Bellefleur

  “Go home,” Yolande said, her voice shaking. “You shouldn’t be here, you’ll get into trouble. If you go home now we won’t tell . . .”

  “You get out of here,” the boy said to Christabel, who was trying not to cry, “and take the baby with you. Go on—get! I don’t want no crowd here.”

  “Please,” Yolande said, “leave us alone. . . .”

  “We’re going swimming! You and me! Gonna take off our clothes and go swimming!”

  Germaine had begun to make faint sounds, whimpering, gasping, as she pushed herself backward on the grass. The boy, peering at her, stood very still for a long moment, the kitten crushed against his chest, and then said, “Get her out of here! I don’t want no baby here! I don’t want no bawling baby here!”

  Yolande picked Germaine up to comfort her, and Christabel hurried to crouch behind them. Her bare legs streamed water and her teeth had begun to chatter.

  “D’you hear what I said, you!—you there!” the boy said to Christabel. “Take that baby and get the hell out of here! I don’t want no goddamn bawling baby here! Or I’m going to do this to all of you,” he said, making a sudden gesture as if he were twisting the kitten’s head off. When the girls screamed he grinned at them, and showed that the kitten was untouched, but made the gesture again, his hand cupped about its head—and again the girls screamed, and Germaine began to shriek. He laughed at their distress, but a moment later was irritated by it, and said, raising his voice to be heard over the baby’s terrified wails, “You’re making me mad! You don’t want to make me mad! Yolande Bellefleur, you don’t want to make Johnny mad ’cause I know your name and I know how to get you—Yolande Bellefleur, Yolande Bellefleur—you want something nice to stuff your pussy with? Better shut up that baby—”

  But the baby continued to cry. And Christabel, crouched behind Yolande, had to press her hand against her mouth to keep from sobbing.

  “I can’t stand no bawling,” the boy said. “Y’want me to do this to you all—” Again he made the twisting gesture; but this time he did twist the kitten’s head. It made a single hideous ear-piercing cry and must have slashed his hands with its claws, for he swore, and threw it out into the creek as lightly as he might have thrown a stone: it sank into the swift-flowing current in the center, a small hurtling scrap of orange, sinking immediately from sight. It had all taken place so quickly the girls could not grasp what had happened. This terrible boy had wrung the kitten’s neck, he had thrown it into the creek. . . . And what was he saying about the baby, taking the baby away, what did he want with Yolande. . . . !

  “We could go swimming. Or we could go over there,” the boy said, indicating with a jerk of his head an abandoned barn on a rise nearby. “Just you and me, Yolande. I don’t want none of them others. . . . Y’want me to twist all your heads off? Eh? Better stop bawling!”

  Clearly he too was frightened. His young voice rose and fell with anguish, with daring, with an inarticulate rage; in his impatience he danced about, stomping, bringing the heel of his boot down hard near the girls’ feet, as if he were teasing a dog. He touched Yolande’s hair. His fingers closed in her hair. A kind of radiance broke across his face—his ugly smile faded—he simply stared at her. After a long moment he said, in a low, broken voice: “. . . that barn over there . . . just you and me . . . just for a few minutes. . . . Yolande. . . . Yolande Bellefleur. . . . Just for a few minutes. . . .”

  “Barn! What barn! Where is there a barn . . .” Yolande whispered.

  The boy pointed.

  She laughed, turning, shading her eyes. There was a barn nearby. One of the old hop-curing barns. It was badly rotted now, on the brink of collapse: moss of a bright lurid green grew on the sagging roof; even a few tiny maples nested there. “Oh, there. . . . That . . . ” Yolande said.

  He tugged at her hair. Hard. Then a little harder. He did his angry dance-step again, nudging Yolande’s foot. And nudging her with his knee. Like a puppet she did not resist: she did not even cry out when his fingers yanked her hair.

  “Y’want me to come back here sometime, at night, I could come back at night, and wring all your heads off, all the goddamn fucking Bellefleur heads, wring ’em off and throw ’em in the creek,” the boy said softly, bumping against Yolande. “Y’want me to . . .”

  “No,” said Yolande. “No. It’s all right. I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll go with me?”

