Her fingers hold mine, and we rest them on the sand.
“You’ll take care of Papa?” she asks. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the ponies call out. They’re coming down to the water. Anytime now, the herd leader will appear on the dunes to watch over the smaller and the weaker as they gallop to the shore.
I tell Isabelle that I will care for Monsieur until he is gone. It won’t be many years. He is old and lame, and he has outlived all the ones he loved, except for Isabelle.
“He comes from a different time, Iola Anne,” she pleads. “He doesn’t know another way. Forgive him for what he is.”
“I do,” I say as the ponies appear on the hill, wild and unbridled.
Isabelle rouses herself and takes up the camera to preserve yet one more day in this place. One more day together with the sister that love has given me.
Forgive me, Father, for asking for another day yet, and another beyond that, when this one is so very beautiful. We, in our humanness, cannot help but foolishly desire eternity in this life.
Your loving daughter,
Iola Anne
I set the letter aside, swallowed tears, and stood to stretch. Outside, the skies had dried up, a heavy moon casting a silver lining around the clouds above the loblolly pines. Paul had fallen asleep at the desk after finishing the last box before the one I’d opened on the bed. We’d finally come together in the middle.
Downstairs, the kids were both sleeping now. In a few hours, the church bells in Fairhope would ring out their morning call to worship. Desperate prayers would be offered up, conversations played out, and legal chatter kicked back and forth in search of some means of saving Iola’s house and Fairhope. In a strange way, Iola and the town were finally united.
I looked over Paul’s shoulder at the letters scattered on the desk. Girard Benoit, Iola’s grandfather and Isabelle’s father, had died in 1963, just after the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge connected Hatteras to the northern Outer Banks, opening Hatteras to drive-on tourism and changing it forever. The era of quiet, remote life in saltbox houses was over. Girard Benoit had never acknowledged Iola’s blood relation, other than in leaving her the family inheritance that caused her neighbors to accuse her of taking advantage of an old man whose mind was gone. Why she’d kept her secret all her life, I still didn’t know, and I guessed no one ever would.
I laid a hand on Paul’s shoulder and woke him. “You don’t look very comfortable there,” I said. “There’s a bed downstairs in the room off the kitchen. Why don’t you go catch a little sleep? I think I’ll curl up in the parlor with the kids for a while. In the morning we can go to Bink’s and print out all the sections we photographed, make the displays with the newspaper articles and whatnot.” The poster boards were J.T.’s idea —something resembling the science fair project he was working on in Paul’s class, but this display would be about Iola’s life. A visual catalog of all that she’d done for the Outer Banks. We planned to include some of Isabelle’s photographs and her magazine articles. Zoey had unearthed a pile of old Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Life magazines in the storage closet under the stairs, all featuring Isabelle’s works about the islands.
Paul blinked, seeming confused at first about where he was.
“You were really asleep,” I said, a drowsy chuckle teasing my throat as I peeled back a piece of stationery that was stuck to his arm. There was a sketch on it, a little girl sitting in a metal porch chair, her face buried in her hair.
“I thought we’d put that one on the display boards,” he said. “I just like the feel of it . . . sort of conveys a moment when all hope seems lost, you know?”
“Feels like it fits the mood,” I admitted. Now that we’d gone through the boxes, I wondered if anything we were doing would make a difference. There was money and power on the other end of this struggle. Fairhope was a tiny community of fishermen and working people. There was no political pull here.
Paul squeezed my fingers. “We can do this,” he promised, and then we walked from the blue room together.
CHAPTER 25
TWO STEPS OUTSIDE the county commissioners’ court, I was filled with righteous anger and determination. In my hand, I held a notebook with my speech about Benoit House. Beside me, Paul carried the poster boards on which we’d gathered parts of Iola’s story —paragraphs copied from her letters, articles we’d taken from the newspapers stacked among Iola’s things, a smattering of Isabelle’s writings and photography, scraps about the historic value of Benoit House. Like a warrior’s armor, they made me feel strong —a shield, a sword. A cause that was worth fighting for.
This entire community would hear Iola’s story now. They would know her as I had come to know her. Secrets would be revealed, and people would finally understand who she was and what she had done. She wasn’t a thief, a squatter in Benoit House. She was a daughter of it. She was a small, humble woman who had made her life a gift of service and never asked for anything in return —not recognition, not fame, not even the gratitude of those she’d helped. A quiet angel, a woman who served a calling first learned from a gentle nun in an orphans’ home. If not for the boxes, no one would ever have known. Iola Anne Poole would’ve disappeared from this place, silent and invisible. Forgotten.
If I had anything to say about it, she wouldn’t be. Her neighbors here on these narrow strips of sand would see that they owed her the debt of granting her final wish, the only thing she’d ever desired for herself —that her family home, the place she treasured, be preserved.
Paul and I had worked all day Sunday and Monday on the speech, honing and refining it while Zoey, J.T., and the Binks printed photos of Iola’s writings, then clipped and laminated and arranged them with old pictures of the house and Isabelle’s magazine works. Geneva Bink had done an e-blast of an electronic postcard that Zoey helped design. At the Seashell Shop, Sandy had shared the information with every business owner on the island and with her list of customers. Mike Mullins, the UPS driver, had taken flyers and given them to his contacts. The hope was that even people who loved to vacation in the Outer Banks might show up at the meeting, flood the commissioners’ court with citizens who were more concerned about preserving the island’s history and character than satisfying land developers anxious to support rampant construction along the shore.
I’d imagined the scene over and over as I practiced the speech, Paul giving me encouraging looks while running a stopwatch. Three minutes. That’s all that was allowed for each person in the public comments forum.
Three minutes. Was it possible to encapsulate an entire life in such a small scrap of time?
Geneva Bink would speak before me, talking about the history of Fairhope and its importance to the citizens who lived there. I would follow with my speech about Iola’s life and Benoit House, and several other Hatteras residents, including Sandy, would speak after me, with the intent of driving the point home. Our names were on the public comments list. The only question now was whether anyone would listen.
“Here we go,” Paul said as we neared the doors to the building. “If anyone can make Iola come alive for these people, you can.”
I looked into his eyes and was momentarily convinced that I could do anything. Paul made me feel larger than I was, invincible. He believed in me in a way that made me believe in myself. Sometime in the middle of the night, as we sat in the blue room, the soft light of the Tiffany Magnolia lamp bathing dozens of failed attempts at speech writing wadded on the floor, I’d looked at Paul, bent over one of Iola’s prayer boxes, and realized that I didn’t know what I would do without him. His was the smile I looked forward to most in the day, his and Zoey’s and J.T.’s. His was the voice that fell softly on my ear, that built me up rather than tearing me down. I’d never known anyone like Paul Chastain.
I hadn’t told him that —how much he meant to me. I wasn’t sure why, but the words weren’t there. I didn’t have a definition for Paul and me. I didn’t have words for what this was. Maybe he didn’t either, and that was part of the problem. I wasn’t sure what I was to him —a project, a way to fill a gap in his life, part of a fractured family he felt the need to reroot and repair, rebuild like he rebuilt storm-damaged beaches?
What could I possibly be to someone like him, other than a project?