The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (16 page)

Bonaventure went back to the house, and Dancy gave him that extra piece of cake. But he would have traded the cake and everything else he had if his father could be a real live dad and stay with him forever.

Bonaventure often knew when his father was entering or leaving a room because the air made a sound like it was zipping its pocket: open for hello, closed for goodbye. He knew when Gabe Riley was coming into a room too because Gabe had his own particular sound. It was the note of an eagle soaring. Eagles had a special place in Bonaventure’s silence; he liked the steadiness of their sound. He wished he could be an eagle, one that could unzip the air and soar behind the sky. He liked everything about eagles, and he liked everything about Gabe Riley too.

He wasn’t the only one.

“I think hiring Gabe was one of the best things we’ve ever done,” Letice said to Dancy one Friday afternoon before the teacher arrived for lessons.

“You can say that again. He sure is in the right line of work,” Dancy responded.

“He has high standards. I like that,” Letice said.

“To tell you the truth, I was worried about being able to learn sign, but having a teacher like Gabe has made all the difference. And he’s so good with Bonaventure! He’s patient, but he pushes him in an easy kind of way,” Dancy said.

“I know Bonaventure looks forward to sign lesson days. So do I. It’s like we’re all getting a different kind of voice, isn’t it?”

Neither of them mentioned that Bonaventure was able to write things out and could probably get along with the notepad alone. Gabe Riley was giving them a silent voice to have in common, one that engaged the eyes, took the mind to the hands, and gave life to unspoken, unprinted, deeply felt words. The Arrows didn’t want to give that up.

Both Dancy and Letice had come to accept that Bonaventure was never going to speak, but neither of them mentioned it, just in case the other one still held out hope.

Gabe also looked forward to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Bonaventure grasped things more quickly than any child Gabe had ever taught. He initially chalked this up to the fact that Bonaventure could hear, but soon realized there was more to it than that: the boy was incredibly observant and curious and had the mind of a poet. Sometimes he would come out with something touching and rather personal in their concise, signed conversations.

—My mom willow.

“Do you mean widow?” Gabe asked.

—No. My mom willow. Tree, beautiful, cries.

Gabe let it go.

In spite of the fact that he felt he had no right to any personal information about Dancy, Gabe sometimes tried to steer conversations with Bonaventure along those lines. He thought about her all the time and had from the moment they’d met. He got into the habit of talking with Dancy after the lessons on the pretense of giving an update, but what he really wanted was to get to know her. He wanted to smell her perfume; he wanted to make her smile. He dreamed about her sometimes, and as the months went on, he began to fantasize that Bonaventure was his son and that Dancy was his wife. Then he would catch himself and remember that Dancy Arrow had never given even the slightest hint that she saw him as anything other than the sign language teacher who came to her house three times a week and was paid to help her son. But that didn’t stop Gabe’s feelings.

The Dancy he’d fallen in love with wasn’t the same Dancy William had known; she was more worn down now, like the side of a seawall that faces the breakers. One thing Gabe loved about her was how she stood solid in her life and did her best to keep things right. But strong as she appeared to be, he sensed that she was fragile at the same time, and so he admired her even more. He loved her dry sense of humor and the way she enjoyed learning. But he kept those things to himself because he was afraid that if he told her how he felt, the worn-down, widowed part of her would rise up and demand to know how he could say such a thing. She would be filled with disgust and send him away. So he did what he could to maintain an easy friendship in the hope that, if nothing else, a certain kind of love might find its way to her heart—most likely the kind that was one part attraction and nine parts appreciation. But one part would be enough. For now he clung to the memory of the last time he’d addressed her as Mrs. Arrow, and she’d said to call her Dancy.

Dancy did not know of Gabe’s feelings, but Bonaventure could hear them and he thought they sounded like a pearl that forms in concentric layers of kindness to protect a helpless oyster from a hurtful grain of sand.

