He raised a hand. “Mr. Magnusson?” he said. “What killed these fish?” Magnusson looked at him, grinned. “It wasn’t anything that’ll kill us, okay?”
“What was it?” Jason asked.
“Oxygen starvation,” Magnusson said. “They weren’t poisoned, they strangled to death. So we can eat them, okay?” He went on to explain that if the temperature and humidity were right, algae could grow in the catfish ponds. The algae used up all the oxygen, so the fish would die unless they could get oxygen. Joe Johnson, who owned the ponds, had died attempting to save his fish. The blue object was, in effect, a large blue outboard motor, electrically powered, with a propeller on the end. It was called an aerator, and its propeller acted to thrash air into the water so that the catfish wouldn’t die. When algae began to grow in his catfish ponds, Mr. Johnson had tried to start his aerator, but had electrocuted himself by accident, and his catfish had died before anyone noticed.
Stupid way to get killed, Jason thought through his weariness. But then, he thought, what was the intelligent way to die? Get blown up by your star?
Jason looked from the dead man to the acres of dead fish. “We’re not going to harvest them by hand, are we?”
Magnusson grinned. “Not exactly, no. We’ve got other plans for you.” In a few minutes a truck arrived, with a crane on its bed. A net was strung from the crane, and a team of men deployed the net along the far side of the pond. Then the crane hauled in the net, brimming with dead catfish, and dropped the fish into the back of one of the pickup trucks that had brought the work crews to the site.
“Right!” Magnusson called, and clapped his hands. “Everyone get on the slime line!” Jason realized with a certain listless revulsion that he was not expected to rescue the dead fish from the ponds, he was going to have to clean them afterward.
“Ten tons of fish!” Magnusson shouted. “And we’re going to save every pound, glory hallelujah!”
“Omar,” Tree Simpson said. His voice crackled over the radio in Omar’s police cruiser. “Omar, I’ve got some information for you. About Morris.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know, I thought I should maybe get the body X-rayed, to see if there were any bullets in it. But Dr. Patel’s little X-ray machine is out of commission, so what I did—I’m kinda proud of this, actually—was to borrow Joe Roberts’ metal detector. And when I passed it over the head, it started beeping. So I probed into the skull, and I came out with a deformed nine-millimeter round.”
“I took a nine millimeter into custody today,” Omar said. “From one of the rioters.” The gun would test negative, of course, because the pistol that killed Morris was sitting on Omar’s hip, but that didn’t signify. All that meant was that there was more than one armed bad man in the camp: more information with which to terrify the good people of the parish.
“It may be a while before we can send it to the state police to test it.”
“It’ll wait,” Omar said. “Thanks a bunch, Tree. This is real helpful.” Now he would tell Mrs. Morris that someone from the camp had killed her husband. He would put out a murder warrant for a man already dead, send out a bulletin, and then he would send deputies to everyone who lived around the camp, warning them of armed, murderous refugees. Don’t talk to anyone from the camp, they would say, just call the police and we’ll deal with them.
And then Omar would do what was necessary. He didn’t want to think about it yet, because it would mean the end of everything he had worked for.
But he knew he would face it when the time came.
Jason was given a knife and instructions on the filleting of a catfish, a task more difficult than it sounded. The dorsal spine had to be avoided, and the tough skin, which had no scales, had to be peeled off rather than scraped. The easiest way to accomplish this was to nail the fish’s head to a plank, then peel the skin off with a pair of pliers. Jason repeatedly demonstrated his incompetence at this task, so Magnusson reassigned him to another group that gutted the fish before the stronger, more experienced boys peeled them.
Others were getting the big smoker ready to smoke fish on an industrial scale, other fish were being salted, drying racks were being readied, and the kitchens were frying and baking fish as fast as they could be delivered.
Dinner was fried fish served with a ball of rice. For once Jason ate as much as he wanted. He suspected this generosity wouldn’t survive the current emergency, and though the fish half-nauseated him, he made himself eat as much as he could. The work went on after dark, by floodlights strung up on the poles that held the PA speakers. Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse, the weird artwork with its iridescent, hallucinatory rendition of biblical scenes, glowed in the light of the floods and provided an eerie backdrop to the toiling workers. The Reverend Frankland’s tones boomed from the speakers, either old recorded speeches about the upcoming Apocalypse or genial encouragement to everyone on the slime line. An exhausted cheer rose from the camp as the last of the fish was cleaned about one in the morning. Jason’s clothes were covered with blood and fish guts. He smelled like offal and his head swam with exhaustion. He’d cut his hands with the filleting knife, and no bandage would stick to him in the slime, so he just bled onto the fish until the wounds closed. He washed in a galvanized horse trough and threw himself onto the first piece of level ground that wasn’t already occupied by a stunned figure. If boys cried that night, Jason didn’t hear them.
The Earthquake. —A letter has been received in this city, from a gentleman of the first respectability in Tennessee, which states that the Earthquake, so generally felt on the 16th of Dec. was so violent in the vicinity of his residence, that several chimnies were thrown down, and that eighteen or twenty acres of land on Piney river had suddenly sunk so low, that the tops of the trees were on a level with the surrounding earth. Four other shocks were experienced on the 17th, and one or more continued to occur every day to the 30th aft., the date of the letter.
“It’s been lovely,” Wilona said. “Hard work, but lovely. I almost fainted when I helped Dr. Patel set that broken leg, but afterward Mrs. Ashenden said I was very brave.” She smiled. “And all the patients are so understanding. So kind. Even the ones who are in pain. They know we’re doing our best.” Omar listened to Wilona in silence while a headache beat through his temples. He had picked her up at the Clarendon camp and was driving her home for the night, after which he would drive back to his office and continue his planning session with Micah Knox.
“We’ve got about a dozen cases of diarrhea,” Wilona said. “There’s some kind of stomach bug going around. That’s the most disgusting thing we’ve had to deal with.” She gave a little laugh. “We had that with Davy when he was little, of course, but I’m out of practice. Look out!” she called. Omar swerved to avoid the figure of old Cudgel, off tramping the road alone at night. Omar caught a glimpse of the hermit’s yellow eyes in his lined, black, bearded face beneath his big hat. Cudgel carried a stick over his shoulder with some kind of dead animal dangling from it.
“Poor man,” Wilona said.
“He’s probably happier than most of us,” Omar said.
Omar and Knox had been discussing the situation at the A.M.E. camp when Wilona got off shift. Knox had been full of ideas. Knox really knew his stuff, Omar thought. Omar would never have thought of half those notions in a million years.
As Wilona spoke of her day, Knox sat in the back of the police cruiser without speaking. Omar could hear the faint sound of Knox’s fingertips tapping on his knees. Some part of Knox was always in motion, tapping to the furious speed of his mind. His distinctive scent—not just sweat from wearing flannel in hot weather, but maybe some weird kind of cologne, too—floated faintly to Omar in the front seat. Knox was like a weapon, Omar thought. It was as if he was purpose-built. Knox had nothing but his cause: no property, no family, no job, no hobbies, no one to love. He hardly seemed to sleep at night. It was as if God had made Knox solely for Spottswood Parish.