PELERIN PARISH, LOUISIANA
2010
WILFORD “BOY” BROUSSARD
If it’s good to eat, he’ll shoot it, never mind what the law says. That’s just his right, as he sees it. Gros becs, bec croches, hérons bleus. Wood ducks too, but there haven’t been many of those the last few years. He don’t pay no mind to all them rules that say kill three of this and none of that, a female this, a male that, and only during these particular months. He don’t waste his money on no lease nor license. Boy Broussard shoots or fishes for what he wants, wherever he wants, as long as he can eat it or sell it.
He doesn’t brag, never mentions the salt-cured alligator hides rolled up behind a false wall at the old camp, or the sack of doves out of season, or the three dozen squirrels in the freezer. The bobcat pelts and coon tails. The owl skull on top of the TV. And anyhow, he doesn’t do it to brag. He does it to get by.
He ought to have inherited the piece of marshland that had belonged to his forefathers, granted to his long-ago Acadian ancestor on his mama’s side, Louisana’s ur-Guidry, by the Spanish colonial government and handed down for almost two hundred years, even up to his parents’ generation. Boy’s mama would spend every winter out there with her sister and parents, piled up in a houseboat, trapping muskrats. If some part of that land had come to him as it should have, he would now be making bank on the extraction of oil. He might have become a hunter, trapper, fisherman, and pursuer of traditional arts for the pure shits and giggles of it instead of by necessity. Local color by choice. Meanwhile, the royalties would roll in. He’d have a house that was a proper house and not a fortified trailer on stilts. He’d have something to offer this daughter of his, suddenly in his life, twelve years old or thereabouts, with her always-astonished eyes and crumpled shoulders.
Instead, by shenanigans too complicated to understand or explain, the land did not come to Boy and was now solely the property of his conniving uncle by marriage and his willfully ignorant aunt, Jacot and Rosa Terrebonne. Deeds and quitclaims and tax bills and mineral leases, a hurricane of paperwork that has nothing to do with the very simple fact of everyday use, of history, of what is right and just. But never mind all that. It gives him a headache, every damned time.
Some inherit, others glean, and justice don’t enter into it. Louisiana law might say if you live on the land and use the land, it’s yours, squatter’s righs and all that, but try proving it in court when all you’ve got for evidence is stories. And those stories say that his people have been here longer than American laws have been here, longer than plat maps and mineral rights and hunting leases. The Acadian people, that is, though he believes he might be a little bit Indian too. They all are, aren’t they, the folks down here? Houma, Spanish, German, African, Acadian, Creole. Chinese, even. All mixed up, speaking their wonky French. Who knows what all they are. Who knows in how many ways they have used and owned and forfeited the land under their feet. He’s read a good deal of history, not to mention what has been passed down, the family lore. You don’t need a college degree to figure this stuff out. You’d be surprised what you can pick up just poking around the library or keeping the radio tuned to talk that isn’t flat-out evangelism, which bores the hell out of him.
Boy applied once for a roll card with the Houma Nation. He had a great-grandfather the family always claimed was Houma, and if that was so, the way Boy lived was just a matter of asserting his ancient rights. A few weeks later, the application came back to him stamped “unable to process.” He could not, after all, produce the receipts.
Even so, some of his best friends have been Indian. Okay, so not
best friends, but they’ve been the guys to drink with him and invite him to crawfish boils, barbecues. He’s been in their houses and camps and boats, and he can vouch firsthand that he lives more like a Indian than they ever did, with their HDTVs and Wi-Fi routers. One guy has never even shot a gun. (Nor a bow and arrow neither. Ha ha.) And Boy’s babymama, as they say these days, is Indian, mostly (but also French, like everybody else. And maybe Chinese! Who knows!), so Boy’s daughter, Lee, is Indian too (et cetera), unequivocally, more or less, in the eyes of the law.
Boy knows plenty about being Indian, not least because he was halfway raised by one (who was also Cajun and et cetera). Old Mr. Hubert, who spoke French better than English, who claimed to be Houma, and who had learned from his own Cajun grandmother to be a traiteur, relieving neighbors of shingles and warts with a touch, a prayer, and a poultice of cut potatoes. When Boy was ten years old and his mother and stepfather had had enough of his lying and stealing, it was Mr. Hubert or juvenile detention. Together, him and Mr. Hubert lived like old-time Cajuns, like legitimate Indians, far out in the marsh where they could pull what they needed, when they needed, from the water. Mr. Hubert seemed to know everything that could be known about the marsh, about living off it. He knew every creature, how to catch it, whether to. He knew every plant and what it was said to do for a person, knew every prayer to the Catholic God and the older gods. Knew, too, that good medicine came bubbling up from the earth, painted rainbows on the water, with the acrid, near-poisonous smell of things that heal. Boy never had the heart to tell him different. Oil. He always knew the old man was talking about oil.
Boy met this daughter of his only a few weeks ago.
Her mother called him up on his landline, the same number he’d always had—he hadn’t heard from her in years, but they’d gone together for a good six months before she came up pregnant—and though he thought for just a second about putting the receiver right back down in the cradle or, better yet, of stretching the line all the way to the bathroom and giving her the flush treatment like he did the telemarketers, he stayed on the phone.
She said, “I’ve got a little girl here asking all kinds of questions.”
