An orchid, Leah whispered. Is that thing an orchid.

A very beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. He spoke with sudden passion, as if he had sent the mysterious flower. (In fact there was no envelope, no card, attached. And the delivery man had had no idea, of course, who was responsible.) A very beautiful orchid, Nightshade said. As you can see.

Leah stared at it. She took it from him. It was odorless, and weighed nothing. And it was beautiful: purple and lavender and creamy-lavender, and a rich midnight-blue purple; and a purple so dark, so glistening-dark, it appeared to be black.

Leah stared at it for so long that her servant, waiting at her elbow, became uneasy. Miss Leah, he said gently, shall I bring a vase-? Or would you like to wear it in your hair?

Leah, holding the orchid, did not hear.

Though it is a large flower, Nightshade said, in his deep, guttural, passionate voice, I believe it would look most charming . . . most charming . . . in Miss Leah's hair. I could, you know, fix it there myself. You needn't call one of the girls. Miss Leah . . . ?

Without thinking Leah began to shred the delicate fluted petals with her thumbnail. How lovely the colors were-purple and lavender and a creamy-pale lavender that was almost white-and a rich, rich midnight-blue; and a glistening-dark purple that might have been black. How delicate, how airily delicate, the white pistil, the dark trembling stamens, which protruded so far, and dissolved into dust on her fingers! Seven stamens on seven thin stalks: soon broken and crumbled away to nothing.

Ah, Leah cried, what am I doing-!

For without thinking she had quite destroyed the lovely flower.

TAKE THE SILLY thing away and throw it in the garbage, she said, a minute or two later, and don't interrupt me again this morning, Nightshade. You really know better.

Revenge.

Once upon a time, the children were told, a man rode through the main street of Nautauga Falls attired in such handsome clothes, and mounted upon a horse of such exceptional grace and beauty, that all who happened to gaze upon him were stopped in their tracks, and spoke of the sight for years afterward. He was a deeply tanned man of indeterminate age, no longer young, in a suede suit that closely fitted his tall, slender body, with a high-crowned wide-brimmed black wool hat, and a black string tie, and smart lemon-yellow gloves, and leather boots with a pronounced heel: quite clearly a stranger, from another part of the country. And what a handsome man he was, everyone agreed.

Did they know he was Harlan Bellefleur, come to revenge his family's deaths? Did they recognize his Bellefleur profile, no matter that he wore a Western hat, and no longer spoke like a native of the Chautauquas?

In any case they sent him to Lake Noir, to the Varrells. And not a single hand was raised against him when, the following day, he shot down in cold blood (for so the greedy newspapers termed it, cold blood) four of the five men who had been accused by his sister-in-law of having murdered his father, his brother, and his brother's children.

There, that's done, Harlan was reported to have said, with a disdainful smile, when the last of the Varrells, Silas, lay dead. With a meticulous sense of style (for indeed he was being watched, indeed there were numerous witnesses) he then turned to walk away.

THAT, THE CHILDREN were told, was revenge. Not just the acts, the murders, themselves: but the style as well.

Nothing is quite so profound as revenge, they were told. Nothing quite so exquisite. When Harlan Bellefleur rode into town and hunted down his family's murderers and shot them one by one, like dogs-!

The taste of it. Of revenge. Honey-rich in the mouth, it was. Unmistakable. The lurching of your heart, the powerful intoxicating waves of blood coursing through your veins, a raw clamorous yearning tide of blood. . . . Unmistakable.

(BUT HOW UGLY, revenge. The very thought of it. Animals tearing at one another. The first blow, and then the next, and the next, and the next: the sickening quaver of the knees, that tarry-black taste at the back of the mouth. . . . So Vernon Bellefleur thought, alone amid the excited children. He must have been a child, among them; at any rate he was in disguise as a child. Then. In those blurred interminable days long ago. Revenge, the others whispered, laughing aloud with the sheer nervousness of certain thoughts. Ah-revenge! If only we had lived then.) BUT HOW EXQUISITE it was, really. There was nothing like it. No human experience, not even the experience of passionate erotic love, could match it. For in love (so the more articulate Bellefleurs speculated) there is never, there can be never, anything more than the sense, however compelling, that one is fulfilling oneself; but in revenge there is the sense that one is fulfilling the entire universe. Justice is being done by one's violent act. Justice is being exacted against the wishes of mankind.

For revenge, though it is a species of justice, always runs counter to the prevailing wishes of mankind. It makes war against what is fixed. It is always revolutionary. It cannot exert itself but must be exerted; and exerted only through violence, by a selfless individual who is willing to die in the service of his mission.

Thus Harlan Bellefleur, hawk-faced Indian-red Harlan Bellefleur in his black Stetson, on his sleek brownish-gray Costena mare, riding into Nautauga Falls one fine May morning in 1826. . . .

