Bayou Hymnal
Three stories from the water country south of New Orleans, where the fog comes in with the tide and the church bell rings on its own.
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A camp on Bayou Lafourche where the radio only plays one station, and the station only plays one voice. A church in Pointe-aux-Chênes whose bell rings every night at the hour the old building flooded. A crab trap that comes up full of things that were lost, and a fisherman who cannot stop checking it. Three quiet horror stories from the edge of the Louisiana marsh, where the land is going and something is coming in to take its place.
The radio at my uncle’s camp on Bayou Lafourche only got one station, and the station only ever had one man talking on it. He read fishing reports. Wind southeast ten to fifteen, seas two feet, speckled trout biting on the outgoing tide by the Grand Isle bridge. He had a slow voice and he never played music and he never said the call letters. The summer I was fifteen I noticed he was reading the reports for the next day. Then I noticed he was right. My uncle told me not to talk about it, and to
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About the author
S. L. Marchand
I spent thirty years in the engine rooms of Mississippi riverboats, mostly at night, mostly alone with a lot of machinery that knocked when it wanted attention. You learn to listen down there. You learn that a river has moods and a boat has opinions. I retired to a shotgun house in the Bywater with a porch, a fig tree and a neighbor who tells me every ghost story she has ever heard, twice. My books are not about blood. They are about the sound in the wall that stops when you stand up, and the streetcar that comes by one stop too many. I write at the kitchen table after midnight, which my wife says is the problem.
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