Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  (Of course there were other horses. Innumerable horses. Even an albino—of nearly as high a quality as Gideon’s famous Jupiter, decades later, with the same pinkish skin and white hooves, fifteen hands two inches in height, thirty-two inches from girth to ground, a dazzling snow-white horse that, seen, could not always be believed; even the matched Andalusians his malicious son Harlan was to steal from him one windy night. In the period of prosperity that came before, and led into, his catastrophic term in Washington as a congressman, Jean-Pierre began a rhapsodic memoir of his experiences with horses, The Art of the Equestrian, which, though never completed, was to appear in serial form in the small upstate newspaper he would acquire in the early 1800’s. There were other horses, many horses, just as there would be many women—a flood of women, in fact: but it was the nameless chestnut gelding he would recall, with ferocity and love: his first mount of the New World, the earliest of his innumerable prizes!)

  Pepper, the young black gelding who threw Jedediah, and then stumbled backward over the screaming child, snapping his leg just below the knee, was another “good-natured” horse. After the accident Jedediah’s mother insisted that he be sold, or given away; but Jean-Pierre refused. It was hardly the horse’s fault, he said, that some contemptible fool in blood-stinking overalls and boots came too close . . . and it was hardly the horse’s fault that his boy hadn’t enough sense to grab onto a saddle horn. When, after the bone was set, and after, slowly, it mended, Jedediah still limped, it was often the case that his father asked him impatiently what was wrong. “Are you trying to reproach me?” he said. “You can walk correctly if you try.” Eventually the horse was sold when Jean-Pierre needed money quickly, and most of his property was tied up in complicated legal arrangements. But he was to remain in Jedediah’s imagination, in the dimmest, least fathomable region of his mind’s eye, for the rest of his life: a gigantic whinnying creature, utterly black, both wraithlike and portentous as stone, rising on his hind legs, careening backward, bringing down the incredible irrevocable fact of his weight on a child’s bare knee. In the delirium brought about by his solitude Jedediah would wake speechless from dream-visions in which the horse appeared—not as Pepper, not as one of his father’s horses, not even as a horse, but as an aspect of God Himself.

  Then there was an ugly scrappy creature of uneasily mixed blood—Arabian, Belgian, saddle horse—Louis’s stallion Bonaparte, later called Old Bones. He was named not for the megalomaniac emperor but for his older brother Joseph who, traveling incognito as the mellifluous Count de Survilliers, acquired through Jean-Pierre’s Compagnie de New York some 160,260 acres of uninhabitable and unfarmable wilderness land under the mistaken impression that, as part of New France, it would prove a reasonable and even idyllic retreat for the defeated emperor himself, once he escaped Saint Helena. (Unfortunately, Napoleon was closely guarded on Saint Helena and his escape was never a possibility. And the 160,260 acres were uninhabitable, despite Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s hearty enthusiasm, and his dreams of roads, railroads, and even canals to come.) The elder Bonaparte was wall-eyed, and so was Louis’s stallion. But while the horse was, even in his prime, graceless and temperamental, he was also resilient, shrewd, and courageous, and as stubborn as his master. Perhaps to antagonize his father Louis liked to say that he wasn’t a horseman—wasn’t an equestrian—and ridiculed the cult of breeding Thoroughbreds. He had read in a newspaper that in the long run, over a period of many years and many races, Thoroughbreds did not make all that much profit for their owners.

  It was the roan stallion Bonaparte Louis was riding that April afternoon in 1822 when he pursued the noisy hooting mob out of the settlement on the south shore of Lake Noir (not to be called Bellefleur for some years)—the mob, the laughing, frightened justice of the peace, and the doomed Indian boy himself (tied by a length of barbed wire to the saddle horn of a man named Rabin, an old Indian trader, and forced to run alongside Rabin’s horse). Louis shouted to the men that they might have the wrong person, they’d better let the boy stand trial, they’d better call in the sheriff and have an investigation—and one of the Varrells, a man Louis’s own age and approximate size, but with sharply slanted cheek-bones and dead-black straight hair, reached over, swaying drunk in his saddle, and struck Bonaparte’s neck with his fist. He shouted at Louis to get the hell home. The stallion whinnied in alarm and danced away, his great eyes rolling, but he did not rear back; and Louis, though astonished that anyone would have the audacity to strike out at him, was nevertheless clear-headed enough to do nothing more than settle his horse, and to resist returning the blow while he and Varrell were both on horseback. For he wanted, after all, to save the boy’s life. . . .

