"Should the Waters Take Us" — fiction excerpt set on a vanished Louisiana island

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CHENIERE DISPARUE, LOUISIANA, 1893

The inhabitants of Cheniere Disparue had a reputation for sloppy living. They ate whatever, married whomever. On Sundays, they sometimes went to sea or danced or gambled. Too lazy, it was said, to go up the bayou for wood, they had cut down the protective oak trees on their barrier island, cleared a path for Gulf winds and storm surge. They were Cadiens, the French-speaking descendants of the rollicking, complacent Acadians expelled from New France more than a century before, and also, as legend had it, of Caribbean pirates who had hidden themselves in the shifting mazes of the saltwater marsh that surrounded Cheniere Disparue and had given the wooded ridge its name: It was a place for lost men, disappeared men, or those who wanted to be.

The proclivity for piracy lived on. In hard years, Noe Terrebonne, the great-great-grandson of Acadian exiles, would do a bit of smuggling for Li Shan, the Chinese proprietor of a shrimp-drying platform on Bayou Andre, in the marsh north-west of Cheniere Disparue. From time to time, Li Shan would offer Noe a sum impressive to a fisherman to sail his lugger—a forty-foot vessel made for the shallower waters of home into the Gulf to meet a ship bound for New Orleans. Noe and his sons would take on cargo from this ship, barrels that they would stow in the hold among the hills of oysters or shrimp, padded all around with damp palmetto leaves to keep them cool. In these barrels: men and women from China, the Philippines.

And once, when his son cried out the approach of inspectors, Noe Terrebonne was only a good enough man to think first of his wife and children, of his two sons on the boat who would also bear the consequences should they be found out. He did as Li Shan had told him: He and his boys hugged between them one barrel at a time, apologized in French through the air holes they had drilled in the sides, and ignoring as best they could the muffied panic, the thudding and scratching, they heaved the barrels overboard into the Gulf.

He had not seen their faces, had not passed a single word through those barrel staves until the end, and he never spoke of it again, but his sons did, much later, as though it had happened to someone else. Through the generations, Noe’s descendants would never forget what Noe’s sons could never forget: the meek and sickening glug-glug-glug-glug as water swallowed man and barrel both.

*

When the great storm came in 1893, it was easy enough for reporters to turn the story into one of human, not natural, evil—of negligence or decadence or felony—treading carefully only because so many had died: more children than adults, more women than men.

Still, so many newspaper accounts told it this way: On the night of the storm, seeing the darkening skies over the Gulf and the violent waves that broke on the sands of their secluded barrier isle, the Cadiens of Cheniere Disparue clucked their tongues at the weather, and then, ignoring every sign of impending doom, calmly set about their customary hedonism—dancing, spreading gossip, betting on a game of galosh—until their walls began to shudder and a fifteen-foot storm surge burst through the doors and drowned them all, the sad, unwitting souls who had thought themselves invisible to the vengeful hand of God. It was tragic, of course, but given the obvious certainty that one day the sea would rise up and wipe them away, they had no business settling on this shifting landscape in the first place. The houses and farms, tl1e gestures at permanence: all folly and hubris. Why not speak the truth that everyone was thinking?

It served those Cadiens a little bit right.

The mundane details of October 1, 1893, were mostly forgotten in the storytelling, eclipsed by the doomful storm, except that the weather was decidedly unstrange. How could the skies—a gentle morning rain and then so lovely an afternoon—fail to warn them? How could no command come from on high to build an ark, to gather their animals and loved ones?

After shrimping the shallows of the bay, Noe spent the morning selling his haul to Li Shan. Li Shan, like Noe, was sixty-some years old, a patriarch. He knew his business. Catch, boil, salt, sell. The son of a Cantonese fisherman, he had crossed the Pacific for the promise of gold in California, and when white miners drove him from his claim, he took up the profession of his forefathers, fishing the waters of Monterey Bay. And when white fishermen drove him from that livelihood too, he went east to New Orleans—the Civil War was over—then on down the Mississippi River and through the twisting waterways beyond, into the treeless, brackish marshes to the southwest. Eighty miles from New Orleans as the pelican flies, but so much longer by boat. For ten years now, Chinese had been banned from immigrating to this country. No Chinese could naturalize. If he went home to see his old mother and his sisters, he would have to leave all this—and his Indian wife and children—forever.

