Bellefleur

  In his wanderings he keeps that mountain in view. It is one of the few snow-covered peaks in the Chautauquas, which are said to be old mountains, eroded by millennia. In a dream he learned that the mountain is a sacred mountain, presided over by spirits that, like angels, are not human; nor are they, exactly, God. They have to do with God. But are not God. Not exactly. . . . He keeps that mountain peak in view. Sometimes he stands motionless and stares at it, observing how, as the minutes pass, or perhaps they are hours, passing silently, seamlessly, the “white” cap shifts and blurs in the sun, as if preening before him. It trembles, writhes, shakes itself.

  God?

  But God hides within His creation.

  In certain lights the mist turns to flame. His breath is sucked from him, his eyes fill with involuntary tears. Ah, that the entire world could so easily turn to flame!—except for God’s fastidious mercy. Which holds the sun back. Which measures what man can bear.

  Jedediah contemplating “Jedediah.” It seems that he inhabits a body. Uses it to walk about in. The eyes—his eyes—are evidently the means by which he draws God to him. When he read the Bible, in those days before the spirits’ humming and singing and their coy, sweet whispers (“Jedediah? Jedediah? Come to us!”) distracted him, it was evidently the case that God, though a spirit, was to be evoked through the print of a book: through verse after verse of that old leather-bound book. Hear my prayer, O Lord, Jedediah whispered, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me. . . . For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned. . . . My heart is smitten, and withered like grass. His eyes smarted in the smoke from his tiny fire, his voice was hoarse with longing. Still, he did not raise his voice; he did not beg; certainly he did not command his Lord. Very softly he whispered, Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

  It would be many weeks, Jedediah reasoned calmly, before God might reveal Himself.

  ONE OF THE mountain spirits slipped giggling beneath the covers and, in a gesture both childlike and depraved, ran her thin cold fingers up and down his thighs.

  Jedediah turned at once to embrace her. Hard. Hard. Though they were pressed together in the dark, though his ravenous mouth was against hers, he could see her quite distinctly.

  He groaned with the surprise of her. Of it.

  Strange, in his father’s house, in his brother’s household, he had seen only a small warm pretty face. Hair, eyes, shoulders. Shyly expressive hands. He had looked at her often enough, covertly, but he had never seen her.

  Now he saw her vividly. Piercingly.

  With his very skin he saw her.

  The mole beside her left eye, the delicate vein on her forehead. The tiny, white, almost invisible lines about her mouth, which was a girl’s mouth. He had not remembered that her limp, curly hair was so fine, feathery-fine, and that it stirred with his breath as he grew near.

  Germaine?

  She smiled. Revealing slightly grayish teeth that were charmingly crooked. The incisors were a fraction of an inch longer than the front teeth so that her smile gave her the quick, fey, shy, somewhat wicked look of a woodland creature—a wolverine, a fox. And what color were her eyes? Brown? Gray-brown? Hazel flecked with gold? At the moment when his hard, eager, desperate flesh entered hers—when the soft, warm resistance of her body suddenly gave way—her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled white in their deep-set sockets.

  Germaine, he groaned.

  And afterward he woke, his heart pounding so violently that he feared he might be having a seizure: with both hands he pressed against his chest, against his tumbling heart. His lips were too numb to shape a prayer.

  Then he saw what had happened, what the spirit had teased him into doing, and he woke fully, humiliated, angered. As his heartbeat slowed and his breathing returned to normal her image faded swiftly. He realized with spiteful pleasure that he had forgotten her name. As he had forgotten the name of the mountain, and the name of the river that plunged below him, so thunderous he no longer heard it.

  Her small hectic face? Faded, erased. The quick daring movements of her hands? Gone.

  She was his brother’s wife, his brother’s child-wife. A girl of sixteen, imagine, married to that bullying ignorant fool! He remembered Louis’s name clearly, of course, but he did not remember hers. . . . Begging him to stay until the baby was born. Don’t you want to see your little nephew?—aren’t you going to be his godfather? A certain flirtatious, nervous lilt to her voice, so that he would not really think she was begging.

  Now he never thought of her. He never thought of any of them.