(VENGEANCE IS MINE, sayeth the Lord. So Fredericka insisted, arguing with Arthur. For John Brown was a murderer, wasn't he, no matter that he imagined himself in the service of the Lord? And Harlan Bellefleur as well. A murderer in the face of the Almighty.) DR. WYSTAN SHEELER COULD not have known, nor could Raphael Bellefleur have explained (lacking, as he did, any sense of the interior life-which he would have considered merely weakness), but, some seven decades after Harlan appeared on his high-stepping mare, Raphael was to subside into that cynical, dispirited melancholy, and order himself skinned for a drum, partly as a consequence of certain events that had happened before his birth.

What rage he felt, and what shame-! Though without exactly feeling anything. For Raphael had no conscious memory of having been told (by neighbors?-by classmates?-certainly not by his parents, who never spoke of the past) about the Bushkill's Ferry massacre and the trial and Harlan's sudden reappearance; he had, indeed, very little conscious memory of himself as a child.

(Though he must, he knew, have been a child-at least for a while.) These were the things to be contemplated, over the years, at the periphery of his highly active life: the massacre, and the rescue of Germaine from the burning house, and the arrest of old Rabin and the Varrells, and the hearing, the indictment, the trial itself. . . .

Above all, this: his mother's humiliation.

His mother Germaine, slow-speaking and easily confused, in the courtroom day after day, that late winter of 1826, before hundreds of curious staring strangers. Her humiliation there was more grievous, in a way, than the massacre itself, which was over so quickly. (It never ceased to astonish: six persons killed in a matter of minutes. So quickly!) His mother Germaine, in a shapeless black dress, twisting and pleating her skirt as she spoke. . . .

Raphael wondered: Did she look over to the defendants' table, did she look upon them, her family's murderers . . . No doubt she would have found them, in the stark light from the courtroom's high windows, quite ordinary men; diminished as much by their surroundings as by their guilt. Or did she keep her gaze stonily averted throughout the many days of the trial. . . .

Yes, I recognized them, yes, I knew them, my husband's and my children's murderers. Yes, they are in this courtroom.

THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE at Nautauga Falls boasted a sandstone facade and four "Greek" columns; it overlooked a handsome square, and the old county jail, at the square's opposite end. The courthouse was, for its time, a spacious building, and accommodated more than two hundred spectators for what was known variously as the Bellefleur trial, and the Varrell trial, and the Lake Noir trial. (The Lake Noir district with its innumerable unsolved crimes-theft, arson, murder-had been notorious from the time of its first settlement in the mid-1700's; and though the Bellefleur murders were considered excessive, and particularly hideous because of the fact that children were involved, the public, and the downstate newspaper reporters, tended to see them as representative of the region's lawlessness-brutal, barbaric, but unsurprising.) Crowded into the courtroom's pewlike seats were friends and neighbors of the Bellefleurs, and friends and neighbors and relatives of the Varrells, and others from the area who had not precisely chosen sides; and innumerable strangers-some having come to the Falls in horsedrawn wagons, others in handsome carriages. The poor had brought their own food and ate it outside in the square, despite the cold; wealthier parties were staying at the Nautauga House and the Gould Inn, or drove downtown from their estates on the Lakeshore Boulevard, curious to see the Bellefleur woman and the men, the dreadful men, who had murdered her husband and children. (Some of the well-to-do spectators had known, in their time, old Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, though few of them would have admitted it.) That a woman should be a witness to such horror, and yet survive. . . .

Poor Germaine Bellefleur.

That wretched woman.

Newspaper sketches of Germaine Bellefleur showed a dark-eyed, staring, profoundly somber woman in her mid- or late thirties, with a somewhat thick jaw, and premature creases bracketing her mouth. She was not, opinion had it, pretty. Perhaps at one time, but not now: decidedly not now: wasn't there even something stubborn and bulldoglike about the set of her mouth, and her eyes' narrowed expression? Called to the witness stand, seated in the chair on its high platform, she looked smaller of build than she was, and her voice, faltering, had a nasal, sexless ring; it was decidedly unmelodic, and cost her sympathy. As she answered the prosecutor's interminable questions, and, afterward, the defense attorney's interminable badgering questions, it was observed how she twisted and pleated the skirt of her unflattering dress, and stared at the floor, as if she were the guilty party. . . . (The newspaper reporters were disappointed not only in Mrs. Bellefleur's appearance, which lacked feminine grace, but in her testimony as well: it was so obviously rehearsed. For of course Mrs. Bellefleur, as well as the murderers themselves, and most of the witnesses, would not have dared speak in such a place, before a judge and jurors and so many spectators, without having memorized, like school children, their every word-with the consequence, as one correspondent for a Vanderpoel paper said wittily, that everyone, Mrs. Bellefleur as well as the accused murderers, and their neighbors, struck outside observers as belonging to one large dull-witted family, with the intellectual skills and manners of brain-damaged sheep. How graceless they all were!) Backcountry people. Hill people. "Poor whites." (Despite the fact of the Bellefleurs' vast property holdings, and Jean-Pierre's numerous investments.) There was old Rabin with his sunken cheeks and near-toothless gums, his face wrinkled as a prune, and so ugly; and the Varrell men in the first suits and neckties they had ever worn-Reuben and Wallace and Silas, looking sick-and the boy Myron, who looked, now, not much older than seventeen, gazing about the courtroom with a vacuous half-smile. Old Rabin and the Varrells and Mrs. Bellefleur: weren't they all Lake Noir people, weren't Lake Noir people always involved in feuds, weren't they all uncivilized, and hopeless . . . ?

