Why was he hanged, the children asked.

Some men thought he had started a fire. A hay barn went up in flames, and people thought Indians had done it.

But did he do it?

Your great-uncle Louis thought he hadn't, probably.

Then what happened?-what happened to the Indians?

The boy was killed, and they dragged his body around the village for a while, and ended up with it at a riverside tavern. It might have gotten buried. As for the rest of the Indians-they ran away, as they always did. After a while, then, they came back.

Weren't they afraid?

Well-they came back.

FREDERICKA READ ALOUD to her brother, punctuating her reading with sobs of angry despair, for men were animals, mankind as a whole was unregenerate, and only Christ's Word could redeem them: by lamplight on a sleeting January evening she read from Franklin's "A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown, with Some Observations on the Same," while Raphael sat with his fingers still, not drumming, on the desk top before him.

. . . These Indians were the remains of the tribe of the Six Nations, settled at Conestogo, and thence called Conestogo Indians. On the first arrival of the English, messengers from this tribe came to welcome them, with presents of venison, corn, and skins; and the whole tribe entered into a treaty with the first proprietor, which was to last "as long as the sun should shine, or the waters run in the rivers."

This treaty has been since frequently renewed, and the chain brightened, as they express it, from time to time. It has never been violated, on their part or ours, until now. . . .

It has always been observed that Indians settled in the neighborhood of white people do not increase, but diminish continually. This tribe accordingly went on diminishing, till there remained in their town on the manor but twenty persons, viz., seven men, five women, and eight children, boys and girls. . . .

This little society continued the custom they had begun, when more numerous, of addressing every new governor, and every descendant of the first proprietor, welcoming him to the province. . . . They had accordingly sent up an address of this kind to our present governor, on his arrival; but the same was scarce delivered when the unfortunate catastrophe happened, which we are about to relate.

On Wednesday, the 14th of December, of 1763, fifty-seven men from some of our frontier townships, who had projected the destruction of this little commonwealth, came, all well mounted, and armed with fire-locks, hangers, and hatchets, having travelled through the country at night, to Conestogo manor. There they surrounded the small village of Indian huts, and just at break of day broke into them all at once. Only three men, two women, and a young boy were found at home, the rest being out among the neighboring white people, some to sell the baskets, brooms, and bowls they manufactured, and others on other occasions. These poor defenseless creatures were immediately fired upon, stabbed, and hatcheted to death! The good Shehaus, among the rest, cut to pieces in his bed. All of them were scalped and otherwise horribly mangled. Then their huts were set on fire, and most of them burnt down. Then the troop, pleased with their own conduct and bravery, but enraged that any of the poor Indians had escaped the massacre, rode off, in small parties. . . . Those cruel men again assembled themselves, and, hearing that the remaining fourteen Indians were in the workhouse at Lancaster, they suddenly appeared in that town, on the 27th of December. Fifty of them, armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the workhouse, and by violence broke open the door, and entered with the utmost fury in their countenances. When the poor wretches saw they had no protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least weapon for defense, they divided into their little families, the children clinging to the parents; they fell on their knees, protested their innocence, declared their love to the English, and that in their whole lives they had never done them injury; and in this posture they all received the hatchet. . . . Men, women, and little children were every one inhumanly murdered in cold blood. . . .

The poor woman broke off, too moved to continue. After some minutes she asked, in a quavering voice, that Raphael join her in prayer-that they kneel together on the floor of his study, and beg God to forgive them their sins. The white race, she whispered, wades knee-deep in blood.

Raphael took off his pince-nez, sighing, and laid them on his desk, but did not kneel. He did not move from his chair. He said, before Fredericka could repeat her request, Those Indians have been dead a long time.

LOUIS'S WIFE GERMAINE, now a woman of thirty-four, with a plump, ruddy, pretty face and hair that frizzed in humid weather, read, in her stumbling way (for she had never entirely learned to read) newspapers and magazines that came into the house, usually by way of her father-in-law, who traveled about so restlessly; and she always read Harlan Bellefleur's terse letters to Louis, for fear they might contain passages the children, or at any rate the fifteen-year-old Arlette, should not see. . . . For instance, in the Colorado Territory U.S. soldiers, led by Colonel J. M. Chivington, attacked a settlement of friendly Indians camped outside the walls of Fort Lyon, murdering six hundred of them in a day (most of them women and children), and mutilating and scalping them as well: some of the soldiers cut out the genitals of women and girls, and stretched them over their saddle bows, or wore them in their hats while riding in the ranks. . . .

