Page 103 of The River We Remember

She wasn’t Evangeline then. Her real name was Jolie Rae LeBlanc. And Mama Farrah wasn’t her birth mother, but she was, in all ways, Jolie Rae’s true mother. Jolie Rae barely remembered her birth mother. The woman her father brought into the house after that, a thin, hard woman named Delia, had been lazy. Or maybe just sick. She’d lain around the old shack on Bayou Rouge and done almost none of the work of seeing to the men, Jolie Rae’s four brothers and her father. When the men came back from a day of hunting or fishing the bayous, or from selling crawfish or pelts or gator skin and meat, or drunk from the cockfights, it was Jolie Rae who was responsible for feeding them and cleaning their muddied or bloodied clothing. She’d done it since she was old enough to have memories.

A week after Jolie Rae turned ten, Delia died. Jolie Rae’s father went away for a month. He came back with a new wife. She was big, robust, with hair like a wild bonfire and a long, ugly scar across her left cheek from the corner of her mouth to below her ear. She took control of that ratty old shack on Bayou Rouge and the men in it and became the only real mother that Jolie Rae ever knew. She took the ten-year-old girl under her ample wing and gave her an education. Not only in the things she believed every girl needed to know, but a real education. Jolie Rae barely knew how to read, but Mama Farrah badgered Jolie Rae’s father mercilessly until he brought back books with him when he went off to sell the bounty he and the boys had reaped from the bayou. Mama Farrah made certain that Jolie Rae read every day and practiced her writing and knew her manners and how to speak to people in a way that might disguise her bayou upbringing. And for her Christmas present the year she turned twelve, Mama Farrah gave Jolie Rae a leather-bound volume of blank pages and told her to write her life every day as she lived it. Jolie Rae had no idea as to the why of all this. Mama Farrah would only say, Preparing you, child, for something better.

Which sounded just fine to Jolie Rae, who wasn’t looking forward to a life of taking care of her brothers and father and eventually maybe a husband who was just like them. Mama Farrah gave her hope that there might be something else in her future, something better.

She was fourteen the first time one of her brothers tried to seduce her. When seduction didn’t work, Andre tried to rape her. She was strong and lithe and fast, however, and escaped that terrible possibility. When she told Mama Farrah what had happened, Andre got the beating of his life. And Mama Farrah made it clear to all of Jolie Rae’s brothers that any other such attempts would net them the same result.

She could have survived on Bayou Rouge under the protection and tutelage of Mama Farrah, but when Jolie Rae was fifteen Mama Farrah got sick and took to her bed. The woman with bonfire hair and a long ugly scar and the heart of a lioness lay dying, and Jolie Rae could do nothing to change that. In the eyes of her brothers, who’d been so cowed by Mama Farrah, Jolie Rae could see what would happen once she was alone and unprotected.

Before the end came to her, Mama Farrah called Jolie Rae to her bedside.

Under the cypress by the well, she whispered. Dig.

Jolie Rae found a small metal box containing twenty-dollar gold coins. She counted fifteen.

They’re yours, Mama Farrah told her. You’ve got to go, girl. You’ve got to leave this place.

Jolie Rae begged her, said she couldn’t leave her there alone with the men of Bayou Rouge.

They won’t do anything to me now but leave me be. Which is what I want, Jolie Rae. But I can’t rest until I know you’re away from here.

Then Mama Farrah gave Jolie Rae a sealed envelope with a name and address on the outside.

Find her, Jolie Rae. She was my mama, like I’ve been yours. She’ll take care of you. She’ll ask things of you, girl, things that might seem hard at first, but she won’t mistreat you, I promise.

It was the most difficult choice she’d ever made, leaving Mama Farrah to die among those men who did not love her. But it was what Mama Farrah wanted and what Mama Farrah needed in order to pass away with an easy heart. So, in the middle of a night when the moon was huge and full and had turned the water of Bayou Rouge into a silver highway among the cypress, she took one of the flat-bottomed pirogues and poled her way to a new life, taking with her only the gold pieces and her leather-bound journal.

The address was in Houston, Texas, a lovely old mansion on a street lined with oak trees hung with Spanish moss. It took Jolie Rae two weeks to get there. When she knocked on the door, it was opened by a Negro woman, dressed beautifully and with a warm, welcoming smile. Jolie Rae handed her the letter and was ushered inside. She waited in a grand foyer decorated with old paintings. In a few minutes, another woman came to her, a woman much older than Mama Farrah, but dressed more beautifully than any woman Jolie Rae had ever seen.

Farrah? the woman asked.

Jolie Rae told her story, and she could see the sadness in the woman’s eyes.

Did she tell you about me, about this place?

Jolie Rae said she hadn’t.

