The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

by Rita Leganski

  “You have to be quiet now, miss. Drink Calypso’s tea. It will send you to sleep.” Suville was not willing to compromise her reputation for the sake of this stupid, sniveling, lovesick white girl. “I’ll come back when you are ready,” she said.

  Calypso poured hot water into the cup and let it steep for a moment before holding it out to Letice. She began to speak then in the Creole patois that she used on such occasions. It was a way she had of hypnotizing as she slipped into voodoo ways.

  “Drink it, miss. It take you away from here. You know your spirits then, and the angels gwine come to help you.”

  Her words encouraged Letice, coaxing her to finish the tea. When she had drunk it all, Calypso took the cup and began to read the bits of herbs that had settled on the bottom, and then in a mesmerizing rhythm, she spoke of what the voodoo kind of hoodoo had conjured:

  “Look at them writings over on that wall. Even though you got your back turned, them writings, they looking at you. You listen to Calypso and I tell you about the eyes and the teeth in them writings. Fearful, monstrous things they is. Listen good now. Them writings, they you. And they mean something. Something bad. They quiet right now, but they gonna scream one day. Fearful things. Too much fear. Fear of numbers. Everything be numbered. The days till you bleed at your moon time be numbered. The days you carry a child be numbered. You number for that done come up with this baby, eh? And seven. A body got to fear the oddness of a seven. One too many for half a dozen. Two too many to count on one hand. Three too many for the corners of the earth. Seven years a long time. In seven years your childhood pass. In seventeen years your girlhood pass. Do you see all them sevens over on that wall? They all in the Good Book: seven plagues, seven sorrows, seven deadly sins. Seven times seven gwine come to you, girl. You listen to Calypso now. The devil, he coming. I know it in my bones. I know it like I know my own hand. Too much gone wrong now. Mercy, Lord, too much gone wrong now. The mirror done broke and your life looking back at you from all them sharp glass pieces. There is words left here in the bottom of your cup. They say that all the good you do be buried under bad luck. Look out for the numbers. Look out for them sevens.”

  This soliloquy on the written word, this waxing poetic in Bayou patois, was remarkable for one thing: Calypso could not read. She was an émigré from the deep country, raised away from schooling and the influence of science; a frightened and gullible believer, a conjurer who gathered what drained from superstition and then attached it to numbers and meaningless words. Calypso was not a bad woman. She simply inhabited the dark side of her mind, a mind choked by a painful past endured in the dampness back of the swamp, for it was in that part of her mind where she felt empowered, in that part of her mind where she felt safe. And that was where she took all of the girls who came to Suville Jean-Baptiste.

  “Seven times seven . . . the devil, he coming . . . seven times seven” wound around Letice’s mind, hypnotizing her fears. Calypso’s words became drawn out and distorted as the walls began to expand and contract like the smooth yellow skin on a bullfrog’s throat. The words became a lullaby then, and Letice gave in to sleep.

  Suville came to the room and began to bathe her patient, pouring water over Letice’s outer womb. Suville had entered a trance of her own, one in which she saw herself as the reincarnated John the Baptist. But Suville was nothing of the kind. Suville Jean-Baptiste brought no babies into life; Suville Jean-Baptiste took babies to death.

  A cramping came to Letice then, and a sweet-smelling cloth came down over her face. Suville took the curette into her right hand and began.

  The infant never saw that small special knife, but the infant felt the scraping. With care and precision, Suville placed torn placenta and tattered baby into a basin being held by the insane Calypso.

  The past and the future descended upon Letice, sweeping her deep into hallucination and bizarre phantasmagoria:

  Tristan stands before her, hand outstretched. The two of them dance over treetops. They are covered by the past they share and the love they were born with. Then they are dancing at Bal Masque until she finds herself alone beneath a tree and it becomes a pew and she is in the church of her childhood. She holds a book but cannot decipher the words on its pages. Two doors are painted on the ceiling of the church, and she believes that one of them leads to heaven, but she does not know which one. Saint Anne and her daughter, the Virgin Mary, stand frozen in statue serenity on the side altars, but Letice knows that they can see her.

