The Rougarou's Lent

Chapter 1: The Undertaker's Niece

The first thing Odette Babin learned about the dead was that they were heavier than they looked.

Not in the metaphorical sense — though that was also true, and she would come to understand it in time — but in the plain, physical, hauling-a-body-off-a-wagon sense. A man who weighed a hundred and sixty pounds alive seemed to weigh two hundred dead. Something about the way the muscles released, the joints loosened, the whole architecture of a person surrendered to gravity as though the soul had been the only thing holding it upright.

She was nineteen years old, and she had been lifting the dead for three years.

The funeral home sat on Rue Principale in St. Cyprien, Louisiana, a narrow clapboard building painted white twice a year whether it needed it or not, because Remy Babin believed that a funeral home should look like a place where respectable things happened. The preparation room was in the back, behind a door that locked from the inside. The viewing parlor was in the front, with velvet curtains Odette beat clean every Monday and chairs she arranged in rows that looked like church but felt like waiting. Between the two rooms was the office where Remy kept his ledgers, his correspondence, his bottle of rye whiskey, and the silence he preferred to conversation.

Odette worked in all three rooms, but she belonged to the back.

That was where the truth lived.

"You wash him down first," Remy had told her on the first day, standing over the body of old Alphonse Guidry, who had died of pneumonia at eighty-one. "You wash him like he's your own grandfather. You wash him like somebody loved him. Because somebody did, even if they didn't always show it."

Odette had nodded, her hands shaking, and picked up the cloth.

She had not vomited. She had not cried. She had washed Alphonse Guidry from his gray hair to his yellowed toenails, and when she was done, Remy had looked at her and said, "You'll do."

That was the closest thing to praise Remy Babin ever offered.

He was her father's brother, ten years older and ten times quieter. Where her father, Clement Babin, had been a talker — a man who could sell you your own hat and make you feel lucky to buy it — Remy was a listener. He listened to the grieving widows and the angry sons and the guilty daughters. He listened to the priests who came to bless the bodies and the sheriffs who came to inspect them. He listened to the stories people told about their dead, and he nodded, and he made notes in a ledger that no one else was permitted to read.

The one rule, he told Odette. The one rule that keeps us trusted.

"Notice everything. Write down almost nothing."

Odette was very good at the first part.

She was getting worse at the second.

It was February 1921, and the bayou was swollen with winter rain. The cypress trees stood knee-deep in brown water, their roots like arthritic fingers gripping the mud. Spanish moss hung from every branch like the parish was in mourning, which, given the frequency with which Odette prepared bodies, it often was. St. Cyprien Parish was not a large place — perhaps three thousand souls spread across the town, the sugar plantations, the fishing camps, and the scattering of houses along the bayou roads — but it produced the dead with a regularity that kept the funeral home solvent.

People drowned. People got kicked by mules. People caught fevers that started as sniffles and ended as coffins. Old women died in their sleep, and young men died in their fights, and babies died for no reason anyone could name, which was the worst kind of dying because it left the mothers with nothing to blame but God, and God did not come to the funeral home to explain himself.

Odette handled them all.

She washed them. She dressed them. She combed their hair and closed their eyes and folded their hands. She boiled the instruments in the big copper pot on the stove and laid them out on clean cloth. She swept the preparation room floor, which was concrete and sloped slightly toward a drain that Remy had installed himself. She kept the ledger of expenses — the cost of embalming fluid, the cost of ice, the cost of fabric and thread and the small cotton plugs she packed into nostrils and ears.

She did not keep a ledger of what she noticed.

Not officially.

But in the back of her mind, and sometimes in the margins of her personal notebook — the one she kept under her mattress in the room above the funeral home — Odette recorded the things the dead told her.

The bruise on Madame Trosclair's wrist that looked like a handprint.

The needle marks on young Theo Landreneau's arm that his mother swore were mosquito bites.

The way Judge Duhon's wife had a broken collarbone that had healed crooked, years old, never reported.

Notice everything.

Write down almost nothing.

Odette was learning that "almost nothing" was a flexible concept, and that flexibility was beginning to feel like complicity.

But she said nothing about this to Remy, because Remy had taken her in when her father died, and Remy had given her a trade when the parish would have given her a broom and a rich man's kitchen to sweep, and Remy had never once told her she was too young or too female or too anything to do the work.

He had only told her to be quiet about it.

So she was quiet.

Until Aristide Boone came in on a Tuesday morning, pulled from the bayou by two fishermen who said they'd found him floating face-down near the old Arceneaux landing, and the quiet stopped being enough.

