Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Naturally there were minor frustrations, for things did not always go well. There was, Leah knew, a certain perversity in the fabric of the world. She and Lily had groomed Vida, sweet little Vida, for the eye of the governor’s son, but he had preferred Morna, and now Aveline was queening it over them; Leah’s plans for a handsome new camp on the fifty-acre site across the lake, where aunt Matilde lived in willful squalor, were temporarily stalled—but only temporarily—by the crazy old woman’s refusal to move; and Garth, Little Goldie, and their infant son had left the stone cottage in the village, shortly after the “difficulties” with the fruit pickers (for so the events of late August came to be known within the family), to live in another part of the country. Garth claimed that he wanted a farm of his own, in Iowa or Nebraska; he and Little Goldie wanted to live somewhere where no one knew the name Bellefleur.

  (“All right, then, but don’t you come begging back here, don’t you come crawling back to me!” Ewan said. He was so deeply wounded by Garth’s decision to move away that he would not even shake hands with him, on that last day; he refused even to glance at Little Garth, though Little Goldie held the squirming infant up to his grandfather for a goodbye kiss. “Don’t you come back here, my boy, because we aren’t going to let you in! Is that understood?” Ewan cried. Garth merely nodded, forthrightly, as he backed away. He and Little Goldie had traded in the yellow Buick for a small van, which was now packed with their household items.)

  So there were minor disappointments, minor frustrations. But in general, even the pessimistic Hiram had to agree, things were going very well indeed: for quite apart from the Schaff windfall they now owned slightly more than three-quarters of the original property, and the rest was certain to be theirs within a few years.

  “But we must concentrate on what we’re doing,” Leah said frequently. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to become distracted.”

  GOVERNOR HOREHOUND AND his family and part of his entourage were invited to the castle for a week of hunting, as soon as deer season opened; and less than a week before the visit Nightshade approached Leah with a proposal. “As you know, Miss Leah,” he said humbly, “there is the matter of the rats.”

  “The what?”

  “The rats, ma’am.”

  “The rats?”

  “The rats, yes, ma’am. That live in the walls and the attic and the cellar and the outbuildings.”

  Leah stared at her manservant. In recent months she had become so accustomed to the little man that she rarely noticed him—and now it alarmed her, the clever wizened face with its eyes like glass chips, and the dull shallow indentation on the forehead. Odd too was the wide lipless smile that appeared to stretch from ear to ear. Though Nightshade was not exactly smiling; one could not call it a smile. The children complained that he carried in one of his pouches a “made-up” animal, a mandibulate, fashioned out of bits of dried mice, beetles, newts, snakes, bullfrogs, baby birds, turtles, and other creatures, which he used to frighten them, though he always denied that was his intention. The thing was about the size of Nightshade’s fist (which was big as Ewan’s), and it gave off a queer sickish odor that was exactly like Nightshade’s odor.

  Leah sent the children away, annoyed with their silly tales. She doubted very much that Nightshade had created his own dried animal, still less that he used it to frighten the children. And it wasn’t true that he smelled. She noticed nothing. In fact, in recent weeks it seemed to Leah that the poor hunched-over man had grown an inch or two taller; or, at any rate, his severely stooped posture had begun to correct itself. The good food he received in the castle, and the pleasant surroundings, and, perhaps, her frequent small kindnesses to him were having a salutary effect.

  And now he came to her with a strange proposal: that she allow him to brew a concoction that would rid the castle once and for all of its rats. “Before Governor Horehound and his people arrive, Miss Leah,” he said softly.

  “But we don’t have any rats,” Leah said. “Oh, perhaps there are a few—I suppose there are, in the outbuildings especially—in the old barns—and maybe in the cellar. And mice: I suppose there are mice.”

  Nightshade nodded gravely. “Yes. There are mice.”

  “But there aren’t enough, are there, to matter? If there were, we could call in a professional exterminator. But of course we have the cats.”

  Nightshade’s lips twitched but he said nothing.

