She fixed her very dark blue eyes upon him with an almost mocking concentration as he spoke, but it seemed quite clear to Gideon, who blushed and stammered, that she was not really listening to his words. (Indeed, she was thinking, as she stared at her handsome cousin, with his thick dark hair that rose from his forehead like a brush, and his squarish jaw, and his eyes that were so prominent, almost bulging with—with what?—energy?—excitement?—that any other girl would fall in love with him, possibly in a matter of minutes, but that she was not such a girl. And she thought, lazily stroking Love’s hairy back, in order to placate him (for he seemed unusually agitated, she could feel his tiny heart beating), that though it might be amusing to appear to fall in love with Gideon Bellefleur, since it would outrage not only the Lake Noir Bellefleurs but, most of all, Della herself, such an antic might bring with it consequences she could not foresee. Gideon’s reputation was not so wicked as Ewan’s, but he was a gambler, and it was common knowledge that he and Nicholas and one or two other young men frequently raced their horses on outlaw tracks, and involved themselves with sluttish women back in the mountains, and over in Derby and Port Oriskany; and he had been very cruel to an acquaintance of Faye Renaud’s, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who had presumed, on the basis of two or three innocent outings, always in the company of others, that Gideon Bellefleur would soon be engaged to her. Still, there was the quite appealing fact that Gideon lived in the castle, and Della loathed the castle, and frequently made a show—a silly show, in Leah’s opinion—of actually shielding her eyes from it, on exceptionally clear days when its eerie sprawling coppery-pink shape appeared to float above the lake, far closer than, in fact, it was. And Leah was curious about the castle, for she’d seen, over the years, only the grounds, and the walled garden, and two or three of the larger downstairs rooms, which were really public rooms, open to any Bellefleur guest. She wanted—ah, how badly she wanted!—she could not resist wanting, despite Della’s warnings—to see every room, every cubbyhole, every secret passageway, every corner of that monstrosity. Gazing at Gideon her eyes misted over as she saw the two of them, Gideon leading her by the hand, descending the stone steps into the vaultlike cellar . . . where strands of cobweb would brush against their eager faces, and mice would scamper away in corners, and the air would smell of damp, of mildew, of rot, of pitch-black darkness itself, a darkness ten times black . . . and Gideon’s flashlight would dart about . . . and he would grip her hand hard if she stumbled . . . and if she began to tremble with the cold he would turn to her, and . . . ).
Gideon broke off in the middle of a sentence and said roughly that he didn’t want to bore her; he’d better be going. He had wanted to ask her to accompany him to Carolyn Fuhr’s wedding but she was clearly not interested. . . . “You keep petting that thing on your shoulder,” he said. “That ugly thing on your shoulder.”
Leah blushed, and brought Love into her lap, where she stroked his back and sides, and tickled his fat little belly, or bellies, with her forefinger. She and Gideon stared at each other for a full minute, and then she said, blushing even more deeply, “He isn’t ugly! How dare you say such a thing!”
Gideon got to his feet, with the graceful dignity of which he was sometimes capable, and made a mocking little bow with his head, and simply walked out of the parlor and out of the house and down the brick walk.
But at their second meeting he was again insulted, for this time not only was Love present (though not in his mistress’s lap or on her shoulder, but quivering at the center of a five-foot web spun out so recently, in a high corner of the room, that it glistened wetly, and possessed an almost icy, crystalline beauty—quivered, Gideon saw with disgust, as he greedily devoured bits of food placed in the web for him), but Della—Della with her cheerless bustle, her long black skirts that looked (as Cornelia said) as if they were fashioned out of feedbags!—Della with her dried-up prunish shrewd face, and her small head that seemed to be made of ill-fitting plates of bone, and her wasp’s smile, and her obvious gloating dislike of him!—was in and out of the room, bringing the young couple tea and stale chunks of carrot cake, and inquiring after Gideon’s family with a feigned courtesy, and sympathetic little moues when she heard that Noel had been laid up with the grippe, and Hiram had injured himself sleepwalking again, and the deer and porcupines were eating up everything in sight. Leah appeared to be somewhat more congenial on that afternoon, but it was difficult to tell: her dimpled smile, her calm level lovely dizzying stare, her erect posture, her strong hands clasped at her knees, her murmured assents: what, really, did they mean? Was she trying to signal Gideon, when Della’s back was turned?—or was she perversely trying to signal Della, while Gideon looked blankly on? And the huge ugly creature in the web, devouring his bits of carrot cake, and fairly shuddering with the ecstasy of eating. . . .