  “You were baptized right there,” the Virgin says. Letice cups her hand in the baptismal font and brings the water to her mouth. She drinks it down in hopes that it will wash away her sins. And in her dream her innocence is restored; she can feel the tightness of virginity between her legs once again, and Letice knows the innocence of the newly born.

  And then she steps into the confessional, but no priest is there to hear her sins. Next, she is walking up the center aisle, dressed in white, a miniature bride on her way to First Communion, clutching a book of prayer. A circlet of flowers rests on the communion rail. She cradles it in both hands and floats up to place it on the Holy Mother’s head, a crown for the church’s Queen.

  And then Letice is a bride, placing a flower at the Virgin’s feet. But she is simultaneously in the back of the church, attending her own wedding as both bride and guest. She moves to take a seat, but an usher tells her that she must sit at the front. She gets only as far as the middle pew when she is startled by a disruption at the altar. She watches her bride-self cry, for the groom is not Tristan. Letice is to marry a stranger.

  And then she is a mother, and the bells ring out at her baby’s baptism. She holds her baby in her arms and begins to feel a spreading wetness. Letice screams when she sees that blood is soaking through the blanket the baby is wrapped in. She folds the cloth back to find the source of the bleeding and sees that her child has been torn to pieces as if chewed by a wild beast. And then that baby is gone and a little boy holds her hand.

  A casket rises up before the altar then, solid and sealed and still. Someone recites the joyful mysteries as the casket is covered in stained-glass light, and Letice cannot find her little boy. She can hear something a far way off. It is the sound of mad laughter known as un fou rire and it is coming from the fearful monstrous writings on the wall, the ones Calypso spoke of. And then the laughter melts away and all that she hears is the cry of a baby.

  Suville laid the knife down, pleased with her work.

  Calypso washed and dried Letice and packed a dressing between her legs. The abortionist was busy washing her own hands, and Letice continued to sleep. No one saw Calypso take a bit of the dead fetus’s bloodied tissue from the porcelain basin and smear it between two glass prisms as she imagined the voodoo queen Marie Laveau would have done in the making of a powerful wanga.

  “Have you finished cleaning her, Calypso?”

  “Yes, Miss Suville.”

  “Then call your daughter in to sit with her. Another patient will be here soon.”

  “Trinidad,” Calypso called. “Come in here and sit with this girl.”

  Ten-year-old Trinidad came into the room and perched on a stool near the foot of the bed. Calypso took satisfaction in the fact that her daughter had on a very clean head cloth. She didn’t want this white girl to take Trinidad for a sharecropper’s child or for white trash either. She wanted this white girl to know that Trinidad be a Fontenaise.

  Trinidad thought the young woman looked as white as the sheets; even her lips had lost their color. The only sign that she was alive was the slight rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. She looked so very young.

  A breeze whispered through the room, bringing with it the sound of a newborn’s cry. Trinidad could feel the air on her own skin and could see it quiver through the long brown hair that surrounded the sleeping girl’s face. Trinidad stared at the girl in the bed, watching for some sign of stirring. She looked hard enough to see a bruised and bloodied angel place a kiss on its mothe
r’s face. The tiny thing looked at Trinidad then, with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, so beautiful they could only have come from God, and she felt for that angel baby and for its bleeding young mama every kind of compassion.

  The following morning Calypso helped Letice to dress. When they finished, Calypso handed her a carved wooden box. Inside it were the prisms that held the relic of Letice’s dead baby between them like so many drops of martyr’s blood.

  Calypso slipped back into that thick Creole patois and whispered, “You keep this with you. This be you baby. You let it know you be sorry. You still be its mama. You has to keep this baby safe now. I gwine put your baby in this bag with the bandages you need. Don’t you tell you mama, now. She mean this baby harm.”

