Bellefleur (90 page)

His mother Germaine, in a shapeless black dress, twisting and pleating her skirt as she spoke. . . .

Raphael wondered: Did she look over to the defendants’ table, did she look upon them, her family’s murderers . . . No doubt she would have found them, in the stark light from the courtroom’s high windows, quite ordinary men; diminished as much by their surroundings as by their guilt. Or did she keep her gaze stonily averted throughout the many days of the trial. . . .

Yes, I recognized them, yes, I knew them, my husband’s and my children’s murderers. Yes, they are in this courtroom.

THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE
at Nautauga Falls boasted a sandstone façade and four “Greek” columns; it overlooked a handsome square, and the old county jail, at the square’s opposite end. The courthouse was, for its time, a spacious building, and accommodated more than two hundred spectators for what was known variously as the Bellefleur trial, and the Varrell trial, and the Lake Noir trial. (The Lake Noir district with its innumerable unsolved crimes—theft, arson, murder—had been notorious from the time of its first settlement in the mid-1700’s; and though the Bellefleur murders were considered excessive, and particularly hideous because of the fact that children were involved, the public, and the downstate newspaper reporters, tended to see them as representative of the region’s lawlessness—brutal, barbaric, but unsurprising.)

Crowded into the courtroom’s pewlike seats were friends and neighbors of the Bellefleurs, and friends and neighbors and relatives of the Varrells, and others from the area who had not precisely chosen sides; and innumerable strangers—some having come to the Falls in horsedrawn wagons, others in handsome carriages. The poor had brought their own food and ate it outside in the square, despite the cold; wealthier parties were staying at the Nautauga House and the Gould Inn, or drove downtown from their estates on the Lakeshore Boulevard, curious to see the Bellefleur woman and the men, the dreadful men, who had murdered her husband and children. (Some of the well-to-do spectators had known, in their time, old Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, though few of them would have admitted it.) That a woman should be a witness to such horror, and yet survive. . . .

Poor
Germaine Bellefleur.

That
wretched
woman.

Newspaper sketches of Germaine Bellefleur showed a dark-eyed, staring, profoundly somber woman in her mid- or late thirties, with a somewhat thick jaw, and premature creases bracketing her mouth. She was not, opinion had it, pretty. Perhaps at one time, but not now: decidedly not now: wasn’t there even something stubborn and bulldoglike about the set of her mouth, and her eyes’ narrowed expression? Called to the witness stand, seated in the chair on its high platform, she looked smaller of build than she was, and her voice, faltering, had a nasal, sexless ring; it was decidedly unmelodic, and cost her sympathy. As she answered the prosecutor’s interminable questions, and, afterward, the defense attorney’s interminable badgering questions, it was observed how she twisted and pleated the skirt of her unflattering dress, and stared at the floor, as if
she
were the guilty party. . . . (The newspaper reporters were disappointed not only in Mrs. Bellefleur’s appearance, which lacked feminine grace, but in her testimony as well: it was so obviously
rehearsed.
For of course Mrs. Bellefleur, as well as the murderers themselves, and most of the witnesses, would not have dared speak in such a place, before a judge and jurors and so many spectators, without having memorized, like school children, their every word—with the consequence, as one correspondent for a Vanderpoel paper said wittily, that everyone, Mrs. Bellefleur as well as the accused murderers, and their neighbors, struck outside observers as belonging to one large dull-witted family, with the intellectual skills and manners of brain-damaged sheep. How graceless they all were!)

Backcountry people. Hill people. “Poor whites.” (Despite the fact of the Bellefleurs’ vast property holdings, and Jean-Pierre’s numerous investments.) There was old Rabin with his sunken cheeks and near-toothless gums, his face wrinkled as a prune, and
so
ugly; and the Varrell men in the first suits and neckties they had ever worn—Reuben and Wallace and Silas, looking sick—and the boy Myron, who looked, now, not much older than seventeen, gazing about the courtroom with a vacuous half-smile. Old Rabin and the Varrells and Mrs. Bellefleur: weren’t they all Lake Noir people, weren’t Lake Noir people always involved in feuds, weren’t they all uncivilized, and hopeless . . . ?