A LIFE, SEVERAL lives, reduced to a single hour.

The terrible exhausting concentration of meaning: as if Germaine's life had stopped, on that October night, along with the others' lives. As if nothing existed apart from that time: not an hour, really, but considerably less than an hour.

Will you please recount for the court, as clearly as you can, omitting no details, exactly what happened on the night of . . .

The silence of the courtroom. Silence, interrupted frequently by waves of whispers. Ladies turned to one another, raising their gloved hands to shield their faces, and their words. Germaine broke off, confused. What she had said, what she was yet to say, what she had already said so many times, tangled together, like ribbons, like an unwisely long thread, and should she stop, should she snip the thread at once and begin again, or should she continue. . . .

Please tell us, Mrs. Bellefleur, as clearly as you can, omitting no details . . .

And so, again. Again. The halting procession of words. The sudden panicked realization that something had been forgotten: and should she pause, and return, stammering and blushing (for she knew very well, how could she fail to know, how pitying and contemptuous certain persons were of her, facing her hour after hour, how they judged her), or should she continue, repeating one thing after another, And then in the next room I could hear them with Bernard, I could hear Bernard scream, one set of words after another, as if she were crossing a turbulent stream on stepping-stones that threatened to overturn beneath her weight. She must keep going. She couldn't stop. And yet- And you are absolutely certain, Mrs. Bellefleur, that you recognized the murderers' voices. . . .

And again, again, the names: the names that were like stepping-stones too: Rabin and Wallace and Reuben and Silas and Myron. (And though it occurred to her while she lay convalescing in a neighbor's home that she knew, really, who one and possibly two of the others were, she could hear again their voices and recognize them, or almost recognize them, yes she really knew, she knew, it was advised that she restrict herself to her original story, for the defense would surely interrogate her about "remembering" so many days after the fact.) The defendants at their table: coarse-faced, sullen, baffled men, three of them with whiskers that covered half their faces, the youngest, Myron, vacant-eyed, smiling at the judge and the jurors and the sheriff's men as if they were old friends. (The Varrells' attorney wisely kept Myron off the witness stand, for he would probably have confessed had he remembered the crimes. Myron, it was said, didn't deal with a full deck now, and it might have been as a consequence of his amiable calfishness that, some months after the trial, he was to drown in a canoe accident on Silver Lake, in unremarkable weather.) Boldly and defiantly and with an incredulous little laugh deep in his throat the Varrells' attorney (twenty-eight years old, an Innisfail boy with political ambitions) moved that the case be dismissed because of lack of evidence: for of course his clients had alibis, relatives and neighbors and drinking companions had from the very first supplied detailed stories of the men's whereabouts on that night (absurdly detailed stories which newspaper reporters thought further proof of Lake Noir ignorance-a curious combination of naivete and brutality), and in any case there was no proof, there was absolutely no proof, merely a confused and spiteful woman's accusation. . . . How, the young man asked Mrs. Bellefleur, drawling her name as if he thought it somehow extraordinary, could she possibly ask the court to believe that in the confusion of the moment she could have recognized anyone? When, by her own testimony, the murderers were wearing masks?

Certainly there was no proof. Not even circumstantial evidence. And his clients had alibis. Each of them could account thoroughly for that night, for every hour of that night. It was a single woman's word against the word of dozens of others, each of whom had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth.

And you ask us to believe, the young man drawled, smiling as he looked about the courtroom, at the twelve men in the jury box, and the judge, and the spectators crowded into the rows of seats, you ask us to take seriously, Mrs. Bellefleur, an accusation that by your own account must be judged as frankly dubious . . .

As if sharing his clients' guilt the attorney was edgy, bold, arrogant, even indignant. He had learned a trick of smiling very faintly just after he made a statement he considered outrageous: smiling faintly, with his head lifted in mute astonishment. And you ask us . . . And you ask the court . . . He must have taken elocution lessons, he projected his thin, reedy voice with such confidence; and his small portly body with its melonlike belly was always perfectly erect.