  It was on a smooth-gaited, high-headed Costeña mare that Harlan Bellefleur appeared after years of absence, come home to revenge his family’s massacre: townspeople in Nautauga Falls eyed the remarkable horse, with its arched, muscular neck, its abundant gray mane, its dancelike gait—and most of all its handsomely attired rider, who wore lemon-yellow gloves and a floppy-brimmed hat of soft black wool—and murmured that they had never seen anything quite like it; it was something “foreign.” (Indeed the horse was Peruvian, sleek, dun colored, with bright, large, expressive eyes set wide in its head, and small ears, and a muzzle that was almost delicate. Harlan himself by this time looked more Spanish than French, and it was only when he leaned from his saddle to inquire courteously about directions to Lake Noir—or did he ask, bluntly, as some witnesses claimed, where he might find the Varrells?—that he seemed, by way of his somewhat nasal inflections, a native of the region: in fact, a Bellefleur. After his death the mare was confiscated by local authorities and disappeared only to turn up, a few months later, in the Tennessee stable of the notorious Reverend Hardy M. Cryer, soon to be Andrew Jackson’s “turf adviser.”)

  Raphael Bellefleur professed to admire horses, and indeed he owned several fine Thoroughbreds, and nodded sagely in the company of his many horse-minded associates; but in fact he could barely tell one horse from another, an Arabian from a Morgan, a Standardbred from a Percheron. All that raw, blunt physicality paralyzed his imagination; he liked to think in terms of dollars, tons multiplied by dollars divided by costs. Before politics became a disorder of the nerves for him, and he felt some interest in, if not actual affection for, his magnificent estate, he was often seen in an elegant English two-seater, riding about the graveled lanes, always impeccably dressed despite the reddish dust that arose in capricious clouds, and the pitiless summer sun (which, even in the mountains, could turn the fine thin air to a quivering 105 degrees on windless afternoons). His horses were all English Thoroughbreds, for it was quite true, as the rumor went, that Raphael Bellefleur scorned the French, and professed not to understand a word of his grandfather’s tongue; hadn’t he, for instance, sailed to London to acquire an anemic pigeon-breasted English girl by the name of Violet Odlin, and wasn’t he attempting to furnish his improbable castle in the style in which he imagined English country squires furnished their castles? His chief groom bragged in town that one of their stallions was descended from Bull Rock himself—Bull Rock being, as horse lovers knew, the first English Thoroughbred import, brought to the Virginia colony in 1730; and even Raphael’s lesser horses were prizes. But he hadn’t any time for racing, or shows; and all forms of hunting repulsed him; so the stallions were exercised mainly by the stablehands, and after his death, when the Bellefleur fortune declined sharply, and poor Lamentations of Jeremiah took over the estate, what remained of the horses were sold off one by one. . . .

  During her first years in America, when she was still a reasonably young bride, before her ten pregnancies overtook her, and something very like the black mood of the Bellefleurs poisoned her system, Violet herself was frequently seen in the two-seater, or in her husband’s ebonized, gilt-trimmed coach, driven by a liveried black man in a scarlet and gold fez, not a slave, but a freed man originally from the Ivory Coast, lithe and graceful even with a whip, and possessed of a
“magical” way with horses. He drove Bellefleur’s wife to visit friends, other men’s wives, in mock castles and baronial mansions in the Valley (for these were the days, in the 1850’s and ’60’s, of heady prosperity in certain areas of the North), and observers were struck by the aristocratic beauty of the matched Thoroughbreds—their fastidiously groomed coats a very dark brown, gleaming with fragrant imported oils, their manes brushed and, upon occasion, braided—and, carried along by the strength of their superb legs, the wan, washed-out, halfway apologetic, halfway cringing beauty of the woman in the carriage with the heraldic embossed Bellefleur insignia on its doors: “There is Lady Violet,” the more reverent murmured, possibly knowing that Violet Odlin was nothing more than Mrs. Raphael Bellefleur, but sensing her husband’s heroic pretensions—her husband’s, not her own. For Violet, the brim of an enormous veiled and beflowered hat usually slanted across her fine-boned face, had very few pretensions. And in the end she had none at all.

