In the summer of 1922, Alcid Veret was twenty-eight years old and had guided men through the Atchafalaya Basin for thirteen years. The largest river swamp in the country had not yet been walled in by the levees the Corps of Engineers would finish later that decade. Water came and went by season. Islands appeared in spring and drowned by August.
Tracts of cypress that a surveyor had put on paper in 1870 could be open water by 1920. The country did not stay where you put it. That was the first thing Alcid learned as a boy, and it was the thing he tried to tell the three men from Baton Rouge, and it was the thing they would not hear. The letter reached him three weeks before they came.
It was on the letterhead of the Delta Cypress Timber Company and engaged his services as guide for a party of three entering the basin at a landing near Bayou Chene, traveling some fourteen miles southwest to a tract the company had purchased from the estate of a man named Ephraim Cormier. That was the first thing that bothered Alcid. Everyone at the landing knew the name Ephraim Cormier. An old man who lived somewhere in the basin, he came out once a year in early autumn to sell hides and buy salt, coffee, and shot.
His French was older and rougher than the Acadian French of the Teche, and his hands smelled of something that was not the swamp. He had not come out in the autumn of 1920, nor in the autumn of 1921, and the assumption in the parish was that he was dead. But the letter said the estate of Ephraim Cormier had sold land. Alcid sat on the step of his porch and smoked a cigarette down to nothing.
Ephraim Cormier had no one. Still, the letter offered eight dollars a day, which was better than a good day’s work at the mill, and Alcid had a young wife and a roof that needed replacing before winter. He wrote back on the seventeenth of June and said he would take them in. The three men arrived on the fourteenth of July at the landing at Bayou Chene in a Model T driven over ground no automobile had any business on.
They wore linen shirts and low boots. One wore spats. The surveyor, Oid Gilbo, was a tall, spare man of forty-one with a mustache waxed to points, carrying a brass compass in a wooden case, a plane table, a pocket transit, and a notebook bound in red Morocco. He was, Alcid would say, the sort of man who believed the country would arrange itself around his instruments.
Marius Prejan, the timber cruiser of thirty-five sent to assess the cypress, was short and square with hands that had done work, and he spoke a little Acadian French. He asked whether the water was up or down for the season and listened when Alcid answered. The company representative, Etienne Brousard, was the one Alcid did not like. He was a soft-featured man with a small mouth and a gold ring on his right hand that he turned around his finger constantly without seeming to know it.
When Alcid spoke to him, he looked at a point above Alcid’s left shoulder. That night they slept at the store at Bayou Chene, run by a widow named Bernadette Melançon. She had known Alcid since childhood, and after the men had gone to their rooms, she came out onto the gallery and told him in French she had a bad feeling about the trip. He asked why.
She said she did not know why, only that when the men had signed the ledger, the pen had felt for a moment as though it were the wrong weight in her hand. Alcid told her he had felt something similar. He asked whether he should send them back. She said you can’t send them back, they’ve paid you.
He said he could give it back. She said you could, but you won’t. They left at first light on the fifteenth of July with two pirogues. Alcid had asked at the store for a fourth man, and old Elzar Duson came down before dawn.
Elzar was seventy-four and had been in the basin longer than any man living. As they loaded the gear, he came up beside Alcid and said something quietly in French: the old ground doesn’t sell. Whatever paper they have, it isn’t the deed. The first day was easy country.
They pulled up Bayou Chene until it narrowed and split, then took the westward branch that had no name on Gilbo’s maps. Gilbo kept his compass on his knee and every quarter hour made a mark in his red Morocco notebook. Prejan looked at the cypress on either bank and made his own marks. Brousard sat with his satchel on his lap and looked at nothing.
They made twelve miles before the sun was overhead. At noon they stopped on a shell ridge under the cypress and ate cold biscuit and salt pork. Gilbo asked how much farther to the Cormier tract. Alcid told him a day and a half.
Gilbo said the company had told him a day. Alcid said the company had not been in the basin. In the middle of the afternoon, they came into a slough Alcid had been through many times, and he noticed as they entered it that the sound had changed. The birds were calling in the pattern of dusk, not afternoon.
