He skittered off the porch and darted into the flower bed, disappearing as I opened the door and went inside.
A rhythmic knocking caught my attention when I started toward the stairs, the sound drawing me past the piano room and down the long hall to the kitchen. Above the sink, a bird was beating against the window, trying to get in. I shooed it away, then heard something else —a faint slithering and scratching coming from Iola’s ancient-looking washer and dryer in the utility. Something was back there.
I pictured snakes, raccoons, squirrels. Over the years, living near stables and horse pastures, I’d done battle with all of those and more.
Grabbing a broom for protection, I crept across the floor, moving at an angle, trying to get a view of the area behind the cockeyed dryer. If something’s back there right now, other things could’ve crawled in earlier . . . or yesterday . . . or the day before. A shudder ran through me all the way to the bone, and the next thing I knew, I was running to the dryer and crawling on top, then peering over the edge.
In the shadow of the wall, the accordion-like vent hose had a life of its own. Something was in there. Something large. The hose bulged like a snake’s belly after a henhouse visit, the length of it wriggling on the floor. I watched with a combination of fascination and horror, thinking, Now what? Do I call an exterminator? The humane society? The park service? The Ghost Hunters?
Paul was the first person who came to mind. He would either know what to do or get a laugh out of this —me on top of the dryer, having an I Love Lucy moment.
Something protruded slowly from a slit in the dryer hose —something black, small, furry. A paw, the pads stretching out, grasping the slit and pushing it open, allowing another paw to press forth and touch the floor.
The dryer hose slowly birthed the point of a nose, a set of whiskers, a tattered ear, a familiar face.
“So that’s how you do it.” Setting the broom aside, I watched the tomcat emerge, then shake off the final traces of lint before strolling regally into the house.
Midway across the kitchen, he paused to cast a curious look over his shoulder, as in, Why, pray tell, are you squatting atop the clothes dryer?
“Now I know your secret.” I pointed at him and smiled.
He blinked slowly, then turned away, the movement seeming to say, Oh, there are so many secrets. You’ve only scratched the surface.
He followed me upstairs to the blue room and lay in a stream of sunlight by Iola’s black shoe as I opened the closet and reclaimed the box from 1941, piling the letters atop the quilt and sinking slowly into Iola’s life. Changes were coming fast.
Isabelle’s father was furious after her elopement. He’d tried to force her to return to Hatteras and petition that the marriage be annulled on the grounds that it was not conducted by a priest of the church and no dispensation had been granted. But Isabelle was determined, and she was of legal age. She refused to come home, even when her father threatened to disinherit her. Girard Benoit attempted to use his considerable political connections and his pull within the prewar shipping industry to prevent Isabelle’s aviator husband from being restationed to Hawaii, but even he couldn’t sever every tentacle of the Army’s reach. Orders were issued, channels circumvented, and Isabelle got what she wanted.
In October of 1941, Isabelle and Andrew Embry moved to beautiful Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where a revolution of sorts was taking place. The island was rife with young minds, adventurous spirits far from home for the first time, free from the social taboos of the mainland.
Iola’s prayers were filled with her reactions to Isabelle’s letters.
. . . and Isabelle writes to me, “Oh, Iola, this is that City of the Future we dreamed of. This is that place where everything is possible. I have joined a group of wives in auxiliary service at the hospital, although there is not much to be done there. The place is peaceful, save for the occasional results of a training accident on board ship or plane or the aftermath of a night of brawling with so many young soldiers and sailors nearby. I want you to come here, Iola. I know that Father won’t provide the funds for it, but we will find a way.”
How can I tell Isabelle that it isn’t the City of the Future my heart wants, but the moments of yesterday? I wish for our long walks on the beach with the old horse, the days as endless as ocean and sand. How can I pray against Isabelle’s dreams? Is it wrong, Father, that my heart says to you, Don’t bring me to Pearl Harbor. Bring Isabelle home, instead?
And yet your Word whispers here also, as Sister Marguerite read to me from the Scriptures of the apostle Paul, “But this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before . . .”
My heart reaches back and back and back. All in this house reaches back and strains for seasons that cannot be again.
And I wonder, Father, if Isabelle is the wiser one when she says that the only way to look is forward.
But how to go forward, when I don’t see good ahead? I think on this as I walk miles along the shore while Maman and Monsieur and Old Rupert sit silent in the shadows of this sad house.
How to go forward, always seeking, always in anticipation? Always a little more and a little more, just a few steps farther, a few moments longer. Something new may have washed up on the tide, just over there or beyond that dune or around that point or just out of sight, waiting in the next curl of a wave.
I desire to live my life this way, Father, as Isabelle has. Not caged by the walls of fear, but in anticipation of the bridges to magnificence.
Help me to find the way.
Your loving daughter,
Iola Anne
When the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor reached the world through President Roosevelt’s radio address, just two months after Isabelle’s departure, Girard Benoit was inconsolable, raging through the house with a pistol, drunk on Southern whiskey, until finally he sank into a chair and wept, certain that he had lost another child to the curse on his family.
The words now come from Monsieur, wild like a flood. Maman runs to the kitchen room to hide, and I press myself cold and stiff against the wall. Only Rupert enters the study. He speaks softly, as if calming an animal, as he slides the whiskey and the pistol away.
“I have no one,” sobs Monsieur. “The curse. The curse has taken them all. Each of my children. All that I have been, wiped from the earth . . .”
A shiver pulls through my bones, and my body quakes with fear and grief. I cover my mouth and press hard into the wall. I close my eyes, Father, and I call to you.
“No’sah, that ain’t so.” Old Rupert’s voice seems far away. “You know that ain’t so. Miss Isabelle, she gon’ get a message through, you gon’ see. She gon’ get a message through, and she gon’ be fine.”
I pray, I pray, I pray. You, Father, hold the power of death and life.
“My blood shall not survive on this earth!” Monsieur’s voice trembles the rafters. “It is the curse! This wicked curse on my blood!”
“Your blood be livin’ right down there in that room off the kitchen!” Old Rupert’s voice booms deep and loud. I lean closer, my heart pounding, the words loud and strange. My mind cannot take them in.
“Your blood been there all this time, and you know that be true. You know your son, Miss’uh Stephen, he the father of Iola Anne, and it was you what send him off on the ship when he been with Iola’s mama, when they talkin’ fool talk of love, like young folk do. Ain’t no voodoo on this fam’ly. Ain’t no voodoo nowhere but in yo’ mind. You still got blood on this earth. You still got Iola Anne. And Isabelle, she gon’ come home too. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with no blood curse. Nothin’.” . . .
I stared at the letter in which Iola had poured out her heart, her pain and confusion as she tried to reconcile the truth of her parentage. She’d been told all her life that her father was a light-skinned groom who’d died after being trapped in a stall with an unruly young horse.
A week after the revelation, when word came that Isabelle and Andrew had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, Iola packed her belongings and left Benoit House under cover of darkness.
On the mainland in Norfolk, war fever was on. The attack on Pearl Harbor had brought America into the conflict, full force. With young men signing on to the war effort, there was work for young women. Iola took a job cleaning in a hotel filled with men preparing to ship out.
Months later, in the summer of 1942, with America still believing the war would quickly be won, Iola passed by a makeshift recruiting office on her walk home from the grocery store. At a table out front, she signed up to enter the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She’d been told that, as a WAAC, she could be sent to Hawaii to aid in the rebuilding of Pearl Harbor. With the single stroke of a pen, she left her old life behind.