The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  Trinidad’s baking talents multiplied exponentially during the holiday season. She turned out butter cookies and spritz and pfeffernüsse and gingerbread and fruitcake. She made nougat roll and peppermint bark. She baked tiny pecan pies called teatime tassies and a chocolate-covered Yule log cake. To enter the Arrow kitchen at Christmastime was to transcend this earth entirely.

  Dancy invited Gabe to go along with her and Bonaventure to get a Christmas tree. The three of them gave each possibility a good looking over, turning them this way and that. They had all agreed that the best trees weren’t perfect, that it was the flaws that gave them character. The ninth tree they examined was the keeper. When Dancy went to pay, she found out that Gabe had settled up with the tree man.

  “I can’t let you do that, Gabe.”

  “Of course you can,” he said. “Consider it my Christmas gift.”

  “That’s not why I wanted you to come along.”

  “I know that, Dancy.”

  “Well, I hope so.”

  “So why did you?” he asked.

  “Why did I what?”

  “Want me to come along?”

  “Because it’s Christmas,” was what she said. But what she didn’t say was that she liked to be around him. She couldn’t say that even to herself.

  Bonaventure got full of pine pitch when they sawed off the bottom to make sure the tree wouldn’t lean off to one side.

  “People who sign should be careful of pine pitch,” Gabe told him, and ruffled his hair. “Their fingers could get stuck on a word.”

  Bonaventure loved the joke.

  They had eggnog and cookies in the living room, and listened to Christmas music while the tree settled in. Later, when they were putting on the lights, Gabe got kind of warm, so he took his sweater off and rolled his shirtsleeves up to just below his elbows. It was an innocent thing, but it grabbed Dancy’s attention and she felt a stirring she hadn’t felt since William. She didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so she fussed around with the ornament boxes.

  When all the decorations were on, Bonaventure got to plug in the tree lights and turn off the lamps, and they all stood back and said “ah” in whatever way they could.

  Dancy thought about Gabe for a long time that night and decided she needed to get things back on track once and for all.

  The next morning at breakfast Letice suggested they invite him for Christmas dinner.

  “I thought about that and decided against it.”

  “You decided against it? Why?” Letice asked.

  “He might feel like he should bring gifts, and he already bought the tree. And anyway, I think he said something about spending the day with his folks.”

  Gabe, of course, had said no such thing.

  Adelaide Roman got all gussied up on Christmas Eve and sashayed over to the Resurrection Tent to get lost in a reverie about Brother Harley John. While over in her little house on the Neff Switch road, Trinidad Prefontaine sat down on the green velvet bench and played “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful” on the old pump organ. She’d taught herself to play and felt she wasn’t too awful bad. She’d baked some sugar cookies that morning, decorated her door with holly at noon, tossed some seed outside for wild birds at suppertime, and lit a candle in honor of Peace on Earth and the Little Lord Jesus when starlight filled the sky.

  Grand-mère, Bonaventure, and even Dancy went to Midnight Mass. It was sixty-three degrees that night, with a mist in the air like suspended rain. Bonaventure loved the sound of that mist; it made him think of angels’ wings. When he mentioned this to Letice, she said it was the best present he could have given her.

  The sounds of the Christmas Vigil Mass nearly carried Bonaventure from the church pew all the way to Venus. Mixed in with the beautiful music, he heard a candle sputter in Trinidad’s house and it made him feel warm and good.

  William felt a pounding where a physical heart would be, as if he wasn’t dead at all. He stayed away on Christmas morning to walk the shore of the Almost Heaven sea.

  On New Year’s Eve, the Arrow household stayed up until midnight and welcomed 1957 with a champagne toast for the grownups and root beer for anyone who was almost seven. It had been the happiest holiday season they’d known in years.

  Dancy and Letice would survive the winter as the passion flower vine survives the same: their roots would sleep in the soil of the past and their stems would survive the dark and the cold while dreaming of bees and hummingbirds and being tended to lovingly by Trinidad and Gabe.

  The Spirit that had brought them all together wished them the best in what was to come.

  THE Wanderer thought he’d had a button once. He could remember how it felt to reach into his pocket and rub his thumb over it. Then he thought that perhaps there’d been the likeness of an eagle on the front of it. Yes, there was, and that eagle still looked big, even though it fit on such a small thing as a button. The Wanderer couldn’t understand that at all.

  That lady who came to see him always wore a sweater with buttons, but none of them had eagles on the front.

  The Wanderer had no thoughts of Christmas.

  Part II

  Innermost

  1957

  The Pinkerton

  NOTHING had ever calmed the resentment Dancy felt toward William’s killer. Her hatred, always a blister on her soul, had become a fetid ulceration, cracked and sore. She hoped he lived a long life in that prison for the insane, and she hoped he was in pain every single day.

  Letice did not feel resentment or hate, but her curiosity had never lessened. Even after all these years, she still wanted desperately to know the man’s name, and why, why, why. So in January of 1957 she gave up on ever receiving resolution from Sergeant Turcotte and hired a retired Pinkerton detective named Coleman Tate, a man so dedicated to his work that he’d never found time to marry.

