Bonaventure Arrow had been chosen to bring peace. There was guilt to be dealt with, and poor broken hearts, and atonement gone terribly wrong. And too there were family secrets to be heard: some of them old and all of them harmful.
A Privilege Allowed Restless Souls
N
EW
Orleans is a place of cemeteries in which dignified sepulchers stand aboveground, guardians of love and remembrance. In those cities of the dead, statues and etchings mark resting places, and a populace of angels stands in constant pose directing the departed toward heaven. Broken flowers and weeping willows pay reverent homage, while poppies bestow eternal sleep. Doves bequeath peace, Christ’s bleeding heart wears a crown of thorns, and lambs mark the graves of children. Every statue and every design keeps vigil over the dead. Some say they drive evil spirits away—a task well noted in New Orleans.
It has long been known that bodies decompose rapidly inside their tombs in the heat of Louisiana summers. The locals call them bone ovens because year after year there is nothing left but skeleton, the rest of the corpse having all but baked away. Lying at peace and rid of their flesh, the newly baked bones are politely placed into an opening in the crypt’s floor, down into a hollowed-out space beneath, in a macabre and gracious gesture of making room for more—a natural thing in a place like New Orleans.
Such was not the case with the Arrows. They were a well-to-do family that had long ago commissioned a mausoleum in Cimetière du Père Anastase large enough to hold twelve bodies at rest, never to be disturbed. William’s remains would be placed near those of his father, Remington, who rested near his own parents and grandparents. That was the way of the Arrow family.
William attended his own funeral; it is a privilege allowed restless souls. The transcendence of the requiem mass offered to take him into the sky above, but he resisted and sat next to his coffin in the hearse on the way to the cemetery. He took note of the freshly engraved letters on the tomb—“WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW ~ BORN DECEMBER 16, 1926 ~ DIED DECEMBER 16, 1949”—and of the graceful script that flowed into the shadow of the Valley of Death spoken of so poetically in the Twenty-third Psalm.
There was, however, no psalm to describe the irony of William dying on his twenty-third birthday, or of the fatal bullet having traveled a notable distance, around corners, through tree trunks and solid red brick to lodge in the life of his pregnant young widow.
William Arrow did not rest in peace.
In the weeks following the funeral, Dancy couldn’t manage much in the way of sleeping or eating. Her skin grew ashen, her hair hung limp, and her eyes became dull as gray slate. In this regard she was not unlike The Wanderer—lost in an emotional catalepsy, her consciousness made ethereal, her heart made paralyzed.
Wanting the best for her daughter-in-law and soon-to-be-born grandchild, Letice Arrow insisted that Dancy come live with her in William’s childhood home. It would be hard enough to care for a newborn, she said, never mind trying to do so while mired in the throes of grief. But there was more to Letice’s kind offer than that. She wanted to hold a living baby, to show God once more that she could be a good mother.
Dancy acquiesced because she didn’t have the will for much else, and she didn’t like being alone in the house in New Orleans, to which William would never come home.
Letice’s house faced a park and was a lovely reminder of the antebellum South. Like so many others in that part of the country, it was an Italianate, with pronounced eaves atop decorated corbels and, set off with ornate wrought iron, an upper belvedere from which to view cypress trees and live oaks all draped in Spanish moss. There was a smooth-as-glass pond across the way where geese and swans floated gracefully in imitation of their brethren in New Orleans. It was the perfect place for dragonflies to skim above the surface, glimmering green and purple between the water and the sun.
The house had been built by a seafaring man who’d furnished it with the exotica of his travels. The interior was full of ebony, teak, and thick Turkish carpets. The banister of the front stair had been carved in Africa, while every hinge and hasp was made of brass and bore the likeness of a heron, etched by a Viennese craftsman who’d had the steady hand and eye to accomplish such a thing.
The desk drawers in William’s old room still held his stamp collection and baseball scrapbooks, as well as a cigar box containing three Indian-head pennies, a rabbit’s foot on a chain, and no less than a dozen number-two pencils, every one of them with teeth marks set in its wood.
