Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So Yolande left the cemetery, and descended the hill to the creek, walking at a normal pace. She was not frightened, she was not going to allow herself to be frightened; the boy would only laugh at her; she wasn’t frightened. (Though the stitch in her side had returned. And her head still ached.) She followed the fishermen’s path alongside the creek, knowing the strange boy would not pursue her.

  “Why, if I told Papa about this . . . or Grandpa . . . or even Garth . . . Why, Garth and his friends, or Uncle Gideon, or . . .”

  She did not want to look back, for fear he was watching her, but she couldn’t help herself: and there was something following her though it didn’t look like the boy or even a person . . . unless it was a person crawling along through the high grass. . . .

  Yolande swallowed. She felt faint. Perhaps if she ran back into the forest and hid, perhaps if she shut her eyes tight, her lover would find her, her true lover would discover her and save her and carry her back home. . . . But, ah!—it wasn’t a person, it was a dog. Only a dog.

  She crossed a marshy meadow, holding her skirt and petticoats off the ground (how muddy and nasty everything was!—her shoes were ruined) and saw in the corner of her eye the dog trotting parallel with her.

  “You go away back home!” she cried. “You know you don’t belong here!”

  If only her lover would appear: he would clap his hands vigorously and frighten the dog away. And sliding his arm across her shoulders he would walk her back to the house. . . .

  “Shoo! Go away! Go home where you belong!” Yolande cried.

  It wasn’t a dog she recognized. A hound with a mud-splattered yellowish hide, and a tail that had never been trimmed. Even at this distance Yolande could see it had the mange. Odd, how it contemplated her as it trotted along; its expression was almost human.

  “You heard me—we don’t allow stray dogs on our property,” Yolande said, beginning to sob.

  The creature paused, lifted one hind leg, and in response to her words urinated on a clump of weed flowers.

  “Oh, aren’t you nasty. . . . Dogs are so nasty . . .” Yolande whispered.

  She turned and walked faster and believed she could see, a mile or so away, the towers of the castle, the towers of her home. She would be there in a little while and they would take care of her and the hound wouldn’t dare follow her, any more than the boy had dared follow her, and she would tell her father and Uncle Gideon about what had happened, and then . . . The yellow dog trotted beside her, now at a distance, now uncomfortably close, growling and nipping at her heels, and then falling back, half-cringing, staring at her with his dark moist eyes. He was seeing her, he was thinking about her. . . . Yolande tried to keep from sobbing. Because if she once gave in, she couldn’t stop. But her hat was gone: her hat had been knocked off and was lost and she didn’t dare look for it: so the sobs began. The dog, keeping pace with her, its tongue lolling, drew its lips back from its stained teeth in a look of studied derision.

  The Room of Contamination

  On the third floor of the northwest wing of Bellefleur Manor, overlooking the immense muscular grace of the cedar of Lebanon, and, in the distance, the mist-shrouded slopes of Mount Chattaroy, was the extraordinary room known at first as the Turquoise Room—for, some years after the completion of the castle, when it was believed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the Baron and Baroness von Richthofen were to be monthlong guests of Raphael Bellefleur, this part of the northwest wing was redone as a combination guest room and drawing room, in a most elegant fashion: on one wall was a large plate-glass mirror, approximately six by ten feet, enclosed in a bower supported by two pairs of highly ornate columns from Pisa, of Italian Renaissance design; fronting the mirror was a latticed grillwork giving a delicate, somewhat precious floral effect with vines and small wine-dark roses; descending from the vaulted ceiling were three dragon-ornamented chandeliers, in gold and crystal; above the fireplace were four oak-sculpted figures, of indeterminate age and gender, swathed in long voluptuous gowns; the floor was marble, and always chilly; there were, on the walls, paintings attributed to Montecelli, Thomas Faed, and Jan Anthonisz van Ravestyn; and the furniture and ornamentation were finished predominately in turquoise and gold. It was rumored that more than $150,000 had gone into the Turquoise Room alone but the exact figures were never known except to Raphael Bellefleur, who of course spoke to no one about financial matters, not even his brother, or his eldest son. (It was characteristic of Raphael’s studied generosity that, in 1861, he would hire to take his place in the 14th Regiment of the Seventh Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac not one but two bounty soldiers, and that though he contracted to pay them a fairly small, fixed price, he in fact paid them far more, on the condition that they tell no one—no one at all—exactly how much he was paying. And since one of the soldiers died almost immediately, in Missouri, and the other was to die at Antietam, under McClellan, the extent of Raphael’s largess was never known.) The Turquoise Room was probably the most beautiful room in the manor but within a few years it was closed off from the rest of the house, its great tulipwood door locked forever, and it came to be known—in whispers, predominately among the servants—as the Room of Contamination.