His questions then fastened upon Jean-Pierre and Louis. But especially Jean-Pierre. The Onondagan woman Antoinette who had died along with the others-what was her relationship, if any, to the family? Wasn't she, the attorney asked with a mocking hesitancy, a particular friend of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur's . . . an intimate friend . . . who had shared the Bellefleurs' household for years . . . ? At first Germaine did not reply; she stared at the floor, and her face appeared to thicken. Then she said in a slow voice that the woman kept to her part of the house. They rarely spoke. They rarely saw each other. . . . In a louder voice, somewhat bitterly, Germaine said that of course she hadn't approved, not with the children, but what could she do . . . what could anyone do . . . that was the old man's way . . . he did what he wanted . . . and even Louis wouldn't stand up to him . . . though she hadn't asked him to, because . . . because he would have been angry . . . because he always took his father's side against anyone.

Might the killings, the attorney asked, have had anything to do with the Onondagan woman? With the fact that she was living common-law with Jean-Pierre Bellefleur . . .

Germaine, hunched forward, appeared to be thinking. But she did not reply.

Mrs. Bellefleur, isn't it possible that . . .

Baffled, the creases deepening beside her mouth, Germaine shook her head slowly. She seemed not to comprehend the line of questioning.

A young Onondagan woman, your elderly father-in-law with his innumerable . . . his innumerable, shall we say, former business associates . . .

And then there were questions about Jean-Pierre's various activities since his years in Congress. The many acres of wilderness land he had accumulated, under several names (a fact that appeared to surprise Germaine, who stared at the attorney in bewilderment), his part-ownership of Chattaroy Hall and the coach line from Nautauga Falls to White Sulphur Springs and the Gazette and the steamboat and the Mount Horn logging company that had filed for bankruptcy and . . . and hadn't there been a large fertilizer sale . . . a hoax . . . reputedly Arctic elk manure . . . many wagonloads of . . . And during Jean-Pierre Bellefleur's last term in Congress hadn't there been the sensational expose of La Compagnie de New York . . .

So the questions came, one after another. Germaine tried to answer. I don't know, she said haltingly, shamefully, I don't know, I don't remember, they never talked about business, I don't know. . . . And then abruptly she was being interrogated about the night of the murders again, and the masks. Hadn't she been terrified, hadn't she been confused, wasn't it even the case that, according to her own admission, she had been unconscious most of the time the men were in the house . . . ? How, if the men had been masked, had she recognized their faces?

And she hadn't been a witness to the others' deaths. Only to Louis's. In the other wing of the house Jean-Pierre Bellefleur and the Onondagan woman had been killed, quite some distance away; and in the parlor and kitchen the children. So she hadn't witnessed those murders. She couldn't possibly have known what was happening. Or who the murderers were. She claimed to have recognized voices but how could she possibly have recognized voices. . . . The murders had been committed, the young man claimed, in a high ringing voice, by strangers. It was quite plausible that they were thieves, attracted to the Bellefleur home because of its size and the reputation of old Jean-Pierre; or that they were Indians, furious at the Onondagan woman for her relationship with the notorious Jean-Pierre; or that they were-and this was most likely-enemies of Jean-Pierre's who wished him dead for reasons having to do with his discreditable business practices. Mrs. Bellefleur in her deranged state may have convinced herself that she heard familiar voices . . . or she may even have wanted (for reasons it would be indelicate to explore) to accuse the Varrells and Rabin because of the long-standing enmity between her family and them. . . .

Germaine interrupted. I know who they were, she said. I know. I was there. I heard them. I know them! I know! And then, rising, before the sheriff's men hurried forward to restrain her, she began to scream: They did it! Them! Them there! Sitting over there! You know it and everybody knows it! They killed my husband and children! They killed six people! I know! I was there! I know!

A LIGHT SNOW was falling very early on the May morning when Harlan Bellefleur managed to shoot and kill, within an hour and forty-five minutes, four of the accused murderers; the fifth, young Myron, was spared because in trying to escape from Harlan he not only turned his back to run but fell to his hands and knees and began to crawl, desperate as a maddened animal. And so Harlan, acting out of a sense of revulsion rather than pity, raised the barrel of his silver-handled pistol skyward, and did not fire.

Old Rabin was shot just once, in the chest, as he opened the door to his shanty on the north shore of Olden Lake, in answer to Harlan's loud knocking; Wallace and Reuben were killed on the main street of the village known at that time as Lake Noir; Silas was shot in the darkened back room of the White Antelope Inn, where he appeared to be awaiting Harlan (for by then-by midmorning-he had heard, of course, that Bellefleur was on his way), simply sitting hunched over in a cane-backed chair, weaponless. Harlan, euphoric from the morning's activity, and followed by a small gang of admiring townsmen who urged him on, Now Silas, Silas is next!, kicked open the tavern door and strode into the building as if he knew beforehand that Varrell, this particular Varrell, would put up no struggle. Pity for the moronic Myron had weakened him but he would have no pity for Silas, cowering there in the dark, his breath audible at a distance of some yards, through a closed door.

So you were found Not Guilty, Harlan laughed. And raised the pistol and fired point-blank into the man's face.

Unknown to Gideon . . .

