The wedding was a low-key ceremony that took place at the Cornerstone Southern Baptist Church in Bayou Cymbaline, which was two blocks west of the VFW Hall, where a small reception was held. The day’s events were attended by Theo’s coworkers and all of the Shoats Creek Romans who could make it. It seems the Cormiers’ invitations went out late. Theo wouldn’t meet his in-laws until a few years later, when he took Dancy out for a visit. But Adelaide never went back.
The low-budget wedding was intentional on Adelaide’s part. The big money was reserved for the honeymoon and her trousseau. Theo scratched his head and questioned the need for six pairs of new shoes, to which Adelaide responded that if he couldn’t afford for his wife to have shoes maybe he should have said something before she gave up everything to marry him and move to a place where she didn’t know a single soul. Theo never questioned her spending habits again. He learned that if he just let her buy what she wanted for herself or the house, she could be pleasant enough. By the same token, Adelaide had figured out that it was best to have marital relations before she spent more than ten dollars on anything, which is how it was that Dancy came to be conceived the night before the purchase of a dining room set complete with a sideboard, a hutch, and two leaves for the table.
Adelaide didn’t dislike pregnancy; she despised it. It wasn’t that she was sick in the mornings, or at any other time for that matter; it was how heavy and painful her breasts became, and how stretch marks ran all over her abdomen like silvery mucous trails left by snails, and especially how her belly button stuck out. Adelaide seethed through the whole nine months and vowed she would never be pregnant again.
She’d labored for less than two hours when Dancy glided out of her body as if she were covered in Vaseline. Adelaide could have filed her nails through the whole thing with very little disruption. The doctor said that in all his years of practice he’d never seen a woman have such an easy time of it.
Theo came to her hospital room afterwards, a dozen red roses in one hand and a jeweler’s box in the other. Adelaide said that the roses were pretty, but for future reference she preferred pink or yellow, and that she would exchange the opal necklace as soon as she was able. He had the receipt, didn’t he? Then she told him there would be no more sex in their future because the doctor said she’d almost died while giving birth and would most likely be in pain the rest of her life.
As for forming a bond with her daughter, well, that would have to come about all by itself and would definitely not happen through nursing. Nursing was for broodmares and barn cats, she said, and that’s why God made bottles.
Theo was another story. Dancy took over his heart from day one. It was Theo who stayed up nights when she was sick with a stomachache, a cough, or a fever; Theo who taught her to tie her shoes; Theo who taught her to ride a bike; and Theo who did just about everything else a parent could and should and ought to want to do. This included taking her to visit her grandparents, which meant going to see the Cormiers, since his own parents were deceased by then. Adelaide was all too happy to stay behind in Bayou Cymbaline with her indoor toilet and her linoleum floors, comforts she’d never had on Bayou Deception Island. And she loved not having to cook dinner for her husband or having to mind her child.
Dancy didn’t miss Adelaide on those trips. By the time she was eight years old, she’d already decided that she would
not
be like her mother when she grew up. She wouldn’t ever yank on her daughter’s arm, or call her stupid, or take away her dinner as punishment.
All throughout her childhood, Dancy fantasized that Adelaide would run off for New York City. Then it would be just Dancy and her daddy, who never said he wished she was prettier and never called her disgusting. Never.
This dislike of her mother remained as Dancy grew up. She supposed she had some feeling for Adelaide, in a detached sort of way and only because of their blood tie. But that was all. Any hints of warmth or trust were missing from their relationship.
If you’d asked for advice on raising a daughter, Adelaide Roman’s response would have been to fall to your knees and pray for the strength to know the devil when you saw him. Although she’d never outright proclaimed that a demon had hold of Dancy, there’d been plenty of times when Adelaide had said, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” the minute the girl walked out of the room. As a congregant of the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel, Adelaide Roman was an expert on Satan.
