Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Gideon recklessly approached them, and though he saw, to his mild alarm, that they weren’t backing away, that they were staring at him, in fact, with queer frozen expressions—grimaces so contorted they appeared to be involuntary, as if facial muscles had locked in spasms—eyes half-shut or screwed up in malevolent mocking winks—ugly little grins in which the preternaturally wide mouths were held shut and the thin, pale lips were stretched tight against the teeth—still he continued down the hill, slipping and sliding, though the safety lock wasn’t on his gun and what he was doing was extremely unwise.

  The force of the first wooden ball, striking him on the shoulder, was enough to nearly fell him; and in his pain and surprise he actually dropped the shotgun—but in another instant, acting before he had time to think, he snatched it up again. By then, however, the dwarves were upon him. Shouting and jabbering and squeaking, obviously furious despite their frozen screwed-up faces, they swarmed up the hill, like a pack of wild dogs, exactly like a pack of wild dogs, and one seized Gideon by the thigh and another climbed up him and seized his hair, knocking him over by the sheer weight of his body (which, though stunted and undersized, was remarkably heavy), and before Gideon had time to cry out he felt teeth sink in the fleshy part of his hand, and there was a terrible paralyzing kick to his groin, so that he nearly lost consciousness, and the high-pitched squeaking was exactly like that of shrews devouring prey—even other shrews—and even in the midst of his wild desperate struggling (for he wanted, ah, how he wanted to live) Gideon knew that they were going to kill him: these ugly misshapen creatures were going to kill him, Gideon Bellefleur—!

  But of course it was not to be, for Garth had come up behind Gideon, and, at that unearthly sight, simply fired into the air; and the little men, terrified, scrambled off Gideon. Even in his consternation Garth was a cautious enough hunter to aim away from his uncle—he had time for only one more shot, so he turned to fire at a dwarf who had been jumping about at the edge of the commotion, tearing at his dark coarse hair with both hands, in a paroxysm of excitement. The buckshot tore into the hideous little creature’s right arm and shoulder, and brought him down at once.

  The other dwarves fled. Though panicked, they had prudence enough to snatch up their bowling balls and clubs, and not one was to be found afterward; but the meadow was so badly chewed up, it was not difficult to ascertain that a peculiar game of some kind had been played there. . . . By the time Albert, Dave, and Benjamin arrived, out of breath, the other dwarves had disappeared, and only the one Garth had shot remained. He was groaning and writhing about, bleeding from innumerable little wounds, his great misshapen head flailing from side to side, his clawlike fingers plucking at the grass. In silence the men gazed down upon him. They had never seen anything quite like him. . . . Not only was the creature hunchbacked, but his spine had curved so brutally that his jaw was mashed against his chest; he looked (the image flew into Gideon’s mind, though he was staggering with pain and exhaustion) like a young April fern, coiled up, so tightly coiled up you would never think it might grow straight and flare out into its extraordinary beauty. . . . But, this creature, how ugly!—how repulsive! His shoulders appeared to be muscle-bound, and his neck was as thick as a man’s thigh; his hair was coarse and shaggy and without luster as a horse’s mane; there was an indentation on his forehead, a mark deep in the bone itself, and the skull had grown about it asymmetrically. As he whimpered and groaned and begged for mercy (for his queer gibberish, which sounded part Indian, part German, part English, was quite intelligible) he opened his mouth wide, as if grinning, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the mouth extended almost fully across his broad face, traversing the muscular cheeks. He flopped over onto his belly and began to crawl, dragging himself, toward a patch of higher grass and weeds, like a wounded turtle. The sight of his oily blood on the ground went to Albert’s head; he drew out his long hunter’s knife and begged permission from Gideon to cut the thing’s throat. Just to put him out of his misery! Just to shut up that babbling! But Gideon said no, no, better not. . . . But didn’t he lay hands on you, Albert said, didn’t he touch you! And he ran over, fairly dancing with excitement, to the patch of weeds in which the dwarf lay, clutching frantically at the soil and grass, and seized hold of the dwarf’s hair, and lifted his head in triumph. Gideon, please, he begged. Gideon. Gideon. Just this once. Ah, Gideon . . .

  No, better not, Gideon said, adjusting his clothing, sucking at his wounded hand, after all the thing is human.