Think if Arlette should happen to read of such a thing! Germaine said to her husband. Her full, broad cheeks had turned beet-red; her mouth was a tiny damp hook of consternation. Why, that shouldn't be talked about! That isn't-that isn't nice, she whispered.

ONE FINE OCTOBER day a flotilla of steamboats and canalboats appeared from the west, to celebrate the opening of the Great Canal. The Great Canal was nearly four hundred miles long and had taken eight years to complete, and all along its banks, on this day, crowds of cheering spectators awaited, and cannons were fired, and firecrackers were set off. In the villages and towns church bells rang as if it were a crazed Sunday.

The Chancellor Livingston, a steamboat, was the flagship of the squadron, and a fine trim ship it was-decked out in red, white, and blue streamers, and carrying the most fashionable of passengers. Another handsome ship was the Washington, carrying naval, military, and civil officers and their guests. There were, in addition, some twenty-nine sailing ships, schooners, barks, canalboats, and sailboats, each receiving cannon salutes from the forts they passed. A canalboat called the Young Lion of the West was bedecked with flags and banners, and carried on board, to the spectators' delight, two eagles, four raccoons, a fawn, a fox, and two living wolves. The Seneca Chief, a barge drawn by four powerful white horses, bore two fawns, two live eagles, a single brown bear, a young moose, and two Senecan Indian youths in the costume of their dusky nation.

ONCE UPON A time, the children were told, there was a family named Varrell.

Where did they come from, so many of them?

It was said they bred like rabbits, or aphids.

They must have sprung out of the earth, or maybe crawled out of the Noir Swamp. The men were trappers, Indian traders, peddlers, farmers on small scrubby good-for-nothing soil. . . . No, they were really trash. White trash. They lived common-law back in the woods, and beat their wives and children. They were notorious drunkards and bullies and law-breakers. Horse theft, arson, tavern brawls, backwoods murders that went uninvestigated. (If the Varrells killed people like themselves, or killed one another, why would Chautauqua authorities intervene? Besides, it would be dangerous to intervene.) Even their moonshine, customers complained, was inferior. When it wasn't outright poison.

Involved in the lynching of the Indian boy were Reuben, Wallace, and Myron Varrell; their ages were forty-six, thirty-one, and twenty-two. And there were other Varrells in the Lake Noir settlement-by some estimates as many as twenty-five.

Where did they come from, so many of them, in a generation or two? Men with hard flat faces, unkempt hair and beards, eyes the color of chill swamp mist . . . ? Their crimes were of two types: one committed surreptitiously, often by night; the other committed boldly, even self-righteously, in public, frequently with the help of others. Some of the Varrells had of course been killed in brawls, and many of them had been badly beaten (and even crippled: Louis Bellefleur had witnessed, from the street, the drunken melee that erupted at a wedding party in a Fort Hanna hotel that resulted in Henry Varrell's broken spine-Henry being young Myron's father); a number were imprisoned at Powhatassie; but most of the time they ran off unapprehended, and witnesses did not care to testify against them. A Varrell girl had married into the family of a Bushkill's Ferry justice of the peace, and Wallace, even with his record of arrests (for fighting, arson, and petty theft) was a sheriff's deputy. . . . Reuben, who dared to strike Louis's horse, and who shouted drunkenly for him to go on home, had worked on the Great Canal and was said to be half-crazy as a consequence of heatstroke suffered one sweltering August day. He and his common-law wife had been arrested, but never tried, for the malnutrition death of a ten-month-old baby. . . . So Reuben should have been in prison at the time of the lynching.

