The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (19 page)

—What do I do after I get it?

“Well, first you take it all the way out of the house. After that, you’ll have an idea. That’s all I know right now.”

—When am I supposed to get it?

“Not yet. I don’t think it’s time just yet. I’ll let you know when.”

Bonaventure winked and said, —Gotcha.

Then they knocked around the backyards some more before going to count dragonflies over at the park. William was treading carefully.

T
HEY
offered The Wanderer
pencil and paper at the asylum, but he never wrote anything sensible.

One time Bonaventure heard the graphite of a pencil rasp across a piece of paper and leave a slight and quivered mark behind. He listened so hard he heard the graphite’s history, when it was still a part of metamorphic rock that didn’t know it would one day almost capture what was almost a thought from the mind of an insane man.

Wondering who The Wanderer was and why he’d murdered her son ate away at Letice as much as it ever had. She began to make inquiries regarding private detectives.

Eugenia Babbitt continued to fill the emptiness in her life with regular visits to the asylum.

The Bluebottle Fly

B
ONAVENTURE
sat in the kitchen all by himself, which was not unusual given the fact that he favored the kitchen above all other rooms in the house, especially in the mornings when he could swirl up dust motes and pretend they were miniature snowflakes, a phenomenon he’d read about but had never actually seen. Some mornings he pushed a chair over to the east-facing window and pulled the ring on the string that lowered the shade until it blocked out the sunlight except for one single beam that shot through a pinpoint hole in the canvas. On this day he was in the mood for daylight, and so he didn’t lower that shade but let sunshine fill the room and find the cat’s eye marble he’d pulled from the depths of his pocket. He shut one eye and held the marble to the other, concentrating on how his kitchen might look through the eye of a cat; then he put the glass ball on the table and set it in motion with a flick of finger and thumb, relishing the sound of rolling glass. He watched the swirl of purple in the marble’s middle turn and turn, and at the very last second he moved to save it from a fall.

Just as he scooped the marble up, the border of his concentration was touched by the buzzing of a bluebottle fly. The sound ceased when the insect lit on the marmalade spoon and scuttled around its edge twice, even walked upside down where the convex side of the tip curved up from the surface of the table. Gradually, the creature returned topside and descended the spoon’s shallow bowl as if walking down a slide. It flew away just when the swinging door opened and Dancy entered the room. Bonaventure thought it took a lot of courage for something as small as a fly to come anywhere near human beings.

“Hey there, cutie-pie! You’re in luck if you’re here for breakfast, because I’m in the mood to cook,” she said, and tweaked his nose on her way to the refrigerator. Within seconds she brought a bowl from the cupboard, cracked four eggs into it, took a whisk from the drawer, and slid bread into the toaster, all the while humming “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” even though she wasn’t religious, and even though it was the last week in June.

Bonaventure scooped out some marmalade with the spoon so recently visited by the bluebottle fly, put it into his mouth, and rolled it around a time or two before swallowing. He tucked the spoon into his trouser pocket then, because he thought that it really belonged in his memento box. No sooner had he tucked that spoon away than his stomach growled, so loud his mother heard it way over by the sink.

Putting emphasis on the first syllable of her favorite nickname for him, Dancy asked, “Adventure Arrow, is there a lion in this house?” To which Bonaventure gleefully nodded as his stomach growled again.

“Adventure Arrow, are
you
that lion?”

Another vigorous nod.

This was a game they played. Sometimes he was a spider, sometimes a snake or a fox or a shiny brown beetle; one time he’d been an albino squirrel, and yesterday he’d been a one-eyed, hook-beaked screech owl. His mother didn’t know that now he really was part fly because he had fly footprints inside him from the walked-upon spoon.

“I beg your pardon, but you most certainly are not a lion,” she said. “You are well and truly Bonaventure Arrow and you live on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, and I’m your mama and don’t you forget it!”

