The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  Dedication

  For Paul

  and for

  The Pelican

  Epigraph

  SILENCE IS THE PERFECTEST HERALD OF JOY.

  —William Shakespeare

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Bellwether

  Gifted

  The Time She Simply Thought of as Before

  This Turn of Events

  The Wanderer, As Yet Unknown

  The Newlyweds

  The Voices Were Very Encouraging

  Left, Right Closer, Closer

  A Privilege Allowed Restless Souls

  As If to Keep from Breaking

  From Whence She’d Come

  The Other Grandma

  Arrival

  The charge nurse at the asylum

  The Meaning of a Name

  Mardi Gras Sentimental

  Sacrament

  A Voiceless Baby and His Lonely Mother

  Time Went on with No New Findings

  Taking Up the Prophecy

  An Eloquence of Face and Hands

  Mission

  The Wanderer could still walk

  Rarer Secrets

  The Ways of a Silent Boy

  The Wanderer continued to live

  The Abundant Good Graces of His Silence

  Up Next to a Eucalyptus Tree

  Accusation

  The Wanderer came down

  The Wagon

  Powerful Wangas and the Loup-Garou

  In a Piece of Time Too Small for a Clock

  Staring into Liquid

  As for Dancy

  Man to Man

  They offered The Wanderer

  The Bluebottle Fly

  On the Late Afternoon of a Fine Summer Day

  Sassafras and Spanish Moss

  The Wanderer was allowed to dig

  Like Ripples on the Surface of a Pond

  Friends

  The Voices of Crayons

  Marking Time

  Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild

  The Wanderer thought he’d

  Part II: Innermost

  The Pinkerton

  The Sight of Her Brokenness

  The Sickness Brought About by Ignorance

  Eugenia Babbitt read aloud

  Hearing Extra

  Drawing Near

  The Age of Reason

  Good Afternoon, Miss Babbitt

  The Scary Story Champion of Southern Louisiana

  The Handshake

  A Promise Made of Chains

  The Wanderer recalled the white

  Voodoo and Hoodoo and the Sweet By-and-By

  Mémoire d’Archive

  The Dreams of a Bright and Ambitious Girl

  The Sins of the Mother

  A Reasonable Supposition

  Remains of a Shared Past

  You Need to Give Me a Little More to Go On

  July 14, 1957: The Sounds of Sorrow and of Angel Blood

  Those Things She Found Spiritual

  The Wanderer stopped eating

  One of Us Here Knows the Rules: July 19, 1957

  Can I Get a Witness?: July 20, 1957

  Ladies’ Choice

  Part III: Evensong

  Things began to change in Bayou

  Acknowledgments

  P. S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Advance Praise for The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Bellwether

  1949–1956

  Gifted

  BONAVENTURE Arrow didn’t make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. But the child was only listening, placing sound inside quiet and gaining his bearings because everything had suddenly changed. The water chant was gone, as was the oxygen whisper and the comforting beat of his mother’s steady heart. Where were the voices? Where were the dream tones? Where was the hum of the ever-present night? Bonaventure didn’t know what to do with all that loss. The world he’d known had vanished. Been swallowed up whole by harsh light and shocking coldness and a terrible, hurtful, clamoring dissonance. He shivered when the doctor handed him over, but he gave no hearty newborn cry. Instead, Bonaventure listened hard as he could for that missing steady heart.

  Bup-bup, bup-bup.

  The heartbeat was lost in a lot of other sounds now, but was strong enough to bring forth a calmness that allowed him to be wide-eyed and hopeful. His mother, Dancy Arrow, thought she heard him cry from a long way off, but that was nothing more than a trick of the anesthesia.

  Bonaventure stayed like that, all wide-eyed and hopeful, and continued to keep his silence. People worried about it right away. Except for Dancy. She was too taken up with what else was missing to grasp that her baby was quiet all the time.

  Bonaventure settled into the hospital nursery, finding comfort in his swaddling blankets and coziness in the confines of his bassinet cocoon. He matched voices to touches, and footsteps to nurses, and formed a great fondness for the ticking of clocks. His silence gave pause to the experts who examined him; here was a curiosity beyond their expertise. (They could never have explained Bonaventure anyway because there is no scientific word for miraculous.) They knew nothing of Bonaventure’s rarefied hearing, the acuity of which was an extraordinary grace and an unearthly symptom of the mystery behind his silence. They didn’t know that through his remarkable hearing he would bring salvation to the souls of those who loved him. Nor did they know that Bonaventure’s silence was full of sound that came to him in the same way it had come to the universe when space expanded to form nebulae and novas and all things celestial out of a divine and loving pulse.

  Bup-bup, bup-bup.

  All told, Dancy and Bonaventure spent a week in the hospital, as mothers and babies did in 1950, and then they were discharged. It had been determined that they were hale and hearty and that this silent situation was not the end of the world.

  “Mrs. Arrow,” the doctor said, “you have a fine healthy boy, though we are greatly concerned that he has yet to make a sound. You must pay special attention to the matter and come back to see me in six weeks or so.”