But where did they come from, so many of them? Breeding like rabbits or aphids? It seems they sprang from a single woman, a lumber-camp follower who passed herself off shamelessly as a cook. She lived right in the bunkhouse with the men. Migrated from camp to camp, from Paie-des-Sables to Contracoeur to Mount Kittery to the great pine forest east of Mount Chattaroy, season after season, bringing with her two or three squaws, a few white women, and a moronic baby-faced girl, grossly fat, who sucked her thumb and whimpered much of the time, when she wasn't eating or being employed by the men. Where, exactly, this string of diseased whores came from, whether the Varrell woman (who treated them sternly but not unkindly) had brought them to the mountains, to the lumber camps, or whether they had simply happened to meet there and to team up, for safety's sake, no one knew. The youngest and most attractive squaw, blind drunk on corn whiskey, tried to stab the foreman of the Paie-des-Sables camp to death, and did a fairly good job of it before his friends pulled her off; but in general the Varrell woman kept her girls under control. She was a tall, soft-bodied, good-natured woman with an agreeably ugly face and a nose that looked as if it had been broken. Already in her early thirties her stout legs were riddled with varicose veins, but as a girl, it was said, she had been quite attractive . . . at least to men in this part of the world, who might go for months without seeing a woman. She was foul-mouthed, blunt, frank, funny, and never wept. And never regretted anything.

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 Costena 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 pensees, 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.

Part of the problem was that Bromwell was extremely young-only eleven and a half-and all the other boys were older by several years. (The boys' ages ranged from fourteen to eighteen; there was even a nineteen-year-old, a slack-jawed sadistic ox, who either could not manage to graduate, or did not wish to graduate.) Even for his age Bromwell was undersized, though his fair brown hair that looked, in certain lights, as if it were shading into silver, and his stern, rather censorious expression, and his glasses, gave him the air of a forty-year-old. Despite his physical size and the frequency of the other boys' bullying he could not seem to resist, especially in the classroom, murmuring sarcastic comments when they displayed their ignorance; he was not even able to keep to himself (though surely it would have been politic to do so) his amused incredulity as his instructors' blunders. But do you want to be so rigorously disliked by your peers, the headmaster asked, and Bromwell replied, after a moment, in a startled voice: Is being liked or not being liked important? Is it something other people think about . . . ? I must say, I have never considered it.

Everything about the school vexed him though he realized, as he said in his letters to Leah, that he couldn't remain at home: he couldn't endure those embarrassing tutorial sessions with uncle Hiram, and of course it was out of the question for him to attend the local school, or even the public school in Nautauga Falls. So he would try, he would try. . . . He would try to accommodate himself to the school's idiotic schedule (the boys were roused by clanging bells each weekday morning at 7:00 A.M. and were allowed to sleep until eight on weekends; "lights out" was at 10:30 P.M. every day except Fridays and Saturdays, when they might stay up until 11:30; if a boy did not march into the dining room with the others in his corridor, if he came in even a minute late, alone, he was turned away from his table; and of course they all had to attend-what primitive folly!-chapel).

No concessions were made to his repeated pleas that he be allowed to stay up as late as he wished, in the laboratory (which was shamefully inadequate) or the library (which was even more shamefully inadequate: the worst of it was, his own books were still in their crates, unpacked, in the school's damp basement, because there wasn't "enough room" for them elsewhere). He craved, with an almost physical desire, to stay up through the night . . . to know that his was the only consciousness, the only thinking consciousness, in the building . . . and as a consequence he lay awake until two or three in the morning, quite miserable, his mind beset by mathematical problems and astronomical speculations until he felt he might go mad.

Do you want me, Mother, he inquired politely, to go mad? Is that part of your design?

But Leah rarely answered his letters. She sent him his allowance, and usually scribbled a few words of a cheerful or innocuous nature (telling him nothing, even, about Christabel: the last news he had, she and her lover were being pursued by two separate teams of detectives, Schaff's and the family's, and had been traced to Mexico), making no reference to his queries.

He wrote to Gideon, and to grandfather Noel; he even wrote to his cousin Raphael, whom he almost missed-though he suspected that if he were back home, Raphael's moodiness would soon bore him. He complained that the athletic activities he was forced to endure were destroying him. During a recent basketball game, for instance, the boys had repeatedly thrown the basketball at him, right at his face, regardless of the fact that the referee was blowing his whistle like mad, and Bromwell's nose was dripping blood (his glasses, of course, had been knocked off immediately, and were-again-cracked); when at last, after great hesitation, he had ventured out to the end of the diving board, trembling with cold, a boy had rushed past him to dive into the pool, giving him a playful shove with the flat of his hand, and he'd fallen, sideways, to everyone's amusement, and so badly slapped his side, and filled his head with water, that he had nearly drowned. Yet these events were always called accidents, or instances of his classmates' high spirits. . . . Most distressing of all, Bromwell complained, was the fact that Bellefleur was so frequently whispered about. At the start of the term some of the older boys barged into his room, throwing themselves on his bed, eager to make friends; they had heard all sorts of things about his family, up there at Lake Noir, didn't the Bellefleurs own racing horses, weren't they mixed up in politics, weren't they wealthy, hadn't there been murderers in the family, and someone sent away to prison . . . ? Meeting Bromwell, then, had been a considerable disappointment.

