The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  “It sounds like voodoo,” Dancy said.

  “Voodoo uses gris-gris too, but voodoo is more of a religion that has gods and such. They say it come here from the west part of Africa after it passed through the Caribbean Islands. Voodoo tampers with evil. Voodoo gris-gris can look like a charm, or some kind of doll, but it usually comes in small cloth bags with herbs or oils or even bits of fingernails or small bones inside. Sometimes they hold some personal possessions, or even a piece of cloth that still holds a body’s sweat.

  “Hoodoo come from Africa too, but maybe from the deeper part. Hoodoo wants to set magic on a problem. Although now that I think on it, there’s hoodoo that’s called root work, and root work be the using of roots and herbs and oils and such for curing. Ain’t no fooling with charms or curses or spells in root work.

  “When I was a child, there was a colored woman name of Big Angeline lived down the road from us, and she was a root worker. Big Angeline always say voodoo was about sacred things. Course, I didn’t know the meaning of sacred since my mama and daddy didn’t hold much with any kind of churching, so Big Angeline she explains it to me, and she says that sometimes voodoo charms got voodoo-sacred stuff in them, stuff to do with one god or another, but some had powders that were supposed to be medicines. I can still hear that Big Angeline just like it was yesterday: ‘Doze be de ones possessed by de spirits,’ she would say. ‘Holy spirits dat make de medicine work, sometime good, sometime bad. Sometime dey bring money to your pocket, or love to your heart. Sometime dey stop a tongue dat gossip.’ Ya, ya, that’s what Big Angeline would say.” Grandma Cormier laughed at the memory.

  “How do the charms work?” Dancy asked.

  “Well, they get put on a person, throwed on them, or maybe set in the doorway where they live. Big Angeline used to tell about a voodoo queen lived in N’awlins name of Marie Laveau who wrote somebody’s name on a balloon and then tied it to a statue of Saint Expedite. She did it so when the balloon broke free and flew away, the person whose name was on that balloon went away in the same direction. I always did love to hear about Marie Laveau. Big Angeline said Marie Laveau made some real powerful gris-gris. She liked to put in little bits of bones or stuff from animals: bird nests or horsehair. Sometimes she put in dust from the graveyard, called goofer dust. Sometimes she used gunpowder or salt or red pepper.”

  At that point in the conversation, Mama Isabeau, a Creole woman of color who lived just down the road, came ambling up the Cormiers’ path. Mama Isabeau couldn’t have done much more than amble even if she’d wanted to because she weighed close to three hundred pounds and Mama Isabeau weighed that much because Mama Isabeau loved to eat.

  “Do I hear you talk about Marie Laveau?” she panted as she climbed up the steps real slow.

  “Ya, Mama, ya, you know all about Marie Laveau, don’t you?” Grandma Cormier answered back.

  “My auntie, she used to caution all us about the voodoo. She talk about Marie Laveau all the time. She say Marie’s most powerful bad luck gris-gris be called wangas. She say Marie like to tell about her worst one. It seem she make a gris-gris bag from the shroud of somebody been dead nine days. She put in a dried-up lizard what have only one eye, the little finger off a black man who killed hisself, a dried toad, the wings from a bat, the eyes from a possum, a owl’s beak and a rooster’s heart. That gris-gris meant to kill somebody.”

  “Can anyone make gris-gris bags?” Dancy asked.

  “Well now, gris-gris bags they take some planning, ya, ya,” Mama Isabeau said. “You has to have a altar with something of the earth and the air and the water and the fire. And you has to put in the ingredients by the numbers. You has to be able to count them ingredients by odd numbers, but never more than thirteen, ya, ya. You can’t never have a even number of things in the gris-gris bag.”

  “Did you ever know of anybody who got good gris-gris put on them?” Dancy asked.

  “Oh, ya, ya! I know a gambling man once who swore he got good luck from a gris-gris charm he kep in his left shoe. The gris-gris maker mixed pine-tree sap with some blood from a dove and use it for ink to write an amount of money on a little piece of cowhide. She wrap the cowhide in a piece of green silk and put a snake’s tongue in between the layers. Then she sew it together with cat’s gut. The gambling man swear that charm give him real good luck!”

