The Evangeline Rose

Chapter 1: The Water We Came From

Everybody who ever loved this water got poisoned by it one way or another, and I mean to tell you exactly how.

But first you need to understand what the water was before it turned against us, because nobody poisons you like something you love.

Delacroix Parish sits at the bottom of Louisiana the way silt settles at the bottom of a glass—heavy, forgotten, and holding up everything above it. The land isn't really land at all. It's marsh and shell road and canal cuts threaded between stands of roseau cane, and if you've never been, you'd say it looks like the earth gave up trying to decide between water and dirt and just split the difference. We had one gas station, one school, two churches, and enough shrimp boats to make the whole place smell like brine and diesel from April to October.

Our boat was the Evangeline Rose.

She was a sixty-five-foot Lafitte skiff, white hull gone the color of old teeth, with a green waterline stripe my grandfather had painted in 1974 and my daddy repainted every March whether she needed it or not. The outriggers spread wide like arms reaching for something, and when they were down and the nets were dragging, the boat looked like a bird skimming the surface of the world. My grandfather built her. My daddy inherited her. And I grew up on her deck the way other kids grew up in backyards.

My name is Marley Bourque. I was twelve years old in 2010, and I thought the worst thing that could happen to a person was a bad shrimp season.

I was wrong about that the way children are wrong about everything—completely, and with total confidence.

My daddy, Curtis Bourque, was a third-generation shrimper who measured his worth in pounds of white shrimp. Not money, not reputation, not the opinions of men at the dock. Pounds. He kept a logbook in the wheelhouse with columns for date, location, weather, water temperature, and yield, and he'd filled eleven of those logbooks in twenty-two years. I used to sit on the engine hatch and watch him write in them with a pencil stub he kept behind his ear, his handwriting small and precise in a way that didn't match the rest of him. Curtis Bourque was six-two, broad across the chest, with hands that looked like they'd been carved from cypress root. He had a gap between his front teeth and a laugh that started low in his belly and came out like a boat horn. People in the parish called him Big Curt, and when he walked the dock at the Delacroix marina, the other captains would nod and step aside, not out of fear but out of the kind of respect you give a man who always brings in more than you.

My mama, Renee, was the opposite of my daddy in every physical way—small, careful, with reading glasses she wore on a chain and fingernails she kept painted even when there was no occasion. She kept the books for the Evangeline Rose, and she kept the books for our family, and I don't think she ever saw a difference between the two. There was a metal filing cabinet in the hallway of our house, and inside it, organized by year and category, was every receipt, every fuel ticket, every dockside weigh slip, every insurance premium, every tax return the Bourques had generated since 1988. My mama believed that if you documented something properly, it couldn't be taken from you. She was wrong about that too, but it took longer for her wrongness to show.

Then there was my brother. Seventeen-year-old Curtis Wade Bourque Junior—everybody called him by his middle name so there wouldn't be two Curtises hollering across the same supper table. He was lean where Daddy was thick, restless where Daddy was rooted. He had our mama's sharp face and our daddy's stubbornness, and he wanted out of Delacroix the way a catfish wants out of a net—thrashing, constant, and with every part of his body.

LSU. That was the word that hung over every conversation in our house like a weather system. LSU, where he'd study engineering. LSU, where he'd become the first Bourque to get a degree. LSU, where the world was bigger than sixty-five feet of fiberglass and a season that ran from May to December.

Daddy never said he was against it. He just went quiet when it came up, the way the water goes quiet before a squall, and you could feel the pressure change in the room.

"Boy's got a right to his own life," Mama would say after one of those silences, loading the dishwasher with the kind of force that suggested she was loading an argument.

"Didn't say he didn't," Daddy would answer, and then he'd go out to the dock and check lines that didn't need checking.

I understood both of them without understanding either of them, which is the particular gift of being twelve and the youngest and a girl in a family that talked around things instead of about them.

The spring of 2010 started like every other spring. Daddy hauled the Evangeline Rose for bottom paint in February, replaced the starboard outrigger cable in March, and spent the first two weeks of April running test drags in the inside waters, coming home with mud on his boots and reports on shrimp counts that he delivered to Mama like a doctor delivering test results.

"Looking good," he said one night, standing in the kitchen doorway with a beer sweating in his hand. "Counts are up from last year. Water temp's right. We're gonna have a season, Renee."

Mama looked up from her filing cabinet, pushed her glasses up her nose, and smiled—a real one, not the polite smile she used for the insurance man or the school principal. "Then we'll have a season," she said.

I remember that smile. I've carried it with me like a photograph in a wallet, creased and fading but still legible, because it was the last time I saw my mama smile without something broken behind it.

My best friend was Tess Ancelet, a girl with a sunburn that never faded and a gap between her front teeth that matched my daddy's, though they weren't related. Tess lived two shell roads over in a house her grandfather Ray had built on pilings after Betsy, and her daddy, Leon, ran a smaller boat called the Miss Yvette out of the same marina. Tess and I had been friends since we were five, which in Delacroix meant we were practically sisters, which meant we fought like sisters, loved like sisters, and knew each other's houses as well as our own.

Tess didn't care about shrimp or boats or the water. She cared about horses, which was a strange thing to care about in a place with more mud than pasture, but she'd covered her bedroom walls with pictures torn from magazines and spent her weekends at a stable in Violet where a woman named Claudette let her muck stalls in exchange for riding time. Tess talked about horses the way my brother talked about LSU—like they were a door to a room she could already see but couldn't yet enter.