(During the spring term news came of the Fort Hanna shootout, during which uncle Ewan and his deputies gunned down four men who were barricaded in a rooming house with rifles and a considerable amount of ammunition-but Bromwell met his classmates' respectful inquiries by claiming that he had never met Ewan Bellefleur, the popular sheriff of Nautauga County. He was a distant relative.) IT WAS SHORTLY after the Fort Hanna incident, and after Bromwell had had to endure the ignominy of earning a grade of 55 on his American history exam (his grades in history were always poor, since he never studied), that he conceived of the idea of running away. The Bellefleurs had so wildly unrealistic a notion of his expenses at the school, and his pastimes, and the "treats" he might wish to buy for his friends, that several of them sent him allowances on a fairly regular basis, and there were frequently unexplained cash gifts from Leah and grandmother Della: so he had managed to acquire, without giving it any thought, more than $3,000. (Which he was shrewd enough to keep, not in his room, or even in the academy's safe, but in a bank in the village.) He then wrote a highly formal letter to the Mount Ellesmere Institute for Advanced Study in Astronomy, which was located in a distant western state, expressing his hope that, despite his lack of official training and his age (which he did not give), they might allow him to study there. He received an application form, and an impersonal covering letter, so he filled out the form and mailed it back and, one Saturday morning in mid-May, without having heard from Mount Ellesmere, he simply left the New Hazelton Academy for Boys-arose at the usual time, breakfasted with the rest of the pack, and, wearing several layers of clothing (which his roommate thought was odd, but then Bromwell was odd), strolled down the school's brick driveway to the road and disappeared. Later, it was discovered that he had withdrawn all his money-a considerable sum-from a local bank, and that he had destroyed all his family's letters, and the few snapshots he'd brought with him to school. When last seen he was walking down the drive, his hands in his pockets; his lips were pursed, and he was whistling a cheerful, tuneless little air.

The Jaws Devour . . .

It was on a fair June morning that Leah woke with a headache and the curious words The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured, running through her mind. And then again on a July morning, very early, before dawn, waking with the thought that there was someone in the room with her, someone who meant harm, The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured, a hoarse phlegm-rattled mutter that was her own voice, but much altered. And again later in the month. No matter that her life was now a series of triumphs. No matter that the titanium-its quality as well as its astonishing quantity-now being extracted from the Mount Kittery mines would make it possible for the family to buy up the rest of Jean-Pierre's empire. The dull pulsing headache, the orangish parched taste at the back of her mouth, the sudden conviction that her arms and legs would not respond: that she would lie paralyzed in her bed until someone discovered her. . . . That morning in June, and two mornings in July, and then again in mid-August, before the busloads of migrant workers arrived and it was evident that, this year, the Bellefleurs would have trouble: the sensation of heaviness, despondency, too leaden to be panic, the sensation of grief, but grief, she wanted to shout, for what?-in Christ's name, what?

She was triumphant, she carried all before her, within a year or two her plans would be complete (though she was ready for a battle since certain property owners in the mountains, being nearly as wealthy as the Bellefleurs themselves, would not willingly agree to sell), on all sides she was admired, and feared, and of course envied; and disliked. But as Hiram told her, the Bellefleurs did not appear on this earth to be liked, but to fulfill their destiny. Old Jeremiah had been well liked, in a pitying contemptuous sort of way, and what good had that done him, or anyone? He hadn't even a place of rest in the family cemetery. . . .