A LIFE, SEVERAL
lives, reduced to a single hour.

The terrible exhausting
concentration
of meaning: as if Germaine’s life had stopped, on that October night, along with the others’ lives. As if nothing existed apart from that time: not an hour, really, but considerably less than an hour.

Will you please recount for the court, as clearly as you can, omitting no details, exactly what happened on the night of .
. .

The silence of the courtroom. Silence, interrupted frequently by waves of whispers. Ladies turned to one another, raising their gloved hands to shield their faces, and their words. Germaine broke off, confused. What she had said, what she was yet to say, what she had already said so many times, tangled together, like ribbons, like an unwisely long thread, and should she stop, should she snip the thread at once and begin again, or should she continue. . . .

Please tell us, Mrs. Bellefleur, as clearly as you can, omitting no details .
. .

And so, again. Again. The halting procession of words. The sudden panicked realization that something had been forgotten: and should she pause, and return, stammering and blushing (for she knew very well, how could she fail to know, how pitying and contemptuous certain persons were of her, facing her hour after hour, how they
judged
her), or should she continue, repeating one thing after another,
And then in the next room I could hear them with Bernard, I could hear Bernard scream,
one set of words after another, as if she were crossing a turbulent stream on stepping-stones that threatened to overturn beneath her weight. She
must
keep going. She couldn’t stop. And yet—

And you are absolutely certain, Mrs. Bellefleur, that you recognized the murderers’ voices. .
. .

And again, again, the names: the names that were like stepping-stones too: Rabin and Wallace and Reuben and Silas and Myron. (And though it occurred to her while she lay convalescing in a neighbor’s home that she knew, really, who one and possibly two of the others were, she could hear again their voices and recognize them, or almost recognize them, yes she really
knew,
she
knew,
it was advised that she restrict herself to her original story, for the defense would surely interrogate her about “remembering” so many days after the fact.)

The defendants at their table: coarse-faced, sullen, baffled men, three of them with whiskers that covered half their faces, the youngest, Myron,
vacant
-eyed, smiling at the judge and the jurors and the sheriff’s men as if they were old friends. (The Varrells’ attorney wisely kept Myron off the witness stand, for he would probably have confessed had he remembered the crimes. Myron, it was said, didn’t deal with a full deck now, and it might have been as a consequence of his amiable calfishness that, some months after the trial, he was to drown in a canoe accident on Silver Lake, in unremarkable weather.)

Boldly and defiantly and with an incredulous little laugh deep in his throat the Varrells’ attorney (twenty-eight years old, an Innisfail boy with political ambitions) moved that the case be dismissed because of lack of evidence: for of course his clients had alibis, relatives and neighbors and drinking companions had from the very first supplied detailed stories of the men’s whereabouts on that night (absurdly detailed stories which newspaper reporters thought further proof of Lake Noir ignorance—a curious combination of naïveté and brutality), and in any case there was no proof, there was absolutely no proof, merely a confused and spiteful woman’s
accusation
. . . . How, the young man asked Mrs. Bellefleur, drawling her name as if he thought it somehow extraordinary, could she possibly ask the court to believe that in the confusion of the moment she could have recognized anyone? When, by her own testimony, the murderers were wearing masks?

Certainly there was no proof. Not even circumstantial evidence. And his clients had alibis. Each of them could account thoroughly for that night, for every hour of that night. It was a single woman’s word against the word of dozens of others, each of whom had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth.

And you ask us to believe,
the young man drawled, smiling as he looked about the courtroom, at the twelve men in the jury box, and the judge, and the spectators crowded into the rows of seats,
you ask us to take seriously, Mrs. Bellefleur, an accusation that by your own account must be judged as frankly dubious .
. .

As if sharing his clients’ guilt the attorney was edgy, bold, arrogant, even indignant. He had learned a trick of smiling very faintly just
after
he made a statement he considered outrageous: smiling faintly, with his head lifted in mute astonishment.
And you ask us .
. .
And you ask the court .
. . He must have taken elocution lessons, he projected his thin, reedy voice with such confidence; and his small portly body with its melonlike belly was always perfectly erect.

