Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

made Johnny’s heart contract, for he wanted—he wanted— Leah, he might have shouted, I know who you are! We all know you! The young man with whom she was speaking was nearly as tall as Gideon. He was fair-haired, beardless, quite handsome, and though he laughed and joked with Leah he was also staring at her with an emotion Johnny could well comprehend. It gave Johnny pleasure to carry the Bellefleur woman’s image with him, and to subject it, in the privacy of the night, to certain fitting tortures: tortures with hog-butchering knives, branding irons, and whips (the very whip, an old buggy whip, his father used on Johnny and his brothers, having stolen it from the Bellefleur stable years ago): just what she deserved.
    A flicker began to shriek and he resisted the impulse to run wildly out of the cemetery. He did trot downhill, now in a hurry to leave, but the fence, the iron fence, the spikes . . . He found an opening and jammed himself through, whimpering, on all fours, his scrawny tail trembling close to his haunches.
    He did not believe in spirits, not even in Bellefleur Cemetery. Not during the day.
    Now in the near distance the castle floated. Bellefleur Castle. The coppery roofs, the pink-gray towers. Vapor rising from the dark lake. And behind the monstrous house the sky was marbled blue and white, harsh glaring colors.
    He paused, staring. He was breathing hard: the shrieking bird had frightened him though he knew better.
    Bellefleur Castle. Larger than he remembered. Still, it could be destroyed. It could be burnt. Though it was built of stone it could be burnt, from the inside perhaps. Even if the stone itself would not burn the insides would burn—the fancy woodwork, the carpets, the furnishings.
    A bomb might be dropped from high in the air. In a magazine that was nearly all photographs he had seen pictures of flaming cities in black and white, he had seen and admired the helmeted young pilots smiling out of their cockpits, looking his own age. There were the castle, the old stone barns, the garden behind its high secret wall, the curving white-gravel drive lined by trees whose names Johnny did not know. . . . Ah, but nearer him were old wood-frame sheds, used long ago for hop drying, now overcome with trumpet vine and ivy, their roofs nearly rotted through and about to collapse; those buildings would burn.
    He trotted downhill and found himself approaching the creek again. It had twisted about, and now ran through pastureland; in some places its red-clay banks were more than six feet high, in other places—where cattle came to drink—they sloped down gradually into the water. A Posted: No Trespassing sign caught his eye. Though he could not decipher the words, could not have named the individual letters, he understood the message.
    “Bellefleur,” he whispered.
    They could shoot someone like him, if they wished. Out of anger or out of sport. If they wished. If they caught sight of him. There were rumors, ugly tales: wandering dogs shot, fishermen who ignored the posted signs shot at (so Dutch Gerhardt claimed, though he had been fishing Bloody Run high up the mountain, on Bellefleur property, yes, but miles from the house). . . . And then, five or six years ago, when a number of the fruit pickers in the Valley talked of striking, and the young man from downstate who had worked at organizing them and had made so many angry speeches was found badly beaten, blinded in one eye, in a field overlooking the Nautauga River. . . . When Hank Varrell, a friend of Johnny’s nineteen-year-old brother Eddy, made a remark about one of the Bellefleur women—a girl from Bushkill’s Ferry, a distant relative—it somehow got back to the Bellefleurs, and Gideon himself sought Hank out, and would surely have killed him if other people hadn’t been present . . . . Johnny shook himself awake. He had been walking along, staring at the ground. When he looked up he saw the pond: he saw sunshine slanted through