Powerful Wangas and the Loup-Garou

D
ANCY
had spent her childhood summers with the Cormiers on Bayou Deception Island. She took to the bayou like a duck to water; even the outhouses didn’t bother her and she wasn’t afraid of bugs or the dark or the swamp or even voodoo stories. There were Creole and Cajun folk thereabouts who could sing and dance and play music on washboards and cook crawdads that melted in the mouth. Never in her life had Dancy heard anybody tell stories the way the Bayou Deception Islanders could, tales about spells and charms and the loup-garou and gris-gris, which was pronounced “gree-gree,” even though it wasn’t spelled that way.

Old Miz Antonet told the best stories of all, especially about the loup-garou. The loup-garou was said to look like a wolf; he could catch you in the woods and take your blood and make you crazy if you told anyone that you’d seen him. Miz Antonet had lived on the island her whole entire life and claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the loup-garou. When she talked about the creature, her voice was a rasp that started in the hollow of her neck and came out through lips that curled over toothless gums. She said she’d met up with the loup-garou when she was “nine yeah ole, ya ya. Right here on ’Ception Island.” She could describe how its eyes glowed red and how it took three drops of her blood before it got scared off by a hoot owl that was her familiar, ya ya, and how she lived to tell about it because she never said a word for “nigh on ten yeah.” Miz Antonet knew how to survive the loup-garou: “You just has to keep shut you mouth and the loup-garou leave you alone.”

Dancy had started hearing those stories when she was only six, and in the years to follow she learned that the loup-garou wasn’t nearly as powerful as voodoo and gris-gris.

Right before she turned thirteen, Dancy had thought she was dying. She was positive she suffered from some dreadful disease that came and went on a regular basis. These certain symptoms would appear and disappear, and she figured that every time they came around she was dying a little bit more. Summer couldn’t come fast enough for Dancy, because if she was going to die, she wanted to die on Bayou Deception Island and be buried in a tomb erected and whitewashed by her grandfather and decorated by her grandmother with fresh chrysanthemums and colored glass beads. Someone would sing the old Cajun waltz, “
J’ai passé devant ta porte
,” and there would be a sad, slow procession, and everyone would cry and say how she had had her whole life ahead of her and how she was such a sweet, pretty girl and how only the good die young. Adelaide would fall to the ground and cry out how she really did love her daughter, and beg Dancy to forgive her mother for not paying attention when she tried to tell her how sick she was. Dancy’s almost-thirteen-year-old eyes filled with tears at the mere thought of her imagined passing.

The symptoms always came on the same way: a terrible headache and a sleepiness that came over her no matter the time of day. And as if that wasn’t enough, her face would break out in spots and her stomach would bloat up, and when that happened she knew the worst was about to come: blood would start to drain out of her body and keep draining for at least four days, sometimes more. By the third time this happened, Dancy confided in her father, who was still alive back then, but Theo got all tongue-tied and kept clearing his throat and finally croaked out that she should go tell her mother about it.

“I thought as much, moody as you’ve been,” Adelaide said, and showed Dancy an advertisement for Kotex in a magazine and sent her off to Charbonneau’s Drug Store to figure things out for herself. But she needed something more than a magazine ad and some sanitary napkins. She needed to know why this was happening and she needed someone to tell her that it was going to be all right. When she and Theo made their annual pilgrimage to Bayou Deception Island, Grandma Cormier gave the answer in her earthy, bayou way.

It was early evening and they were sitting on the porch shucking peas for supper when Dancy dove in with, “I been getting my monthly since March,” and then it was woman-to-woman. Grandma talked about the pull of the moon and the making of new life. She hugged Dancy to her in her warm, strong arms and said the bleeding was a magical thing, an initiation into the mysteries of the body and the first step toward becoming a woman.

Eventually the conversation led to the use of a woman’s bloody flux by hoodoo women in the making of powerful love potions, which were a favorite topic in some circles.

“Hoodoo? Don’t you mean voodoo?” Dancy asked.

“No, I mean hoodoo. Hoodoo is about conjuring, you know, bringing magic. The hoodoo maker puts together what’s called an amulet—that’s a little cloth bag—and they put things inside it and that’s the gris-gris
.
”

“It sounds like voodoo,” Dancy said.

“Voodoo uses gris-gris too, but voodoo is more of a religion that has gods and such. They say it come here from the west part of Africa after it passed through the Caribbean Islands. Voodoo tampers with evil. Voodoo gris-gris can look like a charm, or some kind of doll, but it usually comes in small cloth bags with herbs or oils or even bits of fingernails or small bones inside. Sometimes they hold some personal possessions, or even a piece of cloth that still holds a body’s sweat.

