The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (11 page)
Those color sounds intrigued him and brought with them that anonymous beat he’d heard before, the one that rolled around alongside his own heartbeat every now and again. The beat that meant something was happening.
Every day brought a heightened anticipation to Dancy and Letice, as they waited for Bonaventure to speak. Perhaps he would be one of those children who began talking in lengthy and meaningful sentences to the astonishment of family and friends. They loved him just the way he was; they truly did. Even so, both women had begun to move as if caught in a hesitation waltz, paused and quiet and still, one step suspended before taking another. They were listening for a word, a cry, or a bubbling giggle to come from their dear little boy who, at a year and a half, still hadn’t found his voice.
Dancy started to take note of the sounds Bonaventure did make: His little hands slapped against the floor when he crawled, and the bells she’d put on his shoes jingled when he kicked his legs while sitting in his high chair. He pounded his toy hammer against wooden pegs and a toy mallet on a one-octave toy xylophone. When he was being silly, he would force air out through his lips to make that raspberry sound that children love. Dancy was greatly encouraged by his silliness because it showed that he was being expressive, even if he didn’t use his voice to do it. Her favorite Bonaventure sound was the smacking one he made with his mouth when he put what passed for a kiss on her cheek. But even in the thick of her enthusiasm Dancy still listened for signs of vocals. Often when she watched him nap she could tell a difference in his sleeping silence, the naturalness of it, and then she felt bad for noticing. She couldn’t possibly understand that Bonaventure’s silence would serve a purpose to do with the family.
Sometimes their pausing and listening had nothing to do with Bonaventure and everything to do with a split-second, quick-flashing vision of William, or the ricochet of a word he’d said, or maybe the sudden scent of him on a zephyr that seemed an exhalation. This pattern of stopping to catch a sound or sight or smell became their normal way, and so Dancy and Letice moved through the house on Christopher Street keeping interrupted time with an uncertain metronome, day after expectant day.
Sometimes when she entered a room, Letice sensed that William had just been there but had hurried out because he didn’t wish to stay. This rejection upset and mystified her. She couldn’t fit it in with her memories: how he’d carried around an old nightgown of hers until he was almost three; all the dandelion bouquets he’d pulled from behind his back; the year he glued macaronis to a coffee can and painted it red for Valentine’s Day. Memory led to more memory: the sight of two-year-old William standing on a kitchen chair stirring dish suds in the sink; how he clomped around in cowboy boots that were sometimes on the wrong feet; how he fell asleep with his hand in his catcher’s mitt. The smell of boy. His big brown eyes. Nowhere in these memories could she find a place for blood or bullets.
Letice prayed for the repose of William’s soul, she prayed for Dancy, and she prayed that the police would find out the killer’s name.
William didn’t want her to pray for the repose of his soul. It felt as if she was praying him away.
Time went on with no new findings. Letice went to the police station for another face-to-face with Sergeant Turcotte.
“I’ve been to see the director of the asylum,” he said.
Letice braced herself.
“There’s no change, Mrs. Arrow, no change at all. The guy just stares most of the time. The nurses say he shuffles around some and likes to sit outside.”
“Have you been checking records at the bank? Following up on people who might have wanted revenge?”
“Yes, ma’am, we did that. If anything, your bank extended more loans than they called in. There were some that got foreclosed, but we could account for all those folks and their descendants. Of course, there would have been situations where people came in to ask for a loan but were never even considered. We didn’t find any records of denied applications, so there’d be no way to trace any of those people. I’m sorry, Mrs. Arrow.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Please continue to check with the doctors and nurses and keep me informed.”
“I surely will, ma’am.”
Letice wondered how it was that she hadn’t gone mad.
Sergeant Turcotte was not the only one to visit the asylum in regard to The Wanderer; Eugenia Babbitt went there too. So did William Arrow. William was trying to figure out the connection between him and his murderer, or at least try to understand his killer’s state of mind. It was becoming clear to him that the man had no constant state of mind, that most of the time his killer’s mind was utterly and completely blank.