Those men and women in barrels? It wasn’t only a mercenary venture.

Together, these two men stood under the awning of Li Shan’s commissary and watched Noe’s boys shovel their catch from the hold of the lugger into baskets on the wharf. The lugsail rippled and popped overhead. The tide was going out fast, pushed back into the Gulf by the wind. The last heat of summer went with it.

Noe negotiated with Li Shan in a pidgin mix of French, English, and Cantonese as the workers fanned out on the wobbling platform, slipping on the slick bodies and shells of the catch. The ripe salt-sea smell, raw and delicious and foul, that rose up from the platform and haunted the marsh for miles around, was today tamped down by the freshwater air blowing down from the north. The workers on the platform were Asian, black, Houma Indian, a few destitute Cadiens. Which of these men arrived here in barrels hidden on Noe’s own boat? Whose wives or brothers had he drowned?

*

By the time Noe and his sons were back home and had moored the boat to their wharf on the narrow pass that separated Cheniere Disparue from the mainland, the last low clouds of the front hung over the Gulf. Noe’s wife had been to Mass that morning with the younger children, and now they were home again. She stood on the porch of her house—pristine white and smelling of sap, built last spring with money from Li Shan—and she peered into the barrels that collected rainwater from the gutters. As Noe came across the front patch of yard, she proclaimed as though it were an omen, “I ya un rat!” She scooped out the dead rat with a bucket, handed the bucket to Noe, and then almost wiped her hands on the front of her Sunday dress.

Noe returned to the wharf and slung the dead rat across the water. He helped his sons gather up the seine nets, and the three of them went around back of the house, where they would drape the nets over the corral fence to dry. Noe’s horse huddled against the work shed. One of Noe’s younger boys stood on a ladder under the orange tree, plucking fruit from the branches and chucking them to the ground, scattering the chickens.

Noe and his sons looked up at the sky to watch five pelicans fly northward, away from the Gulf. Silent and purposeful, the pelicans cut through a raucous chaos of gulls at the end of the wharf and glided on into the marsh. The gulls flew inland, indecisive. They circled the church tower just to the west; their calls joined for a while with the nine bright peals of the noon-time Angelus. Finally, they, too, disappeared into the marsh.

*

At twilight, the bell began to toll again, erratic, like a spoon pinging the side of a coffee cup. The sound hung, tinny, above the steady roar of the wind that had risen as Noe’s wife was laying out dinner. The younger sons were in their attic room, the oldest out somewhere, wooing the Guidry girl or playing cards with her brothers—when a stronger gust slapped the house. Dishes rattled in the cupboards. Another gust hit the southern wall, and there was a crash as something—a tree limb?—flew hard into the steep slope of the roof, then clattered down, scraping against the shingles. Off in the distance, the church bell tolled one wavering note, was silent, tolled another.

Noe’s wife called her children down from the attic, wrapped them in blankets, and made them huddle under the table.

Noe said, It’s too late to leave.

But he went out anyway, leaned and pushed fifty paces into the gale until he could see the waves rise up and crash against the shore. The wharf was swallowed completely, and his lugger listed so far to starboard he could see the bare plane of the deck. No rain yet, but across the water, the whispery glow from the setting sun lit the northern face of the storm.

Inside, they crouched against the noise of the wind. The house was creaking and groaning, but Noe knew the strength of every crossbeam, having placed each one himself, and the house, he believed, would hold. It was a bad storm, but they had seen storms. Only five weeks before, another one hit farther west, and in no memory, living or recorded, had two storms struck the same coast in one season. Even if it was bad, how bad could it be? But there was water coming under the door and up through the cracks in the floor. Noe’s wife lifted the smaller children onto the table; the larger ones got themselves up on cupboards. Noe lit a lantern and another, gave one to his wife. If the flood came higher, they would go upstairs.

