In the summer of 1962, a writer for a state historical survey sat on the porch of a small clapboard house west of Bayou Chene and recorded the testimony of a man named Alcid Veret. Veret was 68 years old at the time. He had guided men through the Atchafalaya Basin for nearly five decades.
The recording was never placed in the survey files. The written record, however, ran 14 pages. Those pages were later pulled from the collection. The story Veret told that day concerned the summer of 1922, when he was 28 years old and took three men into the swamp. Only one of them came back.
In 1922, the Atchafalaya was not yet walled up by the levees that the Corps of Engineers would finish later that decade. The water came and went by season. Islands appeared in the spring and drowned by August. Maps were unreliable because they were drawn at different water levels. A tract of cypress recorded in 1870 could be open water by 1920. The country did not stay where you put it.
Veret tried to explain this to the three men from Baton Rouge. They would not hear it.
The men arrived on the 14th of July. They came with a letter from the Delta Cypress Timber Company, which had engaged Veret to guide a party into the basin to a tract of land the company had purchased from the estate of a man named Ephraim Cormier.
The name bothered Veret. Everyone at the landing knew it. Cormier had lived in a cabin somewhere in the basin and came out once a year to sell hides and buy supplies. He was an old man who spoke little. His French was older and rougher than the local dialect. Veret had traded with him once as a boy and remembered that the old man’s hands smelled of something that was not the swamp, and that his teeth were very small, and that he did not blink for a long stretch of time.
Cormier had not come out of the basin in the autumn of 1920 or 1921. The assumption was that he was dead. But the letter said his estate had sold land to the timber company. Veret could not think what estate meant, because Cormier had no one.
Still, the pay was $8 a day. Veret had a young wife and a house that needed a new roof before winter. He wrote back and said he would take them in.
The three men arrived at the landing at Bayou Chene in a Model T that had no business on the roads it had traveled. They wore linen shirts and low boots. One wore spats. Veret watched them and said nothing.
The men were Oid Gilbo, a land surveyor of 41; Marius Prejan, a timber cruiser of 35; and Etienne Brousard, the company representative, who carried the deed in a leather satchel he did not let out of his hand.
Gilbo carried a brass compass and a notebook bound in red Morocco. He was the sort of man who believed the country would arrange itself around his instruments. Prejan was easier. He had been in the woods before and spoke a little Acadian French. Brousard, the company man, was soft-featured with a small mouth. He wore a gold ring on his right hand and turned it constantly. He did not look at Veret when Veret spoke to him.
They spent the night at the store at Bayou Chene, run by a widow named Bernardet Milansson. She had known Veret since childhood. After the men had gone to their rooms, she came out onto the gallery and told him in French that she had a bad feeling.
She said that when the men came in to buy tobacco, the one with the ring signed the ledger, and the pen had felt for a moment as though it were the wrong weight in her hand, as though it had grown heavier as he wrote.
Veret asked if she thought he should send them back. She said he could give the money back, but he would not. They looked at each other in the dark, and neither said anything for a while.
They left at first light on the 15th of July. Veret had two pirogues and had asked for a fourth man to pull the second one. Old Elzar Duce, then 74, came down before dawn without a word. As they loaded the gear, Elzar came up beside Veret and said something quietly in French. The writer in 1962 took it down phonetically. A man who spoke that dialect later translated it: “The old ground doesn’t sell. Whatever paper they have, it isn’t the deed.”
They put out.
The first day was easy country. They pulled up Bayou Chene until it narrowed and split, then took the westward branch. Gilbo kept his compass out and made marks in his notebook. Prejan looked at the cypress and made his own marks. Brousard sat with his satchel on his lap and looked at nothing.
They made 12 miles before the sun was overhead. At noon they stopped on a shell ridge and ate cold biscuit and salt pork. Gilbo took a reading and asked how much further to the Cormier tract. Veret told him a day and a half. Gilbo said the company had told him a day. Veret said the company had not been in the basin.
In the middle of the afternoon they entered a slough Veret knew well. He noticed the sound had changed. The birds were calling in the pattern of dusk, not afternoon. The frogs were quiet. The cicadas were absent altogether.
Elzar met his eyes and gave a very small shake of the head. Prejan said without turning around, “The country is listening.” Gilbo said, “Nonsense.”
They came out into a lake Veret had never seen. The map showed no lake. He stopped his pirogue. Elzar came up beside him. Gilbo asked what was the matter. Veret said in French to Elzar that this was not here. Elzar said in French that it was just not for them.