T
RINIDAD
Prefontaine was alone in this world. She’d never known her father, and her mother was dead from the bite of a poisonous thing, as best anyone could figure out. When she was eleven years old, Trinidad had ended up in an orphanage for Negro children, and at seventeen she’d become the wife of Jackson Prefontaine, a hardworking young fellow she’d met there. The two of them found work over in Mississippi, where they never had children and Jackson died fairly young.
She had no brothers or sisters; however, until recently there’d been a relative on her mother’s side, an old maiden aunt by the name of Henriette Dimontere. Henriette had died in her sleep, lying flat on her back atop ironed white sheets. On her last day on earth, this Henriette enjoyed several moments of prescience that had inspired her to take a bath, don her best nightgown and purple turban, and lie down on those freshly washed-and-ironed white sheets. Then she closed her eyes and died.
The prescience had actually come to Henriette the week before, when she’d been inspired to leave a last will and testament (which bore the seal of a notary public), a copy of which was recorded at the courthouse by the Register of Deeds. Another copy was mailed to her niece, Trinidad Prefontaine, care of the Virgil B. Hortons.
Henriette had been given her house and land by the judge who’d employed her for most of her life and who had also been her lover. Though the judge had been good to Henriette, he would not allow her to take her niece in when the child had been left an orphan. Henriette had kept in touch with her only living relative and now was leaving the property to her. She’d always felt sorry for the girl, surmising that she’d had a miserable childhood.
Trinidad received this news some three weeks later in June of 1952, and she took it as a sign. She’d begun to feel an itching on the soles of her feet, and she took that as a sign too; mixed in with all that itching was her own intuition and Mam Judith’s prophecy, and Trinidad decided it was time to move on. She’d been serving the Dalton family for quite some time and something was telling her it was just about enough. In fact, there was more than one something. There was the imp that still skipped around at the edge of her eyesight, and there was the memory of that vision she’d once had of the circling raven, the dove, and the sparrow on a night when certain stars shone bright through holes in rain-filled clouds.
All of those things pulled on Trinidad, but what pulled on her most was a fluttering that came to her reversed heart sometimes. Good Lord, how that fluttering could get her attention!
And so at the age of thirty-nine, Trinidad began to detach from the Pascagoula Hortons, point her toes westward, and scan the horizon, sniffing at the air like a hound on a scent. The Hortons were devastated at her departure, but the best she could do to comfort them was to say she would remember them fondly and might return for a visit.
All of her belongings fit into an old leather satchel she’d bought at a secondhand store: three cotton dresses and a sweater, as well as an assortment of objects she treasured because she believed they held spiritual powers. She carried her kitchen around on her back, rolled up in a handmade quilt—a pot, a pan, a knife and spoon, a rolling pin, and a coffee pot made of white-speckled, slightly chipped enamel over steel.
On the day she set out, Trinidad took one last look eastward and went the other way. She made it to Louisiana by means of a ferryboat that ran across Bay St. Louis, and once there walked the shoulder of Highway 90.
She entered Bayou Cymbaline on her own two feet, and not one of its citizens noticed her arrival. She reached the center of town at two o’clock in the afternoon on the very hot next-to-the-last day of June. Ten minutes after she’d crossed the city limits, she stood before the entrance of the courthouse on Lafayette Street, the one in which William and Dancy had married. She went around back in search of a hose or a water pump with a sign that would designate it “for colored.” She always looked for such a sign above doorways, at hospitals, schools, churches, cemeteries, beaches, lunch counters, and most of all public restrooms.
Trinidad wanted to wash the travel dust from her face, hands, and feet. She found a fountain but no designation. This made her very nervous. She knew the boundaries. She knew the story of Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black who had boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans bound for Covington and intentionally sat in a white-only car and refused to move when asked. Plessy was arrested and remanded for trial in Orleans Parish, where he was convicted of breaking the law and fined. Trinidad also knew that the United States Supreme Court supported the State of Louisiana with regard to Homer Plessy in a ruling it called “separate but equal.” Trinidad believed the law would not be on her side if she mistakenly washed herself at an unmarked fountain, so she nervously washed before going to settle the business matter that had brought her all this way. She did not know that Bayou Cymbalinians in general had never embraced Jim Crow, no matter how well received he was in New Orleans.
