Letice formed her right hand into a fist and whispered, “
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
”—my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault—as she pounded her fist to her chest three times as if pounding shut a door to keep her guilt from escaping.
Jesus dies on the cross . . .
Had he gone beyond pain?
Jesus’s body is removed from the cross
. . . Was William still warm when they took him away?
Jesus is laid in the tomb
. . . Was the undertaker gentle when he closed the wounds and sewed up the terrible, torn-flesh holes?
By the fourteenth station Letice could no longer separate her own child from the Virgin Mary’s, and for a few hallowed moments experienced a rapture in which William came back to her as whole as he ever was. The devotion ended and the church emptied out, yet Letice remained caught in enchantment. She stayed that way for one hour more, transfixed by the vision made real by her piety. Still on her knees, she stared at the crucifix covered as it was in the purple cloth of Lent. She imagined the face of the only begotten son who had died that she might be absolved of her sins. And then she imagined the face of her own son, who she feared had died for the very same reason.
On Holy Saturday morning, Letice went back to Our Lady of the Rosary to reach for a state of grace. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” And then she confessed to keeping secrets and to impure thoughts of long ago, and to the deed she wished she had never done, the one she’d confessed so many times before. The priest spoke the words of absolution, and Letice returned to the pew to recite her penance. When she arrived back home, she felt clean enough to carry out her plan.
In the very early hours of Easter morning, when she was the only one up and about, Letice took a sleeping Bonaventure into her chapel, where beeswax votives burned bright in red glass. Holding the child of her child in the crook of her arm, she knelt on the prie-dieu that stood before the crucifix and asked God to bless her intentions. After that, she rose and anointed the baby’s forehead with a drop of the oil-cum-chrism; then she dipped her hand into the small font that held the holy water she’d brought back from Lourdes. Letice let the water dribble over Bonaventure’s forehead, baptizing him in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The baptismal water trickled into Bonaventure’s ears and music flooded his sleep, flowing around and through him with a soothing, fluid grace. It was a melody made in heaven and meant for the ears of God’s smallest darlings.
Trinidad Prefontaine took laundry from the line, for it had begun to rain. An unknown music reached her ears, soothing and soft as the raindrops.
From an alcove off to the side, a carved Virgin Mary looked out upon the garden where Louisiana iris and bird-foot violet blossomed silent and lovely in deep Lenten purple, interspersed among periwinkle and angels made of stone. It was an interesting parallel to what had taken root inside that house: secrets growing in boxes, choking guilt-ridden hearts with their vines.
At Easter Sunday mass, Letice celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the fact that she had cleansed her little grandson’s soul, which was more than she could do for her own.
Sometimes, when Bonaventure was all alone in the quiet, there came a new heartbeat, constant as his mother’s but with the character of a stranger, that walked in through his ears and rolled to his chest to swoosh through his atria, ventricles, and valves. The beat of that unnamed visitor tumbled through him from head to toe. It stayed but a minute, swirling like a whirligig powered by a spirit wind, dancing about on the fertile ground of his innocent infant heart.
Something was beginning.
A Voiceless Baby and His Lonely Mother
L
ETICE
kept Bonaventure’s baptism a secret. While the sacrament had brought her a great deal of comfort, her conversations with Sergeant Turcotte brought none. Her anxiety over knowing the name of William’s killer was eating at her insides now. She wracked her brain for a practical explanation. Part of her wanted to believe the killer was connected to William through a lawsuit at his firm; in that case it would be nothing to do with her. But another part of her felt William had died in order for her to gain God’s forgiveness, and she didn’t want to believe God would do such a thing. Letice Arrow was a conflicted woman.
After a time, the police informed her that they’d found no traceable connection to William’s law firm, so Letice cast about for another explanation and began to wonder if the killer had a grudge against the Arrow family. They were bankers, after all. She could remember one case in particular, that of a young man desperate to save his family’s farm, though his name did not come to mind. She remembered how much it had upset Remington to refuse that young man a loan. She supposed there were any number of bank customers who’d been foreclosed on and lost everything. Any one of them could be the killer. She would bring it up with Turcotte.
But what if it didn’t have to do with the bank? The thought of voodoo sparked in her mind, and the blasphemy made her feel ill. But what if? What if William’s death had to do with the fact that she’d married into the Arrow family under false pretenses? The words of that woman in the house on St. Philip Street came back:
The mirror done broke and your life looking back at you from them sharp glass pieces.
Letice Arrow was a conflicted woman, indeed.
“Believe me, Mrs. Arrow, I would like nothing more than to give you some new information, but there is none,” Turcotte told her.
“I just can’t believe that no one saw the man at any time or in any place,” Letice said.
“Oh, he was seen. A couple of people came down to the station and reported seeing him at the public library,” the sergeant said.
“And?”
“The librarians remembered seeing him. They said he didn’t bother anyone, just kept to himself. It’s not unusual for vagrants to try to get comfortable at the library. In fact, it’s a problem the librarians deal with all the time.”
“Did you check with restaurants and grocery stores? He had to eat, didn’t he?”
“We checked those places, but they didn’t pan out.” The sergeant paused before adding, “They remembered him at a liquor store in the Quarter. He was in there buying Jack Daniel’s.”
“And where did he go to drink it, Sergeant?”
“We’re looking into that. He wasn’t staying anywhere near the library or the A&P.”
“Surely he was sleeping somewhere. You’ve said yourself how noticeable he was; didn’t anyone see him on a park bench or perhaps loitering around? Do you think he had a car? Is that where he was sleeping?” Letice was like a dog with a bone.
“There was an abandoned vehicle about a half mile from the A&P, but it turned out to be part of some college kid’s prank. No taxi drivers or streetcar drivers remembered him either.”
“Did you check the bus and train depots?” Letice asked.