  THEY CALLED HIM Nightshade because it was a patch of purple nightshade he had dragged himself into, and they noted with what desperation, and what remarkable skill, he was crushing leaves and berries and mashing them against his wound. Within a few minutes the worst of the bleeding had stopped. And so efficacious was the nightshade juice that the creature did not afterward suffer any infection, and within a few weeks appeared to have totally forgotten his injury.

  Long afterward Gideon was to regret not having allowed his nephew to slit Nightshade’s throat: but, after all, how could he have foreseen the future, and how, in any case, could he take it upon himself to condemn even so repulsive a creature to death? Killing in the heat of a fight was merely killing, but killing in such a manner was murder. . . . No Bellefleur has ever committed murder, Gideon said.

  So they brought the dwarf home, carrying him for five torturous miles from a maple limb held at either end by Garth and Albert (his ankles and wrists bound, he was unceremoniously slung from the pole, like a carcass), and then laying him in the back of the pick-up truck. He had long since lost consciousness: but each time they checked his feeble heartbeat (for, if he had died, it would be wisest just to dump him into a gully) they saw that he was alive, and would probably remain so. . . . What a heavy little bastard he is, they exclaimed.

  Because Gideon had saved his life Nightshade was always craven before him, and would possibly have adored him—as he adored Leah—had he not sensed Gideon’s nature, and prudently shied away from him whenever they happened to see each other. But at the very sight of Leah—Leah striding into the room—though her hair was disheveled and she looked somewhat drawn—not quite herself—a moan escaped from Nightshade’s lips, and he flung himself to the floor, and kissed it, in honor of the woman he took to be mistress of Bellefleur Manor.

  Leah stared at the hunchback, stepping back from his desperate furious kissing; she stared, her lips parted, and it was a long moment before she looked up to her husband, who was watching her with a small calm malicious smile. “What—what is this,” Leah whispered, clearly frightened. “Who is—”

  Gideon gave the dwarf a little shove with his foot, pressing the heel of his boot against the hump. “Can’t you see? Can’t you guess?” he said. The color had flooded back into his face and he looked quite triumphant. “He’s come a long distance to serve you.”

  “But who is— I don’t understand—” Leah said, drawing back.

  “Why, it’s another lover, can’t you see!”

  “Another lover . . .”

  Leah looked at Gideon, her face furrowed and her lips puckered as if she were tasting something vile.

  “Another—!” she whispered. “But I have none now—”

  IN TIME—IN A very short time—Leah came to find Nightshade delightful, and took him on as a special servant, her servant, since he was so clearly infatuated with her. With his immense shaggy head and his small eyes and the ugly hump between his shoulders he was, as she said, a piteous sight—a pitiable sight—and it would be cruel for them to turn him away. And then he was remarkably strong. He could lift things, force things, unscrew caps, scramble with enviable agility up a stepladder to make a difficult repair; he could carry, single-handedly, a guest’s entire luggage into the house, showing no indication of strain except the minute trembling of his legs. Leah outfitted him in livery, and from somewhere he acquired straps, belts, buckles, and little leather pouches, and wooden boxes, which gave to his costume a quaint, gnomish look. (Thou
gh he was certainly not a troll, as Leah said repeatedly, often in amused anger: Bromwell’s official definition was dwarf, and dwarf it must be.)

  He spoke rarely, and always with a fussy show of deference. Leah was Miss Leah, uttered in a half-swooning murmur, as he bowed before her, bent nearly double, a comical and somehow—or so Leah thought—a touching sight. He could play the mouth organ, and did simple magic tricks with buttons and coins, and even, when he was especially inspired, with kittens: making them disappear and reappear out of his sleeves or the shadowy interior of his jacket. (Sometimes, the children saw to their half-frightened astonishment, he made things—even kittens—appear when other things, unmistakably other things, had disappeared!—and it alarmed them, and kept them awake at night, worrying about the fate of the things that had disappeared.) Though he was so silent as to appear nearly mute, Leah had the idea that he was uncommonly intelligent, and that she could rely upon his judgment. His subservience was of course embarrassing—silly and annoying and distracting—but, in a way, flattering—and if he became too profuse in his adoration she had only to give him a playful kick, and he sobered at once. Despite his freakish appearance he was a remarkably dignified little man. . . . Leah liked him, she couldn’t help herself. She pitied him, and was amused by him, and gratified by his loyalty to her, and she liked him very much, no matter how the other Bellefleurs—and even the children, and the servants—disapproved.