Vestiges of William’s boyhood shouts hovered somewhere near the ceilings, while memories of his trampling feet pattered over all the floors, and echoes of his singing voice inhabited the walls. Ghostly William did what he could to let those sounds find their way into Dancy’s head, but things didn’t work out in the way he’d intended. Those shouts and footsteps and echoes of songs could not chisel their way into Dancy’s grief-stricken mind and so went to her womb instead.
Even though Bonaventure didn’t always understand the sounds he was hearing, he did know how they made him feel, and the carefree noises of William’s childhood made him feel much better than the constant forlorn sounds of mourning.
William had been admitted to Almost Heaven, but he found it a lonely place and so made visits to Christopher Street, where he stayed for days on end. During one of those visits, he wondered if his unborn baby could still hear him, and so he spoke a question: “Hey, little man, how’s it going in there?”
Bonaventure turned in a circle when he heard that familiar voice. His movement caused a stir inside William’s dead man’s heart.
S
ORROW
has a nature of its own, and of course it always does change things. In the case of Bonaventure Arrow, Sorrow moved in with his family and enjoyed the status of uninvited guest.
For all intents and purposes, Dancy and Letice were strangers who stood at the edge of reality. Dancy occupied the fringes of each day avoiding people and conversation, while her mother-in-law walked ever deeper into prayer. They dressed; they ate; they went through the motions. They held themselves stiffly as if to keep from breaking. Though they had come together to mourning’s abyss, each looked into the gorge alone.
This familiar estrangement was due to a couple of characteristics the two women held in common: The first of these was the practice of keeping emotion at bay; while Dancy was new to it, her mother-in-law had long been a master. Letice was a disciplined woman, albeit quite kind, and commanded respect without saying a word. The second shared characteristic was that both of them had made a deliberate choice to lock down heartbreak. To set their sadness free would be to let William go, and neither of them could do that.
Although they grieved in company, there was one major difference in their thinking: Letice wanted to know the killer’s name and where he had come from; Dancy, however, did not. Letice had a private theory, one she’d woven from the threads of a secret that had been haunting her for years. This theory laid the blame for William’s death directly at her door.
Ironically, Dancy believed that she was the one at fault, and that being left to wonder was part of her punishment. Neither woman came right out and blamed God. Letice could not tolerate the thought, and Dancy felt that if there was a God—and she had started to doubt his existence—he was the monstrous one her mother worshipped, and she refused to recognize any such being.
Adelaide Roman also believed that her daughter was being punished, but she felt it was for sneaking off to have sex before marriage, bringing shame on their family like the worst kind of sinner, and making Adelaide a grandmother at the age of forty-one. Well, Dancy would have to pay for that:
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Adelaide always cherry-picked verses from her King James Bible and applied them any which way she liked.
Letice Arrow contacted Sergeant Turcotte, the New Orleans police sergeant in charge of the investigation, to see what, if anything, he had been able to ascertain. She was told the perpetrator, referred to as John Doe, was uncommunicative.
“The doc up to the asylum thinks he doesn’t even know his own name, Mrs. Arrow,” were the policeman’s exact words.
“Was there no wallet, nothing at all?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry to say. He didn’t have much on him. He kept his money in an unmarked envelope and a few whatnots in his pockets, but nothing that points to who he is or why he did it. We fingerprinted him, and nothing turned up.”
“Are you saying that there is no clue whatsoever?”
“We’re asking around town. He was kind of an eyesore, if you know what I mean. I believe that eventually somebody will come forward, someone who noticed him, who can give us an idea of where he was staying or where he came from. In addition to the cash, I remember he had a Chicago newspaper with him dated December 1, 1949, and a paper napkin. The napkin was from a coffee shop in Memphis, so put all that together and it looks like he was a drifter. That’s about all I can tell you right now, Mrs. Arrow.”
“How much cash was he carrying?” Letice asked.
“A pretty good amount, over $700 I think it was.”
“Do drifters usually carry that much money?”
“Maybe he was a gambling man,” the sergeant said.
“Maybe? Is that the best you can do, Sergeant?”
Turcotte let a few seconds of silence come between them. “Mrs. Arrow, I am not your enemy here. We’re doing the best we can.”