She’d had a reason for joining the Forthright, but that reason had nothing to do with God. It was a reason that had come to her at her place of employment. Adelaide worked at the Bayou Cymbaline Branch of the United States Post Office on Pepperdine Street in Bayou Cymbaline. It was there, in August of 1946, that a handsome stranger with the most gorgeous blue eyes she’d ever seen walked in to stand directly in front of her. The man introduced himself as Brother Harley John Eacomb and asked if he might post a notice on the corkboard that hung in the post office vestibule. Adelaide said she didn’t see why not.
The handsome stranger tipped his head in a graceful bow before going out the way he’d come in. When he was gone, Adelaide just about fell over herself getting out to the corkboard to see what he’d posted. She believed it was the first time in her life she actually felt blessed by God to be in the right place at the right time. The notice stated that a special Meeting of the Righteous was to be held down by the river the following Sunday at six in the evening. Presiding over the meeting would be Brother Harley John Eacomb, pastor of the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel.
Adelaide spent all of Saturday getting herself ready. She bought a new dress, and shoes to go with it, and splurged on a white silk hat with peek-a-boo netting that came down over her eyes, and white gloves with a mother-of-pearl button at the wrist bone. Dancy was only sixteen at the time and not yet a cosmetologist, so Adelaide went to the beauty parlor for a professional wash and set, and had her nails painted in a color called Happy Heart Red.
When her husband asked her where she was going, she said, “Some of us care about the welfare of our eternal souls, Theo. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to church like I always do.”
“In the evening? And dressed like that? You don’t usually get so dolled up. I thought maybe you were headed for Bourbon Street,” he teased.
To which Adelaide insisted on knowing if she was entitled to look her best when she praised God Almighty or not.
The Meeting that night was still going on past nine. Brother Eacomb called down God and called out Satan in a voice that no one in those parts had ever heard the like of. He would teach them to praise God, he said. He would cure their ills and wash the sins from those who genuinely wished to be saved. Brother Eacomb promised to cast out demons and to purify hearts. After that, he promised to lead his flock up the holy mountain, because they were surely a righteous people, the chosen ones of God.
If his blue eyes hadn’t gotten to Adelaide, his mellifluous voice surely would have. Adelaide Roman had never in her life heard such a voice come out of a man. But oh my Lord, those eyes.
On the Thursday after that first Meeting of the Righteous, Theo Roman complained of feeling ill and stayed home from work for the first time in his life. Adelaide left early for her job at the post office, but Dancy stayed home from school because she was worried. At a quarter past ten, she heard a thump and a strangling sound coming from her parents’ room. She found Theo on the floor, called for an ambulance, and rode along with him to a hospital in New Orleans, where she had to borrow money for the pay phone to call her mother. Adelaide said she would be there after work. This situation aggravated her; she wouldn’t be able to go shopping, and she needed to find another new dress to wear for her personal savior, Brother Eacomb.
Theo was in the hospital for a week. When he was discharged, the doctor handed Adelaide a small glass bottle with nitroglycerin tablets in it and explained to them both that Theo should place one under his tongue if he felt another heart attack coming on. He said the instructions were on the label. Adelaide put the bottle in the drawer of the bedside table when they got back home.
It wasn’t but a month later that another heart attack came to call. Adelaide and Theo had just sat down to dinner when he felt the first pain. Dancy wasn’t home.
“Nitro . . .” he gasped.
“What’s that, Theo? What are you saying? I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Nitro . . .” He was turning a bluish white.
“What are you trying to say, Theo? I can’t understand you.”
A raspy, whispered “Nitro . . .”
“I still can’t understand you, Theo.” She was shouting by now. “Are you saying nitro? Do you need one of those pills?”
Theo managed to nod his head, and Adelaide folded her napkin, put it back on the table, and walked to the bedroom to get the medication. When, nearly two full minutes later, Theo fell to the floor stone-cold dead, Adelaide was straightening a throw pillow and smoothing a wrinkle in the bedspread.
The next time Brother Harley John Eacomb came to Bayou Cymbaline to conduct a Meeting of the Righteous, Adelaide showed up in a snug-fitting, black sheath dress. After the service she approached him and proclaimed that now she understood Mark 9:43–48. Her husband had been like a hand or a foot or an eye that offended, and he had been cast off.
