So did William.
Adelaide Roman was certain of her soul’s perfection, and so felt comfortable pointing out iniquities committed by others. To that end, she brought her religion with her wherever she went, including to her job at the United States Post Office.
“Yoo Hoo.”
“In the kitchen, Mama.”
Adelaide Roman sat down and placed the newest Sears Roebuck catalog on the table, saying she was entirely mindful that it was addressed to Creathie LaRue, but seeing how Providence changes things for certain mail recipients (namely, fornicators and liars), she believed the catalog had rightfully come into her possession. She supposed that forfeiting the Sears Roebuck catalog was just one of the consequences visited upon a person who run off in the night and then had the gumption six months later to come back from where she’d run off to with not only a husband but a child too, one she claimed was prematurely born. Not that Adelaide knew anything personal about Creathie LaRue. Just sayin’.
Bonaventure would have to wait through Grandma Roman’s entire wash, set, dry, and comb-out, because he had to stay clean for their standing date at Bixie’s Luncheonette. These lunch dates were a fairly recent development. He hadn’t been alone with his Grandma Roman much since that time when he was two and she’d threatened to cook his pink elephant in the oven. He only went along with it now because he loved Bixie’s and neither his mother nor grand-mère did, so Grandma Roman was his best chance of getting there.
His shirt collar chafed from Staley’s Sta-Flo laundry starch and his shoes felt way too tight, but being Bonaventure he wasn’t saying a word; and anyway, the discomfort brought him welcome distraction.
Grandma Roman perused the Sears Roebuck while she sat under the hairdryer, each page making a crinkly, rustling sound that Bonaventure liked very much, although its connection to his grandmother worried him. He never kept sounds that had to do with Grandma Roman, as he’d never even heard one he wanted. But he did like that crinkly sound of those pages, and after a few anxious moments he reasoned that the catalog was only indirectly related to her because, according to the United States Post Office, it really did belong to Creathie LaRue. So twenty minutes later, when Adelaide had her eyes closed against the mists of Helene Curtis Spray Net, Bonaventure tore out a page from the middle, folded it up real small, and tucked it in his pocket, where it would reside until it joined the mementos in that box beneath his bed.
The two of them finally headed for Bixie’s, where the specialty was always biscuits and gravy and where tin advertising signs decorated the walls, which is how Bonaventure came to develop a certain fondness for whiskey, billiards, and tobacco, charmed as he was by their very fine slogans: “Jack Daniel’s—Charcoal Mellowed Drop by Drop” and “Don’t Be Vague, Ask for a Hague—Hague Scotch Whiskey.” He also loved “Easy Eight’s Billiards & Pool—The Best Racks in Town!” and “Happiness Is a Cigar Called Hamlet.” But his highest admiration was reserved for “L.S.M.F.T.—Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” He particularly loved the pure, sparse poetry of those five initials, and the way they had of proclaiming the fineness of something in such a small confederation of alphabet letters. Bonaventure would sign those letters over and over, as if they were a little chorus in a tune about Bixie’s.
Grandma Roman ordered the meatloaf and a slice of soda cracker pie. Bonaventure had a grilled cheese sandwich with a strawberry milkshake, the accompanying straw of which naturally found its way down his shirt as another piece for the memento box, qualified as it was by the unique timbre of its gurgling, slurping sound.
Claude and Opal Rondelle, twins somewhere past fifty years old, were taking lunch at Bixie’s that day. Claude wore the dark green trousers and shirt of a working man because that is what he was—a fellow who cut grass, repaired radios and small appliances, and sharpened knives and scissors. Opal always had an apron on, even when she went out in public. She took in wash for a living, and once in a while she babysat.
Grandma Roman said the Rondelles always sat in a booth because they were midgets and couldn’t manage the stools at the counter. “You can tell they’re midgets even when they’re sitting down,” she was fond of saying. “They got that midget look to their features, like two little old elves who wandered off from the North Pole.” She always got a kick out of herself with that one.