“I don’t think you are, Sergeant. I don’t think you realize how important this is.”
“I assure you, ma’am, I do.”
Subsequent conversations took place every week. Letice was obsessed with the notion that William’s life had been payment for a terrible sin she’d committed, and for tricking Remington Arrow into marrying her by letting him believe she was something she was not. She’d been living a lie, and William had paid the wage of her sins.
She didn’t tell Dancy about her talks with the sergeant; the girl might wonder why she wanted so badly to know the killer’s name. Letice was afraid that if she tried to explain, she would have to go back years, all the way to the passion and the potion and the innocent blood, and the prediction that
seven times seven gwine come to you
. She hadn’t known what it meant at the time, but now she knew: William had been murdered in 1949, and forty-nine is the same thing as seven times seven. Letice had fallen into the trap of finding sense inside the rant of a superstitious woman. Such traps are not uncommon in a place like New Orleans, spongy as it is with tales and magic.
The funereal scent of magnolia and white lilies hung heavy in the air of the house on Christopher Street, settling on the black crepe de Chine that covered its mirrors and clinging to the women who lived within its walls. Dancy moved through the rooms of William’s brief life, touching door knobs and newel posts she knew he had touched, collecting his fingerprints in the palm of her hand. Sometimes she felt that she was drowning in the very air she breathed, and just when it seemed her lungs had filled with combustible anguish and were about to burst into flame, she would feel a pulling such as that which comes to a body in water, lifting it up and taking it to the surface. She welcomed the sensation but never told anyone about it, or of how it would take her all the way to the crypt at Père Anastase, where her sweet murdered husband lay.
Dancy loved those visits. They were a surviving intimacy, the only intimacy she had left. She talked to William when she was there, told him how much she missed him and that she would love him and only him forever and ever and ever. She went to the cemetery on Christmas Eve but didn’t leave her room on Christmas Day.
William didn’t leave it either; he watched Dancy pace the floor or stare out the window hour after long empty hour.
Dancy visited William’s crypt on the third day of January in 1950. She was seven-and-a-half months along, and unborn Bonaventure could push pretty hard. He pressed so hard against her insides that day that she could see the outline of his tiny baby knuckles right through her clothes, and she sang “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” in an attempt to calm him down.
The music worked. From inside Dancy’s warm, safe womb Bonaventure heard two voices singing, and his little heart beat out a raining tattoo as if to keep time with the song. He had no suspicion that anything had changed, because for him they had not; he’d always known those two voices, one soft, one deep, and had always found them soothing.
Hap Wilkens, the head groundskeeper at Père Anastase, was tending to a fallen urn at a crypt two rows behind when he saw Dancy and heard her singing. That night while playing double solitaire at the kitchen table, Hap told his wife about what he had witnessed. The two of them speculated that the poor girl had lost her mind, standing in the cemetery like that singing “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apply Pan Dowdy.” And didn’t she have a right to go crazy, what with her husband being killed at the A&P and all? They shook their heads and tsk-tsked, and said it truly was a pitiful situation. Purely pitiful.
Rather than diminishing with time, the pulling sensation became stronger. It would come to Dancy from nowhere, on the wings of thoughts she did not consciously have. And then a sort of relationship formed between Dancy and the pulling, as if it were her only real friend, the only one that understood. She began to wonder if she should give the sensation a name, companion that it had become. But the pulling already had a name; it was William Everest Arrow.
Letice was at all times gracious, and Mr. and Mrs. Silvey, the live-in help, tried to show that they cared very deeply and felt terrible about the whole situation. Forrest and Martha Silvey were ideally suited to dealing with loss, having met as hospital volunteers in the First World War when both were very young. Their wartime romance had been an effort in tenderness, touched by the leavings of war that were so visible in the dead eyes of living soldiers (the memory of which came back to them whenever they looked into Dancy’s). Both of them were from the South—she from Mobile and he from Baton Rouge—a trait that endowed them with a love of home and an appreciation for etiquette, both of which had greatly appealed to the Arrow family when they’d hired them back in 1926 right before William was born.