Bonaventure Arrow could hear conjured charms and sanctified spirits deep in the marrow of New Orleans. He could hear the movements of voodoo queens and the prayers of long dead saints. He could hear the past and the present.
But even had she known all that, Dancy would not have imagined that such hearing was only a bellwether of what was to come. She could not understand that Bonaventure’s muteness was not a handicap at all but a gift—an extraordinary, inexplicable, immeasurable gift that allowed him to hear what no one else could. The silence that had taken the place of Bonaventure’s voice was the very same silence in which exists the Universe of Every Single Sound, a place that reverberates with perfect peace and mirthful bliss, but also with despair’s deep moaning and the whispers of secrets.
Two such secrets lived right there in the house on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, while yet another was scattered over miles and miles and miles. Those secrets were waiting for Bonaventure to hear them and find them and take them out for healing. They would have to wait seven more years, for Bonaventure Arrow needed to grow into his gift; after all, he was only a baby. And he needed to join with a kindred spirit, one Trinidad Prefontaine—a female Creole servant, childless and widowed, who lived in Pascagoula, Mississippi, at this time.
As for Dancy, Bonaventure was the child she loved with all her heart, and a tether to the time she simply thought of as Before.
The Time She Simply Thought of as Before
B
ONAVENTURE
Arrow was conceived during an evening twilight, the fruit of a casual Catholic and a fallen-away Baptist who’d made unwed, unrepentant, consummated love on a Sunday in May of 1949, with a tenderness and a passion uncommon in two so young.
Bonaventure’s parents, William Arrow and Dancy Roman, had met at a place called Papa Jambalaya’s, a gumbo joint out on Atchafalaya Road, where food bit the tongue and liquor stung the eyes and some Creoles from Opelousas played hot zydeco. Cigarette smoke and drugstore cologne twirled the room on the heels of the two-step, while trills of laughter, hum, and sizzle accompanied the band. And every now and then, off to the side, came the cracking sound of a break shot in a game of crazy eight.
The first time William saw Dancy he lost his breath completely. By the time she reached his table, he barely had it back. There was nothing but the sight of her—no smell of Creole cooking, no beat of stomping feet, no sound of strummed-on washboard or of button accordion song. Never in his life had he been so enthralled. The curve of her cheekbone transfixed him; the sweep of her jaw threw him down; and the delicacy of her ear lobe ran off with his heart. It took everything he had not to put his hand on her face, just to know for an instant what that would be like.
Dancy touched the nib of her pencil to the tip of her tongue, placed it on her order pad, and asked if he’d decided. He couldn’t stop staring long enough to reply. The tip of her tongue might as well have been a lightning bolt that struck him in the chest.
She smiled while he fumbled to find his voice and recommended the chicken étouffée. He nodded and said that would be just fine.
“What’s your name?” he blurted out, as she turned to walk away.
She hesitated a bit, he was a stranger after all, but he had such an innocent face. “Dancy,” she replied. “What’s yours?”
“William.”
He ate dinner at Papa’s for several nights running, taking four hours to drink three beers. He wanted to be wherever she was. Every night, they talked to each other and joked around. William tried to get up the nerve to ask if he might take her home; he’d rehearsed it at least five hundred times but couldn’t get any further than asking about the special. And then on the seventh night, ignoring the oceans of blood that roared in his ears and the winds of anxiety that blew his mouth dry, William Arrow’s last nerve finally came through.
Papa’s was noisy as usual while he waited for a table in Dancy’s section. But he was patient and determined.
“Hey there, William, need some time to decide?”
“Not tonight, Dancy. I know exactly what I want.”
“Well, good. The food gets here quicker if you tell me what to bring.” She winked at him and did that pencil-to-tongue thing. After a good ten seconds went by, Dancy started to say he would have to speak up some, but the look on his face made her words turn back.
Her blue eyes found his brown ones and their gazes locked in tight. There was no one and nothing else in that time and place for as long as it took life to turn inside out.