  For more than seventy-five years the door has been locked, Vernon told Germaine, walking with her in the garden, pointing to the windows on the third floor, beneath a particularly rain-rotted pinnacled roof: and the door will always remain locked.

  The little girl, not plump so much as sturdy, solid, strong, peered up at the bay windows with their heavy mullions and tracery, and did not ask why, as if she knew the answer very well.

  (The other children, overhearing, naturally asked why, and Vernon told them the room was accursed, it was contaminated, no one must ever be allowed to set foot in it again: for something terrible had happened to their great-great-uncle Samuel Bellefleur in that room, when he was still a young man in his twenties. And naturally the children asked what had happened to him; even Little Goldie, who was customarily silent in Vernon’s presence, as if his very warmth, his unstudied affection, intimidated her, joined the chorus asking what? why? were there ghosts? was he murdered? what was in the terrible room?)

  Even when the unfortunate Lamentations of Jeremiah was hounded by his late father’s creditors into auctioning off paintings, statuary, and other luxurious furnishings, a mere three years after Raphael’s death, the Room of Contamination was not unlocked. Had Jeremiah wanted it open, Elvira would not have consented, for she had agreed to marry into the Bellefleurs only upon the condition that (for rumors spread so wildly in the north country!) certain rooms in the castle never be opened, and certain misfortunes never be dwelt upon; and even if Elvira had given her consent, no servants would have been willing to cross the threshold. . . . The room was not simply haunted, it was contaminated. To breathe its air was to risk madness and death, and even dissolution. (Ah, but one midsummer night, overly stimulated by the public fireworks display the Bellefleurs had put on along the southern shore of the lake, Gideon and Nicholas Fuhr, then in their late teens, rode back to the manor alone with the intention of prying open the door. The fireworks display had been magnificent, spectators for many miles around had come to stare, reduced to awed silence by the ingenious kaleidoscopic explosions, the “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” the “Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac,” “God punishing the cities of the plain”—and for some reason it occurred to the boys that they would never again have such an opportunity to explore the Room of Contamination. Of course they did not believe that the room was really “contaminated”; they knew very well that the old tales of ghosts and spirits were absurd; so there was hardly any risk in what they did, apart from the risk of punishment should they be caught. But when, with two crowbars, a screwdriver, and spike and a mallet, they tried to open the door (beautifully carved in rococo fashion and finished in gold and turquoise), they felt almost immediately the queerest sense of . . . of languor . . . languor and vertigo . . . as if they were
at the bottom of the ocean, barely able to lift their arms, barely able to keep their heads from nodding. . . . There was such a pressure on every square inch of their bodies, even on their eyeballs, that each found it too difficult to speak, to explain to the other that he was weak . . . or ill . . . or dizzy . . . or suddenly frightened. After no more than ten minutes Gideon dropped his instruments and stumbled away, and Nicholas crawled after him, and neither boy was to mention the episode to each other, ever again.)

