The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  Adelaide sat down on the sofa, stared at Bonaventure, and congratulated herself on having been inspired to get him alone. Just wait until she told Brother Eacomb! She hadn’t even finished her self-congratulations when a new idea struck. She got up, walked over to Bonaventure, and took the pink elephant out of his hand. He immediately reached for it, but she made no move to give it back. Instead, she went into the kitchen and waited for him to follow. When he toddled into the room, she opened the oven, put his precious pink elephant inside, and slammed the door shut. Bonaventure’s apprehension tingled into anticipation.

  A game! he thought. He stopped in the doorway and gave her a grin as if to say, —What next?

  Grandma Roman stood still and didn’t do a thing.

  Bonaventure touched one hand to his mouth and then extended his arm toward her as if he was blowing a kiss. It’s what he did to engage.

  No response.

  He did this gesture over and over, but Grandma Roman did not react. Apprehension returned.

  “Do you want your elephant back?”

  A certain nod.

  “Say please.”

  Hand to mouth, arm outstretched.

  “Say please.”

  Hand to mouth, arm outstretched.

  Still nothing.

  Bonaventure was beside himself. He went to the stove and reached for the door handle, but Grandma Roman slapped his hand away. When he tried again, she lowered herself so she could grab his shoulders and look him in the eye.

  “I am doing this for your own good, young man. It is my sacred mission. I’ll give you your elephant back; all you have to do is say please. I know you can do it; the devil’s got your tongue and nobody is helping you get it back.”

  Hand to mouth, arm outstretched.

  Adelaide Roman was irritated and she shook him. “You can be as stubborn as you want, little boy. I am trying to heal you as I’ve been directed to do.”

  By now Bonaventure was flapping his hands in the air, his bottom lip and little chin quivering.

  She scooped him up and took him back to the sofa, where he curled up and listened for his elephant and his mother. His little face crumpled, and tears flowed from his eyes as he cried in his silent way. Adelaide sat down on the couch too and worked on a piece of embroidery.

  Bonaventure made four attempts to go back to the kitchen. The last time, she threatened to turn the stove on and burn up his elephant if he did it again.

  So he didn’t.

  At five minutes to three, she took the pink elephant out of the oven and gave it back.

  “How’d it go?” Dancy asked when she walked in the house. “Mama, he looks like he’s been crying.”

  “Oh, he was. Only a little bit, though. I think he was missing you. We got on just fine; no trouble at all.”

  “And he’s soaked right through to his trousers! Honestly, Mama!”

  “Well, he must’ve just done that. How was I supposed to know? It’s not like he could’ve told me. Is there a wet spot on my sofa?”

  Dancy didn’t answer.

  As she watched them drive away, Adelaide Roman reckoned that Brother Eacomb was right. Being a healer wasn’t easy. She would pray about it. And why did Dancy allow the kid to have a pink toy anyway? Weren’t things bad enough without him being a sissy? She guessed she would have to pray about that too.

  THE Wanderer could still walk and dress himself and manage his hygiene. But he could not remember his name, or how old he was, or where he’d been born, or how such a thing had happened to his face. A tree stood in the courtyard of the place he was in; The Wanderer watched it carefully. There were birds nesting in its branches.

  Sometimes when The Wanderer was watching those birds, Bonaventure could hear the breeze in their feathers.

  More than two years after the crime, no one had figured out anything.

  Letice continued to pray and Miss Babbitt continued to visit, as did ghostly William.

  Rarer Secrets

  SMALL secrets have always existed in the form of bits of information or private habits kept within personal darkness. For instance, in Bayou Cymbaline, teenage boys hid pinup-girl magazines to look at in the nighttime, and housewives skimmed a few cents off the grocery money to buy a new lipstick or a bright chiffon scarf.

  But there were rarer secrets in town that had more to do with fear and shame, like those of women who claimed their bruises were caused when they walked into a door or slipped and fell down the stairs, or those of men who lost money shooting craps and hid when the insurance man came to collect the premium.

  These bigger secrets came to Trinidad Prefontaine as an atmospheric change, a thickening of the air lasting no more than a second or two. Sometimes this change came as a sudden coolness, at other times as a rise in humidity, or as a crack in the sky like a flash of lightning, or as a cascade of unleashed electricity in a shower storm of sparks. After the atmospheric change, she would get the feeling that something had been altered, and then a secret would call to her, and she would try to work with it.

  Not far from Trinidad’s small inherited estate she found a swamp with palmetto flats thick as a jungle and laced at the edges with cardinal flowers and bald cypress. In the nearby bottoms, clumps of sphagnum moss languished among spiderworts and Christmas fern, and bayou violets were spectacularly showcased. Low growing partridge berry and piney woods lily filled up the swamp’s slopes, thriving among false foxglove and Carolina jessamine. It was her private paradise.

