Bellefleur (46 page)

Which sounded, in the antiquated courtroom with its faint dry echo, not quite right.

JEAN-PIERRE WAS FOUND
guilty of murder in the first degree, despite his innocence, and sentenced by Judge Phineas Petrie to life plus ninety-nine years . . . plus ninety-nine years repeated ten times. Evidence was no more than circumstantial; the only witness—the tavern-keeper’s malicious wife—admitted that she was nearly fainting with terror when she saw, from an upstairs window, a single rider galloping away into the night, along a narrow trail leading into the foothills. She could not
see
the figure, could not of course
identify
the murderer, but she claimed that “of course” it was Jean-Pierre Bellefleur who had, within her hearing, loudly and drunkenly threatened lives in the past, and had had to be ejected from the tavern more than once, because of his wicked temper. All this was slanderous, of course. And Jean-Pierre protested. He had left Innisfail House before midnight and was home by three in the morning. Because he was so exhausted he had slept in a hayloft . . . he hadn’t wanted to disturb his family . . . perhaps he
was
somewhat drunk . . . the events of the night were badly confused. He knew only one thing: that he was innocent of the heinous charge brought against him. And that the “Innisfail Butcher”—how quickly the newspapers had hit upon that vile epithet, and how widely Jean-Pierre’s lean, anxious, hawkish face was known throughout the state!—remained a free man, given license to murder again, while he, Jean-Pierre, a victim of grotesque circumstances, was condemned.

The tavern-keeper’s wife simply repeated her imbecilic story. The rider on the horse headed in the direction of Lake Noir, by way of the foothills; the dark horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail; Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s belligerence and general rowdiness. He was like a child, the woman said, wiping at her eyes. A child pretending to be an adult man, and fooling people into accepting him as such. . . . But also like the Devil. When he drank, he was like the Devil. He just went wild, he had to be dragged out onto the veranda by his friend from Missouri, slapped around and maybe splashed with cold water; and even then he wasn’t always all right. (But when Jean-Pierre’s attorney, cross-examining the woman, asked her with a droll twist of his mouth why she and her husband allowed such a “devil” into their establishment, she could only stammer: “But—you see—so many of them are—so many of the men—They’re
all
like that more or less—” A ripple of laughter ran through the packed courtroom.)

Nevertheless, he was found guilty. By twelve jurors who had seemed, at first, to be just and upright and unprejudiced men. (Though of course no one in the Valley could be “unprejudiced” about a Bellefleur.) It is said that jurors, filing back into court with a verdict of Guilty, do not look at the defendant; but the jurors at Jean-Pierre’s trial certainly looked at him. They eyed him, studied him, stared quite frankly at him as if they were in the presence of a venomous but fascinating insect.

. . . And how do you find the defendant?

. . . We find the defendant Guilty as charged.

Guilty!

Guilty as charged!

When of course he was innocent, and could do nothing more than scream and tear at the sheriff’s men who were restraining him. No! You can’t! I won’t let you! I’m innocent! The murderer is at large! The murderer is among you!
I am not the murderer!

If only the tavern-keeper’s spiteful wife had been killed along with the others: then there would have been no witness. But in the pandemonium the woman was overlooked.

If only . . .

FOR A WHILE
he could not be certain he had heard correctly. What did the words mean,
Guilty as charged
. . .
?

Perhaps when the prosecuting attorney had queried him about the old feud of the 1820’s—whether he felt any “ill-will,” whether he had ever craved “revenge”—he should have answered more carefully, more thoughtfully, instead of uttering, through tight pursed lips: “No.”

(For there were, among the eleven dead, two Varrell men. One in his mid-fifties, the other about Jean-Pierre’s age. It was his claim that he hadn’t known they were Varrells, which was somewhat unlikely; for, as the tavern-keeper’s slanderous wife pointed out, everyone knew everyone else in the Valley. And Bellefleurs and Varrells always knew one another.)

He could only repeat his story: leaving the tavern early, getting a ride with the peddler, sleeping in the hayloft because he didn’t want to disturb his family. (His father Jeremiah suffered from insomnia, his mother Elvira suffered from “nerves.”) When the sheriff and his men came to arrest him at dawn, dragging him out of the barn and knocking him about until his nose bled onto his filthy, already bloodied shirt, he couldn’t imagine why they were there; he couldn’t make sense of anything they said. They must have had a warrant for his arrest but he didn’t remember seeing any warrant.