Every time she spotted the Rondelle twins Grandma Roman would shake her head side to side and mutter the same thing, “Now I wonder just what in the Sam Hill their normal parents done to deserve it. I mean, Good Lord, those two must hafta buy their clothes in the children’s department. Don’t you think so, Bonaventure?”
Bonaventure began to sign a response, moving his hands around the story of the gumball machine that stood just inside the front door of Bixie’s, and the time Claude Rondelle had put two pennies in its slot and had given the gumballs to Bonaventure rather than keeping them for himself. Bonaventure still had them, one red and one yellow; he hadn’t chewed them because of the wonderful rattling sound they’d made as they left the machine’s glass bubble. He had barely started the story when his grandmother reached over and yanked his hands down and pressed them to his sides.
“Stop it!” she hissed. “It is not at all polite to draw attention to yourself like that. Honest to Christmas, sometimes I just don’t know where your mother’s head is. I positively don’t. You listen to me, Bonaventure Arrow. One day you’re gonna do that finger-wagging nonsense and end up arrested for being lewd and lascivious. Do you hear me?”
Bonaventure didn’t know the meaning of lewd and lascivious, but he did know the sound of a woman ashamed, and it was coming real loud from Grandma Roman.
She nudged him then and motioned toward a cross-eyed girl sitting at the end of the counter. Then she looked at Bonaventure and crossed her own eyes and said, “Where you at, Bonaventure? On my left or my right?” and laughed a snorty laugh.
After that, she talked about how she’d love to take him to hear Brother Harley John Eacomb preach about the sickness brought about by ignorance. She said that every single week she could hardly wait for Sunday to hurry up and get here.
“Hey, guess what,” she said. “There’s plans for Brother Eacomb to hold two special ceremonies and initiations down to the river come the twentieth of July. The first one is at two o’clock in the afternoon and the second one is at seven in the evening; there has to be two separate ceremonies because of the expected multitude, and Brother Eacomb needs to rest in between because he throws his whole self into saving souls. It would kill a lesser man, but Brother Eacomb just needs to rest a bit. Any-hoo-how, I’m thinking it would be a real treat for you to go with me because you, Mr. Bonaventure Arrow, are an interesting case. But like I said it’s not gonna happen until July.”
Bonaventure did not encourage her to go on. He knew there was no need.
“I been thinking, see. And what I been thinking is that Brother Eacomb can speak in tongues, by which I mean in languages only God can understand. Now, what makes these meetings special is that there’s gonna be the laying on of hands. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
She paused to allow Bonaventure to show some sign of eagerness, but he wouldn’t so much as blink. Keeping his face motionless around Grandma Roman was something he did on principle. Sometimes he listened only to her consonants, which erased all meaning from whatever she said, and sometimes he imagined her as a big old crow, squawking away and pecking at people.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that Brother Harley John Eacomb is a healer.” She paused again and threw her grandson a look meant to ask if he got her drift. When he didn’t respond, she continued with, “I’d say it stands to reason that Brother Eacomb is your destiny, young man. I absolutely would say that very thing.”
Bonaventure’s eyes widened the tiniest bit, but enough for her to notice.
“You heard me right. He’s a healer. Brother Eacomb can heal people and bring them to redemption. Why, sometimes folks don’t even know they’re si
ck. There might even be some in your very own family.” Lowering her voice, she added, “Even though I could name names, I won’t. You just take it from me that there’s folks whose sins have harmed the innocent; they are people who did things before you were born that they had no business doing. But like I said, you won’t hear any names from me. My lips are sealed and yours should be too, so don’t you go wagging your fingers or writing out notes about this conversation. This is confidential business between you and me.”
She dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin, folded it neatly, and laid it next to her plate, upon which rested one uneaten bite of rhubarb pie. Adelaide Roman happened to know that well-bred people never ate every bite.
“No, sir, you won’t hear their names from me,” she repeated.