“Yes, ma’am. But you’ve got to remember that he would have been arriving here, no reason to talk to a ticket seller. He could have been coming from anywhere and walked through the station unnoticed.”
“I want you to go to First Regent’s Bank, Sergeant; it’s been owned and operated by the Arrow family for generations. Examine the records of foreclosures and disputes. Maybe the man was seeking revenge for some financial loss that happened years ago. And when he realized that no one would recognize him, he decided to act.”
“Sure, Mrs. Arrow. We’ll follow up on that.”
Letice felt the police officer was patronizing her. She could tell by the tone of his voice that he believed the pieces were falling into place, and the picture they formed was of a man angered by his deformity and driven senseless by drink.
She couldn’t help but wonder what had turned the man into a killer. How had he become disfigured? Why had he been walking around with a gun? There were a lot of people in the A&P that day, so why had he chosen William? She knew Dancy would agree with the sergeant, because the policeman’s reasoning gave her an anonymous target for her hate.
Letice was right; Dancy believed that knowing the killer’s past, or finding some reason for what he had done, just might relieve her of her guilt, and Dancy wanted to keep her guilt.
One of William’s challenges was to do with Dancy’s thinking: he needed to relieve his wife of her self-imposed guilt. William understood very well that he could remove it. He knew where she kept her guilt and what must be done to take it away. As for forgiving his killer, William felt that time would take care of it and that one day he would be able to say with ease, “I forgive you.” However, William had yet to understand what it is to forgive.
Those challenges didn’t worry William. The one that had him worried was the last one, the one that involved doing something to Dancy that he never thought he would.
After her surreptitious baptizing of Bonaventure, Letice had begun to see a difference in her daughter-in-law. Dancy had come out of her stupor and slipped into motherhood. Since her milk had not come in as it should have, Dancy hadn’t been able to nurse, and bottle feedings had mostly been attended to by Letice or Mrs. Silvey. But now the young mother was up by six o’clock, rinsing out the nighttime bottles while the morning bottle warmed. It was as if she’d been lost in a kind of half-coma and finally had snapped out of it. She spent hours and hours just looking at Bonaventure’s face and watching him sleep. Dancy had become entirely captivated by her child, and his silence only served to charm her more. She was awed by the softness of his skin and found comfort in the rhythm of his breathing. She held him. She bathed him. She rocked him to sleep. He brought her joy. He kept her sane. He gave her back a missing part.
But sometimes motherhood wasn’t enough. There were nights Dancy lay in bed, longing for William. Some nights she took a swallow or two from a jelly jar she’d filled with gin and kept in the back of her closet. The gin seemed to help her get to sleep and so escape her torment. But sleep was just another kind of torture when William inhabited her dreams. She knew he was there, always in the next room or on the other side of a wall with no door. She could hear him call to her, could smell his skin; every part of her yearned for his body, his smile, his masculine voice. A thrilling hunger overtook her while she dreamed, pulling her blood flow deep and down low. She craved his touch. She wanted to take him in her young woman’s body.
Dancy woke from those dreams in the grip of frustration; her wounds cut open, her grief bleeding out.
Ghostly William had to look away.
Bonaventure was really the only one who could intrude on his mother’s grief. She kept him near her always, even put him in a Moses basket next to the tub when she took her nightly bath. William would perch on the edge of the tub, just as Dancy had done when they were newlyweds. He watched as she soaped her beautiful arms and raised each lovely leg, and when she rose up out of the water, he felt a longing he could no longer satisfy.
This is what bittersweet means
, he would think, as he sat there loving his child and missing his wife and holding on to them both as hard as he could. His need was enough to put a touch on Dancy’s shoulder and make her turn around.
One morning, when he was not quite four months old, Bonaventure was lying on his back, waving his hands in front of his face and noting that he could move his fingers (though he wasn’t at all sure how), when he heard his mother whistling. The sound of it was enough to make him turn his head, flap his arms, stiffen his legs, and spread his toes in sheer and complete delight. Dancy took him from the crib, laid him on the floor, pulled him up to a sitting position, and said, “Oh my goodness! What a big boy you are!”
And he gave her the brightest smile he could muster in lieu of an audible giggle.
By the time he was six months old, Bonaventure was holding his head steady when he heard his mother laugh, and it wasn’t long before he could follow the motions of her hand for the itsy-bitsy spider.
Save his muteness, Bonaventure Arrow was just like any other child: He put everything in his mouth and he drooled when cutting teeth, such babyhood things as that. But he was also purely himself. He developed particular habits as he grew, like taking his right shoe off but leaving the sock alone; he opened wide for oatmeal but didn’t care for spinach; and sooner than most he was dexterous at putting shapes into holes and stacking alphabet blocks one upon the other.
There was, of course, one considerable difference: Bonaventure could hear things from all around the world and from another world as well, but only William knew that. Ghostly William knew a lot of things. He knew guilt was locked up in the Arrow house, and he knew that everyone would remain locked up with it until he met his challenges. It was going to take a long time.
William didn’t mind.
He could wait.
He didn’t much want to leave anyway.
Time Went on with No New Findings
H
OLD
on to me,” the couch cushion offered in a jacquard silk voice, while Bonaventure took his first steps.
“Try to fall on your bottom,” said the floor when he made it to the end of the sofa.
“Oh, be very careful,” said the dining room chair. “I might tip over and you might too, then we’d both get bumps on our heads!”
“Take your time, little guy,” said the deep voice he’d been hearing all along, the one that belonged to William.
Such perceptible counsel came to the curious boy, who was figuring his legs out in those early-walking days of toddlerhood.
On his first birthday, Dancy strung balloons across the dining room, and though Bonaventure didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, he most definitely could hear blue and green and red and yellow ringing themselves into the monotone of a dreary February day.