The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  The memory of the discovery was this:

  She’d worked alongside her mother in the fields that day, and they had snap beans and boiled potatoes for dinner. It happened to be a Monday, the only day of the week that the hoodoo woman would read your tea leaves if you gave her two copper pennies. The woman was called Mam Judith, and she’d been the bringer of hopes and omens to the colored part of Bayou Cane for coming up on fifty years.

  Trinidad didn’t say a word during supper, and she chewed as fast as she could. It was the first time she was being allowed to visit Mam Judith, and the girl was in a rush to get there. She tried to plant a hurry-up thought in her mother’s head just by staring at her when she wasn’t looking. Finally, after a dozen forevers came and went, her mother took one last bite of beans, picked her teeth with the fingernail of her right pinky finger, gulped down the dregs of her chicory root coffee, and let out a very deep, very long belch before she finally spoke.

  “Whatchew looking at, girl? Get up off your behine and clean up here. We gots somewhere to go.” This was as near to an expression of affection as Trinidad was ever likely to hear from her mother.

  The child did as she was told, taking extra care so as not to have to do anything twice. When she’d hung the kitchen rag over the washtub’s edge and stood still waiting for approval, her mother spoke again.

  “All right then. Go getchew a clean head cloth. I won’t have my chile stand before Mam Judith looking all nappy.” As Trinidad ran to do it, her mother’s voice pinched at her back: “Didjew hear me? I said make it a clean one. Make it your best clean one. You ain’t a sharecropper’s chile, and you ain’t no white trash neither. You be a Fontenaise.”

  This was something her mother often said, this “You be a Fontenaise,” and her mother was fond of calling herself Missuz Fontenaise as if it were a claim to something fine and proud. It seemed to Trinidad that her mother’s voice was filled with haughtiness when she said it, though she never explained her claim to such arrogance. The truth of the matter was that Trinidad was the child of a rapist who’d used her mother five times in one night, taking off and leaving her half-dead and bleeding something more than three-and-a-half miles from home. She was never part of any marriage, and Fontenaise was a name she’d heard only once and bestowed upon herself.

  The mother and daughter set off down the red clay road that never seemed to dry out completely, even if there hadn’t been rain for a month. They walked until they came to a weather-beaten tombstone that jutted up out of the ground like a moss-covered, ancient stone drunkard askew. That tombstone was how they knew to turn left and follow a smaller footpath that was mostly overgrown with swampish vegetation, until they came to two rotten fence posts held together with rusted barbed wire upon which hung a handmade cast-iron bell—the tea reader’s attempt at dignified formalities, as if to say, “Mam Judith is receiving today.”

  Trinidad’s mother rang that bell three times and turned in a circle once; then they proceeded on. That’s how this business was done if done proper, according to local lore.

  Mam Judith was as close to majestic as anyone from those parts ever got. No one knew how old she was, though it was said she was two days older than dirt. Her skin was the color of tree bark—mostly gray, save for the brown of the wrinkles that ran down her face like the graves of gone-away roots—and her eyes were green, like emeralds. Huge golden hoops always hung from her earlobes, and one tiny gold stud pierced the right side of her nose. And Mam Judith was diminutive; she looked like a wizened child sitting there on a cushion in the big rattan chair that flared up behind her and made her seem queenly.

  Naturally, it was the silks that grabbed one’s eye in Mam Judith’s place, silks not being common in a part of the bayou where the general population had to look up to see bottom. And all those colors of all those silks were reflected in the small silver tea kettle that simmered on the cook stove.

  Trinidad and her mother stepped inside the door and stood still as statues. Mam Judith moved her head in an almost imperceptible nod, and Trinidad felt her mother push her forward. The reader of tea leaves looked straight into the young girl’s eyes and said in a voice deep as a well and cold as a river bottom, “Pour some of that water into this cup and then drink it down, girl. I got business witchew.” She didn’t take her eyes away from Trinidad’s even for a second.