She kept up her incessant chatter all the way home, complaining, among other things, about how some women wore white shoes before Memorial Day and then turned around and wore them long after Labor Day, like they didn’t have the sense God gave a flea. She complained about her job at the post office and about all the junk mail she had to handle, and about how most people didn’t have the manners to know they should remember their postal workers at Christmas. She insisted that not a single letter would ever get delivered in Bayou Cymbaline if it wasn’t for her diligence, considering how the only help she had on her shift was in the person of Eustace Hommerding or, as she called him, Useless Hommerding.
“I’m here to tell you that that man is the laziest human being in these United States. Why, just the other day he comes back from his mail route an entire twenty minutes later than he should have and he says to me”—and she screwed up her face and did her best to sound whiney—“ ‘I’m sorry Adelaide, it’s just my gout’s been acting up and it’s godawful painful. I got to go back and get some more of the cure from Miz Prefontaine.’ ” And then in her normal tone she said, “That would be your nigger woman he was talking about.”
Bonaventure heard a whip crack and the snapping of sliced-open skin.
“And you know what I says back?” I says, ‘You’re sorry all right, Eustace. You are the sorriest excuse for a mailman I have ever seen.’ Honest to Christmas, what does that good-for-nothing take me for? But I been thinking about things, and I think I just might contact the U.S. postmaster and see to it that Mr. Eustace Hommerding gets reprimanded. There is absolutely no reason I should have to work myself to death just because he never learned how to take care of his feet. I mean, can you just imagine someone with foot trouble sticking their neck out to be a mailman?”
She lowered her voice then and said, “You know what kind of name Hommerding is, don’tcha? It’s German. And just in case nobody’s ever told you, the Germans were enemies of the U.S. of A. in two big wars, and I don’t think there’s any of them ever got over losing twice. So what I’m wondering is how Mr. Eustace Hommerding could be a good American with him being a German and all. I’m just sayin’.”
Bonaventure Arrow lost himself in his silence.
EUGENIA Babbitt read aloud to The Wanderer, and on this day she’d begun The Count of Monte Cristo. The Wanderer listened intently, and the headaches came back full force.
Bonaventure heard the sound of swallowing that was going on in The Wanderer’s crooked throat. The man was swallowing fear, just as he’d done in the war.
Hearing Extra
THE hammock swayed as Bonaventure explored his silence from inside out and above and below. He heard cosmic vibrations flowing under dirt and through air, and the vivacious life of the lands and the oceans. He listened to sinuous underwater plants and the portamento movements of sea cows gone graceful as they moved through undulating sub aqua waves. He heard a river laugh as it tumbled along in the English town of Ottery St. Mary. He heard emperor penguins move atop ice as they waddled their way to the Antarctic Sea. His listening intensified day by day until he could hear the adagio movement of a nucleus inside an electron aria that floated through the operatic galaxy inside a single atom. And then he began to hear extra.
The extra was nothing to do with fishes in rivers or penguins on ice or operas that played inside atoms. The extra part had to do with what brought about a sound and what it could possibly mean. In the case of the marmalade spoon, the whir of the bluebottle fly was more than a buzzing; it also spoke of the splendor of courage. That was the extra part.
Every day brought new sounds that refracted and found him and roused his curiosity. He heard rooster feathers and catmint and sea glass, and the sound of a rabbit’s foot that whispered of running. Bonaventure Arrow was bringing his hearing homeward.
Very soon he would hear the innermost secrets that were concealed in the house on Christopher Street.
Drawing Near
BEING a big C. S. Lewis fan, Grand-mère Letice had given Bonaventure The Chronicles of Narnia to read. The story captivated him so much that he wanted to live it. There was no question that his mother’s closet was the one most like the wardrobe in Professor Digory Kirke’s house, the one that was the passageway to Narnia. But there was a problem: he was still afraid of that terrible sound that came from that box on the closet’s top shelf. He remembered how much it had scared him and made him feel sick to his stomach. He brought it up the next time he talked with his dad.
“I promise that box won’t hurt you,” William said.
And so Bonaventure went back into the closet.