"You ever think about leaving?" she asked me once, lying on her back in the tall grass behind her house, watching pelicans wheel over the canal.

"Leaving where?"

"Here. Delacroix. All of it."

I thought about it. The marsh was humming with insects, and the air smelled like salt and something green and alive. "No," I said. "Where would I go?"

Tess rolled over and looked at me with an expression I didn't have a name for then but recognize now as pity. "Anywhere, Marley. That's the whole point."

I didn't understand her then. I thought loving a place meant staying in it. I thought roots were the same as anchors. I was twelve, and the water was still clean, and my daddy could still fill a logbook with numbers that meant something, and the Evangeline Rose sat at the dock like a promise the world intended to keep.

April 20, 2010, was a Tuesday.

I know because it was the day we had a math test on fractions, and I'd studied for it on the boat the night before while Daddy ran the last test drag of the preseason. I sat in the wheelhouse with my textbook open on the chart table, and Daddy quizzed me while he watched the depth finder.

"Three-eighths plus five-eighths," he said.

"One."

"Seven-sixteenths minus three-sixteenths."

"One-quarter."

"Good girl. You're smarter than me, you know that?"

"Mama says everybody's smarter than you."

He laughed—the boat-horn laugh—and the sound carried across the water and came back to us off the tree line, doubled. "Your mama's right about most things," he said. "Don't tell her I said that."

The next morning, before school, I heard the television in the kitchen. Mama was standing in front of it with a coffee mug in her hand, not drinking, just holding it like she'd forgotten what it was for. On the screen, an oil platform was burning.

The Magnolia Platform. Forty-one miles off the coast. A deepwater rig operated by Consolidated Deepwater Energy, a name that meant nothing to me then and everything after. The footage was shot from a supply vessel, and the platform looked like a birthday candle on the ocean—a single bright flame on a dark surface, impossibly far away and impossibly large at the same time.

"Curtis," Mama said, not turning from the screen.

Daddy came in from the hallway in his undershirt, toothbrush in his mouth. He looked at the television. He took the toothbrush out.

"Lord," he said.

"Eleven men," Mama said. "They're saying eleven men."

Daddy put his hand on the back of a kitchen chair and leaned on it, and I watched his knuckles go white. Eleven men. Roughnecks, roustabouts, toolpushers—the same kind of men who drank coffee at the marina and nodded to my daddy on the dock. Men who went offshore to work and were supposed to come home.

"Is it gonna be bad?" I asked.

Neither of them answered me, which was an answer.

The rig burned for two days before it sank. Then the oil started.

You've seen the footage, probably. The underwater camera, the plume of crude boiling up from the seafloor like something alive, like the earth had opened a vein and couldn't close it. But footage doesn't give you the smell. It doesn't give you the way the air changed in Delacroix over the next two weeks—first a faint chemical tang, like someone had spilled gasoline in the next room, and then something thicker, something that settled in your sinuses and wouldn't leave.

And footage doesn't give you the silence. The marina went quiet. The boats stayed tied. The VHF radios that usually crackled with chatter about water temps and shrimp counts went dead, and in their place came a new language: boom deployment, dispersant application, exclusion zone, claims process.

Daddy stood on the dock every morning for a week, watching the water. He didn't say much. He'd cross his arms and look south toward the Gulf, and his jaw would work like he was chewing on something he couldn't swallow.

On May 2nd, the state closed the fishing grounds.

I remember the exact moment Daddy heard, because I was sitting on the Evangeline Rose's stern doing homework when his phone rang. He answered it, listened for maybe thirty seconds, said "Yeah" twice, and hung up. Then he sat down on the engine hatch—the same spot where I used to watch him write in his logbooks—and he put his face in his hands.

I'd never seen my daddy put his face in his hands. I'd seen him gut a thousand pounds of shrimp without flinching, pull a treble hook out of his own palm with pliers, work through a tropical storm because the catch was too good to quit. Curtis Bourque did not put his face in his hands.

"Daddy?" I said.

He took his hands away. His eyes were dry, but something behind them had gone out, like a pilot light.

"Season's done, baby girl," he said. "Before it started."

He stood up, walked to the wheelhouse, and closed the door. I heard him in there, not crying, just breathing—heavy, deliberate breaths, like a man trying to keep his head above water.

That night at supper, nobody ate much. Mama had made a pot of red beans and rice, which was Monday food, but it was a Friday, and the wrongness of it sat on the table like a fifth place setting. The television was on in the living room, and every few minutes a news anchor's voice would drift in with words like catastrophic and unprecedented and worst environmental disaster, and Daddy would look toward the sound the way you look toward thunder.

"What do we do?" Mama asked. Not panicked. Practical. Renee Bourque was always practical.

"I don't know yet."

"Curtis, the payment on the boat is due the fifteenth. Insurance is due the first. We've got maybe six weeks of—"

"I said I don't know yet, Renee."

The silence after that was the kind that has weight. I could feel it pressing on my chest. Across the table, my brother sat with his fork halfway to his mouth, frozen, watching our parents the way you watch a glass balanced on the edge of a counter.

"I'll figure it out," Daddy said, quieter now. "I always figure it out."

But his voice had a crack in it I'd never heard before, thin as a hairline fracture in fiberglass, and I knew—the way you know weather is turning before the clouds show—that something fundamental had shifted.

The water we came from had turned against us, and we were not ready.