Bellefleur (56 page)

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things
. . .

—yet for some reason, when Raphael was about eleven years old, they became estranged. Of course it was all on the boy’s side: Vernon had never ceased loving
him.
But the boy rose early and slipped away before breakfast, and spent all his time at the pond north of the cemetery (Mink Pond, it was called, though another pond, now dried up, had once been called Mink Pond), and when Vernon hiked out there to be with him he could feel how unwelcome he was: how, as he approached the pond’s marshy reedy willow-choked bank, and caught sight of the boy lying stomach-down on his raft, staring into the water, he was clumsily violating the child’s privacy, the child’s very soul. It was, he thought, sadly, like tramping heedlessly on a bird’s wing . . . Raphael lingered about the pond until after sunset, and then only reluctantly came home; even in the rain he played there; even on uncomfortably cold days. (What does he
do
for so many hours, Lily asked in exasperation, wondering if the boy needed a doctor’s care, or simply a good spanking, and Vernon said, somewhat arrogantly, What do any of us
do
—?) But he had lost Raphael and would never reclaim him. Now there was only Germaine: Germaine, that sturdy red-cheeked beauty with the amazing, uncanny eyes, and Garnet’s baby Cassandra, who was of course far too young, still, to appreciate Vernon’s devotion. And someday, he supposed, he would lose Germaine and Cassandra too.

And then there was Leah.

Leah—“Lara”—his Muse—his inspiration—his folly.

Ewan had asked rudely if Vernon had ever performed the act of love with a woman; he had not asked if Vernon had ever
loved
a woman. Surely there was an important distinction. He had fallen in love with Gideon’s young wife on the very day of the wedding, at the wedding party, as he gazed with longing at the dancers—at his cousin Gideon and Gideon’s bride—magnificent Leah Pym—Leah from across the lake—Della Pym’s daughter—one of the “poor” Bellefleurs. (Poor out of pride, it was said. For Della could certainly have lived in the castle had she wished.) He had loved her then and had been, over the years, content to love her at arm’s length, like a courtier of old, reading in her presence (though not, alas, always with her attentive ear) poems of longing, his own and others’,
With how sad steps O moon,
and “Greensleeves,” and the tender, clumsy, assonance-heavy “Lara” sonnets; eager to do errands for her, to mind the children, to listen sympathetically as she complained of Cornelia’s tyranny. But Leah was, in recent months, not always an inspiration. The gross but marvelous physicality of her pregnancy had somewhat unnerved him—he had discovered, then, that Leah in his imagination was sometimes lovelier than Leah in the flesh—but the Leah of the present was more extreme. Her glittering eyes disturbed him, and her fingers smudged with newsprint (for she read, each morning at breakfast, several papers), and her quick wit, her manner of addressing Hiram, even in Vernon’s presence, in a language so studded with private allusions and financial terms and abbreviations of one kind or another that it constituted, nearly, a code—a code poor Vernon could not hope to decipher, and which caused him pain. And she was frequently imperious. Hoarse-voiced, and then shrill. Sending back the tea things because a single cup was cracked, or the tea wasn’t hot enough, or there was an indentation—“Suspiciously like a thumbnail!”—in the icing on a piece of coffee cake. (Isn’t she terrible, the servants whispered, sometimes in tears. Isn’t she full of herself! And such was their distress that they frequently spoke in voices loud enough for Vernon to hear.)

Of course she was still beautiful. She would always be, Vernon knew, beautiful. Despite the fact that the soft plump placidity of her face had thinned slightly so that near-invisible lines showed about her eyes, ghostlines, really, not seriously imprinted in the flesh, and visible only in harsh bright sunlight. . . . (She had lost a considerable amount of weight after her pregnancy, and continued to lose it. For she was always rushing from place to place—the state capitol, Vanderpoel, the Falls, Port Oriskany, Derby, Yewville, Powhatassie, even New York City—and even at home she rarely relaxed, as she had in the old days, in the walled garden or Violet’s boudoir. Even sprawled exhausted in a chair she was thinking, thinking, planning, plotting, her mind turning and turning about like a windmill blade, giving off a nearly palpable heat. Vernon had actually glimpsed her, once, through the partly open door of Raphael’s study, talking over
two
telephones, a receiver tightly couched against each of her hunched shoulders!) But Leah would always be a beautiful woman, Vernon told himself, sighing a lover’s sigh of resignation, and he would always love her; and she would always belong to another man.