“I don’t want any food,” William said. “I just want to know if I can see you home tonight. That is, unless you’ve already got a ride.”
She didn’t say anything right away; she was lost in the brown of his eyes. Several seconds ticked by before she managed to tell him that she got off at eleven, and no, she didn’t have a ride. She said she walked because home wasn’t that far, just under a mile she supposed. She explained that she liked walking because the noise and the smoke and the grease of Papa’s always stuck to her, and the night air made everything fall clean away. William didn’t mention that he had a car; a ride would be over too quickly.
The pulse of the earth thrummed through the moonlight, mixing its heartbeats amongst theirs and offering them a promise. William and Dancy had never even seen each other outside of Papa’s, so there was awkwardness between them at first, the sort that will put a notch in a breath. But then they fell into step as they walked side by side, and they swallowed and blinked in a comforting synchrony. Their hands never touched, not even in an accidental brushing, and that was a good thing, for real intimacy has a dawn. They stuck to the shoulder of the backcountry road until Dancy turned onto a shortcut that took them through a forest of loblolly pine. Fallen needles covered the ground, giving hush to their shoes and a spring to their step, though the bounce was more to do with them walking together along the edge of possibility.
That evening’s walk turned into an every-evening ritual that allowed them time to become better acquainted, not to mention familiar with nuances of voice and speech—William was just as fond of “in my opinion” as Dancy was of “that’s how I see it, anyway.” They watched for a smile to go from mouth to eyes, which usually happened in unison on both of their faces. And so they slipped into courtship. He taught her to drive his ’47 Chevrolet, and she taught him to whistle real loud through his teeth.
The driving lessons were quite the experience for William. They practiced in the lumberyard parking lot when she got off work, and later graduated to some back roads that were mainly used by farmers. Then one Saturday afternoon, she just up and drove out onto the highway without even saying she was going to do it. Dancy declared she’d never felt so free and promised to teach him to whistle like a longshoreman in return for his patient instruction.
William and Dancy were opposites, different by nature yet equally smitten. She was rather fair-skinned and fine-boned, while he was quite tall, with a suntanned face he’d earned on his college rowing team. He had a sweet tooth, while she preferred salt, so when it came to agreeing on food they were beat before they started. There were, however, two things they had in common: their fathers were dead, and their mothers were fixed on religion.
Likenesses and differences set to the side, it could never be said that one had fallen harder in love than the other. Before long they had formed into a circle, and neither of them could imagine being a straight line again, caught in the loneliness of blunt, severed ends.
When he said he wanted to introduce her to his mother and would like to be introduced to hers, she told him she wasn’t ready for all that and didn’t care to discuss the matter further. And so they continued to live in a world that fit inside a few hours. That is until he drove her to the small house he was renting on Washington Avenue in New Orleans, where they spent an entire afternoon kissing and caressing and moving against each other. There were several such occasions after that one; occasions in which they managed to find fulfillment within the confines of risk-free touch.
And then came that Sunday in May.
William had picked Dancy up precisely at noon; they planned to spend the entire day in New Orleans. She was wearing a green-and-blue-striped sun blouse and a light green skirt, and she’d let her hair fall loose, the way he liked it best. When she hopped into the car and leaned over toward him, he knew just how to touch her chin and tip it slightly, and how to move his own head to catch the lightness of her kiss. Their first kiss of the day was always sweet like that, soft and a little bit breathy.
While William and Dancy were driving to New Orleans, Dancy’s mother was still attending services over at the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel, to which she’d converted—the one she’d left the Southern Baptists for. The Forthright Gospelers didn’t have an actual house of worship made of bricks or stones or Louisiana lumber but met down by the river under what they called the Resurrection Tent, a structure that was really nothing more than some canvas tarpaulins from a surplus store over in Gretna. Dancy had gone to the tent service just once and refused to ever go again. The preacher was a fearmonger in her eyes, a man who could only threaten. His face became grotesque and spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth as he beseeched God Almighty in a doom-laden voice.
