Free The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski

the progress of the sweep-second hand. One of them flipped through the pages of a magazine and the other kept trying to pray.
    Bonaventure would know the praying one as Grand-mère Letice, who, whether she admitted it or not, was reaching back through the years to a time when she had been called Miss Letice, when she was still deserving of proper respect, before she had committed her most grievous sin. He would know the magazine reader as Grandma Roman, a woman who was purely in love with anything that made her sound biblical. To her way of thinking, every upright Christian on the face of the earth could open a King James Bible to the Book of Romans if so inclined. She had never actually read that part and didn’t know a thing about Saint Paul, but as far as she was concerned, the only thing she needed to know was that the Romans had ruled the world. That’s as far as it went with Adelaide; she didn’t consider the fact that, for all their might and grandeur, it was the Romans who’d made fun of the Son of God right before they killed him. She blamed the Jews for that. Adelaide tended to skim the Bible the same way she skimmed the magazine in her hands, looking at the pictures and drawing whatever conclusion she fancied at the moment.
    Forrest and Martha Silvey sat off in a corner. It had been a very long time since they’d been this close to childbirth, and they didn’t quite know what to think, say, or do; however, they agreed it was probably best to keep quiet or to speak in whispers if the need should arise. Mrs. Silvey wasn’t sure if Dancy would be nursing the baby—given that the birth had happened prematurely, these things hadn’t yet been discussed. In Mrs. Silvey’s heart of hearts, she hoped there would be bottles, and that maybe she would be asked to give one now and then.
    While those thoughts tiptoed through Martha Silvey’s head, her husband rotated his hat brim in his hands and hoped the baby would turn out to be a boy, one who might like to putter with tools and learn how to fix things, and maybe go fishing on Saturday afternoons.
    Adelaide Roman crossed one knee over the other and sat there swinging her foot. She was so irritated by the presence of the Silveys she could hardly sit still. She’d never had help in her life, but Dancy did. It wasn’t fair.
    When the nurse came through the swinging doors, the grandmothers and the Silveys flew up as if they’d been shot from the mouths of cannons. Knowing there was only one patient in delivery at the time, the nurse reasoned that all four of them were waiting for the same announcement.
    “Congratulations!” she said. “You must be the family of Baby Boy Arrow.”
    There was a collective intake of breath and a spreading of smiles and a chorus of “A boy! A boy! A boy!”
    Letice was the first to regain composure. She thanked the nurse and said with a distinct note of pride in her voice, “He’s to be named Bonaventure.”
    To which the nurse responded, “You don’t say. Well, now, that’s different, isn’t it?”
    “You got that right,” Adelaide said with a roll of her eyes, while the Silveys were truly delighted.
     
    William stayed in the hospital with his wife and his child, walking through the walls of the nursery or of Dancy’s private room. The first time the nurse brought Bonaventure in, William saw Dancy as he never had before: she’d turned from a girl to a woman. And then he couldn’t take his eyes from Bonaventure’s features: his nostrils, his eyelids, his perfect little chin. In all of his twenty-three years, William had never known such wonder and pride. He sat on the bed next to his widow, awestruck by the heels of their baby’s feet, the half moons on his fingernails, and the little pink lines that crossed the skin of his knuckles.
    William sang to his child during the night, and Bonaventure was lulled to sleep.
     
    Dancy was still caught between mourning her husband and welcoming her child and seemed perplexed by