Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She had one son, Reuben. And then another. And then another, and another, over a period of years. She left the lumber camps to live with a man; and then with another man; and then she wandered from town to town, living with her children when they were willing to take her in. In the end, it was said, she drank herself to death—and she wasn’t that old, really: probably in her late fifties. But women wore out quickly in that part of the world. (Germaine, Louis’s wife, believed she had once seen the old Varrell woman—that terrible creature—urinating in a public thoroughfare in Bushkill’s Ferry. What a sight! How shameful, for everyone to see! Germaine had tugged at her daughter Arlette’s arm, commanding her to hurry along, not to look back, but of course the willful girl would look, and even giggle in horror.)

  It was commonly known, long before the lynching, that the Varrells resented Jean-Pierre because they believed he had “cheated” them of some land. (He had bought it from them. Had paid cash. Of course he hadn’t paid much but then they hadn’t expected much, had been in fact grateful for what they received.) They were jealous of him, as they were jealous of his son Louis, and of anyone in the area who appeared to be doing well—anyone who wasn’t in debt, or struggling to pay off two mortgages. If it appeared that a Varrell might be establishing himself in town, like Silas with his partnership in the White Antelope Inn, it invariably happened that the business went bankrupt or suffered, uninsured, a fire loss; or simply died a gradual death that was no one’s fault. The girl who had married into the justice of the peace’s family soon left the mountains with her husband, to stake out a claim in Oregon, and was never seen or heard of again. Myron, who had served in the state militia, was rumored to have been promoted through the ranks—he was a first lieutenant, or a captain, or a major—but one day he merely appeared back home, a civilian again, discharged, with a wormlike little scar on his right cheek and $35 severance pay and no explanations. He worked intermittently as a farm laborer, sometimes alongside the Indian boy Charles Xavier, whom he had always disliked. An Indian with a name like that!—pretending to be a Catholic convert, of all the outrageous things! It was an insult, the Varrells thought, for a white man to work alongside an Onondagan half-breed.

  Charles Xavier was short for his age, and considered mildly retarded (he was an orphan, abandoned at birth, found wrapped in some rags in a Fort Hanna alleyway on a stinging-cold March morning), though his small, sturdy shoulders and arms were well developed, and he could work long exhausting hours in the fields or orchards without complaint. He was valued as a farmhand but not especially liked, even by the farmers’ wives who customarily took pity on him (for he was an orphan, and a Christian), since his narrow chin and dark scowling eyebrows and chronic silence gave him the reputation, possibly misleading, of being hostile even to friendly whites.

  On the day of the opening of the Great Canal, which ran, for some miles, parallel to the wide, rough Nautauga River, when church bells were ringing in villages and towns, and firecrackers and Roman candles were being set off, and cannon discharged from atop the walls of the old forts, it happened, certainly not by accident, that a corncrib silo belonging to a farmer named Eakins, who lived just off the old Military Road, caught fire; and because volunteer firemen were all at the canal opening festivities, miles away, the silo blazed like mad, and a nearby storage barn also caught fire and was lost. Indians were blamed because Eakins had had difficulty with a gang of threshers, all Indians, he had hired not long before, and had been forced to fire (they had started out industriously, but soon lost energy and interest)—but those Indians, those particular Indians, had vanished.