Gilbo looked at his compass. The needle, which had held steady on north for hours, was slowly turning. Not swinging. 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 did not leave a wake. The water closed behind them without a ripple, as though it were remembering itself as it went.
They made camp on a ridge on the far side under three cypress trees that stood in a line so straight Veret could not believe they had grown that way. He walked around them and found no axe marks, no burn scars, no sign that anything had ever been done to them by a human hand. Elzar looked at the trees and did not go near them.
They set up two tents. The men from Baton Rouge shared one. Veret and Elzar took the other. Neither of them slept.
Veret said they heard the water breathing. Not wind on water. The water breathing 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, there was a sound like a thumb dragged very slowly across the belly of a drum.
Once in the second hour of the dark, a bird cried out in the cypress above them. It was the cry of a daybird, calling as it does at noon in bright sun. Then it was silent.
After midnight, Elzar said in French very quietly, “Alcid, don’t answer the voice.” Veret 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. Brousard was pale, with a small vein moving in his temple. He held his hands very still on his satchel. Prejan said quietly that something had walked around the tent all night.
Gilbo tried three times to level his transit. On the third attempt, he turned around and said in a voice that was not quite his own, “The instrument is faulty.” Veret said the instrument was not faulty. Gilbo looked at him for a long time, then took the transit off the tripod, put it back in its wooden case, and did not open it again.
They put out into the black lake. It took them three hours to cross it, though the day before it had taken one. When they came out on 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 shell, not mud. The shell was white, and the water above it was clear, so a man could see all the way to the bottom.
On the bottom of that clear water in the shallows were things Veret first took to be more shell. As they pulled closer, he saw they were 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. The writer in 1962 did not know how to spell it. Two men who know that dialect later said it is not a word anyone should say out loud.
Brousard looked into the water, then at his satchel, then into the water again. His small mouth opened and no sound came out. Gilbo said they should go. Prejan said yes, now.
Brousard said the deed was there. They were at the tract. They had to walk it.
He got out of the pirogue, stepped onto the shell in the shallow water, walked up onto the bank, and stood there with the satchel in his hand. He waited for the rest of them to follow. They followed him.
There was a house on the tract. The letter from the company had mentioned no house. The map had shown no house. Ephraim Cormier had lived in a cabin. What stood on the tract that day was not a cabin.
It was a house of two stories, with a gallery around the second floor and shuttered windows on both floors. It had a chimney of brick laid by a man who knew brick work. The house was painted, or had been painted, in a white that had gone the color of old bone. The shutters were painted a green so dark it was almost black.
The house stood on brick piers about four feet off the ground, in the manner of an old Creole house. The yard around it 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. No man had raked it that morning. There was no man there and no rake.
Brousard walked up to the house. Gilbo told him to wait. Brousard did not wait. He went 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 parlor with 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 Veret could only describe as waiting.
The candles on the table were lit. They had been burning for some hours. There was no draft in the house, though the door had just been opened, and the flames did not move.
There was no one in the parlor. There was no one in the hall. There was no one in the kitchen, though there was a kettle on the stove with steam coming out of it. Prejan went up the stairs and came down very quickly and said only that there was no one.
They stood in the hall and looked at each other. Gilbo asked in a very small voice who lit the candles. Brousard said the deed was valid. They were going to walk the boundary, file the deed, and go back.
Prejan said the candles were 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. Veret did not go with them. He stayed on the gallery with Elzar. They sat on the top step and did not talk and watched the three men walk out along the raked shell into the cypress.
Nothing happened for a long time. The light in the clearing did not seem to move. The sun did not cross the sky. The shadows of the cypress did not shift. Veret’s pocket watch showed the same time on the third look as it had 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 in what was not an hour, Prejan 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. His eyes were wrong. Not the pupils, not the color. The eyes themselves were wrong in some way Veret could not put into a sentence.
Prejan said, “Alcid.” Veret said, “Marius.” Prejan said, “Where’s my hand?”
Veret looked down. Both of Prejan’s hands were where they should have been. They were not damaged. Veret told him his hand was right there.
Prejan looked down at his hands. He looked at them 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 Veret’s arm and said in French, “Don’t answer him again.”
They waited. Prejan stood at the foot of the 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. It was that Veret’s 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 in very small increments.
Veret looked away. When he looked back, Prejan was gone. The raked shell was undisturbed.