  “Christabel,” said Yolande, in an unnaturally high voice, “take the baby home. Take the baby home and stay there. It’s all right. I’ll go with him. It’s all right. . . . Honey, please stop crying. It’s the best way, doing what he says. Then everything will be all right. Do you understand?”

  She understood. She seemed to understand. Though Germaine was clearly too heavy for her, she even tried to carry her for a few yards; then she lowered the baby to the ground and walked her along. Smiling, her face wet with tears, Christabel waved goodbye to Yolande and the boy. And Yolande waved back. The boy was standing close beside her, his fist still closed in her hair. He was very tall. He had pulled the cap down so tightly on his forehead that his head looked too small for his body. Christabel was to remember that cap—it was gray, with a faded initial—black, or deep red—and its visor was frayed. She was to remember the boy’s queer twitching grin and his moist eyes and the agitation of the air about them, as if they were standing on a violently rocking surface. And Yolande’s posture, so stiffly erect. And her calmness. Could it be possible—her calmness! Jaws set rigid so that her teeth would not chatter, eyes opened wide in a doll’s paralyzed stare—

  “Goodbye! I’ll be along in a while! Take care of Germaine! Stop her crying! It’s all right! It’s all right!” Yolande shouted.

  OF COURSE CHRISTABEL ran for help, dragging the baby along. She ran to the lake, where the boys had been swimming; now most of them were on the dock, partly dressed. Garth was the first to hear her screaming.

  It seemed that someone had hurt Yolande—or was with her now—trying to throw her in the creek?—drown her? Or were they in one of the barns—?

  The boys ran along the creek, found no one at the cove, climbed the hill to the barn, and discovered, there, Yolande and the boy—Yolande’s dress was ripped from her shoulders, her small white breasts were exposed, her face was contorted, she shouted Stop him! Help me! Help me! She pushed her way free of the boy, who cowered back, his face sagging with astonishment: he stared at Garth and Albert and Jasper and the others as if he could not believe what he saw. Garth recognized him as one of the Doans—the son of one of the Bellefleurs’ tenant farmers—and stooped at once to pick up a sizable rock. Don’t let him out! Kill him! Kill him! Yolande was screaming. Though Garth would not have required her help she seized his arm, tore at him, pushed him forward, even struck his shoulder with her fist. Oh, kill him! she screamed, her snarled hair in her face, Don’t let him live!

  Which is what happened.

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES the barn was in flames. One of the boys tossed a lighted match, and the barn exploded in flames. (But which of the boys did it? Jasper claimed to have seen his brother Louis strike a match, Louis denied it but claimed to have seen Garth, Garth was certain he’d seen Dave, but Dave, turning his pockets inside out, claimed that he never carried matches in his trouser pockets, only his shirt pocket, and his shirt was back on the dock: he halfway thought he’d seen Albert throw the match.)

  They bombarded the Doan boy with rocks, yelling and hooting, two of them at the doorway of the barn, the others at the windows, pelting him with rocks (some of them so heavy they could barely be thrown) and stones and pebbles and chunks of dried mud and cow manure, and even branches, and old rusted parts from farm machinery, anything they could get their hands on, anything that might have weight enough to give pain. Yolande, in a frenzy, the bodice of her dress still hanging torn about her hips, ran from window to window, throwing rocks, screaming in a voice no one had ever heard before. Oh, kill him! The filthy thing! The filthy thing! He doe
sn’t deserve to live!

  Bleeding from the forehead and cheek, whimpering, the Doan boy instinctively ran to a corner, and crouched there, his hands protecting his neck, his entire body shaking; but Garth, leaning in a window, was able to bring something down on his back directly—something rusty and pointed—and a stream of blood leapt out and soaked through his coveralls. And then, within seconds, the barn was in flames. It was odd, it was very odd, afterward a number of the boys considered how odd it was, that they hadn’t run into the barn after him—for some reason they had stayed outside—they had contented themselves with attacking him at a distance—as if they had known it might be dangerous to follow him into the barn.

