Six

The gumbo was terrible. Angeline knew it without being told. She’d put too much of something, or maybe not enough.

Whatever the problem, the only fix for it was to toss out the whole pot and start over again. She hoisted the pot and turned to throw it to the dogs, only to run into her mother. The gumbo sloshed and threatened to spill, but she leveled the pot in time to whirl it back around onto the stove.

Looking down, she realized she’d saved the very gumbo she meant to throw out while she’d ruined her one good dress in the process. At least she hadn’t been burned by the hot roux.

“Goodness, Bebe, you don’t have to carry that heavy thing. Let the mens come on out an get it.” Before she could respond, her mother shoved her toward the house. “Now you go on and get yourself prettied up afore someone sees you wearin’ the gumbo, eh?”

A few minutes later, Angeline stood among the wreckage of two ruined dresses. One still brown and streaked with mud from the bayou and the other wearing gumbo roux in splotches across the front.

The only dress left in the armoire was her Sunday dress, and she could hardly show herself downstairs in that on a Friday evening. Why, it would look like she was headed for church instead of. . .

Her mind caught on the thought of Sunday clothes and hung there. Papa’s trousers.

“Oh no!”

❧

Jeff circled the path twice before setting his feet toward the Breaux cabin, the peach pie in a tin tucked into the crook of his arm and the trousers wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. Leave it to Mrs. Mike to think of a way to return Mr. Breaux’s trousers without making a fuss. Now if he could just hand off the package to Angeline without drawing attention to the fact.

Surely the Lord would do the both of them this small favor. Neither he nor Angeline needed to face any more ire from Theophile Breaux.

Deep threads of purple and orange decorated the edges of the sky and danced across the waves on the bayou. Beneath Jeff’s feet, the hard-packed terrain wore a layer of decaying leaves, each step sending up the earthy scent so peculiar to south Louisiana to tease his nose.

And the sounds—no words could do justice to the symphony of bayou creatures when they began their evening songs. It was the music of his childhood, the anthem of his youth. Soon it would be the sound of a fading memory.

Wednesday morning he would climb aboard a train headed north and trade those brilliant hues and fresh scents for a city where progress made up for beauty and symphonies were conducted only within the hallowed halls of the opera house.

And Wednesday would be here ever so soon.

What had he been thinking? An evening of stolen happiness—a lifetime of what-ifs—that’s what Jeff would face if he continued with his ridiculous notion to actually sit at a table with Angeline Breaux and her father.

He squared his shoulders and picked up his pace. It would be neither, he determined. Tonight would merely serve as a good-bye to the bayou and the life he must sacrifice to do what God created him to do.

Tomorrow was Saturday, a good day to finish collecting the things he wanted sent to his apartment in New York. Sunday would be a day of worship, of course, and Monday would bring more decisions. He would call on Pop’s lawyer that day to start the process of selling the big old place. Tuesday would be reserved for packing and last-minute errands, and Wednesday morning he would be on the train to New York. By Friday his well-ordered life would resume, and he would probably find himself working the weekend in the lab just to catch up with his research.

He cradled the pie and stepped over a protruding root, nearly losing his balance, the package, and the pie in the process. Yes, he decided as he righted himself, it would be good to get back to his comfortable routine—to his quiet life.

He heard the noise before he actually saw the cabin. A chorus of sounds, male and female, echoed among the trees and seemed to shake the tails of the Spanish moss. A lone fiddle played soft and low, a mere accompaniment to the true Acadian concerto—the Acadians themselves.

Rounding the corner, he stepped into the clearing. With the sun behind the wood frame home, the front yard lay bathed partially in shadow. In places across the lawn, if one could call the expanse of green and brown a lawn, groups of men and boys stood in clusters while children ran among them.

Jeff searched the crowd for a glimpse of Angeline. He even stared hard into the lighted windows to capture a glance of her. Finally his gaze landed on the porch and a group of older women.

Clothilde Breaux stepped away from a knot of ladies on the porch to meet him halfway. “Well, there you are, Jefferson Villare. Come on over here.”

After a mind-numbing introduction to aunts, cousins, and other assorted relatives, he handed Mrs. Breaux the pie. “Mrs. Mike sends this with her compliments,” he said.

“Why, thank you very much, Jefferson. Your Mrs. Mike makes the best peach pie in all of south Louisiana, she does. You tell her I’ll be sending her a little something come tomorrow morning, eh?” Angeline’s mother looked from the pie to the package under his arm. “What else you got there?”

He shifted the paper-wrapped trousers and searched for an answer. To his surprise, Mrs. Breaux looked past him to offer up a broad smile.

“Now look who else is here.” She handed off the pie to one of the elderly ladies with a brisk word of direction in French and clasped Jeff’s hand. “Jefferson, I want you to meet Nicolas Arceneaux. Proper-like, that is.”