Unknown to Gideon, who was to become, as the summer deepened, more and more obsessed with flying (for now he had his pilot's license, and had bought, at Tzara's encouragement, a handsome high-winged cream-colored Dragonfly with a 450-horsepower engine that could cruise at exceptionally low speeds), unknown to Gideon, Old Skin and Bones (for so the young women affectionately called him-though they still feared him, somewhat), whose three or four hours of nightly sleep were titillated by lurching visions of the Invemere runway which he must bring his craft down to, in safety, despite the fact that the dream-plane rushed with such violence through the air and threatened at any moment to disintegrate, so that he woke grinding his teeth, on the very edge of screaming: unknown to Gideon, who imagined his fascination with the air to be, like his fascination with the Rache woman, quite unique-really quite unique in the history of his family-there were two distant cousins, as unknown to each other as they were to Gideon, who had, in their time (a time long past) lived out their devotion to flying.

One assisted the elderly Octave Chanute in the late 1890's, at his work camp on Lake Michigan, experimenting with gliders and eventually with biplanes; it was young Meredith Bellefleur, in fact, who built the first biplane with a compressed-air motor, with the glider as its foundation, and Bellefleur whom Chanute most praised. Hungry for more praise and evidently quite young, still (little is known of Meredith Bellefleur other than the fact that he moved away from his family at the age of seventeen, to "make his own way" in the world), Bellefleur then volunteered to fly one of the old man's riskiest gliders, partly for the glory of it, partly because the contraption was so beautiful (it had ten wings, each seven feet long, rather like a crane's wings, and a small kitelike wing directly over the pilot's head, all painted a brilliant fearless red): but he was at the mercy of insidious wind currents that blew him, jerkily, in spasms, farther and farther out over the lake, until finally he was out of sight. . . . Octave Chanute mourned the loss of Bellefleur as he might have mourned the loss of his own son. The body was never found, nor was the prodigious glider's wreckage washed ashore. I can't help but think, Chanute frequently said, afterward, that young Meredith died happily. For to die like that . . . to die like that is surely a privilege.

Equally privileged was another young Bellefleur man, from the Port Oriskany Bellefleurs, who were, in the words of the Lake Noir Bellefleurs, never anything more than "middle-class"-they owned a block or two of Port Oriskany, and had something to do with lake freighting, and their marriages were undistinguished. This boy, Justin, spent his summers in Hammondsport, working with Glenn Curtiss; the passion there was to build upon the Wright brothers' invention, to surpass it, in as brief a time as possible, for of course there would be a great deal of money involved in airplanes-the future itself was contained in airplanes-and whoever built the most efficient and most practical model would be as wealthy, eventually, as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford themselves. Curtiss's company turned out an early version of the June Bug in 1907, a charming little craft with a 40-horsepower engine and a chain-driven pusher propeller, capable of flying as fast as 35 miles per hour. Justin, then nineteen years old, was to fly the plane in the First International Aviation Meet in Reims the following year but an inexplicable accident-he had appeared to have taken off smoothly, into a firm, stable wind-resulted in his premature death. (Falling from a height of no more than forty feet, young Justin might have survived; but he suffered vicious lacerations from the propeller, which seemed to have gone berserk as the little craft crashed to earth.) In addition to the cousins Meredith and Justin, about whom so little was known by the Lake Noir Bellefleurs, there was a story-possibly legendary-about Hiram's wife Eliza being carried off in a trim little seaplane, a surplus Navy vehicle, very early one morning before the household was awake: but whether the pilot was the woman's lover, or whether he had, for totally incidental reasons, landed his plane on the lake in order to make a minor repair, and was then waved ashore by the distraught woman-no one knew. At any rate she did disappear, leaving behind her little boy Vernon, who was to mourn her forever. (Unless-and this is possible-Vernon was to meet with her in later years, far beyond the boundaries of the Bellefleur empire, and of this chronicle.) Unknown to Gideon too was the fact that Leah had been making surreptitious inquiries about the obscure Mrs. Rache for weeks (Who is this new "love" of Gideon's? Old Skin and Bones, wouldn't you think he might act his age! Who is the bitch's husband? Do they have money? Where do they live? Does she love Gideon? What does she think of him?-of us?), but quite without success. Tzara would give out no information, and the airport's mechanics knew nothing about her other than the fact (so frequently repeated, Leah grew cynically amused) that she wore tight-fitting trousers, men's trousers with a zipper in front, and a tan leather jacket that came only to her waist, and goggles, and a leather helmet into which she heedlessly tucked her hair as she strode out to her favorite plane. So far as anyone knew she had never exchanged more than a half-dozen words with Gideon, who introduced himself to her one July afternoon as the airport's new owner. (Startled at his voice, which came at her unexpected, and sounded-for poor Gideon's voice had changed-both strident and thin, she had paused, and turned, but only from the waist, peering at him over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed behind the tinted lenses as if she fully expected to meet, in the shadow of the hangar, a stranger's lustful stare: and in response to Gideon's words she offered nothing of herself, not even a smile to acknowledge his hopeful smile, but asked only what the afternoon's weather would be-was the wind going to change?-would there be a break in the cloud floor?) SOMETIMES IN THE Dragonfly, sometimes in a cream-and-red Stinson voyager, sometimes in a handsome Wittman Tailwind W-8 with a continental engine, Gideon raced with his newly acquired flying friends out of the Invemere airport, toward the Powhatassie, or westward into the Chautauquas (which were not nearly so dangerous to navigate as they appeared, for the highest peak, Mount Blanc, was only about 3,000 feet high), or southwest toward the great lurid oval of Lake Noir, or due south to Nautauga Falls where, if they liked, they might land at the Falls airport and spend an hour or two at the Bristol Brigand, a pub close by. Gideon enjoyed his new friends though he did not much believe in them. Perhaps he sensed that his life was running out-perhaps he sensed that he was being borne along by a quick, sullen, capricious wind that cared not at all for him-but he did not credit his friends (Alvin and Pete and Clay and Haggarty) with much substance. Two were former bomber pilots, and had flown many missions, and had survived, and a third-Pete-had even survived a crash-landing in a cornfield east of Silver Lake. They were excellent drinking companions; they loved to tell tales about flying, and to give Gideon pointers (for, in their boisterous company, he appeared somewhat subdued, and despite his emaciated frame and pouched eyes he appeared comparatively youthful) not only on flying but on life as well-even on women. (That Rache woman! Wasn't she something! Ugly as hell! Ugly, yes! But, still-still.) They drank, and returned to their planes, and taxied out the runway, and plunged into the sky, reckless and euphoric. Life was so simple, so extraordinarily clear as soon as one lifted into the air: it was only the earth that gave trouble.

