Rolls, of course, was the family’s near-unanimous choice for their largest car; and so, as the Bellefleur fortune swelled, they acquired, at Leah’s particular insistence, a six-seater Silver Ghost with every imaginable feature—leather upholstery, hand-painted panels, silver ashtrays, silver-framed mirrors, gold fittings, and thick fur (it was a novelty fur—Alaskan wolf) carpeting: a most impressive sight, and a fittingly impressive sight, to appear at the ugly portals of the Powhatassie State Correctional Facility to bear away poor meek ashen-faced Jean-Pierre II, who was at last deemed worthy of a pardon by the governor of the state. But it was not the Rolls, of course, Leah wished to take, as, accompanied by her manservant, Nightshade, and Germaine, and young Jasper (who was developing so rapidly, who seemed to know, now, as much about the estate’s finances as Hiram himself, and nearly as much as Leah), she drove south in a fruitless and really quite ill-advised attempt to locate, and bring back, her erring daughter Christabel: for that purpose Leah drove her own car, an austere, practical Nash sedan which, she calculated, would never draw attention to itself or its occupants. But of course she never found Christabel and her lover Demuth, nor did the authorities ever find the Fiat, though Edgar had reported it missing at once. (What a generous gift it had been, that bright red coupe with its cream-colored top and its dazzlingly shiny hubcaps!—and all, as the elder Mrs. Schaff said bitterly, to provide a common whore with the means of flight from her husband and family; and who knows but that the Fiat hadn’t inspired the little whore’s love affair, as well as her escape from Schaff Hall?)
Over the years there had been, not in strict chronological order (for the Bellefleurs, reminiscing, quite shamelessly jumbled “chronological” order—indeed, to Germaine’s way of thinking, they had a lofty contempt for it), a Packard limousine, and a Pierce-Arrow saloon car, and a green Stutz-Bearcat, and something called a Scripps-Booth (which no one seemed to remember); insurance records showed a Prosper-Lambert, evidently a French car, with acetylene gas lamps and seat covers of dyed kid. There was a Dodge, and a La Salle; there were several Fords including two Model-A’s, which were among the hardiest of the Bellefleur cars. Interest in automobiles varied wildly among the Bellefleurs, and was not consistent, in any single individual, throughout a lifetime: though Ewan professed to have little genuine concern for what he drove, so long as it got him from place to place quickly and economically. He viewed with something like alarm his brother Gideon’s sudden infatuation with cars, which seemed to him less plausible than Gideon’s earlier infatuation with horses, if only because Gideon was now a fully mature man, and no longer an impulsive boy.
Ewan himself was content to drive a good, solid, handsome American car, a Packard, though he bought for his favorite mistress (the divorcée Rosalind Manx, who called herself a “singer-actress’), through Gideon’s and Benjamin Stone’s assistance, a showy blue Jaguar E-type with dyed rabbit-fur upholstery and silver fixtures, which was often seen tearing along even the narrowest of Nautauga Falls streets, evidently oblivious to (and immune from) traffic police. (Ewan would not have minded if Lily had learned to drive, though he didn’t encourage it, and of course hadn’t time to teach her himself: but he evidently expressed amused gratification when Albert, who had tried to teach his mother to drive Leah’s Nash, pronounced her hopeless.) Albert himself owned a Chevrolet Caprice which was one day to sideswipe a tenant farmer’s pick-up truck, injuring Albert and killing the farmer outright; Jasper drove a smart, practical Ford, with few frills, and Morna was to one day acquire, as her birthday present from a new husband, a handsome chocolate-brown Porsche. Bromwell was never to acquire a car, nor was he even to learn how to drive.
