The Prayer Box, page 20
“What? Don’t tell me you’re afraid of storms. A big, bad tomcat like you?”
He mewed again. I extended my arm and lightly touched his head, careful to keep my fingers away from his mouth, just in case. His body arched around me, and he leaned against my hand, suddenly my friend.
“Okay, now I know this is some weird dream.” Any minute now, I would wake up in the cottage, still bloated on crawfish, corn, and boiled potatoes. Surely the cat who had been carefully avoiding me for days now wasn’t meekly trailing me as I tried to get J.T.’s lantern to work, then moved through the house, checking closets and cubbyholes in search of a flashlight, in case the power went out again.
Unfortunately, there were a million hiding places for a flashlight in Iola’s house, and if the cat had any clues, he wasn’t telling. I finally ended up settling for an oil lamp that was sitting on the fireplace mantel in the small, narrow room where Iola’s recliner and console television resided. Along one wall, an old Queen Anne settee sat dusty with disuse, keeping company with a set of TV trays, a magazine rack, and the window heat-and-air unit that had gone on and off every day like clockwork when Iola was still living here. I lingered for a moment at the bookshelf by the door. Iola was a fan of romance novels. Go figure. Some of the paperbacks looked like they’d been read a million times, the spines creased white, the titles practically gone. A few well-worn classics sat among them as well. A booklet—the kind probably printed for tourists at some time in the past—perched sideways atop three copies of The Old Man and the Sea. I tilted my head to read the title: Historic Homes of Hatteras Island.
The cat clung close to my legs again as I slid the booklet from the shelf and looked at the montage of photos on the cover. I recognized the image in the bottom left corner. The artificially colorized photo had been taken in better days when the gardens around this house were carefully manicured, the climbing roses trimmed, and the gingerbread railings on the porch freshly painted. A man in a suit stood beside a fifties-model car in the driveway, his thumbs tucked into the pockets of a vest that fit tightly over his round stomach, his chin upright and stiff. He wasn’t smiling but regarding the camera with an aristocratic air meant to indicate that he was someone important.
The lantern cast light over my shoulder as I set it on an upper shelf and opened the booklet, thumbing through until I found the same photo inside. An older picture and a newer one flanked it. The old photo was of a party on the lawn beside the house, perhaps in the early forties, judging from the cars parked in the driveway. The caption underneath read, Benoit House shown during the collegiate graduation celebration of Isabelle Renee Benoit, May 1941. Isabelle and her daughter, Christina, would both die young, leaving Benoit House and the Benoit shipping empire with no heir. Rumors of voodoo curses placed on the Benoit family by Haitian slaves would haunt Benoit House and Girard Benoit Sr. until his death from liver cancer in 1963, shortly after the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge, of which he was a strong proponent, officially linked Hatteras Island to the northern Outer Banks.
On the opposite side of the page, a color photo showed Iola’s house, not in its present state of decay, but not in its full glory, either. The flower beds were neatly groomed, but the paint on the garage building was weathered, and the upstairs railings were already leaning outward. A red Dodge Dart was parked in the garage.
The caption read, Benoit House in 1981, now owned by Mrs. Iola Anne Poole, remains an example of Gilded Age splendor on the Outer Banks. (House not open for public viewing at this time.)
Moving so that I wouldn’t cast a shadow on the book, I scanned through the one-page article, the lantern glow flickering over the words as the house lights blinked off, then on. The details in the article were largely about the history of the house.
. . . built by a Carolina lumber tycoon in 1898, eventually purchased as a summer property by Girard Benoit Sr., a shipping magnate from New Orleans whose family had long-held interests in the Outer Banks. Benoit’s adult sons from his first marriage lived briefly in the house. Both sons died in separate shipping accidents, one occurring just off Cape Hatteras, in an area known as Diamond Shoals, where two major Atlantic currents collide. The ship sank within sight of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, but rescuers were not able to reach it in time. Benoit’s daughter from a short second marriage, Isabelle Renee Benoit, similarly died young, giving fuel to the legend that Benoit labored under a lifelong curse, placed on the family when a slave midwife was forced to leave her own daughter to labor through a deadly breech birth alone so that the midwife could attend to a birth in the Benoit home. After a long illness and rumored bouts of mental instability, Girard Benoit left his fortune to his household help, rather than to extended family members, in a much-rumored effort to protect them from the curse and thus ransom himself in death.
