Larry hadn’t mentioned his own shoulder injury to anyone—it hadn’t seemed important enough—but he found that his injured shoulder hurt less if he cradled the right arm in his left, so that’s what he did. It didn’t occur to him to ask someone to make him a sling.
He went to the edge of the mound and gazed out at the plant, giant concrete and steel islands in the flood. It was the darkest night he could remember. There were no lights anywhere, none. Normally the station was ablaze at night, flood-lights illuminating the parking lots, air warning flashers on the cooling tower, the other buildings outlined by spotlights and illuminated offices. There were no lights on the river, no lights from nearby towns. The whole country had gone dark, and that meant the whole power grid was down. Not just Poinsett Landing, but everywhere for hundreds of miles around. As a consolation, perhaps, there were the stars. Larry had never seen so many—just looking up took his breath away. He could see the broad swath of the Milky Way, the red glow of Arcturus, the bright yellow gleam of some planet or other, probably Jupiter. The stars of the Corona blazed with an intensity he had never seen, and Cygnus and Aquila wheeled about the pole.
It was to a sky such as this, he thought, which ancient Britons had in homage raised the monument of Stonehenge.
His shoulder ached. The thought of Helen kept rising to his mind.
He needed something more to do.
THIRTEEN
…the river was now doing what it liked to do, had waited patiently the ten years in order to do, as a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.
The Mississippi is lazy between Cairo and Memphis, and in no hurry to reach its destination. It moves in long, swooping, snakelike curves, heading generally south, but also turning east, west, and sometimes north. At the New Madrid bend it manages to move in all four directions, one after the other. On occasion the river shortens its path. Sometimes the Mississippi, instead of taking a gentle curve around a bend or point, will decide to cut right through the point at its base, shortening its length and leaving, in its old course, one of the many picturesque oxbow lakes that ornament the Mississippi valley. On occasion the river has left a piece of Tennessee attached to Arkansas, or annexed a piece of Arkansas to the state of Mississippi.
Mark Twain, who noted that in his time the Mississippi shortened itself on average by a mile and a third per year, remarked that at this rate, in seven hundred years the Lower Mississippi would be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans would share their streets. Sometimes these shortcuts do not occur naturally, but are imposed on the river. Before the Civil War, some planters, resentful that their inland plantations were less valuable than those blessed with access to the river, brought their field hands out to the nearest point in the dead of night, armed with pick and shovel, to cut the river a new channel, giving themselves river access and stranding their neighbors on a newly formed oxbow lake. Sometimes these attempts succeeded. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes, whatever the outcome, the ambitious planter was shot dead by a neighbor firing in defense of his property values.
During the Civil War, General U.S. Grant tried to cut the river a new path across DeSoto Point in hopes that this would strand the rebel fortress of Vicksburg inland, making it useless to the Confederacy. He failed, but a few years later a flood rushed across his old works on DeSoto Point and carved the river a new path through Centennial Cutoff, ending Vicksburg’s access to the river until the Corps of Engineers restored it a quarter-century later.
Later, in the twentieth century, the Corps eliminated the four Greenville Bends—Rowdy, Miller, Spanish Moss, and Bachelor—shortening the Mississippi’s length by thirty miles and creating Lake Ferguson, named after the Army general who masterminded the project.
But these cutoffs were created artificially, attended by all the massive Corps engineering necessary to achieve a safe result and a deep, navigable channel.
When the river carves its own path, the result is less gentle. The path is cut across country, sometimes over a farmer’s fields, sometimes through stands of heavy timber. The channel is narrow at first, full of shoal water, and the Mississippi rages through it, the weight of the entire river turning it to foam. There are rapids and falls, and the channel is littered with trees, rocks, snags, and stumps. The bank on either side is continually eroded and falls in half-acre chunks into the water. Large steamboats were sometimes sucked out of control into these new channels, flung through the new-made chutes, and either dashed to pieces on obstacles or spat out spinning into the old river.
South of Cabells Mound, the flooding Mississippi had cut through the bend called Uncle Chowder’s, and the flood waters were about to drain through it as if someone had pulled a cork at the bottom of the river. The boat dropped down a precipice and hit a mass of glistening black water stern-first. A fan of spray rose high and fell into the boat. The impact knocked the breath out of Jason as he clung to the wheel. He never realized that water could be so hard.
The sound of the rapid was overwhelming, loud as the earthquake. Spray filled the air. Jason could feel the boat’s vibration up his spine, through his bones. A piece of wreckage—a whole tree, Jason realized—ground against the side of the boat, knocking it into a sideways lurch that brought another gush of spray into the boat. As the big tree surged past, tree limbs caught the bow and spun the boat around. Branches clawed at Jason’s face.
Jason hung onto the wheel and wished that the boat had seat belts.
The torrent whirled around him as the boat spun helplessly in the channel. Something slammed into the boat, sent it airborne for a few seconds, then dropped it into a hole. Jason gave a yell as the steering wheel punched his sternum. He had barely caught his breath before the boat took another bounce—this time off the bole of a cottonwood that was somehow still standing upright in the middle of the white water.
He wondered how long the boat could take this kind of pounding before it was beaten into a shapeless hunk of metal.
Retired and Gone Fishin’ careened down a chute of white water. The spray was so dense that Jason couldn’t tell if he was underwater or not—the boat might have capsized for all he could tell. At the bottom of the chute the boat hit something hard, and the impact threw Jason back away from the wheel, against the seat behind. The boat was spinning like a yo-yo at the end of its string. Jason clawed blindly for the metal wheel as the world rumbled and shuddered around him. He pulled himself forward onto the wheel again, felt the boat lurch madly to port. His inner ear spun. He opened his eyes and saw that the boat was tipped on its right side, that the starboard gunwale was underwater, that another ounce of weight added to rightward side of the balance could capsize her… Terror clutched at Jason’s heart. He flung himself to the left, threw his arms over the gunwale, tried to add as much weight as possible to the forces dropping the boat back onto an even keel.
The boat skated on its side for several long, terrifying seconds, then slowly began to tip to port. Jason gasped: he realized he’d been holding his breath. He slid back into the seat as the boat tipped, as its bottom slammed on water.
The terror ride continued: Jason clung on as the bass boat raced along between steep banks, smashed into rocks, trees, and less identifiable debris. Something huge and black loomed up—Jason realized it was a stranded river barge—and the boat slammed into it, grating along its rust-streaked side. Jason ducked as steel cable whipped over his head. And then there was one last, horrible grinding noise—the boat tipped on its port side, sending Jason clawing to starboard as a frantic counterweight—and then the boat was over the obstacle and was being pushed by the rushing river into wide, calm water. Jason gasped for breath as the roaring faded behind him. His heart pounded in his chest. He glanced around, saw nothing but starlight glinting off debris-filled water. There was six or eight inches of water in the boat, and no way to bail.