“Well, you’re gonna get all dried up on your insides. See if you don’t.”
Dancy merely laughed.
“Go ahead and laugh. But you know what they say. ‘Use it or lose it,’ they say, and if it was me I wouldn’t want to lose it. Not at twenty-seven years old, I wouldn’t,” Donna Rae continued.
“Well, I don’t know who
they
are, but I do know that I don’t want to talk about it. Not one more word, and I do mean not one,” was Dancy’s firm response.
Donna Rae ignored the admonition and went on. “Look, honey, I know you loved him, but you’re not the one who died. I mean, this is 1957. Come December it’ll be eight years. I worry about you is all, and I just wanna help.”
“Let it be, Donna Rae. I’ll work it out,” Dancy said, in a tone that was a little bit weary.
Once in a while, someone would try to set her up on a date without her knowing what they were up to. “It’s just a get-together,” they’d say. “Dinner, maybe some cards.”
Dancy never fell for it.
William spent a lot of time at Dancy’s shop. He loved to watch her when she was concentrating on her work. But the best was when she was all alone, sitting in front of the mirror and playing around with her own hair, trying it this way and that, and experimenting with makeup, though she never really wore much. He happened to witness that conversation with Donna Rae, and it bothered him that his passionate Dancy didn’t care if she dried up, and the way she’d turned cold sort of bothered him too.
William would have to do more than remove Dancy’s guilt; he would have to face his hardest challenge. The mere thought of it felt like the bullets that had already killed him once. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet. If only he could just talk to her . . .
And so he pulled her to the cemetery as he had always done, and stood at the door of the crypt. When she got there, she sat down on a marble bench.
“Dancy,” he said.
She sat very still.
He spoke again: “I’m here. I’m right here.”
She looked up in a sudden hair-rising-up-on the-back-of-the-neck kind of way and kept very still.
“Stand up if you can see me, Dancy. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”
She stood up then and ran for her car, and tightened the lock on her tears. Dancy feared she might be going crazy and starting in with hallucinations.
She dreamed of William that night, and woke up with proof that she had not dried up on her insides. She threw herself into her shop after that, the better to become exhausted, too tired even to dream. Dancy lost herself in work. She spent so many hours on her feet that her back hurt at the end of the day. But it was worth it. She was too worn to feel anything.
Bonaventure could hear his mother battle with her nerves. He tried to distract her by making her sing with the radio; he thought she had the most glorious voice. He listened for that certain little catch in it that wasn’t quite a yodel, the one that made her sound like Patsy Cline.
Dancy mostly listened to country music. Sometimes the radio was tuned to doo-wop or to Cajun, but never to the proudly mournful blues as sung in the bayou-filled delta of southern Louisiana.
On an evening when she felt kind of restless without knowing why, Dancy decided she needed to leave the house for a while. She made sure Bonaventure brushed his teeth and allowed that he could play in his room for another half hour. When time was up, she tucked him in and asked Letice if it would be all right if she went out for a drive. Letice knew to let her go.
Dancy drove out to Papa Jambalaya’s, put a coin in the jukebox, and pushed J-17. As Hank Williams sang “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry,” Dancy Arrow became the lonesome whip-poor-will and the midnight train and the weeping robin and the leaves that had begun to die.
She had herself a couple of beers and ordered the special but didn’t eat a bite, just sat there staring and smoking Pall Malls one right after the other.
William stood behind her, remembering the night they’d met. It had been nothing like this. The sight of her brokenness became too much for him, and he went outside to wait.
Back in his room on Christopher Street, Bonaventure could hear Dancy’s cigarette smoke wafting up to the ceiling and hovering over the happiness at Papa Jambalaya’s. He could also hear the heavy unshed tears that stung his mother behind her eyes and ran down her throat all the way to her chest.
Sometimes he hated his ears.
The Sickness Brought About by Ignorance
W
E
hafta hurry it up a little bit, Venture Forth Arrow. Grandma Roman is coming over, and since it’s an every-other-Saturday, she’ll be wanting her hair done before going to services at the International Church of the Big-Ass Righteous.”
Bonaventure’s hands flew to his mouth and his head and shoulders shook with silent laughter. Grand-mère Letice would keel right over if she heard his mother cuss like that, but he thought it was awful funny.