“He was a drinker and a smoker and he played poker every Friday night, Brother Eacomb. And though he was always clean-shaven and shined his shoes on Saturdays, he was a godless man. I am convinced he will be playing cards with the devil for all eternity.”
And Brother Harley John Eacomb said, “Praise Jesus, sister, praise Jesus.”
Adelaide took to wearing fancy lingerie to every Meeting of the Righteous. She told herself it had nothing to do with the fact that she drove to a motel over in Chalmette and had sex with the married Brother Eacomb after services. That wasn’t it at all; she had simply wanted to look her best for God, as any good Christian woman would do.
Having become Brother Eacomb’s truest disciple, Adelaide believed it was her duty to save others by any means available, and she carried this out at her post office job by intercepting and opening mail that was not addressed to her, all in the name of the Lord. She reasoned that doing so would allow her to identify any works of the devil that tried to disguise themselves as United States mail. It was a practice well suited to Adelaide Roman, a woman who understood the ways of the devil.
A
T
no time after William’s death had it been suggested that pregnant Dancy move in with Adelaide rather than Letice. She couldn’t have stood Adelaide anyway—all the gossip mixed in with Bible quoting, Praise-be-to-Godding, and unceasing holier-than-thou judgments. Nor did she wish to feel unwanted, or to listen to the snide insinuations that her father had been a failure.
Most days Dancy just sat very still and stared into nothing. She nibbled at her food and sipped at her drink. Dancy couldn’t place herself back in the world because her world had gone missing, completely erased by some cold, cruel void. She had lost every manner of feeling, from the sensation of touch to the experience of emotion. She could have plucked an egg from boiling water and never felt a thing. Dancy was like a sieve; the only thing she could hold were the boiled-down husks of cooked-away happiness, leftovers from a life that had drained through the wires.
If she wanted for anything she had only to ring a silver bell, which she did for the first time on the night her water broke. And she only rang it then because she was too big to bend over and clean up the mess. It was the last day of January 1950, and it was two weeks too soon for Bonaventure to happen.
Bonaventure heard the water break and felt something give way beneath him. Then he heard the sounds of the little bell’s clapper, and of footsteps, and of questions formed from rushing words. The voice that belonged to Letice had a bit of something in it that hadn’t been there before. His mother’s voice was different too, stretched out and brittle at the edges, and her breathing had become erratic.
Letice marshaled an outer calm while frantically and surreptitiously looking for any sign of late-term miscarriage. She telephoned the doctor and Dancy’s mother and took the suitcase that had been packed some three weeks before from where it stood beside the tall old walnut chiffonier. Mrs. Silvey sat Dancy down and cleaned her up a bit, while Mr. Silvey brought the car around and mentally rehearsed the route to the hospital.
Sensation and emotion returned to Dancy in a rush, and she began to feel two different fears, one far greater than the other. The lesser was the fear of pain; the greater was the fear of losing her connection to William. As long as the baby was inside her body, so too was a part of her husband, and she felt close to him, and warm and safe and loved and touched. She didn’t want to lose him again.
Bonaventure heard sharp yelps of pain when the womb where he lived began to contract. So many sounds were raging around him that he couldn’t separate happiness from fright, and his own heart started to race. He could hear the whimpering of his mother’s fears but didn’t know what to do with them. Her heart was telling him to stay, while her body urged him to go. He pulled on his ears in complete desperation and listened as hard as he could.
“Don’t be afraid,” said a familiar deep voice. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Trinidad Prefontaine could not find sleep. Her room was bathed in a ghostly light, for the moon was nearing full. A winter rain fell against her windowpane, its rivulets turned silver by that waxing moon. She’d been restless inside her own skin for three days, as if some strange and invisible imp were blowing its breath against her neck. That scamp had been following her in the daytime too, from stove to cupboard and from inside to out, like a playful, excitable secret. The rascal would ceaselessly sing a wordless song and escape from the corner of Trinidad’s eye when she turned. It was a supernatural being; she was certain of that.