It has long been known that bodies decompose rapidly inside their tombs in the heat of Louisiana summers. The locals call them bone ovens because year after year there is nothing left but skeleton, the rest of the corpse having all but baked away. Lying at peace and rid of their flesh, the newly baked bones are politely placed into an opening in the crypt’s floor, down into a hollowed-out space beneath, in a macabre and gracious gesture of making room for more—a natural thing in a place like New Orleans.
Such was not the case with the Arrows. They were a well-to-do family that had long ago commissioned a mausoleum in Cimetière du Père Anastase large enough to hold twelve bodies at rest, never to be disturbed. William’s remains would be placed near those of his father, Remington, who rested near his own parents and grandparents. That was the way of the Arrow family.
William attended his own funeral; it is a privilege allowed restless souls. The transcendence of the requiem mass offered to take him into the sky above, but he resisted and sat next to his coffin in the hearse on the way to the cemetery. He took note of the freshly engraved letters on the tomb—“WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW ~ BORN DECEMBER 16, 1926 ~ DIED DECEMBER 16, 1949”—and of the graceful script that flowed into the shadow of the Valley of Death spoken of so poetically in the Twenty-third Psalm.
There was, however, no psalm to describe the irony of William dying on his twenty-third birthday, or of the fatal bullet having traveled a notable distance, around corners, through tree trunks and solid red brick to lodge in the life of his pregnant young widow.
William Arrow did not rest in peace.
In the weeks following the funeral, Dancy couldn’t manage much in the way of sleeping or eating. Her skin grew ashen, her hair hung limp, and her eyes became dull as gray slate. In this regard she was not unlike The Wanderer—lost in an emotional catalepsy, her consciousness made ethereal, her heart made paralyzed.
Wanting the best for her daughter-in-law and soon-to-be-born grandchild, Letice Arrow insisted that Dancy come live with her in William’s childhood home. It would be hard enough to care for a newborn, she said, never mind trying to do so while mired in the throes of grief. But there was more to Letice’s kind offer than that. She wanted to hold a living baby, to show God once more that she could be a good mother.
Dancy acquiesced because she didn’t have the will for much else, and she didn’t like being alone in the house in New Orleans, to which William would never come home.
Letice’s house faced a park and was a lovely reminder of the antebellum South. Like so many others in that part of the country, it was an Italianate, with pronounced eaves atop decorated corbels and, set off with ornate wrought iron, an upper belvedere from which to view cypress trees and live oaks all draped in Spanish moss. There was a smooth-as-glass pond across the way where geese and swans floated gracefully in imitation of their brethren in New Orleans. It was the perfect place for dragonflies to skim above the surface, glimmering green and purple between the water and the sun.
The house had been built by a seafaring man who’d furnished it with the exotica of his travels. The interior was full of ebony, teak, and thick Turkish carpets. The banister of the front stair had been carved in Africa, while every hinge and hasp was made of brass and bore the likeness of a heron, etched by a Viennese craftsman who’d had the steady hand and eye to accomplish such a thing.
The desk drawers in William’s old room still held his stamp collection and baseball scrapbooks, as well as a cigar box containing three Indian-head pennies, a rabbit’s foot on a chain, and no less than a dozen number-two pencils, every one of them with teeth marks set in its wood.
Vestiges of William’s boyhood shouts hovered somewhere near the ceilings, while memories of his trampling feet pattered over all the floors, and echoes of his singing voice inhabited the walls. Ghostly William did what he could to let those sounds find their way into Dancy’s head, but things didn’t work out in the way he’d intended. Those shouts and footsteps and echoes of songs could not chisel their way into Dancy’s grief-stricken mind and so went to her womb instead.
Even though Bonaventure didn’t always understand the sounds he was hearing, he did know how they made him feel, and the carefree noises of William’s childhood made him feel much better than the constant forlorn sounds of mourning.