She was triumphant, yet the moods came upon her with increasing frequency. Of course she recognized them as mere weaknesses, one of the manifestations of the silly Bellefleur curse, in which she did not really believe-not really-for how could she believe in what was almost the sanctity of despair, seeking its expression in a variety of unlikely (sometimes comically unlikely) forms? There was an old family tale of a Bellefleur woman who had simply retired to bed for the rest of her life: she hadn't even pretended, to herself and others, as most female invalids of that era had, that she was ill. And Della with her tiresome perpetual grief, which was so obviously nothing more, now, so many decades later, than a way of irritating the family; and Gideon with his selfish moods. . . . Well, it was clear to Leah that such behavior was contemptible. She would have roused that complacent old woman from her goosefeather pillows, and turned her out of her room: here, here is the world, it's here, you can't deny it! Over the years she had done her best to deflate Della's pretentious mourning, though with little effect: for Della was one of the most stubborn of the Bellefleurs, and would probably leap smiling into her grave knowing that she had managed, throughout the decades, to vex and annoy and sadden everyone who had known her. And then there was Gideon. Gideon with his black rages, his black despondency. Hidden from his admirers. Unguessed-at by his women. (For Leah conceded that he had, from time to time, though only casually, women: very much in the plural. But so long as no one in the family knew that she knew, or suspected, so long as Gideon himself didn't know, she was, in a sense, still innocent of her husband's infidelity-a kind of virgin-a defiant and righteous virgin who would one day, at her leisure, have her revenge. But then she sometimes toyed with the idea of a reconciliation. For of course she could win her husband back, if she wished. Whenever she wished. She hadn't any doubt but that he loved her, beneath, or beyond, or simultaneous with, his numerous adulteries. Perhaps she would summon him back to her bed someday. If she wished.) The jaws devour, the jaws are . . .

So Leah fell, day by day, into despair. She knew very well that it was absurd, it was quite senseless, yet she could not help herself; she woke earlier and earlier in the morning, no longer with her old sense of impatience, but with a sense, leaden and horrible, of infinite patience . . . her limbs so heavy she could barely move them, her head weighed down, her eyelids burning as if she'd spent the night, in secret, in tears. It was mid-August. It was late August. Eight busloads of migrant workers, jabbering their strange, sibilant, malicious tongue, were threatening to go on strike: or the foreman who now represented them (for the old foreman, the one the Bellefleurs had always dealt with was gone-rumor had it he had been killed earlier in the season) was threatening to go on strike: and the acres and acres of peaches, pears, and apples from the Bellefleur orchards would be lost, falling rotten from the trees, to lie in mounds, food for yellow-jackets, flies, birds, worms. Ewan and Gideon and Noel and Hiram and Jasper were greatly upset, and every day, nearly every hour, something was happening; but Leah, a damp cloth over her eyes, lay on her chaise longue in her darkened bedchamber, too weak to move, too indifferent to care, hearing only a hoarse sluggish voice, The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured, a voice she did not recognize and in which she had no interest, any more than she had, now, in the Bellefleur fruit harvest or the Bellefleur fortune.

Water going down a drain. Counterclockwise, did it move? Ever more quickly and quickly as it ran out. A sucking gurgling sound. Not at all disturbing. Restful. Restful as the compost heap the gardener kept, just outside the garden wall. Restful as old Raphael's mausoleum. (But sometimes it angered her, even in her lethargy, to realize that Raphael too had been betrayed by his workers. His employees. After the poor man had begun improving their living quarters along the edge of the swamp, after he had allowed himself to become convinced by a visiting Manhattan physician that it was his responsibility, as their employer, to provide better sanitary conditions for them, and to treat, or attempt to treat-for there were so many!-those who were suffering from that mysterious intestinal ailment: after he had actually made a number of improvements, why then the reporters had swarmed into the village, eager to "expose" him, under instructions from their editors, who were in turn under instructions from newspaper publishers who wanted, for crude political reasons, to ruin Raphael Bellefleur's chances for election. The injustice! The irony! And there was nothing he could do, no way to suppress the fact that thirteen people had died, among them a number of very young children (who were, as the gloating reporters insisted in story after story, working in the hop fields in 102-degree heat alongside their parents)-no way to erase from the minds of the sensation-greedy masses the charges that were laid against him in the public press. And now, and now, Leah thought wearily, that ugly tale was repeating itself, and the family would be helpless, the fruit would rot and thousands upon thousands of dollars would be lost, the workers were being led by a madman, a common criminal, but nothing could be done . . . the Bellefleurs would not only lose their fruit crop but they would be, throughout the Valley, possibly throughout the state, held up to ridicule in the press, and "pitied" by their competitors. Leah would have been angrier but she was so tired: so simply, helplessly, shamelessly tired.) The jaws devour . . .