Ah, if he had stayed a companion to Mr. Newman, if they had followed through on their scheme to duplicate the tower of the Hôtel de Ville in the States! How profoundly and beautifully
innocent
their partnership would have been!

But through an excess of boyish enthusiasm he had irrevocably offended the older man, and now his life was ruined. He was only thirty-two years old and his life was ruined. The Lake Noir district had been notorious in the past for lynchings, murders, arson, and theft, and continual harassment of Indians; but there had never been anything quite so lurid as the “Innisfail Butcher” with his handsome, boyish,
aggrieved
face. He was in all the newspapers, out to the West Coast, the “Innisfail Butcher” who had murdered eleven men and claimed not to remember anything, claimed to be innocent, absolutely innocent: and how
certain
he was! The newspapers naturally resurrected old stories about the Bellefleur-Varrell feud though Jean-Pierre had made clear, in open court, repeatedly, that he hadn’t even been aware that two Varrell men were in the tavern that night. . . . But no one believed him, and his young life was ruined.

For a stunned moment he could not believe the sentence old Judge Petrie had passed. Life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus . . . Individuals in the courtroom burst into applause. (For it was felt throughout the community that a death by hanging—a death that would involve, at the most, ten minutes of agony—was far too merciful for Jean-Pierre.) “But I am innocent, Your Honor,” Jean-Pierre whispered. And then as the sheriff’s men tugged at him he began to shout: “I tell you I am innocent! The murderer is still at large!
The murderer is among you!
”

So Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II, the grandson of the millionaire Raphael Bellefleur (who came so close—so heartbreakingly close—to political prominence), was incarcerated in the infamous state penitentiary at Powhatassie, there to serve a sentence of life plus 990 years.

He fainted at the sight of its massive walls—fainted and had to be slapped back into consciousness—whimpering, still, that he was innocent, he was innocent of the charges brought against him, a terrible mistake had been made— Yes, yes, the guards chuckled, that’s what you all say.

THE POWHATASSIE STATE
Correctional Facility housed, at the time of Jean-Pierre’s incarceration, about 1,500 men, in a space originally designed for 900. Prisoners customarily fainted or screamed at the sight of its great stone walls, which were slightly over thirty feet high and stretched, so it seemed, for miles, marked at regular intervals by six-sided turrets topped with Gothic cupolas, in which guards armed with carbines and rifles spent their days. The prison, modeled after medieval French prison-castles that had exerted a curious spell, for some reason, on the architect hired by the state to design the facility, was built on a rugged promontory overlooking the dour Powhatassie River, at the very spot at which, according to legend, the water had run red with the blood of Bay Colony pioneers who had ventured too far west and were massacred by Mohawk Indians. Built in the late 1700’s, the prison was in visible decline (everywhere walls were crumbling, exposing rusted iron rods), but possessed, still, the ugly nobility of a medieval fortress; and its huge dining hall, with columns, arches, and heavy wrought-iron grillwork on its windows, reminded poor Jean-Pierre of nothing so much as his grandfather’s pretensions. There was a curious
religious
aura to the horrific place.

He seemed to know beforehand that his appeals—made to the State Supreme Court, and argued faultlessly—were doomed, for he sank almost immediately into a state of apathy, and maintained a Bellefleur detachment from his surroundings that infuriated, at first, his fellow inmates, and certain of the guards. That his first cell was five feet by eight, that the “toilet” was a hole, uncovered, that the food was inedible (indeed, it was indefinable), that he was issued unlaundered clothes several sizes too big for his graceful frame, that his mattress was filthy and infested with bedbugs, and the single cotton blanket issued to him stiff with filth and dried blood—that there were cockroaches and footlong rats everywhere—and the majority of his fellow prisoners were evidently ill, physically or mentally, and sat on their cots or the floor, or walked about, with the spirit of zombies—that since a riot five or six years ago in which seven guards were killed and twelve inmates “committed suicide” the guards were exceptionally cruel: none of this stirred him.

