Bonaventure made pilgrim hats out of folded-up newspapers and insisted on having popcorn instead of regular corn in remembrance of the Wampanoag Indians who’d brought it to the first Thanksgiving. Mrs. Humphrey had read that story out loud in school, and it was one of his favorites because it held the sound of friendship.
Grandma Roman showed up in time for the meal; she said she’d been dishing up dinner to the homeless at the Resurrection Tent, and doggone it if she didn’t have to rush right back over there and wouldn’t get the chance to help them clean up. No one believed her, outfitted as she was in a new black dress and stylish satin pumps.
C
HRISTMAS
was different that year too, mainly because Bonaventure had gone to the trouble of examining the fireplace; of late he had formed some suspicions. He didn’t know why they even had a fireplace; it wasn’t like they ever used it much. He bent over and stuck his head in to get a good look, and one good look was all he needed. He straightened up and determined his suspicions had been correct—a cat couldn’t get down that chimney, never mind a fat man carrying a sack big enough to hold toys for all the children in the world. Bonaventure Arrow had let go of Santa Claus. Bonaventure Arrow was growing up.
Trinidad’s baking talents multiplied exponentially during the holiday season. She turned out butter cookies and spritz and pfeffernüsse and gingerbread and fruitcake. She made nougat roll and peppermint bark. She baked tiny pecan pies called teatime tassies and a chocolate-covered Yule log cake. To enter the Arrow kitchen at Christmastime was to transcend this earth entirely.
Dancy invited Gabe to go along with her and Bonaventure to get a Christmas tree. The three of them gave each possibility a good looking over, turning them this way and that. They had all agreed that the best trees weren’t perfect, that it was the flaws that gave them character. The ninth tree they examined was the keeper. When Dancy went to pay, she found out that Gabe had settled up with the tree man.
“I can’t let you do that, Gabe.”
“Of course you can,” he said. “Consider it my Christmas gift.”
“That’s not why I wanted you to come along.”
“I know that, Dancy.”
“Well, I hope so.”
“So why did you?” he asked.
“Why did I what?”
“Want me to come along?”
“Because it’s Christmas,” was what she said. But what she didn’t say was that she liked to be around him. She couldn’t say that even to herself.
Bonaventure got full of pine pitch when they sawed off the bottom to make sure the tree wouldn’t lean off to one side.
“People who sign should be careful of pine pitch,” Gabe told him, and ruffled his hair. “Their fingers could get stuck on a word.”
Bonaventure loved the joke.
They had eggnog and cookies in the living room, and listened to Christmas music while the tree settled in. Later, when they were putting on the lights, Gabe got kind of warm, so he took his sweater off and rolled his shirtsleeves up to just below his elbows. It was an innocent thing, but it grabbed Dancy’s attention and she felt a stirring she hadn’t felt since William. She didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so she fussed around with the ornament boxes.
When all the decorations were on, Bonaventure got to plug in the tree lights and turn off the lamps, and they all stood back and said “ah” in whatever way they could.
Dancy thought about Gabe for a long time that night and decided she needed to get things back on track once and for all.
The next morning at breakfast Letice suggested they invite him for Christmas dinner.
“I thought about that and decided against it.”
“You decided against it? Why?” Letice asked.
“He might feel like he should bring gifts, and he already bought the tree. And anyway, I think he said something about spending the day with his folks.”
Gabe, of course, had said no such thing.
Adelaide Roman got all gussied up on Christmas Eve and sashayed over to the Resurrection Tent to get lost in a reverie about Brother Harley John. While over in her little house on the Neff Switch road, Trinidad Prefontaine sat down on the green velvet bench and played “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful” on the old pump organ. She’d taught herself to play and felt she wasn’t too awful bad. She’d baked some sugar cookies that morning, decorated her door with holly at noon, tossed some seed outside for wild birds at suppertime, and lit a candle in honor of Peace on Earth and the Little Lord Jesus when starlight filled the sky.