The oldest automobile the Bellefleurs owned, at about the time of Germaine’s birth, was grandmother Della’s black two-door Ford, a gift from a sympathetic uncle-in-law (one of Elvira’s brothers) so that she might, if she wished, drive herself about: but of course Della never learned to drive, and the car remained, decade after decade, unused, its battery dead, swallows nesting in its cushions, in the old carriage house behind the red-brick house in Bushkill’s Ferry. Leah, as a girl, had tried unsuccessfully to start it; she had nagged Della about getting it serviced, and in working order—for, if it worked, her boy friend Nicholas Fuhr had offered to give her lessons—and it might be fun, didn’t Della think, if the two of them went for Sunday drives along the river, or southward out of the mountains on an overnight trip, for a change of scene?
“Whyever would you want a change of scene,” Della asked irritably (for her tomboyish daughter had such a strident, aggressive voice), “aren’t things troublesome enough here?”
So the old black Ford remained in the carriage house, graceless, unwanted, rusting in leprous patches, covered over with a film of dust and pigeon- and swallow-droppings—and so it remains, in fact, until this very day.
The Demon
In the mountains, in those days long ago, Jedediah Bellefleur wandered, a penitent. And when he saw that a demon had come to dwell in Henofer’s cabin, that the demon had pushed himself inside the old man’s grizzled chest and now stared boldly out of the old man’s eyes—boldly and mockingly, as if daring Jedediah to recognize him!—he knew that he must not suffer the creature to live.
I know you, he whispered, advancing upon him.
The demon blinked and stared. Henofer’s face had undergone many changes, perhaps it was already the face of a dead man, astonishingly aged. Though Jedediah had lived on the other side of the mountain for only a year or two or three, in that period of time Henofer had become an old man, and it was possible that his infirmity allowed the demon to slip into his body.
Of course you know me, the demon said.
That isn’t his voice, Jedediah said, smiling. You can’t quite imitate his voice.
His—? Whose? What do you mean?
The old man. Henofer. You didn’t know him, Jedediah said. So you can’t imitate his voice. You can’t deceive me.
What do you mean? the demon said. In a pretense of fear he began to stammer. I’m Mack—you know me—it’s Mack, Mack Henofer—for God’s sake, Jedediah, are you joking? But you never joke—
Jedediah looked around the clearing. There was Henofer’s sway-backed horse, and his mule; his cowardly hound lay with his belly pressed flat against the ground and his ragged tail limply wagging, as if, having made peace with his master’s murderer, he now wished to make peace with his master’s avenger.
On a crude wooden rack by the doorway of Henofer’s cabin there were several hides—bloodstained and ragged and unrecognizable—raccoons, foxes, beavers, squirrels, bobcats? The sight of them was a surprise.
I didn’t know you could work the trap lines, Jedediah said, eying the creature with a sly smile.
Where Henofer would have laughed his wheezy blustery laugh, the demon, again pretending to be frightened, stared at Jedediah and moved his lips silently. A prayer to the Devil, perhaps, but Jedediah did not draw away.
You can’t live on this mountain. This is a Holy Mountain, Jedediah said calmly. Henofer might have welcomed you—probably did—probably invited you to stay the night and drink with him and listen to his foul disgusting stories—yes?—but he never understood the nature of this mountain and he deserved to die. But you: you can’t stay here. God will not tolerate it.
Henofer’s lips parted in a queer gaping grin. It was not Henofer’s smile but the demon’s, and it bore no resemblance at all to the old man’s.
You aren’t well, Jedediah, the demon said. And then tried to offer him a drink—asked him to come inside that shanty, and have a drink—but God distressed him at that moment with a fit of coughing that left his blubbery lips wet with dark spittle.
Jedediah stood his ground, waiting. Though he harbored no fear of the Devil his insides were trembling and he had to fight the desire to join old Henofer in that wracking terrible cough.
The hound began to bay, its stump of a tail flopping about.
Jedediah wondered—Was ther
e a demon, a dog-demon, coiled up inside that sorry creature?—would it too have to be destroyed? Or was the dog untouched, deemed by the Prince of Darkness as too lowly to be contaminated?
THOUGH GOD REFUSED still to show His face to Jedediah He made it known that Jedediah was the means by which His message would be broadcast. The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured. And again, louder, in a terrible bugle-blast of a voice: The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured. So the Lord God has spoken.
