The Silveys were a childless couple, patient and kind and devoted to each other. They were a living example of the axiom that people who live together for a long time begin to look alike; Mr. and Mrs. Silvey even got taken for brother and sister by those who didn’t know better. They were both rather shapeless, with stooped shoulders like melted-down candle wax. They had no waistlines to speak of, and their faces sagged from cheekbones to chins.
They hadn’t always been childless; there’d been a baby once, a little girl, when they were first married all those years ago. They’d named her Caroline, and she’d died a sudden naptime death. That’s when their sagging faces started, and also when their hair gave up all color and turned a bright snowy white. The loss of William deeply hurt the Silveys, for he had been precious to them, as precious as the child they’d lost.
Bonaventure loved Mr. and Mrs. Silvey’s voices; they had a way of cooling the scalding, unshed tears that boiled around his mother’s heart, burning holes in its tender tissue; he could clearly hear it happen. Far in the future he would hear the same thing in the lovely cooing of a pair of doves. But for now he listened from where he lay, curled inside his mother like a flesh-and-blood rosebud preparing to bloom.
W
HILE
unborn Bonaventure was doing all that listening, his kindred spirit was going about her business. Trinidad Prefontaine was descended from the beautiful Consette, a mulatto girl who’d been born in Haiti, sired by a white man on a girl off a slave ship. Consette had been traded by that white man to a thieving midshipman on the cargo ship
Andanza
for a dozen cases of bumbo rum. It happened in 1820 when she was just sixteen years old. The midshipman sold her to the captain, who gave her as a gift to one Augustin Tulac, a white Creole plantation owner who lived with his lawful wife and legitimate children outside the city of New Orleans.
Consette had eyes the color of lapis lazuli, a blend of azure with glimmering turquoise that put the skies of the heavens to shame. Her skin had the feel of an orchid petal. She was structured delicately like a hummingbird, with luxuriant hair that was two shadows blacker than midnight. Consette was altogether enchanting.
Augustin Tulac kept Consette in a stately home on Esplanade Avenue in Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood famous for
marriages de la main gauche
, “left-handed marriages” in English. Her patron was generous, and her bank account grew monthly; even her servants possessed a veneer of sophistication. But all that aside, Consette harbored a deep hatred for Tulac. On nights she lay beneath him, she lost herself in memories of the Quarter: the dancing flames and the beating drums and the half-closed eyes of the
Mambo
sur point
, priestess to the
Asogwe
Eulalie Bibienne. When she thought of these things, a fever would start deep inside Consette’s body, causing her to arch her back and move her hips in a pulsing, pumping rhythm.
When her loathing of Tulac grew enough, Consette paid a visit to Eulalie Bibienne, seeking her advice. On a hot steamy night, she did as the
Asogwe
bade her do and took her hatred to the Quarter, where she let the
Caplatas
do with it as they would. In two short weeks Tulac was dead, a look of terror on his frozen face. No investigation was made; a death like Tulac’s was left alone at that time in New Orleans.
Consette shed herself of her home and her servants and chose a husband after Tulac’s demise, a freed man named Isaac who was a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave called Zimba. She moved to his farm and gave birth to four dark daughters, whom she endowed with her fascination for the occult. Consette’s fixation passed down her line through all generations to follow.
In 1913, one of Consette’s descendants gave birth to Trinidad and nurtured the child with superstition and the demon side of plants. Trinidad learned that the bulb of a hyacinth could cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it could be fatal; that oleander leaves are poisonous and harmful to the heart; that all parts of the dieffenbachia will burn the mouth and can swell a tongue enough to cut off air; and that one or two castor beans are deadly things to eat. Trinidad was given all that knowledge, but not a solitary ounce of healthy love.
She took it all in, but unlike her mother, Trinidad was not interested in the poisonous, the harmful, the burning, or the deadly. Instead, she looked for healing.
