The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  She entered Bayou Cymbaline on her own two feet, and not one of its citizens noticed her arrival. She reached the center of town at two o’clock in the afternoon on the very hot next-to-the-last day of June. Ten minutes after she’d crossed the city limits, she stood before the entrance of the courthouse on Lafayette Street, the one in which William and Dancy had married. She went around back in search of a hose or a water pump with a sign that would designate it “for colored.” She always looked for such a sign above doorways, at hospitals, schools, churches, cemeteries, beaches, lunch counters, and most of all public restrooms.

  Trinidad wanted to wash the travel dust from her face, hands, and feet. She found a fountain but no designation. This made her very nervous. She knew the boundaries. She knew the story of Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black who had boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans bound for Covington and intentionally sat in a white-only car and refused to move when asked. Plessy was arrested and remanded for trial in Orleans Parish, where he was convicted of breaking the law and fined. Trinidad also knew that the United States Supreme Court supported the State of Louisiana with regard to Homer Plessy in a ruling it called “separate but equal.” Trinidad believed the law would not be on her side if she mistakenly washed herself at an unmarked fountain, so she nervously washed before going to settle the business matter that had brought her all this way. She did not know that Bayou Cymbalinians in general had never embraced Jim Crow, no matter how well received he was in New Orleans.

  The back door to the building was locked, and her only option was to go through the front. Trinidad began to worry about exactly where this prophecy was going; just as she wasn’t used to drinking out of unmarked fountains, she wasn’t in the practice of entering through unmarked front doors. Once inside the vestibule, she felt coolness settle on her head and move down her body, diminishing the sun scorch of the open road and the burning it had put on her skin. She consulted the directory posted on the wall and proceeded on through the mezzanine and up a grand staircase to Room 205, the office of the Register of Deeds. She removed a document of identification and a folded paper from a pouch that hung around her neck and presented it to the woman behind the counter, keeping her head down and being sure to address the woman as ma’am and not look directly into her eyes. The clerk checked the document’s authenticity and gave directions to the property Trinidad had inherited from her dear and dead old aunt Henriette. Trinidad thanked the woman and wondered when the other shoe would drop.

  The directions took her to the outskirts of town, and she ended up at a two-room house with a wraparound porch, a mansard roof, and a cupola sheathed in copper. A small barn and a chicken coop completed the estate, and a red-painted water pump stood in the yard, directly in line with the door. Trinidad liked the feel of the place, the unmistakable rightness of it. She entered the house and began removing dustcovers from what furnishings there were: a good, sturdy table with two straight-backed chairs, an ornate pump organ with a green velvet bench, a rocking chair with a seat made of cane, and a neat and narrow bed in a room off the kitchen. It was absolutely more than enough.

  Opening the door of the woodstove showed that it was all cleaned out and ready for fire; there was even a box of strike-anywhere matches that had been put inside an empty can to keep the damp away. She went outside, primed the pump, and filled the bucket she’d found by the door. Putting the big tin ladle to her lips, Trinidad drank her fill of cool, clear water before setting off for the barn, where she bowed her head and expressed her thanks for the lantern oil, the ladder, the axe, and the spade that she found within it.

  She spent the rest of that first afternoon giving the property a more thorough going-over than her initial inspection had allowed. She noticed a dark spot on the floorboards in the kitchen and looked up to find a watermark on the ceiling, for which she went to the woods to collect some pine pitch and make herself a patch.

  Night fell, and her stomach was complaining about how she’d forgotten lunch, and so she set a big pot of water to boiling. She filled it with the onions and carrots she’d found growing among a bunch of bergamot and overgrown brambles out back, near a sagging old rope clothesline. Trinidad was thankful for her earthy dinner.

  Over the next few days she made several trips into Bayou Cymbaline, where she spent her saved-up coins on such things as four balls of twine, some stone-ground flour, and a piece of fine white linen. People were friendly, and to anyone who asked she confided that she’d inherited the small house out on the Neff Switch road. Yes, that’s right, the one that had belonged to Henriette Dimontere, who’d been her mother’s only sister. She said she was originally from over near Bayou Cane but had spent several years in Pascagoula. She had always heard good things about Bayou Cymbaline, she would say, and everyone liked her just fine.

