Bellefleur (5 page)

Last of all he went to cousin Vernon, who taught the children, sporadically, “poetry” and “elocution,” usually on dark rainy afternoons when his own rambles into the woods were impractical. But Vernon spoke with an ecstatic certainty that disturbed his nephew. I say to you—all things are gods—
all things are God.
The living God is not distinct, my dear confused boy, from His creation.

THE CREEK WAS
dangerous on higher ground, and the lake was rough even on fairly mild days, stirred by underground currents; but Mink Pond was safe. It was safe, it was hidden, it was
his
pond. The other boys had no interest in it. (There were no fish in Mink Pond, only minnows, and not even very many frogs.) Raphael’s brothers and cousins and their friends rowed out onto the lake, or rode on horseback down to the Nautauga, where they could fish for pike and largemouth bass and black bullheads and catfish and perch and satinfin shiners and carp. Why the hell would anyone want to hang around that little pond, they asked Raphael. It isn’t anything more than a drinking hole.

Mink Pond. Raphael’s pond. Where he could hide away for hours, and no one would disturb him. Grandfather Noel spoke of the pond but he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about, his memory must have been confused, because the area beyond the pear orchard was just a marshy soggy meadow where red-winged blackbirds and grouse nested; there was no
pond
there at all.

Why does Grandfather keep talking about the pond with the snapping turtles, Raphael asked his father. There aren’t any snapping turtles. There isn’t any pond where he says.

Your grandfather might be getting things mixed up, Ewan said curtly. He had very little time for the children, even for his favorite, Yolande; he was always hurrying out to check on the tenant farmers, or track down an ailing cow, or drive to Nautauga Falls to meet with someone at the bank. His face was often brick-red with anger he couldn’t speak of because it might mean another quarrel with his younger brother Gideon, and all the children were wise enough to shrink aside when he passed, and never to draw his attention to them at meals. He said to Raphael, sternly: Show respect for your grandfather. Don’t you ever let me hear you mocking your grandfather.

But I wasn’t mocking anyone, Raphael protested.

Mink Pond. Where the very air was gentle with listening. Should he whisper aloud it heard him, it did not question or challenge his words, it was his secret, his alone. He sometimes crouched for hours in the waist-high rushes, watching dragonflies and fisher spiders and whirligig beetles, which were tireless.
That
they existed struck him from time to time as extraordinarily amazing. And
that
he existed in the same world as they . . . His mind drifted free of shore. It skittered across the surface of the water with the insects, or sank slowly to the bottom of the pond, darkening as it sank; but he felt no apprehension with the approach of this darkness, which was so different from the darkness of his room in the manor with its high ceiling and drafty windows and odor of dust and anger. Is there anything in the world you love more than that pond of yours, Raphael’s mother Lily asked him, stooping to kiss his warm forehead, not guessing the truth that lay hidden in her words: just as the leopard frogs lay hidden in the grasses at the very edge of the pond, and leapt noisily into the water when he approached.

YET IT HAPPENED,
one cold October afternoon within a week of Mahalaleel’s arrival at the manor, that Raphael nearly drowned in his pond.

Nearly
was
drowned, that is. For he was set upon, as he lay dreaming on his raft, by a boy named Johnny Doan whom he hardly knew.

The Doan boy was fifteen years old, from a family of eight children who lived on a five-acre farm several miles south of the main Bellefleur property, on the outskirts of the little village of Bellefleur (which was hardly more than a railroad depot and a few stores, since the granary had closed down). Many years ago the Doans—women and children as well as men—labored in Raphael Bellefleur’s enormous hop fields; indeed, they were brought to the Nautauga Valley for that reason, along with other workers, and housed in barracks-style buildings with tin roofs and only the most rudimentary kind of plumbing, at the edge of the fields. At one time, at Raphael’s peak, he employed more than three hundred workers, and drew a crop from over six hundred acres—it was said in the state (not altogether truthfully) that the Bellefleur hop plantation was the largest in the world at that time. Raphael himself took pride in the quality of his hops, which he claimed was far more subtle than that of hops planted on lower ground (in Germany, for instance), and in the discipline with which his foremen treated the workers. I am not here on earth to be loved, he frequently told his wife Violet, but to be respected. And so indeed he was not loved by his workers, or even by his foremen, or managers, or distributors, or associates, or the three or four other extraordinarily wealthy landowners in the Chautauquas—but he was certainly respected.