  Except, at unanticipated times, at moments when his soul felt unaccountably weak, watery as gruel, he found himself gazing upon his father through his eyelashes; his head bowed; his manner supplicant. There, the man who was his father. The man whom God had employed to bring him into the world. Into time. Into suffering. Into sin. What did it mean, Jedediah wondered, stooping to rub his ankle which throbbed painfully at such times (for all his money, Jean-Pierre Bellefleur had a reputation for miserliness, and perhaps it was true—he refused to take his son back to Manhattan, to an “overpriced” butcher, and turned him over, after the accident, to a drinking companion of his, a Dr. Magjar, who had drifted down across the border from Quebec and who spoke only a few words in English, and spoke them poorly: Jean-Pierre’s logic being that no great skill was needed to set a few bones)—what did it mean, what did God intend, that out of that man’s loins he, Jedediah, should have sprung?

  The shock, the disgust, of that first trip to the north country. Two weeks of hunting, fishing, canoeing. Indians. Iroquois. Imagine an Iroquois guide! And Iroquois children. Your own age. And lakes, and mountains, a wilderness as far as the eye can see . . . !

  Harlan and Louis and Jedediah, then a very young child. Their mother, of course, remained behind in their twelve-room town house, and Jean-Pierre did not mention her once during the two weeks. Instead, at the lakeside camps, at the riverside inns and taverns, there were other women, astonishingly friendly, noisy, gay: women who tilted their heads back and roared with laughter. One of them, no younger than Jedediah’s mother, and far less attractive, ran her fingers roughly through Jedediah’s hair and told him he had his father’s beautiful dark eyes, Satan’s eyes. She had smelled of perspiration, like a man.

  Jean-Pierre, his voice slurred with drink, his eyelids drooping. Hugging the boys. Jedediah and Louis, but Harlan wrenched free; and then Louis pushed away. Hugging Jedediah, who could not move. If you fall in love too young, Jean-Pierre said shrilly, you will always be alone. Her name was Sarah. Her name . . . but it wouldn’t mean anything to you . . . it wouldn’t mean anything now. . . . If you fall in love too young and nothing comes of it you will always be alone for the rest of your life. So you might as well open the doors. Bring the crowd in. One, two, a dozen, two dozen, what the hell, what does it matter. . . .

  Jedediah had wanted to shrug himself free of his father’s embrace, but he had not dared to move.

  His father, his father’s voice. In the cabin with him. He felt the danger of that voice’s intimacy.

  Suppose his father hunted him down. Made out a warrant for his arrest. Or paid a gang of men to bring him back. (Slung over a horse, wrists and ankles bound. A deer carcass. A gutted deer.) In the first year of his solitude he had thought God would reveal Himself at any moment . . . but his only surprises, his only visitations, were from men: trappers, hunters, men like himself who wandered the mountains, some of them known to him from his life down below, most of them strangers. Every few weeks one or two of them might approach his cabin, calling his name. (For they knew him.) Except in the deep of winter, when the fifteen-foot snowbanks protected him, these unwelcome visitors would interrupt his solitude so often that it sometimes seemed (but of course he was imagining it, he really knew better) that his father and his brother were employing them, not merely to bring letters and provisions and unwanted gifts, but to destroy his peace. In that
first year . . . or was it more than a year . . . letters were thrust boldly into his unwilling hands . . . and the request was even made that he write out a reply . . . a few words, a few lines . . . to be brought back home. Of course he always refused. Sometimes in anger, sometimes in alarm. Write out a reply! But why, and to whom? He had given them up. He had surrendered himself to God.

  Nevertheless he skimmed the letters, holding them at arm’s length. For perhaps God might address him through another’s voice. Through his brother’s scribbling, with its misspellings and its frequent exclamation points. (“Wait till you see your little nephews, growing so fast!—and the town is growing too—Papa bought into a coachline, and a ferry, and one or two other things that will come as quite a surprise!! He asks after you & sends his love. . . .”) But he never read the letters carefully, his eye darted about in panic, and in the end he usually folded them and burned them, so as not to risk the temptation of reading them at another time. And he was right to do so, as he discovered one morning when he did examine a sheet of paper that was only scorched around the edges: for it turned out that his father now spent most of his time at White Sulphur Springs, at something called Chattaroy Hall, where wealthy southerners came to summer, bringing with them their daughters, their marriageable daughters, and Jedediah was of an age when he must marry, and take up the responsibilities of an adult, and if he could see one or two of these lovely girls—who couldn’t hear enough about him, who already adored him for living alone in the mountains—

  Elsewhere was the commandment to Love & Honor Yr. Father.