The frogs were quiet. The cicadas were absent altogether. Alcid looked back at Elzar in the second pirogue, and Elzar met his eyes and gave a very small shake of the head—not a negation, an acknowledgement. Prejan said without turning around, the country is listening.
Gilbo said nonsense. They came out of the slough into a lake Alcid had never seen. He was exactly where the map said he ought to be, and the map showed no lake. He stopped his pirogue.
Elzar came up beside him. Gilbo asked what was the matter. Elzar said in French, this wasn’t here. Alcid said they were going to make camp on the far side of the lake, on a ridge he could see under the cypress, and take up the survey again in the morning.
Gilbo said there was three hours of light left. Alcid said there was one. Gilbo began to argue, and then he stopped. He had just looked at his compass, and the needle, which he had watched for hours hold steady on north, was slowly turning—not swinging as a compass does when a man moves, but turning steady and slow, as though the pole of the earth were sliding around them.
Gilbo put the compass down and said nothing. They pulled across the lake. The water was black, not dark—black the way ink is black. The pirogues left no wake.
The water closed behind them without a ripple, without a sound, as though it were remembering itself as it went. They made the ridge on the far side as the light went and made camp under three cypress trees that stood in a line so straight Alcid could not believe they had grown that way. He walked around them in the last of the light and found no axe marks, no burn scars, no sign anything had ever been done to them. They had simply grown in a line.
Elzar looked at the trees and did not go near them. They set up two tents. The men from Baton Rouge shared one. Alcid and Elzar took the other, though Alcid did not sleep, and Elzar did not either.
They lay awake in the dark and listened. They heard the water breathing—Alcid’s word for it, slow and long, the way a man breathes when he is sleeping and does not want to be waked. Under the breathing, at intervals of about a minute, came a second sound, like a thumb dragged slowly across the belly of a drum. Once in the second hour of the dark, a bird cried out in the cypress above them, not the cry of a nightbird but the cry of a daybird calling as it does at noon in bright sun.
Then it was silent. Sometime after midnight, Elzar said quietly, Alcid, don’t answer the voice. Alcid asked what voice. Elzar said, the one that’s going to call your name.
No voice called that night. The men from Baton Rouge came out of their tent looking as though they had not slept either. Brousard was pale, and he did not turn his ring that morning. Prejan said to Alcid quietly that something had walked around the tent all night.
Gilbo said nothing. He was setting up his transit, and his hands were shaking. He tried three times to level it. The third time he turned around and said in a voice that was not quite his own, the instrument is faulty.
Alcid said the instrument is not faulty. Gilbo looked at him for a long time. Then he took the transit off the tripod, put it back in its wooden case, and did not open it again. They ate a cold breakfast and put out into the black lake.
It took them three hours to cross, though the day before it had taken one. When they came out on the western side, they were, Gilbo’s map said, at the Cormier tract. The country had changed. The cypress were older, stood farther apart.
The ground under the water was shell, not mud—white shell, with clear water above it, so a man could see all the way to the bottom. What Alcid first took for more shell, as they pulled closer, was not shell. He put his pole down in the pirogue and looked away. He did not look back at the bottom of that water for the rest of the day.
Elzar said one word in French, a very old word that the writer in 1962 did not know how to spell and that men who know the dialect would not say out loud. Brousard looked into the water, then at his satchel, then opened his small mouth and no sound came out. Gilbo said we should go. Prejan, whose face had gone the color of paper, said yes, now.
But Brousard, with his ring hand on the satchel, said the deed is here. They were at the tract. They had to walk it. They walked it.
There was a house on it. The letter had mentioned no house. The map had shown no house. It was not a cabin.
It was a house of two stories, with a gallery around the second floor, shutters on both floors, a brick chimney laid by a man who knew brick work. It had been painted white, gone the color of old bone, with shutters painted a green so dark it was almost black. The house stood on brick piers about four feet off the ground. The yard around it was clear of undergrowth, though there was no sign anyone had cleared it.