“Whoa,” I breathed, looking down at the cat. “Okay . . . well now, there’s a story, right?” That explained, perhaps, how Iola had come to own this house. Her family members were the household help.
I studied the room in the dim light—the books on the shelf, the stack of plastic tubs in one corner with misty outlines of yarn balls, knitting needles, and swatches of fabric showing through.
Was this her story? Was this why she had lived the way she did, almost as if she were a guest here? As if the furniture and the fixtures were not hers to alter? Did that explain the belongings packed in containers, stacked in the hallway? Did she feel guilty about taking over ownership? Did she feel as if this place had never really belonged to her?
The cat stopped moving and sat with his body pressed against my leg. His crooked tail curled around my ankle like a furry leg iron, the tip brushing back and forth over my foot.
“Aren’t you just my best friend all of a sudden?” Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the dark corners of the room and blinking the lights again.
The cat ducked his head and let out a low, miserable sound.
“It’s just a thunderstorm.” I scratched his head, then untangled my leg and put the book back on the shelf, making sure it was exactly as I’d found it. All this business of family curses and mysterious deaths had shifted me off center. The only good thing about the pounding rain was that, if the house was making any of its usual noises—popping floorboards that sounded like footsteps, wind moaning through window sashes, bells ringing—I couldn’t hear them tonight. There was only the drumming of the rain, the rush of water from downspouts, and the crash of clouds colliding like titans.
The overhead lightbulbs browned out, the filaments barely casting a glow as I carried the lamp through the house, the flame circle dancing against the paneled walls, sliding over boxes, reflecting against plastic containers, casting into dark rooms, and slipping over the random arrangements of furniture. Upstairs, there were new sounds. In addition to the bass of thunder, the snap of lightning, and the rumble of rain, the drip of water into containers played a strange, random melody. Drop, plink, splash, plink, plink, plink, drip. I stopped at the top of the stairs, looked both ways up and down the dark hall as far as the lamplight would allow, listened. This was Iola’s music at the end of her life, the theme song of her struggle to save this house, to protect it.
Why did she care so much, if she had no one to leave it to?
If only I’d known, during those first weeks we lived in the cottage, when the cold rains fell endlessly. If I’d had any idea that the tiny old woman here, frail and stooped, had been dealing with all this mess, I could’ve helped.
I would have, wouldn’t I?
I was afraid of the answer, if I looked at it honestly. Maybe I wouldn’t have. I’d been so messed up, chopping the last of the OxyContin into tiny pieces, taking a little less and a little less, trying to come back to earth, to lose the haggard, foggy-eyed look so I could search for jobs. Counting the pennies as they dwindled. Worrying about whether Trammel would find us.
I hadn’t given one thought to the old woman in this house. The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you’re not in any shape to save anyone else. You can’t be a lighthouse when you’re underwater yourself. If Iola were still alive now, I’d walk across the yard and ask what I could do to help. We’d sit on the porch and share tea and have long talks. She would show me the photo she’d shown the UPS driver—the one of her posing as a pinup girl.
Lightning struck so close that I jumped away from the hallway window. The hurricane glass on the lamp rattled, threatening to fall off. The cat hissed and skittered off. I realized I’d stepped on his tail.
“Be careful.” The breathless words broke the silence that lingered when the noise died. I imagined myself tripping over the cat, dropping the lamp, oil and flames shooting everywhere.
The cat mewed, watching from underneath a bowlegged table as I set down the lamp and emptied buckets. A new drip had started in the hallway. I scavenged a red-and-white kettle and placed it under the leak near the door to the blue room.