  Bayou Cymbaline had started a generation before the Civil War and quickly became the pet project of a couple of competing women, wives of the two biggest millionaires ever made by sugarcane and old King Cotton. The women tried to out-do each other in building monuments to themselves, and as a result the town suffered no shortage of grandeur. Its fine old library was built of the very best brick and sported a portico and Doric columns and a pair of two-ton doors that swung so smoothly they seemed to be weightless. “Even a two-year-old can open those doors,” is what the old ladies would say. A museum of local heritage occupied the library’s second floor and was staffed by the local chapter of the Civil War Society, a group comprised entirely of sweet-smelling women who met for tea and delicate pastries on the third Thursday of every month, wearing girdles and hats and snow-white gloves, no matter the heat or humidity.

  Bayou Cymbaline was home to fishermen, shopkeepers, and makers of barrels; to poets, musicians, and philosopher types, and to every sort in between. To the casual observer, it might have seemed an odd mix of folk; however, such diversity infused the place with enough character to circle the earth twice at the equator. It was not unusual to find a person skilled in the cleaning of shrimp playing chess in the park with a reader of Shakespeare. Some folks said “ain’t” and “I don’t got no,” while others spoke with cultured refinement, each word enunciated and grammatically correct; still others fell somewhere in between. There were those who ate from homely tin dishes all bumpy with dents, and those who took their meals off bone china plates so thin at the edge you could see right through them. Bayou Cymbaline is probably best described as a municipal jambalaya—a slow-simmered stew with a hot, tangy flavor from the blending of mixed bloods and Caribbean spice. The population stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 souls, most of European descent, though some had made their way from Acadia in Canada or from African jungles by way of slave ships that had stopped in Saint-Domingue.

  There was a healthy respect for individuality in Bayou Cymbaline as well as for the eccentric and the avant-garde. The fact was that the town was accepting of strangers, no matter their color, which made things easy for Trinidad Prefontaine.

  She opened her heart and her home to her Purpose, and waited for it to come in.

  An Eloquence of Face and Hands

  WHILE Trinidad Prefontaine settled into her new home out on the Neff Switch road, toddler Bonaventure was learning to produce all manner of clicks and occasionally tied a small breath to a t or an h or an s, but that was the extent of it. On an early summer evening when he was two years old, Dancy held him in her lap as she moved the porch swing with the toes of one foot and said, “Red skies at night, sailors delight,” then sang a song about shrimp boats.

  When Bonaventure felt her voice vibrate against the back of his head, he squirmed around to press his ear against her chest and to reach up a hand to touch her throat. He felt the rising of her sternum as it let the air in and set her vocal cords vibrating and sending forth oscillations. He could hear the muscles of her larynx move and grab hold of the air and turn it into the song.

  Touching throats as people spoke became
a habit of Bonaventure’s. Before he went to sleep at night, when he was all alone, he would call up the words of the day and place a hand against his own throat and invite his own tongue and teeth and palate and lips to form the words that he remembered. And then he didn’t do that anymore. Little by little and one day at a time even his clicks and bits of alphabet disappeared as Bonaventure put all effort into developing an eloquence of face and hands. He found it pleasing to keep unnecessary noise from cluttering up the silence. He seemed to know it was the better choice.

  Dancy and Letice loved Bonaventure’s expressive ways. Grandma Roman was another story; she felt that Bonaventure’s gesturing made him look spastic. After every visit to Christopher Street, the same tirade stomped through her mind: How is that child ever going to learn to speak like a human being if he doesn’t even have to try? His mother should make him work harder at it. What does she suppose people think when they see him behave like that, wiggling his fingers around and rolling his eyes and smiling like a chimpanzee? Yes, it was the same tirade every time.