William had been admitted to Almost Heaven, but he found it a lonely place and so made visits to Christopher Street, where he stayed for days on end. During one of those visits, he wondered if his unborn baby could still hear him, and so he spoke a question: “Hey, little man, how’s it going in there?”
Bonaventure turned in a circle when he heard that familiar voice. His movement caused a stir inside William’s dead man’s heart.
As If to Keep from Breaking
SORROW has a nature of its own, and of course it always does change things. In the case of Bonaventure Arrow, Sorrow moved in with his family and enjoyed the status of uninvited guest.
For all intents and purposes, Dancy and Letice were strangers who stood at the edge of reality. Dancy occupied the fringes of each day avoiding people and conversation, while her mother-in-law walked ever deeper into prayer. They dressed; they ate; they went through the motions. They held themselves stiffly as if to keep from breaking. Though they had come together to mourning’s abyss, each looked into the gorge alone.
This familiar estrangement was due to a couple of characteristics the two women held in common: The first of these was the practice of keeping emotion at bay; while Dancy was new to it, her mother-in-law had long been a master. Letice was a disciplined woman, albeit quite kind, and commanded respect without saying a word. The second shared characteristic was that both of them had made a deliberate choice to lock down heartbreak. To set their sadness free would be to let William go, and neither of them could do that.
Although they grieved in company, there was one major difference in their thinking: Letice wanted to know the killer’s name and where he had come from; Dancy, however, did not. Letice had a private theory, one she’d woven from the threads of a secret that had been haunting her for years. This theory laid the blame for William’s death directly at her door.
Ironically, Dancy believed that she was the one at fault, and that being left to wonder was part of her punishment. Neither woman came right out and blamed God. Letice could not tolerate the thought, and Dancy felt that if there was a God—and she had started to doubt his existence—he was the monstrous one her mother worshipped, and she refused to recognize any such being.
Adelaide Roman also believed that her daughter was being punished, but she felt it was for sneaking off to have sex before marriage, bringing shame on their family like the worst kind of sinner, and making Adelaide a grandmother at the age of forty-one. Well, Dancy would have to pay for that: Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Adelaide always cherry-picked verses from her King James Bible and applied them any which way she liked.
Letice Arrow contacted Sergeant Turcotte, the New Orleans police sergeant in charge of the investigation, to see what, if anything, he had been able to ascertain. She was told the perpetrator, referred to as John Doe, was uncommunicative.
“The doc up to the asylum thinks he doesn’t even know his own name, Mrs. Arrow,” were the policeman’s exact words.
“Was there no wallet, nothing at all?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry to say. He didn’t have much on him. He kept his money in an unmarked envelope and a few whatnots in his pockets, but nothing that points to who he is or why he did it. We fingerprinted him, and nothing turned up.”
“Are you saying that there is no clue whatsoever?”
“We’re asking around town. He was kind of an eyesore, if you know what I mean. I believe that eventually somebody will come forward, someone who noticed him, who can give us an idea of where he was staying or where he came from. In addition to the cash, I remember he had a Chicago newspaper with him dated December 1, 1949, and a paper napkin. The napkin was from a
coffee shop in Memphis, so put all that together and it looks like he was a drifter. That’s about all I can tell you right now, Mrs. Arrow.”
“How much cash was he carrying?” Letice asked.
“A pretty good amount, over $700 I think it was.”
“Do drifters usually carry that much money?”
“Maybe he was a gambling man,” the sergeant said.
“Maybe? Is that the best you can do, Sergeant?”
Turcotte let a few seconds of silence come between them. “Mrs. Arrow, I am not your enemy here. We’re doing the best we can.”
“I don’t think you are, Sergeant. I don’t think you realize how important this is.”
“I assure you, ma’am, I do.”
Subsequent conversations took place every week. Letice was obsessed with the notion that William’s life had been payment for a terrible sin she’d committed, and for tricking Remington Arrow into marrying her by letting him believe she was something she was not. She’d been living a lie, and William had paid the wage of her sins.
