Bonaventure returned the box to its place on the shelf. But he had not put the note back in, for he knew it was the thing he was supposed to take away. He also knew that he couldn’t put it in the memento box that lived under his bed, full as that box was of happiness. To put it there might make the note even sadder, which didn’t seem fair at all. And anyway, he was supposed to take it out of the house.
He talked to William about the dilemma that night.
—Is this what Mom is keeping that she shouldn’t keep anymore?
“Yes, Bonaventure, it surely is.”
—It makes a real sad sound. Can you hear it?
“No, but I know you can.”
—Does Mom hear it?
“She hears it all the time.”
—Those are your clothes in the box, aren’t they?
“Yes.”
—You and Mom say you died in an accident, but I think somebody shot you with a gun. I heard gun sounds like in the movies.
“That’s right. Somebody did. I used to think he did it on purpose, but then I realized he couldn’t help it.”
—Why couldn’t he help it?
“Because his mind got hurt and it never got better.”
—His mind must have been hurt pretty bad.”
“It was. Broken just like his heart.”
—The box told me something.
“What did it say?”
—It said Mom thinks it was all her fault.
“Your mom blames herself because she asked me to stop at the A&P that day, and that’s where I got shot. But it wasn’t her fault at all. We need to take the note away so it can’t blame her anymore.”
The second challenge was met.
—What should we do with it?
“I don’t know, but you will. Wait and see.”
—I’ve been wondering about something, Dad.
“What’s that?”
—Will you be leaving for Real Heaven now because our job is done?
“Not yet, but soon.”
—How soon?
“I don’t know.”
—Will you still be able to talk to me from there?
“I don’t know that either.”
Bonaventure lowered his head and said, —I’ve been wondering about something else.
“Oh?”
—After you go to Real Heaven, will I get a voice?
The question took William by surprise. “Do you want one?”
Nothing at first and then, —Maybe. It might be nice to be like everybody else.
“No, Bonaventure, always be you. And anyway, maybe you’re supposed to be the only super-hearing guy in the world. Like there’s only one Captain America.”
Bonaventure’s head lowered once again, and he gave a pretty big shrug, —I don’t know about that.
“Well, it sure would explain why none of the other kids at school can hear like you can.”
Even that didn’t cheer Bonaventure up. Ever since kindergarten, when he’d heard the color orange and been accused of cheating, Bonaventure had held himself apart, not wanting to get hurt again because of his super hearing.
Later that evening, after he’d said good night to everyone, Bonaventure reached under his pillow and pulled out his mother’s note. He knelt down, closed his eyes tight, pressed the paper between his hands and said every prayer he’d ever learned. He kept his eyes shut for a few minutes even after the prayers were done, and listened for his father.
He called to him, —Dad?
But William wasn’t there. He’d gone back to the shore in Almost Heaven to think about what was left to do. He’d forgiven his killer and removed the reminder of Dancy’s misplaced guilt, but he hadn’t met the third challenge yet: he had to let go of Dancy, and there was no help for that one. And then something opened up inside William, some small perforation on the dark side of his soul that let in a cosmic light. He admitted then what he’d known for a while, that he’d held them both captive far too long, and it was time for him to go.
Bonaventure listened for maybe ten minutes more, which is a very long time to a seven-year-old boy, and then he figured that maybe his father was tired. He opened his hands and told the note he was sorry, but he would take it out back to Mr. Silvey’s shop until he could think of what to do. His last thought of the day was that maybe a gris-gris idea would come along and mix in with all the prayers.
THE Wanderer recalled the white light of welding and the sound of flying sparks. He could feel the wetness of his own sweat and the soreness that entered his muscles at the end of a day that had been filled with grueling work. He could summon the taste of an ice-cold beer, and how it felt to drink when he still had a jaw. But The Wanderer didn’t know when any of those things had happened.
Bonaventure heard the echoes of that white light and those sparks and the cries of those worn-out muscles. The biting sound of hatred accompanied those sounds, as if the welder was taking things out on the steel. Bonaventure conveyed those clues to Coleman Tate the next time the investigator came around, just as his father had told him to do.
Voodoo and Hoodoo and the Sweet By-and-By
BONAVENTURE had grown to love Trinidad like a second mother. She smiled and sang more than most people do, and everything she baked tasted better even than the stuff from TouTou’s Patisserie. Trinidad had a smell like soap, sunshine, and sweet, moist earth. Bonaventure liked to breathe her scent until it filled up his lungs and went to his ears and mixed in with the sounds of his silence.
He wanted to ask her something and he wanted to be very specific, so he used the note system for the conversation.
—Did you ever put the gris-gris on somebody?
Trinidad turned from the kitchen island where she was frosting a cake and acted like she hadn’t read his note. Bonaventure waited for a minute, and when it looked like she had gotten busy with washing the cake pan, he went over to the sink and tugged on her arm and held the notepaper closer to her face.
She sighed. “Well, now, there’s gris-gris and then there’s gris-gris. If you mean the voodoo sort that brings all kind of bad down on people, then no, I haven’t done that. But if you mean the hoodoo kind, well, then, maybe I have.”
—What’s the difference?
