noisy rebellious Leah had never been a favorite. Ah, that bitch Mullein! Leah had wished the woman dead, and indeed she
was
now dead, and now Leah had a cat of her own, a creature quite simply the most beautiful animal she had ever seen. (And of course Leah had adored her horses, especially as a young girl; and she had had, from the age of twelve until nearly nineteen, when she became engaged to Gideon Bellefleur, a most unusual pet—a large satiny-black spider of which she was inordinately, and perversely, fond; and she’d had a sentimental attachment to numerous Bellefleur hounds, and the usual household cats and kittens: but none of these creatures was to mean as much to her as Mahalaleel.)

“Yes, aren’t you a beauty,
aren’t
you a gift,” Leah murmured, hardly able to tear her eyes away from Mahalaleel, who was now washing his paws with quick, deft strokes of his pink tongue, oblivious of her. There was something mesmerizing about his fur: roseate, shining, silky and light as milkweed fluff, and yet astonishingly thick; and how endlessly fascinating, how haunting, the pattern—which she could not
quite
discern—made by those thousands of hairs, each with its own subtle color. From a distance of some feet Mahalaleel looked one color, a frosty pinkish-gray; closer up he looked another shade, laced with bronze. From one angle he appeared to be eerily transparent, as the morning sunshine penetrated his fine, delicate, rather large ears; from another angle, where his long, thick tail and his somewhat outsized feet with their pink-gray pads were in evidence, he looked massive—a creature whose considerable bulk was dense with muscle, though disguised by deceptively pretty, even frivolous fur light as bird’s down. But how magnificent! Leah stared and stared.

Hugging her knees, her disheveled braid lying over her right shoulder, she stared at the beast she had named Mahalaleel. He was an omen, quite clearly: an omen of great good fortune. How languidly he washed himself, oblivious of her. . . . Half-consciously she fingered the scratches he had made the night before in his terror. They still hurt, and had now begun to itch. Her fingertips took note, with a curious bemused detachment, of the fine, hard, hairlike ridges of coagulated blood on her forearms, and shoulders, and low on her right cheek, and even on her right breast: ah, the strange pleasure of seeking out those welts, scratching them lightly,
teasingly
!—the strange pleasure of encountering such very interesting and unexpected textures on her own flesh, where, the previous day, there had been only smooth unmarked skin. And though this beautiful creature had hurt her he had behaved without knowing what he did, and was consequently innocent.

“Mahalaleel? Why have you come to us?” Leah whispered.

The cat continued to wash his paws, and then his ears, and then he stretched and yawned—showing magnificent teeth, ivory-white, so sharp and strong that Leah drew in her breath. Suppose he
should
suddenly attack her . . . ? Suppose he should sink those teeth, sizable as an ocelot’s, into her flesh? She leaned forward to pet him again, moving cautiously. With an aristocrat’s natural disdain he drew away slightly, and then allowed her to stroke his head. “My beauty, my Mahalaleel,” she said.

WHEN THE REST
of the household saw Mahalaleel they were, of course, astonished. That skinny ratlike creature of the night before, that ugly doomed little beast—! Transformed into
this.

Grandfather Noel spoke for them all by stammering, “But it doesn’t—it doesn’t seem
believable
—”

Mahalaleel stretched and turned away, curling into a massive ball on the hearth, ignoring them.

From that day onward the uncanny creature Mahalaleel lived with the Bellefleurs; indeed, he had the run of the castle, and everyone’s awed
admiration
—everyone’s, that is, except Gideon’s. Gideon could not help but wish from time to time that he
had
broken the creature’s neck, on that stormy night. For it seemed (though why it seemed so, no one knew) that everything began on that night. And, once begun, it could not be stopped.

The Pond

M
ink Pond, a half-mile north of Bellefleur Cemetery. In a stand of hemlock and mountain maple and ash. In a sun-dappled secret place.

Mink Pond, where Raphael Bellefleur, the twelve-year-old son of Ewan and Lily, played and splashed about and swam, and spent long hours lying on the small raft he had fashioned out of birch logs and wire, staring into the water. Most days it was clear, and he could see to the muddy bottom seven or eight feet below at its deepest.

Mink Pond, a pond so new and so secret that the older Bellefleurs knew nothing about it. If someone asked Raphael where he’d been all morning and he said, in his rapid indistinct murmur, Oh, nowhere—the pond, his grandfather Noel would assume he was talking about a pond just the other side of the old pear orchard. There’s plenty of bass there, his grandfather said, and I’ve seen herds of white-tails browsing there, one time more than thirty-five, I counted them, the biggest old buck with an antler spread of three feet, I swear!—but you know, boy, that pond’s a home for snapping turtles too and those buggers are dangerous. He poked Raphael with his forefinger, chuckling. D’you know what a snapping turtle can do to a young boy wading?—or fool enough to swim? And as Raphael blushed red, and yearned to escape (for he was a shy child who rarely raised his voice, and made every effort to avoid the raucous company of the other boys), the old man laughed crudely, pressing his hands against his little potbelly, which strained against his vest and trousers, rocking from side to side. D’you know what one of them hefty old buggers can do, snapping away at nice warm tender meat dangling in front of him?