When the water had soaked Noe’s boots and risen to his shins, something knocked against the door, or rather, someone did, and Noe’s wife slid away the bolt, and the door swung wide, sent waves through the flood that slapped against the cabinets and carried a pair of shoes across the room. It was their oldest son, huddled under his tented coat, sludge-soaked, and behind him, twenty or more people, a few gathered on the porch helping others out of the churning waters, men with children on their shoulders, women dragging their heavy, drenched skirts. They crowded Noe’s house, filled the place with the mineral smell of mud and sea. More than sixty of them had been pressed together in the Guidrys’ house, a bit higher on the ridge but nearer to the Gulf, when the house collapsed under the force of the wind. Somehow they got out, waded or swam toward the only light they saw.

“Ecoute!” said one. Do you hear that? It’s the bell.

No, it isn’t.

Or it was, but above the bell, a higher, quieter tone, rising up in swells and sinking, from no clear direction or from every direction: shouts, anguished cries.

*

Near midnight, the sea calmed, the wind died. The water drew back from the house, left a thick, stinking silt across the floor. Noe unlatched the door, stepped onto the porch with a few of the men. They heard now, in the distance, a whoop, and they whooped too, calling across the water. Noe lowered himself into the flood that lapped at the top step of the porch, about as high as it had ever risen before, and waded toward the floating white belly of his overturned bateau, tangled in the moorings of the lugger, which was still tied to the bare pilings of the wharf, though the wharf itself was gone.

Above: a mess of stars, a thin moon. Everywhere: the mirroring flood. Noe set right the skiff, found a floating limb for a push pole. The men on the porch gave him a lantern and one of them, his neighbor Jean Guidry, jumped into the boat beside him. Guidry, at the prow, raised the lantern, revealed in the circle oflight a bobbing tangle of sargassum weed, a swimming snake, a child’s cloth doll. And beyond the light: What? Noe followed the sound of voices, moved the skiff toward a flickering in the church tower. The storm, he knew, was only taking a breath. They didn’t have much time before the eye of the hurricane passed, an hour or two at most.

“Icitte!” called a woman clinging to a barrel. Noe Terrebonne and Jean Guidry pulled her into the skiff. A little farther, and again, “Icitte! Aide-moi!”–this time an old man, a young man, a woman. Noe knew them all–Melfort and Helene and Marie Gaspard, Leon Boudreaux, Rodolph Theriot, Lucien Picciola, and on and on–swept into his path from all over Cheniere Disparue. He took them one by one into the boat until the boat was full; then he ferried them to his teeming house and went back out for more.

They were near the church when the wind returned, now from the west, and set the bell to ringing again. Noe looked up toward the light in the steeple, where a silhouette—the priest—gestured toward a darkness in the water, and whenJean Guidry cast the lantern there, they saw it was a man—Basile Perrin, yes, that was Basile—holding on to the slippery hand of a girl and hugging a tree limb under one arm. The girl’s eyes were rolled back, her head kicked helplessly by waves.

Noe leaned over the side of the boat, reached out with the oar. The water was breaking across the bow, the flood lifting them, the wind pushing them farther from the house. You can’t help her, shouted Noe. Basile, let her go. But the man would not let go, would not grab the oar, and he and the girl were swept away.

*

When the storm was again at its full raging strength, more than seventy people were sheltered in the Terrebonne house, brought there by Noe himself or having found their way, wading, swimming, paddling, afloat on unhinged doors, the ruins of their homes. They were packed into this house, in the damp, in the dark, shoulder to shoulder in the single groundfloor room, children riding the backs of their fathers, grandparents linked arm in arm to keep themselves upright, and outside was the wind, flood, roaring sea, and the bell in the distance, and here, Noe with his lantern, hip deep in flood, arguing—they could hear him in every corner of the house, above the wind, the hammering rain—with a group who wanted to leave, who did not trust this house to stand the storm. But where would they go? At least here was a roof. Yes, they said, a roof under which we might drown. A roof that will come down on our heads. More souls pushed toward the door. Noe stood his ground, blocked their passage. He held up the lantern, lit their faces.

Here were his neighbors.

