The Prayer Box, page 12
I understood Iola’s feelings, her yearning, her fear. Life with strangers isn’t easy when you’re just a child yourself. You can try your best to be good, to be perfect, to look at those people with eyes that say, Love me, please. I need it. But love doesn’t always come your way. Eventually you learn to stop taking the risk. By the time I’d finally ended up with a foster family who really wanted me, at sixteen, I couldn’t open myself up to them the way they needed me to.
The Lathrops were empty nesters with their daughters’ show horses standing in the pasture, and they loved the fact that I was a good rider. They taught me everything I needed to know about riding show jumpers and helped me get a scholarship at a little college with an equestrian team. I repaid them by believing my freshman English professor when he told me I was special, talented, and that he’d never met anyone like me. I didn’t even go home to the Lathrops again after I got pregnant. I knew how disappointed in me they would be. Instead, I tracked down my sister and moved in with her. Like most things with Gina, it didn’t last very long.
Reading Iola’s letters, I wondered if she’d ever had the chance to go home again or if she eventually traveled off into the world on her own, as I had.
Iola enjoyed learning at the orphan school. Her writing had changed from uneven print to artful cursive, her thoughts slowly transforming from those of a child to those of an adolescent. The nuns had discovered that she was exceptionally bright, talented both in music and language. In the four years she’d been there, she had learned to speak proper French, begun instruction in Latin, and studied music. She’d been selected for a choral group that performed at various events around town, where ladies’ societies and audiences at all-white churches were delighted with the angelic singing of colored children who had been lifted from their lowly stations by the compassion of nuns and generosity of benefactors.
During her snatches of contact with the outside world, Iola had learned two things about herself. She revealed them through the final letter in the box, written just before Christmas, 1936.
. . . hear them whispering, the ladies behind their hands. I catch bits and pieces as we file past after our singing. I see them watching me, craning beneath their broad-brimmed hats, fanning their sweating chins. Their voices buzz by my ear like the hum of a dragonfly, whirling along a riverside among the cattails. “. . . at that one, how pale she is. No surprise that she’s been sent away. . . . Someone’s bastard . . . will be quite a beauty . . . Wouldn’t want her around my home, either. Too much temptation there . . . an anathema, really . . .”
Anathema. When we are back in school, I find Sister Marguerite so that I might ask her, what does this word mean? Her baby-leaf-green eyes twinkle as she looks up from scrubbing the floors in the bathroom. She sings, even as she cleans the mess from too many children in so small a space. I ask, why does she sing when the work is hard? “All labor is joy,” she tells me. “It is not washing dirty floors, but the feet of Jesus, Iola. All we do for others, we do for the One Most High.”
I think of this for a moment. Is it possible that all service is worship?
I do not ask her this but instead I ask about the word I have heard today, anathema.
“My, my, Iola Anne, but you do come to me with the most interesting questions,” Sister Marguerite says. “You’ve the intelligence of a girl much older than thirteen. Where did you hear that word?”
“At the Women’s Aid Society. A lady looked at me and said it,” I tell her.
Sister Marguerite’s smile fades. When she pauses to turn my way, moisture clings along the bottoms of her eyes, like dew in a trumpet vine. “It is a complicated word,” she answers. “Not one our heavenly Father would be pleased to have us dignify with thought or conversation. We are his children, each knit together as we should be. We must go by the name our Father has given us—Beloved—not by the names which others might seek to place upon us.” She brushes a wrist across her cheeks as she returns to her work. She sniffles softly. I see that I have hurt her, and I should not ask about this again. I would never wound Sister Marguerite. She is kind to me.