So did William.
Adelaide Roman was certain of her soul’s perfection, and so felt comfortable pointing out iniquities committed by others. To that end, she brought her religion with her wherever she went, including to her job at the United States Post Office.
“Yoo Hoo.”
“In the kitchen, Mama.”
Adelaide Roman sat down and placed the newest Sears Roebuck catalog on the table, saying she was entirely mindful that it was addressed to Creathie LaRue, but seeing how Providence changes things for certain mail recipients (namely, fornicators and liars), she believed the catalog had rightfully come into her possession. She supposed that forfeiting the Sears Roebuck catalog was just one of the consequences visited upon a person who run off in the night and then had the gumption six months later to come back from where she’d run off to with not only a husband but a child too, one she claimed was prematurely born. Not that Adelaide knew anything personal about Creathie LaRue. Just sayin’.
Bonaventure would have to wait through Grandma Roman’s entire wash, set, dry, and comb-out, because he had to stay clean for their standing date at Bixie’s Luncheonette. These lunch dates were a fairly recent development. He hadn’t been alone with his Grandma Roman much since that time when he was two and she’d threatened to cook his pink elephant in the oven. He only went along with it now because he loved Bixie’s and neither his mother nor grand-mère did, so Grandma Roman was his best chance of getting there.
His shirt collar chafed from Staley’s Sta-Flo laundry starch and his shoes felt way too tight, but being Bonaventure he wasn’t saying a word; and anyway, the discomfort brought him welcome distraction.
Grandma Roman perused the Sears Roebuck while she sat under the hairdryer, each page making a crinkly, rustling sound that Bonaventure liked very much, although its connection to his grandmother worried him. He never kept sounds that had to do with Grandma Roman, as he’d never even heard one he wanted. But he did like that crinkly sound of those pages, and after a few anxious moments he reasoned that the catalog was only indirectly related to her because, according to the United States Post Office, it really did belong to Creathie LaRue. So twenty minutes later, when Adelaide had her eyes closed against the mists of Helene Curtis Spray Net, Bonaventure tore out a page from the middle, folded it up real small, and tucked it in his pocket, where it would reside until it joined the mementos in that box beneath his bed.
The two of them finally headed for Bixie’s, where the specialty was always biscuits and gravy and where tin advertising signs decorated the walls, which is how Bonaventure came to develop a certain fondness for whiskey, billiards, and tobacco, charmed as he was by their very fine slogans: “Jack Daniel’s—Charcoal Mellowed Drop by Drop” and “Don’t Be Vague, Ask for a Hague—Hague Scotch Whiskey.” He also loved “Easy Eight’s Billiards & Pool—The Best Racks in Town!” and “Happiness Is a Cigar Called Hamlet.” But his highest admiration was reserved for “L.S.M.F.T.—Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” He particularly loved the pure, sparse poetry of those five initials, and the way they had of proclaiming the fineness of something in such a small confederation of alphabet letters. Bonaventure would sign those letters over and over, as if they were a little chorus in a tune about Bixie’s.
Grandma Roman ordered the meatloaf and a slice of soda cracker pie. Bonaventure had a grilled cheese sandwich with a strawberry milkshake, the accompanying straw of which naturally found its way down his shirt as another piece for the memento box, qualified as it was by the unique timbre of its gurgling, slurping sound.
Claude and Opal Rondelle, twins somewhere past fifty years old, were taking lunch at Bixie’s that day. Claude wore the dark green trousers and shirt of a working man because that is what he was—a fellow who cut grass, repaired radios and small appliances, and sharpened knives and scissors. Opal always had an apron on, even when she went out in public. She took in wash for a living, and once in a while she babysat.
Grandma Roman said the Rondelles always sat in a booth because they were midgets and couldn’t manage the stools at the counter. “You can tell they’re midgets even when they’re sitting down,” she was fond of saying. “They got that midget look to their features, like two little old elves who wandered off from the North Pole.” She always got a kick out of herself with that one.
Every time she spotted the Rondelle twins Grandma Roman would shake her head side to side and mutter the same thing, “Now I wonder just what in the Sam Hill their normal parents done to deserve it. I mean, Good Lord, those two must hafta buy their clothes in the children’s department. Don’t you think so, Bonaventure?”
