In the summer of 1962, a writer working for a state historical survey sat on the porch of a small clapboard house west of Bayou Chene and recorded a story told by 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 ran 14 pages. Those pages were later pulled from the collection, and the story they contained was one Veret told only once.
In the summer of 1922, Veret was 28 years old. That summer, he took three men into a part of the Atchafalaya Basin from which only one of them returned.
The Atchafalaya is the largest river swamp in the country. In 1922, it had not yet been walled up by the levees the Corps of Engineers finished 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 by a surveyor in 1870 could be open water by 1920. The country did not stay where you put it. That was the first thing Veret learned as a boy, and it was the thing he tried to tell the three men from Baton Rouge.
They arrived on the 14th of July. Veret had received a letter from them three weeks earlier. It was written on the letterhead of the Delta Cypress Timber Company and engaged his services as a guide for a party of three. They planned to enter the basin at a landing near Bayou Chene and travel some 14 miles southwest 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 west of Bayou Chene. He came out once a year in early autumn to sell hides and buy salt, coffee, and shot. He was an old man who did not speak much. His French was older and rougher than the French of the Acadians on the Teche.
Veret had traded with him once when he was a boy of 15. He remembered that the old man's hands smelled of something that was not the swamp, that his teeth were very small, and that he did not blink for a long stretch of time. Veret counted once without meaning to. He reached 23.
Cormier had not come out of the basin in the autumn of 1920. He had not come out in the autumn of 1921. The assumption in the parish was that he was dead. But the letter said his estate had sold a tract of land to the timber company.
Veret could not think what estate the letter meant. Cormier had no one. Still, the letter offered $8 a day, which was better than a good day's work at the mill. Veret had a young wife at home and a house that needed a new roof before winter. He wrote back on the 17th of June and said he would take them in.
The three men arrived at the landing in a Model T that had been driven the last nine miles on ground no automobile had any business being on. They wore linen shirts and low boots. One of them wore spats.
The men were Oid Gilbo, a land surveyor of 41; Marius Prejan, a timber cruiser of 35; and Etienne Brousard, a company representative of 39 who carried the deed in a leather satchel he did not let out of his hand.
Gilbo was a tall, spare man with a waxed mustache. He carried a brass compass, a plane table, a pocket transit, and a notebook bound in red Morocco. Veret later said Gilbo 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. He was short and square with hands that had done work. He spoke a little Acadian French and could roll a cigarette in the wind. On the first evening, he asked Veret whether the water was up or down for the season and listened when Veret answered.
Brousard was the one Veret did not like. He was a soft-featured man with a small mouth. He wore a gold ring on his right hand and turned it around his finger constantly without seeming to know he was doing it. He did not look at Veret when Veret spoke to him.
They spent the night of the 14th at the store at Bayou Chene, run by a widow named Bernardet Milansson. She had known Veret since they were children. After the men had gone to their rooms, she came out onto the gallery and said in French that she had a bad feeling about this trip.
She said that when the men came in to buy tobacco, and the one with the ring signed the ledger, 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 told her he had felt something similar. He asked whether she thought he should send them back. She said he could not. They had paid him. He said he could give it back. She said he could, but he would not.
They left the landing at first light on the 15th of July. Veret had two pirogues. He had asked for a fourth man to pull the second one because three men and their gear was more than one pirogue could carry through the shallows.
Bernardet sent word to old Elzar Duce, who was then 74 and had been in the basin longer than any man living. Elzar came down before dawn without a word. As the men loaded the gear, Elzar came up beside Veret and said something to him in French very quietly. A man who spoke that dialect later translated it as: "The old ground doesn't sell. Whatever paper they have, it isn't the deed."
Veret did not answer him. They put out.
The first day was easy country. They pulled up Bayou Chene until it narrowed and split. They took the westward branch, which had no name on the maps Gilbo had brought. Gilbo kept his compass out on his knee and made marks in his notebook every quarter hour.
They made 12 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 took a reading and marked their position. He 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 came into a slough Veret had been through many times. He noticed as they entered it that the sound had changed. The birds were calling in the pattern of dusk, not of afternoon. The frogs were quiet. The cicadas were absent altogether.
Veret looked back at Elzar in the second pirogue. Elzar met his eyes and gave a very small shake of the head. Not a negation. An acknowledgement. Elzar had heard it too.
Prejan, the cruiser, said without turning around, "The country is listening."
