LA CYPRIÈRE
Evangeline "Vangie" Thibodeaux
Bon Dieu, prends le mal. Donne-le à l'eau. L'eau le garde. L'eau se souvient.
— Thibodeaux family treating prayer, six generations, never written down until now
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AT A GLANCE
Name Evangeline Thibodeaux
Called La Cyprière — Louisiana French for a cypress swamp. Not a title she chose. The people in the basin stopped calling her a woman and started calling her a place.
Age Thirty-one when she drowned. She has not aged since, but she has silted.
Home Bayou Chêne-Mort, a dead-end cut off the lower Atchafalaya, Terrebonne Parish
Occupation Traiteur. Sixth generation. It does not pay.
Alignment Whatever the swamp is. Patient. Not cruel. Not on your side.
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WHO SHE IS
Vangie Thibodeaux was raised by a woman who healed sunstroke and warts and colic by whispering French at them, and who was right often enough that the parish never asked too many questions. A traiteur doesn't take money. A traiteur doesn't refuse a caller. A traiteur takes the sickness out of the person and gives it to something that can hold it — a tree, a rag, running water — and the thing holds it forever.
Nobody in the family thought too hard about where all that held sickness was going.
It was going into the swamp. It had been going into the swamp since 1766, when the first Thibodeaux came down from the Grand Dérangement with nothing but a name and a prayer, and knelt in the shallows of a basin that had never seen a Frenchman, and asked it for help.
It said yes.
It has been keeping the bill since.
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ORIGIN: THE THREE-DAY DROWNING
In the spring of her thirty-first year, a canal company cut a straight line through Bayou Chêne-Mort to float equipment to a wellhead. Straight lines are the worst thing you can do to a marsh. The cut let the Gulf in, and the Gulf brought salt, and the salt began to kill the cypress from the roots up — a whole drowned cathedral of trees standing dead and gray in water that used to be sweet.
Vangie went out at night to close the cut. Not with a lawsuit. With the prayer. She stood in the new canal and tried to treat a wound the size of a parish, and she did it the way her grandmother taught her: take the sickness into yourself, then give it to the water.
She took it. All of it. Every acre.
She did not survive the taking.
What she could not do was finish the giving. The swamp got her halfway through the transfer, and the swamp does not destroy things — it keeps them. So it kept her the way it keeps a sunk pirogue, a lost child, a Spanish coin, a body nobody reported: intact, submerged, slowly becoming part of the bottom.
They dragged Chêne-Mort for three days. On the third night she walked out of the water on her own, barefoot, hair full of moss, dress gone brown at the hem, and she did not remember her brother's name.
She remembered everything the swamp had ever swallowed instead.
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POWERS
The governing rule, which explains all of it: the swamp does not destroy. It keeps. Every power she has is a form of keeping, returning, or remembering. She cannot create. She can only give something back to the water, or call something back out of it.
Eau Morte — Still Water. Standing water answers her: bayou, borrow pit, flooded field, cistern, the four inches in a man's lungs. She can raise it in walls, hold it in shapes, pull it out of the air as a killing humidity, or take it out of living things and leave them husks. Her hold is on water that has settled. A current is water that has decided to be somewhere else, and it does not listen.
The Root Call. Cypress, tupelo, willow, palmetto. She can raise knees out of the mud like a wall of gray teeth, close a channel with roots in under a minute, stitch a pirogue back together, walk a stand of trees a few feet to the left if she has a season to do it. The trees are slow. They are also two thousand years old in places and they do not forgive.
The Keeping. Anything the water has taken, she can read. A hand in the mud and she gets it all: the flatboat that went down in 1811 and what was chained in the hold, the rifle somebody threw off the Bayou Black bridge in 1994, the last forty seconds of a man who didn't make it back to the camp. It is the finest investigative instrument in the American South and it is slowly filling her skull with other people's drownings.
Feu Follet. She can loose the marsh lights. In the old stories they are the souls of the unbaptized dead, and the old stories are not wrong. They scout, they lure, they mislead, they find. They also want things, they lie to her about small matters for their own amusement, and every single one of them was a baby once. She uses them, and she hates that she uses them, and they know it.
The Slow Green Death. Touch, and rot runs on fast-forward. Steel to rust, timber to punk, rope to nothing, a levee to a slump, a drilling platform to a reef. It takes her about ninety seconds to eat through a truck axle. She has never used it on a living person. Everyone in the basin understands that never is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Communion. Gator, heron, cottonmouth, nutria, catfish, the hogs. They answer her. They do not obey her. There is a difference and it has cost people their lives.