But the ranting didn’t work on Dancy. She wasn’t afraid of her mother’s odious preacher, or of that preacher’s gruesome God. When she came right out and said as much, her mother told her she was taking the shortest road to damnation there was. Dancy said she didn’t care. After that, she proceeded to excuse herself from organized religion altogether, which is how she came to have Sundays free to do whatever she liked.
William parked near his house, and they took the St. Charles streetcar to Canal Street, getting off at the French Quarter. The day was beautiful, pure-aired and velvet. William took Dancy for brunch at Antoine’s, and then they strolled the Vieux Carré, ducking into shops, trying on hats, and sizing up antiques for imaginary purchase, though the only thing they really bought was a box of pralines. They listened to a street band play some good jazz. They went for a ride in a surrey. They savored the stirrings that would lead to William’s bed.
When they returned to the house on Washington Avenue, some essence of pent-up passion that always haunts the Quarter returned along with them. They’d felt arousal before, but this time was different. They wound around each other with a languid tension and a wild thirst for more. They went to the edge and back, and then they took the jump. They had never felt anything like it.
Afterwards, as they lay together on William’s soft sheets, coolness crept over their skin like dry dew. He tightened his arms around her and pulled her close as he could. She nestled her head beneath his chin and tangled her legs up with his. Neither one spoke for a while, and when they did, it was in whispers.
“I love you, Dancy.”
“I love you, too.”
And so William and Dancy became a destiny fulfilled, two halves of the same whole, a sun and a moon in their own private galaxy. They lay entwined and thought themselves alone. But that is one thing they most definitely were not, for Bonaventure had begun. The cells of his body were doubling again and again, dividing in two, then four, then eight, becoming many thousands.
A few days after their incautious passion, tiny embryonic Bonaventure floated down a fallopian tube and settled in to grow. About five weeks later, his arms and legs began to bud, his heart had started to beat its own drum, and blood swirled through him at four miles an hour. Bonaventure would keep on growing and changing and changing again and soon would weigh as much as a three-page letter.
Trinidad Prefontaine detected a change in the night sky. She ascribed it to a new presence, one that needed some time to reach her, for starlight does not hurry.
One missed period and two sore breasts later Dancy said she had something to tell William as he walked her home through the loblolly pines. She didn’t say anything for a pained eternity, and then she stopped walking and looked him straight in the eye. Her tears welled up and spilled over before she even said a word, and William was certain she was about to break his heart.
W
ILLIAM
Everest Arrow and Danita Celine Roman stood before the justice of the peace upstairs in the courthouse on Lafayette Street in Bayou Cymbaline, on a Wednesday in July of 1949, promising to have and to hold from that day forward. He was twenty-two and she was just nineteen. Both of them were excited-nervous. The bride wore a powder blue, short-sleeved dress with eleven buttons down the front and a cinched waist that would be too tight in a week. She’d fashioned her long blond hair into a chignon that she felt was in keeping with the feather and rhinestones on the netted felt hat she had borrowed from a friend. The groom was dashing in dark gray serge and a white bespoke shirt, with twenty-four-karat gold cuff links at his wrists. The scents of Evening in Paris and Old Spice puffed into the air from the pulse points on the sides of their necks, near the veins that carried blood from their heads to their hearts.
The county clerk acted as witness, and the certificate of marriage was signed and recorded.
The young man’s background was full of pedigreed ancestors, a businessman and bankers among the paternal Arrows, and landed gentry among his mother’s people on the old-moneyed Molyneaux side.
Not so the young lady’s. Her father’s family, the Romans, owed their living to the various crustaceans of the Louisiana delta; anything that crawled, swam, or burrowed in the muck around Shoats Creek. Her mother’s stock, the Cormiers by name, were good-natured, hard-scrabble bayou folk who dwelled amidst the palmetto jungles of Beauregard Parish along with lizards and spiders and dark-loving bats. They were steeped in all things Cajun and Creole and wore the pungent, musky taint of the swamp like a badge. Dancy’s mother had never fit in with her folk.