  When Emmaline came to collect her, Letice was sitting up in a chair, fully dressed, with several folded rags packed between her legs to soak up the blood that wept from her uterus like sticky, dark red syrup.

  “She did well,” Suville assured Emmaline Molyneaux. “Keep a clean dressing on her. There are several in that bag. No baths until the bleeding stops. And no sex. Do you have any questions?”

  Emmaline blushed and cleared her throat before voicing what was on her mind. “Will she be able to have other children? Will her future husband be able to tell anything?”

  “There is no physical reason she cannot have more children,” Suville said, and turned around to remove something from a chest of drawers behind her. She held a small pouch out to Emmaline. “As for a future husband, brew this as you would a tea and give it to her before the wedding night. It will bring about a bloody show that will make her seem a virgin.”

  “Is there any chance that this has disfigured her somehow?” Emmaline persisted.

  Suville was enraged by the woman’s impudence. How dare she question her expertise? But her face remained composed. “She has not been harmed,” Suville said.

  But Suville Jean-Baptiste was wrong about that. Letice’s heart and soul had been scraped to a bloody pulp by the sharp and gleaming, delicate curette.

  They remained in New Orleans for five more days, during which time Emmaline alternately browbeat, comforted, and threatened Letice until she’d convinced the girl of what had to be done.

  “We’ll put you out, Letice. No one will help you”—and then—“I love you, sweetheart. You’re my own sweet girl. I only want what’s best for you”—and then—“I’ll ruin them, Letice. Tristan’s father works for us. I’ll ruin the entire family. Is that what you want?”

  Emmaline was relentless. She finally broke her daughter, and they began to rehearse what Letice would say and how she would say it.

  The day after returning home, Letice found Tristan in the tack room.

  “God, I missed you,” he said, reaching for her, but Letice pulled away.

  Tristan looked stunned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tristan, I’m going to marry Remington Arrow.” Letice brushed some lint from her sleeve in an effort to appear very casual. “Don’t look so shocked. You knew this was going to happen.”

  Tristan shook his head as if to clear it and said, “You said you wouldn’t go through with that wedding. You wanted to marry me, remember?” He reached for her again, and again she pulled away.

  “Oh, honestly, Tristan, you never really believed that, did you?”

  The hurt on his face was unmistakable. “Letice, what are you saying? We love each other. I only need a little more time; I almost have enough money saved . . .”

  “Tristan, you’ll never have enough money.”

  She may as well have thrown ice water over him. When he was able to speak, he stammered, “This is about money?”

  “Not just money,” Letice answered in a voice that seemed slightly amused. “Did you really think I would marry a stable hand?”

  “Letice, why are you talking like this? What’s happened?”

  “You almost ruined my life is what’s happened, Tristan. You got me pregnant.” Letice slipped the tone of bitterness into her charade.

  “Pregnant?” Tristan was momentarily speechless. “We’ll get married right away!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I got rid of it.”

  Tristan looked her in the eye and said, “You’re lying.”

  “No. I’m not. You were fun, Tristan. But that’s all. My mother knows everything.” Letice went on, “She wants you to leave; as I do. If you breathe one word about this, she’ll bring your father into it. Mother will accuse him of stealing and he’ll never find work again, not to mention the shame.” And then she echoed Emmaline’s words: “Is that what you want?”

  Tristan turned away from her and simply said, “I’ll go.”

  Letice reported back to her mother, then took to her bed and slipped fully into numbness. Her only consolation was that she had loved him enough to let him go.

  Emmaline went to her husband to tell him that Tristan Duvais would be leaving their employ. Horatio Molyneaux was distressed and suggested they raise his pay.

  “No dear. Let the boy go. I don’t like the way he looks at Letice.”

  Emmaline’s threat had done the trick. Tristan told his parents he wanted to do something else with his life. They said they didn’t understand. He could hardly look at their faces when he said he wanted a better life than the one that they had managed.