“One’s spelt with a V and one’s spelt with a H.”
Hands on hips, exasperated look.
“Oh, go on with that face. You know Trinidad only joking with you,” she said. “Voodoo be a religion. It got its own spirits. Voodoo folks make gris-gris out of all kinds of things. Voodoo folks have a lot of superstitions and charms and such. And some believes things like if you lay a broom across your doorway at night a witch can’t come in; or if you sweep trash out the house after dark, you’ll sweep away your luck; or that you can bring harm down on people by burning some of their hair.
“Hoodoo, now, at least the hoodoo I know, be different than that. Some hoodoo be about conjure, you know, calling up magic. My kind of hoodoo comes from root work. It bring about God’s healing. That’s the hoodoo I know. Now, here be a example of the difference between hoodoo and voodoo: There be a voodoo cure-all recipe that say to mix jimson weed with sulfur and honey in a jar, but then that recipe say that you gots to rub that jar against a black cat before you sip the mix down real slow.
“Well, now, I might use what God put in the soil of this earth to make a cure, but I don’t ever tell nobody they gots to rub it on a black cat. I just go ahead and make a medicine out of growing things that I know will help a body make it through they troubles. I don’t hold with no fetishes like voodoo folk do. If I keep a thing and look at it when I pray, it because it remind me of the God of Abraham and Moses who deliver the Hebrews away from the Pharaoh and take them to the Promised Land. Now, lets us talk about something else.”
—Where’s your family?
“They all be gone.”
—Where did they go?
“They gone on before me to the Sweet By-and-By.
—Is that in Louisiana?
Bonaventure made a mental note to ask his dad about the Sweet By-and-By.
—Did you ever see anybody do voodoo?
“Are we back on that old stuff? Yes, I did. But she gone now.”
—Did she go to the Sweet By-and-By?
“That depends.”
—On what?
“On whether she be sorry or even understand the bad she done.”
Trinidad busied herself at the sink and stove then. She didn’t like to dwell on certain memories.
Bonaventure had this feeling that Trinidad knew things other people didn’t. Not stuff like if somebody happened to eat a cookie before supper or if somebody maybe forgot to wipe his shoes on the mat and maybe tracked some dirt in the house. It was more like he thought she could tell when folks were feeling bad, like when they were sick or sad or worried.
The next time he met with Grand-mère Letice for what she’d begun to call his catechism lessons, the story of the Ten Commandments was the topic of the day. After their lesson, Bonaventure signed, —Trinidad knows Ten Commandments.
“Oh? What makes you say that?”
—She knows about God.
“That’s good.”
Nod, nod.
“What does Trinidad say about God?”
—She keeps things for him.
“I see.”
—And Trinidad can make hoodoo medicine. Not voodoo.
Even though Grand-mère was superb at understanding sign by this time, Bonaventure used the notepad to write out the stuff about hoodoo and voodoo, just to make sure she knew what he said.
Letice tried not to give her thoughts away. She didn’t speak; she didn’t blink; she didn’t breathe. She looked at her watch and said, “Well, I think that’s all we have time for right now, Bonaventure,” and kissed him and sent him out to play. She couldn’t stop shaking for the rest of the day.
Letice had a dream that night in which William was alive, locked inside his tomb. He flailed and gasped for air, spending his breath in anguished screams. The door was solid brass, heavy. William scraped at it until his fingers bled. Then the vault transformed around him: its cement walls and iron braces softened into human flesh, and he was trapped inside a grasping membrane within a hollow, gray-tissued, scarred-up womb. William peeled and tore and rubbed at the membrane, and as he did, the cord wrapped tighter and tighter around his neck, leaving it covered in welts and bruises.
Letice awoke sick to her stomach. That afternoon, when Gabe came for the tutoring session, she excused herself, saying she had something to take care of, and headed for the kitchen.
“How are you today, Trinidad?” she asked.
“Well, I’m just fine, Miz Arrow, just fine. And you?” Trinidad wondered how it was that Miz Arrow was in the kitchen with her instead of at the lesson with everyone else.
“I guess you could say I’m mostly fine.”
As determined as she was to find out about Trinidad’s connection to hoodoo, Letice was nervous and was having a hard time getting started at it. She busied herself rearranging the apples and bananas that sat in a wooden bowl. Finally, she spoke.
“Bonaventure tells me you’re familiar with hoodoo.”
Trinidad felt the presence of suspicion in the room. “Yes, ma’am.”
“In that case, I would like to ask a favor of you.”
Trinidad supposed it was possible that Miz Arrow was about to ask for an herbal remedy for some slight malady or other, but Trinidad didn’t really believe that was the case.
“You’re more than just familiar with hoodoo, aren’t you, Trinidad? In fact, you are a hoodoo practitioner. Am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please don’t be offended by what I’m about to say, but I would appreciate it if you would not discuss hoodoo or voodoo with Bonaventure. I’m trying very hard to educate him in the Catholic faith and I don’t want him to become confused. Can I count on you?”
“Yes, ma’am, you can. I know you be Catholic. I have Catholic in my soul too.”
“You’re Catholic, Trinidad?”