  The boy tried to escape from the burning barn, on his hands and knees, in the very doorway of the barn he crawled, and they pelted him with rocks, jeering and hooting, and he fell back, disappeared, and walls of flame hid him from view; and the very air crackled with heat; and from out of nowhere (unless the creature had been sleeping up in the loft, and had hidden there during the stoning) there appeared, again in the doorway, a skinny yellow hound, maddened with terror, its fur licked with flames, a mutt none of the boys had ever seen before, obviously a stray, and quite spontaneously they stoned it, and drove it back, and they could see it bounding, in flames, from side to side, and they could hear its pain-crazed cries for some minutes—until at last it was silent.

  They backed away from the burning barn, suddenly exhausted.

  “That dog,” said Yolande tonelessly. “Where did that dog come from. . . .”

  The fire burnt noisily, great billowing clouds of smoke rose into the air, and the orangish flames towered above the tallest of the trees.

  “I didn’t see any dog,” one of the boys said.

  “There was a dog. A dog in there. That was a dog. . . .”

  “I saw a dog. I don’t know where the hell it came from.”

  They backed away, panting, wiping their faces. In all the vast landscape there was nothing so mesmerizing, so eerily beautiful, as the flaming barn.

  “The stupid dog, to be in there with him,” one of the boys muttered. “. . . deserved it.”

  “I didn’t see any dog,” another boy said.

  “Oh, he was in there, all right,” another said. “He’s still in there.”

  BOOK THREE

  In the Mountains . . .

  In Motion

  In that twelve-foot-high granite tower three storeys above the garden (which, in the autumn, was noisy with the labor of workers) Bromwell chattered absentmindedly to his baby sister, not showing the queer half-painful excitement he felt when she so avidly, so eagerly, aped his words and even his gestures (as if, at the age of fourteen months, she were already greedy for knowledge—for his knowledge—and her very hunger stimulated a hunger in himself): and many years later as he rose from his seat, unconsciously pressing his somewhat bent wire-rimmed glasses against the bridge of his nose, hearing enumerated, in an English quaintly and brusquely accented, the dimensions of his “prodigious” (an adjective from the popular press, one Bromwell would have scorned had he even known of it) achievements in the young field of molecular astronomy, he was to see again, and to hear again, for a fraction of a fraction of a wondrous second, the night sky cold as a knife blade above Bellefleur Manor, and his own high-pitched rambling voice. Cassiopeia, Canis Major, Andromeda. And there is Sirius. (And the baby would repeat, almost accurately, Sirius.) But only in our language, Germaine. And only in our galaxy. And only from this position in our galaxy. Do you understand? Yes? No? Of course you don’t understand because no one does. And here: Ursa Major. (Ursa Major, said the child, her eyes and hands grabbing at the air.)

  In that crude tower above the garden (whose stained, crumbling statuary was being hauled away, heaped in the back of a truck, at last—what an eyesore that crowd was, Leah exclaimed, what a graveyard) Bromwell, surprisingly, “watched” his baby sister; and competed with Christabel for the opportunity. “But he’s no fun, he doesn’t play with her, he never takes her outside, even,” Christabel said angrily; “it’s always that damn old telescope of his, and those skeletons, and butterflies, and twaddle he’s fished out of books—do you even know what it smells like up there, Mamma? Why don’t you go and investigate!”

  Leah, of course, had no time for such things. And since the day when Jasper and Louis broke into Bromwell’s laboratory to release the muskrats, mourning doves, grasshoppers, frogs, and garter snakes he’d been keeping there for experimental purposes (his old laboratory on the second floor, that is, years ago), Bromwell made certain, through an elaborate system of locks, wires, and levers, and a secret “eye” in the steelbound oak door, that no one could intrude, whether to vandalize or merely investigate. “Your son is growing increasingly eccentric,” aunt Aveline told her brother Gideon, of whom she had once been extremely fond. “Don’t you and Leah care that he hides himself away from everyone, that he’s experimenting on live creatures, and mixing chemicals, and looking through that microscope all hours of the night?” Gideon, who had taken to ignoring most of his family now, with the exception of his brother Ewan, shrugged one shoulder in passing and said, “Telescope. Not microscope. You half-literate bitch.”

