Read Online The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rita Leganski
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consequence: there was the slightest tremble way down in the earth and the smell of birth blood riding on the wind—it was a scent that always troubled Trinidad, coming as it did from a deep dark curve in the backbone of her past.
Mam Judith sprang to Trinidad’s mind, and the memory of the first time the Knowing had come. It had happened not long after her visit with the tea reader. She’d been hanging wash on the line when knowledge of the death of a certain three-year-old child came into Trinidad’s head. Two months later that child’s body was found facedown in a ditch. He had drowned in six inches of water.
Now all those years later she tossed and turned as she recalled other times and other Knowings: 1927, when the Mississippi River broke out of its levees, flooding the land for a hundred miles and killing 246 people in seven different states; 1940, when a hurricane made landfall across southwest Louisiana, flooding Acadiana and killing 75,000 muskrat and six human beings; 1947, when a storm put Jefferson Parish under six feet of water and claimed over fifty lives; the tornado that same year that touched down north of Shreveport, killing eighteen folks and leaving next to nothing standing in the town of Cotton Valley. Trinidad had foreknown all of those things.
But this imp was new to her. This imp knew something she did not.
Each minute became a new eternity for Dancy. When she was weak from agony and whimpering from hurt, anesthesia was administered and she fell far away. As the ether entered her body, all sensation left and she returned to those hundreds of moments she’d spent in the shelter of William’s warm arms, surrounded by his familiar scent and steeped in a happiness she could not even describe.
The ether passed into the narrow confines of her body, and Bonaventure became groggy as he tried to escape the womb he’d outgrown. He could still hear his mother’s heartbeat, slower now than it had been a while ago when the fastness of it had distressed him.
William was there, and he recalled how Bonaventure had turned in a circle at the sound of his voice once before, so he spoke to him again.
“Almost over,” he said to his frightened child.
Bonaventure took comfort in that familiar deep voice, and then other voices came, voices he did not know.
“Hang on, Dancy, we’ll get you through this,” said one of those strange new voices.
“Here comes the baby,” another chimed in.
And then the smothering darkness vanished as a whooshing wind came up in Bonaventure’s lungs that blew him clean out of his mother’s body and into a much larger world. It was two minutes after three o’clock in the morning on February 1, 1950, and someone was telling Dancy that she’d been a real champ.
Bonaventure looked like any other newborn, all scrunched up and red and mottled with afterbirth. But he did not make the usual sounds. With his eyes wide open and his little lips parted, he let out the silent cry of a mime.
“It’s a boy!” whispered ghostly William into his wife’s exhausted ear, and then fell to his knees, rendered humble and low by a terrible, terrible longing.
In the middle of her sleepless night, Trinidad experienced a vision. A scavenging raven circled the room, its beady eyes questing after death. The bird spread its wings to swoop and glide, its feathers sounding like rustling silk. From the bird’s shaggy throat came a prruk-prruk call and a toc-toc click and a dry, rasping kraa-kraa cry. After the raven came a pure white dove, and after the dove, a sparrow.
Up in the sky a beautiful spiral in a pinwheel galaxy northwest of Ursa Major shone particularly vivid and unusually bright, brighter even than the stars of Cassiopeia, Orion, Pegasus, and Andromeda.
In the waiting room, the two grandmothers sat facing the American Standard clock that hung above the swinging doors leading to the maternity ward. Both of them glanced several times a minute to monitor
Mam Judith sprang to Trinidad’s mind, and the memory of the first time the Knowing had come. It had happened not long after her visit with the tea reader. She’d been hanging wash on the line when knowledge of the death of a certain three-year-old child came into Trinidad’s head. Two months later that child’s body was found facedown in a ditch. He had drowned in six inches of water.
Now all those years later she tossed and turned as she recalled other times and other Knowings: 1927, when the Mississippi River broke out of its levees, flooding the land for a hundred miles and killing 246 people in seven different states; 1940, when a hurricane made landfall across southwest Louisiana, flooding Acadiana and killing 75,000 muskrat and six human beings; 1947, when a storm put Jefferson Parish under six feet of water and claimed over fifty lives; the tornado that same year that touched down north of Shreveport, killing eighteen folks and leaving next to nothing standing in the town of Cotton Valley. Trinidad had foreknown all of those things.
But this imp was new to her. This imp knew something she did not.
Each minute became a new eternity for Dancy. When she was weak from agony and whimpering from hurt, anesthesia was administered and she fell far away. As the ether entered her body, all sensation left and she returned to those hundreds of moments she’d spent in the shelter of William’s warm arms, surrounded by his familiar scent and steeped in a happiness she could not even describe.
The ether passed into the narrow confines of her body, and Bonaventure became groggy as he tried to escape the womb he’d outgrown. He could still hear his mother’s heartbeat, slower now than it had been a while ago when the fastness of it had distressed him.
William was there, and he recalled how Bonaventure had turned in a circle at the sound of his voice once before, so he spoke to him again.
“Almost over,” he said to his frightened child.
Bonaventure took comfort in that familiar deep voice, and then other voices came, voices he did not know.
“Hang on, Dancy, we’ll get you through this,” said one of those strange new voices.
“Here comes the baby,” another chimed in.
And then the smothering darkness vanished as a whooshing wind came up in Bonaventure’s lungs that blew him clean out of his mother’s body and into a much larger world. It was two minutes after three o’clock in the morning on February 1, 1950, and someone was telling Dancy that she’d been a real champ.
Bonaventure looked like any other newborn, all scrunched up and red and mottled with afterbirth. But he did not make the usual sounds. With his eyes wide open and his little lips parted, he let out the silent cry of a mime.
“It’s a boy!” whispered ghostly William into his wife’s exhausted ear, and then fell to his knees, rendered humble and low by a terrible, terrible longing.
In the middle of her sleepless night, Trinidad experienced a vision. A scavenging raven circled the room, its beady eyes questing after death. The bird spread its wings to swoop and glide, its feathers sounding like rustling silk. From the bird’s shaggy throat came a prruk-prruk call and a toc-toc click and a dry, rasping kraa-kraa cry. After the raven came a pure white dove, and after the dove, a sparrow.
Up in the sky a beautiful spiral in a pinwheel galaxy northwest of Ursa Major shone particularly vivid and unusually bright, brighter even than the stars of Cassiopeia, Orion, Pegasus, and Andromeda.
In the waiting room, the two grandmothers sat facing the American Standard clock that hung above the swinging doors leading to the maternity ward. Both of them glanced several times a minute to monitor
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