The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (20 page)
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.
A
FTER
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.
When she opened the sassafras jar, a story escaped and found its way into Bonaventure’s silence and began to tell him how Dancy had made filé gumbo a long time ago, how happy she’d been and how worried she’d become as she watched the clock and waited, and how she went to the door when someone rang the bell and how there were policemen on the other side who asked if she was Mrs. William Arrow . . . And then his mother put the lid back on the sassafras and returned it to the cupboard.
Bonaventure was subdued through dinner and he still wasn’t saying much by bedtime.
“Everything okay, Mr. Venture Forth Arrow?” Dancy asked.
—How did my dad die? (He wished she would finally tell him because his father kept saying he didn’t remember much about the accident.)
There was a noticeable pause before Dancy said, “Oh, Bonaventure, not again,” and she let out a tired sigh. He could tell that she still didn’t want to talk about it, and he decided that there was another way to find out.
The next day when everyone else was busy, he went to the kitchen, pushed a chair over to the counter, and reached for the sassafras jar. He put it in his pocket, got down, and quietly moved the chair back where it belonged.
The voice came from his mother’s closet then, beckoning to him and telling him to bring the sassafras along. When he got to the closet door, he began to twist the jar’s lid slowly, lefty-loosey, and then the sassafras picked up with its story about the policemen at the door:
“There’s been an accident, ma’am. We need you to come along to the hospital with us,” and then Bonaventure heard his mother saying the same things over and over . . .
“What’s happened to William? Where is he? Oh, please, please tell me. Why won’t you tell me? I’m begging you! Please!” And then he heard a terrible sound like nothing he’d ever heard before. It was coming from the box way up on the top shelf.
Bonaventure began to feel dizzy and sick to his stomach, and he was afraid that maybe being sneaky was making him feel that way. He put the lid back on the spice and returned it to the kitchen. His curiosity was gone. He no longer wanted to know the secret that was hiding inside the word
accident
.
As he did on so many nights, William came to Bonaventure’s room; he knew what had happened in the closet and he wanted to see for himself that everything was all right.
Bonaventure heard that stir in the air and looked up from his book about airplanes.
—Dad?
“How ya doing, buddy?”
—I didn’t have a very good day. I think I found that bad thing in Mom’s closet and it made me feel sick.
“Are you feeling better now?”
—Yeah, but it was pretty scary.
“I promise it won’t hurt you, son. Let’s forget about it for now.”
—Yeah. Let’s forget about it and talk about something else.
So they talked about how to build a really good go-kart, until Bonaventure nodded off.
William had a look around the room while Bonaventure slept. It was obvious from the book and the balsa-wood model planes hanging by strings from the ceiling that Bonaventure was fascinated by flight. William wondered how he hadn’t known this before. Gabe Riley had known it for a while.
Bonaventure felt fine in the morning. After breakfast, he went to wait outside Grand-mère’s chapel; they were going to look at stuff in her library after she finished her prayers and had something to eat. Bonaventure couldn’t understand how Grand-mère could wait so long to have breakfast. He listened for the morning sounds to finish their quiet concerto: the click of rosary beads, the whispers that went in search of God, and the windy little breath that put out the candle. He heard all of that, and then he heard something else. It was a new sound that was small and sad and was coming from the chapel. He wasn’t scared by it. He just felt sorry.
Bonaventure started signing with Grand-mère the minute she stepped from her chapel:
Roll of eyes, blowing breath out loudly. —You, no food?
“Man does not live by bread alone, Bonaventure,” she said to him in reply.
—I know. We eat gumbo two days. Remember?
Letice pulled him into a hug and told him that she loved him and that she had her work cut out for her. Once in the kitchen, she made herself some tea and attempted to poach an egg but gave up on it and had toast instead.
—Find new Mrs. Silvey today?
“Oh, Bonaventure, don’t I wish! I think the only thing that has stood between us and starvation has been the grace of God,” which was pretty much what he would have expected her to say.
Grand-mère finished her breakfast, and they went into the library. Waiting there for Bonaventure was the newest sound yet: drums low-whispering in an unbroken rhythm.
Grand-mère talked about Saint Bonaventure and his special prayer, which she had on the back of a holy card. While she read it out loud, the whispering drums put a good solid tempo to the peaceable words of the prayer:
Be Thou alone ever my hope; my entire confidence,
my riches, my delight;
my pleasure, my joy
When she finished reading the prayer, Bonaventure signed, —Okay, ask God for something?
“Like what?”
—New Mrs. Silvey. You remember lady, grass hat, pie, when you drive?
“Yes I do. What about her?”
Eyebrows raised, palms turned up as if to say, —Maybe she can cook.
“You might be onto something, Bonaventure. You just might be onto something. What made you think of her?”
Bonaventure shrugged his shoulders as if to reply, —I don’t know.
Actually, he did know. The Spanish moss had been speaking to him again, and it mentioned that the lady with the itching feet was the pie lady, and that she was magical. Bonaventure didn’t care much about food, but he did want to be with someone magical.
He returned to the library later that day to find out if the drums were still there. They were. He tracked them down to a book by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and since he was all by himself, he could give them his full attention.
Books are generally considered to be soundless things, but Bonaventure knew better. He pulled Longfellow from where he stood between Oliver Wendell Holmes and Herman Melville, carefully, as Grand-mère had taught him to do, relishing first the unsticking and then the sliding sounds the book’s cover made when it broke ranks from its place on the shelf. When he opened the volume, its binding made a pleasant cracking noise. There was a wonderful peeling-away sound when he grasped the corner of the first page and turned it, and the gold leaf on the page’s edge let out a snapping salute. A picture appeared on the frontispiece that showed a young Indian girl wearing beautiful beads and a fringe-sleeved dress. The caption said “Minnehaha, Laughing Water,” and Bonaventure heard that lovely name flow across the page.