And he surprised himself, he really did. He said, “Why don’t y’all meet me on Saturday evening. Let’s get dinner at the Piccadilly.” In the moment, it was the only sit-down place he could think of.
Truth be told, he’d been wondering about that little girl. He had always wanted a family, sure, but not with Mandy.
For one thing, she’s from down on Chenière Disparue, what’s left of it. Cursed, that place, sure enough. Boy’s own ancestors had the good sense to clear out after the Great Storm of Eighteen Ninety-Whenever drowned every other Broussard but them two. The Cajuns left that sodden place to the Indians and took to higher ground. A little up the bayou, deeper into the marsh, in that sense
higher, but still basically mud. Mandy’s parents lived down on the chenier until it wasn’t even a chenier anymore so much as a strip of road with the water lapping up on either side. Nothing left but a few stilt houses, some old folks and poor folks holding out.
Don’t get Mandy started on politics. Don’t get her started on the
environment. She took some classes at the community college, and if you caught her in the wrong mood, she’d get going real good on silt and subsidence and disturbance hydrology, how all seventeen thousand souls of the Houma Nation (not counting Boy, of course) are still doing battle for federal recognition, how the oil industry tore up their marsh, stole the land from their people, stole the wealth right out from under them, and left them with nothing—nothing!—but a waterlogged strip of highway. Mandy was raking in money from the oil industry too, though, so it was a little hard to take when she’d get on Boy’s case about chucking a beer can into the bayou or hunting where he shouldn’t. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite.
When he met her, she was working down at Port Goulot as a dispatcher while she logged hours on the water toward her captain’s license, and she was so often the only woman out there that eventually her manner, which was none too ladylike to begin with, began to match her mouth, which was positively filthy. She liked to cut up with the boys on the CB radio. She had a handle and everything.
Renard Rouge. Red Fox. Too easy, right? All those hours alone on a boat with a bunch of men, and when she came up pregnant, the child was definitely, without a doubt, his? Sure it was,
Renard Rouge.But when he saw the girl walking up with her mother (who had gotten a little heavy in the last dozen years but
goddamn those hips) in the parking lot of the Piccadilly, it hit him all at once what a low-down sonofabitch he’d been, because any stranger on the street could look at the two of them—father and daughter—and tell she was his.
“Come on, girl, give me a hug,” he said, like they were making up after a fight. She was skinny and as tall as Mandy, who was nearly as tall as Boy. Her brown eyes had the same anxious, pleading look that her mother’s took on sometimes, suddenly, when you said something that cut her, surprising you, because otherwise Mandy was all bravado and I-don’t-need-a-damned-thing. But the child’s knobby nose, her wavy mess of red-brown hair and apple-hard cheeks: That was all Boy.
She said, “I always wondered who I looked like,” and Boy said, “Well, now you know.”
All through their dinner, the girl wouldn’t quit staring at him, which made it hard to get a good look at her, except in the quick glimpses he stole when she’d reach for her fork or her glass of coke. Easier to keep his eyes on her mama, who was, after all, easy on the eyes. She’d done something new to her hair,
frosted it, like his older sisters would have said, except when his sisters did it—to each other, in the kitchen, stinking up the whole house with ammonia—the result was more like they’d walked under a flock of seagulls. On Mandy: caramel sun streaks on long hair so dark a lifetime in the sun could never streak it. It was classy, though, he had to admit. And then, by contrast: their daughter.
“Have you thought about putting her in a modeling class?” he said, which may have been one of the stupidest things he’d ever said in his life. He just meant that there was no reason she should make such a disappointing first impression. She held herself like she didn’t want to be seen, shoulders hunched up, trying to lose some of her height. Pimples on her chin and around her nose. What was she even doing with that hair? She’d started to brush out the curls, it seemed, and then changed her mind.
Mandy looked at him like she might very well collect her purse and her daughter and depart the restaurant without even leaving money for the bill. Not that he expected her to pay the bill. He was going to pay for this dinner. Of course he was. Obviously.
Instead, Mandy said, “I got a job. Offshore,” and she got that wide, impish grin, flashing a gap between her front teeth that would have looked thoroughly goofy on a less cocksure woman. “I thought maybe Lee could spend some time with you while I’m working.” The child glared at her mother as though she’d sprouted the head of a serpent.
“Nope,” he said. “Absolutely not.”
“Fuck you,” Mandy said, calmly, but it was just a preamble. He’d seen this mood before.
“What’s she going to do about school?” Boy said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Take her with you. She’ll learn something. ‘Homeschool.’” Her fingers hooked sarcasm around the word.
Lee stared at her pie, waiting for her fate to be decided. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but he had barely known the girl an hour. Plus, he couldn’t tell where his money was coming from, one week to the next, or what he’d be doing to make that money. “No. Nope. Unh-uh.”
Mandy balled up a napkin and threw it in his face. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what’s going to happen. I’m telling you. It’s my turn. I’ve been doing this for twelve years, Wilford, and now it’s my turn.”
The old folks at the next table were staring. Everybody in the restaurant was waiting to see what he was going to do, and all he could think was
I don’t even have doors. He’d have to put up curtains between the rooms in his trailer-on-stilts so she’d have enough privacy to change her clothes. They’d be able to hear each other in the bathroom, tinkling and what all.
Copyright © 2026 by Stephanie Soileau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