Bonaventure began to sign a response, moving his hands around the story of the gumball machine that stood just inside the front door of Bixie’s, and the time Claude Rondelle had put two pennies in its slot and had given the gumballs to Bonaventure rather than keeping them for himself. Bonaventure still had them, one red and one yellow; he hadn’t chewed them because of the wonderful rattling sound they’d made as they left the machine’s glass bubble. He had barely started the story when his grandmother reached over and yanked his hands down and pressed them to his sides.
“Stop it!” she hissed. “It is not at all polite to draw attention to yourself like that. Honest to Christmas, sometimes I just don’t know where your mother’s head is. I positively don’t. You listen to me, Bonaventure Arrow. One day you’re gonna do that finger-wagging nonsense and end up arrested for being lewd and lascivious. Do you hear me?”
Bonaventure didn’t know the meaning of lewd and lascivious, but he did know the sound of a woman ashamed, and it was coming real loud from Grandma Roman.
She nudged him then and motioned toward a cross-eyed girl sitting at the end of the counter. Then she looked at Bonaventure and crossed her own eyes and said, “Where you at, Bonaventure? On my left or my right?” and laughed a snorty laugh.
After that, she talked about how she’d love to take him to hear Brother Harley John Eacomb preach about the sickness brought about by ignorance. She said that every single week she could hardly wait for Sunday to hurry up and get here.
“Hey, guess what,” she said. “There’s plans for Brother Eacomb to hold two special ceremonies and initiations down to the river come the twentieth of July. The first one is at two o’clock in the afternoon and the second one is at seven in the evening; there has to be two separate ceremonies because of the expected multitude, and Brother Eacomb needs to rest in between because he throws his whole self into saving souls. It would kill a lesser man, but Brother Eacomb just needs to rest a bit. Any-hoo-how, I’m thinking it would be a real treat for you to go with me because you, Mr. Bonaventure Arrow, are an interesting case. But like I said it’s not gonna happen until July.”
Bonaventure did not encourage her to go on. He knew there was no need.
“I been thinking, see. And what I been thinking is that Brother Eacomb can speak in tongues, by which I mean in languages only God can understand. Now, what makes these meetings special is that there’s gonna be the laying on of hands. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
She paused to allow Bonaventure to show some sign of eagerness, but he wouldn’t so much as blink. Keeping his face motionless around Grandma Roman was something he did on principle. Sometimes he listened only to her consonants, which erased all meaning from whatever she said, and sometimes he imagined her as a big old crow, squawking away and pecking at people.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that Brother Harley John Eacomb is a healer.” She paused again and threw her grandson a look meant to ask if he got her drift. When he didn’t respond, she continued with, “I’d say it stands to reason that Brother Eacomb is your destiny, young man. I absolutely would say that very thing.”
Bonaventure’s eyes widened the tiniest bit, but enough for her to notice.
“You heard me right. He’s a healer. Brother Eacomb can heal people and bring them to redemption. Why, sometimes folks don’t even know they’re sick. There might even be some in your very own family.” Lowering her voice, she added, “Even though I could name names, I won’t. You just take it from me that there’s folks whose sins have harmed the innocent; they are people who did things before you were born that they had no business doing. But like I said, you won’t hear any names from me. My lips are sealed and yours should be too, so don’t you go wagging your fingers or writing out notes about this conversation. This is confidential business between you and me.”
She dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin, folded it neatly, and laid it next to her plate, upon which rested one uneaten bite of rhubarb pie. Adelaide Roman happened to know that well-bred people never ate every bite.
“No, sir, you won’t hear their names from me,” she repeated.
She kept up her incessant chatter all the way home, complaining, among other things, about how some women wore white shoes before Memorial Day and then turned around and wore them long after Labor Day, like they didn’t have the sense God gave a flea. She complained about her job at the post office and about all the junk mail she had to handle, and about how most people didn’t have the manners to know they should remember their postal workers at Christmas. She insisted that not a single letter would ever get delivered in Bayou Cymbaline if it wasn’t for her diligence, considering how the only help she had on her shift was in the person of Eustace Hommerding or, as she called him, Useless Hommerding.