  How odd it was, how annoying, how selfish, Leah thought, that they didn’t care for poor Nightshade. Surely they must pity him?—surely they must be impressed by his indefatigable energy and good nature, and by his willingness (and his eagerness) to work at the castle for no salary, only for room and board? She could understand Gideon’s contempt, for Gideon, she had always thought, was a severely limited person, as crippled imaginatively as Nightshade was crippled physically, and the sight of something wrong frightened him (she recalled what a whimpering coward he had been, at Germaine’s birth, and how she had had to baby them both); but it was strange that the others disliked Nightshade too. Germaine shied away from him, and the older children, and grandmother Cornelia avoided looking at him, and it was said that the servants (led by the silly superstitious Edna, who would have to be replaced before long) whispered that he was a troll. . . . A troll, imagine, at Bellefleur, in these modern times! But it was unmistakable, the others’ dislike of him, and Leah resolved not to give in to it: not to Germaine’s silly fears, not to her sister-in-law’s vague mumbled objections (for Lily didn’t dare speak aloud in opposition to Leah: she was such a coward), not even to Gideon’s disdain. In time, Leah thought, they will like him well enough, they’ll like him as much as I do.

  The first night great-aunt Veronica saw him, however, Leah couldn’t help but be struck by something not only peculiar but, it seemed, irrevocable in the older woman’s attitude. When Veronica descended the wide circular stairs, one beringed hand on the railing, the other grasping her heavy dark skirts in order to lift them slightly, to keep from tripping, she happened to see Nightshade (it was his first evening as Leah’s “manservant,” he was wearing his handsome little livery uniform) drawing a chair close to the fire for his mistress; and in that instant she froze, froze with one high-buttoned shoe uplifted, and her hand grasping the railing tightly. How very queerly aunt Veronica stared at Nightshade who, on account of his stooped-over posture, did not at first see her. It was only as he withdrew, backing out of the room, bowing, that he happened to lift his eyes to her . . . and, for a fraction of a moment, he too froze . . . and Leah, who would ordinarily have found all this amusing, caught a sense, a near-indefinable sense, of Veronica’s and Nightshade’s mutual alarm: not as if they knew each other, for it wasn’t that simple, but that, instead (and this is very difficult to explain), what they were was kin; what each was called out to, and drew back from, what the other was. (And afterward Veronica sat leadenly at her place at dinner, pretending to sip her consommé, pushing food around on her plate as if the very sight of it nauseated her (for there was the pretense, with Veronica, that she was—despite her generous heft—a finicky eater), swallowing a few mouthfuls of claret before excusing herself and hurrying back upstairs to “retire” early.)

  Nor did the cats like him. Not Ginger and Tom, or Misty, or Tristram, or Minerva; least of all Mahalaleel, whom Nightshade tried to court, offering him fresh catnip (he carried various herbs wrapped in waxed paper carefully tied with string, in his several pouches and wooden boxes), but Mahalaleel kept his magisterial distance, and would not be tempted. Once Germaine came upon Nightshade in the dim, teakwood-lined reception room, stooped over more emphatically than usual, holding something in his gloved hand and calling Kitty-kitty-kitty, here kitty-kitty-kitty! in his high-pitched squeaking voice—and a moment later Mahalaleel, his back and tail bristling, bounded past the little man and ran out of the room. Nightshade paused, sniffed the herb in his hand, and followed along after the cat, calling Here kitty, here kitty, kitty-kitty-kitty in a tireless unoffended voice.

  Automobiles

  It was in a handsome two-seater Buick, canary-yellow, with rakish wire-spoked wheels, that Garth and Little Goldie eloped, and in a smart little fire-engine-red Fiat with a cream-colored convertible top and polished hubcaps (a gift from Schaff for her recent birthday) that Christabel and Demuth Hodge eloped one fine autumn morning, driving, for brief periods during their gay, reckless, euphoric flight, at speeds of a hundred miles per hour despite the winding mountain roads. It was a supercharged Auburn, chalk-white, with gray upholstery and exposed exhaust pipes, of gleaming chromium, another sporty two-seater, that carried away, into the labyrinthian shadows of an unnamed foreign city, possibly Rome, the beautiful young actress “Yvette Bonner” in a film called Lost Love which was seen, in secret, by a number of the younger Bellefleurs (who speculated not only upon the identity of the actress—for was she Yolande, or did she merely seem to be Yolande?—but upon the probability of her having, in real life as well as on film, the tantalizingly cerebral and yet erotic relationship with the young mustached Frenchman who, in Lost Love, drove her so boldly and noisily away).

