The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (36 page)

Vida

“Well, well, well, Miss Vi, now what do you suppose we should do about this? I’ll tell you what I think: I think that, first of all, this letter definitely needs to reach Mr. Harold Hopkins in Port Arthur, Texas. And second of all, I think there’s quite a few folks right here in Bayou Cymbaline who would be interested to know about this.”

She folded the letter back up, resealed the envelope with Elmer’s glue, and stuck it in her purse. “I got to get going now, Miss Vi; I got to take a bath and lay out my clothes for tomorrow. It’s gonna be a special Meeting of the Righteous, and I got plans.”

Can I Get a Witness?: July 20, 1957

T
HE
next morning, Adelaide headed over to Dancy’s shop for her usual wash and set. It happened to be one of those every-other-Saturdays that she took Bonaventure out to lunch.

“Hey, Dancy, I been thinking about doing something special for Bonaventure,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, like what?”

“
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
is playing over to the Palace Theater, and I thought I’d take him for lunch at Bixie’s and then to a matinee.”

“Well, you’ll just have to take him another time. He’s supposed to clean his room and weed the flowerbeds after you bring him back from lunch.”

“Oh, now, don’t be that way, Dancy. I heard this is the last day that picture is showing and then it’ll be gone.”

Dancy knew that Bonaventure wanted to see the movie about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, but she didn’t want to be the one to take him because she had no desire to see anyone get shot, even if they were only actors.

“I guess his chores can wait. Okay. I’ll allow it. But I don’t want you taking him anywhere near that church meeting of yours; you bring him straight home after the movie.”

“You don’t need to worry, Dancy. You’ve made it perfectly clear that you want to raise your child a pagan. I’m not going to the afternoon meeting, anyway; I’m going to the seven o’clock.”

When Bonaventure got back, Dancy said, “Get yourself cleaned up, Venture Forth Arrow. Grandma Roman talked me into something.”

Bonaventure couldn’t figure out what was up with Grandma Roman. She’d rushed him through lunch and now she was gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white, and she had her eyes squinted and her mouth puckered. She blew right through the Stop sign on Dooley Avenue because she was driving like she was in a super big race. He thought it was kind of fun until she drove them past the movie theater, which was where he’d hoped they were headed, and then she kept right on racing.

Tug on her arm, —Slow down, Grandma!

“Oh, hush up your hands, Bonaventure Arrow. I know exactly how fast we need to go. I want seats close to the stage, and I’m gonna make sure we get them.”

She stopped the car in a field that had been commandeered as a parking lot and told him to hurry it up.

In his wildest dreams, Bonaventure Arrow would not have imagined that his mother had given permission for him to attend the two p.m. Meeting of the Righteous, but it looked as if that was exactly what happened. That must be why she had used the words “talked me into something.”

Anticipation filled the air that surrounded the meeting. Grandma Roman said she’d heard there were folks coming from as far away as Little Rock! At 1:30, one of the church elders mounted the stage and beseeched the crowd for quiet. Noise rippled away only to explode again upon the introduction of Brother Harley John. The preacher clutched his Bible and raised his fist in the air and hollered about sin and salvation until he’d worked himself up to speaking in tongues, which was the whole entire point of the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel. It was the speaking in tongues part of things that Adelaide Roman had pinned her hopes on, praying with all her might that her only grandchild might speak. She’d been waiting for years to bring glory to her blue-eyed lover, and this was the day it would happen.

In short order, Brother Eacomb made a crippled woman walk, made a blind man see, and brought stillness to a young girl who suffered from palsy. Adelaide figured they must’ve all been some of those Little Rock people, because she couldn’t remember ever seeing any of them before.

The sound of the preacher’s voice had become like knife cuts in Bonaventure’s ears, which is why he muffled all sounds of the meeting and was not listening when the announcement was made at three that one among the crowd would be allowed to mount the stage and receive the gift of speaking in tongues. But Grandma Roman heard it, and she grabbed his arm and rushed the stage, agile as a deer. Before the congregation had a chance to choose anybody else, she had hauled Bonaventure up the steps to stand before Brother Eacomb.