  Now Dancy was remembering the loup-garou and gris-gris, and she came to the realization that the loup-garou was any fear that had taken a form and intended to drive someone crazy.

  But she had no idea there were makings of gris-gris right there in the house on Christopher Street, or that root work was happening not far away in Trinidad Prefontaine’s garden.

  In a Piece of Time Too Small for a Clock

  WINTER passed, spring came, and life was uneventful until the end of March in 1956. On a Saturday afternoon, Bonaventure was in the kitchen with Mrs. Silvey, who stood at the butcher-block table humming a song and rolling out dough. She was making fresh-baked bread and cinnamon rolls, and putting together something she called blitzkuchen that came from a recipe she knew by heart.

  Bonaventure was drawing on a roll of white shelf paper that Mrs. Silvey kept in the pantry just for him; he loved that he could keep going and going, the paper was so long. He’d drawn a wagon train and some cowboys and Indians, and the swans that lived in the pond in the park, and now he was drawing the tools that hung on the workshop walls. While he drew, he listened to the dough’s pfff-pfff breathing, and to the hiss of melting butter, and to the grit-sandy voice of light brown sugar. He was a one-boy audience for objects that liked to tell stories. On this day, a saucepan was telling him about heating his bottles when he was a baby, and how one time Dancy almost caught the sleeve of her bathrobe on fire because it was two in the morning and she was still half asleep.

  Then right in the middle of the story, a notable noise grabbed Bonaventure’s attention. He banished all other sounds and listened, trying to liken it to something he might have heard before. He couldn’t place it, but it reminded him of the tip of the root of the penultimate sound of a train whistle, the one made in the instant before it releases a roaring scream that comes from a long way off and reaches its highest intensity in seconds. He was certain of two things about that sound: It was something to be worried about, and it was coming from inside Mrs. Silvey’s head. And then Mrs. Silvey collapsed. Bonaventure instantly searched for the sound of grand-mère, then ran to where she was and pulled her all the way back to the kitchen.

  Letice grabbed the telephone and dialed the operator and begged for an ambulance. It was too late. In a piece of time too small for a clock, Martha Silvey had lost all sensibility and was dead before she hit the floor, killed by an aneurysm she’d carried for years without even knowing it.

  The noise made by the ambulance siren turned all other sound to whiteness and felt like acid being splashed onto the cochlea whorls inside Bonaventure’s ears. Even after her body had been taken away, he could still hear an echo of the frightened screech of tearing that had come from inside Mrs. Silvey’s head. In the days that followed, he signed and wrote and drew pictures: He used the black and gray crayons to draw a speeding train; he drew yellow and orange sparks coming off the track; he mixed every color to draw the explosion of sound; he drew her face with empty eyes. He drew her fallen to the floor and himself standing off to the side, a stick person pressing his hands to his ears and opening his mouth in a silent scream. And he took those drawings to his mother. It was the first time he had tried to tell anyone about the extraordinary things he could hear, but Dancy just thought he was blaming himself for what had happened. She hugged him and said, “Oh, Bonaventure, it wasn’t your fault. No one can know when a stroke is coming. You did the right thing and you did it as fast as you could.”

  The funeral was held in Baton Rouge. It was a small affair, but the flower arrangements were enormous; the Arrows felt it was the least they could do. Plans were made for burial to take place in Baton Rouge, where the Si
lveys had started their life together. Mr. Silvey turned into a very old man overnight and had to carry around an extra handkerchief to keep up with the tears that still traveled down his face a full three weeks after the funeral. His shoulders were more stooped, and the skin of his face sagged down farther over his collar. His walk had wound down to a shuffle, and he grew forgetful of the tools and the workshop and Letice’s automobile a little bit more every day. He didn’t always remember to bathe or to change his clothes, and he started to smell kind of sour.