Gilbo came back about an hour after that. He came out of the eastern cypress carrying his red Morocco notebook, open, reading from it as he walked. He walked all the way across the clearing to the foot of the steps and did not look up.
He 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. He looked up. He said to Veret, “Please tell my wife I finished the work.”
Then he walked past them up the gallery steps and into the house. Veret and Elzar 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 came back at dusk. He came out of the northern cypress, walking easily with the leather satchel in his hand. He was smiling.
He had not smiled once in all the days since he had come off the road from Baton Rouge. Now he was smiling.
He came up to the foot of the gallery steps and said in a pleasant voice that it was a good tract and the company would be pleased. Veret did not answer.
Brousard asked where Gilbo and Prejan were. Veret said they went in the house. Brousard said, “Ah.” He looked at the house for a long time. Then he turned back and said, still in the pleasant voice, that Veret should go now.
He told Veret and Elzar to take the pirogue and go and not stop until they made Bayou Chene. He told them not to look back at the clearing after they had left it.
Veret asked what about him. Brousard said the company sent him to walk the tract and he had walked it. There was paperwork.
Brousard said, “Alcid, I am telling you to go.”
Then his small mouth changed. The smile did not go away. The smile stayed exactly where it was. But under the smile, the mouth changed, and there was, for the very briefest of moments, something that was not a mouth at all. And then there was a mouth again, and the smile was still on it.
Veret went.
They took the two pirogues and put out into the shallows west of the house. They pulled through the clear water where the shell on the bottom was not shell. Veret did not look down. Elzar did not look down.
They came into the black lake and crossed it. This time the water did not close behind them. It parted for them and stayed parted in two long lines of black water, as though it had been cut. When Veret looked back once, the two lines of parted water went all the way back across the lake, past the shell ridge with the three cypress trees, and into the country beyond, in two straight lines that did not meet the horizon.
They came out into the western branch of Bayou Chene sometime in the night. They reached the landing at Bayou Chene at first light on the 17th of July.
Bernardet Milansson was on the gallery of the store in her night dress with a shawl around her shoulders, though it was already warm. She said she had not been able to sleep.
Veret told her what had happened. He told her inside, in the back room of the store, with the door closed. Elzar was there. It took him a long time to tell her, because he had to stop several times to gather himself.
Bernardet listened. She did not ask questions. When he was finished, she got up, went out into the store, and came back with a bottle of clear liquor and three glasses. She poured for all of them, and they drank without toasting.
She said he had to go to the sheriff. Veret said yes. She said the sheriff was not going to believe him. Veret said no. She said he had to tell him only the parts he could believe.
They worked out what Veret would tell Sheriff Prosper Landry of St. Martin Parish. It was the true story with the impossible parts left out. Three men from Baton Rouge had gone into the basin. They had lost themselves in a stretch of country west of Bayou Chene. Veret had waited a day and then a second day and then had come out alone. Elzar Duce 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 18th of July. He read it back. He asked Veret two questions, and Veret answered both. Then Landry looked at Veret across the desk for a long time.
Veret understood in that moment that the sheriff knew. Not the details. But he knew that the statement was the true story with the impossible parts left out. And he knew that the impossible parts were the important parts. And he knew that Veret was not going to give him the impossible parts, and he was in his own way grateful.
Landry said he had had statements like this from the basin before. Veret said yes, sir. Landry said he 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. 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, by any employee of the company or any company that came after it.
When the Corps of Engineers later surveyed the country west of Bayou Chene for the levee system, they drew it as an unbroken cypress swamp. No house. No clearing. No tract of any Ephraim Cormier or any other man on it.
That would be the end of the story. Except for one thing.
Marius Prejan’s wife, Odal, received a letter on the 23rd of July, four days after her husband was reported missing. The letter was postmarked Bayou Chene. It was in her husband’s handwriting. It said only, in the middle of an otherwise blank sheet of paper: “Tell Alcid the work is finished.”
Odal Prejan sent that letter some years later to Sheriff Prosper Landry. Landry filed it with the case. The case, being an open case of missing persons, was not sealed.
The letter is in her husband’s handwriting. The paper is the paper of the Delta Cypress Timber Company. The postmark is Bayou Chene. 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 on the porch and sit in the dark. A man who was there at the end told that Veret would sometimes tilt his head in the dark as though he were listening.
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 45 years. But Veret was still not answering. That was the last thing he had learned in the basin, and it was the thing he had held on to. He had come to believe it was the only reason he was still alive to hold on to anything at all.