  The Bellefleurs’ oldest son Samuel—who was to say shortly before his tragic disappearance, though the remark has been attributed, over the years, to various members of the family—Time is clocks, not a clock: you can’t do more than try to contain it, like carrying water in a sieve—was given, for his twentieth birthday, one of his father’s finest English Thoroughbreds, a deep-chested, rather angular, leggy bay named Herod. Young Samuel, his father’s pride, was an officer in the Chautauqua Light Guard, and his Bellefleur handsomeness—the strong chin, the bone-straight nose, the deep-set eyes—was shown to great advantage in the Guard’s dress uniform (which, as represented even in fading, coppery-pale daguerreotypes that could not do justice to its heroic colors—the towering ermine hat, the smart white jacket, the green trousers with their dazzling white stripe, the skin-tight white gloves, the scarlet ornamentation about the sword’s deep sheath—was to strike later generations of irreverent, unsentimental Bellefleur children as merely ludicrous), and mounted on stately Herod he looked, it must be said, the quintessence of New World aristocracy; who could fail to comprehend, and even to sympathize with, his father’s deep pride in him . . . ? Samuel Bellefleur was the envy of his fellow officers, and even of his superiors. (Ah, his fellow officers! All of them were, like Samuel, the sons of well-to-do landowners; they and the male members of their families were enchanted with fine-bred horses, military processions, ceremonial occasions, sabers, muskets, the latest in weaponry and military strategy, and the need to rebuke, to punish, in fact to bring to its knees, the traitorous Confederacy. They were also powerfully moved by military music: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Buchanan’s Union Grand March,” “The Tars from Tripoly,” “Brother Soldiers All Hail!” brought quick tears to their eyes, and caused their hearts to swell with the instinct, the almost physical need, to march into battle. They would all, with the exception of Samuel Bellefleur, ride off to war in 1861, and while not each was to be killed in action not one escaped grievous suffering; nor did their handsome steeds survive more than a few months.)

  Felix (later renamed by his possibly deranged father Lamentations of Jeremiah) loved, as a boy, his pony Barbary, a Shetland with large expressive gray eyes, a marvelous gray-and-white dappled coat, and long thick hair that, brushed hard, seemed to give out galaxies of light from within; as a child of five or six he was to be seen carried about the Bellefleur estate, on the newly laid pinkish seashell-and-gravel drives, in a pony cart originally made (so the rumor went, and it sprang from Raphael’s neighbors) for a Prussian prince. Sometimes his driver was the aloof Ivory Coast black in his fez and braided jacket, sometimes a mere local boy, the son of a hop-field foreman who, dressed uncomfortably in black, and carrying a lightweight whip more suitable for a woman’s hand, sat stiffly erect and refused to speak to his shy, hopeful little charge, who had no friends, and not even any brothers, really, since Samuel, years older, paid no attention to him, and Rodman, his senior by two years, chose to assert his precarious authority by bullying Felix. The hop-field foreman’s son was driving the elegant little canopied cart on that August morning when the kidnapping took place, and when—after the boy was found in a ditch, his skull crushed—it became clear that he had disobeyed Raphael Bellefleur’s instructions and driven out toward the river, where Raphael’s growing paranoia told him, correctly as it turned out, thieves and kidnappers did await (for the history of the Valley aristocrats was not a placid one: forbidden to hunt and fish on territory that had once seemed quite clearly their own, or no one’s, accused of poaching and trespassing if they strayed off their own small farms, Chautauquans began to exact revenge in small sinister ways, by starting fires, destroying dams, poisoning cattle, and in large flamboyant ways, by picking off their wealthy neighbors as they were driven here and there in their custom-made carriages—the marksmanship of the Chautauquans being legendary), after it was obvious that the boy had brought not only his own misfortune on himself, but the greater misfortune of the kidnapping of Felix Bellefleur, Raphael said before witnesses: “If the little beast had been alive when they found him, I would have kicked in his miserable skull. . . .” Felix was to turn up, unharmed, some three weeks later, in New Orleans; by then he had already begun to affect a shy, gentle Southern drawl. He could give no account of his kidnapper or kidnappers, and it was possibly his placid indifference to his father’s three weeks of grief, rather than the fact of the kidnapping itself, that led Raphael to rename and even rebaptize him Lamentations of Jeremiah. But what of Barbary, the child clamored. Where is Barbary . . . ? The docile little Shetland was never to be found, though the pony cart, overturned, had been almost immediately discovered in a nearby stand of pines. “Where is Barbary? What did you do with Barbary? I want Barbary!” the child wept, turning away not only from his father but from his distraught mother as well.