  The Arrows were considerate of Mr. Silvey and his loss. They did for themselves things that he used to do and they wove conversation around what he remembered. Hours became days and days became weeks, and Mr. Silvey never got any better. The part of him that remained aware approached Letice, hat in hand, and told her he just couldn’t bear to be where his wife would never be again. He was off to live with his sister in Baton Rouge, what with Martha being buried there and all. Miss Dancy knew how to drive, he said, and he would talk to the fellows at Lemke’s Auto about maintenance on the car.

  Letice responded that she had always thought of him and Mrs. Silvey as family and would certainly never wish him to suffer unhappiness. She completely understood, she said, and told him the door would be open if he ever changed his mind, but even if he didn’t, she hoped that he would visit.

  This new death distracted Letice and Dancy from their usual grief and bitterness. Their sympathy for Mr. Silvey covered them like the Bible’s balm of Gilead. But the respite was temporary. Dancy headed back inside her private loneliness, and Letice took up her worries once again. Six years had gone by, but she could not forget that the assassin was still alive in the asylum for the criminally insane. What if he escaped? What if he did have a grudge against the Arrows? What if killing William wasn’t enough and he came after Bonaventure? What if he was still that crazy? What if God had allowed a curse to fall down on their family? And all because of her.

  Staring into Liquid

  EVEN with Mr. Silvey gone, there was more than enough bereavement left in the house. Letice’s thoughts often turned backward when she looked at Dancy; she knew what it was like to be left with a little boy and no husband and a big gaping hole in place of a marriage.

  Letice had been the perfect wife to Remington; she’d run his house and planned his meals and soothed his brow at the end of the day. She’d been an interesting conversationalist during business dinners too, for Letice was intelligent and charming. He’d bought her flowers and all kinds of jewelry and loved her with all of the strength that he had. Sex didn’t happen frequently in their marriage, but there was sweetness when it did, as though they were both very grateful. Remington Arrow always thought himself an unremarkable man, and he never could figure out how it was that his beautiful wife had settled for him.

  Letice was clearly aware of what she didn’t have in her marriage, but she chose to dwell instead on what she did. One of her most cherished memories was the night she’d whispered to Remington that she was pregnant, causing him to get as close to delirious as he ever would. Pregnancy brought a sudden and brilliant passion to their bed, and Remington pampered her more than ever. There was a steady parade of jewelers and florists through the house, and once a furrier brought a long coat made from the pelts of silver foxes, even though it was never very cold in New Orleans for any length of time.

  On December 16, 1926, Letice gave birth to a son. If ever a baby brought a husband and wife closer, William Everest Arrow was certainly the one. Here was a child who’d inherited every good quality his ancestry had to offer. The best Molyneaux traits came to him from Letice: good looks, dignity, and a passionate heart. From the Arrows he’d inherited charm, though not the cunning, humor, kindness, and a penchant for daring that reached all the way back to County Armagh in his great-grandfather Cormack’s Ireland.

  Though Remington Arrow did not possess the larger-than-life personality of Cormack, he was a caring and patient father to William, one who tirelessly tossed a baseball and sat him on his lap to pore over the sports section; one who bought the boy his first bat and explained that it should be held with the fingers because they’re stronger than the palm. Remington showed William how to line up his knuckles so that his wrists could roll properly after he hit the ball, and cautioned him to keep his fingers loose, maybe even wiggle them while he waited for the pitch, and not to worry because they would tighten up when he swung. The two of them carefully cut out box scores for William to paste in a notebook to worship George Herman Ruth—the Babe, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat.

  In the end it was too good to last. Remington came down with congestion of the lungs in November of 1934. The illness started with a feeling of being bone-tired, followed by a tickle in his throat that grew into a fiend and traveled to his chest, where it rumbled and pounded and took his breath violently, leaving him gasping and writhing in pain. The doctor made a house call and prescribed bed rest, camphor vapor, and a liquid containing a dose of belladonna to act as a sedative and hopefully bring some relief from the coughing.