  ONE NIGHT, FEVERISH, the skin of his forehead, cheeks, and upper chest actually burning, Jedediah stumbled out into the dark, into the rain, and turned his astonished face upward, convinced that someone had called his name. God? Was it God? Calling his name above the noise of the river, and the hard pounding rain?

  He had been ill for several days. His bowels had sickened, turning to water; a fine gray mist passed before his eyes. He slept and woke and slept again, sometimes waking in a convulsive shiver, sometimes with a snort like a deer’s snort—his throat was so dry, so parched.

  God? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God of Wrath and of infinite majesty?

  A God of fist-sized raindrops. Falling from the sky. How odd, how very odd, the beautiful way in which they fell: so weighted, so heavy! He gaped up into the sky. There was no sky, there was nothing to see, only the immense glistening raindrops, striking him with the force of pebbles. He had lived his entire life so far, Jedediah thought dizzily, without worshipping the God of Rain. Without standing bareheaded, utterly submissive, supplicant, virginal as a young bride, his face turned up to the hammer-force that fell from God.

  Calm. Silence. Silence within the deafening roar. Silence within the tumult of his veins, the chatter inside his skull.

  God? Now? In this hour?

  One hour was all hours, one raindrop all raindrops. God in each, in all, icy-hard, piercing. It was very cold. But there was no wind. But it was summer. Wasn’t it summer? The first summer after the summer of his leavetaking . . . or perhaps the second summer . . . the second, or the third. . . . One summer was all summers, just as one raindrop was all raindrops, and he had only to stand there, bareheaded, bare-chested, a suppliant, meek before God, opened to God’s love.

  The beautiful drumming rain! The ceaseless rain! Egg-sized, fist-sized drops of rain! Mesmerizing. Blinding. (For he could not even see the edge of the bank, he could barely see the doorway of the cabin behind him.)

  The burning sensation was gone. Now he shivered, in gratitude. Rain ran down his forehead, his cheeks, his chest, it ran down his body in caressing chilling streams, not many drops but one single drop, a vast benevolent soothing flood.

  God? he whispered softly.

  And then for some reason he turned to look back, and saw, there, in the doorway of his cabin, the very mountain spirit who had teased and tormented him, and led him into sin: she was holding her arms out to him, though not blatantly, not boldly: her small oval face was pale, and utterly familiar, and her voice, though loud enough to be heard over the roar, was gentle. You will have to come back, Jedediah. To me.

  The Spider, Love

  From approximately the age of thirteen and a half, until she was eighteen, and Gideon Bellefleur so valiantly courted and won her, Germaine’s mother kept as a pet a spider of remarkable size and beauty, which she called Love.

  “Ah, isn’t it a handsome thing, just look at it,” Leah would say, as it quivered in its spittle-glistening web (and the web itself was a masterpiece, Leah would have liked to draw it in pen-and-ink, in all its exquisite detail), or scuttled about the walls and ceiling of her room (upon which it frequently left, at first to the distress of her roommate at La Tour, and La Tour’s headmistress, Madame Mullein, and then to the angry distress of her mother, a translucent film or slime that, though almost imperceptible at first, gradually darkened to form ineradicable tracks), or crept affectionately up her arm to her shoulder where it nuzzled, blackly silky and bold, against her neck. “It’s just the gentlest thing, aren’t you? It wouldn’t do any harm to anyone.”

  Which Leah knew wasn’t altogether true. For Love did bite if irritated, and Leah’s fingers were covered with angry little stings about the size of mosquito bites, which grew red with her impatient scratching; and if she didn’t feed it immediately in the morning—dead flies and other insects, even dead spiders; bread crumbs; cookie crumbs; milk and sugar and tiny bits of meat, offered with a tweezers—it would sometimes leap down from its web and sting her sharply on the back of the hand. If anyone was present (and there were girls at La Tour, her age or younger, who, fascinated and disgusted by Love, crept into Leah’s room very early, before chapel, to watch the handsome spider at his breakfast) Leah did no more than draw in her breath sharply, and cry “Oh!—aren’t you naughty!—can’t you wait a moment?” and suck at the tiny wound, giggling, her eyes shining as they darted over her silent, staring audience of girls in floor-length nightgowns and woollen robes, their hair, long as Leah’s, unbraided for the night and falling loose past their thin shoulders. “He gets ravenously hungry during the night, because it’s so long for him,” Leah explained.