Oddly enough, Trinidad had been born with a condition for which there is no herbal remedy. In Latin it is called
dextrocardia situs inversus
—spoken plainly, her heart was positioned in the right of her chest, a mirror image, completely transposed. But this was not her only distinction, for Trinidad was a Knower and also a receiver of visions. For most of her life, unbidden knowledge had floated itself to the anterior of her body cavity, above and just to the right of her gut, before settling on the surface of her turned-around heart. She’d first found out about the Knowing back in 1922, on the day she turned nine years old.
The memory of the discovery was this:
She’d worked alongside her mother in the fields that day, and they had snap beans and boiled potatoes for dinner. It happened to be a Monday, the only day of the week that the hoodoo woman would read your tea leaves if you gave her two copper pennies. The woman was called Mam Judith, and she’d been the bringer of hopes and omens to the colored part of Bayou Cane for coming up on fifty years.
Trinidad didn’t say a word during supper, and she chewed as fast as she could. It was the first time she was being allowed to visit Mam Judith, and the girl was in a rush to get there. She tried to plant a hurry-up thought in her mother’s head just by staring at her when she wasn’t looking. Finally, after a dozen forevers came and went, her mother took one last bite of beans, picked her teeth with the fingernail of her right pinky finger, gulped down the dregs of her chicory root coffee, and let out a very deep, very long belch before she finally spoke.
“Whatchew looking at, girl? Get up off your behine and clean up here. We gots somewhere to go.” This was as near to an expression of affection as Trinidad was ever likely to hear from her mother.
The child did as she was told, taking extra care so as not to have to do anything twice. When she’d hung the kitchen rag over the washtub’s edge and stood still waiting for approval, her mother spoke again.
“All right then. Go getchew a clean head cloth. I won’t have my chile stand before Mam Judith looking all nappy.” As Trinidad ran to do it, her mother’s voice pinched at her back: “Didjew hear me? I said make it a clean one. Make it your best clean one. You ain’t a sharecropper’s chile, and you ain’t no white trash neither. You be a Fontenaise.”
This was something her mother often said, this “You be a Fontenaise,” and her mother was fond of calling herself Missuz Fontenaise as if it were a claim to something fine and proud. It seemed to Trinidad that her mother’s voice was filled with haughtiness when she said it, though she never explained her claim to such arrogance. The truth of the matter was that Trinidad was the child of a rapist who’d used her mother five times in one night, taking off and leaving her half-dead and bleeding something more than three-and-a-half miles from home. She was never part of any marriage, and Fontenaise was a name she’d heard only once and bestowed upon herself.
The mother and daughter set off down the red clay road that never seemed to dry out completely, even if there hadn’t been rain for a month. They walked until they came to a weather-beaten tombstone that jutted up out of the ground like a moss-covered, ancient stone drunkard askew. That tombstone was how they knew to turn left and follow a smaller footpath that was mostly overgrown with swampish vegetation, until they came to two rotten fence posts held together with rusted barbed wire upon which hung a handmade cast-iron bell—the tea reader’s attempt at dignified formalities, as if to say, “Mam Judith is receiving today.”
Trinidad’s mother rang that bell three times and turned in a circle once; then they proceeded on. That’s how this business was done if done proper, according to local lore.
Mam Judith was as close to majestic as anyone from those parts ever got. No one knew how old she was, though it was said she was two days older than dirt. Her skin was the color of tree bark—mostly gray, save for the brown of the wrinkles that ran down her face like the graves of gone-away roots—and her eyes were green, like emeralds. Huge golden hoops always hung from her earlobes, and one tiny gold stud pierced the right side of her nose. And Mam Judith was diminutive; she looked like a wizened child sitting there on a cushion in the big rattan chair that flared up behind her and made her seem queenly.
Naturally, it was the silks that grabbed one’s eye in Mam Judith’s place, silks not being common in a part of the bayou where the general population had to look up to see bottom. And all those colors of all those silks were reflected in the small silver tea kettle that simmered on the cook stove.
Trinidad and her mother stepped inside the door and stood still as statues. Mam Judith moved her head in an almost imperceptible nod, and Trinidad felt her mother push her forward. The reader of tea leaves looked straight into the young girl’s eyes and said in a voice deep as a well and cold as a river bottom, “Pour some of that water into this cup and then drink it down, girl. I got business witchew.” She didn’t take her eyes away from Trinidad’s even for a second.