  To which Dancy smiled and said, “Thank you. I will,” and though her heartbeat stumbled, she said no more than that. In the deepest places inside herself she was joyful and jubilant and over-the-moon about her quiet baby boy. It was just the numbness that kept her subdued, like a sleepwalker who puts one foot in front of the other on a journey she won’t even remember.

  Luckily, Bonaventure heard one small sound of his mother’s dormant joy, and that small sound was enough.

  The nursery at home on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline held all the receiving blankets, diaper pins, and talcum powder anyone could want, as well as a rocking chair right next to the window. It was an altogether fitting place for twinkling stars and lullabies and dishes that ran off with spoons—there was no hint of unusual circumstance, no visible trace of tragedy.

  Bonaventure managed the breathing sounds that all infants make, but they had nothing to do with larynx or vocal cords or deliberate intentions. Nevertheless, his mother was in love with those unintended noises and with everything else about him: the translucency of his eyelids and the lilting look of his brows, his tiny feet and toes, each perfect little nail, the plumpness of his sweet bottom lip. Sometimes a look passed over Bonaventure’s face while he slept, as if he’d seen something spectacular in his dreams, and Dancy would try to imagine what it could possibly have been.

  Six weeks went by and Bonaventure maintaine
d his silence. Without even realizing it, Dancy gave up listening in favor of watching and did the best she could.

  “Has he made any sound at all?” the doctor asked. “Any crying, any fussing?”

  “Well, no crying, but he does fuss some,” Dancy told him.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean if he’s hungry he scrunches up his face and kicks his legs and stretches his arms up over his head. And if he’s wet or he’s messed in his diaper, he squirms around until he gets cleaned up.”

  The doctor lowered his head and smiled the kind of smile one puts on pity. Then he gave that smile to Dancy and said, “We need to do some tests.”

  “Maybe he just needs a little more time. After all, he was born two weeks early.”

  “I’d like to do them soon, Mrs. Arrow.”

  Dancy nodded and held Bonaventure closer, kissing the soft spot on the top of his head.

  A physical examination showed no irregularities, and auditory tests established that Bonaventure could definitely hear. In fact, it was obvious that he responded strongly to even the faintest sounds. This was believed to be connected to his muteness in some way, but no one could quite say how. It became a matter of much speculation. There were those who were certain his condition was a blessing, and those who feared it might be a curse. Dancy Arrow wondered fearfully which one it was. She was wondering about it on a Wednesday afternoon when Bonaventure was five months old. She was rocking him to sleep in the chair by the window when the suggestion of blame smoked in through the keyhole, for even a shut door won’t keep blame away. Dancy continued her to and fro rocking, an unspoken apology sitting on her lips. Had she abandoned her child for the sake of her loss? Had she failed to pay attention when she held him in her womb? Was Bonaventure’s absent voice her fault, too?

  She sang a song to him then and put a kiss on his forehead; he lay in her arms looking up and directly into her eyes. Then he knitted his brow in a serious way, which gave him the look of a very old soul. He slowly breathed in and breathed out three times, then smiled up at her with all the strength he had.

  Dancy had been wandering ever deeper into mourning, and Bonaventure had beckoned her back. And that became the moment in which Dancy Arrow knew there was something more to her little one’s silence; knew it as surely as if some talkative angel had come into the room and told her so. She wasn’t sure what to do with this realization, so she set it down in the back of her mind and turned her thoughts away. She moved to the daybed, lay down on her side, and wrapped her arm around her baby as if to put him back inside her.

  Dancy had missed the other side of Bonaventure’s silence. She did not realize he could hear her heartbeat whenever he wanted to. She was unaware he could find the sound of her blood flowing and of the inflation and deflation of her lungs no matter how far away she was. She had no idea he could hear a bluesy trumpet in a French Quarter alley, or the shuffling of tarot cards in a Bogalusa sanctum, or the echoes of footsteps made by the Acolapissa more than three hundred years before, or the fog rolling over Saint Anthony’s Garden some fourteen miles away.

  Bonaventure Arrow could hear conjured charms and sanctified spirits deep in the marrow of New Orleans. He could hear the movements of voodoo queens and the prayers of long dead saints. He could hear the past and the present.

  But even had she known all that, Dancy would not have imagined that such hearing was only a bellwether of what was to come. She could not understand that Bonaventure’s muteness was not a handicap at all but a gift—an extraordinary, inexplicable, immeasurable gift that allowed him to hear what no one else could. The silence that had taken the place of Bonaventure’s voice was the very same silence in which exists the Universe of Every Single Sound, a place that reverberates with perfect peace and mirthful bliss, but also with despair’s deep moaning and the whispers of secrets.

  Two such secrets lived right there in the house on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, while yet another was scattered over miles and miles and miles. Those secrets were waiting for Bonaventure to hear them and find them and take them out for healing. They would have to wait seven more years, for Bonaventure Arrow needed to grow into his gift; after all, he was only a baby. And he needed to join with a kindred spirit, one Trinidad Prefontaine—a female Creole servant, childless and widowed, who lived in Pascagoula, Mississippi, at this time.

  As for Dancy, Bonaventure was the child she loved with all her heart, and a tether to the time she simply thought of as Before.