As penance for having raised his voice on the Holy Mountain Jedediah was to wander for an unfixed number of days, or weeks, or months—God would instruct him more specifically—and if his camp should be destroyed, if wild creatures should devour his vegetable garden and thieves break into his cabin and plunder it, and set fire to it, God’s will be done. The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured.
There was a paradox in God’s teaching. For though Jedediah had been chosen (and, again, it was difficult to discern God’s wrath from His love) nevertheless he was forbidden to leave the mountains: he must, for instance, never leave the sight of Mount Blanc. When he lay down to sleep, having resisted sleep for as long as possible (for that too was part of God’s instruction), he must face the mountain; and when he opened his eyes in the morning the mountain must be the first thing he saw—the first image to fill his stupefied consciousness. On those mornings when the great mountain was obscured by mist Jedediah lay paralyzed, blinking as if the entire world had vanished in his sleep.
He preached to the few people he encountered. Trappers like old Henofer; a party of hunters (how smartly dressed they were, how costly their shotguns and rifles and gear must have been!—they smiled upon Jedediah pityingly, yet with a kind of courteous patience; but their Indian guide—a tall big-stomached Mohawk who wore a white man’s hat and carried a rifle heavy with silver ornamentation—fixed him with an unmistakable contemptuous stare); a settlement of four families on the south bank of the Nautauga, near a nameless crossroads (they frowned and grinned and jabbered at him, finally, in a foreign tongue, which he knew was not French, and which he could not hope to comprehend without God’s grace). He approached a contingent of soldiers walking in loose columns along a dusty road, but they had no time for him, and their officer playfully—it may have been seriously—aimed his rifle at Jedediah’s feet, and bade him begone into the woods before an “accident” took place. Nor had he any more luck with a group of men, working with oxen and mules, who appeared to be digging a canal from east to west, out of nowhere and into nowhere, a ludicrous blasphemy in the sight of God (for why build a canal when the mountains were so richly veined with lakes and rivers?—why disfigure God’s landscape on a human, vainglorious whim?)—many of the men did not understand English, and even those who seemed to be speaking English did not understand Jedediah, and soon grew impatient with him, and drove him back into the woods with rocks and chunks of mud and obscene taunting shouts. All these humiliations Jedediah endured for God’s sake, and in full expectation that God should someday soon reward him. For he was, after all, God’s servant: all that had been Jedediah Bellefleur was swallowed up in God.
THE JAWS DEVOUR, the jaws are devoured. But the forces of darkness did not want this message taught. And so Jedediah was aware of God’s enemies, and of his own father’s spies, watching him from the shadows at the edges of clearings, from behind rocks, from inside crude rotting shelters that appeared to be abandoned but which he dared not approach, not even in the most ferocious of rainstorms. Sometimes it was unclear, which were God’s enemies and which were his own: his father (whose name Jedediah had temporarily forgotten though he could see, in his troubled dreams, the wicked old man’s face as vividly as if it floated before him) was perhaps an enemy of God, but then he had always seemed too caught up with the vanities of the world, too busy, to care enough about God to actively oppose him: or was this merely an aspect of the old sinner’s cunning? It was true that he had repudiated Roman Catholicism when he repudiated his homeland, and his mother tongue, and set his face to the West, and he had sloughed off this corrupt devil-ridden religion as easily as if he had done no more than wash his hands; and of course that must have pleased God. But he had erected no other belief in place of Catholicism, so far as Jedediah knew. He worshipped money. Political power, gambling, land speculation, horses, women, businesses of one kind or another—Henofer had told him many things, Jedediah remembered very little—but in the end only money, everything was transformed into money: money was his God. And was that God identical with Satan himself?