  Remington Arrow came to call on the following Sunday, and the elder Molyneauxs regretted to say that Letice was ill but should be fine in a week or so. Hardly two months after her abortion, Letice stood at the altar as Remington’s bride. She went through the motions, she spoke the vows, but her heart was not in attendance.

  During the reception, Emmaline made certain that Letice drank the tea as advised by Suville, all the while assuring her that everything had worked out for the best.

  Letice played out her part. It was she who reached for Remington that night, and in the morning the sheets were stained with false virginity, just as Suville had said they would be.

  The carved wooden box was kept in a locked drawer of her letter-writing desk for years, though she took it out and looked at it all the time. When her chapel had been completed, after Remington died, Letice placed that box in the niche she’d had built into the wall beneath the mosaic of the Angel Lailah, guardian of babies from conception to birth. But the ache of regret stayed with her.

  Trinidad never forgot the beautiful eyes of the baby she’d seen cross over in that room on St. Philip Street. It was those eyes she saw so many years later in the face of Bonaventure Arrow, who’d inherited them from his paternal grandmother on the old-moneyed Molyneaux side.

  A Reasonable Supposition

  COLEMAN Tate laid out The Wanderer’s possessions on his desk in an effort to determine some sort of hierarchy, some meaningful strategy, some line of dominoes ready to fall. Had he been less inclined toward cold, hard facts, he might have seen them as a kind of gris-gris.

  Since the man’s cash was still held in a vault at the asylum, Tate used a dollar bill of his own as stand-in. Given the amount the man had carried, he assumed he had closed a bank account. Tate figured that one did such a thing when one did not intend to return to that bank, either out of dissatisfaction or because one is moving on. In this case, he favored the moving-on theory. Tate also believed the absence of a wallet to be deliberate. The man did not want to carry proof of who he was, or perhaps he wished to forget his identity altogether.

  The matchbook bearing the inscription Zip’s Tavern—Melvindale, Michigan seemed like half a clue, since there had been no package of cigarettes or even a cigar to go with it. And then of course there was the fact that none of the matchsticks had been burned. A souvenir perhaps? Tate consulted an atlas. Melvindale was near Detroit.

  The newspaper was a common enough thing—people bought newspapers every day. The clue this one provided was the date. It placed the perpetrator in Chicago on December 1, 1949. It had been neatly folded as if to fit in an inner coat pocket and be taken out later to read.
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  The detective believed the killer had considered the button to be the most valuable of the objects he carried with him; it seemed a sentimental thing. The button was made of brass, had a shank inset into holes, and bore the Great Seal of the United States on its front and, on its back, the words Scovill Manufacturing Company, along with two stars. Coleman Tate had served in the army himself and knew it to be the button of an enlisted man. He deduced that the man had fought in World War II; perhaps that was where he’d suffered the injury to his face. Perhaps not.

  The paper napkin struck Tate as a whimsical thing. The only characteristic that set it apart from any other paper napkin was the slogan printed on it: Memphis—Home of the Blues. It seemed to Tate that the man might have identified with the notion and general mindset of the blues. Maybe he was a killer with a soft spot for the sad side of romantic. Maybe he’d been jilted a time or two. Maybe he felt no one could love his ruined face.

  It occurred to the detective that the objects had all come from different locations, and on the heels of that idea he began to arrange them geographically. He situated the dollar bill and the matchbook toward the top of the desk as if to place them near Detroit; he then placed the newspaper slightly lower and to the left as if sitting west of Detroit in Chicago. The napkin he placed southerly, where Memphis would be. He believed it likely that more trains or buses bound for New Orleans left from Chicago rather than Detroit, which didn’t explain the Michigan connection; he would have to come back to that. He deemed it a reasonable supposition that William Arrow’s killer had traveled from Chicago, thence to Memphis, which would have been a likely stop, and wound up in New Orleans, where he started to use the public library with a specific purpose in mind.

  The next day Tate went to Union Station to check a schedule and see if there was such a route. There was.