On July 4 Gideon and Alvin managed to fly their planes beneath the eight-span Powhatassie Bridge within sixty seconds of each other, and with only about four feet to spare; the other pilots, approaching the bridge, lost their courage, or frankly panicked, and flew over it to forfeit their bets. (The bets were small-$100, $150-and meant nothing to Gideon; but he had to be careful not to insult his friends.) On another occasion Gideon, Alvin, and Haggarty managed to "thread the needle" between two immense elms a quarter-mile beyond the Invemere airport, though Gideon was the only one to repeat the trick. How childlike they were, how sweetly exhilarated they felt! Life was so easy, so uncomplicated, there really was nothing to it, so long as one stayed in the air. . . . Another time, in mid-August, the men raced one another to Katama Pass nine hundred miles to the north, where the brother-in-law of one of them owned a fishing lodge. They were able to land, though not gracefully, on a stretch of unpaved highway.

So Gideon had his friends, in whom he did not altogether believe.

And he had Mrs. Rache: Mrs. Rache of whom he thought a great deal, but never with pleasure. (He had offered the woman, tauntingly, the Hawker Tempest. As a gift. Would you like it? Why then take it! You're the only one who flies it out of this airport. . . . He had offered her the airplane but she hadn't known how to respond. Reluctantly she turned to him, her hands on her hips, turning to stare at him, to assess him. She did not fear him as a woman might fear a man. She feared him, he saw, with a pang of excitement, as one man might fear another man-not knowing whether the offer was serious, or meant in jest. It would involve, after all-wouldn't it?-property worth thousands of dollars.) Of course he tried to follow the Hawker Tempest. From time to time. Unobtrusively. When the mood was on him. He did not expect to keep the plane in sight for long, though it always alarmed him how quickly the fighter did disappear, banking to the west, climbing to 2,500 feet and then to 3,000 and higher. The Hawker Tempest had a 2,000-horsepower engine and could be flown hundreds of miles in a brief period of time, but Gideon had no idea where the woman took it, or even if she brought it to earth. He himself leveled out at about 2,000 feet and cruised at 145 miles per hour westward into the Chautauquas, his excitement gradually waning (for the Rache woman was simply too fast for him). He had no destination and no sense of urgency; he hardly had a sense of being Gideon Bellefleur (and, yes, he knew he was frequently called Old Skin and Bones, and he did not really mind); once he was off the runway, once he cleared that line of sickly poplars he had acquired along with the mortgaged airport, nothing earthly mattered. Nothing weighed upon him seriously-certainly not his sentimental lust for a woman whose face he had never seen.

ALONE. ALONE AND floating. Buoyed up by the ocean-currents of air, moving effortlessly, languidly. At seven to eight hundred feet his sense of the earth was already dissolved; he floated free, and even the window-rattling forward motion appeared to diminish. The takeoff and the initial climb were headlong plunges but once he was secure in the sky he felt the earth shift below him, quite harmless. Even the engine, throttled back to cruising speed, was quiet, hardly more obtrusive than his own heartbeat.

