The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  The next time Brother Harley John Eacomb came to Bayou Cymbaline to conduct a Meeting of the Righteous, Adelaide showed up in a snug-fitting, black sheath dress. After the service she approached him and proclaimed that now she understood Mark 9:43–48. Her husband had been like a hand or a foot or an eye that offended, and he had been cast off.

  “He was a drinker and a smoker and he played poker every Friday night, Brother Eacomb. And though he was always clean-shaven and shined his shoes on Saturdays, he was a godless man. I am convinced he will be playing cards with the devil for all eternity.”

  And Brother Harley John Eacomb said, “Praise Jesus, sister, praise Jesus.”

  Adelaide took to wearing fancy lingerie to every Meeting of the Righteous. She told herself it had nothing to do with the fact that she drove to a motel over in Chalmette and had sex with the married Brother Eacomb after services. That wasn’t it at all; she had simply wanted to look her best for God, as any good Christian woman would do.

  Having become Brother Eacomb’s truest disciple, Adelaide believed it was her duty to save others by any means available, and she carried this out at her post office job by intercepting and opening mail that was not addressed to her, all in the name of the Lord. She reasoned that doing so would allow her to identify any works of the devil that tried to disguise themselves as United States mail. It was a practice well suited to Adelaide Roman, a woman who understood the ways of the devil.

  Arrival

  AT no time after William’s death had it been suggested that pregnant Dancy move in with Adelaide rather than Letice. She couldn’t have stood Adelaide anyway—all the gossip mixed in with Bible quoting, Praise-be-to-Godding, and unceasing holier-than-thou judgments. Nor did she wish to feel unwanted, or to listen to the snide insinuations that her father had been a failure.

  Most days Dancy just sat very still and stared into nothing. She nibbled at her food and sipped at her drink. Dancy couldn’t place herself back in the world because her world had gone missing, completely erased by some cold, cruel void. She had lost every manner of feeling, from the sensation of touch to the experience of emotion. She could have plucked an egg from boiling water and never felt a thing. Dancy was like a sieve; the only thing she could hold were the boiled-down husks of cooked-away happiness, leftovers from a life that had drained through the wires.

  If she wanted for anything she had only to ring a silver bell, which she did for the first time on the night her water broke. And she only rang it then because she was too big to bend over and clean up the mess. It was the last day of January 1950, and it was two weeks too soon for Bonaventure to happen.

  Bonaventure heard the water break and felt something give way beneath him. Then he heard the sounds of the little bell’s clapper, and of footsteps, and of questions formed from rushing words. The voice that belonged to Letice had a bit of something in it that hadn’t been there before. His mother’s voice was different too, stretched out and brittle at the edges, and her breathing had become erratic.

  Letice marshaled an outer calm while frantically and surreptitiously looking for any sign of late-term miscarriage. She telephoned the doctor and Dancy’s mother and took the suitcase that had been packed some three weeks before from where it stood beside the tall old walnut chiffonier. Mrs. Silvey sat Dancy down and cleaned her up a bit, while Mr. Silvey brought the car around and mentally rehearsed the route to the hospital.

  Sensation and emotion returned to Dancy in a rush, and she began to feel two different fears, one far greater than the other. The lesser was the fear of pain; the greater was the fear of losing her connection to William. As long as the baby was inside her body, so too was a part of her husband, and she felt close to him, and warm and safe and loved and touched. She didn’t want to lose him again.

  Bonaventure heard sharp yelps of pain when the womb where he lived began to contract. So many sounds were raging around him that he couldn’t separate happiness from fright, and his own heart started to race. He could hear the whimpering of his mother’s fears but didn’t know what to do with them. Her heart was telling him to stay, while her body urged him to go. He pulled on his ears in complete desperation and listened as hard as he could.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said a familiar deep voice. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Trinidad Prefontaine could not find sleep. Her room was bathed in a ghostly light, for the moon was nearing full. A winter rain fell against her windowpane, its rivulets turned silver by that waxing moon. She’d been restless inside her own skin for three days, as if some strange and invisible imp were blowing its breath against her neck. That scamp had been following her in the daytime too, from stove to cupboard and from inside to out, like a playful, excitable secret. The rascal would ceaselessly sing a wordless song and escape from the corner of Trinidad’s eye when she turned. It was a supernatural being; she was certain of that.

