Bellefleur (73 page)

Germaine, watching through a front window, saw her husband ride off, and her daughter, poor ungainly Arlette, standing for a while in the road, amid the puddles, bare-headed, somewhat stooped, her fingers twitching. She may have been crying: her back was to the house and Germaine couldn’t see.

Of the three children, Arlette, the youngest, was the most difficult: they called her “high-strung.” She endured her older brothers’ teasing, and her grandfather’s well-intentioned affectionate bullying; she obviously loved, and was deeply embarrassed by, her father (he was so loud and blustery, even in the close confines of the kitchen, on a snowy day, and of course he drank, and was always quarreling and even fighting, with his fists, with men like himself; and the queer half-frozen look of his face, paralyzed on one side, so that he never had more than
half
a smile, was excruciatingly embarrassing to Arlette); though she fought, alternately sardonic and tearful, with her mother, and seemed unable, since the age of thirteen, to bear her mother’s mere
presence,
Germaine was inclined to think that it was just her age: it would pass: she was a good girl, not at all malicious, and in a few years, maybe after she married, or after she had her first baby, she would get over being so high-strung and come around to being . . . a sweet affectionate sensible daughter.

(But in the meantime, how difficult she was! The tantrum in the stable, and out on the road; plucking at her father’s sleeve so that he had to swat her away; actually screaming at him, her face gone red and her eyes dilated, as if she had a
right,
an actual
right,
to behave like this with her father. She frequently exclaimed in disgust that she was ashamed of her grandfather—yes, he had made a great deal of money, and now he was famous for owning half of the
Nautauga Gazette
(where some of his own
pensées,
on horses, were appearing frequently), and everyone respected him, or at least feared him; but she couldn’t forgive him for the Indian woman with whom he lived, when he was in the area, and whom he had actually brought home—to
their
home—several times, without apology. She couldn’t forgive him for the way he favored his grandsons over her (though at the same time she couldn’t have endured his “grandfatherly” attentions either, his teasing about her figure, or her hair that looked, on certain days, like a “pickaninny’s.”) It was probable that she admired her brothers, Jacob especially, for he most resembled their father, but they were frequently quarreling, like all brothers and sisters, and in any case neither Jacob nor Bernard had much time for her. She was most ashamed of her uncle Jedediah. She had never met him, of course, for he had gone off into the mountains before her birth, but she loved, with a disdainful fastidiousness, to ask Germaine and Louis about him. There were always stories about Jedediah, told at the country schoolhouse, or brought home by Louis who, half-amused, half-contemptuous, repeated them, often with embellishments: sometimes Jedediah was sighted, ghostlike, in the mountains, clad in animal skins, with a long gray-white beard, and a cadaverous face, and “piercing” eyes. He was a prophet out of the Old Testament. Then again, he was quite simply loony—he didn’t, as the saying went, deal with a full deck—but he wasn’t any more crazy, probably, than most of the mountain hermits of local legend. At other times he was sighted, people claimed, upriver, at Powhatassie or as far away as Vanderpoel, again clad in fur (but these were fine furs—mink, or fox, or beaver—fashioned for him by an expert furrier), obviously wealthy from his dealings in skins, on his way toward being another John Jacob Astor, perhaps: a handsome man in the prime of life, usually accompanied by a beautiful woman, who did no more than stare blankly, without recognition, at the scruffy Lake Noir men who gazed after him in the street, too awed to call out: Bellefleur! Aren’t you a Bellefleur! . . . Then again he was a cranky, troublesome eccentric who never left the Mount Blanc area and whom no one (except Mack Henofer) had seen for years: it was he, surely, who was responsible for the sabotage of so many traplines that trappers now avoided his territory. He was raving mad, or then again he was simply mean-spirited; he lived with an Indian woman; or he lived alone on the side of a mountain no one could traverse. He subsisted on potatoes. He ate raccoons and squirrels raw. He was deathly sick. He was tall and muscular and in superb health. . . . But no one had seen him for years except Henofer, and now that Henofer was dead (he had been found, his body badly decomposed, at the bottom of a ravine near his cabin, his shotgun beside him, one barrel fired) it was likely that no one would ever see Jedediah again. It was even possible that he had died.)