Jeff whirled around to come face-to-face with the stranger he’d seen that morning. He stuck out his hand, and the Arceneaux fellow took it in a viselike grip.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jeff said.

“Likewise.” The stranger smiled and squeezed harder. “I didn’t think you would come back.”

For a moment Jeff stood mute, sizing up what he quickly decided was to be his competition. Strange he thought of that word, and yet as he studied the strapping Acadian, he felt exactly that.

“Now why wouldn’t he come back, eh?” Clothilde asked. “You two boys go on inside and make merry with the rest of the family. How about that?”

“Actually I’d like to speak to this man a moment,” the Acadian said. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Breaux.”

Angeline’s mother stared hard at him, then turned her gaze to Jeff. “Just a minute and not one second more, you hear?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He turned to Jeff. “Why don’t you and I take a little walk?”

The challenge in his words was unmistakable. “Fine,” Jeff said.

He looked down at the package beneath Jeff’s arm. “Do you want to leave that here?”

Jeff leveled a hard stare. “Do I need to?”

The Acadian instantly backed away and smiled. “Not unless you want to.”

Jeff let the statement hang between them just long enough to see the bigger man square his shoulders. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“We’re not talking about the package anymore, are we?”

To his surprise, the Arceneaux fellow clapped him on the shoulder and began to walk toward the edge of the clearing. “Ah, you are a smart man, are you not, Dr. Villare?” He did not wait for an answer. “I know this because we first talk about that package there, but then we begin to talk about my Angeline. You know this too.”

“Your Angeline?” The question slipped out before Jeff could stop it.

The big man smiled. “Actually, yes.”

His temper flared. How dare the big oaf assume any proprietary relationship with his Angeline? “Would you care to be more specific, Arceneaux?”

Instead of giving him an answer, Nicolas Arceneaux laughed. Jeff notched up his anger and took a step forward.

“There you are.” Clothilde Breaux appeared at the edge of the clearing. “I have been looking all over for you.”

She stared at Jefferson, then turned her attention to Nicolas. “Have you made friends with our Jefferson? He’s practically like one of my own, you know. Why, his daddy and my daddy go way back. His daddy or Doc Broussard birthed every baby I had including my Angeline.”

When neither responded, Mrs. Breaux linked arms with both men and turned toward the house. “Let’s us go see the family, eh?” she said as she led them across the lawn and onto the porch.

Jeff stepped over the threshold behind Clothilde and allowed himself to be drawn into the boisterous crowd of Breaux family members. When he left, he knew he would leave a little piece of his heart beneath the patched roof of this cabin beside the Nouvelle. While he stayed, he would wonder what Nicolas Arceneaux meant.

The Acadian pressed past the crowd to meet Theophile Breaux in a serious conversation. A few moments later, Clothilde joined them and seemed to lighten their moods. At least she had them smiling until she walked away.

Meanwhile, Jeff made polite conversation with a distant cousin of Clothilde’s, keeping a safe distance from Theophile and Arceneaux, who now huddled in the corner casting him furtive glances. Suddenly Angeline appeared in the room, stopping his heart and insuring that it would be left at her feet forever.

Flushed despite the relative cool of the May evening, she wore a pretty frock of pale green dotted with yellow rosebuds. Her thick hair had been captured and pinned in a knot at the base of her neck, the severe style only serving to emphasize her beautiful face. Dare he hope this show of beauty was for him?

Jeff rose from his seat by the fire to watch her float toward him. The room tunneled and closed until only the two of them occupied its space.

He took a step toward her, then froze as her father caught her by the elbow and tugged her over to join his conversation with the stranger. Angeline spared him only the slightest backward glance of regret before turning her attention to the men.

A familiar voice called his name. With difficulty, he tore his gaze from Angeline.

“Jefferson, welcome.” Ernest Breaux grasped his hand in a hearty greeting and laughed. “So you’re braver than I thought, eh?”

Braver? Foolish seemed a more apt description.

He thrust the package toward Ernest. “Say, Mrs. Mike sent this to Angeline. Would you see that she gets it later?”

“Sure,” he said as he tossed the bundle onto the top of the old cypress pie safe. “Now tell me what’s new with you.”

“I’d rather hear what’s new with you, Ernest. I’m afraid my life’s terribly boring.”

As Ernest began to regale him with his latest adventure working his father’s traps, Jeff cast covert glances at Angeline.

When she smiled, he wondered why, and when she laughed, he longed to be in on the joke. But when her hand rose to her lips, shaking fingers pressed against her mouth, something turned to lead in his stomach. The stranger, he’d said something that caused her reaction. Was it good, this surprise, or terrible? From the high color on Angeline’s cheeks, Jeff could not say.