“I’m here to tell you that that man is the laziest human being in these United States. Why, just the other day he comes back from his mail route an entire twenty minutes later than he should have and he says to me”—and she screwed up her face and did her best to sound whiney—“ ‘I’m sorry Adelaide, it’s just my gout’s been acting up and it’s godawful painful. I got to go back and get some more of the cure from Miz Prefontaine.’ ” And then in her normal tone she said, “That would be your nigger woman he was talking about.”
Bonaventure heard a whip crack and the snapping of sliced-open skin.
“And you know what I says back?” I says, ‘You’re sorry all right, Eustace. You are the sorriest excuse for a mailman I have ever seen.’ Honest to Christmas, what does that good-for-nothing take me for? But I been thinking about things, and I think I just might contact the U.S. postmaster and see to it that Mr. Eustace Hommerding gets reprimanded. There is absolutely no reason I should have to work myself to death just because he never learned how to take care of his feet. I mean, can you just imagine someone with foot trouble sticking their neck out to be a mailman?”
She lowered her voice then and said, “You know what kind of name Hommerding is, don’tcha? It’s German. And just in case nobody’s ever told you, the Germans were enemies of the U.S. of A. in two big wars, and I don’t think there’s any of them ever got over losing twice. So what I’m wondering is how Mr. Eustace Hommerding could be a good American with him being a German and all. I’m just sayin’.”
Bonaventure Arrow lost himself in his silence.
E
UGENIA
Babbitt read aloud
to The Wanderer, and on this day she’d begun
The Count of Monte Cristo
. The Wanderer listened intently, and the headaches came back full force.
Bonaventure heard the sound of swallowing that was going on in The Wanderer’s crooked throat. The man was swallowing fear, just as he’d done in the war.
T
HE
hammock swayed as Bonaventure explored his silence from inside out and above and below. He heard cosmic vibrations flowing under dirt and through air, and the vivacious life of the lands and the oceans. He listened to sinuous underwater plants and the portamento movements of sea cows gone graceful as they moved through undulating sub aqua waves. He heard a river laugh as it tumbled along in the English town of Ottery St. Mary. He heard emperor penguins move atop ice as they waddled their way to the Antarctic Sea. His listening intensified day by day until he could hear the adagio movement of a nucleus inside an electron aria that floated through the operatic galaxy inside a single atom. And then he began to hear extra.
The extra was nothing to do with fishes in rivers or penguins on ice or operas that played inside atoms. The extra part had to do with what brought about a sound and what it could possibly mean. In the case of the marmalade spoon, the whir of the bluebottle fly was more than a buzzing; it also spoke of the splendor of courage. That was the extra part.
Every day brought new sounds that refracted and found him and roused his curiosity. He heard rooster feathers and catmint and sea glass, and the sound of a rabbit’s foot that whispered of running. Bonaventure Arrow was bringing his hearing homeward.
Very soon he would hear the innermost secrets that were concealed in the house on Christopher Street.
B
EING
a big C. S. Lewis fan, Grand-mère Letice had given Bonaventure
The Chronicles of Narnia
to read. The story captivated him so much that he wanted to live it. There was no question that his mother’s closet was the one most like the wardrobe in Professor Digory Kirke’s house, the one that was the passageway to Narnia. But there was a problem: he was still afraid of that terrible sound that came from that box on the closet’s top shelf. He remembered how much it had scared him and made him feel sick to his stomach. He brought it up the next time he talked with his dad.
“I promise that box won’t hurt you,” William said.
And so Bonaventure went back into the closet.
His mother’s clothes made the sound of curtains brushing over the sill of an open window or dancing upon a very light breeze; one sweater in particular sang a comforting little song in its wispy cashmere voice. Dancy’s shoes, if listened to all at once, were a symphony of every kind of percussion from tapping and chiming to cymbals and drums. Bonaventure figured the shoes took their sounds from where they had walked, which explained why her cemetery shoes were as quiet as a saw bug rolling over moss. The low shelves held boxes that were full of hair curlers and rattail combs and half-empty cold cream jars. When he opened those boxes up even a crack, they sounded like a bunch of different radios playing all at once, each one trying to tell its stories the loudest. Bonaventure liked to get them all going to see if he could differentiate one from the other.