  “Yet you say there are rats?” Leah said, growing somewhat irritated.

  “Yes, Miss Leah. A concentration of rats.”

  “And how do you know this? Have you seen them?”

  “I am capable of certain judgments, ma’am.”

  “Well—I would have thought our cats—”

  Nightshade chuckled softly. “Not your cats, Miss Leah,” he said, “not these rats.”

  SO HE BREWED a special concoction of poison, with an arsenic base, on the kitchen stove. Two gallon-sized kettles were filled and allowed to simmer for several hours, until most of the liquid had evaporated. This particular poison, he assured everyone, attracted only rodents—and poisoned only rodents. Cats and dogs would not touch it, nor would children, under ordinary circumstances, be drawn to it. There was no danger whatsoever: only rodents would die.

  “But we don’t have that many rodents,” grandmother Cornelia said stiffly. “I grant you there are field mice that turn up sometimes in the cellar . . . and of course in the barns. . . . And a rat or two, wood rats, I believe they are, nasty things, but not a problem, really. I don’t see that we require a mass extermination.”

  “It does seem rather excessive,” uncle Hiram said.

  “But now that Nightshade has made the poison,” grandfather Noel said, with a peculiar smile, “of course we must allow him to use it. Otherwise it will only go to waste.”

  So very early the next morning, before most of the family had awakened, Nightshade crept about the castle and the outbuildings, sprinkling his poison crystals (which were a dazzling white) in every conceivable corner. He then filled buckets and pans with water, and carried them into the larger rooms of the castle, on all three floors; and he carried several heavy tubs of water into the cellar; and arranged others outside, in the shrubbery, among the ornamental trees in the garden, on the back steps. His furrowed, pasty-pale forehead was soon beaded with sweat, and his lipless smile was more pronounced than ever. As he toiled, the castle’s cats scurried away before him, or leapt onto high places, from which they watched him with bright narrowed eyes. One and then another of the dogs began to howl, but faintly, almost timidly. He took no notice of these creatures but arranged buckets, pans, pots, tubs, and even troughs of water, grunting as he worked.

  He then sat back to wait.

  But there was little waiting: within a half-hour the rats appeared.

  From out of cellars, walls, closets, cupboards, from out of drawers, from out of haylofts, from beneath floorboards, from inside overstuffed cushions and pillows, from out of the larder, from out of Raphael’s leather-bound library, came the rats—squeaking, clawing, their eyes glittering, mad with thirst. Some were more than a foot long, some were pink hairless babies. All ran, scuttling crazily, tumbling over one another, scrambling, screeching, their toenails clicking on the floors, their whiskers abristle. How thirsty they were! Desperate with thirst! Mad! Maddened! They fought one another viciously to get to the water, and plunged headfirst into it, and in their maniacal eagerness to drink some of them were actually drowned. What a screeching and a squeaking! No one had ever heard anything like it before.

  Streams of rats and mice and shrews, jostling one another blindly, thumping about inside walls until, finding a hole or a soft spot, they pushed through with their heads, and forced their way out, and ran to the water. . . . The Bellefleurs, astonished, climbed atop furniture, even crouched on the dining room table of the Great Hall, staring at the writhing jabbering creatures. So many! Who would have thought there were so many! And how violently thirsty they were, how gree
dily they drank, drank and drank and drank, as if their thirst could never be quenched! No one had ever seen anything remotely like it before.

  And then, after a brief time, the convulsions began.

  The living bodies bloated, second by second, balloonlike, and soon they were flinging themselves about, rolling over and over, screaming and clawing and slashing. They writhed, they foamed at the mouth. Their legs paddled crazily. Their high-pitched squeals grew ever more frantic until the Bellefleurs, panicked, had to press their hands over their ears to keep from screaming themselves.

  How strange a sight, how hideously fascinating, the creatures’ swollen bodies! Stomachs bloated white, the skin stretched to bursting; legs flailing about as if they were drowning; stiffening tails. Death leapt invisibly from one to the other, touching a whiskered chin here, a balloon-stomach there, until, after some time, after many minutes of agony, the last of the beasts lay still. Now their tongues protruded, and were also bloated; and very pink. In death the larger of the creatures resembled human infants.