She didn’t tell Dancy about her talks with the sergeant; the girl might wonder why she wanted so badly to know the killer’s name. Letice was afraid that if she tried to explain, she would have to go back years, all the way to the passion and the potion and the innocent blood, and the prediction that seven times seven gwine come to you. She hadn’t known what it meant at the time, but now she knew: William had been murdered in 1949, and forty-nine is the same thing as seven times seven. Letice had fallen into the trap of finding sense inside the rant of a superstitious woman. Such traps are not uncommon in a place like New Orleans, spongy as it is with tales and magic.
The funereal scent of magnolia and white lilies hung heavy in the air of the house on Christopher Street, settling on the black crepe de Chine that covered its mirrors and clinging to the women who lived within its walls. Dancy moved through the rooms of William’s brief life, touching door knobs and newel posts she knew he had touched, collecting his fingerprints in the palm of her hand. Sometimes she felt that she was drowning in the very air she breathed, and just when it seemed her lungs had filled with combustible anguish and were about to burst into flame, she would feel a pulling such as that which comes to a body in water, lifting it up and taking it to the surface. She welcomed the sensation but never told anyone about it, or of how it would take her all the way to the crypt at Père Anastase, where her sweet murdered husband lay.
Dancy loved those visits. They were a surviving intimacy, the only intimacy she had left. She talked to William when she was there, told him how much she missed him and that she would love him and only him forever and ever and ever. She went to the cemetery on Christmas Eve but didn’t leave her room on Christmas Day.
William didn’t leave it either; he watched Dancy pace the floor or stare out the window hour after long empty hour.
Dancy visited William’s crypt on the third day of January in 1950. She was seven-and-a-half months along, and unborn Bonaventure could push pretty hard. He pressed so hard against her insides that day that she could see the outline of his tiny baby knuckles right through her clothes, and she sang “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” in an attempt to calm him down.
The music worked. From inside Dancy’s warm, safe womb Bonaventure heard two voices singing, and his little heart beat out a raining tattoo as if to keep time with the song. He had no suspicion that anything had changed, because for him they had not; he’d always known those two voices, one soft, one deep, and had always found them soothing.
Hap Wilkens, the head groundskeeper at Père Anastase, was tending to a fallen urn at a crypt two rows behind when he saw Dancy and heard her singing. That night while playing double solitaire at the kitchen table, Hap told his wife about what he had witnessed. The two of them speculated that the poor girl had lost her mind, standing in the cemetery like that singing “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apply Pan Dowdy.” And didn’t she have a right to go crazy, what with her husband being killed at the A&P and all? They shook their heads and tsk-tsked, and said it truly was a pitiful situation. Purely pitiful.
Rather than diminishing with time, the pulling sensation became stronger. It would come to Dancy from nowhere, on the wings of thoughts she did not consciously have. And then a sort of relationship formed between Dancy and the pulling, as if it were her only real friend, the only one that understood. She began to wonder if she should give the sensation a name, companion that it had become. But the pulling already had a name; it was William Everest Arrow.
Letice was at all times gracious, and Mr. and Mrs. Silvey, the live-in help, tried to show that they cared very deeply and felt terrible about the whole situation. Forrest and Martha Silvey were ideally suited to dealing with loss, having met as hospital volunteers in the First World War when both were very young. Their wartime romance had been an effort in tenderness, touched by the leavings of war that were so visible in the dead eyes of living soldiers (the memory of which came back to them whenever they looked into Dancy’s). Both of them were from the South—she from Mobile and he from Baton Rouge—a trait that endowed them with a love of home and an appreciation for etiquette, both of which had greatly appealed to the Arrow family when they’d hired them back in 1926 right before William was born.
The Silveys were a childless couple, patient and kind and devoted to each other. They were a living example of the axiom that people who live together for a long time begin to look alike; Mr. and Mrs. Silvey even got taken for brother and sister by those who didn’t know better. They were both rather shapeless, with stooped shoulders like melted-down candle wax. They had no waistlines to speak of, and their faces sagged from cheekbones to chins.