HE WANDERED IN
the Lake Noir area, and in the foothills, gone sometimes for a week or ten days, tramping the fields and lanes and riverbanks in his muddy, leaking shoes, wearing on his head a cast-off rubber rainhat of Noel’s, or a cast-off Irish hat of Ewan’s he had found on the floor of a closet. With his straggly graying beard he looked decades older than he was, like a figure out of mythology, or out of the mountain mists, an incongruous red scarf tied about his neck, his trousers stained at the knee, his jackets sometimes baggy, sometimes tight, sometimes not even
his.
Aunt Matilde had knitted him a wonderful bulky sweater heavy as a coat, with generous-sized pockets for his books and papers and pens, and she had sewn on wooden buttons she’d carved herself, out of hickory wood; but one day he returned to the manor without it, shivering like a fool in the rain, and claimed that he could not—
could
not—remember what had happened to it. (A man who loses an article of clothing he is wearing, Hiram intoned, will eventually lose everything.)

So he wandered, always on foot. Eccentric, probably not “crazy” (for there were far crazier people in the hills), probably not dangerous. He was never to encounter, in his years of wandering, his cousin Emmanuel—by now an almost legendary, improbable figure, about whom the other Bellefleurs rarely spoke, as if they had forgotten he was a brother of Gideon’s and Ewan’s, and had come to think of him as remote in time, like Raphael’s son Rodman, about whom so little was known: though presumably Emmanuel was still mapping the region, covering every acre on foot, and would one day return home in triumph. With his mismatched eyes (which always surprised and amused children, but sometimes made adults uneasy) and his untidy appearance and his “poesy” Vernon came to be famous in the region; of course he was also known as a Bellefleur, and given a wide berth. Farmers driving pick-up trucks along the country roads he traveled slowed courteously as they passed him, never offering him a ride (for to
offer
a Bellefleur anything might be interpreted as impertinence, coming from a social inferior, and everyone lived in dread of offending or insulting the Bellefleurs: Ewan had injured a number of men in fights, as had Gideon; and Raoul’s temper had been legendary; Noel had been a hellion in his day; Hiram, in some ways the most sinister of the Bellefleurs, had exercised his kind of power decades ago by buying up, at dismayingly cheap prices, land belonging to farmers who had been forced into bankruptcy; and of course there had been Jean-Pierre II who had murdered eleven men one night, quite calmly and methodically, because of an “insult” he had overheard), though they were quick to stop if Vernon indicated he wanted a ride. And quick to allow him to sleep in their haylofts, or to help with farm chores (though he was almost comically clumsy) in exchange for meals. They liked Vernon—they liked
him
—however they may have felt about his family—and could forgive him his doggerel-poetry which he imagined, poor fool, would someday save the world. And if he spoke of a farmer’s kindness, back at the castle, perhaps one of the harder-hearted Bellefleurs would overhear. . . .

JUST AS THE
Bellefleurs were sharply divided on the subject of religion—more specifically, on the subject of
God
—so were they divided on the related subject of the existence of Evil. Whether Evil “existed” or whether it only appeared to exist, from a necessarily limited point of view; whether it certainly
did
exist, and existed for a purpose (inevitably divine in scope if not in sentiment); whether there was no Evil, but a small galaxy of evils, each contending for its share of human flesh; whether Evil was simply the palpable absence of Good (thought to be the laziest of the arguments); whether, given a universe dominated by spirit, the only significant Evil could be spiritual; or, conversely, whether the only significant Evil could be material, given the fundamental material nature of the universe . . . so the Bellefleurs argued, sometimes quite passionately, sometimes with a lamentable lack of civility, and not only failed to convince one another but, by way of their very passion, closed their minds against those subtleties, however infrequent, which might have aided their intellectual growth. (Indeed, the spirit of contention was sometimes thought to be the essential curse of the Bellefleurs—for isn’t it out of contention that all evils spring?)

