PROGRESS REPORT
IN THE MATTER OF WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW (DECEASED)
Upon careful review and consideration of the items found in the possession of John Doe, I have determined that the perpetrator most likely took a train from Chicago to New Orleans on or shortly after December 1, 1949. I will continue pursuing this line of inquiry. Further findings to follow.
A couple of sounds had come to Bonaventure, and he’d saved them up for Tate: they were a motor sound and the sizzle of a match. While the investigator met with Letice to discuss his report, Bonaventure raced a small die-cast metal car on the floor of the foyer, sending it flying across the marble tiles until it spun out and crashed and flipped over on its top. When the detective reached for the doorknob upon leaving, Bonaventure placed the tiny car within Tate’s hand and wrapped his fingers around it as if to say, —Here. Take this. You can keep it.
That toy car had an official name: Matchbox. Bonaventure had given Tate a double clue.
That night, Coleman Tate turned the toy over and over in his hand while he ruminated about the case. He determined that Michigan, not Chicago, was the place to look; Melvindale, specifically, Zip’s Tavern to be exact, and he began to assemble a plan. The first thing he did was obtain the police photograph taken of John Doe at the time of the murder. Coleman Tate didn’t need to prove the man’s guilt; he merely needed to find out his name.
Remains of a Shared Past
SOMETIMES the remains of a shared past unearth themselves; memories emerge from the crust that covers them and they are newly discovered by the mind. So it was for Letice and Trinidad when they were the only ones home, working out menus for the upcoming week.
The kindness on Trinidad’s face took Letice back to the quiet child who’d sat at her bedside while she’d cramped and bled and dreamed a bad dream. At the very same moment, Trinidad once again saw the frightened young woman who was white as the sheets, and the bloody little ghost with the beautiful eyes. Each woman suspected then that they had met in a room on St. Philip Street in New Orleans a long time ago. They recalled the how and the why of it, but a sense of politesse prevented either one from voicing the memory of what had gone on behind the dark green door.
Secret memories have the power to isolate, and even an unspoken sharing is soothing. Letice steered the conversation in a direction meant to uncover the past without bringing it up directly, and Trinidad followed her lead.
“Where are you from, Trinidad? Originally, I mean.”
“Well, I be born in Terrebonne Parish, but we call it by the Cajun, Paroisse Terrebonne. My mama and me we live about an hour’s walk outside Bayou Cane. There wasn’t no streets or anything like that where we lived; just a bunch of Negro families in cabins. We all work the fields for the man who own the land. Mama and me, we live there until right after my birthday when I turn nine years old.”
“You mention only your mother,” Letice said.
“Yes, ma’am. That because I don’t ever know my daddy. My mama say he die when I be a baby too young to remember. She say he be a fine man who had some education. His family name was Fontenaise.”
“How did your mother support you?”
“Well, like I say, we work in the fields outside Bayou Cane until Mama found us work in New Orleans. We worked for a woman on St. Philip Street.”
There it was. The first implied evidence.
“She found work for you too?” Letice asked.
“Yes, ma’am. We work together for a Creole lady. I did the washing and Mama help the lady with her work. Mama be in charge of the tea. See, this lady used certain teas in her work.”
Letice did not miss the second offering. As if propelled toward a full confrontation with her past, she asked, “What was it the lady did?”
“She doctored females is all I know; she say she put them back together. Some of them that come to her, they all excited to be there, and they fall all over theyselves thanking the Creole lady. But there be a terrible sadness on others. I feel real bad for the sad ones. Always when one of the sad ones go back out the door I think to myself, ‘Lord, that girl look like she still need help.’ Of course, I be only ten years old at the time, but I surely did feel bad for them what had come to the Creole lady and left all covered in sadness.”
Confirmation came over them all of a piece, and both were sure of the memory. Their eyes met long enough to acknowledge the truth, and then, as if by unspoken agreement, they wrapped that memory back up in quiet.
