The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

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The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 8

by Rita Leganski


  After a time, the police informed her that they’d found no traceable connection to William’s law firm, so Letice cast about for another explanation and began to wonder if the killer had a grudge against the Arrow family. They were bankers, after all. She could remember one case in particular, that of a young man desperate to save his family’s farm, though his name did not come to mind. She remembered how much it had upset Remington to refuse that young man a loan. She supposed there were any number of bank customers who’d been foreclosed on and lost everything. Any one of them could be the killer. She would bring it up with Turcotte.

  But what if it didn’t have to do with the bank? The thought of voodoo sparked in her mind, and the blasphemy made her feel ill. But what if? What if William’s death had to do with the fact that she’d married into the Arrow family under false pretenses? The words of that woman in the house on St. Philip Street came back: The mirror done broke and your life looking back at you from them sharp glass pieces.

  Letice Arrow was a conflicted woman, indeed.

  “Believe me, Mrs. Arrow, I would like nothing more than to give you some new information, but there is none,” Turcotte told her.

  “I just can’t believe that no one saw the man at any time or in any place,” Letice said.

  “Oh, he was seen. A couple of people came down to the station and reported seeing him at the public library,” the sergeant said.

  “And?”

  “The librarians remembered seeing him. They said he didn’t bother anyone, just kept to himself. It’s not unusual for vagrants to try to get comfortable at the library. In fact, it’s a problem the librarians deal with all the time.”

  “Did you check with restaurants and grocery stores? He had to eat, didn’t he?”

  “We checked those places, but they didn’t pan out.” The sergeant paused before adding, “They remembered him at a liquor store in the Quarter. He was in there buying Jack Daniel’s.”

  “And where did he go to drink it, Sergeant?”

  “We’re looking into that. He wasn’t staying anywhere near the library or the A&P.”

  “Surely he was sleeping somewhere. You’ve said yourself how noticeable he was; didn’t anyone see him on a park bench or perhaps loitering around? Do you think he had a car? Is that where he was sleeping?” Letice was like a dog with a bone.

  “There was an abandoned vehicle about a half mile from the A&P, but it turned out to be part of some college kid’s prank. No taxi drivers or streetcar drivers remembered him either.”

  “Did you check the bus and train depots?” Letice asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. But you’ve got to remember that he would have been arriving here, no reason to talk to a ticket seller. He could have been coming from anywhere and walked through the station unnoticed.”

  “I want you to go to First Regent’s Bank, Sergeant; it’s been owned and operated by the Arrow family for generations. Examine the records of foreclosures and disputes. Maybe the man was seeking revenge for some financial loss that happened years ago. And when he realized that no one would recognize him, he decided to act.”

  “Sure, Mrs. Arrow. We’ll follow up on that.”

  Letice felt the police officer was patronizing her. She could tell by the tone of his voice that he believed the pieces were falling into place, and the picture they formed was of a man angered by his deformity and driven senseless by drink.

  She couldn’t help but wonder what had turned the man into a killer. How had he become disfigured? Why had he been walking around with a gun? There were a lot of people in the A&P that day, so why had he chosen William? She knew Dancy would agree with the sergeant, because the policeman’s reasoning gave her an anonymous target for her hate.

  Letice was right; Dancy believed that knowing the killer’s past, or finding some reason for what he had done, just might relieve her of her guilt, and Dancy wanted to keep her guilt.

  One of William’s challenges was to do with Dancy’s thinking: he needed to relieve his wife of her self-imposed guilt. William understood very well that he could remove it. He knew where she kept her guilt and what must be done to take it away. As for forgiving his killer, William felt that time would take care of it and that one day he would be able to say with ease, “I forgive you.” However, William had yet to understand what it is to forgive.

  Those challenges didn’t worry William. The one that had him worried was the last one, the one that involved doing something to Dancy that he never thought he would.

  After her surreptitious baptizing of Bonaventure, Letice had begun to see a difference in her daughter-in-law. Dancy had come out of her stupor and slipped into motherhood. Since her milk had not come in as it should have, Dancy hadn’t been able to nurse, and bottle feedings had mostly been attended to by Letice or Mrs. Silvey. But now the young mother was up by six o’clock, rinsing out the nighttime bottles while the morning bottle warmed. It was as if she’d been lost in a kind of half-coma and finally had snapped out of it. She spent hours and hours just looking at Bonaventure’s face and watching him sleep. Dancy had become entirely captivated by her child, and his silence only served to charm her more. She was awed by the softness of his skin and found comfort in the rhythm of his breathing. She held him. She bathed him. She rocked him to sleep. He brought her joy. He kept her sane. He gave her back a missing part.

  But sometimes motherhood wasn’t enough. There were nights Dancy lay in bed, longing for William. Some nights she took a swallow or two from a jelly jar she’d filled with gin and kept in the back of her closet. The gin seemed to help her get to sleep and so escape her torment. But sleep was just another kind of torture when William inhabited her dreams. She knew he was there, always in the next room or on the other side of a wall with no door. She could hear him call to her, could smell his skin; every part of her yearned for his body, his smile, his masculine voice. A thrilling hunger overtook her while she dreamed, pulling her blood flow deep and down low. She craved his touch. She wanted to take him in her young woman’s body.