  It then happened, miles away at Lake Noir, that a hay barn belonging to a brother-in-law of the former Indian trader Rabin caught fire—and at once Indians were blamed. Charles Xavier happened to be hurrying along the muddy main street of the village, and though he belonged, or half-belonged, to a tribe of Indians who were considered “allies” (though pitifully few in number these Onondagans had fought on the side of the locals against the British, in the recent war) he was seized at once, by a group of men, and hauled into the White Antelope Inn, where he was questioned about the fire for approximately two hours. The more frightened the boy became, the more excited and angry his interrogators; the more he protested, not only his innocence, but his very knowledge of the fire (a fire which hadn’t been, as everyone admitted, a very serious one), the more drunkenly ferocious the white men became. Old Rabin, Wallace, Myron, and a number of others, soon joined by Reuben, who was already drunk, and two or three of his friends; and men who drifted in off the street or who, having heard of Charles Xavier’s “arrest,” came running; and, just before the boy was hauled off to be hanged, the justice of the peace himself, a young-old man with a twitch beneath his left eye. His name was Wiley and since he had drifted over, years back, from Boston, he was considered a city man, and something of a cultured person, though the interests he pursued, in the Lake Noir area, were not very different, except in degree of intensity, from those pursued by most of the other male inhabitants. He drank, but hadn’t the capacity of the others; he played cards, but not with much skill; he had courted a woman who was being courted, from the other side, so to speak, by Wallace Varrell, and had been forced to back away. It was rumored that he accepted bribes but that was probably not the case, usually: he was simply intimidated by the defendants who came before him, or by their numerous relatives. A murderer might be sent away to Powhatassie, or even hanged, but the men who had arrested him, the witnesses who testified against him, and the judge himself, were often not likely to survive. So while it was true, as Louis Bellefleur charged, that Wiley was a coward, he was not an altogether inexplicable coward. . . .

  Those were hard times to live in, the children were told.

  But weren’t they exciting?—so the boys always asked. (For they knew, beforehand, what was coming: the lynching and burning of Charles Xavier; the angry public protesting of their great-uncle Louis; the “trouble” at the old loghouse in Bushkill’s Ferry; the arrival, on a beautiful high-headed Costeña mare, of Louis’s brother Harlan, who had disappeared out west almost twenty years before.) Weren’t they exciting? the boys begged.

  WHEN WORD CAME to Louis that the Varrells and Rabin and their friends were interrogating poor Charles Xavier, and had, evidently, extracted a confession from him, Louis rode off at once for town—no matter that Germaine forbade him to go (for she knew, immediately, that the half-breed boy was doomed—Indian lives were cheap in the mountains, though not much cheaper than white men’s lives), and his daughter Arlette threw a kind of tantrum, running alongside him as he trotted away on old Bonaparte, screaming for him to come back. At the age of fifteen Arlette was a head taller than her mother, and nearly as thick about the waist and hips; but her breasts were tiny and she often seemed, in jackets and pants and riding boots, as much a boy as her brothers. Her face was moon-shaped, a handsome golden tan, and she wore her dark hair—frizzy as her mother’s—as short as possible, though it wasn’t fashionable in those days for girls to wear their hair short. (Even her grandfather Jean-Pierre teased her, and complained to her mother. Didn’t she want, after all, to be a woman?) While Louis saddled his old stallion Arlette shouted incoherently—she wanted him not to go, or maybe she wanted to accompany him—wouldn’t he at least try to locate Jacob and Bernard, and they could accompany him—But Louis swatted her away, and did not trouble to reply. He couldn’t bear hysterical women. He couldn’t even listen to hysterical women.

  Germaine, watching through a front window, saw her husband ride off, and her daughter, poor ungainly Arlette, standing for a while in the road, amid the puddles, bare-headed, somewhat stooped, her fingers twitching. She may have been crying: her back was to the house and Germaine couldn’t see.

  Of the three children, Arlette, the youngest, was the most difficult: they called her “high-strung.” She endured her older brothers’ teasing, and her grandfather’s well-intentioned affectionate bullying; she obviously loved,
and was deeply embarrassed by, her father (he was so loud and blustery, even in the close confines of the kitchen, on a snowy day, and of course he drank, and was always quarreling and even fighting, with his fists, with men like himself; and the queer half-frozen look of his face, paralyzed on one side, so that he never had more than half a smile, was excruciatingly embarrassing to Arlette); though she fought, alternately sardonic and tearful, with her mother, and seemed unable, since the age of thirteen, to bear her mother’s mere presence, Germaine was inclined to think that it was just her age: it would pass: she was a good girl, not at all malicious, and in a few years, maybe after she married, or after she had her first baby, she would get over being so high-strung and come around to being . . . a sweet affectionate sensible daughter.

