The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski Read Free Book Online

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.
    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.

From Whence She’d Come
    W HILE unborn Bonaventure was doing all that listening, his kindred spirit was going about her business. Trinidad Prefontaine