  When she felt him burning up with fever even as he shook with chills, Letice called an ambulance. She left eight-year-old William in the care of the Silveys so that she could go along with her husband. She kept vigil at the side of his hospital bed, telling him not to worry, that the doctor was a specialist, that they would go to some warmer place after the holidays, a place where they could sit in the sun, so he could recover and come home stronger. She watched his mouth open and close, open and close, as he pulled and pulled for air. And then his mouth stopped opening and closing, and his eyes stared straight ahead without focusing at all.

  Letice’s stomach dropped to her feet and her mouth went dry. She squeezed his hand, put her face close to his, and whispered his name as a desperate question: “Remington? Remington?” She hoped he might open his eyes or let out a breath. He did neither. Again she whispered frantically, and again he stayed silent and still.

  Hospitals are very quiet at night. But when Letice bolted out into the hall, she sliced that hospital’s quietness right down the middle with a scream. Two people came running, and one stethoscope explained things.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Arrow,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry, but he is gone.”

  Remington Arrow had died of pneumonia. It was four days before Christmas; he was thirty-nine years old. It was decided that his body should repose in the morgue until further plans could be made. There was no one around who could even imagine a funeral at Christmastime, least of all the heavily sedated Letice, who could no longer imagine anything.

  Just as he had died four days before Christmas, Remington Arrow was entombed four days after, as if some fateful pendulum had swung in an unfeeling and perfect mathematical arc, finishing Remington’s time on this earth. With no more moments to measure, the pendulum dropped to the middle and remained there unmoving, keeping Letice there with it.

  Like his father and grandfather before him, Remington Arrow had been president of the family-owned First Regent’s Bank, and in her heart of hearts Letice believed it was the bank that had killed her husband by pulverizing his good man’s soul. First Regent’s had survived the crash of 1929, and Remington had continued to keep the doors open by working from early in the morning until late at night six days a week, doing all he could to resist foreclosing on homes or turning down requests for loans that came from hardworking people who’d given up pride in favor of begging. But sometimes he had no choice.

  That had been the case with the Heckert family. Mr. Heckert was a long-standing customer at the bank, a farmer the Arrows knew well. But his farm had more than a few failed crops and had fallen into serious disrepair. His eldest son, George, tried to help out by doing odd jobs and selling items he’d made by hand, such as a child’s wagon with a handle he’d fashioned from a plow blade. Ostensibly, that is what brought him to the Arrows’ back door. He knew they had a little boy, but his real purpose was to speak with Remington of a matter to do with busin
ess. No one knew about his plan, for George Heckert was trying to be a hero.

  When Remington Arrow came to the door, George asked what his family’s chances of getting a bank loan might be. They needed to pay some debts and buy some seed and get medical attention for the animals. They’d already had to sell some milk cows and two of their horses because they couldn’t feed them, he’d said, unable to keep the begging out of his voice.

  “I’m sorry, George,” Remington Arrow told him. “Times are tough and your family’s farm needs too many repairs. The bank can’t accept it as security against a loan.”

  The young man hung his head; he’d hoped maybe his family’s reputation for honesty and hard work would have tipped the scales in their favor. But he could see that Remington Arrow thought like a banker and put no value on honesty and hard work.

  Remington tried to help in the only way he could; he bought the handmade wagon.

  George Heckert returned home, his back bent under the weight of his failure. He told his folks that the farm was going to kill them all, and he for one was not willing to die. But they were people who believed that hard work would right things; they did not perceive the mortal wound to George’s pride. He left that night, and his family never saw him again.

  It was cases like the Heckerts’ that aided in Remington Arrow’s decline. Pneumonia had an easy time of it with Remington; he was already broken when the sickness got there.

  The depth of her grief astounded Letice. Her husband had been, after all, a man she’d had to learn to love after having given her heart and passion to someone else. Widowhood did not put her in dire financial straits; Remington had been a cautious investor with a grave mistrust of buying on margin. But money didn’t do much for her loneliness, and so she looked for something that would. Letice searched for respite from all the vacancy around her: Remington’s place at the table, the left-hand side of the bed, her empty arms when Bessie Smith sang. She found relief from her sorrow in bottles of liquor that had accumulated in the cellar even during Prohibition, a residual effect of Cormack Arrow’s immortal influence and charm.