Trinidad did as she was told and set the cup between them when she finished. Mam Judith’s hand, a gnarled and brittle and broken-off branch, reached out to slide the cup closer to her own self. She perused the tea leaves in its bottom, squinting and harrumphing every now and again and sometimes seeming to growl.
When Trinidad swallowed, the sound of it rolled and crackled off the walls and the floor.
“You gots the gift, girl,” Mam Judith said, and then stopped in order to let the drama settle in. She shut her lips tight and stared into Trinidad’s face and finally said in a snake-hissy whisper, “You don’t be all the way of this world. There something in you can’t be from this world. You gots the Knowing. You mark what I say: when the time be right, things gwine come to you by thoughts and by visions. And you gots a Purpose too. Your Purpose gonna show itself when the time be right.”
There was no further explanation, and no one spoke of it ever again.
Trinidad’s life took tumbles and turns after her mother died. She married a man named Jackson Prefontaine but was widowed while still quite young. She ended up as housekeeper for the Virgil B. Hortons, a wealthy white family in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but she was not meant to stay there forever. Trinidad was meant to go to Bayou Cymbaline at a time in the future and join with Bonaventure Arrow, who, like her, would have a touch of the divine.
T
HE
voice of Adelaide Roman came around sometimes, although only once in a while. Whenever unborn Bonaventure heard it, he would climb up behind his mother’s ribs and form himself into a tight little ball, because Adelaide’s voice was sharp and scraping. Sometimes its sound waves beat viciously on his eardrums, nearly shattering his tiny hammer and anvil bones. These instances provided first evidence that the gift of peculiar hearing could sometimes be unkind.
Adelaide had been born and raised on Bayou Deception Island, the only child of Etienne Cormier and the former Reevy Simonette, two full-blooded Cajuns, neither of whom was very much to look at. But they were good people and well thought of, which is why no one could ever figure out how Adelaide fit into the picture. Not only was she pretty, but she had a tendency to act like she’d wound up with her parents by mistake, like she was never meant to be a Cormier at all. She’d been a colicky baby who grew into a prissy kind of child, never wanting to play outside, never wanting dirt on her clothes, and never wanting people to touch her. She narrowed her eyes at her parents, and slapped their hands away. It wasn’t because she was scared; it was because she thought herself better. As she grew up, it became apparent that Adelaide was ashamed of her family.
Her good looks only added to Adelaide’s conceit. Once she matured and became aware of how pretty she was she removed herself mentally and emotionally from Bayou Deception Island. She turned eighteen in 1927 and left the place physically once and for all. She got herself to a town called Cooksville, where she found a waitressing job at a rundown restaurant called the Last Stop Diner. The following year she met Theodore Roman, a man twelve years her senior.
Theodore Roman was a tall, good-natured fellow with a strong chin, a receding hairline, and a voice as smooth as butterscotch pudding. Theo wasn’t from Cooksville; he’d only been on the back side of a fishing trip he’d taken to Big Eddy Lake out near Shoats Creek, where he’d spent his formative years. Theodore lived and worked in Bayou Cymbaline and had only gone into the Last Stop Diner for a cup of coffee and some poppy-seed cake.
Adelaide knew a hardworking man when she saw one, and once she confirmed Theodore Roman had a good-paying job at a cannery, she flirted enough to make him want to come back. It worked. By his second visit she was making sure he knew that she’d cut him an extra large slice of poppy-seed cake, and she made a little show of running her finger along the cake knife and licking the frosting off slowly. By his third visit she was batting her eyes and bending over to pick up things she’d accidentally-on-purpose dropped, because she’d been told one time that she had a nice backside.
After two months of coming all the way from Bayou Cymbaline for a cup of so-so coffee, and without having received so much as a kiss, Theodore Roman produced a diamond ring from his left shirt pocket, and Adelaide Cormier judged it good enough for now. Theo was a nice man; he really did deserve better. But all things happen for a reason.