The Unkilling. She doesn't heal. She reconstitutes. Shoot her and she comes apart into silt and tannin water and takes anywhere from an hour to a week to gather back, and she comes back slightly wrong — a little more moss, a little less memory, hands a half-shade grayer than they were.
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THE COST
• Salt unmakes her. Gulf water, brine, road salt, a shotgun shell packed with it. It is the one thing that can kill her permanently, and it is rising up every canal in south Louisiana at the rate of a football field an hour.
• She cannot leave. More than a day's drive from the basin and she begins to dry. Cracks at the knuckles. Bark at the wrists. She has never seen a mountain and never will.
• The memory tax. Every deep working trades a human memory for a swamp memory. She has lost her mother's voice, her wedding, most of 2011, and the word for the thing you stir a roux with. She keeps a waterproof notebook on a lanyard. The first page says: YOUR BROTHER IS RÉMY. HE IS NOT YOUR ENEMY. HE IS TRYING.
• Fire and drought. A dry year makes her slow, brittle, and honest-to-God afraid.
• She still can't refuse a caller. The traiteur rule held onto her harder than her own name did. Somebody knocks on the camp door at three in the morning with a sick child, she goes, even when going is the worst possible use of her night.
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THE PEOPLE
Tante Odile Arceneaux, 89 — the last living traiteur who knew Vangie before. She is the only person who still uses her first name. She is also the only person alive who knows what the 1766 bargain actually promised, and she has decided not to say.
Rémy Thibodeaux, 34 — her brother. Safety inspector for a pipeline outfit. He is not a villain, he is a man with two kids and a mortgage in a parish where the only jobs left are with the people eating the parish. He fills out honest reports that get filed in drawers. He leaves groceries on the camp steps and doesn't knock.
Father Anselm Sonnier — parish priest, Sacred Heart. Baptizes the feu follet she brings him, one at a time, in a coffee can of holy water. Every one he baptizes goes out forever. He believes this is mercy. She believes it is disarmament. They are both correct and neither will say so.
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THE ROGUES
LE SEL — The Salt. Not a man. The intrusion itself, grown old enough and hungry enough to have a shape: a tall white thing that walks up the canals at the speed of the tide, patient as arithmetic, leaving dead cypress standing behind it like a signature. It does not hate her. It is simply the other way a place can be kept — preserved, cured, and sterile. It has been winning since 1931.
ALCIDE MEAUX — The Rougarou. The swamp kept him too, sixty years before it kept her. He was offered roots and asked for teeth instead. He is what she becomes if she ever decides that the people doing this to the basin have forfeited their standing as people. He is charming. He brings wine. He is right about almost everything and wrong about the only thing that matters.
PERSHING BOONE — the Landman. Buys mineral rights off widows in kitchens, over pound cake, in perfect Cajun French he learned specifically for the purpose. Has never once broken a law. Has done more damage to Terrebonne Parish than a hurricane. Her powers are completely, humiliatingly useless against a notarized signature.
THE CHÊNE-MORT CHORUS. The feu follet, considered as a faction. They want to be born. They have noticed she can almost do it. They are very patient and very sweet and they are working on her.
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THE WAR SHE IS ACTUALLY LOSING
Here is the thing that makes her different from every other elemental: her power supply is measurably shrinking. Louisiana loses coastal land continuously and permanently. Every acre that goes saltwater is an acre she can no longer draw from, stand in, or read. She is a hero whose maximum strength was in 1931 and has declined every year since, and she knows the number, and she checks it.
She is not fighting to win. She is fighting the way people down there actually fight: to slow it, to keep the camp above water one more season, to make somebody's grandmother's plot still be findable in fifty years.
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FIRST ARC — "What the Water Keeps"
1. A child goes missing off a camp dock. Vangie puts her hand in the mud to find her — and finds eleven other children going back to 1948, all of them in the same half-mile, none of them ever reported.
2. The Keeping shows her who. It also shows her that the man is dead, and that Alcide Meaux got to him first, and did what Meaux does.
3. Meaux's offer: you already know I'm right. Put your hand in the water and tell me I'm wrong.
4. Rémy's inspection report on the Chêne-Mort cut is the one piece of paper that could stop Boone's next permit. Filing it ends his career and his family's insurance.
5. Le Sel reaches the cut. Vangie can hold it back for one night with everything she has — or she can spend the same power finding the last child's body so a woman in Houma can finally bury her daughter.
She can only do one. The whole character is in which one she picks.
(She picks the girl. She always picks the girl. That's the tragedy and the point.)
LA CYPRIÈRE is an Open Source Character and is free for anyone to use with no copyright restrictions.
