Old Powder Man (12 page)

Son ran his tongue around his gums looking for a fleck of tobacco that had been worrying him. Finding it, he stuck out his tongue, removed the fleck, and said, “Is that so?”

Other times Poppa lost businesses he had not told until it was too late; Son knew it would be too late now. If he asked why Poppa had not spoken earlier, he would say what he always did: he hadn't wanted to be a bother.

Son said, “What are you going to do now, old man?”

Poppa looked around as if he might find the answer in the confusion of yellow on white that was the wall paper, and his eyes grew moist. Son said quickly, “I can hep you out some. Hep you find something else.”

“I thought maybe a little grocery,” Poppa said. “If I could just work in a little grocery somewhere, I believe I could do all right.” Medicine was helping a kidney infection the doctor had found, had lessened both his dizziness and his sleepiness. Poppa considered himself on the road to recovery, but the doctor held back. Something in his hesitancy, in the set of his mouth, had kept Poppa from telling he had even been to a doctor. Only noticing that he had a little more get-up-and-go, Cally had told him so.

Son asked if he had told Mammy about the store. By a slight lift of one shoulder, Poppa indicated he had. Cally called them to supper and the new boarder was with her. Kate Jefferson, Cally said, and was happy introducing Son, sensing he and Poppa had been talking about what she had wanted them to. When Son came forward to shake hands, to hear Kate had come all the way from North Carolina to teach school, Cally, looking at him, thanked him silently for help. Kate said she had heard a lot about Son; she was glad to meet him. He did not notice too much about her, except that she was tall.

In the next few days Son, like everyone, thought only about the flood and not once about the golf course job. Daily, he and Scottie watched from the office window as the river rose, and finally crested close to fifty feet. From the Delta and as far away as Kentucky, refugees who had been plucked from tree tops, roof tops and the highest windows of buildings, were brought into the city. Son watched as bus loads of people stared at him with faces acknowledging their homelessness and sometimes hunger, holding in little bundles all they now possessed. It sure looked, he said, like the Government was going to have to take over flood control; levees people had now just couldn't do the job. Always, people living in the lower valley had had a solitary struggle to protect themselves and their settled land from high water. Unbelievably long, flood control had been left to chance and isolated local effort.

And always there had been floods, old Red Johnson said; he spent much of his time now reading the valley's history. He told that De Soto, searching for gold in 1543, had been delayed by a flood lasting forty days, and La Salle, exploring for the French, had found much of the valley under water. Both men had noted mounds the Indians lived on in spring when the river annually overflowed. Everyone stayed at the Army Engineers office, talking. Red said one afternoon as bad as this flood was, it didn't represent the old river's full flood potential. “Someday,” he said, “all the rivers going to flood at the same time, you watch.” Terrible as that day would be, he could not help a look of amusement. He called the names of the rivers, relishing them: O-hio, Red, White, the Mo, Tenny-see, Cumberland, Arkansas, upper too.

“Jesus,” Son said, unable to picture anything that bad happening, yet knowing it could. He drove into the Delta with Red and Shut-eye to view damage. Shut-eye called the river hongry. “That river's hongry,” he said. “Always going to be.” The land would not drain even in time to plant ridges, higher ground; a year's worth of crops were lost. Red said, “Before levee days, the river's natural flow-way was forty miles wide. It overflowed and met all the other rivers overflowed and it was all high water then, just high water five or six months out of the year.”

“Naw,” Son said, not skeptically but in astonishment. Then Red went on to tell about the first levees, how the French built them after settling New Orleans in 1717. (Son never had thought about any Frenchmen having to do with anything he had to do with.) In the Delta, where now they stood, the first levees had been built by slaves after a war with Mexico when the cotton plantations were beginning to flourish; afterward slaves were too valuable to risk in malarial swamps beneath the broiling Delta sun. Irish were imported from ports, New Orleans, Cairo, St. Louis, and continued the work using wheelbarrows, the slaves' only implements. Muckers, Son said. By 1890, yellow fever had driven them from the Delta forever: the unmarked graves of those left behind made clear the early railroad and levee lines.