Gilbo said, "Nonsense."
They came out of the slough into a lake Veret had never seen before. He had guided in the basin for 13 years by that summer. He knew the country. But this lake, which they came into on the afternoon of the 15th of July 1922, he had never seen.
The map showed no lake.
Veret stopped his pirogue. Elzar came up beside him. Gilbo asked what was the matter. Veret said in French to Elzar that this wasn't here. Elzar said in French that it just was not for them.
Gilbo looked at the sky and at his watch and said there was three hours of light left. Veret said there was one. Gilbo began to argue, then stopped. He had just 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 on his knee. He did not say anything about it.
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, without a sound, as though the water were remembering itself as it went.
They made the ridge on the far side of the black lake as the light went. They made camp under three cypress trees that stood in a line so straight Veret could not at first 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. Veret did not sleep. Elzar did not either. They lay awake in the dark and listened.
They heard the water breathing. That is Veret's word. Not the wind on the water. Not the small sounds a bayou makes at night. 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 second sound. It was 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 not the cry of a nightbird. 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 said, "What voice?"
Elzar said, "The one that's going to call your name."
They lay in the dark for a long time after that. No voice called Veret's name. Eventually the wet gray came in through the tent flap, and it was morning.
The men from Baton Rouge came out of their tent looking as though they had not slept either. Brousard was pale. There was a small vein moving in his temple. He did not turn his ring that morning. He held his hands very still on top of his satchel.
Prejan said quietly to Veret, "Something walked around the tent." Veret asked when. Prejan said all night.
Gilbo did not say anything. He was setting up his transit on the shell ridge. His hands were shaking. Veret watched him try three times to level the instrument. On the third attempt, Gilbo turned around and said in a voice that was not quite his own, "The instrument is faulty."
Veret 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 closed the case. He did not open it again.
They ate a cold breakfast and 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. They stood further apart. The undergrowth was thin. The ground under the water was shell, not mud. The shell was white, and the water above it was clear.
On the bottom of that clear water in the shallows were what Veret first took to be more shell. As they pulled closer, he saw they were not shell.
Veret, who had grown up in a country where death is a common thing and who had by his 28th year seen more of it than most men see in a lifetime, 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. It was a very old word. The writer in 1962 did not know how to spell it and wrote it phonetically. Two men who know that dialect have 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. No sound came out.
Gilbo said, "We should go."
Prejan, whose face had gone the color of paper, said, "Yes. Now."
But Brousard said, "The deed is here. We're at the tract. We have to walk it."
Gilbo said, "Etienne."
Brousard said again, "We have to walk it. The company sent us to walk it. We're going to walk it."
He got out of the pirogue. He stepped out onto the shell in the shallow water and walked up onto the bank. He stood there with the satchel in his hand and 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. But the thing that 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. The chimney was of brick that had been laid by a man who knew brick work. The house had been painted white, but the white 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 from the last century. The yard around the house was clear of undergrowth. There was no sign that anyone had cleared it. It was simply clear.
The cypress stood back from the house at a respectful distance. 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 said, "Etienne, 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 hall and off the hall a parlor. In the parlor there was 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 that Veret could only describe as waiting.
The candles in the candlesticks on the table were lit. They had been burning, from the look of them, for some hours. There was no draft in that house, though the door had just been opened. The flames of the candles did not move.
There was no one in the parlor. There was no one in the hall. Brousard went into the kitchen. There was no one there, 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. He said only, "There is no one."
They stood in the hall of that house, the four of them, and looked at each other. Gilbo said in a very small voice, "Then who lit the candles?"
Brousard said, "The deed is valid."
Gilbo said, "Etienne, what?"
Brousard said, "The deed is valid. We're going to walk the boundary. We're going to walk the boundary and we're going to go back and we're going to file the deed."
Prejan said, "Etienne, the candles are lit."
Brousard turned on him. The vein in his temple was moving again. He 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 of the house, and Elzar stayed with him. They sat on the top step and did not talk. They watched the three men from Baton Rouge walk out along the raked shell into the cypress.
Nothing happened. It was about the middle of the afternoon by then, though Veret would say 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.
Veret's pocket watch, which he took out and looked at three times in the space of what he would have called an hour, showed the same time on the third look as it had on the first. He did not wind it. He had the very strong sense that if he wound it, something in that clearing would know that he had.