“Brother Eacomb, I am begging you to call on God to heal this boy. He cannot speak because the devil’s got his tongue, Brother Eacomb! The devil’s got his tongue!” Adelaide was gasping for breath.

The atmosphere became thick, more like water than air. Lightning flashed all around, casting white shadows and turning the world ghostly for an instant. For miles around, birds and bugs fled to their hiding places deep in the pine woods, chickens huddled in the corners of coops, and barn cats were nowhere to be seen; or so it was later said, when the event had turned to legend.

Harley John Eacomb did not appreciate the spontaneity of Adelaide Roman’s actions, but did the only thing he could: he took the boy by the shoulders and commanded him to kneel. Bonaventure would not do it. Brother Eacomb commanded him a second time and still the boy remained standing. When Bonaventure refused a third time, Brother Eacomb pressed down hard on the boy’s shoulders, forcing him to his knees. Grandma Roman stood behind him, a hand on each shoulder lest he try to get up.

With fire in his eyes and ice in his soul, the preacher raised his arms to heaven and began to shout:

“Lord, remove the devil from the sinful soul here before me! Do I hear Amen?”

AMEN!

“Lord, bring about the gift of tongues! Do I hear Amen?”

AMEN

“I feel the Lord coming down, brothers and sisters! The Lord is among us! Can I get a witness?

AMEN! AMEN!

“I feel the Lord! I feel the Lord! O brothers and sisters, I feel the Lord! Can I get a witness? I feel the Lord!”

AMEN! AMEN! YES, BROTHER! AMEN!

The preacher himself began speaking in tongues and swaying side to side. Adelaide let loose of Bonaventure and joined him, and eventually she and the preacher collapsed.

Bonaventure got up from his knees and stood completely still.

Silence covered the crowd like a blanket. Adelaide Roman got to her feet and spread them wide. Eyes bright with fevered zeal, chin shiny with drool, she lifted her arms to heaven, threw back her head, opened her mouth, and spoke in more languages than Harley John Eacomb could ever have imagined. The woman had been prayed into nonsense, cleansed of iniquity, and gifted with tongues.

Harley John Eacomb proclaimed to the multitude that his was not to question the Lord.

A ways off from the crowd, where the riverbank met the forest, Trinidad Prefontaine stood all by herself, hidden by the loblolly pines. Unlike the crowd of the Forthright, she was completely composed.

Dancy was in the kitchen trying to scare up some dinner out of leftovers, since Trinidad had put in the unusual request to be given the afternoon off. “Come on in here and tell me all about the movie,” she shouted when she heard the front door open.

Bonaventure and Grandma Roman made it to the kitchen by then; however, Dancy had her back to them because she was staring into the refrigerator sizing up her options.

“Did you get the seats you wanted? Did you see anybody we know? Did you get a root beer or a cherry Coke?”

No answers.

“What’s the matter? Cat got your . . . ,” but she didn’t finish the question because she’d turned around by then and gotten a good look at her mother.

“Mama, what is wrong with you?” she asked. “Did you get sick at the movie? You didn’t eat too much popcorn, did you? You sure don’t look right.”

To which Adelaide burbled out blithering nonsense.

“That’s enough now, Mama. Come on, stop fooling.”

To which there was only more burbling.

Dancy became alarmed. “Bonaventure, what in the heck is going on? What is wrong with your Grandma Roman?”

To which he replied, —She got healed.

Ladies’ Choice

W
ILLIAM
stood barefoot on the wave-wet sand, looking out at the horizon in Almost Heaven and at the narrow strip of land that seemed closer than it used to be. A generous sun touched his face and scattered gleaming bits of itself over the neap tide that signaled a third-quarter moon.

William knew what he had to do.

In her house on the Neff Switch road, a breeze came up inside Trinidad’s chest and swelled her turned-around heart. She felt herself rise right up off the floor and she knew a weightless joy.

William Arrow had told her goodbye.