After less than an hour Gideon left the Pyms’, his face burning with frustration. He had managed to extract from his cousin a vague promise (retracted the very next day, by messenger) that she would accompany him to a lawn party at the home of the former senator, a man named Washington Payne; but he had the uncanny, maddening idea that she was not really listening, that she was not aware of him at all.
And so he did not see her for several weeks, and scrupulously avoided thinking of her, and got into a fairly vicious fight with his brother Ewan when Ewan taunted him crudely about her, and spent as much time as possible with his horses. (His favorite horse at that time was the stallion Rensselaer, descended from old Raphael’s English Thoroughbreds, a grandson, many times removed, of Bull Run himself.) But of course his mind dwelt on her; his very senses, it seemed, swerved upon her at the slightest provocation. A girl’s uplifted voice, the odor of must and damp, the sight of cobwebs in the dew-glistening grass. . . . Children splashing about at the shallow end of the lake. . . . A polka-dot dress worn by his own, rather plain sister Aveline. . . .
One night he rode Rensselaer over to Bushkill’s Ferry, to the Pyms’ old red-brick house, and, his nerves perfectly steady, his audacity fortified by no more than two or three swallows of good mash whiskey, he calculated, from the ground, which room was his cousin’s, and climbed an oak tree with long, slovenly, overhanging branches, and managed, his gloved hands moving deftly and quickly, not only to get the ill-fitting window open but to open it without making any noise; and he climbed inside, and found himself, indeed, in his cousin’s room (a spacious, attractive room, but far messier than he had anticipated), only a few yards away from his sleeping cousin, whose wild dark hair cascaded across her pillows, and whose moist, pouting lips were slightly parted. But judicious Gideon Bellefleur did no more than glance at the sleeping girl. He went at once to the immense, elaborate cobweb that stretched from floor to ceiling, and, without giving himself time to think, without giving himself time to feel the trepidation he might reasonably have felt, simply reached out to grab the spider: a thick, weighty black shadow hovering in the web, its yellow eyes open, its many legs already beginning to thrash. Another man might have killed Love with a gun, or even a rifle; another man might have used a sharp hunting knife; but Gideon made no concession to the hideousness of the creature other than his gloves—fine, soft, beautifully fitting leather gloves with suede ornamentation, custom-made to accommodate his large hands.
The thing made a high shrieking noise, not unlike a bat, and stabbed repeatedly at him with its mouth (which contained teeth, or teethlike, and very sharp, serrations in its jaw), and kicked wildly at him with its many legs (which, though scrawny, were really quite elastically strong), and thrashed about so violently that Gideon nearly lost his balance and stumbled backward. He had not calculated exactly how to kill it—strangling was impossible, it hadn’t a neck—but in the excitement of the moment his gloved hands acted as if by instinct, as if, in the dim Bellefleur past, they had killed many a Love, just by holding it fast, gripping it fast, and squeezing. . . .
Despite the struggle Love put up, despite the spider’s remarkable size, the episode last
ed no more than two or three minutes. By then of course Leah was awake. And had lit the kerosene lamp on her bedside table. And was sitting up in bed, the covers held tightly over her breasts, her hair in heavy darkly-red curtains, frizzled at its ends with alarm, on either side of her beautiful pale face. When Gideon, panting, finally turned to her, and with a magnificent disdainful gesture let drop what remained of Love on the very end of her bed, on a folded-back cotton quilt, Leah stared at him sullenly and said, in a voice so soft he had to stoop to hear, “Now look what you’ve done, Gideon.”
The Nameless Child
He was excited because he could see that the pond had changed greatly since last autumn. Everywhere, on all sides, there was new life. Cattails. Water willow. Burr reeds. An uneven line of tiny alder sprung out of nowhere—out of the marshy soil. He was excited, tramping about in his boots, his woollen shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows the way Ewan often rolled his sleeves up. But within a few minutes he grew breathless, and had to stand very still. It was the muck that exhausted him, pulling at his boots, sucking down as he struggled to walk at the very edge of the pond where the mud was softest.