  (But in the meantime, how difficult she was! The tantrum in the stable, and out on the road; plucking at her father’s sleeve so that he had to swat her away; actually screaming at him, her face gone red and her eyes dilated, as if she had a right, an actual right, to behave like this with her father. She frequently exclaimed in disgust that she was ashamed of her grandfather—yes, he had made a great deal of money, and now he was famous for owning half of the Nautauga Gazette (where some of his own pensées, on horses, were appearing frequently), and everyone respected him, or at least feared him; but she couldn’t forgive him for the Indian woman with whom he lived, when he was in the area, and whom he had actually brought home—to their home—several times, without apology. She couldn’t forgive him for the way he favored his grandsons over her (though at the same time she couldn’t have endured his “grandfatherly” attentions either, his teasing about her figure, or her hair that looked, on certain days, like a “pickaninny’s.”) It was probable that she admired her brothers, Jacob especially, for he most resembled their father, but they were frequently quarreling, like all brothers and sisters, and in any case neither Jacob nor Bernard had much time for her. She was most ashamed of her uncle Jedediah. She had never met him, of course, for he had gone off into the mountains before her birth, but she loved, with a disdainful fastidiousness, to ask Germaine and Louis about him. There were always stories about Jedediah, told at the country schoolhouse, or brought home by Louis who, half-amused, half-contemptuous, repeated them, often with embellishments: sometimes Jedediah was sighted, ghostlike, in the mountains, clad in animal skins, with a long gray-white beard, and a cadaverous face, and “piercing” eyes. He was a prophet out of the Old Testament. Then again, he was quite simply loony—he didn’t, as the saying went, deal with a full deck—but he wasn’t any more crazy, probably, than most of the mountain hermits of local legend. At other times he was sighted, people claimed, upriver, at Powhatassie or as far away as Vanderpoel, again clad in fur (but these were fine furs—mink, or fox, or beaver—fashioned for him by an expert furrier), obviously wealthy from his dealings in skins, on his way toward being another John Jacob Astor, perhaps: a handsome man in the prime of life, usually accompanied by a beautiful woman, who did no more than stare blankly, without recognition, at the scruffy Lake Noir men who gazed after him in the street, too awed to call out: Bellefleur! Aren’t you a Bellefleur! . . . Then again he was a cranky, troublesome eccentric who never left the Mount Blanc area and whom no one (except Mack Henofer) had seen for years: it was he, surely, who was responsible for the sabotage of so many traplines that trappers now avoided his territory. He was raving mad, or then again he was simply mean-spirited; he lived with an Indian woman; or he lived alone on the side of a mountain no one could traverse. He subsisted on potatoes. He ate raccoons and squirrels raw. He was deathly sick. He was tall and muscular and in superb health. . . . But no one had seen him for years except Henofer, and now that Henofer was dead (he had been found, his body badly decomposed, at the bottom of a ravine near his cabin, his shotgun beside him, one barrel fired) it was likely that no one would ever see Jedediah again. It was even possible that he had died.)

  DESPITE LOUIS’S FRANTIC intervention, and the audacity with which (not unarmed, for he was never unarmed in public: but he knew better than to show his pistol) he shouted at the men to release the Indian boy—despite his ill-advised courage in continuing to follow them on horseback, out to the edge of the village, when it was obvious that they were not only not going to be persuaded by him or by his threats but were positively goaded on by him, as by Charles Xavier’s terror, and the presence of awed, excited witnesses—some of them women and children; and despite the fact that the men (Rabin, the Varrells, three or four others, and poor sweating grinning Wiley who was conducting, on horseback, a “trial,” even to the point of attempting to cross-examine the bleeding, stupefied boy as he was dragged along behind Rabin’s horse, barbed wire twined about his chest, pulled snug against his armpits) were all going to be guilty of murder—murder in the first degree, as Louis yelled: despite all this Charles Xavier was doomed, as Louis’s wife had known he would be without leaving her kitchen. He was doomed, jabbering and sobbing with terror, as oblivious of Louis Bellefleur’s attempt to save him as he was of Herbert Wiley’s conducting of a somewhat truncated trial. The men, drunken and gleeful and so excited their hands trembled, and moisture darted out of the corners of their eyes, tossed the rope over the thick limb of the oak tree and brought the noose down around Charles Xavier’s dark head just as Wiley, panting, pronounced the verdict: Guilty as charged! Guilty as charged.

