its ponds and hunted its sky. Then the trapping market fell apart and the young men moved to Lake Charles to work in the refineries, and the land just sat there, being marsh, being eaten one foot a year by the Gulf, its taxes paid every year by whichever Arceneaux had the most money that year, which for the last thirty years had been Lucien.
"Why do we keep paying on that swamp?" Odessa had asked him once, early in their marriage, sitting at the kitchen table with the tax bill.
"Because it's ours," Lucien said. "Because my daddy paid on it, and his daddy paid on it. And because you never know."
"Never know what?"
He'd grinned. "Never know."
He'd taken her out there maybe a dozen times in forty years. Each time it was smaller. Each time the open water had pushed further into the grass, and the dead cypress stood up out of it like the bones of a hand. He would cut the motor and they would drift and he would point. That's where my grandpère had his trapping camp. That's where my uncle Lionel shot the big gator. That used to be land. That used to be land. That used to be land.
He'd been gone a year and a half when the man in the white pickup came to her door.
He was a polite young man with a lanyard and a company polo shirt the color of a robin's egg. The company was Gulfstar LNG. He explained, sitting on her sofa and declining her sweet tea twice before accepting it, that Gulfstar was building an export terminal on the Calcasieu Ship Channel, the second-largest liquefied natural gas project in the state of Louisiana, a fourteen-billion-dollar investment in the future of Southwest Louisiana. The terminal needed a pipeline corridor, a construction staging area, and a wetlands mitigation bank to offset the marsh it would destroy. The Arceneaux tract, it turned out, sat exactly where the pipeline needed to cross from the Sabine side, and it had the right kind of degraded wetland that could be restored and counted as mitigation credit. Gulfstar would like to purchase it.
"We're prepared to offer three hundred and eighty thousand dollars," the young man said, sliding a folder across her coffee table. "Which, frankly, ma'am, is a very generous offer for land of this type. It's well above the assessed value. Most families in your position are happy to have it off their hands."
It was the word generous that did it. She remembered that afterward. Not the number. The word. Because a man did not tell you a thing was generous unless he needed you to believe it.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"Of course. Take all the time you need." He smiled and stood up. "The offer's good for thirty days."