“Enough rain already,” I murmured. The cat sidled closer again, standing with me in the doorway, his tail swaying back and forth, a feathery whip against my skin. The thunder had quieted. Hopefully the storm was moving away, headed across Pamlico Sound toward the tidewater marshes on the mainland.
I walked into the blue room—the last one I hadn’t checked for water. So far, the ceiling in there seemed pristine. The room smelled neither of plaster nor of rain. On the east side, the windows and the double glass doors to the balcony rattled gently, glass shivering against fingers of wood. The walls seemed firm and solid as I set the lantern by the Tiffany Magnolia lamp and crept to the closet, slipping past the short stepladder to take the next box in order, to find out what happened to Iola after she wrote the letter I’d read just this morning. With working at Sandy’s, I’d only been able to allow myself one box each day, but after three more years at the orphan school, Iola had ended the prayers of her fifteen-year-old year, 1938, with four words in large, joyful script, a bird in flight sketched beside them.
I am going home.
Home, I’d learned, was Monsieur’s grand house near the French Quarter of New Orleans. Did Iola later move permanently to the Outer Banks with the Benoits? Why the change of heart about letting her return to the Benoit home in New Orleans at fifteen, after so many years of keeping her away?
This box was heavier than the others—made of tin, probably a container for food or cigars originally. It was decorated with faded prints of palm trees and water and dunes, the sort of images that might have come from tourist postcards back when the wonders of the world were represented in artificially pure colors, blended with misty pastoral lighting. Tiny knobbed whelk shells lined the edges of the lid—a mermaid’s necklace, Pap-pap used to call them. When we found the tubular, papery cases on the beach, he’d cut them open with his pocketknife and show us the miniature whelk shells hidden inside their translucent casings like white diamonds.
The hinged lid groaned softly, protesting my opening it, seeming to momentarily consider keeping its secrets. As always, I slid my fingers beneath the stack inside, lifted it out all at once, and turned it over on the bed. Sand sprinkled the quilt, and several tiny shells fell from among the pages, landing soundlessly and rolling into a patchwork valley of sea colors.
The first letter crackled in my hands, the parchment dry and fragile and smelling of age. A piece of pink sea glass slid along the fold and came to rest in the palm of my hand. I brought it into the lamplight. It was thin, perfectly round, with a thicker rim circling the edge. The base of a very old bottle perhaps. I wasn’t surprised that a young girl would pick it up and save it among her most valuable things.
Rubbing the sea-smoothed edges between my fingers, I turned to the letter.
Dearest Father,
Forgive me. Again, it has been long since I have written to you. How strange that when the hours are long with misery, when needs are many and my heart aches, I seek the solace of conversation with you. Yet when the day is sun-drenched and calm, as peaceful as a milk-full foal splayed on the grass, I am silent, my needs quiet in their slumber.
You have brought me one step short of heaven after my years away. If there is a bit of the divine on earth, these pearls of land among endless sea are that place. If ever all the troubles of the world could be left behind, cast away and washed out with the tide, these islands would hold that magic. I feel you everywhere around me now. I see you in all things—in the vastness of the sky, in the endless roll of the sea, in strange and wondrous creatures washed ashore, in treasures and mysteries, and the flight of seabirds over the water. Here at the edge of land and sea, there is no space for denying you.
Only days are left now before Isabelle will leave for her first term at college in Richmond, so we rush to grab the last of this glorious summer by the sea, this summer of only the two of us, here in this island home. We know that soon enough, Isabelle will board the ferry to travel inland, and Maman and Mama Tee will arrive to take over care of this house and keep it for Isabelle to return to during her respites from school.
There will be cleaning and airing out and dusting and scrubbing and laundering and weeding in the gardens, but for now we leave the dust to itself. We walk over sandy floors and let it gather in moats along the creases of carpets. We run to the stable in the early morning, and we climb onto the old horse bareback, a poke slung over our shoulders. We ride to the sea, along the shore, and the old horse snorts and paws in the surf, tossing his head as if he were young again. His lungs fill beneath our thighs, his skin shudders, and he nickers into the wind. Somewhere in the distance, the wild ponies answer, I think. He quickens with the call of freedom, and so do we.