  Dancy woke from those dreams in the grip of frustration; her wounds cut open, her grief bleeding out.

  Ghostly William had to look away.

  Bonaventure was really the only one who could intrude on his mother’s grief. She kept him near her always, even put him in a Moses basket next to the tub when she took her nightly bath. William would perch on the edge of the tub, just as Dancy had done when they were newlyweds. He watched as she soaped her beautiful arms and raised each lovely leg, and when she rose up out of the water, he felt a longing he could no longer satisfy. This is what bittersweet means, he would think, as he sat there loving his child and missing his wife and holding on to them both as hard as he could. His need was enough to put a touch on Dancy’s shoulder and make her turn around.

  One morning, when he was not quite four months old, Bonaventure was lying on his back, waving his hands in front of his face and noting that he could move his fingers (though he wasn’t at all sure how), when he heard his mother whistling. The sound of it was enough to make him turn his head, flap his arms, stiffen his legs, and spread his toes in sheer and complete delight. Dancy took him from the crib, laid him on the floor, pulled him up to a sitting position, and said, “Oh my goodness! What a big boy you are!”

  And he gave her the brightest smile he could muster in lieu of an audible giggle.

  By the time he was six months old, Bonaventure was holding his head steady when he heard his mother laugh, and it wasn’t long before he could follow the motions of her hand for the itsy-bitsy spider.

  Save his muteness, Bonaventure Arrow was just like any other child: He put everything in his mouth and he drooled when cutting teeth, such babyhood things as that. But he was also purely himself. He developed particular habits as he grew, like taking his right shoe off but leaving the sock alone; he opened wide for oatmeal but didn’t care for spinach; and sooner than most he was dexterous at putting shapes into holes and stacking alphabet blocks one upon th
e other.

  There was, of course, one considerable difference: Bonaventure could hear things from all around the world and from another world as well, but only William knew that. Ghostly William knew a lot of things. He knew guilt was locked up in the Arrow house, and he knew that everyone would remain locked up with it until he met his challenges. It was going to take a long time.

  William didn’t mind.

  He could wait.

  He didn’t much want to leave anyway.

  Time Went on with No New Findings

  HOLD on to me,” the couch cushion offered in a jacquard silk voice, while Bonaventure took his first steps.

  “Try to fall on your bottom,” said the floor when he made it to the end of the sofa.

  “Oh, be very careful,” said the dining room chair. “I might tip over and you might too, then we’d both get bumps on our heads!”

  “Take your time, little guy,” said the deep voice he’d been hearing all along, the one that belonged to William.

  Such perceptible counsel came to the curious boy, who was figuring his legs out in those early-walking days of toddlerhood.

  On his first birthday, Dancy strung balloons across the dining room, and though Bonaventure didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, he most definitely could hear blue and green and red and yellow ringing themselves into the monotone of a dreary February day.

  Those color sounds intrigued him and brought with them that anonymous beat he’d heard before, the one that rolled around alongside his own heartbeat every now and again. The beat that meant something was happening.

  Every day brought a heightened anticipation to Dancy and Letice, as they waited for Bonaventure to speak. Perhaps he would be one of those children who began talking in lengthy and meaningful sentences to the astonishment of family and friends. They loved him just the way he was; they truly did. Even so, both women had begun to move as if caught in a hesitation waltz, paused and quiet and still, one step suspended before taking another. They were listening for a word, a cry, or a bubbling giggle to come from their dear little boy who, at a year and a half, still hadn’t found his voice.

  Dancy started to take note of the sounds Bonaventure did make: His little hands slapped against the floor when he crawled, and the bells she’d put on his shoes jingled when he kicked his legs while sitting in his high chair. He pounded his toy hammer against wooden pegs and a toy mallet on a one-octave toy xylophone. When he was being silly, he would force air out through his lips to make that raspberry sound that children love. Dancy was greatly encouraged by his silliness because it showed that he was being expressive, even if he didn’t use his voice to do it. Her favorite Bonaventure sound was the smacking one he made with his mouth when he put what passed for a kiss on her cheek. But even in the thick of her enthusiasm Dancy still listened for signs of vocals. Often when she watched him nap she could tell a difference in his sleeping silence, the naturalness of it, and then she felt bad for noticing. She couldn’t possibly understand that Bonaventure’s silence would serve a purpose to do with the family.

  Sometimes their pausing and listening had nothing to do with Bonaventure and everything to do with a split-second, quick-flashing vision of William, or the ricochet of a word he’d said, or maybe the sudden scent of him on a zephyr that seemed an exhalation. This pattern of stopping to catch a sound or sight or smell became their normal way, and so Dancy and Letice moved through the house on Christopher Street keeping interrupted time with an uncertain metronome, day after expectant day.

