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

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