Grand-mère, Bonaventure, and even Dancy went to Midnight Mass. It was sixty-three degrees that night, with a mist in the air like suspended rain. Bonaventure loved the sound of that mist; it made him think of angels’ wings. When he mentioned this to Letice, she said it was the best present he could have given her.
The sounds of the Christmas Vigil Mass nearly carried Bonaventure from the church pew all the way to Venus. Mixed in with the beautiful music, he heard a candle sputter in Trinidad’s house and it made him feel warm and good.
William felt a pounding where a physical heart would be, as if he wasn’t dead at all. He stayed away on Christmas morning to walk the shore of the Almost Heaven sea.
On New Year’s Eve, the Arrow household stayed up until midnight and welcomed 1957 with a champagne toast for the grownups and root beer for anyone who was almost seven. It had been the happiest holiday season they’d known in years.
Dancy and Letice would survive the winter as the passion flower vine survives the same: their roots would sleep in the soil of the past and their stems would survive the dark and the cold while dreaming of bees and hummingbirds and being tended to lovingly by Trinidad and Gabe.
The Spirit that had brought them all together wished them the best in what was to come.
T
HE
Wanderer thought he’d
had a button once. He could remember how it felt to reach into his pocket and rub his thumb over it. Then he thought that perhaps there’d been the likeness of an eagle on the front of it. Yes, there was, and that eagle still looked big, even though it fit on such a small thing as a button. The Wanderer couldn’t understand that at all.
That lady who came to see him always wore a sweater with buttons, but none of them had eagles on the front.
The Wanderer had no thoughts of Christmas.
1957
N
OTHING
had ever calmed the resentment Dancy felt toward William’s killer. Her hatred, always a blister on her soul, had become a fetid ulceration, cracked and sore. She hoped he lived a long life in that prison for the insane, and she hoped he was in pain every single day.
Letice did not feel resentment or hate, but her curiosity had never lessened. Even after all these years, she still wanted desperately to know the man’s name, and why, why, why. So in January of 1957 she gave up on ever receiving resolution from Sergeant Turcotte and hired a retired Pinkerton detective named Coleman Tate, a man so dedicated to his work that he’d never found time to marry.
Mr. Tate was of average height and was getting a bit round in the middle. He kept his hair cropped short and always wore a suited vest and a pocket watch affixed to the end of a fob. Tate was a quiet man, patient and thorough. He remembered reading about the murder in the paper.
Coleman Tate asked Letice to go over everything pertaining to the police investigation. She gave him Sergeant Turcotte’s name and relayed the gist of their conversations. She recounted that no connection to William’s law firm had been made; she spoke to Tate of her suspicions that the murderer may have been a disgruntled customer of the Arrow family bank, perhaps someone who’d been foreclosed on. She was honest with him in saying that the police believed they had accounted for all those possibilities, and there was no record of anyone who’d been denied a loan. Nonetheless, she felt it was a possibility that deserved a closer look.
“Everything is worth considering, Mrs. Arrow,” he said. “But I must familiarize myself with the physical evidence first.”
“Whatever you think best, Mr. Tate.”
The day after being retained by Letice, Tate went to the asylum and enlightened the administrator as to his client’s unending grief. He knew it was the right approach. A door was unlocked and a metal box brought out. Tate asked if he might be left to conduct a thorough inventory and maybe take some notes.
“Certainly. Take your time,” the administrator said.
The box contained much more than Tate had expected. He handled each piece of evidence gingerly, examining it with a magnifying glass he’d brought along for that purpose. He asked permission to take custody of the objects for the duration of his investigation “in order to bring closure to the Arrow family.” The administrator knew well the power of the Arrow name and said that while it was unusual, even unprecedented, this one time he would make an exception.
Tate thanked the man and deftly took his leave. At home in his den, he took careful notes, recording even the smallest details.
