The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  Bonaventure scooped out some marmalade with the spoon so recently visited by the bluebottle fly, put it into his mouth, and rolled it around a time or two before swallowing. He tucked the spoon into his trouser pocket then, because he thought that it really belonged in his memento box. No sooner had he tucked that spoon away than his stomach growled, so loud his mother heard it way over by the sink.

  Putting emphasis on the first syllable of her favorite nickname for him, Dancy asked, “Adventure Arrow, is there a lion in this house?” To which Bonaventure gleefully nodded as his stomach growled again.

  “Adventure Arrow, are you that lion?”

  Another vigorous nod.

  This was a game they played. Sometimes he was a spider, sometimes a snake or a fox or a shiny brown beetle; one time he’d been an albino squirrel, and yesterday he’d been a one-eyed, hook-beaked screech owl. His mother didn’t know that now he really was part fly because he had fly footprints inside him from the walked-upon spoon.

  “I beg your pardon, but you most certainly are not a lion,” she said. “You are well and truly Bonaventure Arrow and you live on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, and I’m your mama and don’t you forget it!”

  For someone who claimed to have chosen her child’s name with a haphazard peek at the phone book, Dancy Arrow spent a lot of time singing its praises. On a recent visit to Père Anastase, Bonaventure had noticed his father’s full name on the graveyard plaque. He’d tugged on Dancy’s sleeve, pointed to the name in the center, and raised his eyebrows to pose a question. She explained that Everest had been his father’s middle name.

  Bonaventure signed, —Middle name you?

  “My whole given name is Danita Celine; pretty fancy, huh?”

  —Middle name me?

  “Well, some names don’t need any help because they’re strong enough to stand on their own, and Bonaventure is one such name. Your Grandma Roman wanted me to give you Roman as a middle name, but that would have made you Bonaventure Roman Arrow, which I didn’t care for at all. People would hear it as roamin’, as in wandering aimlessly, so no thank you very much.”

  Dancy placed their eggs and toast on the table, sat down, and reached for the marmalade spoon. When her hand came up empty, she wondered out loud where in blue blazes it could have gone to. Bonaventure let her wonder. Some things he kept to himself.

  A happy breakfast in a sunny kitchen did not hold any guarantees. After supper on the third of July, just four days after Dancy had joked with Bonaventure about a lion in the room, another rage got hold of her. When it felt as if she would jump right out of her skin if Letice so much as looked at her, Dancy went to her room and doused her rage with the entire contents of the jelly jar, which on that day held enough liquor for at least five rages, possibly six, maybe more.

  It was dusk when Bonaventure heard something come to him clear out in the yard where he was trying to catch fireflies in a mayonnaise jar that had holes poked in its lid. What he heard was the sound of Dancy peeing herself because she was too drunk to know any better. But he heard something more than urine streaming out of her body—he heard anguish, and it sounded like someone gulping for air and choking when it got some. Bonaventure followed the sounds to his mother’s room, where he found her passed out on the floor with her mouth gaping open and drool running out one side. He listened intently for the sound of her breathing but could barely hear it for the loudness of that anguish, which was drowning out everything.

  The anguish was coming from inside the closet. Maybe it was that thing his dad had talked about that he was supposed to get, that thing inside a box.

  Bonaventure grasped one of his mother’s hands in both of his and signed the letters W-A-K-E U-P into her palm, and when that didn’t work, he patted her cheeks; and when that didn’t work, he pounded on the floor. Even though he had no voice, his lips moved around Mama, Mama, over and over, and his face wrinkled up into pitiful, soundless crying.

  The visiting beat came to Bonaventure’s heart then, adding strength and helping him shake his mother hard enough to wake her.

  Dancy stayed all gin-drowsy and stupid, though she did manage to turn herself over and crawl to the bathroom on her hands and knees. Her long blond hair fell into the toilet as she retched up bile and vomit. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that she realized her little boy had seen her be sick, after he’d found her sour-breathed and passed out and stinking of piss. What she didn’t know was that her dead husband had seen the whole thing too.