Now what was the world and its claim upon him in this exhilarating sea of the invisible, this vertiginous wave-upon-wave of air upon which he floated, weightless, indeed, bodiless, flying not into the future-which did not, of course, exist in the sky-but into the obliteration of time itself? He directed his trim yellow lightweight plane away from time, away from history, away from the person he had evidently been for so many years: trapped inside a certain skeleton, defined by a certain face. Gideon, Gideon!-a woman called. Ah, what yearning in her voice! Was the woman Leah, was she his wife Leah, whom he loved so deeply, with so little sentiment, that there was rarely any need for him to think of her at all? Or was the woman a stranger? A stranger, calling him to her, forward to her?

Gideon, Gideon- Though the plane moved at 145 miles per hour and was buffeted about by the shifting air currents Gideon experienced no speed. Nor was there speed below: only the slow orderly placid almost indifferent and relentless progression of fields and intersecting roads and houses and barns and curved streams and lakes and forests that belonged to the earth, and consequently to time. Gideon floated above it. The emptiness of the air was fascinating because it was an emptiness with great strength. It upheld him, and bore his plane, cresting and falling upon unseen waves that must have been (so Gideon surmised) astonishingly beautiful. Though of course he could not see them. If he narrowed his eyes it sometimes seemed . . . it sometimes seemed that he could almost see . . . but perhaps he was deluded. The vast gravity-less space that upheld him must always remain invisible.

Alone. Alone and floating, drifting. In absolute solitude. Above the mist-shrouded mountains, through languid strips of cloud, now at 4,000 feet, slowly and lazily climbing, so that not only the checkerboard of fields below faded from sight but the vision of the runway which had so haunted Gideon during the first several weeks of his training had vanished as well: obliterated by the immensity of the sky, which took in everything, swallowed up everything, without a ripple.

At such times, in such isolation, Gideon experienced without emotion certain flashes of memory. Though perhaps they were not memories so much as mere spasms of thought. He heard, or almost heard, voices. But he did not answer them. Sometimes two spoke at once: Tzara instructed him to give the trim crank a turn or two, Noel boasted half-drunkenly of the Rosengarten property, the very last jigsaw puzzle piece, some 1,500 acres of devastated pine forest the Bellefleurs were soon to acquire. (And this would be the final purchase. It would regain for them all of Jean-Pierre's lost empire.) Leah spoke, taunting him, using words he had never heard from her-your bitches, your sluts, aren't they fortunate to have you as a lover!-and then pleading with him, and complaining of the most petty things (for it quite infuriated her, that great-grandmother Elvira and her elderly husband had moved across the lake to aunt Matilde's, and now they would refuse to be dislodged, the three of them, and Leah's plans for a handsome new camp would have to be postponed until the old people died-but when would that be, Leah cried, your people live so long!). There was Ewan wanting to talk with him about the children. Their children. Ewan uncharacteristically grave. Half-drunk, of course, and smelling of ale when he belched, as he frequently did, but grave: distressed. Not only Albert's accident with the new Chevrolet-that little fucker, Ewan groaned, he must have been going over ninety when he sideswiped the truck-over ninety on that dirt road!-but the others as well. For Albert wasn't seriously hurt, Albert would recover, he would recover and buy another car, but what of Garth who had moved away and betrayed his family, what of Raphael whom no one had loved, what of Yolande . . . ? And what of Gideon's own children?

The voices, the faces. Gideon did not resist them, nor did he accept them. He never answered their accusations. He never sympathized. . . . There was his little girl Germaine gazing upon him with an odd sullen weariness. In recent months she had lost something of her spirit: her eyes were no longer so bright, her movements so quick: she was, Gideon halfway supposed, no longer a child. An unfamiliar face, floating close beside him. But of course it wasn't unfamiliar. It was his-his child's.

But do you believe that, Gideon?-so Leah mocked bitterly. That she is yours? That she is anyone's?

(For Leah, impulsive queenly Leah, had begun to notice the child's change as well. Evidently Germaine shrank from her with increasing frequency, would not allow Leah to stare into her eyes, was rebellious and willful, and burst into foolish tears at the slightest provocation. She can't help me any longer, Leah said dumbly, she won't help me, I don't know what to do, I don't know what is happening. . . . ) But she was a child, still. Not yet four years old.

FACES, VOICES, THE wave-upon-wave of the air, bucking slightly now that he had again leveled, at an altitude of 4,500. Beneath him nothing existed. Colorless banks of mist, said to be cloud. A chill wind from the right-the north-and soon he must turn 180 degrees-turn and bank carefully-holding his position firm as the waves of air, grown suddenly more violent, sought to throw him about. But he would not return just yet. He had-hadn't he?-a great deal of time. The fuel tanks had been full at takeoff. He had all the time he required. Gideon, the voice cried plaintively, and then, mischievously, Old Skin and Bones!

He smiled, slightly. He surprised himself, smiling. But of course he was utterly alone in the cockpit and not even Tzara was beside him any longer. Gideon, the woman cried, Gideon don't you love me, Old Skin and Bones don't you love me, don't you understand who I am . . . ?

He turned quickly to her, and caught only a glimpse of her gloating shadowy face. But he did know who she was.

The Jaws . . .