Those words, which rose in her mind at unpredictable times, frequently brought with them a wraithlike image of Vernon's face: she wondered if he had written them, if they were from one of his long, baffling, exasperating poems. And in that instant, suddenly, she missed him. She missed him very much. So many winters ago, in the downstairs drawing room, knowing that he adored her, smiling and laughing and touching his arm, teasing, making him smile, making him boyishly happy. . . . Pretending to listen to his recitations. But sometimes listening (for the poems were not always incoherent, there were snatches of beauty here and there, and melodic sounds), making an effort to listen. If only she hadn't been so distracted . . . ! She could not remember, now, what had distracted her. And now Vernon was dead. They had killed him. That they were now dead themselves as a consequence of Ewan's shrewdness (he had known that to take Vernon's murderers alive would be a blunder, since no witnesses would come forward to testify, and even if they did, and Varrell and Gittings and the others were convicted, some indifferent judge might hand down to them a light sentence, and they might have been paroled in a few years)-that justice had been done, revenge taken-did not soothe her. She missed Vernon. Somehow it had happened that she had not mourned him. One day he was with them, the next day gone: killed by drunken idiots on a Saturday night, thrown bound by his ankles and wrists into the river!-one day she had taken him for granted, as everyone did, and the next day he was gone forever. She hadn't had time, then, to mourn him; or even to think much about him. She had wanted of course to destroy his murderers, and she had been fairly certain that they would be destroyed, in a matter of months; but she hadn't had time to dwell upon Vernon himself. And now those strange, haunting, unpleasant words reminded her of him. And she almost wept-she wanted to weep-lying motionless on her chaise longue.

Vernon, who had loved her, was dead: and the young woman he had loved, with such passionate shyness, was dead.

Thoughts of Vernon pulled her toward thoughts of her daughter Christabel, whom she had lost; and now there was Bromwell (though a week ago a picture postcard showing mesquite and cactus in flower, addressed merely to "The Bellefleurs," arrived with an enigmatic little message on it and Bromwell's initials: he hoped he had not caused them any worry, he said, but his flight had been necessary, and everything was quite fine in his life); and Gideon, of course; Gideon who had deserted her bed after Germaine's birth; Gideon who failed to love her sufficiently. She wanted to weep, and indeed her face constricted, and her mouth opened in a soundless wail; but there were no tears. She hadn't wept, Leah thought, for years.

Gideon, dancing about so clumsily to that tune, how did it go, the needle's eye, the needle's eye, staring into her face, speechless with emotion, Gideon so tender, so absurd, crimson-faced, his silly nose bleeding so that he ran out of the room and the children laughed. . . . He had been such a fool, even as a boy.

Hiram wanted to talk with her about Gideon. But her eyelids were so heavy, she yearned only to fall asleep. . . . What does it matter, she whispered, her lips dry and cracked, what does it matter, let him make a fool of himself negotiating with those people, let him give them everything they ask and we'll go bankrupt and everyone will laugh at us, what does it matter, she said, her voice so feeble Hiram could barely hear.

Leah, he said.

Yes.

Leah, is it this strike that has upset you?

I'm not upset.

Are you worried about the crop?-are you worried they might set fire to the barns?

Your voice is too loud, she whispered.

Are you worried they might incite the other workers- Leave me alone, my head aches, your voice is too loud, she whispered.

So he went away; and she dragged herself up, and managed to dress without glancing in her mirror, and actually went downstairs; and ate what someone gave her; and allowed them to fuss over her, and to tell her about the strikers' demands-higher hourly wages, better living quarters, better food, legal contracts, attorneys on both sides, but primarily higher wages, much higher wages-as she sat with her head balanced on her neck on her shoulders so precariously, so very precariously, her head brittle as crockery on her neck that had no strength on her shoulders that yearned to slump forward as water yearns to circle, faster and faster, the drain through which it is plunging.

So she made an appearance downstairs. So she could do it, whenever she liked. Did that satisfy them? Did that answer their anxious questions? She wanted to yawn, and swat them away like flies, and say that everything comes to an end: life ends: there was no point in continuing with the charade.