For someone who claimed to have chosen her child’s name with a haphazard peek at the phone book, Dancy Arrow spent a lot of time singing its praises. On a recent visit to Père Anastase, Bonaventure had noticed his father’s full name on the graveyard plaque. He’d tugged on Dancy’s sleeve, pointed to the name in the center, and raised his eyebrows to pose a question. She explained that Everest had been his father’s middle name.

Bonaventure signed, —Middle name you?

“My whole given name is Danita Celine; pretty fancy, huh?”

—Middle name me?

“Well, some names don’t need any help because they’re strong enough to stand on their own, and Bonaventure is one such name. Your Grandma Roman wanted me to give you Roman as a middle name, but that would have made you Bonaventure Roman Arrow, which I didn’t care for at all. People would hear it as roamin’, as in wandering aimlessly, so no thank you very much.”

Dancy placed their eggs and toast on the table, sat down, and reached for the marmalade spoon. When her hand came up empty, she wondered out loud where in blue blazes it could have gone to. Bonaventure let her wonder. Some things he kept to himself.

A happy breakfast in a sunny kitchen did not hold any guarantees. After supper on the third of July, just four days after Dancy had joked with Bonaventure about a lion in the room, another rage got hold of her. When it felt as if she would jump right out of her skin if Letice so much as looked at her, Dancy went to her room and doused her rage with the entire contents of the jelly jar, which on that day held enough liquor for at least five rages, possibly six, maybe more.

It was dusk when Bonaventure heard something come to him clear out in the yard where he was trying to catch fireflies in a mayonnaise jar that had holes poked in its lid. What he heard was the sound of Dancy peeing herself because she was too drunk to know any better. But he heard something more than urine streaming out of her body—he heard anguish, and it sounded like someone gulping for air and choking when it got some. Bonaventure followed the sounds to his mother’s room, where he found her passed out on the floor with her mouth gaping open and drool running out one side. He listened intently for the sound of her breathing but could barely hear it for the loudness of that anguish, which was drowning out everything.

The anguish was coming from inside the closet. Maybe it was that thing his dad had talked about that he was supposed to get, that thing inside a box.

Bonaventure grasped one of his mother’s hands in both of his and signed the letters
W-A-K-E U-P
into her palm, and when that didn’t work, he patted her cheeks; and when that didn’t work, he pounded on the floor. Even though he had no voice, his lips moved around
Mama, Mama
, over and over, and his face wrinkled up into pitiful, soundless crying.

The visiting beat came to Bonaventure’s heart then, adding strength and helping him shake his mother hard enough to wake her.

Dancy stayed all gin-drowsy and stupid, though she did manage to turn herself over and crawl to the bathroom on her hands and knees. Her long blond hair fell into the toilet as she retched up bile and vomit. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that she realized her little boy had seen her be sick, after he’d found her sour-breathed and passed out and stinking of piss. What she didn’t know was that her dead husband had seen the whole thing too.

William hadn’t meant for anything like that to happen. The sight had caused him to feel great pain, as if he had suffered a shower of blows to a body he no longer had.

Bonaventure was never the same. In the time it took to go from catching fireflies in the yard to finding his mother unconscious from pain, he’d got caught up in constant worry. He began to break down the sounds that came into his silence, checking their structure for harmful details. Such concentration took a lot of work, and sometimes he needed to sift through the sounds to find one that was pleasant and restful.

It was during one of these sifting times that he picked up on the Spanish moss whispering about a lady who felt itching on the bottoms of her feet.

On the Late Afternoon of a Fine Summer Day

T
RINIDAD
Prefontaine had been scouting her land and finding its medicines ever since she’d come to Bayou Cymbaline. She harvested trees of their apples and plums, and a small vineyard of its grapes, and then she turned the bounty into pies and tarts and bottles of juice. She pulled wild plants from the base of tree trunks and from under the feathery fronds of wild ferns. She plucked them and dried them and boiled them into tinctures or ground them into powders to be used as curatives.