  Of late Trinidad had been noting signs of a coming alteration, some event of momentous consequence: there was the slightest tremble way down in the earth and the smell of birth blood riding on the wind—it was a scent that always troubled Trinidad, coming as it did from a deep dark curve in the backbone of her past.

  Mam Judith sprang to Trinidad’s mind, and the memory of the first time the Knowing had come. It had happened not long after her visit with the tea reader. She’d been hanging wash on the line when knowledge of the death of a certain three-year-old child came into Trinidad’s head. Two months later that child’s body was found facedown in a ditch. He had drowned in six inches of water.

  Now all those years later she tossed and turned as she recalled other times and other Knowings: 1927, when the Mississippi River broke out of its levees, flooding the land for a hundred miles and killing 246 people in seven different states; 1940, when a hurricane made landfall across southwest Louisiana, flooding Acadiana and killing 75,000 muskrat and six human beings; 1947, when a storm put Jefferson Parish under six feet of water and claimed over fifty lives; the tornado that same year that touched down north of Shreveport, killing eighteen folks and leaving next to nothing standing in the town of Cotton Valley. Trinidad had foreknown all of those things.

  But this imp was new to her. This imp knew something she did not.

  Each minute became a new eternity for Dancy. When she was weak from agony and whimpering from hurt, anesthesia was administered and she fell far away. As the ether entered her body, all sensation left and she returned to those hundreds of moments she’d spent in the shelter of William’s warm arms, surrounded by his familiar scent and steeped in a happiness she could not even describe.

  The ether passed into the narrow confines of her body, and Bonaventure became groggy as he tried to escape the womb he’d outgrown. He could still hear his mother’s heartbeat, slower now than it had been a while ago when the fastness of it had distressed him.

  William was there, and he recalled how Bonaventure had turned in a circle at the sound of his voice once before, so he spoke to him again.

  “Almost over,” he said to his frightened child.

  Bonaventure took comfort in that familiar deep voice, and then other voices came, voices he did not know.

  “Hang on, Dancy, we’ll get you through this,” said one of those strange new voices.

  “Here comes the baby,” another chimed in.

  And then the smothering darkness vanished as a whooshing wind came up in Bonaventure’s lungs that blew him clean out of his mother’s body and into a much larger world. It was two minutes after three o’clock in the morning on February 1, 1950, and someone was telling Dancy that she’d been a real champ.

  Bonaventure looked like any other newborn, all scrunched up and red and mottled with afterbirth. But he did not make the usual sounds. With his eyes wide open and his little lips parted, he let out the silent cry of a mime.

  “It’s a boy!” whispered ghostly William into his wife’s exhausted ear, and then fell to his knees, rendered humble and low by a terrible, terrible longin
g.

  In the middle of her sleepless night, Trinidad experienced a vision. A scavenging raven circled the room, its beady eyes questing after death. The bird spread its wings to swoop and glide, its feathers sounding like rustling silk. From the bird’s shaggy throat came a prruk-prruk call and a toc-toc click and a dry, rasping kraa-kraa cry. After the raven came a pure white dove, and after the dove, a sparrow.

  Up in the sky a beautiful spiral in a pinwheel galaxy northwest of Ursa Major shone particularly vivid and unusually bright, brighter even than the stars of Cassiopeia, Orion, Pegasus, and Andromeda.

  In the waiting room, the two grandmothers sat facing the American Standard clock that hung above the swinging doors leading to the maternity ward. Both of them glanced several times a minute to monitor the progress of the sweep-second hand. One of them flipped through the pages of a magazine and the other kept trying to pray.