It was simply clear. The cypress stood back from the house at what Alcid would call, forty years later, a respectful distance. The ground between the trees and the house was covered in fine white shell, raked in curving patterns, though no man had raked it that morning, and there was no man there. Brousard walked up the steps of the gallery and tried the front door.
It was not locked. He opened it and went in. Inside, the house was furnished. There was a hall, and off the hall a parlor, and in the parlor a table set for dinner.
There were four plates. There was food on the plates. The food was not old. It was not fresh.
It was in a state Alcid could only describe as waiting. The candles in the candlesticks were lit. They had been burning for some hours, and there was no draft in that house, and the flames did not move. There was no one in the parlor, no one in the hall.
Brousard went into the kitchen and found no one, though there was a kettle on the stove with steam coming out of it. Prejan went up the stairs and came down again very quickly and said only, there is no one. They stood in the hall and looked at each other. Gilbo said in a very small voice, then who lit the candles?
Brousard said the deed is valid. They were going to walk the boundary, go back, and file the deed. Prejan said the candles are lit. Brousard turned on him, the vein in his temple moving, and said in a voice that was almost a shout in that quiet house, I know the candles are lit.
They walked the boundary. Alcid did not go with them. He stayed on the gallery, and Elzar stayed with him. They sat on the top step, did not talk, and watched the three men from Baton Rouge walk out along the raked shell into the cypress.
Nothing happened. The light in that clearing did not seem to move. The sun did not cross the sky. The shadows of the cypress did not shift.
Alcid’s pocket watch, which he took out and looked at three times in what he would have called the space of an hour, showed the same time on the third look as it had on the first, and he could not bring himself to wind it. At some point in what was not an hour, Prejan came back alone. He walked out of the cypress on the west side of the clearing, walking in a straight line, in the manner of a man who has walked a long way but does not know it. He stopped at the foot of the gallery steps and looked up.
His eyes were wrong—not the pupils, not the color. The eyes themselves were wrong in a way Alcid could not put into a sentence in 1962. Prejan said, Alcid. Alcid said, Marius.
Prejan said, where’s my hand? Alcid looked down. Both of Prejan’s hands were where they should have been, closed into loose fists, not damaged. Alcid said, Marius, your hand is right there.
Prejan looked down at his hands for a long time. Then he looked up, his face unchanged, and said very calmly, Alcid, where’s my hand? Elzar put his hand on Alcid’s arm and said quietly, don’t answer him again. Alcid did not answer him again.
They waited. Prejan stood at the foot of the gallery steps and did not move and did not blink. After a while, the shape of him became difficult to keep in focus. Not that he faded—Alcid was very clear on that.
It was that the eyes began to have trouble deciding where the edges of him were, as though he had begun to be more than one place at once. Alcid looked away. When he looked back, Prejan was gone. The raked shell was undisturbed.
Gilbo came back about an hour after that, walking out of the eastern cypress, reading from his open red Morocco notebook. He walked all the way across the clearing to the foot of the gallery steps without looking up, and read out in a very steady voice: north boundary, 632 chains, marked. East boundary, 632 chains, marked. South boundary, 632 chains, marked.
West boundary, 632 chains, marked. The tract is a square. The tract is a perfect square. There are no natural features on the tract.
There is no water course on the tract. There is no elevation change on the tract. The tract does not exist. He closed the notebook, looked up, and said to Alcid, please tell my wife I finished the work.
Then he walked past them up the gallery steps and into the house. They heard him walk down the hall and into the parlor and pull out a chair at the table where the four plates were and sit down. They did not go in. Brousard was the last to come back, at dusk.
He came out of the northern cypress, walking easily with the leather satchel in his hand, and he was smiling. He had not smiled once in all the days since he had come off the road from Baton Rouge. He came up to the foot of the gallery steps and said in a pleasant voice, it’s a good tract. The company will be pleased.
Alcid did not answer. Brousard asked where were Gilbo and Prejan. Alcid said they went in the house. Brousard said ah, and looked at the house for a long time.