One after another the two-year notes were signed, with most of the estate as collateral. The mines were depleted: the timberlands which had seemed inexhaustible were razed: though the Bellefleur farms produced more wheat, alfalfa, soybeans, and corn, and far more fruit, than their competitors in the Valley, the market was poor and would continue to be poor because of extraordinary harvests everywhere in North America: and so Lamentations of Jeremiah, baptized Felix (but long ago, long ago, in happier times) grew desperate.

He must have grown desperate, his sons reasoned, for why otherwise would he have consented to enter into a partnership with Horace Steadman of all people-Horace whom the Steadmans themselves mistrusted?

"He's essentially an innocent man," Noel said slowly.

"He's innocent, yes. And extraordinarily ignorant," said Hiram.

"You shouldn't say such things about our father, it isn't proper," said Noel irritably. And then, with an impatient gesture: "It isn't good luck."

In their father's presence they said little, for though Jeremiah's reserved, rather shy manner, coupled with the lurid white scar on his forehead (his only "badge of honor," to use his curious expression, from the war of his young manhood, in which so many of his contemporaries died), gave him an air of vulnerability, they were restrained by a natural Bellefleur reticence: natural, at any rate, between father and sons. After the debacle, after Steadman's flight to Cuba, each accused the other of having humored the old man.

Young Jean-Pierre, dabbing after-shave cologne on his smooth white skin, offered no opinion whatsoever. His sensibilities had been so shattered by his father's failure-so Elvira was to charge, hysterically-that he hadn't any opinion. And he couldn't possibly have acted of his own free will that terrible night at Innisfail, no matter what the jurors charged.

The night he was swept away in the flood, poor Jeremiah had been goaded, against his own nature, into drinking far more than he ordinarily allotted himself. For as the raindrops thickened and began to pelt the windows, as the afternoon prematurely darkened, he found himself thinking of the silver foxes he and Steadman had raised-the 2,300 silver foxes he and Steadman had bred, giddy with expectation, quite certain that they would become millionaires within two or three years. (For so they'd been convinced, by the silver-fox breeder who had sold them the original foxes.) And then, and then . . . And then, incredibly, one terrible night, the creatures had somehow broken through their close-meshed wire fences to tear one another to pieces. Jeremiah, even in wartime, had never seen anything like it. He had never seen anything like it. Why, the creatures were cannibals, they were monsters, they appeared to have devoured, or attempted to devour, their own offspring-! Acres of carcasses. Bloody strips of flesh, and muscle fibers, and the ravens and grackles and shrikes picking at their eyes, a sight too hellish to be borne. Jaws devouring jaws . . . And then, the next day, to learn that Horace had taken what remained of the money (hardly more than $500, in Jeremiah's vague estimation) and fled to Cuba with his fifteen-year-old mulatto mistress, about whom everyone had known except Jeremiah . . . !

"You've failed once again and this time you have humiliated us all," his wife Elvira screamed. She hit at him with her small fists, and her face looked wizened, and he was struck by the realization that though she might never love him again he would continue to love her, for he had pledged himself to her, for as much as they shared of eternity. Her detesting him did not free him from his pledge. "When your father was living I couldn't bear to be in the same room with him," Elvira wept, "because of his thinking, his terrible tireless thinking, but now that you have taken his place, now that you have so inadequately taken his place, ah, how I wish he were still here! He would have known Steadman for the villain he is, and he would have known better than to breed those hideous cannibals!"

"But they didn't appear to be cannibals," Jeremiah protested softly, backing away from his wife's blows. "You yourself said, dear, didn't you say, they were so beautiful, they possessed so unearthly a-"

"And now there will be an auction, won't there! A public auction! Of our things! Of your father's precious things! And all the world will trample our gardens and lawns, and track mud onto our lovely carpets, and everywhere people will laugh at us, and talk will surface once again of the curse-"

Jeremiah, backed against a fireplace, tried to take hold of his wife's wrists; but though she was a small woman, and her wrists were touchingly slender, he could not hold them still. "But there is no curse, dear Elvira-"

"No curse! You, of all people, to claim that there's no curse!"

"The very notion of a curse on the family is a profanation, a blasphemy-"

"How else to explain these catastrophes?" Elvira cried, turning away from him to hide her face in her hands. "From the very start . . ."

"But we haven't been accursed," Jeremiah said, smiling foolishly. "It's entirely possible to interpret our history as being a history of-of blessedness."

Elvira stumbled away, sobbing. She wept as though her heart would break: and Jeremiah was never to forget the pathos of the moment. For he had of course failed her, and he was quite conscious of having failed his father as well (whose presence filled the castle at certain troubled times, and whose skin, on that ugly drum, quivered slightly whenever Jeremiah passed near, whether in rage or in simple hope that he might draw his hand along it, it was impossible to know-for naturally Jeremiah did not touch it, or linger on the stairway landing), and of course his children, his innocent children, whose inheritance was dissolving away to nothing.