  Bonaventure would know the praying one as Grand-mère Letice, who, whether she admitted it or not, was reaching back through the years to a time when she had been called Miss Letice, when she was still deserving of proper respect, before she had committed her most grievous sin. He would know the magazine reader as Grandma Roman, a woman who was purely in love with anything that made her sound biblical. To her way of thinking, every upright Christian on the face of the earth could open a King James Bible to the Book of Romans if so inclined. She had never actually read that part and didn’t know a thing about Saint Paul, but as far as she was concerned, the only thing she needed to know was that the Romans had ruled the world. That’s as far as it went with Adelaide; she didn’t consider the fact that, for all their might and grandeur, it was the Romans who’d made fun of the Son of God right before they killed him. She blamed the Jews for that. Adelaide tended to skim the Bible the same way she skimmed the magazine in her hands, looking at the pictures and drawing whatever conclusion she fancied at the moment.

  Forrest and Martha Silvey sat off in a corner. It had been a very long time since they’d been this close to childbirth, and they didn’t quite know what to think, say, or do; however, they agreed it was probably best to keep quiet or to speak in whispers if the need should arise. Mrs. Silvey wasn’t sure if Dancy would be nursing the baby—given that the birth had happened prematurely, these things hadn’t yet been discussed. In Mrs. Silvey’s heart of hearts, she hoped there would be bottles, and that maybe she would be asked to give one now and then.

  While those thoughts tiptoed through Martha Silvey’s head, her husband rotated his hat brim in his hands and hoped the baby would turn out to be a boy, one who might like to putter with tools and learn how to fix things, and maybe go fishing on Saturday afternoons.

  Adelaide Roman crossed one knee over the other and sat there swinging her foot. She was so irritated by the presence of the Silveys she could hardly sit still. She’d never had help in her life, but Dancy did. It wasn’t fair.

  When the nurse came through the swinging doors, the grandmothers and the Silveys flew up as if they’d been shot from the mouths of cannons. Knowing there was only one patient in delivery at the time, the nurse reasoned that all four of them were waiting for the same announcement.

  “Congratulations!” she said. “You must be the family of Baby Boy Arrow.”

  There was a collective intake of breath and a spreading of smiles and a chorus of “A boy! A boy! A boy!”

  Letice was the first to regain composure. She thanked the nurse and said with a distinct note of pride in her voice, “He’s to be named Bonaventure.”

  To which the nurse responded, “You don’t say. Well, now, that’s different, isn’t it?”

  “You got that right,” Adelaide said with a roll of her eyes, while the Silveys were truly delighted.

  William stayed in the hospital with his wife and his child, walking through the walls of the nursery or of Dancy’s private room. The first time the nurse brought Bonaventure in, William saw Dancy as he never had before: she’d turned from a girl to a woman. And then he couldn’t take his eyes from Bonaventure’s features: his nostrils, his eyelids, his perfect little chin. In all of his twenty-three years, William had never known such wonder and pride. He sat on the bed next to his widow, awestruck by the heels of their baby’s feet, the half moons on his fingernails, and the little pink lines that crossed the skin of his knuckles.

  William sang to his child during the night, and Bonaventure was lulled to sleep.

  Dancy was still caught between mourning her husband and welcoming her child and seemed perplexed by the whole situation. But the barest hint of maternal instinct struggled into her consciousness on the second day after giving birth, causing her to lay Bonaventure before her on the bed, touch each tiny shoulder, and lean down to kiss the tip of his nose. After caressing his little bowed legs with her thumbs, she unpinned his diaper to see things for herself, as new mothers will sometimes do.

  “It’s a boy!” shouted ghostly William again, but only Bonaventure heard.