  The Time She Simply Thought of as Before

  BONAVENTURE Arrow was conceived during an evening twilight, the fruit of a casual Catholic and a fallen-away Baptist who’d made unwed, unrepentant, consummated love on a Sunday in May of 1949, with a tenderness and a passion uncommon in two so young.

  Bonaventure’s parents, William Arrow and Dancy Roman, had met at a place called Papa Jambalaya’s, a gumbo joint out on Atchafalaya Road, where food bit the tongue and liquor stung the eyes and some Creoles from Opelousas played hot zydeco. Cigarette smoke and drugstore cologne twirled the room on the heels of the two-step, while trills of laughter, hum, and sizzle accompanied the band. And every now and then, off to the side, came the cracking sound of a break shot in a game of crazy eight.

  The first time William saw Dancy he lost his breath completely. By the time she reached his table, he barely had it back. There was nothing but the sight of her—no smell of Creole cooking, no beat of stomping feet, no sound of strummed-on washboard or of button accordion song. Never in his life had he been so enthralled. The curve of her cheekbone transfixed him; the sweep of her jaw threw him down; and the delicacy of her ear lobe ran off with his heart. It took everything he had not to put his hand on her face, just to know for an instant what that would be like.

  Dancy touched the nib of her pencil to the tip of her tongue, placed it on her order pad, and asked if he’d decided. He couldn’t stop staring long enough to reply. The tip of her tongue might as well have been a lightning bolt that struck him in the chest.

  She smiled while he fumbled to find his voice and recommended the chicken étouffée. He nodded and said that would be just fine.

  “What’s your name?” he blurted out, as she turned to walk away.

  She hesitated a bit, he was a stranger after all, but he had such an innocent face. “Dancy,” she replied. “What’s yours?”

  “William.”

  He ate dinner at Papa’s for several nights running, taking four hours to drink three beers. He wanted to be wherever she was. Every night, they talked to each other and joked around. William tried to get up the nerve to ask if he might take her home; he’d rehearsed it at least five hundred times but couldn’t get any further than asking about the special. And then on the seventh night, ignoring the oceans of blood that roared in his ears and the winds of anxiety that blew his mouth dry, William Arrow’s last nerve finally came through.

  Papa’s was noisy as usual while he waited for a table in Dancy’s section. But he was patient and determined.

  “Hey there, William, need some time to decide?”

  “Not tonight, Dancy. I know exactly what I want.”

  “Well, good. The food gets here quicker if you tell me what to bring.” She winked at him and did that pencil-to-tongue thing. After a good ten seconds went by, Dancy started to say he would have to speak up some, but the look on his face made her words turn back.

  Her blue eyes found his brown ones and their gazes locked in tight. There was no one and nothing else in that time and place for as long as it took life to turn inside out.

  “I don’t want any food,” William said. “I just want to know if I can see you home tonight. That is, unless you’ve already got a ride.”

  She didn’t say anything right away; she was lost in the brown of his eyes. Several seconds ticked by before she managed to tell him that she got off at eleven, and no, she didn’t have a ride. She said she walked because home wasn’t that far, just under a mile she supposed. She explained
that she liked walking because the noise and the smoke and the grease of Papa’s always stuck to her, and the night air made everything fall clean away. William didn’t mention that he had a car; a ride would be over too quickly.

  The pulse of the earth thrummed through the moonlight, mixing its heartbeats amongst theirs and offering them a promise. William and Dancy had never even seen each other outside of Papa’s, so there was awkwardness between them at first, the sort that will put a notch in a breath. But then they fell into step as they walked side by side, and they swallowed and blinked in a comforting synchrony. Their hands never touched, not even in an accidental brushing, and that was a good thing, for real intimacy has a dawn. They stuck to the shoulder of the backcountry road until Dancy turned onto a shortcut that took them through a forest of loblolly pine. Fallen needles covered the ground, giving hush to their shoes and a spring to their step, though the bounce was more to do with them walking together along the edge of possibility.

  That evening’s walk turned into an every-evening ritual that allowed them time to become better acquainted, not to mention familiar with nuances of voice and speech—William was just as fond of “in my opinion” as Dancy was of “that’s how I see it, anyway.” They watched for a smile to go from mouth to eyes, which usually happened in unison on both of their faces. And so they slipped into courtship. He taught her to drive his ’47 Chevrolet, and she taught him to whistle real loud through his teeth.

  The driving lessons were quite the experience for William. They practiced in the lumberyard parking lot when she got off work, and later graduated to some back roads that were mainly used by farmers. Then one Saturday afternoon, she just up and drove out onto the highway without even saying she was going to do it. Dancy declared she’d never felt so free and promised to teach him to whistle like a longshoreman in return for his patient instruction.

  William and Dancy were opposites, different by nature yet equally smitten. She was rather fair-skinned and fine-boned, while he was quite tall, with a suntanned face he’d earned on his college rowing team. He had a sweet tooth, while she preferred salt, so when it came to agreeing on food they were beat before they started. There were, however, two things they had in common: their fathers were dead, and their mothers were fixed on religion.