I suppose it matters little, Father, as I heard Sister Agnes whisper yesterday when we filed out of choral practice, “It’s time we must replace Iola Anne. She’s developing.” There was an emphasis on the final word. I felt her frowning at me, her wrinkled mouth like the navel of a Christmas orange. At first, I did not understand. I have learned so very much in the choral group. I have even begun to master the organ, not so different from Monsieur’s piano. I strained to hear the whisper, as Sister Agnes went on with her thought. “The audiences prefer children who are young, too young to be out working for themselves. It pleases them to feel as though they’re donating to the helpless. Keeping urchins off the streets, you know.”
“Certainly,” said Sister Mary Constantine. “It is a shame, though. Iola Anne has such a beautiful voice. . . .” Sister Mary Constantine is pleased that she chose me for the choral group, and I have done very well. Just yesterday, she promised a new hymn for me to sing, a difficult one.
I will not be learning the new hymn now, Father. I know it. I wonder, what will they do with me instead? Were I an orphan, they would be looking to place me in a cotton mill or tobacco house, but of course I am still here because Monsieur has paid my keep. I wonder, will I be here forever?
I pray that soon you will bring me home to Mama Tee and Maman and Isabelle, Father. I pray that you will ever remind me to answer only to the name you have given me, not to the words men may offer.
I am your child. My Father has named me. I am Beloved.
Your daughter,
Iola Anne
A sound broke the silence. Something ringing . . . an alarm clock, maybe. It faded, then came again.
A hot, sharp lightning of panic rushed through me. The doorbell. I scrambled off the bed, bouncing the mattress and causing the cat to jump to the ground and run for cover.
“Oh no! Oh, shoot-shoot-shoot.” I froze with my hands in the air over the quilt. If that was Brother Guilbeau or someone from the church, I was dead. I had stuff strung everywhere, and I wasn’t even supposed to be up here. Anyone seeing the kitchen would think I was either lazy or a complete liar. I’d said I could handle the job, no problem. Instead, I’d allowed myself to be sidetracked over and over.
Or what if it was the sheriff’s deputies, back to . . . investigate something? If I opened the door, they would bulldoze their way past me like they owned the place. They’d paw through everything and find the letters. . . .
Think, think, think. Think, Tandi. Think of something. The contents of three boxes lay scattered in unkempt piles on the bed. I hadn’t even been trying to fold the letters or prepare to fit them back in the boxes. I hadn’t put one box away before getting out another. I’d just grabbed one letter and then the next, one box after another, reading hurriedly, hungrily, anxious to discover Iola’s story, to learn how life had brought her from an orphanage in New Orleans to here.
“Okay, be calm. Be calm.” I could finesse my way out of this. Somehow.
Moving to the window, I took a peek at the driveway, but if a car was out there, it had been pulled through and parked near the old garage building. Between the thick growth of trees and the porch roof, I couldn’t see a thing. A passing glance in the dresser mirror confirmed that, on top of everything else, I was a wreck. My hair hung in a frizz-ball ponytail, my eyes were red and puffy, and my cheeks were streaked with dried tear trails. I’d been through a meat grinder of emotions this morning, and it showed. I’d promised myself I would only stay here with the boxes a few more minutes, but instead I’d been here for hours.
My heart pounded as I smoothed back my hair, slapped and pinched my cheeks, then hurried to the stairs. The old rotary bell clanged again, the visitor thumbing the trigger, then letting it free. Once, twice, a third time. Whoever it was had no intention of going away.
“Hang on,” I called from the midlanding, then winced as the treads popped and creaked underfoot, the noise ridiculously loud. What if the visitor heard it and knew I’d been upstairs?
A story began spinning, part fact, part invention.
The cat. I heard the cat up there and then the water running . . .
It’s all taken care of now, though. Nothing to worry about. No, no reason to go up there. The faucets are old and they must have slipped on a little. I tied the handles closed so it wouldn’t happen again.
The tapestry wove itself, threads intertwining with impressive speed.
Behind the veiled glass sidelights in the entryway, a human outline shifted back, then forward, disappearing as the visitor reached for the bell, then reappearing.
Someone tall . . . a man . . . dark clothes. Too thin to be Brother Guilbeau.