We travel farther than ever before, first riding, then walking together in the surf, the old horse trailing behind us on his lead. We collect shells and bits of sea glass, holding our finds in our palms and admiring their beauty, their magnificence, their perfection. We clutch them tightly as if this will somehow imprison time itself. This day kept still, inside a whelk’s chambers, an iridescent angel-wing clam, a parchment-like casing filled with tiny shells.
We climb among the bones of a shipwreck and imagine its final moments. We find a diving suit washed up along the shore, and together we weave stories of what might have happened to the diver. Isabelle’s mind is fancy with ideas.
When the afternoon has finally spent itself, we stroll along the tide line, leading the old horse. He snorts and cocks an ear as ghost crabs begin to scuttle from their holes. The sun sinks low over the water, kissing the clouds with amber. The day is at its end, and it is one less day, and sadness overwhelms me.
Isabelle notices, and she asks after my mood.
“You’re leaving in six days,” I say. “Just six days. Maman and Mama Tee will be here in three.” This time is almost over, this time of just the two of us with our sandy feet and long walks by the sea. Maman and Mama Tee will arrive to pack Isabelle off to college. Isabelle’s father cannot do it. He is far away, seeking medical treatment for Madame. Mama Tee says she will not recover. Maman has seen the consumption enough to know it.
It seems that it was only yesterday I came from New Orleans with Isabelle. I think for a moment of Sister Marguerite, who wept as she bade me good-bye and sent me off with Monsieur’s driver, Old Rupert. Now I feel as if I am Sister Marguerite, being left behind by someone who is eager to go away.
“I’ll only be across the ferry and a short train ride away,” says Isabelle. “I’ll be home for term breaks and summers. You can come and visit me too.”
“At college?” I imagine the looks I would get. A colored girl, prancing through the halls of that school.
“Why not?” asks Isabelle.
My laugh comes with an angry sound beneath it. “I don’t want to go to school. I’ve had enough of school. I’m finally home.”
“They have colleges for colored girls.”
“I don’t want to go to college. I never want to leave this place. I wish nothing would ever change,” I say, but the sun is sinking lower. The crabs scuttle toward the tide line to feed. The day is fading.
Isabelle scoffs. “Not me. I’ll see things and learn things and travel around the world.” The scent of freedom is ambrosia in her mouth now. Since Madame Benoit is stricken with illness, there is no one to confine Isabelle. She is free, like the wild ponies on these Outer Banks.
But the ponies won’t swim out to sea when they cannot sight the opposite shore. Isabelle will.
I look over my shoulder toward the bones of the ruined ship in the distance. I think of Isabelle’s dead brothers, those young men who were gone before Isabelle and I were old enough to understand it. I think of what can happen when one sets off into the world, seeking adventure. I yearn for her to remain. “If that ship yonder had stayed in harbor, it wouldn’t be wrecked on the beach, now would it?”
Isabelle dips sideways in her step, her shoulder bumping mine so that I stumble into the tide. “If that ship had stayed in harbor, it couldn’t serve its purpose.”
We say no more about it. Isabelle throws the reins over the horse’s withers and snatches a handful of his mane to swing on board like wild Indians at the picture shows. I swing up behind her, and when we give the horse his head, he canters homeward along the sand, eager for our day’s adventure to end.
I think on Isabelle’s words now, Father, as I sit at my window, watching the moon take the sun’s place overhead. I suppose I thought that you had answered my prayers in bringing me here, but now my mind is filled with ships and bones.
You are not a God of endless harbors. Harbors are for stagnant sails and barnacled wood, but the sea . . . the sea is fresh rain and cleansing breeze and sleek sails. You are a God of winds and tides. Of journeys and storms and navigation by stars and faith.
You send the ships forth to serve their purpose, but you do not send them forth alone, for the sea is yours, as well.
Be close to the sailors, Father. Wherever your tides may lead them.
Your loving daughter,