  Nightshade, wearing thigh-high fishing boots, walked among them gingerly, picking them up one by one by their tails and putting them in gunnysacks. If a rat was not yet entirely dead Nightshade stepped on its belly, pressing down firmly, with immediate results. (Some of the Bellefleurs hid their eyes. Others gazed upon the horror as if they could not turn aside. A few had grown deathly ill, but were incapable of vomiting: they merely stared, helpless, too weak to move.) Though Nightshade worked quickly and efficiently, and though not one of the rodents resisted him, or crawled away to hide, the task took him a considerable period of time.

  Each of the gunnysacks held between fifty to one hundred rodents, depending upon their size. (The Norway rats were, of course, enormous, but the shrews were smaller than mice.) And there were thirty-seven sacks all told.

  Thirty-seven sacks!

  Leah said, when Nightshade approached her, bowing, rather pale from his day-long exertions, that she would have liked him to have warned the family; of course they had had no idea so many rodents lived in the castle. It was rather upsetting, she said, in a voice that faltered, it was rather upsetting . . . for the older Bellefleurs especially. All that scrambling and squeaking and jabbering, and those hideous, agonizing deaths! It had been quite repulsive, really. “If only you had warned us, Nightshade,” Leah said.

  Nightshade bowed even lower. After a long moment he dared raise his eyes to the hem of her skirt. “But Miss Leah is not displeased, is she?” he whispered.

  “Oh—well— Displeased!” She halfway laughed.

  “Perhaps I acted imprudently,” Nightshade murmured, “but the rats are dead. As you have seen.”

  “Yes. Indeed. As I have seen.”

  “And so—Miss Leah is not displeased with me?”

  “I suppose not. I suppose you’ve done a good job.”

  “A good job?”

  “—excellent job,” Leah said faintly. For a moment she felt nauseous: the walls and ceiling reeled, and a rich dark dank odor wafted to her from the hunched-over little man. “Still,” she said, “we were all so taken unawares—we would have thought, you know, that our cats—”

  “Ah, well,” said Nightshade with a sudden wide smile, stretching from ear to ear, “your cats—! Not, you know, with these rats.”

  The thirty-seven gunnysacks, filled to bursting and smartly tied with rope, soon disappeared. What Nightshade did with them no one knew, nor did Leah want to ask.

  The Spirit of Lake Noir

  Once upon a time, the children were told in whispers, a terrible thing happened. It would have been a terrible thing had it happened to anyone; but it happened to us.

  On an October night in the year 1825, in the settlement beginning to be known as Bushkill’s Ferry—

  BUT SHOULD THE children be told, generation after generation?

  Is anything gained? What is gained?

  What is lost?

  But they must be told!

  But why must they be told, if it terrifies them?—if it makes the young ones whimper in their sleep, and the older ones restless with thoughts of revenge?

  —IN THE SETTLEMENT known as Bushkill’s Ferry, in the old log-and-brick house Jean-Pierre and Louis had built, six persons were murdered in cold blood, without warning: Jean-Pierre and his forty-year-old Onondagan mistress, Antoinette; and Louis (then forty-six) and his three children, Jacob, Bernard, and Arlette. Louis’s two dogs—a mongrel retriever and a collie with one clouded eye—were also killed, with clubs, and for some inexplicable reason (the killers later blamed the Lake Noir air) the retriever was crudely decapitated with a hunting knife. And then the house, sprinkled with gasoline, was set afire.

  The five horses in the stable were spared.

  It was on account of the fire—the murderers’ fatal blunder—that Louis’s wife Germaine was saved: she had been left for dead, and the fire naturally attracted neighbors, who broke in and rescued her. (An accident, really, that they located her at all, for she was lying where she’d fallen, against the bedroom wall, between the wall and the bloodsoaked bed where Louis’s badly mutilated body lay.)