At some point in what was not an hour, Prejan came back. He 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 came across the raked shell and stopped at the foot of the gallery steps. He looked up at them. His eyes were wrong. Not the pupils. Not the color. The eyes themselves were wrong in some way that Veret could not put into a sentence.
Prejan said, "Alcid."
Veret said, "Marius."
Prejan said, "Where's my hand?"
Veret looked down at Prejan's hands. Both of them were where they should have been. They were on the ends of his arms. They were closed into loose fists. They were not damaged.
Veret said, "Marius, your hand is right there."
Prejan looked down at his hands. He looked at them for a long time. Then he looked up, and his face had not changed. He said very calmly, "Alcid, where's my hand?"
Elzar put his own hand on Veret's arm. Elzar said in French very quietly, "Don't answer him again."
Veret did not answer him again.
They waited. Prejan stood at the foot of the gallery steps, and he did not move, and he did not blink. After a while, the shape of him became difficult to keep in focus. Not that he faded. Veret was very clear on this. He did not fade. 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. There was no one at the foot of the gallery steps. The raked shell was undisturbed.
Gilbo came back about an hour after that. He came back the way he had gone out, out of the eastern cypress. He was carrying his red Morocco notebook in his hand, and the notebook was open, and he was reading from it as he walked.
He walked all the way across the clearing to the foot of the gallery steps. He did not look up from the notebook. He stopped and read out in a voice that was very steady: "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. They did not go in.
Brousard was the last to come back. He came back at dusk. Veret only knew it was dusk because he looked at the sky and saw that the light had gone gray. He could not have said when, and he could not have said how.
Brousard came out of the northern cypress, walking with the leather satchel in his hand. He was walking easily, in a way he had not walked all day. He was smiling.
He had not smiled once in all the days since he had come off the road from Baton Rouge. Now, walking out of that country at dusk, he was smiling.
He came across the raked shell and came up to the foot of the gallery steps. He looked up at Veret and said in a pleasant voice, "It's a good tract. The company will be pleased."
Veret did not answer him.
Brousard said, "Where's Gilbo? Where's Prejan?"
Veret said, "They went in the house."
Brousard said, "Ah." He turned 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."
Veret said, "What?"
Brousard said, "You should go now. You and the old man. You should take the pirogue and you should go, and you should not stop until you make Bayou Chene. And you should not under any circumstances look back at this clearing after you've left it."
Veret said, "What about you?"
Brousard said, "The company sent me to walk the tract. I've walked it. There's paperwork."
Veret said, "Alcid."
Brousard said, "Alcid, I am telling you to go."
And then, and this is the last of him that Veret would say he saw, Brousard's 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. They 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.
The light held gray, though it did not deepen. They came into the black lake and crossed it. 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.
Veret looked back once, though he had promised himself he would not. The two lines of parted water went all the way back across the lake, all the way to the shell ridge with the three cypress trees, and past the ridge 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. Veret did not remember when.
They came into the landing at Bayou Chene at first light of 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 had not been able to sleep.
Veret told her what had happened. He told her not on the gallery, but 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 and gather himself.
Bernardet listened. She did not ask questions. When he was finished, she got up and went out into the store. She came back with a bottle of clear liquor and three glasses. She poured for all of them, and they drank without toasting.
Then she said, "You have to go to the sheriff."
Veret said, "Yes."
She said, "But he's not going to believe you."
Veret said, "No."
She said, "So you have to tell him only the parts he can believe."
They worked out, sitting in the back room of the store on the morning of the 17th of July, what Veret would tell Sheriff Prosper Landry of St. Martin Parish. It was in essence 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. He and Elzar Duce, an experienced man of the basin, 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 of them.
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.
Landry said, "I've had statements like this from the basin before."
Veret said, "Yes, sir."
Landry said, "I filed them under missing, not foul play."
Veret said, "Yes, sir."
Landry 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 employee of any company that came after it.
The Corps of Engineers, some years later, in the surveys they did for the levee system, drew the country west of Bayou Chene 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 in Baton Rouge, whose name was Odile and who was 32 years old in the summer of 1922, 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."
Odile 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.
Alcid Veret, in the last years of his life in the clapboard house on the rise of ground west of Bayou Chene, would wake sometimes in the small hours of the morning. He would go out on the porch and sit in the dark.
A man who was there at the end and who sat with him on those nights said 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 had 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. It was the thing he had held on to. It was, he had come to believe, the only reason he was still alive to hold on to anything at all.