The old man, the wicked old man, wanted Jedediah to return to the flatland. So that he might marry, and propagate his kind; so that he might, like his brother Louis, bring sons into the world, to continue the Bellefleur name, and the Bellefleur worship of money. (Which was—or was it?—identical with the worship of Satan.) Sometimes, Jedediah rather wearily thought, the money-worshippers were too obsessed with their struggles to devour one another to think, even, of the Devil—they would have had no time for Mammon himself.
Still, there were enemies, enemies whose faces he never saw, but whose presences he sensed: at times, on windless nights, he could even hear their breathing. Shadows at the edges of clearings . . . shadows that came to life, stirring grouse and pheasants into terrified flight, sending rabbits across Jedediah’s panicked field of vision. . . . Behind each of the larger pines a man might easily hide, if he were very cautious, and when Jedediah turned his back he might lean out to stare at him. These spies were probably in his father’s pay. For it was not logical, Jedediah supposed, after long brooding, that mere strangers should care so much about him; and if there were devils (though could there, on the Holy Mountain, even in sight of the Holy Mountain, be devils?—would God permit such a blasphemy?), devils of course were bodiless, or so Jedediah understood, and would not need to hide behind trees or rocks.
That a devil might force himself into a man’s body, and dwell inside that body, and wreak evil from within it—Jedediah hadn’t comprehended at that time.
So he feared the presences, and traveled at night in order to confuse them, and hid during the day, as best he could (for sometimes he was overtaken by a painful hacking cough that seemed to be tearing his lungs out, and surely the creatures who spied upon him heard); and he tried to keep his heart alive with a constant prayer to God which his lips uttered at all times. My God, my Lord and my God, blessed be Thy name, blessed be Thy kingdom, and Thy will, and Thine enemies ground underfoot. . . .
One day, someone whispered in his ear, close against his ear, breathing warmly and tickling with her tongue, one day, Jedediah, you know what’s going to happen?—they’re going to jump at you from behind, and overpower you, no matter how you struggle and howl with rage, and they’re going to carry you back down to home—hanging from a pole, maybe, like a gutted deer—and you’ll wake up on a floor with them standing around gaping and grinning at you—poking you with a foot—Is that Jedediah Bellefleur who climbed into the sky looking for God—! Why, isn’t he a sight, now! Scrawny and puny and sick and lousy (for you do have lice, that’s a louse at this very moment crawling up the back of your neck!) and worm-ridden too (for you do, you know, have worms—you might not like to think of it, and you surely refuse to examine your hard little bloody droppings, but even so, my boy, even so!)—isn’t he a sight—as if any self-respecting God would give a good goddamn for him. And would any woman marry him? Have babies by him? Oh, what a joke! God’s been laughing up His sleeve for eighteen years now! And she skittered away, shrieking with laughter, before Jedediah could lay hands on her.
In his wanderings, before he came upon Mack Henofer’s camp, and saw what had happened there, Jedediah suffered many ugly sights. One day he stepped out of the blazing tide of noon into the darkness of a forest that rose out of marshy, spongy land, and saw a cannibal Indian seated before a small fire, cross-legged, smoking a pipe, clothed in what appeared to be snakeskins—while all about him, in small tumbled-over mounds, were the skulls and bones
of human beings. They were human bones, most assuredly they were human! And the snakeskins, Jedediah saw to his terror, were not skins at all but living snakes: living snakes that coiled and hissed about the brave’s powerful naked body. (The snakes appeared aware of Jedediah’s intrusion, but the Indian—vacant-eyed, expressionless, puffing soundlessly on his pipe—stared past him.) Long after Jedediah fled that hellish vision, for days and weeks afterward, he was to remember the horror of the heaped-up skulls and bones, and the thick-bodied hissing snakes, and most of all the Indian’s stony impassivity. . . . Hadn’t Jedediah heard, as a boy, that the cannibals among the Iroquois tribes had been exterminated, or converted to Christianity? And how was it possible that the Indian should be clad in living snakes?
(The evil of the pagan Indians, Jedediah thought, was an evil that came before the white man’s—before the white man’s evil, or his good. It came before history itself. Perhaps even before God.)