Shut-eye drove them back home. Son settled in the living room with a snack of cheese and crackers and opened the afternoon paper to read that if the flood had been confined, water would have reached almost sixty feet everywhere, nearly seventy in some places. Existing levees had not even been designed to hold such water. Water in such volume had not even been thought of. The newspaper printed a chart, a brief flood history. Having listened to Red so much, Son read it with unusual attention:

1844
: one of the valley's worst floods; the following year, at a convention in Memphis, John C. Calhoun termed the Mississippi River an “inland sea” and claimed it a proper object of Federal interest. Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, Thomas H. Benton advocated Federal flood control. But aid for navigation would come sooner.

1849
and
1850
: the valley was hit by severe spring storms causing numerous levee crevasses. The Government showed a slight awareness of its suffering: passed a Swamp Act granting states unsold swamp land within their borders, funds from sales to be used for flood control projects. But lack of cooperation between states and levee districts involved caused the plan to fail.

1851–1858
: prosperous years for the Delta; but in the latter year and in 1859 floods severely damage the levees, now a straggling and broken line from New Orleans to Memphis. Delta people clamored for one unbroken line from the Chickasaw Bluffs of Memphis to Vicksburg, but the Civil War halted all progress.

1862
: levees were damaged by military operations and a flood; no men remained at home to repair them. The following February, Grant, to reach Vicksburg, ordered a mine exploded in the Yazoo Pass levee. Additional levees were cut to overflow Confederate guns on low embankments. Toward the war's end a flood severe and remarkable in duration caused more than a mile of levee to cave into the river. After the war communities struggled to rebuild but by 1878 hundreds of miles of main line levees had disappeared or were worthless because of crevasses.

1879
: Congress established a Mississippi River Commission to mature plans and estimates that would correct and permanently locate, deepen the channel, and protect the banks of the river. “To improve and give safety and ease to the navigation thereof; prevent destructive floods; promote and facilitate commerce, trade, and the postal service …”

1880
: the Commission submitted its first report. Congress has appropriated a million dollars for the construction of improvement works under the Commission's jurisdiction; the bill states specifically that funds are to be spent only for deepening or improving the river's channel. This marks the begining of a coordinated levee system for the lower Mississippi. However, expenses are limited to levee construction as part of navigation. This will hold true for thirty-five more years.

1882–1903
: seven major floods inundate the lowlands. Levee work begun in 1882 under the Commission marks the beginning of actual construction of a coordinated levee system.

1912–1913
: severe floods in both years, the former causing $40,000,000 worth of property damage. The President requests from the Commission a report on methods of flood prevention; levees, reservoirs, cutoffs, outlets, diversion channels and reforestation are to be considered. Despite the report, Congress took no action toward authorizing a flood control plan for the entire alluvial valley. The Commission's work continued to be limited to repairing levees and keeping the navigation channel open.

1916
: another severe flood results in the first Federal Flood Control Act.

1917
: on March 1, the Act is approved. The control of levees for flood becomes by law a definite part of the Commission's work and responsibility. The Act authorizes the construction of levees for the control of floods but affirms the policy of local cooperation; local interest should contribute not less than one-half the construction cost, in addition to furnishing rights-of-way. Local interest was charged with the maintenance of levees once the work was completed. The Commission was allowed to spend Federal funds for work on tributaries as necessary to protect the upper limits of any alluvial basin from flooding. Under this act many miles of levees were constructed, but the end result was unsatisfactory. Local interests could not meet the responsibilities; a fifty-fifty split with the Government of the costs of flood control was more than the local districts could handle.

1922
: during March and April almost every stream east of the Rockies is in flood. Inundation into the Mississippi Valley continued into May and June.

1923
: a second Flood Control Act is passed further clarifying the River Commission's jurisdiction.