PROGRESS REPORT
IN THE MATTER OF WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW (DECEASED)
A visit to the asylum in which the killer is incarcerated yielded access to the items he was carrying at the time of the murder. In total: a button; a Chicago Tribune newspaper folded triple-wise and dated December 1,1949; a paper napkin from a coffee shop in Memphis; a scrap of paper bearing the notation F379.N5A182; and a matchbook imprinted with the words “Zip’s Tavern—Melvindale, Michigan.” A receipt accompanies these possessions noting that he had $705 in cash, which is locked in the asylum vault. I have determined that these are enough to conduct a thorough investigation. Further findings to follow.
Per his agreement with Letice, Tate was to deliver his reports in person, during the daytime when Dancy was at work. Letice didn’t want to risk things coming in the mail. On the day he brought the first report, Trinidad was cleaning in the front room and Bonaventure was by her side. He was listening to the travel story of a piece of rice dust that claimed to have journeyed from the stratosphere into the troposphere on the foot of a bar-headed goose that had flown over the Himalayas on its way to Pakistan. The particle had just described the delightful dryness of the tropopause and was about to tell how it had ended up in the front room, when the sound of the doorbell interfered. Trinidad answered it with Bonaventure at her heels.
Coleman Tate introduced himself and asked to see Mrs. Letice Arrow if you please; she was expecting him. Trinidad stepped aside and motioned him into the foyer, where he waited while she went to announce his arrival. Tate bent down to shake hands with Bonaventure.
“How are you today, young man?”
Index finger to thumb, three fingers straight up as if to say, —I am A-OK.
“I see you’re the strong, silent type,” Tate said.
Nod, nod, nod.
“Well, nothing wrong with that. You know what they say: loose lips sink ships.”
Bonaventure smiled. He liked Coleman Tate.
Trinidad returned and said, “Please follow me, sir.”
As Tate walked away, Bonaventure heard a cracking, tearing, shattering noise coming from an envelope the man had tucked in his suit-coat pocket.
Not being gifted with access to Bonaventure’s silence, Trinidad didn’t hear that sound, but she did experience a vision when the Pinkerton passed through the door of Letice’s office. She saw a ragged jawbone take wing and fly above his head. That bone-scrap phantom was still flying in a circle above the visitor when he walked through the house to leave.
“There’s some very big hurt in this world, Mr. Bonaventure,” Trinidad said as she closed the door behind Tate.
Boneventure placed one hand on the lower right side of his face in response, as if her vision had reached out to his hearing and let him in on something.
That night, he told his father about Mr. Tate and the scary noises he’d brought into the house.
“I know something about Mr. Tate,” William said.
—Really? What?
“Well, you know how in books and movies there are good guys and bad guys?”
—Uh-huh.
“Mr. Tate is one of the good guys. You should listen really hard around him, and if you start to hear things that you don’t know what they mean, you should send those sounds to him.”
—Why?
“Because he’s a detective.”
Bonaventure took in a surprised little gasp. —Like the Hardy Boys?
“Yup. Only grown up.”
B
ONAVENTURE
was certain he looked different when he peered into the mirror on the morning of his seventh birthday. He thought he looked taller and more grown up. There really was a difference, but it was nothing you could see. He had insisted on inviting Gabe to his birthday dinner, after which they had cake and ice cream and went to see
Lady and the Tramp
, which Bonaventure and Dancy had already been to twice.
The passing weeks were preserved in construction paper and Elmer’s glue and posted on the fridge: valentines, shamrocks, and yellow-headed daffodils.
Dancy was working harder than ever. Talk with her customers was easy and light, tending to revolve around movie stars and sewing patterns and recipes found on Campbell’s soup cans. But lately, their easy camaraderie had begun to intrude on Dancy’s personal life.
“You’re twenty-seven years old,” Donna Rae Miller said. “Don’t you want a man in your life? Why do you keep living like you’re ninety-seven??”
“Oh, that’s a huge exaggeration, Donna Rae, and you know it. I don’t have the slightest inclination to look for a man, or for that matter to cook for him or take him to bed. I’ve got a child to raise and a business to run. What with needing to sleep a few hours at the end of the day, that’s just about all I got time for.”