“I say I have Catholic in my soul, Miz Arrow. I hold with the notion that it not enough to preach, that you got to do good too. And I hold with Blessed Mary.”
“How did you come by your faith?”
“When my mother pass on, I got put in a orphanage that be run by Catholic Sisters; the Sisters of the Holy Family they be,” Trinidad answered. “Well, one of them, Sister Sulpice, she tell me about how we got to show God our goodness, not just brag on ourselves like the Pharisees do, and she told me about that good Saint Francis and how he love all God’s creatures and all God’s earth, and she told me about Mary too. And it felt real good to hear what Sister Sulpice have to say.”
Letice asked to hear more of what Sister Sulpice had said.
“She say Mary never have one sin on her soul because she be the mother of Jesus. And she tell me that Mary’s heart big enough to be mother to everybody. She say Mary all good and all kind and will lead a soul to Jesus if they ask her to.”
Letice reached into her pocket, pulled out a rosary, and handed it to Trinidad. “I want you to have this. If you like, I’ll teach you the proper prayers and the joyful and sorrowful mysteries.”
“Well, now, I thank you for that, Miz Arrow, but there no need to teach me the prayers; I already know them,” she said. “But I always did suspect there be mysteries. Lord knows, nobody understand where love come from if not from inside a mystery. Maybe you could teach me about the mysteries at the same time as you teach Mr. Bonaventure.”
“I would like that,” Letice said. “I would like that very much.”
Trinidad put the rosary into her apron pocket. She intended to place it on her altar when she got home, along with the other sacred objects she kept there. Wanting to make sure things were all right with Miz Arrow, Trinidad offered a further explanation.
“If you don’t mind, Miz Arrow, I’d like to say something more. But like I said, that be if you don’t mind.”
“Well, if it’s important to you, then please go ahead.”
“It be about the hoodoo, ma’am. See, I don’t mix with conjuring or voodoo charms. I only deal with root work. It be the healing of the body with herbs and such. Root work be all I do with the hoodoo.”
Letice hadn’t heard the words root work in nearly thirty-five years, and hearing them now caused her mind to fly back to April of 1923, to a whitewashed room on St. Philip Street, where voodoo and hoodoo leached through the bricks like a creeping scum and crawled down her throat and into her belly and out from the place between her legs. She remembered the fever and the terror and the pain. It was the night she had become haunted, made anxious and devout by the fragile apparition of a torn and bloodied infant.
Mémoire d’Archive
LETICE Molyneaux had kissed Tristan Duvais for the first time on a Thursday in 1921 when they were both sixteen years old. She’d been watching him clean saddles in the tack room. He looked different to her on that day. She suddenly noticed his hair curled at his collar, and she was awed by the breadth of his shoulders. Letice hadn’t planned the kiss; she simply walked up behind him, stood on her tiptoes, and touched her lips to the back of his neck.
“Miss Letice, please don’t do that,” he’d said.
“Mr. Tristan, why not?” There was laughter between her words.
Tristan looked a long look at her before saying, “Don’t make fun of me, Letice. You know why not.”
“Because you’re the help?”
“Right the first time.”
“I don’t care, Tristan.”
“I do. We’re not children anymore, Letice. We’re too old to play together.”
Tristan Duvais left the tack room and went out into the stable yard so as not to be alone with the boss’s daughter.
Three days later she kisse
d him twice, and the second time he kissed her back. A third kiss came through open lips, and a fourth with seeking tongues. The two of them lived with desire after that; a desire they satisfied on a cot in the tack room, or in a hidden place by the riverbank, or on a blanket in a far corner of a pine tree woods. They risked everything to feel each other skin to skin.
Letice sought out her father, saying she wanted to become a better equestrian. Sportsman that he was, Horatio Molyneaux was only too happy to oblige. Arrangements were made for Tristan to give Letice advanced instruction, and no one questioned how much time she spent in the stables.
Tristan and Letice fell in love, in the way only the very young can. What had begun as a sexual awakening became so much more in their eyes. At first, they worried about Letice becoming pregnant, but the longer they were together, the deeper the spell became, until neither of them thought about that at all. They went on sharing their bodies and their dreams, not noticing that more than a year had gone by.
Letice made her debut into New Orleans society at the ball before Lent in 1922, when she was seventeen. She had dressed in white, as debutantes most always will. Tristan had dressed for the evening too, in crisp dark livery, as chauffeurs most always do. Being so close on the night of her debut, but not being able to touch, had put them in a frenzy.
Everyone noticed Letice Molyneaux on Fat Tuesday at the Goddess of the Rainbow Ball. She was presented with a “call-out” card and given a seat in a select area until she was “called out” early in the evening by Remington Arrow, a Rex Krewe member and sender of the card. Remington was older than Letice by ten years.
“Have we met before?” she asked as they danced, trying to make conversation.
“Indeed we have, a year or so ago, on a boat outing.”
Letice did not remember.
“It was a sail down the Bogue Falaya and the Tchefuncte River put on by your daddy’s yacht club.
“Oh, yes, now I recall.”
The evening passed pleasantly enough. Remington took Letice’s quietness for shyness, when in fact she was consumed with thoughts of Tristan.
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 23
