One

On the banks of Bayou Nouvelle—near Latanier, Louisiana, May 1929

Sweat poured off Angeline Breaux’s back and dampened the dress beneath her rough cotton apron as she worked to finish the morning’s wash. If only her troubles could be so easily shed. Today Papa would return from town, and he promised to cast off the burden of her care by fetching a husband.

She knew all about husbands. They expected meals on the table and young ’uns in the crib, each replacing the next with a speed that would make the pollywogs in the bayou look slow.

Allowing the Lord to take His time with a match for her had worn her father’s patience thin, and Theophile Breaux had sworn to take the matter into his own hands. After all, she’d made twenty years plus one, and her finger still bore no man’s ring.

She would be married by fall or to the convent she would go, he declared, even though the Breaux family hadn’t professed the religion of the nuns for three generations. Still, Papa had promised as much last Monday morning when he lit out for town with a dugout canoe full of skins and her eldest brother Ernest, and she believed him.

Papa was a good man, but his ways weren’t always gentle-hearted. Should he find someone willing to claim his daughter in marriage, he might be more pleased than particular, especially since he would have one less mouth to feed.

If only Le Bon Dieu hadn’t sent away the one man who. . .

Angeline shrugged off the thought with a roll of her shoulders. Theirs had not been love, and he had certainly not been a man. Children, both of them, and so young and stupid.

If God had a plan for her, He could begin by bringing her a husband.

One thing was for sure. He needed to hurry.

“Angie?”

She looked past the thicket to where her nine-year-old sister Amalie stood watching. “What is it, Bebe?” she called. “Does Mama need me?”

“No, I just wanted to watch.”

Amalie picked her way through the tall grass to sit at Angeline’s side. One of her dark braids had come undone, and Angeline dried her hands on her apron and repaired the mess.

Her sister looked a bit flushed and her hair curled in damp tendrils at her temples. It might be the heat, but Angeline worried it could be the illness that had been lingering nearly a week. One day she would feel fine, the next she seemed weak. It was all so confusing and worrisome, but today she looked to be merely tired.

Scooting as close as she could to the edge of the bayou, the little girl dipped her toes into the water and began to kick. “Mama went visitin’, and Mathilde told me I had to take a nap with the babies on account of I’ve been sick. I told her you probably needed me.”

She cast a glance over her shoulder at her sister. “And what did she say to that?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t wait to hear. I figure the washing’s more fun.”

Angeline chuckled. “It isn’t nearly as much fun as it looks.”

“You make everything fun, Angie.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I try.” She paused. “So, are you feeling better?”

“Sure, I’m all better.” She picked at a nearby leaf and stifled a yawn. “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

“You know all my stories,” Angeline said. “Why don’t you go ask Mathilde to tell you one?”

“I like yours better than Mathilde’s, and she doesn’t know the one about T-Boy the gator, and that’s my favorite.” She paused to rub her eyes. “Besides, you don’t tell me what to do all the time and she does. If she tells me a story, she’ll make me do some chores.”

An image of Mathilde, soon to be seventeen and already wanting a husband and babies of her own, came to mind. Poor Amalie probably had a list of instructions a yard long. Mathilde generally kept things orderly and employed an army of brothers and sisters to do the work when she could get away with it.

“I suppose she can be bossy, can’t she?”

With a reassuring smile, Angeline went back to her washing. A few minutes later, she noticed Amalie yawning again. The pink in her cheeks had deepened.

“Maybe you’d like to take that old sheet over there and lie down to have a little nap.”

Amalie frowned. “You wouldn’t make me, would you?”

“I would.”

“Well, I’d rather go swimming.”

“That’s not going to happen, Amalie.” She stifled a smile at the girl’s audacity. “Now march yourself over there and take your nap before I have to get even more bossy than Mathilde.”

Her sister stood. “If I’m gonna have to take a nap, I might as well sleep in a bed. Thanks a lot, Angie.” The little girl stormed off, leaving silence in her wake.

❧

Technically, Jefferson Davis Villare was on vacation, although he could think of a half dozen places he’d rather be. Actually, he had no more choice in the matter of visiting the bayou one last time than a cat had of running from cold water.