  Quite frequently one of the girls, lingering behind after the others had left, would ask Leah shyly if she might feed Love sometime. Or have him perch on her finger, or her shoulder, as he did so jauntily with Leah when the mood struck him. “I wouldn’t hurt him, I wouldn’t crush him or anything,” the girls promised, when Love was still fairly small—penny-sized, with a modest little belly; and then as the weeks passed, and Love greedily devoured the dozen little meals Leah offered him daily, and grew—grew to the size of a roach, then to the size of a hummingbird—the girls said, shivering, hugging themselves, “I wouldn’t be afraid of him—I wouldn’t drop him, or knock him away—I wouldn’t scream, Leah, please!”

  Though Leah always accepted food the girls brought, and was particularly pleased to receive walnut fudge (since it was not only one of Love’s favorite foods but one of Leah’s, and Della never—never—sent fudge to La Tour), she always refused to allow the girls to participate in the ritual of feeding Love. He was her discovery, her pet. There had never been anything like him in the history of La Tour Academy for Girls, and there never would be, and Leah was so unhappy there, so lonely and restless and angry, and yet spitefully proud of herself (for she was a Bellefleur: she belonged to the Bellefleur family and as far as anyone knew she belonged to the wealthy Bellefleurs), that she refused not only most of the girls’ timid requests for Love, but their timid, inarticulate, groping overtures for friendship as well. And then too there was the possibility, the very real possibility, that Love would sting a girl so hard that she would betray Leah and run to Madame Mullein. Or might Love even (and this thought rarely crossed Leah’s mind, it was so hideous) quickly grow to prefer another girl, another girl’s trembling finger, her soft freckled arm, the warm fragrant scent of her hair . . . ? r />
  Leah’s roommate Faye Renaud was a child of about average size, and consequently much shorter than Leah, with unruly frizzy hair, and nondescript features, and a slight stammer that sometimes exasperated Leah (who, even when intimidated by a teacher or one of the older girls, spoke out quickly and boldly, for no one was going to get the better of her), and sometimes charmed her: Faye was Leah’s closest friend at the school, her only friend really, and the girls sometimes liked to pretend that they were sisters. But even when Faye begged for a chance to pet Love’s fine satiny-black hair (“I won’t tell the other girls, Leah, please!” she whispered) Leah thought it wisest to refuse.

  “Love is a wild creature, after all,” Leah said, with dignity.

  VERY LATE ONE night, when all the lights were out, shut off by a master switch operated by the headmistress, Leah, sleepless, homesick for the mountains, for the very feel of the Chautauqua air, and the odor of brackish Lake Noir, homesick even (though she would certainly not admit it) for her mother, imagined she heard something beneath her bed. Heard it, or felt it. Sensed it somehow. . . . As a small child she had frightened herself with the thought of nasty ugly creatures hiding beneath her bed. They were vaguely aquatic, yet dark, darkly sluggish, like eels writhing in mud; they were possessed of a queer half-human slyness, though they were also, and this is what terrified her, hardly more than black shapes. They were keenly aware of her, of every move she made in bed, and so it was necessary for her to lie perfectly still, her arms rigid at her sides and her breath as shallow as possible.

  But she had outgrown these silly creatures. The only thing beneath her bed, Leah thought, was dust balls.

  And so, while Faye slept a few yards away, Leah lay at the very edge of her bed and reached under. She groped about quite boldly. Of course there was nothing! What could there be! Her fingers closed about a slipper and tossed it aside. And encountered a ball of dust. (Leah was often scolded for her “failure to observe the rules of cleanliness”—for even her clothes, and even her hands and feet and neck, were not always as clean as they might be.) And encountered, then, something else . . . at the very first like a dust ball, it was so soft, so fine, so filmy . . . and then it was firmer . . . and it tickled . . . ah, it was moving! moving! . . . and then it stung her.