  Trinidad did as she was told and set the cup between them when she finished. Mam Judith’s hand, a gnarled and brittle and broken-off branch, reached out to slide the cup closer to her own self. She perused the tea leaves in its bottom, squinting and harrumphing every now and again and sometimes seeming to growl.

  When Trinidad swallowed, the sound of it rolled and crackled off the walls and the floor.

  “You gots the gift, girl,” Mam Judith said, and then stopped in order to let the drama settle in. She shut her lips tight and stared into Trinidad’s face and finally said in a snake-hissy whisper, “You don’t be all the way of this world. There something in you can’t be from this world. You gots the Knowing. You mark what I say: when the time be right, things gwine come to you by thoughts and by visions. And you gots a Purpose too. Your Purpose gonna show itself when the time be right.”

  There was no further explanation, and no one spoke of it ever again.

  Trinidad’s life took tumbles and turns after her mother died. She married a man named Jackson Prefontaine but was widowed while still quite young. She ended up as housekeeper for the Virgil B. Hortons, a wealthy white family in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but she was not meant to stay there forever. Trinidad was meant to go to Bayou Cymbaline at a time in the future and join with Bonaventure Arrow, who, like her, would have a touch of the divine.

  The Other Grandma

  THE voice of Adelaide Roman came around sometimes, although only once in a while. Whenever unborn Bonaventure heard it, he would climb up behind his mother’s ribs and form himself into a tight little ball, because Adelaide’s voice was sharp and scraping. Sometimes its sound waves beat viciously on his eardrums, nearly shattering his tiny hammer and anvil bones. These instances provided first evidence that the gift of peculiar hearing could sometimes be unkind.

  Adelaide had been born and raised on Bayou Deception Island, the only child of Etienne Cormier and the former Reevy Simonette, two full-blooded Cajuns, neither of whom was very much to look at. But they were good people and well thought of, which is why no one could ever figure out how Adelaide fit into the picture. Not only was she pretty, but she had a tendency to act like she’d wound up with her parents by mistake, like she was never meant to be a Cormier at all. She’d been a colicky baby who grew into a prissy kind of child, never wanting to play outside, never wanting dirt on her clothes, and never wanting people to touch her. She narrowed her eyes at her parents, and slapped their hands away. It wasn’t because she was scared; it was because she thought herself better. As she grew up, it became apparent that Adelaide was ashamed of her family.

  Her good looks only added to Adelaide’s conceit. Once she matured and became aware of how pretty she was she removed herself mentally and emotionally from Bayou Deception Island. She turned eighteen in 1927 and left the place physically once and for all. She got herself to a town called Cooksville, where she found a waitressing job at a rundown restaurant called the Last Stop Diner. The following year she met Theodore Roman, a man twelve years her senior.

  Theodore Roman was a tall, good-natured fellow with a strong chin, a receding hairline, and a voice as smooth as butterscotch pudding. Theo wasn’t from Cooksville; he’d only been on the back side of a fishing trip he’d taken to Big Eddy Lake out near Shoats Creek, where he’d spent his formative years. Theodore lived and worked in Bayou Cymbaline and had only gone into the Last Stop Diner for a cup of coffee and some poppy-seed cake.

  Adelaide knew a hardworking man when she saw one, and once she confirmed Theodore Roman had a good-paying job at a cannery, she flirted enough to make him want to come back. It worked. By his second visit
she was making sure he knew that she’d cut him an extra large slice of poppy-seed cake, and she made a little show of running her finger along the cake knife and licking the frosting off slowly. By his third visit she was batting her eyes and bending over to pick up things she’d accidentally-on-purpose dropped, because she’d been told one time that she had a nice backside.

  After two months of coming all the way from Bayou Cymbaline for a cup of so-so coffee, and without having received so much as a kiss, Theodore Roman produced a diamond ring from his left shirt pocket, and Adelaide Cormier judged it good enough for now. Theo was a nice man; he really did deserve better. But all things happen for a reason.

