Iola was a wife, a newly expectant mother traveling home to stay with her husband’s family. Two months after their secret marriage in a tiny church on the Swiss border, her husband, Marcus, had been injured in a land mine explosion, and she found herself en route to Nevada with him. She’d discovered her pregnancy only weeks before, and she was filled with fear. The life she’d built after joining the WAACs suddenly seemed to be compressing around her. She’d told her husband nothing about her history, other than that she’d grown up in a convent school and had no family. She’d kept her pregnancy secret so far. . . .
Paul’s cell phone rang in the closet, and I jumped. Deep in Iola’s letters, I’d forgotten there was anyone else in the house, much less in the room. Paul had been moving boxes down from the upper shelves and searching through them, ferreting out Iola’s connections with others on the island —the people she’d included in her prayer letters, the causes she’d secretly supported. Paul was discovering Iola’s life from the top down, while I worked from the bottom up.
We photographed bits of her history with Paul’s phone, slowly compiling her story, documenting all the ways she had used the Benoit money to change lives on the Outer Banks and far beyond. Over the years, she’d given the Benoit shipping company over to its employees, allowing the board of directors to create stock-option plans, retirement funds, medical plans, and college scholarships for employees’ children. She’d helped fund libraries, schools, churches, and parks intended to preserve the wild spaces of the Outer Banks for future generations.
She’d helped new businesses like Sandy’s, often making purchases from local shops and then donating the items to charity auctions and nonprofit programs. She’d aided families in need, sent anonymous donations to pay for cancer treatments, bone marrow drives, a motorized wheelchair for a woman who’d lost her legs in an accident on the docks. As her cash resources slowly dwindled, she began using items of value in the house to continue to do the work she felt compelled to do. There had been other Tiffany lamps before the Magnolia left the blue room. Lamps and paintings and statues and jewelry. Symbols of opulence, slowly given away.
Downstairs, Zoey and J.T. were going through the stacks of newspapers that had been stored among the clutter. As I’d suspected, the newspapers weren’t there at random. They were a record —a paper trail of all the needs to which Iola had devoted herself. She’d been an angel of mercy for so many people. Always in secret.
She’d changed so many lives before she’d changed mine. The only difference being that I was the last.
“This woman was everywhere,” Paul commented, coming out of the closet, already reading a letter from a box pulled off the shelf second to the top. “It’s amazing. This is from a tanker spill in 2008. There was a group of students down in Florida trying to help transport a pod of beached dolphins back out to sea. She sent a massive donation to pay for equipment, along with a copy of an old newspaper article about the whales that were rescued from the ice cover in Barrow, Alaska, twenty years before —there was a movie about it a couple years ago, remember that? Iola sent money to help fund that rescue too. She wanted to share the whales’ story with the college kids rescuing the dolphins in Florida, to inspire them to believe it could be done. I love this woman! Listen to this: ‘Father, help these young people to see. Help them to show the world that our greatness is not in things we do for ourselves, but in things we do for others. In power that channels itself into kindness, in a hand outstretched in love. Be with these determined students. Help them to believe, when the naysayers come, that you make all things possible.
“‘And, Father, touch your fingertip again to the life of the Mulberry Girl, that she might be well. I’ve not mentioned her in some time, but I know you are mindful of her, as you are mindful of each sparrow of the field. . . .’” Paul set the letter atop the box and continued to the desk, smiling at me as he passed. “That is magnificent. This woman is like a tiny St. Francis —whales, dolphins, cancer patients, mulberry girls . . . whatever that means.”
“Mama! She bought computers for the library, I think!” Zoey yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “J.T.’s taking a picture of the article!”
“Good!” I called. “Keep going through the papers. Save everything we can use. We’ll print it all at Bink’s later.” The cell phone from Ross was coming to good use after all.
I went back to Iola’s letters, sank into her life again as the night ticked by. A squall blew onto the Outer Banks, and we added emptying drip buckets to our tasks as the hours wore on. The water was coming through the ceiling in streams now, seeping down walls, dampening floors and carpets, leaching through to the lower floor. Paul gave the ceiling in the blue room a worried look as he passed by the bed where I was reading. I knew what he was thinking.
What if the place was too far gone?
I focused, instead, on Iola’s life.
On the other side of the room, Paul muttered to himself, cataloging letters. “. . . prayed for the new pastor at the church, prayed for the UPS guy and the Mulberry Girl . . . Oop, helped fund playground equipment at a new community center. Here’s a good one.” He grabbed the cell phone from the bed and snapped a photo.
I moved through another letter and another.
Water plinked into buckets.
Paul snapped pictures.
“Mama, we’re making some Jiffy Pop, ’kay?” J.T. yelled from downstairs. “We’re hungry and it smells yucky down here.”
“Okay. Yes,” I called back, frustrated by the distraction as I followed the trail of Iola’s life. She’d lost the initial pregnancy after the marriage, and with Marcus redeployed to the war front after recovering from his injuries, she’d waited out the war with his family, learning the life of a ranch wife out west. The Jane Russell–style photo she’d shown to the UPS man had been taken there. There were several shots of Iola in the box, all snapped when she’d gathered with local wives and sweethearts to take photos that would be sent to husbands and beaus overseas —something to boost the morale of the boys fighting far from home.
The UPS man was right. Iola had been a beautiful young woman —olive-skinned, bright-eyed, exotic, her hair flowing over the haystack in rich, dark curls. She looked happy, laughing as the horse nuzzled her, stealing hay from the stack. The photographs captured the moment perfectly. A moment of youth and innocence. Of joy.
Then the war was over, victory declared in Europe and in Japan, the Allied occupation forces turning to the rebuilding of liberated countries, as the box from 1946 began. Marcus’s duty was ending, and he was coming home. He and Iola could finally be together again. A promise of prosperity, peace, and abundance was ahead. They would build a home of their own.
Iola’s joy had been tempered once more by fear. A new home was a place for a growing family. Marcus, his parents, his brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles expected it. But Iola had heard stories about women of mixed race who entered marriages while keeping secrets, women whose hidden heritage was revealed in the births of their children. She’d heard of illicit ways that a woman could make certain she was never able to conceive.
She was afraid. . . .
I sat staring at her words, thinking of that moment when I stood outside the abortion clinic, alone, terrified, pregnant by a man who promised to love me, then didn’t. This is the only way, Tandi, he’d told me. I’ll take care of you once it’s finished. Surely you understand, I have a career to think about, a reputation to protect. Just give me time to work it all out, and we can be together. We won’t have to hide forever. . . .
I understood the fear inside Iola Anne, the desperation, the consuming need to be loved.
And then, as she sat on the porch of the ranch house, contemplating her future, a neighbor boy came by on his pony, carrying a letter, saving the postman a trip. The handwriting on the envelope was unmistakable, the return address a link to the past she’d left behind before the war.
Isabelle had found her.
Wrapped inside Iola’s prayer letter was the letter she had received from Isabelle in March 1946. Isabelle had returned home to the Outer Banks, her husband dead at Normandy, and she herself weakened by a bout of polio.