“Hoodoo come from Africa too, but maybe from the deeper part. Hoodoo wants to set magic on a problem. Although now that I think on it, there’s hoodoo that’s called root work, and root work be the using of roots and herbs and oils and such for curing. Ain’t no fooling with charms or curses or spells in root work.

“When I was a child, there was a colored woman name of Big Angeline lived down the road from us, and she was a root worker. Big Angeline always say voodoo was about sacred things. Course, I didn’t know the meaning of
sacred
since my mama and daddy didn’t hold much with any kind of churching, so Big Angeline she explains it to me, and she says that sometimes voodoo charms got voodoo-sacred stuff in them, stuff to do with one god or another, but some had powders that were supposed to be medicines. I can still hear that Big Angeline just like it was yesterday: ‘Doze be de ones possessed by de spirits,’ she would say. ‘Holy spirits dat make de medicine work, sometime good, sometime bad. Sometime dey bring money to your pocket, or love to your heart. Sometime dey stop a tongue dat gossip.’ Ya, ya, that’s what Big Angeline would say.” Grandma Cormier laughed at the memory.

“How do the charms work?” Dancy asked.

“Well, they get put on a person, throwed on them, or maybe set in the doorway where they live. Big Angeline used to tell about a voodoo queen lived in N’awlins name of Marie Laveau who wrote somebody’s name on a balloon and then tied it to a statue of Saint Expedite. She did it so when the balloon broke free and flew away, the person whose name was on that balloon went away in the same direction. I always did love to hear about Marie Laveau. Big Angeline said Marie Laveau made some real powerful gris-gris. She liked to put in little bits of bones or stuff from animals: bird nests or horsehair. Sometimes she put in dust from the graveyard, called goofer dust. Sometimes she used gunpowder or salt or red pepper.”

At that point in the conversation, Mama Isabeau, a Creole woman of color who lived just down the road, came ambling up the Cormiers’ path. Mama Isabeau couldn’t have done much more than amble even if she’d wanted to because she weighed close to three hundred pounds and Mama Isabeau weighed that much because Mama Isabeau loved to eat.

“Do I hear you talk about Marie Laveau?” she panted as she climbed up the steps real slow.

“Ya, Mama, ya, you know all about Marie Laveau, don’t you?” Grandma Cormier answered back.

“My auntie, she used to caution all us about the voodoo. She talk about Marie Laveau all the time. She say Marie’s most powerful bad luck gris-gris be called wangas. She say Marie like to tell about her worst one. It seem she make a gris-gris bag from the shroud of somebody been dead nine days. She put in a dried-up lizard what have only one eye, the little finger off a black man who killed hisself, a dried toad, the wings from a bat, the eyes from a possum, a owl’s beak and a rooster’s heart. That gris-gris meant to kill somebody.”

“Can anyone make gris-gris bags?” Dancy asked.

“Well now, gris-gris bags they take some planning, ya, ya,” Mama Isabeau said. “You has to have a altar with something of the earth and the air and the water and the fire. And you has to put in the ingredients by the numbers. You has to be able to count them ingredients by odd numbers, but never more than thirteen, ya, ya. You can’t never have a even number of things in the gris-gris bag.”

“Did you ever know of anybody who got good gris-gris put on them?” Dancy asked.

“Oh, ya, ya! I know a gambling man once who swore he got good luck from a gris-gris charm he kep in his left shoe. The gris-gris maker mixed pine-tree sap with some blood from a dove and use it for ink to write an amount of money on a little piece of cowhide. She wrap the cowhide in a piece of green silk and put a snake’s tongue in between the layers. Then she sew it together with cat’s gut. The gambling man swear that charm give him real good luck!”

Now Dancy was remembering the loup-garou and gris-gris, and she came to the realization that the loup-garou was any fear that had taken a form and intended to drive someone crazy.

But she had no idea there were makings of gris-gris right there in the house on Christopher Street, or that root work was happening not far away in Trinidad Prefontaine’s garden.