Then, moving carefully as an elderly woman, she went back upstairs.

SHE HAD NOT cried, and would not.

There was a triumph in that, that she hadn't weakened; that she felt, really, only indifference. It was pure, it was virginal, her supreme indifference. . . . Hiram and the others might think she was despondent because of the strike, but in fact, as they must have known, Leah had begun to sink into her black mood weeks before. She sank three feet, and rose two; she sank eleven feet, and rose eight; one day she sank thirty feet and did not rise at all. On her chaise longue with a damp cloth over her eyes, too tired even to scream at Germaine, or Nightshade, or whoever it was rattling at the doorknob pleading to be let in, she simply floated, bodiless, at the bottom of a great dark pool of water. She was the drowned Vernon, she was Violet, she was Jeremiah who had been swept away in a flood. What remained of Leah cared to protest nothing.

And there had been much, that summer, to protest. For somehow it had happened, no one knew exactly how, that the castle was overrun with children. . . . They were all Bellefleurs, the nieces and nephews of distant relatives; cousins many times removed; strangers with the name Bellefleur who had arrived at Lake Noir for the summer, evidently at Leah's (or Cornelia's, or Aveline's, or Ewan's, or Hiram's) invitation. If you can't come yourselves, send your children . . . they will love the lake and the woods and the mountains. . . . So there were, at different times, nine children, and then twelve, and then fifteen. Of course the servants complained bitterly. Edna wept because she was insulted by them, and the kitchen servants wept because the kitchen was a shambles, the groundsmen were furious, the groom complained that Germaine's pony was being mistreated, Nightshade was hurt (though of course he didn't let on) by their whispers and giggles; and grandmother Cornelia discovered that several of the visitors had dusky skins and very black eyes, black moist wicked eyes, could they possibly be Bellefleurs, with that sort of blood in them . . . ! One July day when Leah felt reasonably well she had been walking restlessly in the garden when she came upon two children scrambling over each other on the ground, beneath low-hanging evergreen boughs, and she saw to her astonishment that one of them was her nephew Louis, Aveline's boy, and the other was a girl she had never seen before: a ferret-faced insolent little wench with dark blue eyes and a defiant Bellefleur nose: and both the children were half-naked. What on earth are you doing! Children your age! Get out of here-get out! Leah shouted and clapped her hands, with as much fury as if she'd come upon one of the cats sharpening his claws on a piece of antique furniture.

But the adults were no better. The adults were worse. Ostensibly to celebrate the success of the Mount Kittery mines, Ewan had thrown open the castle on July 4, and a great crowd of people-invited and uninvited-arrived, and swarmed over the grounds, and gobbled up and drank everything in sight. (Hams, roasts, lobster, caviar, every conceivable sort of salad, fresh-baked breads and rolls and pastries, fruit and cheese, and of course whiskey, bourbon, gin, vodka, wines, brandies, beer and ale on draft. . . . ) Not two weeks later Ewan had another party, a somewhat smaller one, on the lake; and every Friday night now his guests arrived, already merry and braying with drink, men from the sheriff's department, Nautauga Falls policemen, business friends and acquaintances, smalltime gamblers, the owners of bowling alleys and taverns and roadside restaurants, and their women, all their women, in various stages of intoxication. Ewan had paid a lighting contractor to set up, on the dock, an ingenious mechanism that flashed out onto the dark water all sorts of colored designs: crescent moons, snakes, human silhouettes. There was usually a small band, and dancing, far into the night, and in the morning the beach was littered with sleeping couples and other debris, among which dogs and cats and even, at times, mice and rats prowled boldly. As Leah's despondency deepened and she spent more and more of her time upstairs, Ewan's parties became increasingly noisy, and the behavior of his guests-and Ewan's behavior as well-became increasingly blatant. Lily never attended these parties, of course, claiming that she disliked the loud music and the behavior of the guests, but everyone knew that Ewan didn't want her, and simply ordered her to remain in her room. Some of the older children attended these parties, unsupervised. There was a brawl between Dabney Rush, a seventeen-year-old Bellefleur from-where was it?-somewhere in the Midwest-and a man said to be a smalltime bookie out of Port Oriskany, allegedly over the favors of a photographer's model from the Falls; the boy's face had required thirty-two stitches, but even then he had refused to go home. Some of the parties, begun on Friday night, spilled over onto Saturday, and Saturday night, and broke up late Sunday afternoon, but what could anyone do? Gideon was absent, or indifferent; or perhaps he attended the parties himself; so far as Leah knew, he never challenged his brother. Grandfather Noel and grandmother Cornelia looked the other way, as did Hiram, murmuring, But Ewan feels he has to repay the people who put him into office . . . and he has so many new friends now . . . he was always a gregarious young man. . . . Most astonishing of all, some of Ewan's guests had asked if they might see Jean-Pierre II, about whom so much was whispered, and the old man consented to appear, in person, down at the lake, smiling a loose, frightened smile, his dead-white skin glaring in the shadows, his eyes darting from side to side. He had even dressed for the occasion in an old loose-fitting frock coat. Ah, is that him . . . ? Is that the one . . . ? So Ewan's guests whispered, drawing back in awe.