When his wife led more than seventy up to the attic—impossible to imagine how they fit together under those eaves, crouched away from a hole the wind had blown in the roof, piled on each other’s laps, smelling each other’s terror—there were three who would not go. Two shouted at Noe to move aside. One folded her arms over her head, could not get her breath. The walls of the house tilted and groaned. The bell had stopped altogether, the church tower gone down. There was no time, there was no time. Noe left the three, went up to his wife and children and seventy neighbors, and downstairs they tugged at a door that would not open, and all at once, the walls gave. The upper floor came down on the lower.

*

A New Orleans newspaper printed a photograph of Noe Terrebonne taken in the days after the storm. The photo’s caption says, “Rescuers and Survivors from Cheniere Disparue, 1893.” It is clear who is rescuer and who survivor. The men are gathered at a great plank of a table on the deck of a boat—a much bigger outfit than Noe’s lugger—one of the steamboats, surely, that came down from New Orleans loaded with food, clothes, ice, and, from the Board of Health, sacks of lime to scatter over the dead. The rescuers: four men in bowler hats, coats, and ties. One of them stands with fists on hips, listens—the mouth under his mustache in a pucker of Yes, yes, I see— to a seated man, another rescuer. They—these rescuers—are likely discussing practical things: how to navigate a bayou clogged with debris, on whom which task will fall when they reach the chenier. A survivor consults or simply listens. Or doesn’t listen but looks on.

The survivor, Noe Terrebonne, wears the blank face a man wears when his wife, his children, cousins, neighbors, friends will be recorded as numbers only:

LOST SAVED

Broussard, Eraste 10 2

Guidry, Jean 2 4

Terrbonne, Noé 0 7

Or no, the look on his face is exhaustion. He is alive. He has gone for and brought back help. There are bodies to bury, what’s left of his house to salvage: crossbeams, floorboards. He has been away for three days, carrying the news to New Orleans, northward through a tangled maze of bayous and flooded marsh, an eight-hour journey by boat under the best circumstances, so he does not know yet how many are gone. When he left, his wife was crouched on the slanting roof of their collapsed house, leaning out for an orange drifting on the floodwaters. A dozen more women, a few children, crowded behind her; they straddled the roof peak or lay reclined upon it. The men dropped into the flood, wading, chest deep, toward the places where their houses and boats used to be.

At dawn, Noe found his own boat exactly where he’d moored it, mud-spattered but upright, afloat, and his neighbors wondered at this miracle as they would at the smaller miracles they would uncover in the next days; the mystery that spared their most fragile, most trivial possessions—teapots, porcelain icons, nestled perfectly intact in the mud or perched exactly as they had been, on the mantel of a still-upright chimney—but not the houses themselves, not their children and wives.

Noe and his son traveled slowly up Voisin Canal toward Bay St. Honore, steering around wreckage, afraid every moment of losing the canal and going aground. Noe’s son perched on the bow and called out directions to his father, around fallen trees, upturned boats, drowned cattle. On a dry ridge just above the waterline, they saw Eraste Broussard and his boy beneath a bare oak tree, looking up. The man raised his arms to a figure in the branches, a woman whose head drooped, hair loose, wet, falling forward across her face, her breasts. She was naked, her pale arms and legs not clutching but limp, caught.

Broussard turned on his boy, swung an open hand into the boy’s ear. The boy staggered and fell into the mud. “Regarde-le pas! Regarde-le pas, mon fils-de-putain, va!” he shouted. He raised his fists to the two men passing in the boat. Don’t look at her, you sonofabitch. Broussard, a decent man by all accounts, generous with his neighbors, welcoming to strangers, had lost everyone and everything but this boy. The daughter in the tree, his wife, his elderly parents, and six more children besides. Meanwhile Noe, by some miracle or accident, had lost none. It wasn’t a question of deserving.

On Bayou Andre, where Li Shan’s village had been: nothing. Just water, the tips of reeds, a floating mat of palmetto thatching that might have been someone’s roof. How swiftly and utterly a flood will erase a man’s guilt, or at least the tokens of it.

__________________________________

From Should the Waters Take Us : A Novel by Stephanie Soileau. Copyright © 2026 by Stephanie Soileau. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.