1927
: the valley has suffered the most disastrous flood in its history.

Son, having finished the chart, sucked at crackers caught in his back tooth and glanced at the rest of the front page; all articles had to do with the flood. Physical loss had been estimated at $236,000,000 read one headline and another that such disparate groups as the American Investment Bankers and the American Legion had taken up the clamor for the Government to accept flood responsibility. Advocates of Federal flood control argue that waters from as far east as New York and as far west as Montana contribute toward floods in the valley. Only the might and wealth of the whole country can attempt to hold back the Mississippi, they say. The flood has shown that a levee system as the only method of flood control is inadequate. The curving channels of the river increase flood in high water. The river does not stay in a fixed channel; it meanders. Those for Federal control argue further that national benefits will come from it; it will add to overall prosperity. They say that the Government has accepted responsibility for navigation, built revetments to restrain low water so ships can move on the river always. Why does it not maintain levees which restrain high water? Those opposed, sectional-minded men, claim that once the Federal Government assumes all financial burden, a maximum demand for flood protection will result. Local adjustment will reduce itself to a minimum.

Son folded the paper and stood up. Lillian had called him to dinner but he stopped to answer the telephone. Buzz was calling with news he had just heard on the radio: the President was sending a Cabinet member to take direct part in rescue and rehabilitation, an act without precedent.

Several days later, having surveyed the area, Secretary of Commerce Hoover declared it to be the worst disaster of peacetime. Water had breached the levee in two hundred places and had inundated approximately twenty thousand square miles of Mississippi River bottomland. Still, the major cost of the flood was to be borne by the citizens. But Son, Red, most of the Engineers now thought that feeling was running so high the Government would have to recognize the unfairness of the valley spending its own millions to hold back the floodwaters of a nation and would relieve it of its long burden, at last.

Son always told that he certainly thought that was the extent of his interest, that he never had any more idea than a flea the flood would touch him personally. When the entire city of New Orleans was threatened, he was mostly interested because the Engineers wanted to blast a levee below it to draw away water. The blast would wipe out entirely one small country parish. There, a great protest went up from the farmers and fishermen, declaring it unfair they be ruined to save the city and its people. Let the city go under, they said. But permission came from Washington for the blast and the papers were full of pictures of angry farmers leaving their homes forever, carrying their most valuable possessions; these were cabbages and heads of lettuce for some, hastily pulled, loaded into bushel market baskets. Levee work for Son took on a scope and feeling it had not had before.

The first attempt at blasting the levee was unsuccessful. Only a small amount of water was forced through. Son went to bed that night after the radio announced the Engineers planned to try again. Much later, he answered the telephone to hear a voice, with an unfamiliar drawl, telling him something he could not follow until suddenly, understanding, he knew he had heard it all. The second attempt at blasting the levee had failed. The Engineers were desperate for dynamite to attempt a third time, and they needed it by morning. Delton was the closest source of supply and Son the only man they could reach at night; the voice, belonging to a Major General in the Corps of Engineers, apologized for the time of night. “Hell,” Son said. “I'm in business. How much powder you want? What train you want it on?”

“Thousand pounds,” the Major said, having no idea of the astonishment that filled Son. He was already out of bed and had removed his pajamas and telephoned Mr. Ryder as soon as the Major hung up, not even wondering whether Mr. Ryder would go to the magazine at this hour of the night. He heard surprise in Mr. Ryder's voice and thought, Hell, he had to sell that dynamite and the man was working for him. “It's Frank Wynn,” he said.

Mr. Ryder always spoke in a soft, faint voice; now it seemed fainter. “Mr. Wynn?” he said.

Son said, “Mr. Ryder, those folks down in New Orleans need some dynamite bad. The Army's arranging for me to put it on the five o'clock train. They want a thousand pounds and, Mr. Ryder, I need to sell that dynamite. If I meet you out to the magazine, can we load the truck, can you take it to the depot? Hell, if you can't, I will!”