Eulalia Bonneville with Sue and David Day—strangers who housed her after the flood and have helped to restore her flooded home. Photo by Collin Richie.
How two families went out of their way to help a 94-year-old evacuated from the flood
When Mrs. B stepped off the bus at the shelter, she had with her a raincoat, a small pet carrier, a few belongings hastily taken from her flooded home and three curiously bulky pillowcases tied up at the top.
Sue Day saw the short, 94-year-old woman arrive at Celtic Media Centre. It was Sunday, and Sue and her two teenage daughters were supposed to be at church. Instead, Sue decided, they would volunteer to help flood victims.
Unsure where to go first at the sprawling shelter, they walked out to where the buses were unloading, and there was Mrs. B. In the pet carrier she held was a small cat named Little Bitty Kitty. “Come to find out she had three more cats in the pillowcases,” Sue remembers.
Once they got her inside Stage Six, other volunteers tended to the cats while Sue helped Mrs. B get settled and into dry clothes.
Her full name is Eulalia Bonneville. She’s a widow; her husband Ralph died in 2007. She didn’t have any children, and her next of kin, a cousin and his wife, live in Hammond on the other end of the flooded I-12.
Photo by Collin Richie.
“The more I sat and just got to know her, honestly it made me think about my mom,” Sue says. “[Mrs. B] can’t hear that well, and my mom was hard of hearing. She’d always say, ‘You’ve got to talk in my good ear.’ And Mrs. B was saying the same thing.”
That day, Sue’s husband David was out on a rescue boat with the Cajun Navy helping to evacuate other flood victims. When they finally reconnected at Celtic, Sue told David about Mrs. B.
They wouldn’t leave the shelter that day without her, Sue said. Her four cats would come, too.
David is allergic to cats, but he agreed anyway. “Sue has the biggest heart I’ve ever seen,” he says. “She can’t stand for an old person to be in a situation like that.”
Mrs. B woke up in the early morning that Sunday, reached a hand out of her bed and felt cold water. She got up and waded through her small brick home to pick up what she could think of to move to higher shelves. “And at 94, honey, I didn’t know I could do all that,” she remembers with a laugh.
One of her cats, Pretty Boy, was perched on a high window ledge. Whitey and Little Bitty Kitty were on a mattress floating in the spare bedroom. Nelly Gray was on the back of the couch.
Mrs. B’s neighbors came across. They got her out of the water and onto the hood of her car, where she waited for about two hours until the rescue boat came to their neighborhood off Old Hammond Highway. The boat’s driver was able to maneuver the boat all the way up the driveway to scoop up Mrs. B.
“I left my cats till the last thing to take them out of the house,” she recalls. “And the man that came to help me—seems like his name was Fred, but I’m not sure—I told him, ‘Don’t get ‘em wet.’ So he picked them up real good. They were easy to catch; they were just in trauma like me.”
The rescue boat brought her to a nearby McDonald’s. A bus ride later—she sat in the front seat; the cats were secured in the back—and she was stepping off outside Celtic.
The Days put Mrs. B in one of their twin daughters’ bedrooms. They changed out the linens and laid Visqueen on the floor to protect it from the cats. The family’s home didn’t experience flooding, and so they opened it up to whomever they could, from relief workers to family. Besides the two daughters, Sue and David have a college-age son, who came home to help.
David recalls with a laugh the crowded scene at his house: “I had my stepdad, his nephew, his nephew’s wife and his nephew’s daughter, their two dogs, Eulalia and her four cats.”
Mrs. B stayed with them for three days before her Hammond relatives could get to her, but she left the biggest impression out of all the guests at the Day home.
David says even though Mrs. B lost everything, she still appreciated the little things. “She would celebrate the meal you put in front of her, and she’d say, ‘Oh my Lord. How in the world can a 94-year-old woman be so blessed?’”
Mrs. B shuffled slowly around her ruined home with the help of a wooden cane, wearing bright blue tennis shoes with neon green laces she was given at the shelter. (“From the Stage Six boutique,” she says slyly.) It had been two weeks since her evacuation, and she now surveyed the work done to demolish and rebuild her home of 40 years.
A distant relative of her late husband’s, Paul Marcotte, is a retired construction worker, and he supervised the demolition. Paul led her around the house that Saturday morning, pointing to what he was able to fix and what would require professionals. Mrs. B responded with nods and words of agreement, but it was clear this was a lot of information to absorb.
In a front room, furniture and items that survived the flood were arranged neatly like an inventory. The water lines on the walls showed nearly three feet.
Eulalia Bonneville, known as Mrs. B, on the front lawn of her home off Old Hammond Highway. Photo by Collin Richie.
Around Mrs. B, volunteers pulled out drywall, kitchen cabinets and floors. The Days and their children were among them.
Even though Mrs. B was no longer staying in their home, the Days didn’t think twice about continuing to help her.
“Her spirit and her fight has rubbed off on us, I think,” Sue says. “In the midst of all this, she still had a beautiful smile on her face and a beautiful spirit, and it’s just touched us.”
Outside, Linda Nix, the wife of Mrs. B’s cousin John from Hammond, loaded up her car with items Mrs. B wanted to salvage: some framed pictures, a few lamps and other belongings. While Linda and John had before only seen Mrs. B occasionally, the time spent housing her after the flood, driving her to the store or back and forth to Baton Rouge showed them the difficulties she faces in old age.
In a week, the Nixes will help Mrs. B and her cats move into a short-term apartment just three minutes from their own Hammond home. The once-disconnected relatives have now been inextricably threaded into each other’s daily lives.
By mid-afternoon, Mrs. B walked down the driveway to Linda’s car, preparing to head back to Hammond and carrying a small vase and a couple of checkbooks she had taken from the house. There will be bills to pay, inspections and countless conversations with the insurance company and FEMA, with Linda right beside her to help. “Right now, it’s all up in the air,” Linda says.
On both sides of the driveway are massive heaps of drywall, waterlogged furniture, appliances, clothes—the long history of a home spilled out for all to see. Every yard on her street looks like this, homes gutted in the Saturday heat by a mixture of friends, family and complete strangers.
By Labor Day weekend, Mrs. B and the Nixes will be back again, and the Days will still be alongside them to lend a hand.
Out on the driveway, her own hands full of belongings, Mrs. B says something she’s repeated often throughout the ordeal: “These people here, I can’t believe them … They are all perfect angels, every one of them.”
This story was originally published in the October issue of 225 Magazine.