  Bonaventure was an affectionate child, but not with his Grandma Roman. He could hear her coming from miles away and it always made him fretful. At the sound of her voice he would curl himself into a tight little ball, just as he had in utero. And about the only time he really pitched a fit was when she tried to pick him up.

  “Sorry, Mama,” Dancy would say, “it looks like somebody needs a nap.”

  “You know something, Dancy? I don’t believe I’ve ever been around that child when you don’t speak those very same words,” Adelaide Roman would say, and she was right.

  It seemed to Dancy that after one of these recoiling episodes, her mother would start a casual-seeming conversation about the worries of parenthood. It sounded innocent enough, but it was vengeful through and through.

  “You sure have to feel sorry for mothers who lose their babies, don’t you think, Dancy? Just look at those Silveys, isn’t that what happened to them?” Adelaide Roman might say. “Well, sometimes it’s just in God’s plan, I suppose. A fitting punishment for having sinful sex, or something along those lines. Lordy, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to find your baby dead. Can you?”

  Dancy never took Bonaventure to Père Anastase. She thought that a cemetery was no place for a two-year old. And she superstitiously thought that maybe Death would take a look at her wonderful child and grab him for its own. It wasn’t easy having the bayou and New Orleans and voodoo hovering around at the edges of her mind, trying to insinuate themselves into her way of thinking. And even if she managed to put all of that noise out of her head, there were her mother’s words and the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel and that horrid preacher. What if losing William was simply a punishment for having sex before she was married, and not only having it but enjoying it and getting pregnant? What if there truly was a God and he was the sort to take her baby from her? Or what if he was the sort to take a voice from a baby because of a mother’s sins, as if to give a warning?

  Dancy wasn’t taking any chances.

  Letice had volunteered to babysit on Sunday afternoons so Dancy could go alone to the cemetery. One Sunday, after she’d put Bonaventure down for a nap and was getting ready to leave for Père Anastase, Dancy couldn’t find her favorite sweater. It was in Bonaventure’s room. Then she couldn’t find her watch and found it in Bonaventure’s room, and then she couldn’t find her shoes and found them in Bonaventure’s room. She was so caught up in all this losing and looking and finding that she didn’t pay much attention to the fact that Bonaventure was sitting up in his bed, watching her come and go. He was also blinking his eyes and grinning when his hair mysteriously ruffled off his forehead. William was playing with his little boy.

  To Bonaventure, these interactions were natural; that bodiless voice had always been there, talking to him or maybe playing the soft breeze game. He didn’t question this presence; small children don’t think about death and haunting and the oddness of disembodied voices. Small children believe in magic.

  Dancy knew nothing of William’s frequent presence or the connection he had with his son. But she thought she knew a warning when she saw one. There was a reason she kept finding things in Bonaventure’s room. What if Death was waiting to take him in his sleep, which had happened to the Silveys? A nervous chill came over her, causing her to reach for Bonaventure and his little-boy warmth. She scooped him up, put him in a new set of clothes, and took him with her to Père Anastase.

  She saw William standing at the door of the tomb, big as life and smiling like crazy. But then she blinked and he was gone, and she marveled at what imagination could do.

  The sighting was for Dancy alone; Bonaventure wouldn’t have recognized William anyway. But Bonaventure certainly could hear him, and the baby picked out the sound of William’s smile and separated it from the sounds of snails moving and grass growing and ladybugs flying away home. Bonaventure Arrow did love the sound of the big, bright smile that belonged to the gentle deep voice.

  As she lay awake that night, Dancy Arrow felt uneasy. She couldn’t forget the chill she’d felt in Bonaventure’s room, and she couldn’t shake that vision of William. She got out of bed and walked through the sleeping house to the kitchen, where she sat smoking cigarettes in the dark and sipping gin from Waterford crystal. Dancy felt the crystal brought dignity to her drinking, though all it really did was let her overlook the fact that she was drinking alone. It wasn’t the first time. As she flipped open the Zippo to light her seventh Pall Mall, she stared into the flame and made her mind go blank.