  William kept a mighty vigilance during the early days of Bonaventure’s life and wished there was some way to tell his wife and child just how much he loved them. Those visits brought him immeasurable joy, but they also brought him suffering. Unfortunately, they were the only salve he had for his loneliness, and for the dawning realization that eavesdropping was as close as he would ever get to being included in the family. And even that was temporary.

  William was very aware of his circumstances. He knew there were three things he was supposed to do, each of them a challenge. The first was to forgive his killer, and the second to remove something Dancy was keeping. William knew he would need Bonaventure’s help for that one and it bothered him. He didn’t like to think about a little boy finding out violent things, but there was really no other way.

  “We’ve got time, little man. You don’t have to find any secrets yet,” William whispered as night settled in around them. He continued to push the third challenge away, not even forming it into a thought.

  When mother and child were both sound asleep, William walked to the morgue to see if he could find Dancy again, as he had on the night he’d been killed, the night he had held her all the way until morning.

  It didn’t happen. But how could it, he thought. That had been a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

  THE charge nurse at the asylum made a note in The Wanderer’s chart that the patient had cried all day. It irritated her that he didn’t even have the presence of mind to wipe his own runny nose, so she had to do it.

  The librarian, Eugenia Babbitt, had seen the killer’s picture in the newspaper. She looked for more information about him every single day.

  The Meaning of a Name

  NEITHER grandmother ever endowed Bonaventure with a nickname, preferring instead to call him by his Christian name, one that he shared with a thirteenth-century mystic turned saint, although such sharing was said to be coincidence; he was, after all, only half-Catholic, and casual half-Catholic at that. Before long his mother was calling him Adventure Arrow, or Venture Forth Arrow, or any number of pet names like Sweetie-pie or Whirly-bird, depending on her mood.

  When asked where she’d come up with a name like Bonaventure, Dancy couldn’t explain it, and so insisted that she’d plucked it out of the Greater New Orleans telephone directory without even thinking twice. The truth was that one morning she’d opened her eyes from a dreamless sleep and there it was inside her head, an irresistible suggestion. Dancy spoke the name out loud several times a day after that. She wrote it on paper in a lavish hand. She kissed it onto a penny and threw the coin into a fountain as if to wish good luck upon her little unborn child.

  Once Adelaide Roman got used to it, she began to like the name; she thought it sounded like something rich people would come up with.

  “What’s his middle name going to be?” she asked, and suggested that Bonaventure Roman Arrow had a real nice ring to it.

  Dancy said she would have to think about it, though she had no intention of doing anything of the kind.
In the end, when Adelaide realized that his initials would be B.R.A., she called Dancy up at eleven o’clock at night to tell her to forget it, since someone was sure to tease him by calling him brassiere.

  Grand-mère Letice did not think the name a coincidence, but that was a sentiment she kept to herself. Upon learning of it, she looked up Saint Bonaventure in The Lives of the Saints and read about the son of Giovanni di Fidanza and Maria Ritella, a child who’d been born at Bagnorea in the environs of Viterbo in 1221, and who had originally been called Giovanni. She learned that when this certain Giovanni had fallen grievously ill in childhood, his mother had sought the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi, and the dying child was healed. The boy grew up and devoted his life to God. He joined the Franciscan order and changed his name to Bonaventure.

  Letice Arrow’s heart beat fast as she read those things and nearly pounded out of her chest when she found that in 1257, the pope conferred the title of Seraphic Doctor upon Bonaventure di Fidanza. This was exactly what she had hoped to find, for Letice was a believer in angels—she looked for them; she listened for them; she turned to them for help. She knew that in the realms of heaven, the seraphim angels stand nearest to God.

  Letice read on about Saint Bonaventure’s love of learning. She read of his belief that reason and intellect can find many answers, but they can never know God as can the humblest hearts and souls. No one would ever be able to convince her that her grandson had been carelessly named from the telephone directory for Greater New Orleans. No one. Not ever. She believed he’d been born to great purpose, though she did not know what that purpose would be.