  The wedding was a low-key ceremony that took place at the Cornerstone Southern Baptist Church in Bayou Cymbaline, which was two blocks west of the VFW Hall, where a small reception was held. The day’s events were attended by Theo’s coworkers and all of the Shoats Creek Romans who could make it. It seems the Cormiers’ invitations went out late. Theo wouldn’t meet his in-laws until a few years later, when he took Dancy out for a visit. But Adelaide never went back.

  The low-budget wedding was intentional on Adelaide’s part. The big money was reserved for the honeymoon and her trousseau. Theo scratched his head and questioned the need for six pairs of new shoes, to which Adelaide responded that if he couldn’t afford for his wife to have shoes maybe he should have said something before she gave up everything to marry him and move to a place where she didn’t know a single soul. Theo never questioned her spending habits again. He learned that if he just let her buy what she wanted for herself or the house, she could be pleasant enough. By the same token, Adelaide had figured out that it was best to have marital relations before she spent more than ten dollars on anything, which is how it was that Dancy came to be conceived the night before the purchase of a dining room set complete with a sideboard, a hutch, and two leaves for the table.

  Adelaide didn’t dislike pregnancy; she despised it. It wasn’t that she was sick in the mornings, or at any other time for that matter; it was how heavy and painful her breasts became, and how stretch marks ran all over her abdomen like silvery mucous trails left by snails, and especially how her belly button stuck out. Adelaide seethed through the whole nine months and vowed she would never be pregnant again.

  She’d labored for less than two hours when Dancy glided out of her body as if she were covered in Vaseline. Adelaide could have filed her nails through the whole thing with very little disruption. The doctor said that in all his years of practice he’d never seen a woman have such an easy time of it.

  Theo came to her hospital room afterwards, a dozen red roses in one hand and a jeweler’s box in the other. Adelaide said that the roses were pretty, but for future reference she preferred pink or yellow, and that she would exchange the opal necklace as soon as she was able. He had the receipt, didn’t he? Then she told him there would be no more sex in their future because the doctor said she’d almost died while giving birth and would most likely be in pain the rest of her life.

  As for forming a bond with her daughter, well, that would have to come about all by itself and would definitely not happen through nursing. Nursing was for broodmares and barn cats, she said, and that’s why God made bottles.

  Theo was another story. Dancy took over his heart from day one. It was Theo who stayed up nights when she was sick with a stomachache, a cough, or a fever; Theo who taught her to tie her shoes; Theo who taught her to ride a bike; and Theo who did just about everything else a parent could and should and ought to want to do. This included taking her to visit her grandparents, which meant going to see the Cormiers, since his own parents were deceased by then. Adelaide was all too happy to stay behind in Bayou Cymbaline with her indoor toilet and her linoleum floors, comforts she’d never had on Bayou Deception Island. And she loved not having to cook dinner for her husband or having to mind her child.

  Dancy didn’t miss Adelaide on those trips. By the time she was eight years old, she’d already decided that she would not be like her mother when she grew up. She wouldn’t ever yank on her daughter’s arm, or call her stupid, or take away her dinner as punishment.

  All throughout her childhood, Dancy fantasized that Adelaide would run off for New York City. Then it would be just Dancy and her daddy, who never said he wished she was prettier and never called her disgusting. Never.

  This dislike of her mother remained as Dancy grew up. She supposed she had some feeling for Adelaide, in a detached sort of way and only because of their blood tie. But that was all. Any hints of warmth or trust were missing from their relationship.

  If you’d asked for advice on raising a daughter, Adelaide Roman’s response would have been to fall to your knees and pray for the strength to know the devil when you saw him. Although she’d never outright proclaimed that a demon had hold of Dancy, there’d been plenty of times when Adelaide had said, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” the minute the girl walked out of the room. As a congregant of the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel, Adelaide Roman was an expert on Satan.