  Young Samuel Bellefleur had deeply gratified his father by graduating with honors from West Point, and by having been promoted, at the age of twenty-six, to the rank of first lieutenant in the Chautauqua Light Guard. Though photographs showed a conventionally handsome boyish young man with deep-set Bellefleur eyes and a small prim mustache and something both impetuous and smug in the set of his jaw, it was said that no one—no man—in the entire north country was so attractive. He possessed a remarkable grace and composure, whether riding in procession on his English bay, Herod, in the splendor of his full-dress uniform, with the chin strap of the towering ermine helmet cutting deep into his flesh, and his white-gloved hand casually on his saber; or dancing at one or another of the lavish balls that were so popular in the fifties, among the landowners in the Valley; or debating certain lively issues of the day with his father and his father’s friends—the Paine decision of 1852, for instance, which freed a group of eight slaves brought to New York for reshipment to Texas, and caused great distress among the slave-owning states and great delight elsewhere—in Raphael’s handsome drawing room. His fair brown hair was charmingly wavy, his voice was usually well modulated and gentle, his manners were gracious if somewhat self-conscious, and he put to shame his loutish brothers Rodman and Felix (or Jeremiah, as Raphael insisted he be called) simply by the way he entered a room, approached his mother, raised her limp hand to his lips and bowed over it, his heels smartly but inconspicuously together. In secret he scorned the passivity, the weakness, the “holy” patience of Violet Odlin Bellefleur, and did no more than pretend, with minimal effort, to believe the High Church claptrap she evidently believed; he was really not much more respectful of Raphael’s “beliefs”—which he saw, not altogether fairly, as hypocritical—though he was certainly respectful of Raphael’s behavior, and of Raphael’s considerable financial success. “To hear the old man talk in public,” Samuel said to his closest friends, officers in the Light Guard like himself, “you’d think he wanted a monopoly on lumbering in the mountains only to further God’s work on earth, and to be in a position to bolster up the new party, wouldn’t you!”—the new party being, at that time, the Republican Party. But in Raphael’s presence he always behaved with dignified respect, and made a show of listening—or perhaps he actually did listen—when his father launched into one of his long, convoluted, grimly persuasive monologues about the graft, corruption, and outright wickedness in the Democratic Party, the Luciferian dimensions of Stephen Douglas, and the need to bear in mind at all times Hobbes’s admonition that men require a common power to keep them in awe, for otherwise they will be plunged into war: outright war. (In secret, of course, they are locked in a perpetual though unacknowledged war, of which economic struggle is but one manifestation.)

  Samuel was frequently embarrassed by the intensity of his father’s sentiments; he much preferred horse racing, card games, hunting and fishing, dancing and parties, and of course excited speculation on the future (for surely the future involved war?), and who might marry whom. Though no one in the family ever mentioned the Bellefleurs’ tragic past (that massacre in Bushkill’s Ferry!—Samuel detested the victims as well as the murderers, and wondered if his friends murmured behind his back and expected him to pursue that old shameful feud), Samuel was as conscious of it as his brothers, and resolved that the future of the Bellefleurs would be as pure as the past was despoiled; and if, or when, he died, he would die with dignity, his saber in his hand. He would certainly not be surprised in his bed. . . .