  Though Bromwell was ill at ease in the presence of the other children, he chattered away companionably with Germaine, despite—or perhaps because of—the difference in their ages. He enjoyed bringing her up to the third floor, to the tower on the northwestern corner he had had one of the servants help him weatherproof with strips of old asbestos siding they had found in an untidy heap in one of the barns; he enjoyed watching her walk in her quick, halting, thought-absorbed manner, her pudgy arms extended like a sleepwalker’s, her eyes glittering with that peculiar ravenous yearning, as if she knew (as Bromwell surely did) that the visible universe was filled with wonders greatly nourishing to the soul—if only the soul opens itself, unresisting.

  The mystery of the world, one of Bromwell’s early masters said, is its comprehensibility.

  So Bromwell puttered about, sketching in pencil the trajectories of certain planets and comets and runaway stars; making notations in his neat, rigorous, spidery little hand; describing flagelliform orbits that crossed and recrossed the familiar solar system with a whimsicality of their own. (From which Bromwell learned, as the years slowly passed, audacity as well as humility.) Though Germaine was hardly more than a baby, and certainly too young to understand, he was buoyed along by her very presence, and by the greediness of her listening, and spoke aloud any number of things as they came to mind: How can the rest of them remain satisfied with what the eye can seize, unmagnified! How can they live so crudely! Never asking the most obvious questions, Are the past and the future contained in the sky, is there a “single moment” throughout all the galaxies, will it be possible someday to measure God (when the proper instruments are available), why does God delight in motion, is God contained not only in the Universe as it exists at this moment, but in its past and future as well . . . ? Never asking, Where does the Universe end, when did it begin, if it’s an island what surrounds it, if it began 20 billion years ago what preceded those 20 billion years, is it dead or is it alive, is it alive and pulsing, do its components mate with one another, can I contain them all in my mind . . . ?

  A dust grain turned infinitesimally in the sunshine and revealed to Bromwell’s astonished eye a miniature galaxy, diamond-faceted. It might have been the glittering eye of a fly, magnified innumerable times; or the great sun itself, diminished. At such times he began to breathe lightly and shallowly, and his frail body quaked. (Indeed, throughout childhood Bromwell was subject to shivering fits, even when the temperature was mild. Your son is too high-strung, he’s too easily excited, members of the family told Leah and Gideon, disapprovingly; he isn’t much of a boy, is he.) He was hardly three years old before it became evident that his eyes were weak and he needed glasses, rather to his parents’ shame. (For they, of course, had perfect vision. Their handsome eyes would
never require corrective lenses.) One winter, he and his somewhat older cousin Raphael traded a cold back and forth, like pups or kittens in a single litter, greatly worrying their mothers (for what if, in those days before snowmobiles and helicopters, when the castle was snowbound a month or more every winter, one of the children came down suddenly with pneumonia?)—for both had the look of children fated to die young, without protest. Gideon said roughly of his son that he’d outlive all of them; there was no need for the women to fuss. “He just wants answers to his questions,” Gideon said. “Give him answers to his questions and he won’t need any medicine.” But there wasn’t a Bellefleur, unfortunately, not even cousin Vernon, who could give Bromwell the answers he required.

  (In secret, in his tower, fastidiously polishing the lens of his telescope as he talked to Germaine, Bromwell pushed to the very periphery of his mind the subject of family. The subject of Bellefleur. His imagination simply went dead, his prim little mouth settled into an ironic twist. Family and blood and family feeling and pride. And responsibility, and obligations, and honor. And history, Bellefleur history. The New World Bellefleurs were founded, you know, back in the 1770’s, when your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jean-Pierre, settled in the north country. . . . How impatient Bromwell was with such palaver, even as a small child! He wriggled with embarrassment, hearing grandfather Noel drunkenly reminisce, listening to great-grandmother Elvira recall Christmas celebrations, horse-drawn sleigh races on Lake Noir, weddings (at which memorable things invariably happened) between people long dead, of whom no one had heard for decades, about whom no one cared. Even more embarrassing were his own mother’s strident claims: Bellefleur this, Bellefleur that, where’s your ambition, where’s your sense of loyalty, where’s your pride? Bromwell once fidgeted so in her presence that she took hold of him by the shoulders of his jacket to give him a little shake, and he shook himself free, wily and graceful as one of the cats, by wriggling out of the jacket and bounding away, leaving Leah with the bodiless jacket in her hands. . . . Why, Bromwell, what are you doing, what are you thinking of! she had cried, astonished. Are you disobeying me?