  THERE WAS A certain photograph in a certain book in Raphael Bellefleur’s study which the children gazed upon, in silence, sometimes sticking their fingers in their mouths: for what was there to say, what was there to feel? It was not a photograph they cared to examine in one another’s presence, for it was too shameful—too embarrassing—and someone was likely to burst into silly frightened laughter—and perhaps one of the adults would come running, or one of the ubiquitous servants. So they studied it in secret. Over the years. One by one, at odd times, tiptoeing into the library when no one was around, their faces flushed. Even Yolande had looked at it, aghast, and quickly closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, in its special place; even Christabel; and Bromwell (who might have had it in mind, or beneath the threshold of his mind, when he decided to turn away from the fleshiness of history to the cold purities of space); even young Raphael, who stared with his dark melancholy gravity and seemed not to judge, never to wish to judge, anything human. And in her time of course Germaine was shown the photograph, by one of aunt Aveline’s children.

  It showed, with surprising clarity, a group of some forty-six men circled about, but standing well back from, the flaming body of what had been, according to the caption, a “Negro youth.” The men were, of course, all white, and they ranged in ages from about sixteen to sixty; there was a single child, peeping at the body as if he’d never seen anything so astonishing, so bright. A number of the men were staring at the blazing body (which was naked, very dark, partly obscured across its legs by burning boards and trash), some were staring at the camera. Most of the expressions were fairly serious though some were oddly bland, even bored, and others were quite jovial: a gentleman in the left foreground, with a showy zebra-stripe necktie and an umbrella, was grinning proudly for the camera, one hand upraised in a salute. The caption said Lynching death of a Negro youth, Blawenburg, New York. No date was given. No photographer’s credit was given. The lynching must have taken place on a winter day because all the men wore jackets or coats, and hats—they all wore hats, without exception: fedoras, railroad caps, sailors’ caps, even what appeared to be a bowler, dented at the crown. None of the men wore glasses. None of the men wore beards. It was a strange picture. Then again, if you studied it long enough, it was a very familiar picture. The blazing body was a blazing body but the men assembled about it were just men.

  Mount Ellesmere

  Bromwell, sent downstate to an expensive and allegedly prestigious boarding school for boys, began writing letters of complaint home almost as soon as classes started in late September. His instructors, he charged, were either well
intentioned and ignorant, or deliberately malicious and ignorant. The studies he was forced to take were irrelevant, and presented in textbooks of an alarmingly simple-minded nature. The dining hall food might or might not be adequate—he hardly tasted it, not caring about food—but his living quarters were cramped and he was forced (that it was said to be for his own good made him all the more furious) to have a roommate, a rubber-faced, six-foot-tall illiterate whose only interests were football and pornographic magazines. The other boys—well, what was there to say about boys? Bromwell thought them not much more savage and infantile than his cousins, but it was difficult for him to avoid their company, as he had managed, since early childhood, to avoid the company of his cousins. For one thing, he had to room with that creature; he had to sit beside others in classes, in the dining hall, and at chapel; he had to participate in athletic activities, despite his delicate frame and his hypersensitivity and the fact that his glasses, though taped to his head, were always flying off. (But it was part of a boy’s education, at New Hazelton Academy, that the body be challenged and subjected to stress as well as the mind. Yes, the headmaster knew, yes, he knew very well, he knew from painful personal experience—for he too had attended New Hazelton, many years ago, and he too had been physically weak, as he assured the angry, tearful Bromwell at each of their several meetings; sports could be difficult, but the lessons about life they imparted to a boy were invaluable. In later life Bromwell would agree, surely.) I am surrounded by brutes and their slavish apologists, Bromwell wrote home.