Though he avoided listening to that one certain box, he couldn’t help but catch a look at it every now and then. It was black and unlike the others in its size and the fact that it was cloth-covered. Bonaventure had never seen a cloth-covered box before and figured it had to be special, though he had no clue why it was living on a shelf in his mother’s closet. No sound at all came out of it that day, but the next time he went to play Narnia, that box said, “Bonaventure.”
How did the box know his name? What did it want? What would happen if he opened it right now? Would whatever was in it fly out? But that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to take something out of it. Bonaventure felt cold all over, as if he really had gone to Narnia and was standing in the snow.
“Bonaventure,” the voice said one more time, “come closer.”
Bonaventure stood rooted to the floor.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” said the voice from the box.
His father had promised that the box would not hurt him, so he looked up at it and put a question on his face: —Is it a good secret or a bad one?
“It’s a wrong secret,” the box replied.
And then Bonaventure heard the sound of a prison door slamming shut and the bolt sliding into place. It was the sound made by savage remorse as it locked up a human being, and it frightened him worse than before.
—BE QUIET! BE QUIET! BE QUIET! he shouted with the motion of his hands. His heart started to pound and he scrambled away.
“Wait!” the box cried. “Come back. Come back!”
But Bonaventure couldn’t do it. He ran to his room, took his memento box from under the bed, opened it up, took its good sounds into his ears, and sent them rushing to his thundering heart. He pulled his knees up to his chin and rocked back and forth until his mementos sang him quiet.
Trinidad found him rocking like that when she came to his room to put laundry away. He started when she reached down to touch his shoulder.
“I knocked on your door, Mr. Bonaventure. Didn’t you hear me?”
He hadn’t heard her, which in and of itself was alarming.
“Are those goose bumps on you, child? It gotta be more than ninety-five degrees today. Why you be so cold?” And then the Knowing told her he’d got too close to an unnatural thing that dwelled within the house. Trinidad took Bonaventure to the kitchen and made him a cup of cocoa on that sweltering summer day. She could feel that the haunt was in the kitchen with them, so she addressed it silently, saying, “Now would be a good time for you to help this child with some of that love you think you got.”
William went to Bonaventure’s room that night.
Bonaventure couldn’t get the words out fast enough: —The box said it holds a wrong secret!
“I know.”
—I didn’t hear what it was, though. I got scared because I heard this other sound, like getting locked up. But I’ll go back. I promise. I want to help you, Dad. I really do.
“Just go when you’re ready, son. You know I would never put you in danger.”
Other sounds began to beckon after that; they were ones from Grand-mère’s chapel. Bonaventure couldn’t name the chapel’s main sound with any certainty, but it was one he heard in other places all the time, a sort of humming, and it was always good. He’d once decided to take some of that sound with him, and so had removed a sliver of wood from the crucifix that was mounted to the wall. He put it in his memento box for the nights he couldn’t sleep.
And then there was that other one, that small and sad kind of smothered-up noise. Bonaventure always heard it best over by the mosaic of the angel. Unlike the humming sound, this was a sound he never heard anyplace else. If he listened too closely, it made his skin hurt as if he’d been scraped and burned. Bonaventure did not take a souvenir of that sound to put in his memento box because it was too different to fit in. The memento box was a joyful place and not a place for a smothered thing.
The small noise called to him at bedtime that night, and right along with it came the sounds of those rooster feathers he’d heard before, and of saltwater on sea glass, and of the rabbit’s foot, which he was certain were coming from Trinidad’s house out on the Neff Switch road.