  William hadn’t meant for anything like that to happen. The sight had caused him to feel great pain, as if he had suffered a shower of blows to a body he no longer had.

  Bonaventure was never the same. In the time it took to go from catching fireflies in the yard to finding his mother unconscious from pain, he’d got caught up in constant worry. He began to break down the sounds that came into his silence, checking their structure for harmful details. Such concentration took a lot of work, and sometimes he needed to sift through the sounds to find one that was pleasant and restful.

  It was during one of these sifting times that he picked up on the Spanish moss whispering about a lady who felt itching on the bottoms of her feet.

  On the Late Afternoon of a Fine Summer Day

  TRINIDAD Prefontaine had been scouting her land and finding its medicines ever since she’d come to Bayou Cymbaline. She harvested trees of their apples and plums, and a small vineyard of its grapes, and then she turned the bounty into pies and tarts and bottles of juice. She pulled wild plants from the base of tree trunks and from under the feathery fronds of wild ferns. She plucked them and dried them and boiled them into tinctures or ground them into powders to be used as curatives.

  She’d set up a stand at the edge of the Neff Switch road, selling her pies and tarts and juices, and giving the cures away for free, some for illnesses and some for secrets. For example, Enoch Willets and Tabula Cristy held hurtful secrets inside them. Enoch, a clerk at Graber’s Hardware, never told anyone that he liked to knit. He was trying to weave himself into someone a woman would let close enough for him to talk to and court and hopefully marry her. He’d been told too many times that he was ugly, and the knowledge had made him painfully shy.

  Tabula, a nurse’s aide at the hospital, loved to unravel tablecloths in the evenings, carefully transforming them into tight balls of thread. She was a nervous young woman with no self-esteem, who liked to think she could unravel herself until she disappeared.

  Vida van Demming’s secret was a good deal riskier. Vida did not consider herself an official kleptomaniac, although she really did steal. She took things regularly from Claymore’s Candy & Gift Emporium or from F. W. Woolworth’s Five & Dime, but they were always small things that fit up her sleeve or in the pocket of her skirt or in her cleavage inside her brassiere; and she never took anything that cost more than seventy-five cents. Also, she did her stealing in the morning and was sure to put everything back in the stores before they closed at five p.m. What stood in the shadows of Vida’s stealing was the fact that there wasn’t one single thing that made her feel alive. There were precious few thrills in Bayou Cymbaline, so Vida made do with the stealing.

  Enoch, Tabula, and Vida all found their way to Trinidad’s stand out on the Neff Switch road. When Trinidad handed Enoch his bottle of grape juice in a paper sack, she slipped in an envelope containing dried sage. On the front of the envelope were the instructions: Put some under your tongue before you talk to a special lady.

  When Tabula returned home, she found a small pouch that was gathered closed at the top with a drawstring. The pouch was filled with lavender flowers, rosemary leaves, mint, comfrey root, and thyme. A note attached to the end of the string said: Put in your bath and think good things.

  When Enoch saw Tabula in Graber’s Hardware, he slipped some of that sage beneath his tongue and asked if he might take her to hear the concert band on Sunday at the gazebo in the park. Tabula Cristy said yes.

  Vida van Demm
ing, the semi-kleptomaniac, noticed that the apple pie she’d bought was wrapped in a page from the Times-Picayune. She smoothed the paper out and got to reading it and ended up in a letter-writing relationship with a man from Port Arthur, Texas, who had placed an ad for a pen pal in the second column of the personals. It was enough to help Vida quit the stealing.

  Things changed in Bayou Cymbaline. The bullied took charge of their lives, gamblers turned their backs on dice, and folks in general were happier. Everyone knew where to find Trinidad. They came to her for baked goods, and for the powders and potions that cured corruptions of the flesh and abscesses of the soul and the mind.