DESPITE LOUIS’S FRANTIC
intervention, and the audacity with which (not unarmed, for he was never unarmed in public: but he knew better than to show his pistol) he shouted at the men to release the Indian boy—despite his ill-advised courage in continuing to follow them on horseback, out to the edge of the village, when it was obvious that they were not only not going to be persuaded by him or by his threats but were positively goaded on by him, as by Charles Xavier’s terror, and the presence of awed, excited witnesses—some of them women and children; and despite the fact that the men (Rabin, the Varrells, three or four others, and poor sweating grinning Wiley who was conducting, on horseback, a “trial,” even to the point of attempting to cross-examine the bleeding, stupefied boy as he was dragged along behind Rabin’s horse, barbed wire twined about his chest, pulled snug against his armpits) were all going to be guilty of murder—murder in the first degree, as Louis yelled: despite all this Charles Xavier was doomed, as Louis’s wife had known he would be without leaving her kitchen. He was doomed, jabbering and sobbing with terror, as oblivious of Louis Bellefleur’s attempt to save him as he was of Herbert Wiley’s conducting of a somewhat truncated trial. The men, drunken and gleeful and so excited their hands trembled, and moisture darted out of the corners of their eyes, tossed the rope over the thick limb of the oak tree and brought the noose down around Charles Xavier’s dark head just as Wiley, panting, pronounced the verdict: Guilty as charged!
Guilty as charged.

THERE WAS A
certain photograph in a certain book in Raphael Bellefleur’s study which the children gazed upon, in silence, sometimes sticking their fingers in their mouths: for what was there to say,
what
was there to feel? It was not a photograph they cared to examine in one another’s presence, for it was too shameful—too embarrassing—and someone was likely to burst into silly frightened laughter—and perhaps one of the adults would come running, or one of the ubiquitous servants. So they studied it in secret. Over the years. One by one, at odd times, tiptoeing into the library when no one was around, their faces flushed. Even Yolande had looked at it, aghast, and quickly closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, in its special place; even Christabel; and Bromwell (who might have had it in mind, or beneath the threshold of his mind, when he decided to turn away from the fleshiness of history to the cold purities of space); even young Raphael, who stared with his dark melancholy gravity and seemed not to judge, never to wish to judge, anything human. And in her time of course Germaine was shown the photograph, by one of aunt Aveline’s children.

It showed, with surprising clarity, a group of some forty-six men circled about, but standing well back from, the flaming body of what had been, according to the caption, a “Negro youth.” The men were, of course, all white, and they ranged in ages from about sixteen to sixty; there was a single child, peeping at the body as if he’d never seen anything so astonishing, so
bright.
A number of the men were staring at the blazing body (which was naked, very dark, partly obscured across its legs by burning boards and trash), some were staring at the camera. Most of the expressions were fairly serious though some were oddly bland, even bored, and others were quite jovial: a gentleman in the left foreground, with a showy zebra-stripe necktie and an umbrella, was grinning proudly for the camera, one hand upraised in a salute. The caption said
Lynching death of a Negro youth, Blawenburg, New York.
No date was given. No photographer’s credit was given. The lynching must have taken place on a winter day because all the men wore jackets or coats, and hats—they all wore hats, without exception: fedoras, railroad caps, sailors’ caps, even what appeared to be a bowler, dented at the crown. None of the men wore glasses. None of the men wore beards. It was a strange picture. Then again, if you studied it long enough, it was a very familiar picture. The blazing body was a blazing body but the men assembled about it were just men.

Mount Ellesmere

B
romwell, sent downstate to an expensive and allegedly prestigious boarding school for boys, began writing letters of complaint home almost as soon as classes started in late September. His instructors, he charged, were either well intentioned and ignorant, or deliberately malicious and ignorant. The studies he was forced to take were irrelevant, and presented in textbooks of an alarmingly simple-minded nature. The dining hall food might or might not be adequate—he hardly tasted it, not caring about food—but his living quarters were cramped and he was
forced
(that it was said to be for his own good made him all the more furious) to have a roommate, a rubber-faced, six-foot-tall illiterate whose only interests were football and pornographic magazines. The other boys—well, what was there to say about
boys?
Bromwell thought them not much more savage and infantile than his cousins, but it was difficult for him to avoid their company, as he had managed, since early childhood, to avoid the company of his cousins. For one thing, he had to room with that creature; he had to sit beside others in classes, in the dining hall, and at chapel; he had to participate in athletic activities, despite his delicate frame and his hypersensitivity and the fact that his glasses, though taped to his head, were always flying off. (But it was part of a boy’s education, at New Hazelton Academy, that the body be challenged and subjected to stress as well as the mind. Yes, the headmaster knew, yes, he knew very well, he knew from painful personal experience—for he too had attended New Hazelton, many years ago, and he too had been physically weak, as he assured the angry, tearful Bromwell at each of their several meetings; sports
could
be difficult, but the lessons about life they imparted to a boy were invaluable. In later life Bromwell would agree, surely.)
I am surrounded by brutes and their slavish apologists,
Bromwell wrote home.