Letice was the first to reach for idle conversation. “You mentioned once that you spent time in an orphanage, but you didn’t say how you got there. What happened?”
“My mama die when I be eleven. Don’t nobody know for sure what it was killed her, though. Bibelot was the one saw it come on. Bibelot shared a room with us, and as I look back on it, I think Bibelot maybe a prostitute, cuz sometimes there be a man the other side of the curtain with her, and it not always the same man. And Bibelot, she make sweet talk to whatever man be with her, and she wear a plain dress when one of them not there, and nothing but her chemise when one of them was. That’s when Mama would grab my arm and rush us out the door.
“Anyway, Bibelot say Mama die from a spider bite on the soft side of her ankle. I remember she got a blister there, and then a rash come and her whole foot swell up real big and her skin split open and her foot and leg turn real, real dark. I begged her to show the Creole lady cuz the Creole lady know about medicines, but Mama say no. She say she got a curse on her and she hide that swelling. I think she afraid we lose our jobs if the Creole lady think Mama been cursed. So Mama wrap her foot and leg in a bandage and go to a voodoo woman name of Pleasance who give her a amulet. That amulet don’t do no good. The fever come on and an awful terrible sickness. Three days later, she die.”
“How did you get to the orphanage?”
“Well, don’t nobody know exactly what to do with a colored girl who got no mama or daddy left, so Bibelot take me to the Creole lady and ask her what to do, and the Creole lady say to take me to Charity Hospital. Bibelot take me there and tell me to sit nice and quiet until somebody ask me my name and then I supposed to tell how I never know my daddy and how my mama be dead from a poison bite. It seem like most of the day go by, and my stomach just about turn inside out I be so hungry, when this woman come up and ask me who I waiting for. I tell her just like I supposed to, and before I knew what was what them folks send me to the Providence Asylum. But I be too old for there, so somebody from that place take me up to Lafayette Parish where the Sisters of the Holy Family look out for colored children who got nobody else. I remember then about my Auntie Henriette here in Bayou Cymbaline—she the one to leave me the house out on the Neff Switch road. The Sisters send her a letter, but she couldn’t find a way to take me in, so they kept me at the orphanage and it all work out for the good because that’s where I met the boy I married; his name be Jackson Prefontaine.”
“Ah, and that’s where you learned about Mary,” Letice said.
“Yes, ma’am. That be where I learn about Mary. And where I learn how to sew, and how to read, and how to write with a pencil. The only thing I didn’t learn real good be how to talk like a white girl.”
And so the two spoke of things long past, but not of the bloody little baby with the beautiful brown eyes.
You Need to Give Me a Little More to Go On
WHAT’LL it be, mister?” the bartender asked.
“Scotch, neat,” was Coleman Tate’s response.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, early yet for the rush. Tate took in the details of the working man’s bar: dishes of peanuts, metal ashtrays, and memorabilia tied to baseball glories. It was a shrine to the Detroit Tigers and that team’s anointed: Ty Cobb, Goose Goslin, Bobo Newsom, and Schoolboy Rowe. A 1945 World Series pennant graced the mirror behind the cash register. The place reeked of cigars and cigarettes and beer as well as the unmistakable smell of danger. People ran out of luck in places like Zip’s; they got roughed
up and rolled in the alley or worse—Zip’s was a little too close to a river, a little too easy to disappear from.
Tate raised one hand up off the bar to signal for another drink. “How’s business?” he asked the bartender.
“Seen better, seen worse,” was the reply.
“I was wondering if you might help me out with something,” Tate said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m trying to find out about a guy who was a patron at your bar a while back. I believe he might have been coming around here sometime after the war, probably up until late 1949.”
The bartender said, “That’s a long time ago. I might be able to help, but then again I might not.”
Tate inched a twenty-dollar bill in the man’s direction.
“What’s his name?” the barkeep asked.
“Well, now, that’s the problem. I don’t have a name. I was hoping you might remember the guy by his looks.” Tate pulled the photograph from his suit pocket. “As you can see, he was missing part of his face—the jaw on the right side.”