Bonaventure decided to stock up on comforting sounds, like someone gathering up little bits of well-being. Many of them were unique to his mother. Most were little keepsakes of things he heard when he went to her shop—hair from the floor because it reminded him of the neat, shearing sound of her scissors, or an empty vitamin bottle full of water that had sounded like a tiny river when it flowed from the tap of her shampoo sink. Bonaventure could hear extra when he listened to those sounds, and the extra part was Tender Care. Those sounds told of the things his mother did to make people feel beautiful.
Bonaventure concentrated on his comforting mementos and tried to forget about the black box’s noise and the smothered little whimper in the chapel.
William decided to say nothing to Bonaventure about Dancy’s closet. Instead, he asked his son to tell about the things in his memento box, which Bonaventure was only too happy to do.
“Do you have a favorite?” William asked.
—I like them all the same.
“I think I like the marmalade spoon best,” William said.
D
URING
that summer of 1957, Dancy’s rages had all but disappeared, and she even softened toward Letice’s religion. In a burst of well-being and newfound tolerance, she told Letice that it would be okay for her to teach Bonaventure about the Catholic stuff, so long as she didn’t overdo it.
Conversely, Dancy told Bonaventure that if ever he was subjected to “that cockamamie, Tower-of-Babble garbage of Grandma Roman’s” he was to let her know immediately. Her scorn for her mother’s beliefs had not lessened; if anything, it had grown more severe. Dancy wanted no part of an itinerant preacher or a vengeful God to come anywhere near Bonaventure. Although, if her mother was a chosen one of any God, Dancy believed that it must be a vengeful one.
Letice wasted no time in seeing to Bonaventure’s religious instruction. She began by bringing up the fact that he was seven years old and that the number seven is a very important number in the Bible.
Head tilted, eyebrows raised, Bonaventure signed, —Why?
“Because of the many times it has something to do with God.”
Bonaventure switched to note writing. —Like what?
“Like that he created the earth in seven days, and the seventh day was special. It’s the one we call a holy day, you know, Sunday, when I go to mass.”
—My mom doesn’t go to mass. She sleeps in on Sunday.
“Well, for now let’s just say that’s your mom’s way of making Sunday special.”
—Tell me more about sevens.
“Heaven is filled with angels, but there are seven of them who are especially close to God. They’re the archangels, and their names are Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Sealtiel, Jegudiel, and Barachiel.”
—Gabriel is Gabe’s real name!
“That’s right. And that’s very special because the Archangel Gabriel was the messenger of God.”
Bonaventure switched from note writing to sign, thereby honoring Gabe Riley, and asked, —Angels only in heaven?
“All angels live in heaven, but they come to earth sometimes and make good things happen. Each one of us has our own angel. Did you know that?”
Headshake side to side.
“We do, and they’re called guardian angels because that’s exactly what they do—they guard us all the time, even though we never see them. Guardian angels . . .”
Hand brought suddenly forward, palm side out as if to halt the conversation. Furious note writing. —I know my guardian angel.
Grand-mère was taken aback. “You do? Who is it?”
Very certain signing motions. —My dad.
Letice was speechless. She felt as though Bonaventure had offered her a way to believe that William was still alive, even if he wasn’t flesh and blood, and she was very touched.
Tug on sleeve as if to say, —Did you understand me, Grand-mère?
“That’s a very nice thought, my love,” she said.
Smile on face, very pleased nod.
Then Letice talked about seven years of plenty and seven years of famine in Egypt, and of how Jesus made seven loaves and seven fish feed five thousand men. Interestingly, she did not mention that forgiveness is given seventy times seven times.
The echo of past sevens came into her head and she recalled words spoken to her all those years ago:
Do you see all them sevens? They all in the Good Book: seven plagues, seven sorrows, seven deadly sins. Seven times seven gwine come to you.
Letice shook off the memory and steered the conversation back in the direction she wanted it to take. “Last February first you turned seven years old,” she said. “And that’s when a person attains the age of reason. Do you know what that means?”