  Of Jeremiah’s eventual offspring, of his three surviving sons, only the energetic, restless Noel took to horses, and bragged of himself, in later years especially, as a fool about a good horse: if the management of the estate hadn’t taken up so much of his time (for his father, even in his fifties, became increasingly negligent and half-minded) Noel would certainly have traveled about the country, and even to Mexico and South America, searching out horses to add to the Bellefleur stables. He would have bred real racing horses—would have hired professional jockeys—would have bought into tracks like Havre de Grace and Bennings and Belmont Park itself. His brother Hiram, educated in the classics at Princeton, and as a young adult wonderfully obsessed with “the world,” as he put it, of finance, had no interest in horses whatsoever—hadn’t even any awareness of their comeliness, or their ineffable scent, or their magical presence (which so comforted, during difficult times, both Noel and his son Gideon—more than once father and son discovered, faintly embarrassed, that the other had also made his way into the darkened stable, simply to stand with his arm around a horse’s obliging neck, his cheek pressed against a horse’s dry, scratchy mane that smelled of marvels: sun, heat, open fields, open roads along which one might gallop forever, raising clouds of dust behind him.) As for Noel’s older brother Jean-Pierre II—he had professed, for a time, the interest in handsome horses customary to young gentlemen of his class, but he was a poor rider, he never cared to groom his own horses, he used the riding crop ineptly, and was, as a young boy, always being thrown, or brushed off by low-hanging tree branches toward which his malicious mounts would race; he had given up horses by the time he was thirty. (Which was, at his trial for first-degree murder, the defense’s strongest point. For the only witness to the escape of the murderer claimed that Jean-Pierre had ridden off on a dark horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail—a horse that was, indeed, in the Bellefleur stable—unless of course the witness had deliberately lied—unless the entire trial, perhaps even the murder of the eleven men (among whom only two were Varrells, and those with local reputations that were for the most part insignificant) had been contrived merely to hound, to embarrass, to shame, to humiliate, and to de
stroy the Bellefleur family. The witness was the saloonkeeper’s garrulous, mean-spirited wife, who had for some reason Jean-Pierre could not explain taken a violent dislike to him from the first; and naturally in the confusion of that night, the interruption of the card games, the overturned tables and chairs, the shouts that lifted to screams and then to shrieks, the very indescribable reality of that tragic night at Innisfail—naturally she had fixed her mind on Jean-Pierre as the murderer, and the defense’s attorney, excellent though he was, superbly gifted in the art of cross-examination and of addressing both the jury and the judge with an air of intelligent complicity that could not fail, given his elegance, to flatter, was simply unable to dislodge her from her “story.” The murderer was Jean-Pierre Bellefleur and he had ridden off on a horse with three white stockings and a close-cropped mane and tail, a black horse, or a very dark brown horse; and he had ridden, the wretched old woman claimed defiantly, as skillfully as anyone she’d ever seen: like the very devil himself.)

  Germaine’s mother Leah, then Leah Pym, loved horses as a girl, and would have raced her sprightly, spirited sorrel mare in fairground competitions with both boys and girls, had she been allowed; but of course girls were barred from such competitions. They might race with one another, but their victories hardly mattered, and drew little interest. For a while at La Tour, bewitched perhaps by the predilections of other, wealthier girls, Leah took part in stately shows, demonstrating her mastery of her horse, and her horse’s reluctant mastery of certain difficult, dancelike maneuvers. Fetlocks clipped, her smooth-gleaming hide only a degree or two lighter than Leah’s thick russet hair, every part of her washed by Leah herself, and brushed with a dandy brush, and polished (with a linen cloth!) until she shone, her mane clipped and braided with red ribbons that fluttered fetchingly in the breeze and mimicked the graceful undulations of the ends of the green velvet ribbon that hung down from Leah’s chignon, the supple little mare executed all the proper responses to the commandments given her—“Go Large,” “Circle,” “Volte,” “Half Volte and Change,” “Half Pass”—and performed with precision, if not always enthusiasm, rather like Leah herself. The mare’s name, Leah was to remember, years later, when, sated with adulthood and wealth and the ceaseless maneuvers these demanded, and nostalgic with longing for a girlhood she had in fact detested (ah, Della’s decades of mourning, her dry droll humorless remarks about men, about Bellefleur men especially!—her pretense of impoverishment when, as everyone knew, her brother Noel gave them all the money they needed, and not only paid Leah’s exorbitant tuition at La Tour (where he had not sent his own daughter Aveline, saying—quite correctly—that she simply wasn’t intelligent enough for the school), and her show-horse expenses, but refrained, as a gentleman, from saying anything at all when Leah abruptly quit one morning, in the middle of a French grammar quiz, and returned to Bushkill’s Ferry with a single piece of luggage . . . ) was Angel.