Then he turned back and said, still in the pleasant voice, you should go now, Alcid. You and the old man, take the pirogue and go, and do not stop until you make Bayou Chene, and do not under any circumstances look back at this clearing after you’ve left it. Alcid asked what about you. Brousard said the company sent me to walk the tract.
I’ve walked it. Alcid said there’s paperwork. Brousard said, Alcid, I am telling you to go. And then, for the very briefest of moments, under the smile, the mouth changed, and there was something that was not a mouth at all.
Then there was a mouth again, and the smile was still on it. They went. They took the two pirogues and put out into the shallows west of the house. Alcid did not look down, and Elzar did not look down.
They came into the black lake, and the water did not close behind them this time. It had parted for them, and it stayed parted in two long lines of black water, as though it had been cut. When Alcid looked back once, though he had promised himself he would not, the two lines of parted water went all the way across the lake to the shell ridge with the three cypress trees and past the ridge into the country beyond, two straight lines that did not meet the horizon. They came out into the western branch of Bayou Chene sometime in the night, and reached the landing at first light on the seventeenth of July.
Bernadette Melançon was on the gallery in her nightdress with a shawl around her shoulders, though it was already warm. She had not been able to sleep. In the back room of the store, with the door closed, Alcid told her what had happened. It took him a long time.
She got up, came back with a bottle of clear liquor and three glasses, and poured for all of them. They drank without toasting. Then she said he had to go to the sheriff. Alcid said yes.
She said, but he’s not going to believe you. Alcid said no. She said, so you have to tell him only the parts he can believe. They worked out what Alcid would tell Sheriff Prosper Landry of St.
Martin Parish: the true story with the impossible parts left out. Three men from Baton Rouge had gone into the basin and lost themselves in a stretch of country west of Bayou Chene. Alcid had waited a day, then a second day, then had come out alone. He and Elzar would testify to this.
There was no evidence of foul play. The men had simply become separated from their guide and had not returned. Sheriff Landry took the statement on the eighteenth of July. He read it back.
He asked two questions, and Alcid answered both. Then Landry looked at him across the desk for a long time, and Alcid understood that the sheriff knew—not the details, but that the statement was the true story with the impossible parts left out, and that the impossible parts were the important parts, and that Alcid was not going to give them to him, and that he was in his own way grateful. Landry said he’d had statements like this from the basin before. Alcid said yes, sir.
Landry said he’d filed them under missing, not foul play. He filed the statement under missing. The Delta Cypress Timber Company sent two letters of inquiry, one in August of 1922 and one in October, and Landry answered them both with the same words: no evidence of foul play, party lost in the basin, search suspended. The company did not send anyone else in.
The tract they believed they had purchased from the estate of Ephraim Cormier was not entered again so far as any record shows. The Corps of Engineers, in the surveys they did for the levee system some years later, drew the country west of Bayou Chene as an unbroken cypress swamp, with no house, no clearing, and no tract belonging to any man on it. But there is one more thing. Marius Prejan’s wife, Odile, who was thirty-two in the summer of 1922, received a letter on the twenty-third of July, four days after her husband was reported missing.
It was postmarked Bayou Chene, in her husband’s handwriting, and in the middle of an otherwise blank sheet of paper it said only: tell Alcid the work is finished. Odile Prejan sent that letter some years later to Sheriff Prosper Landry, and Landry filed it with the case, and the case being an open case of missing persons was not sealed, and the letter is on the paper of the Delta Cypress Timber Company, and the postmark is Bayou Chene, and there is no known way for such a letter to have been written or posted from any place where any Marius Prejan was known to be alive. In the last years of his life, Alcid Veret would sometimes wake in the small hours of the morning and go out onto the porch of his clapboard house on the rise west of Bayou Chene and sit in the dark. A man who was there at the end, who sat with him on those nights, said that Alcid would sometimes tilt his head in the dark as though he were listening.
And once in the summer of 1967, the year before he died, he said without turning, Birdie, he’s calling my name again. There was no one calling. There had not been anyone calling for forty-five years. But Alcid was still not answering.
It was the last thing he had learned in the basin, and it was the thing he held on to, and he had come to believe it was the only reason he was still alive.