  A year or two before Samuel’s experience in the Turquoise Room, he was engaged to the youngest daughter of Hans Dietrich, whose fortune and castellated mansion on the Nautauga River, if not his land (he owned only ten thousand acres, though they consisted of fertile valley farmland and a thick pine and spruce forest he would not allow to be thinned) rivaled those of Raphael Bellefleur himself. Dietrich made his initial money in wheat, and ventured, with minimal success, into hops at about the same time Raphael Bellefleur conceived of the scheme of creating the world’s largest hop-growing plantation (though the scheme was not to be realized until after 1865); he became increasingly reckless with his investments, since in general they did so well, and made him so outlandishly rich. Consequently he paid no attention when Raphael (who had certainly hesitated before speaking out, knowing it an imprudent maneuver in the unacknowledged war of which Hobbes wrote so persuasively) came to Dietrich Castle one day to warn him against entering into a partnership with a man named Jay Gould, about whom Raphael had heard paradoxical and disturbing things. . . . So it seemed quite fitting, even to his friends, when Dietrich lost his fortune, and rather than file for bankruptcy and allow his numerous enemies to gloat over his shame, and even to prowl about his castle on auction day, he wandered off alone in his beloved woodlands above the Alder River to die in one of those “white mist” storms that can last for a week without lifting. The engagement, naturally, was broken off, though Samuel was halfway tempted—for he did think highly of the girl, despite knowing her only superficially—he did love her—to insist upon the wedding in the face of his father’s and even the Dietriches’ opposition: but in the end nothing came of it. The engagement was broken, the family moved away, the castle’s furnishings were sold at auction for a fraction of their price and the castle itself (a pretentious monstrosity, the Bellefleurs thought, modeled after a medieval Rhennish fortress, with rugged stonework that gave it a pockmarked appearance, and a ludicrous number of turrets, towers, battlements, balconies, and windows of all fanciful distracting shapes: diamond, square, rectanglar, elliptical) was eventually sold to a Dutchman who had made his fortune in bricks, in Manhattan, and who wanted to retire to the north country, where fish and wild game were so famously plentiful. . . . (At the time of Germaine’s birth all that remained of Dietrich Castle was the central, squarish, four-storeyed tower, rising battle-worn and pockmarked out of a field of rubble.) For many years, however, people as far away as Contracoeur and Paie-des-Sables reported seeing Dietrich wandering in snowstorms, stumbling and groping about in the lurid white mist, at times a gigantic figure, even fatter than Dietrich had been in life, at other times lank and shriveled, and always shy—he fled from them, the legend went. But Samuel knew such tales were sheer rubbish, like the rumors he absorbed rather than overheard about his parents, and brushed them away with an airy cavalier gesture.

  He would never have had his curious initial experience in the Turquoise Room, and the tragedy that followed would never have taken place, had it not been for a set of circumstances nearly too complex (so Vernon said, though perhaps he didn’t exactly know all that had happened) to transcribe. But Samuel’s uncle Arthur was back from the Kansas Territory filled with incoherent but impassioned praise for a man who had, evidently, along with several of his own sons, hacked five proslavers to death at Pottawatomie Creek. The man’s name was John Brown, already one of the most famous of the free-soil agitators, and Arthur Bellefleur—until only a few years previously a shy, stammering, portly youth with an inclination toward the ministry, as some have an inclination toward respiratory ailments, until, one evening at a church hall in Rockland when he heard Brown, in person, speak of the evil of slavery and the necessity for man to wreak God’s vengeance on the slavers, he had become transformed—“converted”—Arthur, still stammering, though no longer shy, a deerskin outfit stretched tight across his penguin shape, his hands and saliva flying about, seemed to be reasoning with—was in fact reasoning with—his brother Raphael to give him not only the use
of the coachman’s lodge and a number of the guest chambers of the manor for an unspecified amount of time (indeed, some of Brown’s soldiers—though not Brown himself—were already there, in the kitchen, eating and drinking ravenously all that Violet had directed should be offered them: ten or twelve bearded and disheveled men, three of them husky brutish runaway slaves with skins of an unimagined blackness), and not only a generous amount of money in support of the cause (for Brown, Old Osawatomie, though in hiding and rumored to be wounded, would soon return to initiate a series of guerrilla raids of slaveholding settlements, and he was calling for at least two hundred rifles), and not only some five or ten or fifty or two hundred acres of wilderness land so that Brown could, when he wished, establish a rival nation, a “second government” with a population center to rival that of Washington, D.C., as the struggle against the abomination, slavery, grew in ferocity—but also (and here Samuel had to marvel at his uncle’s audacity) Raphael Bellefleur’s personal blessing.

  “John Brown has said, and you must know it to be true, that the slaveholders have forfeited their right to live,” Arthur said. “You can’t deny the truth of that statement.”