  Due to her upbringing, Trinidad was a believer in the powers of herbs and roots and every local species of growing-in-the-wild plants. She had discovered on her own that every single thing that grew in the swampland and forest bore something of the circle within it, whether in the shape of a leaf, or the bulb of a root, or a perfectly round grain of pollen. Trinidad regarded circles as symbols of God’s eternal love. Her favorite circle was that which is found in the small dark eye of a sparrow.

  This respect for sparrows was something she held in common with none other than Letice. The two had something else in common: a long-ago experience in a quiet room, where a breeze had fluttered in after the blood was cleaned away.

  But the memory of that common experience hadn’t come to Trinidad yet, or even to Letice. It was one of those rarer secrets.

  The Ways of a Silent Boy

  BONAVENTURE began to notice that interesting things happened when he took risks, and so he became a swashbuckler child, venturing farther, and climbing higher, and reaching for strange, new things. It sometimes left Dancy in a quandary as to whether she should offer him praise or a scolding, since she did admire his daring. The only time he clung to her, to Letice, or to one of the Silveys was when his grandma Roman came by, and nothing and nobody was going to make him let loose his hold. It did not escape Dancy that this aversion to Grandma Roman had grown stronger since the day Adelaide had him all to herself.

  Adelaide knew better than to force the issue; she could sense Dancy’s suspicion. She continued her weekly visits to Christopher Street and demonstrated sweetness every chance she got. Adelaide reminded herself that patience is a virtue, and fell into the habit of biding her time.

  By the time he was three and a half, Bonaventure could’ve melted a rock with one look, but he remained unaware of his charm. When he witnessed something particularly winsome, he would point an index finger and raise his eyebrows and take in air through his wide-open mouth to express, —Did you see? Did you see? His hands would flutter and his face would light up and his whole body would wear his wonder.

  He’d have been a real chatterbox, had he been given to talking.

  In fact, Bonaventure did talk to someone when he was all alone. He’d found a voice inside his head but could use it only with the very deep voice he’d always known—William’s. Bonaventure’s speech at these times came naturally and complete, containing every part of speech and following proper grammar. Bonaventure accepted this situation without question; very young children do not doubt the su
pernatural. And since he had no way to tell anyone about these conversations, they remained a confidential connection.

  One such exchange went like this:

  “Hey, there, Bonaventure!” William’s deep voice said.

  —I got a squirt gun today!

  “You did? What color is it?”

  —It’s green and I can take it in the bath.

  “Can I come see later on?”

  —Sure.

  “But don’t you squirt me!”

  Giggle, giggle. —I won’t.

  Bonaventure was getting older, and he would go to school one day, so William wanted to prepare him for being different. William also knew that he really did have to face his challenges and so had to ease Bonaventure into helping him fix the wreckage of the past. But, of course, it would take time.

  For more than three years William had enjoyed his anonymous fatherhood; Bonaventure did not even know who he was. William could be playful and protective and special, though he was nothing more than a voice. But he knew it couldn’t last forever. The time had come to set things in motion, and the first step was to make his child aware of his very special hearing.

  “Your squirt gun is green, huh? I think you can hear green. Am I right?”

  Bonaventure smiled and said, —Yes! I can hear every color!

  “What does green sound like?”

  It wasn’t always easy to describe the sounds, so this time Bonaventure just said, —I like green.

  “I like green too. I like green Jell-O.”

  —Me too. But I like red Jell-O better.

  “What does red sound like?”

  —It sounds like fireworks. Do you like fireworks?

  “Yup. I can hear fireworks, but I can’t hear red. You’re the only one who can do that. You’re the only one who can hear a lot of things. You’re the only one who can hear me.”

  —I am?

  This was how one challenge was set in motion.

  Dancy Arrow had been traveling the road of her son’s missing speech for quite a while, and her feelings on the matter ran in circles. Her main concern was for his safety, since without a voice he couldn’t call for help. And it was a source of sadness to her that Bonaventure would never be able to sing. She also felt sorry for herself because of all that she missed out on: no baby cooing, no cries of delight, no laughter, no questioning why, and no hearing him call her Mama. She felt selfish for those feelings, and ashamed, and so forced herself to call to mind all that she did receive from Bonaventure’s silence: the need to look into each other’s eyes, his busy little hands, the language of his face.

  But still.

  The idea surfaced that maybe it wasn’t that he could not speak, but more that he did not speak, though Dancy couldn’t imagine why. She went to the library and read about aphasia and aphonia and brain damage and emotional disorders. She wondered why he could cough but not put sounds into words. She consoled herself that he hadn’t had a forceps birth. She tried to remember a pregnancy trauma and could only come up with one.

  Eventually she came to the realization that Bonaventure communicated better without a voice than did most people who had one, and that his silence complemented everything else about him. He was small for his age, with a round face, a pointed chin, eyes brown as chocolate, and his father’s straight dark hair. His ears stuck out a bit, and the tip of a crooked smile placed a dimple on the left side of his face. The back of his neck rose with a fragile kind of grace from a delicate spine between slightly sloped shoulders. The sight of the back of that little neck could bring Dancy Arrow to tears.