She’d set up a stand at the edge of the Neff Switch road, selling her pies and tarts and juices, and giving the cures away for free, some for illnesses and some for secrets. For example, Enoch Willets and Tabula Cristy held hurtful secrets inside them. Enoch, a clerk at Graber’s Hardware, never told anyone that he liked to knit. He was trying to weave himself into someone a woman would let close enough for him to talk to and court and hopefully marry her. He’d been told too many times that he was ugly, and the knowledge had made him painfully shy.

Tabula, a nurse’s aide at the hospital, loved to unravel tablecloths in the evenings, carefully transforming them into tight balls of thread. She was a nervous young woman with no self-esteem, who liked to think she could unravel herself until she disappeared.

Vida van Demming’s secret was a good deal riskier. Vida did not consider herself an official kleptomaniac, although she really did steal. She took things regularly from Claymore’s Candy & Gift Emporium or from F. W. Woolworth’s Five & Dime, but they were always small things that fit up her sleeve or in the pocket of her skirt or in her cleavage inside her brassiere; and she never took anything that cost more than seventy-five cents. Also, she did her stealing in the morning and was sure to put everything back in the stores before they closed at five p.m. What stood in the shadows of Vida’s stealing was the fact that there wasn’t one single thing that made her feel alive. There were precious few thrills in Bayou Cymbaline, so Vida made do with the stealing.

Enoch, Tabula, and Vida all found their way to Trinidad’s stand out on the Neff Switch road. When Trinidad handed Enoch his bottle of grape juice in a paper sack, she slipped in an envelope containing dried sage. On the front of the envelope were the instructions:
Put some under your tongue before you talk to a special lady.

When Tabula returned home, she found a small pouch that was gathered closed at the top with a drawstring. The pouch was filled with lavender flowers, rosemary leaves, mint, comfrey root, and thyme. A note attached to the end of the string said:
Put in your bath and think good things.

When Enoch saw Tabula in Graber’s Hardware, he slipped some of that sage beneath his tongue and asked if he might take her to hear the concert band on Sunday at the gazebo in the park. Tabula Cristy said yes.

Vida van Demming, the semi-kleptomaniac, noticed that the apple pie she’d bought was wrapped in a page from the
Times-Picayune
. She smoothed the paper out and got to reading it and ended up in a letter-writing relationship with a man from Port Arthur, Texas, who had placed an ad for a pen pal in the second column of the personals. It was enough to help Vida quit the stealing.

Things changed in Bayou Cymbaline. The bullied took charge of their lives, gamblers turned their backs on dice, and folks in general were happier. Everyone knew where to find Trinidad. They came to her for baked goods, and for the powders and potions that cured corruptions of the flesh and abscesses of the soul and the mind.

Trinidad was interested in every customer, but none so much as the two women and the silent little boy who drove up to her stand in the late afternoon of a fine summer day in 1956. Letice was on her third driving lesson that day. She felt her life was more than half over and it was high time she learned to get around on her own. Dancy chose the Neff Switch road to practice on because it was good and straight and not heavily traveled.

Bonaventure was sitting in the backseat, listening to the swishing tail of a cat that was watching a goldfinch balance on a twig in Texarkana, when from nowhere that never-seen companion came to run though the various parts of his heart and sail all through his veins.
Bup-bup, bup-bup
, it swirled through his body and out through his ears and filled up the car and the road and the land. It grabbed his heartbeat up into the sky to join with a perfect twin rhythm.

“There are an awful lot of people out here for a road that isn’t used much,” Letice said.

“Sure seems like it,” Dancy replied. “I’ve never seen it this busy, but then again I haven’t been out this way in a while. Do you want to keep driving, or would you feel better if I took over?”

“Well, it is making me a little nervous. What’s that up ahead there? Can you tell?”

“It looks like a stand of some kind—somebody selling stuff,” Dancy said. “It must be pretty good—looks like there’s a sizable crowd. Maybe we should check it out.”

“Yes, let’s. My neck is getting stiff; I’ve had enough for one day. We’ll see what’s for sale and then you can drive us home.”

They had to wait while a black woman who was wearing a dress made of bright blue cotton and a hat made of tall fescue grass took care of her customers, all of whom were praising her wares.