Pious and good-natured, and stubborn, Vernon considered himself a henotheist, or perhaps a pantheist; what mattered, he reasoned, was not the
content
of one’s belief but its
depth.
Since his God encompassed and swallowed up everything, every particle of matter—the filigree of synapses in that masterwork of cunning, the human brain; the speckled boxlike armor of the trunkfish; the screech of planing mills, Germaine’s happy smile, his mother’s tearful farewell, the splendor of Mount Blanc and the rank gloomy silence of Noir Swamp—since his God was identical with His creation, there could be nothing left over, no room for laborious theorizing. The pulses sang as pulses have always sung
Here I am, I am here by right, I exist, and the spirit of all creation through me,
and the wise man, and certainly the poet, echoes this song. (But there is a God of Destruction, too, Gideon said one day to Vernon, years ago, when members of the family still took Vernon seriously enough to quarrel with him, come and I will show you. . . . And dragged him away to the witchhobble-choked foot of Sugarloaf Hill where in angry boyish triumph he showed Vernon a partly eaten doe. The poor thing had been pregnant, evidently—her belly had been torn open by dogs—her throat so crudely slashed that she had bled to death—forced to watch (and her affrighted eyes, not yet picked clean by birds, were open and fixed) the horror of the dogs’ greedy devouring jaws. She had died while witnessing the death of her fetus. And the dogs hadn’t been especially hungry, Gideon said, look at all they’ve left. . . . Vernon gagged, and backed away; could not stop himself from vomiting, though he felt his cousin’s excited contempt. But when he recovered he said, Gideon, the dogs must be nourished . . . we eat, and are eaten . . . don’t despair. Gideon had stared at him. What do you mean, what do
you
mean, don’t despair! Don’t judge, Vernon whispered. Don’t despair. But Gideon had looked at him uncomprehendingly, as, years later, the child Raphael was to look at him after having asked him a question about leeches. Don’t despair, don’t judge, don’t set yourself apart from God so that you are forced to judge, Vernon implored Gideon, trying to take his angry cousin’s arm. Don’t touch me, Gideon said.)

The family was also divided, though not as decisively, on the subject of certain more immediate beliefs. Uncle Hiram did not believe in spirits, but his brother Noel did; most of the children believed in the giant snowman in the mountains, and in the Swamp Vulture, or Noir Vulture, as it was sometimes called (indeed, it was sometimes called the Bellefleur Vulture, by people in the area), and most of the adults—though certainly not
all
of the adults—did not. That there were Bellefleurs who claimed to have seen the enormous bird, up in the mountains, or circling the swamp, seemed to inspire, in the others, only amused contempt: All the more reason for knowing the thing is a hoax, Della once declared, if that pathological liar
Noel
claims to have seen it.

Bromwell maintained a scientific detachment, pointing out, pedantically, but quite correctly, that a
vulture
would not seize living prey, a
carrion-eater
would not kill and devour living things; hence the Noir Vulture, if it existed at all (and he had no opinion on that subject, and would never commit himself, even after that unfortunate June morning) was misnamed. But no one paid attention to him, for it seemed somehow pointless to quibble about a mere name, when the thing itself was such a horror.

Vernon would not have said he “believed” in the vulture, had he been asked, before the creature actually appeared in the walled garden (of all places!—of all secluded, private,
secret
places) since, to his knowledge, he had never seen such a bird, and he thought it wisest to minimize the children’s fears. Yet when he caught sight of it with its naked, red head, its incongruously white feathers (tipped with black as if with a tar brush), and its curious pronged tail, he knew at once what it must be. . . . Even before he saw the baby gripped in its talons he began to shout.
Look! That thing! Stop it! Get a gun!
—for so Vernon’s words were torn from him, at the mere sight of the hideous creature.

But of course there was nothing to be done. The baby was lost. As women’s screams lifted from the garden the bird rose higher and higher, with a noisy muscular grace, already jabbing at the helpless prey in its claws—
tearing
and stabbing at it with its sharp beak—so that pieces of flesh and skeins of blood fell, it seemed almost lightly, back toward earth; like laundry flapping in the wind the Noir Vulture rose above the highest branches of the oak trees, an astonishing sight on that mildest of pale blue June days, bearing the baby away as if it were no more than a rabbit or chipmunk.