Read Bellefleur for Free Online Page B

with the initials IH (International Harvester) loosely set upon his head. Whenever anyone outside the family greeted him he revealed tobacco-stained teeth in a quick, half-mocking smile, but he never replied; it was thought by some that he liked to play dumb, and by others that he was slightly retarded. Of course he had been allowed to quit the county school at the age of thirteen, in order to work for his father.
    But he did not work for his father regularly. Nor did his older brothers. They drove about the countryside, when they could afford gas. They took odd jobs, but quit after receiving the first week’s wages. In his dirty bib overalls, shirtless, sometimes barefoot, or wearing old mud-splattered boots, Johnny Doan was a familiar figure in the village of Bellefleur; and he was sometimes sighted along country roads some miles from home, simply walking, alone, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his undersized head slightly bowed. Answering a complaint made by the father of a child attending the small public school in Bellefleur, the sheriff of Nautauga County drove out to the Doans’ one Sunday afternoon, and spoke with Johnny and his father (about, it was said, Johnny’s bullying of younger children), and after that Johnny rarely appeared in the village, though he was seen as frequently as ever walking the country roads, cutting through pastures, squatting by the sides of ditches, utterly alone, companionless, the gray cap perched atop his head, his expression flaccid and content. Hello, Johnny, a friend of Mr.  Doan’s might call out heartily, d’you want a ride somewhere?—are you going somewhere?— slowing his car or pick-up truck so that Johnny might catch up. But the stained teeth showed themselves in an empty grin, and the blank brown eyes kept themselves blank, and Johnny never condescended to accept a ride. It might have been the case that he hadn’t any destination.
    One afternoon he threw the pitchfork down in the manure of the puddled barnyard, and walked away. Trotted away. Through his father’s scrubby pastureland where outcroppings of rock jarred the eye, through a neighbor’s cornfield, where dried stalks rustled with his passage, along a clayey dirt road lifting into the foothills. It was not the child Raphael Bellefleur he intended to injure, and not even the Bellefleur girls he wanted to spy upon—pretty Yolande, pretty Vida!—and Gideon Bellefleur’s wife, the one with the red-brown hair and the squarish chin and the high, heavy breasts, yes, that one!—nor did he want to encounter the Bellefleur boys, whom he wisely feared. It was the castle he wanted to see. He had seen it several times already, and he wanted to see it again. And the lake. All of the Bellefleur property was posted against trespassers and he wanted to trespass and so he trotted along through fields of wild grass and beggarweed and broom sedge and willow bushes, changing himself into a dog, his tongue lolling, his head carried slightly forward so that his shoulders hunched. It was a bright chilly October day. He came to Mink Creek and followed it downstream for a while, not wanting to get his paws wet; fearing the swift current; excited by the hilly land on the other side. At last he came to a shallow bend, where Bellefleur children had placed large flat stepping-stones, and so he trotted across, and leapt to the other side. He was a long-tailed yellowish creature, part hound and part beagle. His tongue was a moist pink, his gums were a very dark grape. His teeth were stained brown but were still quite sharp.
    Bellefleur Cemetery atop a grassy overgrown hill. A wrought-iron fence, badly rusted. A pretentious wrought-iron gate, its bottom spikes stuck in the earth, unmoved for years. He lifted his left hind leg and urinated on the gate, then trotted inside and urinated on the first of the gravestones. Marble, angels, crosses, granite, moss and lichen and a small jungle of ferns. Earthenware crockery set atop graves. The