Hop-growing days in the Valley were long past, but a considerable number of the descendants of the Bellefleur workers were scattered throughout the region. Some worked at the big canning factories in Nautauga Falls and Fort Hanna, where tomatoes, pickles, peas, and various citrus fruits underwent processing; the Bellefleur family owned part of Valley Products, the largest company. Some worked at odd jobs and seasonal labor, and could always rely upon welfare and unemployment insurance in the cities, while a number had done fairly well for themselves, acquiring over the years small farms of their own—though these farms did not generally encompass the richest valley land, which was owned by the Bellefleurs or the Steadmans or the Fuhrs. Some of the descendants of Raphael Bellefleur’s workers were now under contract to Noel Bellefleur and his sons, as tenant farmers; or they worked in sawmills and granaries in Innisfail and Fort Hanna; or, like the Doans, they hired themselves out for harvesting, or fruit picking, or day labor of one kind or another (the digging of irrigation ditches, the construction of outbuildings), though Gideon Bellefleur preferred to import workers from the South, or from Canada, or even from one of the Indian reservations, since he had come to the conclusion recently that local labor could not be relied upon. If a worker did not work a full day, he would not receive a full day’s wage.
A man who contracts to do a job and doesn’t pull his own weight is a common thief,
Gideon often said. The Doans also tried to make a living from their scrubby little farm, growing wheat, corn, sickly-looking soybeans, and raising a small herd of cows. They had no idea of how to keep the topsoil from drying out and blowing away, or perhaps they had no interest in such things, so naturally their farm was turning to dust and in another few years they would be unable to pay their mortgage and the farm and the farm equipment (such as it was) and the house (a two-story shingle-board shanty with a tarpaper roof, and bales of hay dragged untidily up against the cement-block foundation, for warmth over the long winters) would be sold at auction, and the Doans would disappear into one of the cities to the south, perhaps Nautauga Falls, or Port Oriskany, and no one would hear of them again. . . .

Johnny Doan was the third of five boys, and despite the poor diet of fatty meat and starches and refined sugar Mrs. Doan fed them he had grown to the size of a mature man by the age of fifteen. His wide shoulders were always slumped, and he carried his rather small head somewhat forward, so that he appeared to be staring suspiciously into the dirt. He lazed about his father’s farm, dull-eyed, weasel-faced, his pale limp hair falling across his forehead, a filthy gray cotton cap with the initials
IH
(International Harvester) loosely set upon his head. Whenever anyone outside the family greeted him he revealed tobacco-stained teeth in a quick, half-mocking smile, but he never replied; it was thought by some that he liked to play dumb, and by others that he was slightly retarded. Of course he had been allowed to quit the county school at the age of thirteen, in order to work for his father.

But he did not work for his father regularly. Nor did his older brothers. They drove about the countryside, when they could afford gas. They took odd jobs, but quit after receiving the first week’s wages. In his dirty bib overalls, shirtless, sometimes barefoot, or wearing old mud-splattered boots, Johnny Doan was a familiar figure in the village of Bellefleur; and he was sometimes sighted along country roads some miles from home, simply walking, alone, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his undersized head slightly bowed. Answering a complaint made by the father of a child attending the small public school in Bellefleur, the sheriff of Nautauga County drove out to the Doans’ one Sunday afternoon, and spoke with Johnny and his father (about, it was said, Johnny’s bullying of younger children), and after that Johnny rarely appeared in the village, though he was seen as frequently as ever walking the country roads, cutting through pastures, squatting by the sides of ditches, utterly alone, companionless, the gray cap perched atop his head, his expression flaccid and content. Hello, Johnny, a friend of Mr. 
Doan’s
might call out heartily, d’you want a ride somewhere?—are you going somewhere?—
slowing
his car or pick-up truck so that Johnny might catch up. But the stained teeth showed themselves in an empty grin, and the blank brown eyes kept themselves blank, and Johnny never condescended to accept a ride. It might have been the case that he hadn’t any destination.