  Trinidad was interested in every customer, but none so much as the two women and the silent little boy who drove up to her stand in the late afternoon of a fine summer day in 1956. Letice was on her third driving lesson that day. She felt her life was more than half over and it was high time she learned to get around on her own. Dancy chose the Neff Switch road to practice on because it was good and straight and not heavily traveled.

  Bonaventure was sitting in the backseat, listening to the swishing tail of a cat that was watching a goldfinch balance on a twig in Texarkana, when from nowhere that never-seen companion came to run though the various parts of his heart and sail all through his veins. Bup-bup, bup-bup, it swirled through his body and out through his ears and filled up the car and the road and the land. It grabbed his heartbeat up into the sky to join with a perfect twin rhythm.

  “There are an awful lot of people out here for a road that isn’t used much,” Letice said.

  “Sure seems like it,” Dancy replied. “I’ve never seen it this busy, but then again I haven’t been out this way in a while. Do you want to keep driving, or would you feel better if I took over?”

  “Well, it is making me a little nervous. What’s that up ahead there? Can you tell?”

  “It looks like a stand of some kind—somebody selling stuff,” Dancy said. “It must be pretty good—looks like there’s a sizable crowd. Maybe we should check it out.”

  “Yes, let’s. My neck is getting stiff; I’ve had enough for one day. We’ll see what’s for sale and then you can drive us home.”

  They had to wait while a black woman who was wearing a dress made of bright blue cotton and a hat made of tall fescue grass took care of her customers, all of whom were praising her wares.

  Trinidad’s transposed heart was pounding against the right side of her rib cage, pumping blood through her veins, swelling them up and making them joyous. And floating upon her fast river blood was that delicate quivering feather.

  Bonaventure heard that switched-around pounding and it sounded to him like a drum that could sing.

  “Hello, there, my name Trinidad Prefontaine. How you all be on this beautiful day?”

  “We’re just fine, thanks,” Dancy replied. “I’m Dancy Arrow, and this is my mother-in-law, Mrs. Arrow, Senior, and that handsome young man over there is my son, Bonaventure. We were out for a drive and stumbled onto your stand here. Everything sure does look good!”

  Trinidad smiled and took a good long look. She didn’t think there’d been any stumbling about it, not with that pounding taking place in her heart. She knew the older woman, perhaps not by the name of Arrow, but she’d seen her someplace before. And the child’s eyes were dearly familiar. If she had ever doubted that her Purpose had brought her to Bayou Cymbaline, she doubted it no more. She didn’t know the details yet, only knew that fate had something to do with these two women and their little boy. Of that she had no doubt. Not even the faintest shadow of a doubt.

  While his mother and grand-mère talked with the lady in the fescue-grass hat, Bonaventure listened to the syncopated rhythm of her work-worn but beautiful, sturdy black hands.

  Letice was thoughtful on the way home. “Did she look familiar to you, Dancy?”

  “The lady at the stand? No. I’m sure I’ve never seen her before. Why? Do you think we should know her?”

  “There’s something about her, but I can’t think what.” This bothered Letice, though she couldn’t imagine why.

  For the rest of that day and every day to follow, Trinidad Prefontaine waited for the recollection to come to her of how she knew the woman called Mrs. Arrow, Senior, and for the memory of where she might have seen that little boy’s eyes. It would come to her as a Knowing. In the meantime, she would go about her business as best she could, bringing cures to the citizenry of Bayou Cymbaline as their fixed-in secrets presented themselves.

  Trinidad spent the rest of the summer cleaning out the root cellar she’d discovered while clearing the wild cucumber that had spread all over its hatchway doors. Evening was taken up with the carding and spinning of wool that she’d bartered for, and then dyed with colors she’d pulled from the land. She gathered seeds from sunflowers and pine trees. She sorted them and boiled them and extracted their oil. She thought about that little boy and how he had not said one solitary word on that day when the Arrows had come to her stand.

  She baked.

  She sang.

  She waited.