Do you remember, Raphael whispered. Do you know who I am . . . ?
The pond had changed. There were water lilies in bloom, and dragonflies hovering in the air. A rich wet odor. He couldn’t breathe it deeply enough. That winter he had been sick, he’d been sick more than once, the last time with bronchitis and a high fever (so that March passed in a hot delirium, like a rapid shallow stream in which nothing is distinct except the swift movement, the passage, itself), and so it sometimes hurt him to breathe sharply; but the smell of the pond was so rich and dark and good he felt comforted.
Mink Pond. His pond. His secret.
The shouts of his brothers and cousins rang out, some distance away. At the creek, most likely. Playing at war, playing at shooting one another, crouching behind boulders, poking their heads out incautiously, stretching their mouths to jeer. He had let them run ahead of him, he had adroitly eluded them, and now they had no idea where he was, and would never think of him, would let him alone. . . . Do you remember who I am, Raphael said without moving his lips.
How odd, how surprising, the unanticipated growth of the pond. Of course it was deeper than last August, and larger by some six or ten feet all around, because of the thaw, and the cascades of water that plummeted down from the mountains. But it had grown in other ways. There were more cattails, more reeds, innumerable foot-high water willow; and the creamy-white lilies; and horsetails and marsh marigold and pennywort and spike rushes. Many insects. Dizzy with the sunshine. The wet warmth. Dragonflies, diving beetles, water striders. Frogs. As Raphael approached the edge of the pond one frog after another leapt into the water. The water was clear enough for him to watch their quick deft progress as they swam away from him, toward the darker, deeper water at the center of the pond.
His brothers’ and his cousins’ shouts. Girls’ voices as well. And, cutting through their raucous noise, which had the power to annoy but not to disturb him, the terrible, jarring sound of a chain saw. (The giant elms and oaks near the manor were being cut back, after the winter’s damage. There was evidently money for that now. And for repairs on the slate roof, which had been leaking badly for so many years.)
Then the chain saw was silent, and the pond’s sound—which was not a voice, not even a whisper, but an almost inaudible lapping or bubbling murmur—rose to encompass him. It was soothing like music, like music without words. Though the pond could not speak and could not, perhaps, exactly remember, it was allowing Raphael to know that his presence was sensed.
His official name—which he had been shown once or twice, on documents with gold seals and the Bellefleur coat of arms in red and black wax—was Raphael Lucien Bellefleur II. Within the family he was Raphael. A few of the children called him Rafe. (Though most of the time they called him nothing—they did not concern themselves with him.) Alone in his sickbed when even the tiresome hired nurse was out of the room he had no name at all; nor did he have a name by the pond. He slipped into invisibility, nameless.
Sick, his eyes rolling back in his head, he had calmed himself thinking of his pond. Of course it was frozen over—frozen over and packed with heavy snow—seven or eight feet of snow—and if he had been allowed, as of course he wasn’t, to go out on showshoes with the other boys, he might not have known where the pond was, even: though he should have remembered the configuration of hemlock and mountain maple and ash down behind the cemetery. In those brief dark winter days the pond was hidden from sight but Raphael, pretending drowsiness even when his mother and his favorite sister Yolande were with him, saw on the insides of his reddened eyelids the pond of last autumn, defiantly visible, its surface winking like scales in the sun. His pond. Where the Doan boy had tried to kill him. His pond. Which had taken him in, even the outlandish surprise of him, a yelping thrashing drowning child, a terrible coward, plunging and sinking in the water (which had turned muddy as if with disgust), clumsy as a heifer.
He had comforted himself with the pond. It seemed to him that he could bring his temperature down simply by approaching the pond, walking in it, past his ankles, past his knees, past his groin. . . . The soft featureless black mud took him in, but did not draw him off balance. The pellucid water, though agitated by his clumsiness, did not turn cloudy.
Sometimes he woke from a small dream and shook his head in surprise, that so much time had passed. The dream might have begun in midafternoon; but when he opened his eyes it might be dusk. Aunt Leah’s cat Mahalaleel frequently slept at the foot of his bed, and it was remarkable how long the cat could sleep. He sometimes twitched, and shuddered, and made kittenlike mewing sounds, and his great ears trembled, and his large knobby paws kneaded the quilt; but he slept deeply and profoundly and even if Raphael moved his legs or adjusted his pillows Mahalaleel did not wake. That’s because a cat dreams so hard, the nurse told him. They dream of—oh, all kinds of things—I suppose it’s pictures mainly—and they do a lot of running. You can tell.