  Grand-mère Letice had continued to pay for every test imaginable in a tireless effort to find out what was wrong with her grandson, and why, and to determine what might be done. Or so it would appear. What Letice was really doing was seeking to remove medical science from the presence of mystery. She tirelessly looked for evidence of such mystery and believed she found it in Saint Anthony’s prayer for Wisdom, a prayer that Saint Bonaventure favored and in which she found these words:

  . . . put forth Thy hand and touch my mouth, and make it a sharp sword to utter eloquently Thy words. Make my tongue, O Lord, as a chosen arrow, to declare faithfully Thy wonders. . .

  Touch my mouth? A chosen arrow? Arrow? To Letice, there was no mistaking that the words of that prayer were a portent. The doctors could test Bonaventure all they wanted.

  Although there were no definitive answers, the latest test showed that voice or no voice, Bonaventure’s hearing was exceptionally acute. However, the test did not quantify his ability. Everyone would have been shocked to know that he could hear such things as the blink of an eye from across the room, or the sound of a falling flower petal before it hit the floor. They would never have been able to fathom that the scope of his hearing wasn’t even accurately gauged by the sounds of blinking eyes and falling petals, or even by the sounds of shooting stars. For how can such a glorious gift be measured? Surely its value is tied to the giver’s intentions, which in the case of Bonaventure Arrow had to do with bringing peace to the living and the dead.

  Whenever he talked to Bonaventure, William always brought up the super hearing and encouraged the boy to listen as hard as he could. This lesson presented William’s heart with a paradox and placed him at war with himself.

  THE Wanderer continued to live his life unmarked by the clock or the calendar. For the longest time, he did not think of the past and he did not imagine the future. He simply ate and slept and breathed. And then he began to look at magazines and catalogs. Once, he found a magazine that was all about cars and the thought of steel slammed into his brain. That night he dreamed that he sat on a stool and looked into a mirror in a place that was blue with the smoke of cigarettes. He sat there in that dream, lighting matches, one after the other, and letting them burn to his fingertips. He sort of liked the pain. There was music in the background, but the only dancers were those little flames.

  The Wanderer had been in the asylum for nearly four years, although he couldn’t have told anyone that. And still he remained a John Doe.

  The Abundant Good Graces of His Silence

  DANCY read to Bonaventure constantly: newspapers, billboards, and his father’s childhood books. He had a sharp knack for fitting print to voice, and by the time Bonaventure was four years old, tests involving written instructions showed that he could read some words. He’d begun by associating words with pictures, as children always do, but in Bonaventure’s case, something more happened: the sounds of the stories came to him too, even if they existed in another place or time. He could hear whooshing lassos on the American plains, and the colors of rainbows in Ireland; he could detect Eskimos fishing through holes in the ice, and kites in the skies over Norway. Bonaventure Arrow could travel the world through the abundant good graces of his silence.

  William liked to be in the room at story time; it made him feel included. He loved to see Bonaventure snuggle as close to Dancy as he could get, his little head resting against her arm. William watched his son’s eyes move from side to side as he followed the words, and he noticed how Dancy would wait for him to finish looking at the pictures and then let him turn the page. William loved the sounds of Bonaventure’s breathing and Dancy’s voice. Sometimes he would sit on her other side, and she would wonder how it was that she felt some pressure there.

  One rainy afternoon, Bonaventure brought a different book for Dancy to read, one he’d found in a drawer in the front room. It was a photo album. He set the book in his mother’s lap and climbed up next to her. Dancy felt as though she’d been hit hard in the stomach. The room started spinning and suddenly became airless. When she made no move to open the album, Bonaventure opened it for her. When she still didn’t say anything, he took her hand and placed it atop the first picture. Dancy managed to take a deep breath, and equilibrium returned. She had never been able to talk to Bonaventure about his father. And they certainly had never looked at pictures of him; Dancy simply couldn’t bear it.

&n
bsp; William had been taken by surprise as well, and he wondered what Dancy would say.

  “Do you want me to tell you who that is?”

  Nod, nod.

  “It’s your father. It says William Arrow right there, see?”

  To hear her speak his name made William ecstatic.

  Head tilted; puzzled look. To Bonaventure, fathers were storybook people; some families had one and others didn’t, and some people called their father Dad or Daddy.

  Dancy realized that Bonaventure might not understand exactly what she was talking about, so she said, “It’s like Mr. Jarrett across the street. He’s the dad to John and Rosie, right? And Mrs. Jarrett is the mom, like I’m your mom.”

  Look of pondering.

  Dancy didn’t know what more she could say. She thought that maybe the pieces would fall into place as they looked at the pictures. “The writing under this one says it was taken on his birthday in 1930, so he would have been four years old, like you are now. See his party hat and the crepe paper streamers?”

  A look as if to say, —I love birthday streamers!

  Dancy turned toward the back of the album. “Here’s one when he was older.”

  Bonaventure pulled the book onto his own lap and lowered his head to study the photo. She put her arm around him and said, “Your father was a wonderful man, Bonaventure. He loved me and I loved him, and one day our love made you!”

  William punched at the air in his joy.