Bones to Ashes

Despite the sunshine, days passed with no sign of my friend.

I was biking when I spotted her walking along Myrtle Avenue, head tortoised forward, sucking a Popsicle. She wore flip-flops and a wash-faded Beach Boys T-shirt.

She stopped when I rolled up beside her.

“Hey,” I said, one sneaker dropping from pedal to pavement.

“Hi,” she said.

“Haven’t seen you around.”

“Had to work.” Wiping sticky red fingers on her shorts.

“You have a job?” I was awed that a kid be permitted such a grown-up pursuit.

“My uncle fishes out of Murrell’s Inlet. Sometimes I help out on the boat.”

“Neat.” Visions of Gilligan, Ginger, and the Skipper.

“Pfff.” She puffed air through her lips. “I scrape fish guts.”

We started walking, me pushing my bike.

“Sometimes I have to take care of my little sister,” I said, seeking to establish parity. “She’s five.”

Évangéline turned to me. “Do you have a brother?”

“No.” Face burning.

“Me neither. My sister, Obéline, is two.”

“So you have to clean a few fish. It’s still cool to spend the summer at the beach. Is it really different where you come from?”

Something glinted in Évangéline’s eyes, was gone before I could read it.

“My mama’s there. She got laid off at the hospital, so now she works two jobs. She wants Obéline and me to learn good English, so she brings us here. C’est bon. My aunt Euphémie and my uncle Fidèle are nice.”

“Tell me about this forest primeval.” I steered from the topic of family.

Évangéline’s gaze drifted to a passing car, came back to me.

“L’Acadie is the most beautiful place on Earth.”

And so it seemed.

All that summer Évangéline spun tales of her New Brunswick home. I’d heard of Canada, of course, but my childish imaginings went little beyond Mounties and igloos. Or dogsleds mushing past caribou and polar bears, or seals perched on ice floes. Évangéline spoke of dense forests, coastal cliffs, and places with names like Miramichi, Kouchibouguac, and Bouctouche.

She also spoke of Acadian history, and the expulsion of her ancestors from their homeland. Again and again I listened, asked questions. Astonished. Outraged at the North American tragedy her people call le Grand Dérangement. The French Acadians driven into exile by a British deportation order, stripped of their lands and rights.

It was Évangéline who introduced me to poetry. That summer we stumbled through Longfellow’s epic work, the inspiration for her name. Her copy was in French, her native tongue. She translated as best she could.

Though I barely understood the verse, she turned the story to magic. Our childish minds imagined the Acadian milkmaid far from her Nova Scotia birthplace. We improvised costumes and acted out the tale of the diaspora and its ill-fated lovers.

Évangéline planned to be a poet one day. She’d memorized her favorites, most French, some English. Edward Blake. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The New Brunswick–born bard Bliss Carman. I listened. Together, we wrote bad verse.

I preferred stories with plots. Though the English was difficult for her, Évangéline tried my favorite authors: Anna Sewell. Carolyn Keene. C. S. Lewis. And, endlessly, we discussed Anne Shirley and imagined life at Green Gables farm.

In those days I hoped to become a veterinarian. At my instigation we kept notebooks on egrets in the marsh and on pelicans gliding high on the wind. We constructed protective walls around turtle nests. We trapped frogs and snakes with long-handled nets.

Some days we staged elaborate tea parties for Harry and Obéline. Curled their hair. Dressed them like dolls.

Tante Euphémie cooked us poutine râpée, fricot au poulet, tourtière. I can see her in her ruffle-strapped apron, telling stories of the Acadian people in broken English. Stories she’d heard from her father, he from his. Seventeen fifty-five. Ten thousand forced from their homes.

Where did they go? Harry would ask. Europe. The Caribbean. America. Those in Louisiana became your Cajuns.

How could such things happen? I would ask. The British wanted our farms and dikes. They had guns.

But the Acadians returned? Some.

That first summer, Évangéline planted the seed for my lifelong addiction to news. Perhaps because hers was such an isolated corner of the planet. Perhaps because she wanted to practice English. Perhaps simply because of who she was. Évangéline’s thirst for knowing everything was unquenchable.

Radio. Television. Newspapers. We absorbed and comprehended in our limited way. At night, on her porch or mine, June bugs banging the screens, transistor radio sputtering the Monkees, the Beatles, Wilson Pickett, the Isley Brothers, we spoke of a man with a rifle in a Texas tower. The deaths of astronauts. Stokely Carmichael and a strange group called SNCC.