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Boone was a sugar broker. That meant he was the man who stood between the planters who grew the cane and the refineries that bought it, taking a percentage from both sides and calling it commerce. He was fifty-three years old, heavyset, with the kind of red face that came from whiskey and sun in equal measure. He wore good clothes — a linen suit, now ruined by bayou water, and shoes that had cost more than Odette earned in a month.

The fishermen had brought him in on a flatbed cart, wrapped in a canvas tarp that smelled of catfish and diesel. Remy had signed the receipt from Sheriff Prudhomme's deputy, a slack-jawed boy named Thibaut who couldn't have been more than seventeen and who turned green at the sight of the body and excused himself to vomit behind the azalea bushes.

Odette unwrapped Boone on the preparation table.

The official story was already circulating. Drink, dark water, bad luck. Aristide Boone had been at a card game at the Duhon house, had left after midnight, had apparently wandered to the bayou in a state of inebriation, and had fallen in. The current did the rest.

Odette began her wash.

She started with the face, as Remy had taught her. The face was what the family would see. The face needed to look peaceful, or at least as close to peaceful as death allowed. Boone's face was bloated but not yet decomposed — he hadn't been in the water long. His eyes were half-open, clouded, staring at nothing. She closed them with gentle pressure and placed cotton pads over the lids.

Then she moved to the torso.

The wounds were along his ribs, on the left side. Three of them, running parallel, each about four inches long. The official story would call them damage from the current — driftwood, rocks, the general violence of the bayou. But Odette had seen driftwood damage before. Driftwood tore. Driftwood scraped. Driftwood left ragged, irregular marks with splinters embedded in the flesh.

These wounds were clean.

Not surgical — not the neat lines of a scalpel — but deliberate. A blade with a curved edge, drawn across the ribs with enough force to part the skin but not enough to crack bone. Someone had been careful. Someone had wanted to hurt, not to kill.

Or someone had wanted to mark.

Odette stood very still, her hands wet, her cloth dripping onto the concrete floor.

Notice everything.

She noticed.

She moved to the coat, which Remy had hung on the hook by the door. The lining was torn at the bottom seam — not unusual for a man who'd been pulled through water, except that the tear was too even. She ran her fingers along the inside of the lining and felt something hard.

A tooth.

Not a human tooth. An animal tooth — a canine, perhaps an inch and a half long, yellowed with age. It had been carved. Someone had etched tiny marks along its length, marks that might have been decorative or might have been something else entirely. The tooth had been sewn into the coat lining with black thread, small stitches, the kind of work that took patience and purpose.

Odette held it up to the light.

A wolf's tooth.

She had seen wolf teeth before, strung on leather cords and worn by the old trappers who still lived in the deep bayou. They were talismans, good-luck charms, remnants of a time when wolves still roamed the Louisiana lowlands. But this one was different. This one had been placed inside a dead man's coat, hidden where no grieving widow would think to look.

Odette put the tooth in her apron pocket.

She finished the wash. She dressed Boone in the suit his wife sent over — a dark blue affair with brass buttons that made him look like a retired admiral rather than a sugar broker. She combed his hair and positioned his hands and stepped back to examine her work.

He looked respectable.

He looked like a man who had drowned by accident.

He looked like a lie.

Odette went to the office and opened the ledger. Under "Aristide Boone," she wrote: "Cause of death: drowning (accidental). Body received in fair condition. Prepared for viewing per family request."

She did not write about the wounds.

She did not write about the tooth.

But she went upstairs to her room and opened her notebook and wrote both things down in the small, careful handwriting she had learned from her father, who had been a man of letters before he became a man of debts.

Then she sat on her bed and looked at the wolf's tooth in her palm and thought about Aristide Boone, who had been one of the men who loaned her father money at rates that would have made a Shreveport banker blush, and who had then taken the Babin land when repayment became impossible, and who had built a warehouse on the spot where Odette's childhood home had stood.

The same men who called themselves pillars of the parish had always had a way of standing on other people's backs.

Odette closed her fist around the tooth.

She did not feel sorry for Aristide Boone.

But she wanted to know who had killed him, and why, and whether the answer would change anything about the parish that had made her an orphan and an undertaker's apprentice before she was old enough to vote.

Downstairs, Remy was pouring himself a glass of rye.

Outside, the bayou was rising.

And across the water, in the attic of the great house called Belle Rivière, an eleven-year-old boy named Milo Latiolais was dreaming of a wolf.