“I don’t know; there’s lots of men got their faces messed up.”
Another twenty left the detective’s wallet. “I have reason to believe this fellow was a veteran. Do you remember him now?”
“There’s lots of vets around here, mister. You need to give me a little more to go on.”
A third twenty slid across the bar. “He doesn’t look familiar to me. If I was you, I’d try over to the Rouge,” the barman said. “There’s guys over there that got hurt in the war, and guys that got hurt when they first tried to bring in the union, and there’s guys been hurt by dynamite too.”
Tate made a visit to the auto plant, where he had another costly conversation, this time with a personnel worker who gave him the names of four disfigured men who’d served in the military and ended up at the Rouge after returning home from the war.
July 14, 1957
The Sounds of Sorrow and of Angel Blood
IN the moment between dreaming and waking, it came to Bonaventure that the mournful slip of paper he’d taken from his mother’s closet and the small smothered sound that lived in the chapel might comfort one another.
Grand-mère was at Sunday mass and his mother was sleeping in. He skipped breakfast altogether, retrieved the note from Mr. Silvey’s shop, and took it to the chapel. Bonaventure looked at the carved wooden box for a while and listened to that sad, soft weeping. When he pulled the box from its niche, the weeping quieted down to the little hiccup breaths that trail after sobbing. He bent his knees, lowered himself to the floor, and sat there Indian fashion. Then he opened the lid as gently as he could.
All that was inside was a small rectangle made of two pieces of glass that were stuck to each other by a reddish-brown smear. He pulled the note out of his pocket and put it inside the box, on top of those pieces of stuck-together glass, and then he closed it up. There was nothing but quiet. Bonaventure smiled, and on the heels of his happiness the inspiration came that the note and the glass pieces should be buried in the garden, where they would be away from the house and could console each other forever and be surrounded by flowers.
Bonaventure went back to Mr. Silvey’s shed and removed a small spade from where it hung on a hook between a long-handled hoe and a three-pronged cultivator. He took the spade to a spot in the garden and began to dig.
It had rained the day before, leaving the soil dark as wet coffee grounds and soft as butter that’s been left to sit out. Bonaventure listened to the earthworms in their tunnels and tried to be very careful. It was slow going when such care was taken, but he would never want to bring harm to the earthworms and so he didn’t mind. He didn’t fling the dirt up and scatter it but rather placed each scoop gently down one upon the other. Bonaventure maintained concentration on the grave until the spade’s point hit upon something that had managed to get past his uncommon hearing. He immediately stopped digging and acknowledged the surprise.
He put the spade down and dug in the cool moist soil with his hands, probing with his fingertips until he recognized roundness. He used the spade to loosen the shape until he could pry it free. At the end of his efforts, Bonaventure held in one grimy hand a cool and hefty, dirt-covered stone that gave off the finest silence he had ever had the pleasure to encounter.
That stone was immediately precious to him. He took it over to the old brass tap beneath the chapel window in order to wash it. He held the stone under the running water, rubbing it gently until it was smooth as a pearl and cleaner than rain. Then he took it to the garden bench and set it to dry in the sun.
The stone maintained a constant stillness, which Bonaventure took to mean that it was always listening, for in his experience you could hear a lot more if you kept real still. And then too there was the idea that the stone made no sound of its own; Bonaventure could only imagine how much it must be able to hear, what with not having to listen to its own breathing or its own footsteps or its own chewing, and he began to feel a reverence and a solid admiration. Now that the stone was clean, he could see that it was speckled, black and white.
He listened to that stone harder than he’d ever listened to anything, and indeed the stone did speak, sharing its knowledge of how earth and time and all other things had been brought out of darkness and into great light by the Source of all there is.
And then the marvelous sounds began, and Bonaventure heard that good and steady bup-bup, bup-bup, the same as he’d heard inside Dancy’s womb.