  Sassafras and Spanish Moss

  AFTER recovering from her low moment of grief drowned by drink, Dancy Arrow went to the bank and withdrew the insurance benefits paid her all those years ago by the Greater Louisiana Life & Casualty Company in compensation for the loss of her husband. She used the sum to purchase a neat little shop on Seminole Street, which she filled with potted palms and wicker furniture and equipment such as a beautician would use: an aqua-blue sink, three sizes of curlers, five hundred bobby pins, four pair of special scissors, and some strong-smelling liquids in dark brown bottles. Added to all that were two Halliwell Advantage hair dryers and the cosmetology certificate she’d earned about a million years ago. She opened Glamour by Dancy and commenced doing hair, plucking eyebrows, and painting nails in hues of Passion Fruit Red and Sweetheart Pink.

  There was no denying that Dancy possessed a superb talent when it came to administering the professional’s equivalent of the Lilt Home Permanent Wave. She could bring out the best in eyebrows and make dishpan hands look pretty darned smooth. Her clientele grew in no time. She worked from nine until five, six days a week, and slept in on Sundays instead of going to church.

  Dancy Arrow had found her calling. She knew it wasn’t as if she was curing disease or feeding the poor, but she liked having somewhere to go, and she liked that she could make other women feel a little better about themselves. Something new had come into her life, and a small part of Dancy started to heal. The jelly jar of gin began to go dry—a state in which it remained.

  Letice told her that she did not need to worry about money, but she did not discourage her business pursuit, even though running the household suffered some because of it. They still hadn’t found Mrs. Silvey’s replacement. In fact, there hadn’t been a single response to the ad Letice was running in the Daily Presse. The house was haphazard and their meals were paltry. Letice never had been much of a cook, and even though Dancy could have done better, she’d lost interest in cooking after William was killed. They were eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, or baloney, or toasted cheese and tomato. On a good day they might have spaghetti.

  Dancy felt bad about all those slapped-together meals and about spending so much time away from home. On a lazy Sunday she came up with a surprise. “Adventure Arrow,” she said. “I did some shopping yesterday. How’s about we go to the kitchen and whip us up some of that filé gumbo you like?”

  Bonaventure didn’t know his mother could make filé gumbo; Mrs. Silvey had always made it. Nor did he know that Dancy had once read cookbooks and would practice a recipe until she got it just right, back when she was trying to be the best wife ever.

  In no time at all, they were dancing together as Dancy tried to sound like Hank Williams singing to good lookin’ about what she had cookin’.

  That little bit of healing that had begun inside her allowed the filé gumbo to bring a good memory to Dancy instead of
that horrible night when the police had come to the door. This good memory had to do with her Cormier relations and how they were fond of eating crayfish and calling them mudbugs, a name she found a tad off-putting. She shared the memory with Bonaventure, who loved the word mudbugs.

  While Dancy washed her hands, Bonaventure crawled halfway into a bottom cupboard to come up with some crockery bowls, a black Dutch oven, and a well-used cast iron skillet that was so heavy he could barely lift it. Dancy went to the Kelvinator fridge and took out the sausage she’d bought, along with the holy trinity of Louisiana cooking: bell peppers, onions, and celery. Bonaventure climbed up on a stool to watch his mother chop the vegetables while the sausage turned brown and the kitchen filled up with a pow-pow sizzle and a mouth-watering smell.

  William sat on the kitchen counter, thoroughly enjoying being with his wife and his son. He’d never stopped missing Cajun cooking, and this was going to be good. But then he remembered that he could not eat.

  Dancy took flour and butter and commenced making the roux, setting the butter to melting in the Dutch oven over a low blue flame and sprinkling flour in while she stirred it with a whisk. “Never forget, Bonaventure, that a good roux has to be stirred real fast and cooked real slow,” she said.

  An okeydokey nod that said, —Yes ma’am. I will never forget about the roux.

  She sautéed the vegetables right in with the roux and then put the sausage in the skillet. The last thing she started was the filé powder made from dried sassafras, which would be used to thicken the gumbo. Grandma Cormier had used okra to thicken, but Dancy preferred her okra deep-fried and served on the side.