  Many years ago (and there were sepia-tinted photographs to prove it) great-grandfather Jeremiah, for all his ill-luck and despondency, nevertheless owned one of the first motorcars in the area, a gaily decorated Peugeot in which passengers (including great-grandmother Elvira in a richly flowered and wide-brimmed hat that tied firmly beneath the chin) sat facing one another. In styling the Peugeot closely resembled a horse-drawn carriage, open to the wind, with bicycle-sized wire wheels and a single headlight. (Its painted arabesques, which looked, even as reproduced in a poor photograph, extremely delicate and beautiful, put Germaine in mind of certain of great-aunt Matilde’s quilts.) Noel and Hiram and Jean-Pierre shared, for a while, before their father’s creditors claimed it, a wonderful little Peugeot Bébé: it seated only one person comfortably, was noisy and dangerous and almost comically gaudy (with a turquoise leather seat and turquoise trim about the wheels, contrasting with the rich russet wood of the wheels; and a black-and-gold-striped body; and four oversized brass lamps; and a brass horn that gave a loud ribald sound designed to terrify horses on the road), and had the distinction of being the only car of its kind in the entire state at that time. If Hiram, as an older man, never cared for motorcars and refused to learn to drive (and disliked even the family limousine though it was driven by a highly competent chauffeur) it was possibly because he still remembered the Peugeot Bébé with great affection, and was susceptible, from time to time, to black moods, pitch-black airless moods, reminiscent of the one he suffered after the car was sold at auction. (Why love anything if you’re going to lose it, why love anyone, he frequently mused, if there’s a possibility you will lose her. . . . And so he hadn’t, it must be said, very seriously loved his young wife, nor had he much love for the unfortunate Vernon, whose death was as much an embarrassment to him (for he had known the boy would make a fool of himself!) as a source of pate
rnal grief.)

  It might have been Stanton Pym’s Morris Bullnose, as much as his audacious attempt to marry, and to survive marrying, a Bellefleur heiress, that infuriated Della’s family; for though the Bullnose was a small car, and cost considerably less than the family’s cars at that time (a six-cylinder Napier and a Pierce-Arrow saloon car), its pert sporty air, and its brass fixtures, struck Della’s brothers and cousins as impertinent and inappropriate for a junior officer of a Nautauga Falls bank. (After Stanton’s death Della sold the car at once. Both Noel and a cousin named Lawrence offered to buy it from her—and to pay a respectable sum—but Della refused. I would rather drive it into Lake Noir and sink along with it, she said, than sell it to either of you.)

  Great-aunt Veronica’s fiancé Ragner Norst, who called himself a count and may in fact have been one, despite the Bellefleurs’ doubts (for he had been, after all, or claimed to have been, an intimate friend of the famous Count Zborowski—the very Zborowski who owned so much property in New York, and entertained lavishly in Paris, and was killed in a freak accident while driving his splendid Mercedes in a ferocious race in the South of France) drove a most impressive Lancia Lambda, black as a hearse, stately, regal, with a monocoque body and independent front suspension—which the Bellefleurs envied, though they suspected Norst had acquired it secondhand: it had curious scratches on its doors, as well as its front fenders, and its thick gunmetal-gray cushions gave off an odor not unlike that of a stagnant pond, or a tomb.

  For many years the Bellefleurs drove only one “good” car—a maroon Cadillac with steel-spoked wheels, one of the first of the Fleetwood Broughams (it had carpeted foot rests and adjustable swivel-type reading lamps and mahogany fixtures, among other things) and it was this car, rather badly in need of repainting, that Gideon was given as a wedding present, so that he might drive his young bride to their secret honeymoon hotel in style: but at that time Gideon, so enamored of horses, and in any case so enamored of Leah, hardly appreciated the automobile’s 7030 c.c. V8 engine, which carried them along noiselessly though they drove, often without quite knowing it, at high speeds. After the ignominious loss of the plum-colored Pierce-Arrow at Paie-des-Sables, Gideon acquired, through his Port Oriskany friend Benjamin Stone (the son of the philanthropist Waltham Stone who had made his fortune in the production of washing machines), a number of remarkable cars—the magnificent Hispano-Suiza; rebuilt Aston-Martin; a bottle-green Bentley (which Lord Dunraven very much admired); and, somewhat later, at about the time of the migrant workers’ strike, a white Rolls-Royce coupe with a virtually soundless engine—by far Gideon’s favorite car, at least up until the time of his accident.