Part of the problem was that Bromwell was extremely young—only eleven and a half—and all the other boys were older by several years. (The boys’ ages ranged from fourteen to eighteen; there was even a nineteen-year-old, a slack-jawed sadistic ox, who either could not manage to graduate, or did not wish to graduate.) Even for his age Bromwell was undersized, though his fair brown hair that looked, in certain lights, as if it were shading into silver, and his stern, rather censorious expression, and his glasses, gave him the air of a forty-year-old. Despite his physical size and the frequency of the other boys’ bullying he could not seem to resist, especially in the classroom, murmuring sarcastic comments when they displayed their ignorance; he was not even able to keep to himself (though surely it would have been politic to do so) his amused incredulity as his instructors’ blunders. But do you
want
to be so rigorously disliked by your peers, the headmaster asked, and Bromwell replied, after a moment, in a startled voice: Is being liked or not being liked important? Is it something other people think about . . . ? I must say, I have never considered it.

Everything about the school vexed him though he realized, as he said in his letters to Leah, that he couldn’t remain at home: he
couldn’t
endure those embarrassing tutorial sessions with uncle Hiram, and of course it was out of the question for him to attend the local school, or even the public school in Nautauga Falls. So he would try, he would try. . . . He would try to accommodate himself to the school’s idiotic schedule (the boys were roused by clanging bells each weekday morning at 7:00 
A.M.
and were allowed to sleep until eight on weekends; “lights out” was at 10:30 
P.M.
every day except Fridays and Saturdays, when they might stay up until 11:30; if a boy did not march into the dining room with the others in his corridor, if he came in even a minute late, alone, he was turned away from his table; and of course they all had to attend—what primitive folly!—chapel).

No concessions were made to his repeated pleas that he be allowed to stay up as late as he wished, in the laboratory (which was shamefully inadequate) or the library (which was even more shamefully inadequate: the worst of it was, his own books were still in their crates, unpacked, in the school’s damp basement, because there wasn’t “enough room” for them elsewhere). He craved, with an almost physical desire, to stay up through the night . . . to know that his was the only consciousness, the only thinking consciousness, in the building . . . and as a consequence he lay awake until two or three in the morning, quite miserable, his mind beset by mathematical problems and astronomical speculations until he felt he might go mad.

Do you want me, Mother,
he inquired politely,
to go mad? Is that part of your design?

But Leah rarely answered his letters. She sent him his allowance, and usually scribbled a few words of a cheerful or innocuous nature (telling him nothing, even, about Christabel: the last news he had, she and her lover were being pursued by two separate teams of detectives, Schaff’s and the family’s, and had been traced to Mexico), making no reference to his queries.

He wrote to Gideon, and to grandfather Noel; he even wrote to his cousin Raphael, whom he
almost
missed—though he suspected that if he were back home, Raphael’s moodiness would soon bore him. He complained that the athletic activities he was forced to endure were destroying him. During a recent basketball game, for instance, the boys had repeatedly thrown the basketball at
him,
right at his face, regardless of the fact that the referee was blowing his whistle like mad, and Bromwell’s nose was dripping blood (his glasses, of course, had been knocked off immediately, and were—again—cracked); when at last, after great hesitation, he had ventured out to the end of the diving board, trembling with cold, a boy had rushed past him to dive into the pool, giving him a playful shove with the flat of his hand, and he’d fallen, sideways, to everyone’s amusement, and so badly slapped his side, and filled his head with water, that he had nearly drowned. Yet these events were always called accidents, or instances of his classmates’ high spirits. . . . Most distressing of all, Bromwell complained, was the fact that
Bellefleur
was so frequently whispered about. At the start of the term some of the older boys barged into his room, throwing themselves on his bed, eager to make friends; they had heard all sorts of things about his family, up there at Lake Noir, didn’t the Bellefleurs own racing horses, weren’t they mixed up in politics, weren’t they wealthy, hadn’t there been murderers in the family, and someone sent away to prison . . . ? Meeting Bromwell, then, had been a considerable disappointment.