Mink Pond, which was Raphael’s discovery, down behind the graveyard where none of the children played. The day after Mink Creek flooded, wild from melting snow up in the mountains, flooded more than any of the other creeks that flowed into Lake Noir, Raphael tramped out in his rubber boots, blinking against the glare of the sun, his hands stuck in his pockets for warmth though it was April and nearly spring and the terrible winter was said to be over. (Up in the mountains there were great gorges and valleys packed with snow, people said. There were glaciers of such cruel dense
silvery
-blue ice, jammed in sunless ravines, that perhaps they would never melt and there would be a new Ice Age, and what then?—would the Bellefleurs have to travel about by sleigh, as in the old days, or walk with snowshoes everywhere, like old Jedediah?—would tutors have to live in the manor to instruct the children, or would there be no education at all?) But the snow did melt, and the creeks did go wild, and overflow their banks, and as the warm spring rain fell the ice-locked world of the highest mountains groaned and gave way and turned to water that rushed downhill, fiercely downhill, in hundreds of runs—Laurel Run, Bloody Run, Hare Run, Columbine Run—spilling into rivers and creeks, headed for the lake, and then for lower ground, and, it was said, for the ocean hundreds of miles away, which the children had never seen. Raphael, studying the handsome old globe in the library (it was so large that not even big-armed Ewan could reach all the way around it and touch his fingertips together), could not even find Lake Noir, and grew dizzy at the thought of the ocean’s immensity. With something so big, he told his cousin Vernon, you would have to spend your entire life just making your mind equal to it. . . . I don’t ever want to see the ocean.

Mink Creek in less turbulent seasons was a wide meandering creek where Bellefleur horses and cattle and sheep watered; though narrower, and steeper, on higher ground, it sprawled in the meadows, turning back lazily on itself in a sequence of
S
’s. It was fairly shallow in parts, and as deep as twelve or fifteen feet in others. Cattail and sedge and alder and willow bushes grew thick and disorderly on its banks. Great bleached-white boulders lay strewn everywhere, tossed down, the children were told, by a giant with a bad temper who lived atop Mount Blanc. But when did that happen, they asked. Oh, a hundred years ago, they were told. But did it
really
happen, they asked.
Really?
—what do you mean,
really?
You see the boulders there, don’t you? Go out and judge for yourselves!

Alone Raphael tramped upstream one morning, thinking he would discover the creek’s source. His uncle Emmanuel was famous in the Valley (though people laughed at him too: certainly Ewan and Gideon laughed at him) for the fine, fastidiously detailed maps he had made of the mountains, which showed every river, creek, brook, run, pond, and lake; Emmanuel disappeared for long stretches of time, for as many as eight or nine months, and all of the children, or at least all the boys, admired him. It crossed Raphael’s mind that he might run away from home, and go to live with his uncle, somewhere up in the
mountains
. . . . But after less than three miles he gave up, exhausted. The creek bed and much of the bank were a jumble of rock, dislodged shale, fallen trees, rotting logs, and queer writhing pockets and eddies of froth; some of the waterfalls were as high as ten feet, and their spray was chill and blinding.
Raphael
estimated that he had climbed only a few hundred feet up the mountain but he was badly winded. His face stung where willow branches had slapped it, his ears roared from the falls, wasps buzzed angrily about his head, he had frightened—and been frightened by—a ring-necked snake sunning itself on a log (his brother Garth had once brought home in triumph a twelve-footer, slung about his neck like a muffler), and when he drew off his boots to rub his aching feet he discovered a half-dozen leeches between his toes, fastened to his white skin. Nasty ugly horrible things, sucking his blood. . . . Fixed so
tightly
to his flesh. . . . He nearly panicked at the sight of them, and whimpered aloud like a small child. By the time he returned home his head pounded from the sun and every nerve in his frail body was twitching.

Why did God make bloodsuckers, Raphael asked his older sister Yolande, didn’t He know what He was doing?

Yolande, pretty Yolande, delicately scented with a cologne-touched lace handkerchief tucked into her belt, did not even glance at him. She watched her mirrored reflection and continued brushing her long hair, which was brown and blond and auburn, all at once, but which had, to her exasperation, a tendency to separate into ringlets on her shoulders. Don’t be a baby, Raphael, she said, absently, you know there’s no more a God up in the sky than there’s a Devil sitting on a throne in Hell.

At lessons the next morning Raphael asked Demuth Hodge the same question. Mr. Hodge, soon to be dismissed from Bellefleur Manor (and without ever knowing precisely why: he had
believed
he was teaching Latin, Greek, English, mathematics, history, literature, composition, geography, and “basic science,” with great success, considering the Bellefleur children’s wildly varying skills and interest and patience), mumbled something about not being allowed, in his capacity as tutor, to speak to the children of religious matters. “You must know that your family is divided on the subject—there are those who believe, and those who do not—and neither side will tolerate the other’s position. So I am afraid I dare not respond to your question other than to suggest that it is a profound, noble question, which you might spend the rest of your life answering. . . .”