  Mr. Tate was of average height and was getting a bit round in the middle. He kept his hair cropped short and always wore a suited vest and a pocket watch affixed to the end of a fob. Tate was a quiet man, patient and thorough. He remembered reading about the murder in the paper.

  Coleman Tate asked Letice to go over everything pertaining to the police investigation. She gave him Sergeant Turcotte’s name and relayed the gist of their conversations. She recounted that no connection to William’s law firm had been made; she spoke to Tate of her suspicions that the murderer may have been a disgruntled customer of the Arrow family bank, perhaps someone who’d been foreclosed on. She was honest with him in saying that the police believed they had accounted for all those possibilities, and there was no record of anyone who’d been denied a loan. Nonetheless, she felt it was a possibility that deserved a closer look.

  “Everything is worth considering, Mrs. Arrow,” he said. “But I must familiarize myself with the physical evidence first.”

  “Whatever you think best, Mr. Tate.”

  The day after being retained by Letice, Tate went to the asylum and enlightened the administrator as to his client’s unending grief. He knew it was the right approach. A door was unlocked and a metal box brought out. Tate asked if he might be left to conduct a thorough inventory and maybe take some notes.

  “Certainly. Take your time,” the administrator said.

  The box contained much more than Tate had expected. He handled each piece of evidence gingerly, examining it with a magnifying glass he’d brought along for that purpose. He asked permission to take custody of the objects for the duration of his investigation “in order to bring closure to the Arrow family.” The administrator knew well the power of the Arrow name and said that while it was unusual, even unprecedented, this one time he would make an exception.

  Tate thanked the man and deftly took his leave. At home in his den, he took careful notes, recording even the smallest details.

  PROGRESS REPORT

  IN THE MATTER OF WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW (DECEASED)

  A visit to the asylum in which the killer is incarcerated yielded access to the items he w
as carrying at the time of the murder. In total: a button; a Chicago Tribune newspaper folded triple-wise and dated December 1,1949; a paper napkin from a coffee shop in Memphis; a scrap of paper bearing the notation F379.N5A182; and a matchbook imprinted with the words “Zip’s Tavern—Melvindale, Michigan.” A receipt accompanies these possessions noting that he had $705 in cash, which is locked in the asylum vault. I have determined that these are enough to conduct a thorough investigation. Further findings to follow.

  Per his agreement with Letice, Tate was to deliver his reports in person, during the daytime when Dancy was at work. Letice didn’t want to risk things coming in the mail. On the day he brought the first report, Trinidad was cleaning in the front room and Bonaventure was by her side. He was listening to the travel story of a piece of rice dust that claimed to have journeyed from the stratosphere into the troposphere on the foot of a bar-headed goose that had flown over the Himalayas on its way to Pakistan. The particle had just described the delightful dryness of the tropopause and was about to tell how it had ended up in the front room, when the sound of the doorbell interfered. Trinidad answered it with Bonaventure at her heels.

  Coleman Tate introduced himself and asked to see Mrs. Letice Arrow if you please; she was expecting him. Trinidad stepped aside and motioned him into the foyer, where he waited while she went to announce his arrival. Tate bent down to shake hands with Bonaventure.

  “How are you today, young man?”

  Index finger to thumb, three fingers straight up as if to say, —I am A-OK.

  “I see you’re the strong, silent type,” Tate said.

  Nod, nod, nod.

  “Well, nothing wrong with that. You know what they say: loose lips sink ships.”

  Bonaventure smiled. He liked Coleman Tate.

  Trinidad returned and said, “Please follow me, sir.”

  As Tate walked away, Bonaventure heard a cracking, tearing, shattering noise coming from an envelope the man had tucked in his suit-coat pocket.

  Not being gifted with access to Bonaventure’s silence, Trinidad didn’t hear that sound, but she did experience a vision when the Pinkerton passed through the door of Letice’s office. She saw a ragged jawbone take wing and fly above his head. That bone-scrap phantom was still flying in a circle above the visitor when he walked through the house to leave.

  “There’s some very big hurt in this world, Mr. Bonaventure,” Trinidad said as she closed the door behind Tate.

  Boneventure placed one hand on the lower right side of his face in response, as if her vision had reached out to his hearing and let him in on something.

  That night, he told his father about Mr. Tate and the scary noises he’d brought into the house.

  “I know something about Mr. Tate,” William said.

  —Really? What?

  “Well, you know how in books and movies there are good guys and bad guys?”

  —Uh-huh.

  “Mr. Tate is one of the good guys. You should listen really hard around him, and if you start to hear things that you don’t know what they mean, you should send those sounds to him.”

  —Why?

  “Because he’s a detective.”

  Bonaventure took in a surprised little gasp. —Like the Hardy Boys?

  “Yup. Only grown up.”

  The Sight of Her Brokenness

  BONAVENTURE was certain he looked different when he peered into the mirror on the morning of his seventh birthday. He thought he looked taller and more grown up. There really was a difference, but it was nothing you could see. He had insisted on inviting Gabe to his birthday dinner, after which they had cake and ice cream and went to see Lady and the Tramp, which Bonaventure and Dancy had already been to twice.