Wrong kind of hat for a sheriff’s deputy. This guy had on a ball cap.
I reached for the knob, flipped the ornate-looking brass slider that secured the lock from the inside, pulled the door open.
A UPS man. The man in brown. Middle-aged, friendly looking, clean-cut, with a gray-dusted mustache. He had a box under one arm and a plastic grocery bag dangling from the other. We stood staring at each other for a moment while I caught my breath, thinking, Seriously? All that panic for a UPS delivery? Whew, thank God . . .
He blinked. “Where’s Miss Iola Anne?” He lifted the grocery bag in an unconscious way that told me it was for her. The outline of a flour sack, two cans, and several bananas showed through the thin layer of plastic. “I brought her something.”
It dawned on me that I was about to be the bearer of bad news. “She passed away a little over a week ago. I’m sorry. I guess you didn’t know.” I stepped out and peeked around the corner of the house. He’d pulled his truck in by the old garage. He probably knew from experience just where to stop so that he could back up and turn around without hitting trees or the weathered concrete hitching posts with the iron mermaid finials.
“Old Mrs. Poole.” He let his head fall forward, looking crestfallen. The dry river of a sweat stain drew a faint, uneven line around the rim of his hat. I focused on it a moment, thinking that it probably wasn’t easy schlepping packages in the thick summer humidity here. “I’m gonna miss her. She was one of my favorite stops.”
I felt a surprising backwash of grief. It seemed strangely sad that I was trying to understand Iola now, after my chance to meet her was gone. “Did you know her well?”
I shouldn’t have asked, I guess. The question made it obvious that I was a stranger here.
“She was one of my Gutennannies.”
“Your what?”
Lifting the grocery sack again, he gave me a sheepish look. “Guten nannies. That’s German for ‘sweet little ladies who can really cook.’ I’d bring a few supplies by here if the grocery store was clearing out overripe fruit, and when I’d come back this way for a delivery in a day or two, she’d have beignets or cookies in the freezer waiting for me. Put Iola’s banana beignets on the dashboard, let ’em warm up in the sun a couple hours, and mmm-mmm-mmmh.” His eyes closed, and he shook his head back and forth, as if he could taste them now.
“That’s nice.” So Iola hadn’t been the hermit that everyone thought. She was friends with the UPS man. “I guess she got deliveries quite a bit, then?” What could she possibly have been receiving, and where did she put it? The downstairs was cluttered with boxes and belongings, but most of it seemed to be old stuff.
“Yeah, fairly often.” The wrinkles deepened around his eyes, and I had the sense that there was something he wasn’t telling me. “Especially since she quit driving a couple years ago. The first year I was on this route, she had a little red Dodge Dart she ran around town in. It was vintage, but slick as a whistle. She must’ve been in her late eighties by then. Then one week I came and the Dart was gone. She’d backed into a post by Burrus Market down in Hatteras Village, and she got rid of the car the next day. Said she was afraid she’d have an accident and hurt somebody.”
I nodded along, indicating neither that I knew the story nor that I didn’t, but it sounded like the Iola I’d begun to know from the letters upstairs.
“Felt sorry for her after that.” Setting the box down for a minute, he whisked the cap off his head and wiped his brow with a tan hankie, then stuffed it back into his pocket. I hadn’t seen a man carry a hankie in years. “She was lonely. Kept my number right there on her refrigerator. I’d pick things up in town for her if she needed them. I’ll miss that high, squeaky voice coming over my cell phone. ‘Mr. Mullins? I do so hate to trouble you at home, but if it isn’t too much bother, when you’re out in your truck . . .’ She never could quite grasp the fact that the phone was traveling with me in the truck. She always thought she was calling me at home. I guess when you’ve been around since the days of steam trains and milk wagons, some things just don’t seem possible.”
