Marshland Trinity

Marshland Trinity (Win or Lose, Ink, 1997) contains the two short novels Marsh Passage(Tranasse) and The Lost Ones (Les Perdues) originally published as the award-winning Marshand Brace by LSU Press in 1982 plus the short novel In a Kingdom of the Moon (Dans Rayuame de la Lune).

Taken together, they encapsulate the Acadian (Cajun) experience of the tumultuous 1950s.

In the first story, an aged trapper engages in a solo pursuit of a murderer through the vast marshes where he has lived and worked for a portion of every year since he was born. It is a journey of endurance, reflection, danger and -- even in his advanced years -- personal growth arriving at a dramatic realization of the true natural relationship between life and death.

In the second story a boy reaches manhood in a dramatic discovery of the intrinsic values of family, culture, cherished customs yet the inevitability of change. His struggles include contradictory messages in a Catholic school before Vatican II, a society increasingly dominated by post-World War II developments and the suppression of his native language. The tale culminates in a dramatic confrontation of his father and an uncle over a dark family secret during a an attempted roundup of wild cattle on a remote island.

The last story is told from the point of view of a young Cajun boy estranged from his native bayou country with his family on the grounds of a state mental asylum. Through extraodinary circumstances, he and his family are thrust to center stage in a drama involving fraud, McCarthyism and fallout from the Korean War.