In 1962, a 68-year-old Louisiana bayou guide named Alcid Veret sat on the porch of his home and told a state historical survey writer a story about a trip he took in the summer of 1922. He was 28 at the time, and he guided three men from Baton Rouge into the Atchafalaya Basin. Only one of them came back. Alcid’s account runs to 14 pages in the written record.
The audio recording is not in the survey files, and the pages were removed from the collection some years later. The identity of whoever pulled them is not established. The Atchafalaya Basin in 1922 was not yet walled in by the levees the Corps of Engineers would finish later that decade. The water moved with the seasons, islands appeared in the spring and sank by August, and maps were unreliable because they had been drawn at different water levels.
A cypress tract mapped in 1870 could be open water by 1920. The country did not stay where it was put, and that was the first thing Alcid said he tried to explain to the three men from Baton Rouge. The men arrived at the landing at Bayou Chene on July 14. They were sent by the Delta Cypress Timber Company, and the letter engaging Alcid’s services said they needed to travel about 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 about the assignment. Everyone at the landing knew Ephraim Cormier. He lived somewhere in the basin, came out once a year in early autumn to sell hides and buy salt and coffee and shot, and spoke an old and rough French that even the priest in Franklin did not know. Alcid had traded with him once as a boy of 15 and remembered the old man’s strange manner and very small teeth.
Cormier had not come out of the basin in the autumn of 1920 or 1921, and people assumed he was dead. The letter bothered Alcid because Cormier had no family. He was the last of his line, and Alcid could not think what an estate would be. Still, the pay was $8 a day, far better than the mill, and Alcid had a young wife at home and a roof that needed repair before winter.
He wrote back on June 17 and agreed to take them in. The three men were Odile Gilbo, a 41-year-old land surveyor; Marius Prejean, a 35-year-old timber cruiser; and Etienne Broussard, a company representative who carried the deed in a leather satchel he did not let out of his hand. They arrived in clothes unsuited to the country. One man wore spats, a detail Alcid recalled forty years later.
On the first evening at the landing, a widow named Bernadette Milanson, who ran the store and had known Alcid since childhood, told him in French that she had a bad feeling about the trip. She could not explain why, but she said the pen had felt heavy in her hand when the man with the ring signed the ledger. Alcid told her he had felt something similar, and asked whether he should send them back. She told him he could not, because they had paid him, and she said he would not send them back even though he could.
They stood in the dark on the gallery, and then she went inside. They left at first light on July 15 in two pirogues. Alcid had arranged for an old man named Elzar Doucet, then 74 and longer in the basin than any living man, to pull the second boat. As they loaded the gear, Elzar said something to Alcid in French.
A man who spoke that dialect later translated it for the writer as: “The old ground doesn’t sell. Whatever paper they have, it isn’t the deed. ” Alcid did not answer him. The first day was easy country.
They pulled up Bayou Chene until it narrowed and split, then took a westward branch that had no name on the maps Gilbo had brought. Gilbo kept his compass on his knee and made notes in a red Morocco notebook. Prejean studied the cypress. Broussard sat with his satchel and looked at nothing.
At noon they stopped on a shell ridge, and Gilbo asked how much further 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 entered a slough that Alcid knew well, but something had changed. The sound of the country was the wrong shape. The birds were calling in the pattern of dusk, not afternoon. The frogs were quiet.
The cicadas were absent. Elzar met Alcid’s eyes and gave a very small shake of the head, an acknowledgment that he had heard it too. Prejean said, without turning around, “The country is listening. ” Gilbo said, “Nonsense,” and Prejean did not answer.
They came out of the slough into open water, a lake that Alcid had never seen before. He had guided in the basin for thirteen years, but this lake was not there. The map showed no lake. Alcid stopped his pirogue.
Elzar came up beside him and said in French that it was there, just not for them. Gilbo’s compass began to turn while they sat in the water. It was not swinging the way a compass does when a man moves. It was turning slowly and steadily, as though the pole of the earth itself were sliding around them.
Gilbo put the compass down on his knee and said nothing about it. They pulled across the lake, and the water was black like ink. The pirogues left no wake. The water closed behind them without a ripple and without a sound, “as though the water were remembering itself as it went,” Alcid said.
They made camp that night on a ridge under three cypress trees standing in a line so straight Alcid could not believe they had grown that way. He walked around them and found no axe marks, no burn scars, no sign of a human hand. Elzar looked at the trees and did not go near them. That night, Alcid and Elzar lay awake.
Alcid said they heard the water breathing. There was also a second sound, at intervals of about a minute, like a thumb dragged slowly across the belly of a drum. Once, a daybird cried out in the cypress above them, the cry of a bird calling at noon in bright sun, and then it was silent. Alcid had the clear sense that whatever made the cry had been made to make it, and had not wanted to.
After midnight, Elzar said in French, very quietly: “I’ll say this once. 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. In the morning, the men from Baton Rouge came out looking as though they had not slept. Broussard was pale and held his hands very still on his satchel. Prejean told Alcid quietly that something had walked around the tent all night.
