Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

castle’s more spacious rooms—and he too was never found. (He was spirited away in the Turquoise Room, now called the Room of Contamination, and shut off forever from the Bellefleur children who would have loved to explore it.) A long time ago there were whispers that great-aunt Veronica had died, after a lengthy wasting illness, during which her beautiful complexion grew waxen, and her eyes became luminous in their shadowed sockets; but the rumor was obviously absurd because great-aunt Veronica was still living, in superb health, even somewhat plump in recent years, and marvelously youthful for her age. Among the women, Raphael’s unhappy wife Violet did die an unusual death, it was thought for love: she simply walked into Lake Noir one night when Raphael was away and no one was attending her: and her body was never recovered. And there were, of course, the early, unfortunate deaths—Jean-Pierre and his son Louis, and Louis’s three children, and his brother Harlan, about whom so little was known; and Raphael’s brother Arthur, the diffident, stubborn Arthur, who died in an attempt to rescue John Brown; and there were others, innumerable others, most of them children, who died of diseases like scarlet fever and typhoid and pneumonia and smallpox and influenza and whooping cough. . . .
    Or was the curse, as Vernon thought, something very simple . . . ?
    What is gained will be lost. Land, money, children, God. (But—skinny and agitated and chronically unhappy, with his beard so scant and prematurely grizzled, and his love for Leah never declared, and his black ledgerbooks (taken from old Raphael’s desk) filled with sloping smudged scrawls that he claimed was poetry, and would transform the world one day, and expose his family for the tyrants they were—what did cousin Vernon know? So no one listened, or half-listened and waved him away with an impatient wave of the hand. His father Hiram was most impatient of all, for Vernon had turned out not quite right: his blood was all his mother’s, and she had failed disastrously as a Bellefleur wife, and was best forgotten. After she ran away from the manor, many years ago, Hiram, uncharacteristically silent, and extremely ill-tempered, had fashioned for her a two-foot marker of cheap granite, Eliza Perkins Bellefleur, May She Rest In Peace, set down in the corner of the cemetery, on a downward slope, given over to Queenie, Sebastian, Whitenose, Chinaberry, Sweetheart, Bitsy, Love, Pegs, Mustard, Buttercup, Horace, Baby, Daisy, Bat, Pinktail, and others: the children’s various pets: dogs, cats, a turtle, an unusually large and attractive spider, a raccoon with gentle manners, a gray fox cub that did not live to maturity, and a bobcat cub that experienced the same fate, and even a redback vole, and a near-odorless skunk, and several rabbits, and one snowshoe hare, and at least one handsome ring-necked snake. Of his mother’s position in the Bellefleur Cemetery—but of course it was only a symbolic position, the woman wasn’t actually buried there, she wasn’t actually dead—Vernon prudently declined to speak.)
    But then perhaps the curse had something to do with silence. For the Bellefleurs, Leah’s mother Della often said, would not speak of things that demanded utterance. They spent time at foolish activities like fishing and hunting and games (how the Bellefleurs loved games!—games of any kind—cards, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, chess, their own flamboyant variants of checkers and chess, and other games invented by them during the long iron-hard mountain winters; and every variant of hide-and-seek, played with manic enthusiasm in the labyrinthine recesses of the castle—a reckless activity, as it happened upon one occasion that a Bellefleur child, decades back, ran to hide somewhere in the cavernous cellar, and was never found despite days of frantic searching; nor did his poor bones ever turn up) with the abandon of very small children grasping and clutching