Leah was angry, but tired; she was very angry, or would have been, if she hadn't been so tired; so the weeks passed. The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured. . . . In a listless twilight sleep she heard, at a distance, the clarinets and drums and isolated squeals, and wondered idly who they were, those guests of Ewan's, possessed of such gaiety, such zest. . . . It exhausted her even to listen to them.

Vernon.

And Christabel.

And Bromwell.

And Gideon.

And that baby of Garnet's. That baby. Leah turned her back for a half-moment and the great flapping jabbing bird had appeared: and afterward, on the flagstones, there were coin-sized splotches of blood.

So many decades earlier, her own father. Killed as a prank on Christmas Eve. She had heard the story so frequently she half-thought she had witnessed the death. On Sugarloaf Hill. But which tree?

Nicholas Fuhr. Atop Sugarloaf Hill, gazing down at the stunted evergreens. The elfin forest, it was called. They had embraced. They had kissed. Many times. Her hands flat on his chest she had pushed him away, trembling. The memory of his mouth: so warm, damp, loving, living. He might have been her lover, and not Gideon. But she had not loved him, finally; she had not even met him on Sugarloaf Hill. Another girl met him, perhaps. Other girls. Women. There were so many . . . so many women. . . . Nicholas, Gideon, Ewan, and their friends, and their innumerable women. Months ago, or was it only weeks ago, Leah had received a letter from an Invemere woman who claimed that her nineteen-year-old daughter had had an abortion and nearly died, nearly bled to death, right in her room, upstairs in her room, and of course it was Gideon's fault though the girl refused to admit it: would rather die than implicate her lover. Her lover who didn't love her. But what is that to me, Leah wondered, studying the letter-filled with misspellings, grammatical errors, odd stilted phrases-what is it, even, to Gideon, if he doesn't love her? Probably he doesn't remember.

She didn't even regret not having gone to Sugarloaf Hill, that day. Nothing would have been changed, probably.

The doorknob rattled and it was her little girl, her sweet Germaine, begging to be allowed in. Or was it her servant Nightshade. If only, Miss Leah, you will allow me to serve you . . . if only you will allow . . . She turned her head aside and did not hear and in a while the noises ceased. The jaws, the jaws devour. But what is that to me, she thought. She wanted to cry. But could not. She wanted to mourn. But how? And why? What good did it do, exactly? What was the point? She was too practical, too efficient. She was dry-eyed, her skull floated on a dark featureless sea, she was very tired.

Even when they came to her, unlocking her door with a forbidden key, even when they whispered that Gideon had had an accident out on the highway, she could not weep. She found it difficult, even, to open her eyes. What is that to me, the hoarse parched voice wished to say, but hadn't the strength.

The Strike.

Sam, the new foreman, the spokesman for the workers, was a nut-brown youngish man with a small, slick head and a spidery body. He was several inches shorter than Gideon but carried himself so erectly, his head flung back, that it appeared he was staring at Gideon from his own level. Sam's smile was constant. His teeth flashed, as if with surprise. The Bellefleurs deliberated: was that smile ingratiating, or was it mocking?

He means well, they murmured.

He doesn't at all mean well: he's a rabble-rouser.

He speaks with surprising clarity, when you consider . . .

If this were the old days there would be no problem.

They say he has studied law. . . .