Gilbo tried three times to level his transit before turning around and saying, “The instrument is faulty. ” Alcid told him the instrument was not faulty. Gilbo looked at him for a long time, then took the transit off its tripod, closed the case, and did not open it again. They put out into the black lake, and this time it took them three hours to cross it, though it had taken one hour the day before.
When they reached the western side, Gilbo’s map said they were at the Cormier tract. The country had changed. The cypress were older and stood further apart. The ground under the water was white shell, and the water above it was so clear a man could see all the way to the bottom.
On the bottom of that clear water in the shallows were things Alcid first took for more shell and then saw were not shell. He did not say what they were. He put down his pole and looked away, and he did not look back at the bottom of that water for the rest of the day. Elzar said one word in French, so old that the 1962 writer did not know how to spell it, and two men who know the dialect later said it was not a word anyone should say out loud.
Broussard looked into the water, then looked at his satchel, then said the deed was there and they had to walk the tract. He got out of the pirogue, walked up onto the bank, and waited for the rest of them to follow. They followed. Before continuing, Alcid made the writer promise the transcript would not be published in his lifetime.
The writer kept the promise. Alcid died in the autumn of 1968 in the same house on the rise west of Bayou Chene. The doctor called it heart failure. A man who was there at the end called it something else.
The tract had a house on it, and that was the first thing Alcid needed to tell. The letter mentioned no house. The map showed no house. It was a two-story house with a gallery around the second floor, shuttered windows, and a brick chimney laid by a man who knew brick work.
The paint had gone the color of old bone, and the shutters were painted a green so dark it was almost black. The yard was clear of undergrowth, though there was no sign anyone had cleared it. The ground between the trees and the house was covered in fine white shell, raked in curving patterns, though there was no one there to rake it. Broussard went up the steps, tried the front door, found it unlocked, and went in.
The others followed. Inside, the house was furnished. In the parlor, a table was set for dinner with four plates. There was food on the plates.
It was not old and it was not fresh. Alcid could only describe it as waiting. The candles in the candlesticks were lit, and the flames did not move, even with the door open and no draft in the house. A kettle in the kitchen had steam coming out of it.
There was no one in the house. Prejean went upstairs, came down quickly, and said only, “There is no one. ” They stood in the hall, the four of them, and looked at each other. Gilbo asked in a very small voice, “Then who lit the candles?
” Broussard said, “The deed is valid. We’re going to walk the boundary, we’re going to go back, and we’re going to file the deed. ” Prejean said, “Etienne, the candles are lit. ” Broussard turned on him and said, almost shouting 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 with Elzar. He would say later that he did not go because he did not believe there was a boundary, or because he did not believe there was a tract, or because he was afraid.
Any of these was true. All of them were true. Alcid said 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. His pocket watch, which he took out three times in what he would have called an hour, showed the same time on the third look as on the first. He did not wind it, because he had the very strong sense that if he did, something in that clearing would know. At some point, Prejean came back alone.
He walked out of the cypress on the west side of the clearing 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 at them. His eyes were wrong, Alcid said, though he could not put into words how. Prejean asked, “Alcid, where’s my hand?
” Alcid looked down at his hands. Both hands were where they should have been, undamaged. Alcid told him his hand was right there. Prejean looked down at his hands for a long time, then looked up and said very calmly, “Alcid, where’s my hand?
” Elzar put a hand on Alcid’s arm and said in French, very quietly, “Don’t answer him again. ” Alcid did not answer him again. After a while, Alcid could not say how long, Prejean’s shape became difficult to keep in focus. Not that he faded.
Alcid was very clear on that. It was that Alcid’s own 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, and the eye could not settle on which place was real. Alcid looked away. When he looked back, Prejean was gone.
The raked shell was undisturbed. Gilbo came back about an hour later, carrying his red Morocco notebook and reading from it as he walked. He stopped at the foot of the gallery steps and read out in a 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 and said, “Please tell my wife I finished the work. ” Then he walked past them up the gallery steps and into the house. Alcid and Elzar heard him walk down the hall and into the parlor, pull out a chair at the table, and sit down. They did not go in.
Broussard 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, something he had not done once since arriving from Baton Rouge. He came 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 him. Broussard asked where Gilbo and Prejean were. Alcid said they had gone in the house. Broussard said, “Ah.
” He looked at the house for a long time, then turned back and said, still in the pleasant voice, “You should go now, Alcid. You and the old man, take the pirogue, 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 him.
Broussard said, “The company sent me to walk the tract. I’ve walked it. There’s paperwork. ” Alcid said, “Alcid, I am telling you to go.
” And then, the last Alcid said he ever saw of him, Broussard’s small mouth changed. The smile did not go away. Alcid and Elzar took the pirogues and went. Alcid told the writer he did not know what became of the tract, the house, or the company afterward.
He told the story once, in the summer of 1962, and never told it again.