His questions then fastened upon Jean-Pierre and Louis. But especially Jean-Pierre. The Onondagan woman Antoinette who had died along with the others—what was her relationship, if any, to the family? Wasn’t she, the attorney asked with a mocking hesitancy, a particular friend of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s . . . an
intimate
friend . . . who had shared the Bellefleurs’ household for years . . . ? At first Germaine did not reply; she stared at the floor, and her face appeared to thicken. Then she said in a slow voice that the woman kept to her part of the house. They rarely spoke. They rarely saw each other. . . . In a louder voice, somewhat bitterly, Germaine said that of course she hadn’t approved, not with the children, but what could she do . . . what could anyone do . . . that was the old man’s way . . . he did what he wanted . . . and even Louis wouldn’t stand up to him . . . though she hadn’t asked him to, because . . . because he would have been angry . . . because he always took his father’s side against anyone.

Might the killings, the attorney asked, have had anything to do with the Onondagan woman? With the fact that she was living common-law with Jean-Pierre Bellefleur . . .

Germaine, hunched forward, appeared to be thinking. But she did not reply.

Mrs. Bellefleur, isn’t it possible that . . .

Baffled, the creases deepening beside her mouth, Germaine shook her head slowly. She seemed not to comprehend the line of questioning.

A young Onondagan woman, your elderly father-in-law with his
innumerable
. . . his innumerable, shall we say, former business associates . . .

And then there were questions about Jean-Pierre’s various activities since his years in Congress. The many acres of wilderness land he had accumulated, under several names (a fact that appeared to surprise Germaine, who stared at the attorney in bewilderment), his part-ownership of Chattaroy Hall and the coach line from Nautauga Falls to White Sulphur Springs and the
Gazette
and the steamboat and the Mount Horn logging company that had filed for bankruptcy and . . . and hadn’t there been a large fertilizer sale . . . a hoax . . . reputedly Arctic elk
manure
. . . many wagonloads of . . . And during Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s last term in Congress hadn’t there been the sensational exposé of La Compagnie de New York . . .

So the questions came, one after another. Germaine tried to answer.
I don’t know,
she said haltingly, shamefully,
I don’t know, I don’t remember, they never talked about business, I don’t know. .
. . And then abruptly she was being interrogated about the night of the murders again, and the masks. Hadn’t she been terrified, hadn’t she been confused, wasn’t it even the case that, according to her own admission, she had been unconscious most of the time the men were in the house . . . ?
How,
if the men had been masked, had she recognized their faces?

And she hadn’t been a witness to the others’ deaths. Only to Louis’s. In the other wing of the house Jean-Pierre Bellefleur and the Onondagan woman had been killed, quite some distance away; and in the parlor and kitchen the children. So she hadn’t witnessed those murders. She couldn’t possibly have known what was happening. Or who the murderers were. She claimed to have recognized voices but how could she possibly have recognized voices. . . . The murders had been committed, the young man claimed, in a high ringing voice, by strangers. It was quite plausible that they were thieves, attracted to the Bellefleur home because of its size and the reputation of old Jean-Pierre; or that they were Indians, furious at the Onondagan woman for her relationship with the notorious Jean-Pierre; or that they were—and this was
most
likely—enemies of Jean-Pierre’s who wished him dead for reasons having to do with his discreditable business practices. Mrs. Bellefleur in her deranged state may have convinced herself that she heard familiar voices . . . or she may even have wanted (for reasons it would be indelicate to explore) to accuse the Varrells and Rabin because of the long-standing enmity between her family and them. . . .

Germaine interrupted.
I know who they were,
she said.
I know. I was there. I heard them. I know them! I know!
And then, rising, before the sheriff’s men hurried forward to restrain her, she began to scream:
They did it! Them! Them there! Sitting over there! You know it and everybody knows it! They killed my husband and children! They killed six people! I know! I was there! I know!