  She’d had a reason for joining the Forthright, but that reason had nothing to do with God. It was a reason that had come to her at her place of employment. Adelaide worked at the Bayou Cymbaline Branch of the United States Post Office on Pepperdine Street in Bayou Cymbaline. It was there, in August of 1946, that a handsome stranger with the most gorgeous blue eyes she’d ever seen walked in to stand directly in front of her. The man introduced himself as Brother Harley John Eacomb and asked if he might post a notice on the corkboard that hung in the post office vestibule. Adelaide said she didn’t see why not.

  The handsome stranger tipped his head in a graceful bow before going out the way he’d come in. When he was gone, Adelaide just about fell over herself getting out to the corkboard to see what he’d posted. She believed it was the first time in her life she actually felt blessed by God to be in the right place at the right time. The notice stated that a special Meeting of the Righteous was to be held down by the river the following Sunday at six in the evening. Presiding over the meeting would be Brother Harley John Eacomb, pastor of the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel.

  Adelaide spent all of Saturday getting herself ready. She bought a new dress, and shoes to go with it, and splurged on a white silk hat with peek-a-boo netting that came down over her eyes, and white gloves with a mother-of-pearl button at the wrist bone. Dancy was only sixteen at the time and not yet a cosmetologist, so Adelaide went to the beauty parlor for a professional wash and set, and had her nails painted in a color called Happy Heart Red.

  When her husband asked her where she was going, she said, “Some of us care about the welfare of our eternal souls, Theo. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to church like I always do.”

  “In the evening? And dressed like that? You don’t usually get so dolled up. I thought maybe you were headed for Bourbon Street,” he teased.

  To which Adelaide insisted on knowing if she was entitled to look her best when she praised God Almighty or not.

  The Meeting that night was still going on past nine. Brother Eacomb called down God and called out Satan in a voice that no one in those parts had ever heard the like of. He would teach them to praise God, he said. He would cure their ills and wash the sins from those who genuinely wished to be saved. Brother Eacomb promised to cast out demons and to purify hearts. After that, he promised to lead his flock up the holy mountain, because they were surely a righteous people, the chosen ones of God.

  If his blue eyes hadn’t gotten to Adelaide, his mellifluous voice surely would have. Adelaide Roman had never in her life heard such a voice come out of a man. But oh my Lord, those eyes.

  On the Thursday after that first Meeting of the Righteous, Theo Roman complained of feeling ill and stayed home from work for the first time in his life. Adelaide left early for her job at the post office, but Dancy stayed home from school because she was worried. At a quarter past ten, she heard a thump
and a strangling sound coming from her parents’ room. She found Theo on the floor, called for an ambulance, and rode along with him to a hospital in New Orleans, where she had to borrow money for the pay phone to call her mother. Adelaide said she would be there after work. This situation aggravated her; she wouldn’t be able to go shopping, and she needed to find another new dress to wear for her personal savior, Brother Eacomb.

  Theo was in the hospital for a week. When he was discharged, the doctor handed Adelaide a small glass bottle with nitroglycerin tablets in it and explained to them both that Theo should place one under his tongue if he felt another heart attack coming on. He said the instructions were on the label. Adelaide put the bottle in the drawer of the bedside table when they got back home.

  It wasn’t but a month later that another heart attack came to call. Adelaide and Theo had just sat down to dinner when he felt the first pain. Dancy wasn’t home.

  “Nitro . . .” he gasped.

  “What’s that, Theo? What are you saying? I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Nitro . . .” He was turning a bluish white.

  “What are you trying to say, Theo? I can’t understand you.”

  A raspy, whispered “Nitro . . .”

  “I still can’t understand you, Theo.” She was shouting by now. “Are you saying nitro? Do you need one of those pills?”

  Theo managed to nod his head, and Adelaide folded her napkin, put it back on the table, and walked to the bedroom to get the medication. When, nearly two full minutes later, Theo fell to the floor stone-cold dead, Adelaide was straightening a throw pillow and smoothing a wrinkle in the bedspread.