Then William went to his mother’s chapel and waited for her there. Letice came through the door and immediately sensed him there, as she had sensed him so many times in so many rooms in the years since he’d been killed. Letice looked all around, hoping to find some proof of his presence. She waited, still and quiet, but no apparition came. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, and Letice conceded that it must have been her imagination. That is when she heard William’s voice tell her that he loved her, and when she sensed he was already gone.

William left the house on Christopher Street to stand in the back room of Dancy’s shop, where she was busy putting away an order of beauty supplies she’d received the week before. He looked at her breasts when she bent to take bottles from the box, and he let his gaze linger on the shapeliness of her legs before moving to trace her face in profile from her forehead to her neck. He noticed that she’d changed her hairstyle since the week before. She usually wore her hair up, but now it hung below her shoulders, the way he’d always preferred. Even though he’d watched Dancy nearly every day since his death all those years ago and had even touched her lightly, this time he planned to actually hold her.

He concentrated and put a thought inside her head. She walked over to the radio as if responding to an invitation to pick the song for the ladies’ choice dance. She began to turn the dial, stopping at the sound of Karen Chandler singing “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” and recognizing the feeling of walking into water until it gets chest deep and takes your breath away. She closed her eyes as she listened to the music, and then she was in his arms. For the length of a song, Dancy let herself believe that William had never died.

Caught in the embrace of what might have been, she rested her head against his shoulder, and her right hand lay in his left. She could feel the warmth of him and each beat of his heart. She felt his five o’clock shadow brush against her forehead. She could even feel the tremor of unmistakable passion in every one of his breaths.

So many of the days and nights they’d had together went through her head: She took that first order for chicken etouffée, and they walked hand-in-hand through the loblolly pines. He talked to her about second gear, and she showed him how to whistle real loud through his teeth. They rode the St. Charles streetcar. They drank a glass of fine red wine. They made real love for the first time. They stood, all dressed up, before the justice of the peace upstairs at the courthouse on Lafayette Street.

William felt her delicate ribs when he pulled her close, and the softness of her made him tremble and gasp; then he got caught up in reminiscence, too. As snapshots of memory passed before him, they dissolved into mist and soaked him with want: He got one more look at the tip of her tongue as she touched it to her pencil. Once again, her cheekbone transfixed him, her jaw threw him down, and her ear lobe ran off with his heart. He held her on his lap and let her steer his car across a parking lot. He breathed in the scent of her, just as he used to when he came home from work and she met him at the door. He could see her in his bathrobe, tousle-haired, barefoot, and fresh from sleep. He watched a pregnant Dancy smother cornbread in molasses, lick the spoon when she finished eating it, and then give him a lop-sided grin. They painted the nursery yellow and drank lemonade on the porch swing on a hot August night. They watched their unborn baby push against Dancy’s stomach, and they sang to him about shoo-fly pie.

The song faded away, and William went with it, never to return.

The third challenge had been met.

Dancy looked around at where she was and cried a flood of pent-up grief. They were tears she’d kept locked deep inside her as a way of keeping William alive. And now, in the aftermath of the sweet, slow dance and the absence of gentle haunting, she began to let the tears flow.

That night she dreamed she walked barefoot along a shore, the wet sand warm beneath her feet. Her legs felt good and strong, and she could leap great leaps if she chose to. The sun was a bright lemon yellow in the sky, the water a deep blue-green. The tide was coming in, and she could feel the pull of the waves as they caused her to sway where she stood. She had a hat but let it be carried off by the wind, as if letting go of her cares.

Dancy walked along the shore of her dream, basking in the wind, the water, and the sun. Sometimes she danced a made-up dance, running in circles with her arms out wide. She ran out to meet the tide and danced away as it reached her. She kept running and laughing, and then the tide grew stronger. She was engulfed by the waves and felt the water wash into her body, where it grew warm inside her, making her feel an elation she loved. She was weightless as the waves carried her out and back, out and back, and then returned her to the shore and laid her down on the sand.

Dancy felt a pleasant, sleepy weakness. She wished never to leave the reach of the ocean because she wanted to know those feelings again.