One afternoon he threw the pitchfork down in the manure of the puddled barnyard, and walked away. Trotted away. Through his father’s scrubby pastureland where outcroppings of rock jarred the eye, through a neighbor’s cornfield, where dried stalks rustled with his passage, along a clayey dirt road lifting into the foothills. It was not the child Raphael Bellefleur he intended to injure, and not even the Bellefleur girls he wanted to spy upon—pretty Yolande, pretty Vida!—and Gideon Bellefleur’s wife, the one with the red-brown hair and the squarish chin and the high, heavy breasts, yes,
that
one!—nor did he want to encounter the Bellefleur boys, whom he wisely feared. It was the castle he wanted to see. He had seen it several times already, and he wanted to see it again. And the lake. All of the Bellefleur property was posted against trespassers and he wanted to trespass and so he trotted along through fields of wild grass and beggarweed and broom sedge and willow bushes, changing himself into a dog, his tongue lolling, his head carried slightly forward so that his shoulders hunched. It was a bright chilly October day. He came to Mink Creek and followed it downstream for a while, not wanting to get his paws wet; fearing the swift current; excited by the hilly land on the other side. At last he came to a shallow bend, where Bellefleur children had placed large flat stepping-stones, and so he trotted across, and leapt to the other side. He was a long-tailed yellowish creature, part hound and part beagle. His tongue was a moist pink, his gums were a very dark grape. His teeth were stained brown but were still quite sharp.

Bellefleur Cemetery atop a grassy overgrown hill. A wrought-iron fence, badly rusted. A pretentious wrought-iron gate, its bottom spikes stuck in the earth, unmoved for years. He lifted his left hind leg and urinated on the gate, then trotted inside and urinated on the first of the gravestones. Marble, angels, crosses, granite, moss and lichen and a small jungle of ferns. Earthenware crockery set atop graves. The dried carcasses of plants, flowers. He sniffed at a large square marker with a perfectly smooth, gleaming front and rough, irregular edges; but of course he could not read the legend. The long grasses stirred. There were hoarse whispers, there were muffled shouts. He was frightened but would not bolt. His shoulders lifted slightly, his nose sank to the ground, the skin over his prominent ribs rippled, but he would not bolt, the Bellefleurs would not scare him away. Instead he trotted deliberately to what looked like a small house: a temple some fifteen feet high, with four columns, and angels and crosses carved about its border, and another legend in foot-high letters which he could not read and did not wish to read, knowing it said no more than
Bellefleur,
and bragged of someone dead who would be resurrected. Johnny paused for a long minute to inspect a queer stunted figure with the head of a dog—was it a dog?—was the thing an
angel?
—guarding the entrance to the temple. He sniffed at it, and then lifted his hind leg again, and trotted contemptuously on.

Near one of the freshest mounds he kicked over several clay urns, which broke into large startled pieces. He seized a tiny flag, an American flag, in his teeth, and tried to shred it. You see what I can do, he said. You see what the Doans can do. With one of the clay shards he tried to scratch his name on an ebony-black gravestone but the clay wasn’t sharp enough. He would need a chisel, and a hammer. . . .

You see what the Doans can do!

But suddenly he was frightened. He didn’t know if he had spoken aloud or not. It was difficult for him to determine what was shouted, what was whispered, what was only shaped in his own thoughts, silently, and maybe the Bellefleurs were listening, maybe one of their hired men was patrolling the cemetery and would fire upon him . . . ? The land was forbidden land as everyone knew. It was posted against all trespassers and there was a rumor that the Bellefleur boys shot at intruders with .22’s, just for the fun of it; and the county court would never convict them, the sheriff would never even arrest them. . . .

He was frightened and angry too. First the wave of fear, and then a stronger wave of anger. He pushed at one of the old crosses; but he could not dislodge it. It was so
old,
the dates were 1853–1861, they meant nothing to him, really, except that the body beneath the sunken earth must be nothing more than bones, just lying there helpless gazing up at him, nothing more than bones, he giggled, exhilarated, and lifted his leg again to urinate. They said there were spirits but he didn’t believe in spirits. He didn’t believe in spirits in the daytime, and when the sky was clear.