  So Germaine survived. Despite her injuries (deep cuts and lacerations on her face and torso, a broken collarbone, a cracked pelvis, a slight concussion), and the unspeakable terror she must have endured. As soon as she regained consciousness she cried out the names of the murderers—those five of the eight or nine she had recognized, despite their burlap masks and women’s clothing: the Indian trader Rabin, and the Varrells; Reuben, Wallace, Myron, and Silas. She was able not only to identify the men but to give testimony against them at their trial.

  She was thirty-four years old at the time of the massacre, and she was to live, as another Bellefleur’s wife, for twenty-two more years. Unless she was pointed out (That woman, you see, there, that woman is Germaine Bellefleur, her husband and three children were murdered before her eyes. . . . ) no one would have guessed that the stout, rosy-cheeked, graying woman had lived through such an ordeal: she seemed so ready to smile. Indeed, perhaps she smiled too frequently. Sudden noises always frightened her, of course, and she became hysterical if a dog’s baying continued for too long. But she appeared quite normal. She even had other children, three other children, as if to replace the ones she had lost. God sent you these children, it’s a sign from God, two boys and a girl, wasn’t it two boys and a girl you lost, people whispered, but Germaine did not reply. She did not say with a contemptuous laugh, What a fool you are, to talk of God!—my husband and I saw to these babies, and nobody else. She did not say, You dare not speak of my dead children, or of me; you know nothing about us. She nodded slowly as if thinking, and smiled her pleasant shadowless smile. There was an attractive brown mole beside her left eye.

  DO YOU FORGIVE those who have sinned against you? the minister asked.

  Yes, said Germaine. And added in a low voice: Since they are all dead.

  BUT SHOULD THE children be told, generation after generation?

  Vernon, a child of seven, held his ears. Did not want to hear.

  But they must be told! They must understand the secret workings of the world—the fact that, once someone has injured you, he will never forgive you.

  THERE WERE, NEVERTHELESS, Bellefleurs who winced at the very mention of the name Varrell, not because they wanted vengeance (for the time for that was long past: weren’t most of the Varrells dead, and those who remained scattered and impoverished, mere white trash), but because they were ashamed of being linked to such primitive behavior. The old Lake Noir settlement—hunters and trappers and traders and lumbercamp workers—a single muddy street in which stray dogs prowled, and were shot for sport by men on horseback—kegs of corn-mash whiskey—the taverns—the drunken fistfights—the frequent stabbings and shootings—arson—crude bullying animal-men who were (so Raphael realized, years later) almost not to be blamed for their violent behavior since most of them, it seemed, were mentally impaired: they had the intelligence of elev
en- or twelve-year-olds.

  In England, where Raphael was to search for five months before finding, in a quiet country village, the eighteen-year-old Violet Odlin, people frequently asked him about the “blood feuds” of his native country. Was it true, they inquired, that families warred against one another until, one by one, all their members were destroyed? Raphael answered stiffly that such behavior was eccentric even in the West—even in the Far West—where civilization had not yet firmly established itself. But most of the citizens of my native country, Raphael said, in an inflectionless voice from which all traces of a Chautauquan accent had been eradicated, are not, of course, native to the country.

  VERNON HELD HIS ears though the other boys mocked him. And afterward he dreamt he was in his closet, in the dark, and someone was searching for him, heavy-footed, speaking his name in a sly voice, Vernon, little Vernon, where are you, where are you, under your bedclothes? under your bed? or are you hiding in your closet? He had coiled upon himself to make himself as small as possible. And he was small—about the size of a cat. Are you in your closet, is that where you are?—so the voice ran on, and suddenly there was a terrible sound, as the prongs of a pitchfork came crashing through the door. And he screamed and screamed in his sleep and woke, screaming. (Though Arlette had not been stabbed to death in her closet. They had dragged her out, and she was to die, in fact, the most merciful of the deaths, in the kitchen of the old house.)