His mother’s clothes made the sound of curtains brushing over the sill of an open window or dancing upon a very light breeze; one sweater in particular sang a comforting little song in its wispy cashmere voice. Dancy’s shoes, if listened to all at once, were a symphony of every kind of percussion from tapping and chiming to cymbals and drums. Bonaventure figured the shoes took their sounds from where they had walked, which explained why her cemetery shoes were as quiet as a saw bug rolling over moss. The low shelves held boxes that were full of hair curlers and rattail combs and half-empty cold cream jars. When he opened those boxes up even a crack, they sounded like a bunch of different radios playing all at once, each one trying to tell its stories the loudest. Bonaventure liked to get them all going to see if he could differentiate one from the other.
Though he avoided listening to that one certain box, he couldn’t help but catch a look at it every now and then. It was black and unlike the others in its size and the fact that it was cloth-covered. Bonaventure had never seen a cloth-covered box before and figured it had to be special, though he had no clue why it was living on a shelf in his mother’s closet. No sound at all came out of it that day, but the next time he went to play Narnia, that box said, “Bonaventure.”
How did the box know his name? What did it want? What would happen if he opened it right now? Would whatever was in it fly out? But that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to take something out of it. Bonaventure felt cold all over, as if he really had gone to Narnia and was standing in the snow.
“Bonaventure,” the voice said one more time, “come closer.”
Bonaventure stood rooted to the floor.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” said the voice from the box.
His father had promised that the box would not hurt him, so he looked up at it and put a question on his face: —Is it a good secret or a bad one?
“It’s a wrong secret,” the box replied.
And then Bonaventure heard the sound of a prison door slamming shut and the bolt sliding into place. It was the sound made by savage remorse as it locked up a human being, and it frightened him worse than before.
—BE QUIET! BE QUIET! BE QUIET! he shouted with the motion of his hands. His heart started to pound and he scrambled away.
“Wait!” the box cried. “Come back. Come back!”
But Bonaventure couldn’t do it. He ran to his room, took his memento box from under the bed, opened it up, took its good sounds into his ears, and sent them rushing to his thundering heart. He pulled his knees up to his chin and rocked back and forth until his mementos sang
him quiet.
Trinidad found him rocking like that when she came to his room to put laundry away. He started when she reached down to touch his shoulder.
“I knocked on your door, Mr. Bonaventure. Didn’t you hear me?”
He hadn’t heard her, which in and of itself was alarming.
“Are those goose bumps on you, child? It gotta be more than ninety-five degrees today. Why you be so cold?” And then the Knowing told her he’d got too close to an unnatural thing that dwelled within the house. Trinidad took Bonaventure to the kitchen and made him a cup of cocoa on that sweltering summer day. She could feel that the haunt was in the kitchen with them, so she addressed it silently, saying, “Now would be a good time for you to help this child with some of that love you think you got.”
William went to Bonaventure’s room that night.
Bonaventure couldn’t get the words out fast enough: —The box said it holds a wrong secret!
“I know.”
—I didn’t hear what it was, though. I got scared because I heard this other sound, like getting locked up. But I’ll go back. I promise. I want to help you, Dad. I really do.
“Just go when you’re ready, son. You know I would never put you in danger.”
Other sounds began to beckon after that; they were ones from Grand-mère’s chapel. Bonaventure couldn’t name the chapel’s main sound with any certainty, but it was one he heard in other places all the time, a sort of humming, and it was always good. He’d once decided to take some of that sound with him, and so had removed a sliver of wood from the crucifix that was mounted to the wall. He put it in his memento box for the nights he couldn’t sleep.
And then there was that other one, that small and sad kind of smothered-up noise. Bonaventure always heard it best over by the mosaic of the angel. Unlike the humming sound, this was a sound he never heard anyplace else. If he listened too closely, it made his skin hurt as if he’d been scraped and burned. Bonaventure did not take a souvenir of that sound to put in his memento box because it was too different to fit in. The memento box was a joyful place and not a place for a smothered thing.
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 19