Well, child, I’m going start you in the kitchen, teach you how to please a man there. When you’re ready, I’ll teach you everything else you need to know about men.

For the clientele of Madame Justine’s, the name Jolie Rae would not do. She was allowed to choose her own new name, which she took from one of her favorite poems, from a book that Mama Farrah had given her. She called herself Evangeline. Just as Mama Farrah had said, what was asked of her wasn’t easy for her to give, certainly not at first, but she was certain that it was better than the life she’d have had on Bayou Rouge. Once she’d learned the duties in the kitchen, Madame Justine had taught her the refinements and the manners of a lady. She was free to read and to think. The men who visited her room were clean and didn’t ill-treat her. She found that many of these men appreciated a lively conversation almost as much as the other activities that drew them there.

This was all during the war, which she’d been only remotely aware of on Bayou Rouge. In the house of Madame Justine, the war was always on the lips of the men who visited. Frequently, they were men in uniform, fliers from one of the many training bases. They were young, often handsome, often inexperienced in what the girls of Madame Justine’s house offered. In a way, Evangeline considered her work part of their training and also, in a way, a little solace that she could offer before they left to join the war, perhaps never to return.

They fell in love with her, many of them, and one or two asked for her hand. But it wasn’t until, near the end, when she met Christian Madison, a boy from Jewel, Minnesota, who’d been assigned to Ellington Field to train as a navigator, that she thought seriously of the offer of marriage. And why him? At the time, she couldn’t have said exactly. She was seventeen, a veteran already of a kind of life that most people couldn’t understand or accept. Christian was nineteen, and what was ahead of him was nothing but dire possibilities. Yet there was something about him, light and freeing and accepting and forgiving, something that came from a heart that seemed older than nineteen and stronger, somehow, than even Mama Farrah’s great heart. It didn’t matter to him who she’d been, who she was. He told her that what he saw in her was something good and beautiful. And so she’d said yes. For a brief time, they’d shared a life. Then he’d gone to England, and she’d discovered herself pregnant and had journeyed to Minnesota. It was there, a month before Scott was born, that the telegram from the War Department had come.

SO EVANGELINE MADISON had made her life in Black Earth County, and a good life it had been. Then, in a moment of thoughtlessness, she’d laid her journals down in the worst possible of places and they’d fallen into what Angie feared were the worst possible of hands. And now she sat on her bed, sleepless, fear carving a terrible emptiness in her belly as she waited for the long dark of that night to end.

CHAPTER FORTY

AT FIRST LIGHT that Sunday morning, Angie Madison left the house and walked to Saint Ignatius. She tried the doors, but they were locked at that early hour, so she waited on the front steps. Although she often attended church on Sundays—Calvary Lutheran on the other side of town—she wasn’t much of a praying woman. She’d become Lutheran when she joined the Madison family, all of whom had been baptized and raised in that denomination. On Bayou Rouge, she’d had no formal religion. When Mama Farrah came into her life, the woman had brought with her a Bible, but she’d used it mostly as a tool to teach Jolie Rae to read. She never suggested that it was necessarily a guide for anyone to live a life by. What Jolie Rae had read in the Bible remained just stories to her. And praying? In a way, it was like singing. It made her feel better sometimes, but it didn’t change a hard thing and she didn’t really believe anyone was listening. What she believed was that goodness and badness came out of people because of how they were treated. And if you wanted goodness from others, that’s what you let come out of you. And the badness? Well, sometimes it slipped out, too, because no one was all one thing or another, but you forgave yourself when you were not who you wanted to be and you did the same with others. It was a pretty simple way of being, but it was one she could understand and believe in and follow.

She watched the sun rise over the low hills that formed the eastern edge of the Alabaster River Valley. Then she saw the light come on in the kitchen of the rectory next to the church. She knocked at the back door and Father O’Gara answered. He knew her; everyone in Jewel knew Angie, had eaten at the Wagon Wheel, had been won over by her food and her easy manner and the exotic Cajun accent that ghosted through her speech. She explained that one of the books she’d donated to the charitable drive of the women of Saint Ignatius had been a mistake and that she needed to get it back. Did he know where the boxes of books were being stored? Was it possible for her to look for the book?

The priest unlocked the door to the church gymnasium, which was attached to the classroom annex and was where the donations were being stored. She’d packed her books in one of the cardboard boxes left from a delivery to the Wagon Wheel, a Heinz 57 box, and she’d thought it would be easy to locate. Unfortunately, the citizens of Jewel had been depressingly generous, and the whole west wall was stacked high and deep with boxes and bags and wooden crates and anything else that could hold books.

“What are we looking for?” the priest asked.

She told him about the Heinz 57 box.