And he’d been like a cat, running from water, specifically bayou water, ever since Mama died and left him and Pop to rattle around the big house in Latanier. Pop was forever arriving from or racing off to an emergency call, and Jeff was left behind to tend to his studies and learn the discipline that would serve him well in his chosen career as a medical researcher.

With the bayou to the south and the country club to the north, he grew into a man with divided loyalties—true to his patrician upbringing yet with a most stubbornly irrepressible urge to return to the murky water his people had called their own for two centuries.

His people.

The thought brought an ungentlemanly snort. Not since he fled the marsh country to study first manners and then medicine had Jeff considered the Acadians his people. And yet the documents his father displayed behind glass in his study proclaimed it so. What would his forebears think of him now, years and miles removed from the place they loved?

No matter, he decided. As a doctor of some importance, he would no doubt please them. His own grandfather had been doctor to the bayou people, often spending hours on the water, traveling from birth to death by means of a pirogue, a little canoe given him in lieu of payment. Pop held somewhat to that tradition as well, although his own miles through the bayou were more likely to take place by road rather than the traditional Acadian conveyance.

Jeff, however, was a different man, a doctor without the urge to follow in the tradition of the past two generations. He’d decided early on that there would be no late-night calls to deliver babies or early-morning wake-ups to set broken bones. His was to be the disciplined life of a man bent over a beaker jotting notes that would one day save the world, first in the eradication of influenza and then other diseases. From the happy but disconcerting chaos of his childhood, order would reign.

And reign it had for too many years, but with one trip back to his boyhood home, the reasons for his exile all came tumbling back. Chief among them was a dark-eyed Cajun girl who’d captured his heart, then handed it back to him scarred and broken. Could that be her on the other side of the Nouvelle? Had she changed so little that even at this distance, with the live oaks and the cypress casting her into deep shade, he recognized her?

Jeff removed his hat and swiped at the perspiration on his brow, then cursed himself for a fool. What bayou boy in his right mind would wear his best suit into the marsh? Had he lost that much of his past?

The woman shifted and turned, oblivious to his presence as she knelt at the bank and dipped yet another piece of clothing in the water. With a shrug of her shoulders, she caused her inky hair to ripple and catch the sunlight. Blue-black was the word that came to mind as he stared at the tresses of the beauty in rough clothing.

By the first year away, he’d given no more than a passing glance at the belles of the bayou, preferring instead to keep company with women of the fair-haired variety. Too many memories were dredged up in the familiar, so he sought the unfamiliar.

Thinking on it now, that had to be how he came to leave Louisiana and the bayou forever. Not forever, a small voice nagged, for you’re ankle deep in her mud, Old Boy.

Jeff tore his gaze away from the woman to stare at the mess he’d made of his new wingtips. Why hadn’t he planned his wardrobe to fit his activities today? Because the last place he thought he’d end up when he left the house this afternoon was down by the Bayou Nouvelle. He’d hated the Nouvelle, hated its murky depths, hated its dark clusters of trees and the Spanish moss that dipped into her surface like the beards of old men. Most of all he’d hated the memories.

Yet here he stood, inches away from the water and hiding from the woman whose memory had trailed him over the years. A mosquito buzzed his ear, but he knew it was not the ones he heard that could bite. Like thoughts of Angeline Breaux, the real harm was done by the secretive, silent ones.

And yet here you are, the voice nagged. A real man wouldn’t cower in the shadows.

Jeff shook his head to chase away the mosquito and the thought. Both still lingered just on the edge of his sight.

Angeline Breaux, however, remained in clear view.

How simple it would be to call to her, shouting her name or perhaps a few words of greeting across the black bayou water. What would be the harm in renewing an acquaintance forged years ago?

When she turned his way, Jeff lifted a hand in greeting, then quickly swiped his brow instead. Renewing his friendship with Angeline Breaux would be worse than accepting the mantle of responsibility as bayou doctor from his father.

His was a temporary return, and any contact with the dark-haired beauty might foster a need to stay. As tempting as that might seem, he knew the Lord had another plan for him, a plan that involved much bigger stakes than one displaced man’s broken heart.