It was good luck, Raphael knew, that Mahalaleel came up to his room, to sleep on his bed on those dark winter afternoons. Morna said that a cat might creep into a baby’s room and jump right into the cradle and suck the baby’s breath away, so the cat shouldn’t be allowed in Leah’s room with the new baby, or even in Raphael’s room, because he slept so much. Yolande said that was idiotic: Cousin Morna repeated the stupid things Aunt Aveline told her: of course Mahalaleel was good luck, because of his beautiful eyes, and his beautiful fur. But when Raphael leaned down to pet the cat he sometimes made a vexed little sound, deep in his throat, that showed he didn’t want to be touched at that moment.
Bronchitis and a high fever, running for four days. Dr. Jensen, and the woman with the carrot-colored hair, hired out of a Nautauga Falls hospital, and brought up to the castle with a surprising number of boxes (she liked, she said, to have her own things about her—she’d thought that Bellefleur Castle would be cold and damp and frightening, judged from the outside), the expense immaterial. (Raphael overheard the adults conferring. The expense, Gideon told Ewan, is immaterial.) When she believed Raphael was asleep the woman actually got down on her knees and prayed, whispering: Dear God, don’t let this boy die on me, don’t let him die, I know You wouldn’t play such a cruel trick on me. . . .
Of course he hadn’t died. With a thrill of contempt he thought of how far he was from dying: how, walking into the pond, he had felt the cool buoyancy, the springiness, of the water which would never allow him to drown.
That day, something had struck him on the forehead with a terrible, incalculable force, and he had fallen off the raft and into the water, so quickly, so suddenly, it was as if the world had heaved itself sideways and sloughed him off, insubstantial, feathery, as a burr. He must have shouted, he must have cried out—he heard a child’s astonished scream—but there was no time to think, to see, as the dark water rose over his mouth, his nose, his wide staring
eyes. What was happening could not be happening and yet: and yet, even in the water, thrashing about helplessly in the water, he was struck by another rock that crashed down upon him from high in the air, and the dark mud at the bottom of the pond rose up to him. His body struggled. His arms, his legs. He was gasping for air where no air existed, where there was only water, water and mud, still he sobbed, swallowing and choking, raw and desperate and wild and doomed he sobbed, for Raphael knew he was drowning even when he no longer knew that he was Raphael who would drown; he reasoned clearly with a part of his mind which was curiously detached from the ugly thrashing about (as if floating in midair some distance away, but sightless, having no eyes with which to see) that the Doan boy had come here to kill him, to deliberately kill him—that he would kill him, and no one would ever know.
But he hadn’t been killed. He hadn’t drowned.
Squatting at the edge of the pond on this wet sunshine-rich day, his lungs grateful for all the air they could draw in, however sharp, however chilly, it might be, Raphael found himself staring at a small school of very small fish a few feet away. Very tiny fish!—darting, dipping, suddenly reversing direction, and then again reversing direction, so close to him now that he could have reached out, and scooped them up in the palm of his hand. Pickerel . . . ? He did not move, staring at them. Such tiny creatures, near-transparent, hardly longer than the nail of his smallest finger. . . .
He had been saved by entering their element, by learning to breathe in the water: suddenly lithe and slippery as a fish, wriggling away from the deadly surface, away from the hazy ceiling of light through which more rocks plunged, like gigantic murderous raindrops: he swam under the raft, and clutched at it with fingers that were immediately emboldened and strong enough to hold him in place. And then there was silence. A vast profound silence. Through which, gradually, the pond’s voice, the pond’s subtle rhythmic murmurous voice, rose. He had not drowned, he had not even lost consciousness despite the wound to his head. But he was no longer awake. He was no longer Raphael Lucien Bellefleur II. He remained there, beneath the raft (slatted with hazy light, for the logs were fitted very clumsily together), his lungs cautious in their new element, his lips tightly pursed together, waiting, not waiting, in a trance of such calm, such delectable bliss, in which minnows of light and a deeper blanketing dark contended, that when the danger was past—when the danger was long past—he roused himself reluctantly, and swam out from under the raft.
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