The stone’s knowledge carried him through a wind that caused the cosmos to fall inward and then burst open.
Bup-bup, bup-bup.
Bonaventure could feel the rushing of waters blown over by that wind, and then he himself was swept into the sky.
Bup-bup, bup-bup.
His whole body filled with stars being born, with the spinning of atoms, with the pull of the planets, and with suns and moons and constellations.
Bup-bup, bup-bup.
He saw fishes and creatures and trees. He saw people living and loving and dying.
Bup-bup, bup-bup.
And then the stone brought forth echoes of its own birth and how it had tumbled from oceans and rivers and streams to come to rest in the garden. The stone took joy in the warmth of the light now, having known the coldness of the dark.
Bup-bup, bup-bup.
Bonaventure knew then for certain what to do with those sounds of sorrow and of angel blood he had been about to bury.
Dancy still wasn’t up when he went back in the house. Bonaventure didn’t want to wake her, so he wrote a note that said Gone walking and propped it up against the coffee can where he knew she would see it. Then he went to get the wagon. He took hold of its handle in hopes of feeling his father’s warmth or perhaps hearing the sound of his voice, but none of that happened. What did happen was a gravitational tug, much like the one that had brought Trinidad Prefontaine to Bayou Cymbaline. Bonaventure did not fight that tug, but leaned back to feel it pull him all the more.
He walked alone save for the company of the carved wooden box that was perched in the wagon and the speckled stone tucked in his pocket. The stone bumped against his leg with every left step, all the while blending its silence with his, just as a soul mate would do. The narrow trail of hard-packed sand felt solid and warm beneath his bare feet, and its dusty surface sent the softest powder sifting up between his toes. He passed by blue gentians, purple trilliums, and pink yarrow. The day was so wonderful that Bonaventure thought it would taste like cherry pie if he took a bite of it. Feathery clouds streaked the sky, and even though the sun was out, he could still see the moon.
By the time he’d walked long enough to get thirsty, he’d come to the Neff Switch road. He kept right on walking, and in five minutes’ time found himself in a clearing where stood the two-room house with a wraparound porch and a mansard roof and a cupola sheathed in copper.
Bonaventure stood as still as he possibly could, feeling the gladness that always accompanied the
sound of Trinidad’s smile, a sound nearly identical to that of sun sparkle on water. He wished he could capture it to put in his memento box.
Birds and insects pierced the stillness with their songs and beckoning buzzing, while a light breeze whispered through the weeds and wild grasses. Bonaventure considered the scene wildly pleasing and so plucked a blade of grass to keep. A lark stood in the rainwater pond that was growing warm in the old birdbath, and a dragonfly hovered close by, iridescent and splendid.
Inside her house, Trinidad felt Bonaventure’s approach with her right-sided heart. She pulled the big crockery bowl down from its shelf, set it on the wooden block table, and filled it with ingredients whose amounts she knew by feel, sifting flour and brushing it between her hands. She reached into the bowl to knead the smooth, cool dough before plopping it onto the cloth and working the rolling pin, performing the everyday miracle that would turn the mixture into beautiful, thick, round golden biscuits.
She sent a shout through the open window—“Who you are out there?”—even though she knew perfectly well who had come.
Bonaventure sent his silent answer.
“Does that be you, Bonaventure Arrow? Come on, okay, move yourself and get up here then. I can’t be waiting on you all the day.” Then she wiped her hands on her apron and stepped out onto the porch.
Bonaventure approached the house, parked his wagon, and threw his arms around Trinidad’s waist. When the hug was done, she brought him in and set him to work scrubbing the crockery bowl as if he’d done it every day of his life, while she busied herself with the biscuits. When the baking was done, they sat down to partake of not only the biscuits but the juice of ripened muscadine grapes that grew wild on Trinidad’s land. When they finished eating and cleared their plates, she took a small spade from a hook and motioned for him to follow.
“I’m glad you bring your wagon. It going to come in handy.”
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 26