  William was in the kitchen too, and he didn’t like seeing Dancy drink. He turned away and walked through walls until he stood over Bonaventure, watching him breathe and sleep. William figured he still had quite a long time before things had to change. He’d been thinking more and more about the challenges facing him, and now as he looked at his child’s innocent face, he began to question the fairness of using Bonaventure’s help. Would it be so wrong to forget the challenges and just stay where he was? Almost Heaven wasn’t such a bad place; he could walk the shore of its beautiful sea, and he could come to Christopher Street whenever he wanted. Dancy needed him, he reasoned, and his killer was well taken care of. Maybe he really should let things be.

  William and Dancy stayed where they were for several hours more that night, two restless beings trying to cope.

  Mission

  BROTHER Harley John Eacomb was preaching a sermon in the Resurrection Tent by the side of the river: “Brothers and sisters, it is your mission, your sacred purpose as stewards of Almighty God, to go out amongst the sinners and heal them. For, indeed, you are healers, brothers and sisters. And healing, like charity, begins at home, for the devil loves nothing more than to slither into the homes of the righteous. Know this, brothers and sisters: Your way will not be easy! The Lord’s work is never easy! I promise that you will be tested. The spiritually ailing, the afflicted, the devil-possessed move among you, and the worst of them masquerade as the innocent! Do not be fooled by them, brothers and sisters! Do not be fooled! You must find those who are flawed and bring perfection to them.”

  Adelaide Roman was engorged with inspiration. She would do anything for Brother Harley John. She had felt cheated out of everything all her life, and now finally here was someone she deserved, someone who was special in the eyes of God, someone her body constantly hungered for. She took it as her personal mission to please Brother Eacomb in all things.

  Adelaide made a telephone call. “Dancy,” she said, “it’s high time I got to make friends with my one and only grandchild.”

  Dancy responded with “Well, no one’s stopping you, Mama.”

  “Don’t be hateful, Dancy. He’s growing up so fast; I mean, goodness’ sakes, he’s more than two years old already and his Grandma Roman hardly knows him! Do you know why that is?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “It’s because I never get to have hi
m all to myself, that’s why. He’s never even been over to my house; I always have to come to yours.”

  Dancy had to admit there was some truth in her mother’s words, and she felt a twinge of pity. She didn’t for a moment think her mother would be snappish with a baby.

  “Okay, tell you what,” she said. “You name the day and I’ll bring Bonaventure over to spend some one-on-one time with you.”

  “Next Saturday at one would work just fine,” Adelaide said.

  On the appointed Saturday, Dancy loaded Bonaventure and his constant companion, a small stuffed pink elephant, into the car and told him he was off to make a friend out of Grandma Roman. Bonaventure didn’t know what that meant.

  “Alrighty, then, everything you’ll need is in this bag, Mama: fresh clothes, a storybook, and a snack. He ate a good lunch, so I don’t think he’ll be hungry, but I figured just in case. Oh, and there’s some diapers too. We’ve been working on the potty training, but you may not understand if he tries to tell you.”

  “I managed to raise you, Dancy. It’s like riding a bicycle; you never forget.” Adelaide Roman had no intention of changing a diaper. She may have kicked up a fuss about wanting to have Bonaventure to herself, but that was for the sake of her mission. The fact was, she was perfectly happy to keep her distance; children were messy things.

  “You be a good boy for Grandma Roman, Whirly-bird. I’ll see you in a little bit; I’m just gonna do a little shopping.” Then Dancy told Adelaide she would be back by three.

  Bonaventure didn’t know about this situation. He hadn’t expected to be left with his Grandma Roman, but it happened so fast he couldn’t even protest. When Dancy was gone, he sat down near the door and held his pink elephant next to his neck with one hand while he sucked the thumb of the other. That’s what Bonaventure always did when he felt apprehensive. He’d never been comfortable with the sound of Grandma Roman, though by now he could easily muffle her voice. But that didn’t mean he was happy being alone with her.