The back door to the building was locked, and her only option was to go through the front. Trinidad began to worry about exactly where this prophecy was going; just as she wasn’t used to drinking out of unmarked fountains, she wasn’t in the practice of entering through unmarked front doors. Once inside the vestibule, she felt coolness settle on her head and move down her body, diminishing the sun scorch of the open road and the burning it had put on her skin. She consulted the directory posted on the wall and proceeded on through the mezzanine and up a grand staircase to Room 205, the office of the Register of Deeds. She removed a document of identification and a folded paper from a pouch that hung around her neck and presented it to the woman behind the counter, keeping her head down and being sure to address the woman as ma’am and not look directly into her eyes. The clerk checked the document’s authenticity and gave directions to the property Trinidad had inherited from her dear and dead old aunt Henriette. Trinidad thanked the woman and wondered when the other shoe would drop.
The directions took her to the outskirts of town, and she ended up at a two-room house with a wraparound porch, a mansard roof, and a cupola sheathed in copper. A small barn and a chicken coop completed the estate, and a red-painted water pump stood in the yard, directly in line with the door. Trinidad liked the feel of the place, the unmistakable rightness of it. She entered the house and began removing dustcovers from what furnishings there were: a good, sturdy table with two straight-backed chairs, an ornate pump organ with a green velvet bench, a rocking chair with a seat made of cane, and a neat and narrow bed in a room off the kitchen. It was absolutely more than enough.
Opening the door of the woodstove showed that it was all cleaned out and ready for fire; there was even a box of strike-anywhere matches that had been put inside an empty can to keep the damp away. She went outside, primed the pump, and filled the bucket she’d found by the door. Putting the big tin ladle to her lips, Trinidad drank her fill of cool, clear water before setting off for the barn, where she bowed her head and expressed her thanks for the lantern oil, the ladder, the axe, and the spade that she found within it.
She spent the rest of that first afternoon giving the property a more thorough going-over than her initial inspection had allowed. She noticed a dark spot on the floorboards in the kitchen and looked up to find a watermark on the ceiling, for which she went to the woods to collect some pine pitch and make herself a patch.
Night fell, and her stomach was complaining about how she’d forgotten lunch, and so she set a big pot of water to boiling. She filled it with the onions and carrots she’d found growing among a bunch of bergamot and overgrown brambles out back, near a sagging old rope clothesline. Trinidad was thankful for her earthy dinner.
Over the next few days she made several trips into Bayou Cymbaline, where she spent her saved-up coins on such things as four balls of twine, some stone-ground flour, and a piece of fine white linen. People were friendly, and to anyone who asked she confided that she’d inherited the small house out on the Neff Switch road. Yes, that’s right, the one that had belonged to Henriette Dimontere, who’d been her mother’s only sister. She said she was originally from over near Bayou Cane but had spent several years in Pascagoula. She had always heard good things about Bayou Cymbaline, she would say, and everyone liked her just fine.
Bayou Cymbaline had started a generation before the Civil War and quickly became the pet project of a couple of competing women, wives of the two biggest millionaires ever made by sugarcane and old King Cotton. The women tried to out-do each other in building monuments to themselves, and as a result the town suffered no shortage of grandeur. Its fine old library was built of the very best brick and sported a portico and Doric columns and a pair of two-ton doors that swung so smoothly they seemed to be weightless. “Even a two-year-old can open those doors,” is what the old ladies would say. A museum of local heritage occupied the library’s second floor and was staffed by the local chapter of the Civil War Society, a group comprised entirely of sweet-smelling women who met for tea and delicate pastries on the third Thursday of every month, wearing girdles and hats and snow-white gloves, no matter the heat or humidity.