They hadn’t always been childless; there’d been a baby once, a little girl, when they were first married all those years ago. They’d named her Caroline, and she’d died a sudden naptime death. That’s when their sagging faces started, and also when their hair gave up all color and turned a bright snowy white. The loss of William deeply hurt the Silveys, for he had been precious to them, as precious as the child they’d lost.
Bonaventure loved Mr. and Mrs. Silvey’s voices; they had a way of cooling the scalding, unshed tears that boiled around his mother’s heart, burning holes in its tender tissue; he could clearly hear it happen. Far in the future he would hear the same thing in the lovely cooing of a pair of doves. But for now he listened from where he lay, curled inside his mother like a flesh-and-blood rosebud preparing to bloom.
From Whence She’d Come
WHILE unborn Bonaventure was doing all that listening, his kindred spirit was going about her business. Trinidad Prefontaine was descended from the beautiful Consette, a mulatto girl who’d been born in Haiti, sired by a white man on a girl off a slave ship. Consette had been traded by that white man to a thieving midshipman on the cargo ship Andanza for a dozen cases of bumbo rum. It happened in 1820 when she was just sixteen years old. The midshipman sold her to the captain, who gave her as a gift to one Augustin Tulac, a white Creole plantation owner who lived with his lawful wife and legitimate children outside the city of New Orleans.
Consette had eyes the color of lapis lazuli, a blend of azure with glimmering turquoise that put the skies of the heavens to shame. Her skin had the feel of an orchid petal. She was structured delicately like a hummingbird, with luxuriant hair that was two shadows blacker than midnight. Consette was altogether enchanting.
Augustin Tulac kept Consette in a stately home on Esplanade Avenue in Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood famous for marriages de la main gauche, “left-handed marriages” in English. Her patron was generous, and her bank account grew monthly; even her servants possessed a veneer of sophistication. But all that aside, Consette harbored a deep hatred for Tulac. On nights she lay beneath him, she lost herself in memories of the Quarter: the dancing flames and the beating drums and the half-closed eyes of the Mambo sur point, priestess to the Asogwe Eulalie Bibienne. When she thought of these things, a fever would start deep inside Consette
’s body, causing her to arch her back and move her hips in a pulsing, pumping rhythm.
When her loathing of Tulac grew enough, Consette paid a visit to Eulalie Bibienne, seeking her advice. On a hot steamy night, she did as the Asogwe bade her do and took her hatred to the Quarter, where she let the Caplatas do with it as they would. In two short weeks Tulac was dead, a look of terror on his frozen face. No investigation was made; a death like Tulac’s was left alone at that time in New Orleans.
Consette shed herself of her home and her servants and chose a husband after Tulac’s demise, a freed man named Isaac who was a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave called Zimba. She moved to his farm and gave birth to four dark daughters, whom she endowed with her fascination for the occult. Consette’s fixation passed down her line through all generations to follow.
In 1913, one of Consette’s descendants gave birth to Trinidad and nurtured the child with superstition and the demon side of plants. Trinidad learned that the bulb of a hyacinth could cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it could be fatal; that oleander leaves are poisonous and harmful to the heart; that all parts of the dieffenbachia will burn the mouth and can swell a tongue enough to cut off air; and that one or two castor beans are deadly things to eat. Trinidad was given all that knowledge, but not a solitary ounce of healthy love.
She took it all in, but unlike her mother, Trinidad was not interested in the poisonous, the harmful, the burning, or the deadly. Instead, she looked for healing.
Oddly enough, Trinidad had been born with a condition for which there is no herbal remedy. In Latin it is called dextrocardia situs inversus—spoken plainly, her heart was positioned in the right of her chest, a mirror image, completely transposed. But this was not her only distinction, for Trinidad was a Knower and also a receiver of visions. For most of her life, unbidden knowledge had floated itself to the anterior of her body cavity, above and just to the right of her gut, before settling on the surface of her turned-around heart. She’d first found out about the Knowing back in 1922, on the day she turned nine years old.
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 4