“Guess not.” I couldn’t help thinking about all the evolutions Iola had seen in her life—the changes in the world, the events, the cultural shifts. Dictators, wars, men on the moon. She’d been born in a different universe than this one. Her grandmother was a slave. My mind couldn’t quite grasp that. . . .
Were all those things recorded in the boxes upstairs, her thoughts about the world carefully chronicled in prayer?
I wanted to know her, to understand her. To solve the mystery of her.
I felt the blue room tugging at me again, but I wasn’t going up there, other than to put away the mess I’d made. Not today. I’d lucked out when this visitor was only a delivery driver, but I couldn’t make that mistake again. I needed this job.
The UPS man glanced at his watch and thumbed over his shoulder. “The mailbox is stuffed full outside. It’s hanging open a little. I can run and grab it for you, if you want. I used to do that for Miss Iola Anne from time to time, especially this last year or so. She got to where she didn’t come out of the house much. I think it was hard for her to make it down the porch steps.” He indicated the eight wooden steps that led to the front walk.
I squinted at them. Iola didn’t seem to have any problem climbing the stairs in the house. She was capable of hauling drip buckets back and forth to the bathroom. She could’ve made it down those outside steps if she’d wanted to. There was a reason she had kept herself locked away here. Maybe it was just that she was afraid she’d be taken to a rest home.
Maybe there was something more.
Her boxes might tell me. . . .
“No, that’s all right. I’ll pick up the mail.”
The driver nodded, then handed over a package the size of four shoe boxes put together. Surprised by its weight, I shifted it to my hip, and both of us hovered there on Iola’s porch, not seeming to know what to say.
“Someone probably ought to open that up,” he suggested finally. “Usually when she bought stuff, she had it billed to her. She didn’t believe in credit cards—she told me that once. She had accounts with shops all up and down the Outer Banks. A couple times she gave me cash, and I dropped off payments for her, but mostly she paid through the mail, I think. Anyway, there’s probably a bill in that package. Whoever’s looking after her affairs might want to take care of it. The stores on the island are operating on a shoestring since the last hurricane. What stores made it through, that is.”
“Sure . . . I’ll see that it’s taken care of.”
“You a family member?”
“No. Just a friend.” I did feel like one at this point. A friend.
Clicking his tongue, he surveyed the Confederate jasmine and climbing roses pressing through the railings, ripe with the determined growth of a new spring. “She was a pretty lady, even at ninety years old. Had the brightest silvery-colored eyes. One time when I came, she brought out an old black-and-white photo. She told me she’d been sorting through some things and came across it. I’ll never forget her handing that thing to me and saying, ‘I was a looker, wasn’t I?’ And she was. That was quite a picture. She was posed like Jane Russell in the hay, and there was a big ol’ palomino horse nibbling on her ear. She looked like a pinup girl. I gave it back to her and said, ‘Miss Iola, you’re still a looker.’ She laughed and told me if she was forty years younger, I’d have to watch out. She was something else. I think she had stories she never shared with anyone. There was a lot that folks around here didn’t know about her.”
I set the package by my feet and leaned against the doorframe. “Did she ever tell you where she came from? How she ended up here in this house, I mean?”
He shook his head. “No, she didn’t. Every once in a while, she’d mention something—a certain kind of car she had at one time or another, or someplace she’d been, but that was about it. She always wanted to make sure she wasn’t holding me up from my work. That’s the way she was. She thought about other people first—just like getting rid of that car. She didn’t want to hurt anybody with it. She . . .” He stopped, reconsidered whatever he was about to say, then changed the subject. “I’ll sure miss Iola Anne and those banana beignets. Melt in your mouth. Like little bits of heaven.” He extended the grocery sack my way as if he’d suddenly remembered he was holding it. “Here, do something with this stuff, okay? I don’t want to look at it today.”
“Okay.” I understood, really.
After he was gone, I scooted the box farther into the vestibule so I could close the door. Then I peeked into the grocery sack, letting the scent of overripe bananas waft out.