  The passing weeks were preserved in construction paper and Elmer’s glue and posted on the fridge: valentines, shamrocks, and yellow-headed daffodils.

  Dancy was working harder than ever. Talk with her customers was easy and light, tending to revolve around movie stars and sewing patterns and recipes found on Campbell’s soup cans. But lately, their easy camaraderie had begun to intrude on Dancy’s personal life.

  “You’re twenty-seven years old,” Donna Rae Miller said. “Don’t you want a man in your life? Why do you keep living like you’re ninety-seven??”

  “Oh, that’s a huge exaggeration, Donna Rae, and you know it. I don’t have the slightest inclination to look for a man, or for that matter to cook for him or take him to bed. I’ve got a child to raise and a business to run. What with needing to sleep a few hours at the end of the day, that’s just about all I got time for.”

  “Well, you’re gonna get all dried up on your insides. See if you don’t.”

  Dancy merely laughed.

  “Go ahead and laugh. But you know what they say. ‘Use it or lose it,’ they say, and if it was me I wouldn’t want to lose it. Not at twenty-seven years old, I wouldn’t,” Donna Rae continued.

  “Well, I don’t know who they are, but I do know that I don’t want to talk about it. Not one more word, and I do mean not one,” was Dancy’s firm response.

  Donna Rae ignored the admonition and went on. “Look, honey, I know you loved him, but you’re not the one who died. I mean, this is 1957. Come December it’ll be eight years. I worry about you is all, and I just wanna help.”

  “Let it be, Donna Rae. I’ll work it out,” Dancy said, in a tone that was a little bit weary.

  Once in a while, someone would try to set her up on a date without her knowing what they were up to. “It’s just a get-together,” they’d say. “Dinner, maybe some cards.”

  Dancy never fell for it.

  William spent a lot of time at Dancy’s shop. He loved to watch her when she was concentrating on her work. But the best was when she was all alone, sitting in front of the mirror and playing around with her own hair, trying it this way and that, and experimenting with makeup, though she never really wore much. He happened to witness that conversation with Donna Rae, and it bothered him that his passionate Dancy didn’t care if she dried up, and the way she’d turned cold sort of bothered him too.

  William would have to do more than remove Dancy’s guilt; he would have to face his hardest challenge. The mere thought of it felt like the bullets that had already killed him once. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet. If only he could just talk to her . . .

  And so he pulled her to the cemetery as he had always done, and stood at the door of the crypt. When she got there, she sat down on a marble bench.

  “Dancy,” he said.

  She sat very still.

  He spoke again: “I’m here. I’m right here.”

  She looked up in a sudden hair-rising-up-on the-back-of-the-neck kind of way and kept very still.

  “Stand up if you can see me, Dancy. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

  She stood up then and ran for her car, and tightened the lock on her tears. Dancy feared she might be going crazy and starting in with hallucinations.

  She dreamed of William that night, and woke up with proof that she had not dried up on her insides. She threw herself into her shop after that, the better to become exhausted, too tired even to dream. Dancy lost herself in work. She spent so many hours on her feet that her back hurt at the end of the day. But it was worth it. She was too worn to feel anything.

  Bonaventure could hear his mother battle with her nerves. He tried to distract her by making her sing with the radio; he thought she had the most glorious voice. He listened for that certain little catch in it that wasn’t quite a yodel, the one that made her sound like Patsy Cline.

  Dancy mostly listened to country music. Sometimes the radio was tuned to doo-wop or to Cajun, but never to the proudly mournful blues as sung in the bayou-filled delta of southern Louisiana.

  On an evening when she felt kind of restless without knowing why, Dancy decided she needed to leave the house for a while. She made sure Bonaventure brushed his teeth and allowed that he could play in his room for another half hour. When time
was up, she tucked him in and asked Letice if it would be all right if she went out for a drive. Letice knew to let her go.

  Dancy drove out to Papa Jambalaya’s, put a coin in the jukebox, and pushed J-17. As Hank Williams sang “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry,” Dancy Arrow became the lonesome whip-poor-will and the midnight train and the weeping robin and the leaves that had begun to die.

  She had herself a couple of beers and ordered the special but didn’t eat a bite, just sat there staring and smoking Pall Malls one right after the other.

  William stood behind her, remembering the night they’d met. It had been nothing like this. The sight of her brokenness became too much for him, and he went outside to wait.

  Back in his room on Christopher Street, Bonaventure could hear Dancy’s cigarette smoke wafting up to the ceiling and hovering over the happiness at Papa Jambalaya’s. He could also hear the heavy unshed tears that stung his mother behind her eyes and ran down her throat all the way to her chest.

  Sometimes he hated his ears.

  The Sickness Brought About by Ignorance

  WE hafta hurry it up a little bit, Venture Forth Arrow. Grandma Roman is coming over, and since it’s an every-other-Saturday, she’ll be wanting her hair done before going to services at the International Church of the Big-Ass Righteous.”

  Bonaventure’s hands flew to his mouth and his head and shoulders shook with silent laughter. Grand-mère Letice would keel right over if she heard his mother cuss like that, but he thought it was awful funny.