  Sometimes when she entered a room, Letice sensed that William had just been there but had hurried out because he didn’t wish to stay. This rejection upset and mystified her. She couldn’t fit it in with her memories: how he’d carried around an old nightgown of hers until he was almost three; all the dandelion bouquets he’d pulled from behind his back; the year he glued macaronis to a coffee can and painted it red for Valentine’s Day. Memory led to more memory: the sight of two-year-old William standing on a kitchen chair stirring dish suds in the sink; how he clomped around in cowboy boots that were sometimes on the wrong feet; how he fell asleep with his hand in his catcher’s mitt. The smell of boy. His big brown eyes. Nowhere in these memories could she find a place for blood or bullets.

  Letice prayed for the repose of William’s soul, she prayed for Dancy, and she prayed that the police would find out the killer’s name.

  William didn’t want her to pray for the repose of his soul. It felt as if she was praying him away.

  Time went on with no new findings. Letice went to the police station for another face-to-face with Sergeant Turcotte.

  “I’ve been to see the director of the asylum,” he said.

  Letice braced herself.

  “There’s no change, Mrs. Arrow, no change at all. The guy just stares most of the time. The nurses say he shuffles around some and likes to sit outside.”

  “Have you been checking records at the bank? Following up on people who might have wanted revenge?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we did that. If anything, your bank extended more loans than they called in. There were some that got foreclosed, but we could account for all those folks and their descendants. Of course, there would have been situations where people came in to ask for a loan but were never even considered. We didn’t find any records of denied applications, so there’d be no way to trace any of those people. I’m sorry, Mrs. Arrow.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Please continue to check with the doctors and nurses and keep me informed.”

  “I surely will, ma’am.”

  Letice wondered how it was that she hadn’t gone mad.

  Sergeant Turcotte was not the only one to visit the asylum in regard to The Wanderer; Eugenia Babbitt went there too. So did William Arrow. William was trying to figure out the connection between him and his murderer, or at least try to understand his killer’s state of mind. It was becoming clear to him that the man had no constant state of mind, that most of the time his killer’s mind was utterly and completely blank.

  Taking Up the Prophecy

  TRINIDAD Prefontaine was alone in this world. She’d never known her father, and her mother was dead from the bite of a poisonous thing, as best anyone could figure out. When she was eleven years old, Trinidad had ended up in an orphanage for Negro children, and at seventeen she’d become the wife of Jackson Prefontaine, a hardworking young fellow she’d met there. The two of them found work over in Mississippi, where they never had children and Jackson died fairly young.

  She had no brothers or sisters; however, until recently there’d been a relative on her mother’s side, an old maiden aunt by the name of Henriette Dimontere. Henriette had died in her sleep, lying flat on her back atop ironed white sheets. On her last day on earth, this Henriette enjoyed several moments of prescience that had inspired her to take a bath, don her best nightgown and purple turban, and lie down on those freshly washed-and-ironed white sheets. Then she closed her eyes and died.

  The prescience had actually come to Henriette the week before, when she’d been inspired to leave a last will and testament (which bore the seal of a notary public), a copy of which was recorded at the courthouse by the Register of Deeds. Another copy was mailed to her niece, Trinidad Prefontaine, care of the Virgil B. Hortons.

  Henriette had been given her house and land by the judge who’d employed her for most of her life and who had also been her lover. Though the judge had been good to Henriette, he would not allow her to take her niece in when the child had been left an orphan. Henriette had kept in touch with her only living relative and now was leaving the property to her. She’d always felt sorry for the girl, surmising that she’d had a miserable childhood.

  Trinidad received this news some three weeks later in June of 1952, and she took it as a sign. She’d begun to feel an itching on the soles of her feet, and she took that as a sign too; mixed in with all that itching was her own intuition and Mam Judith’s prophecy, and Trinidad decided it was time to move on. S
he’d been serving the Dalton family for quite some time and something was telling her it was just about enough. In fact, there was more than one something. There was the imp that still skipped around at the edge of her eyesight, and there was the memory of that vision she’d once had of the circling raven, the dove, and the sparrow on a night when certain stars shone bright through holes in rain-filled clouds.

  All of those things pulled on Trinidad, but what pulled on her most was a fluttering that came to her reversed heart sometimes. Good Lord, how that fluttering could get her attention!

  And so at the age of thirty-nine, Trinidad began to detach from the Pascagoula Hortons, point her toes westward, and scan the horizon, sniffing at the air like a hound on a scent. The Hortons were devastated at her departure, but the best she could do to comfort them was to say she would remember them fondly and might return for a visit.

  All of her belongings fit into an old leather satchel she’d bought at a secondhand store: three cotton dresses and a sweater, as well as an assortment of objects she treasured because she believed they held spiritual powers. She carried her kitchen around on her back, rolled up in a handmade quilt—a pot, a pan, a knife and spoon, a rolling pin, and a coffee pot made of white-speckled, slightly chipped enamel over steel.

  On the day she set out, Trinidad took one last look eastward and went the other way. She made it to Louisiana by means of a ferryboat that ran across Bay St. Louis, and once there walked the shoulder of Highway 90.

 

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