For some time the only emotion he felt was a deep shame—shame that he had been the cause of his family’s fresh humiliation—that it would be many, many years before the Bellefleurs regained their dignity. (As his brother Noel said, weeping with exasperation, the fact that he was innocent somehow made it all the more intolerable. . . . When Harlan was arrested, after all, he
had
been guilty, and very publicly guilty, of several murders, and every word of his, every gesture, must have been enhanced by the noble melancholy of his predicament. He had killed, he had exacted revenge as, indeed, he was forced to—and then he had died. In every respect he had acted heroically. By contrast poor wretched Jean-Pierre, who was
innocent,
was ignominious as a trapped muskrat: his fate was merely outrageous.)

To anyone who would listen, to guards who greeted him with a routine, unmotivated elbow in the chest, Jean-Pierre spoke quietly of his innocence. His manner was courteous and reasonable. He had long given up shouting. If a penitentiary is a place of penitence, he said, and if an innocent man is wrongly incarcerated,
how
can he do penance . . . ? Isn’t the very foundation of the penitentiary undermined by such injustice . . . ? The considerable sums of money Jean-Pierre received each month (which he was later to increase through poker and bridge games in which, occasionally, guards would participate) allowed him to purchase cigarettes, candy, sugar (no sugar was provided by the institution, and cold oatmeal, alternately watery and glutinous—and sometimes dotted with the remains of weevils—was served every morning, every single morning), and other small favors, and naturally he tipped his guards, as he would tip any servant not in his own hire, so the rough treatment gradually stopped; but it was to be some time—in fact, years—before Jean-Pierre would acquire a more spacious cell, for him and his bodyguard-companion (there was to be a series of such young men over the decades, some fifteen or twenty in all: each would be injured or killed by his successor, another husky young ambitious prisoner eager to serve Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II). But it took time for Jean-Pierre to acquire this sort of power, especially because his manner was so subdued, his voice so hollow and seemingly apathetic, and his insistence upon his innocence—which, as the guards remarked, was universal—detracted from his natural distinction. So when he reiterated his plea, his listless comical logic,
If a penitentiary is a place of penance, and if an innocent man is wrongly incarcerated
. . . more than one guard burst into rude laughter, and butted him all the more cruelly in the chest.

(Later, a friendly prisoner warned Jean-Pierre against “talking crazy.” Because if he talked crazy, no matter how quietly, how politely, he might be diagnosed as crazy. And if he was diagnosed as crazy—by a state psychiatrist who visited the prison on alternate Thursdays, in the afternoon, and made judgments and prescribed medicine from his office, going by scribbled reports handed him by prison officials—he would be sent across the yard to the Sheeler Ward; and that would be the end of him. The Sheeler Ward! Jean-Pierre had heard of it: it was named for Dr. Wystan Sheeler, a physician who had taken interest in the mentally ill in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and had prescribed a radical, and sometimes successful, method of dealing with “madness” through sympathetic immersion in the patient’s delusions. Family gossip had it that Dr. Sheeler had attended Raphael Bellefleur for a while, and even lived at the castle. . . . But the Sheeler Ward, which comprised an entire building made of concrete blocks, was simply the hole into which troublesome prisoners—whether “sane” or “insane”—were thrown, and once committed to the ward there was little likelihood that a man would get out. Some years ago a gang of prisoners there had seized a guard, and one of them had torn out his throat with his teeth; and though the prisoners involved in the uprising were, of course, beaten to death by guards, there was still a tradition of punishment in that ward. There was no sanitation, individual cells were no longer used, everyone was kept in a single dormitory room, a vast warehouse of a room, which was unheated, and said to be littered with unspeakable filth. Since the uprising no guard would venture down onto the floor: from time to time they patrolled the ward from a catwalk, and it was from this catwalk that cafeteria workers (gagging, their faces averted, their eyes shut) dumped food once a day, for the men to scramble for. There were men in that ward, Jean-Pierre was told, who were in the tertiary stages of syphilis, quite literally rotting; there was every kind of sickness; and when a man died—which was of course frequent, since the other prisoners were quite vicious—it might be several days before prison officials hauled away the corpse. So, Jean-Pierre’s companion said quietly, you don’t want them to send you
there.
)