From The Delta Mud."

[Bigguy]

"Don't drop him!" the chief hollered. He dropped the gaff pole and fell to his knees trying to grab John's body as it came floating past. Getting his first look, the chief almost repeated Frank's reaction. He did manage to hang on and pulled what was left of John on deck just as the captain approached from forward.

The captain's hands shook as he took the radio from the chief. "Bob," he said, voice quavering. "forget the barges. We've got a dead man here. Head for ..." He stopped as he tried to think of the closest landing.

"Rosedale harbor is ten miles back." came Bob's voice on the radio.

They had passed Rosedale harbor almost eight hours ago. Now, with the current working with them instead of against them, they could be back there in a little more than an hour. "OK then," said the captain weakly. "Rosedale harbor."

[Bigguy]

— — —
Of the eight barges McNeece had been pushing, two were grounded immediately after the accident. The dropping water eventually left them hard aground, waiting for the salvage crew. Two of the three still attached to McNeece were tied up along the bank and were also later recovered by salvage crews. The fourth was kept faced up to McNeece and accompanied her home. Two more were swept back through Victoria bend and later recovered by boats down stream. The last barge, carrying the unusual cargo of two human legs and forty-thousand pounds of fertilizer took a different path. It was swept well out of the channel above the bend, but somehow missed the sandbars and mud flats. The water at record height, carried it behind a hill along the bank that was usually 20 feet above the river. A small tree at the mouth of the inlet was pushed under by the passing barge, then popped back up effectively hiding it.


The McNeece, occupied with other problems never looked for it. By the time the towing company sent salvage crews out, the barge was aground, twenty-feet up the bank, behind a hill, three miles further upriver than anyone expected it to be. The towing company filed a claim and left the problem to the insurance company. The insurance company expected the barge to eventually be found by a towboat. As the weeks passed and there was no sign of it, they assumed that it must have sunk. The fertilizer would have been ruined, and the barge didn't represent enough value in scrap metal to be worth searching for, so they just wrote it off as a loss. Vines and creepers grew up around the metal structure. Eventually spindly trees flanked it and it became a thing of the land.

[Bigguy]

That is the end of the prologue. If you found it interesting, you can find the book on Amazon:
From The Delta Mud.



From The Delta Mud.

[Bigguy]

I was originally only going to post the prologue, but as the story takes place 30 years later, I've decided to post the first chapter as well.
I hope you enjoy it as well.

[Bigguy]

Chapter 1

February 2020

The wind was coming from the southeast, blowing against the current of the southbound water. The Mississippi river was narrow here, and the current was faster than at other spots along its path. The wind blowing against the current created a choppy surface that was pounding the bottom of the flat bottom aluminum boat. The thirty horse Mercury Engine pushed the light craft along at almost twenty miles-per-hour at bone jarring pace.

Tom kept the throttle wide open as he nosed the boat back toward the west bank and into smoother water. He was still a quarter of a mile above his objective, but he had no intention of landing any closer. He didn't want to draw unwanted attention to that particular spot. He nosed the boat up behind a revetment out of easy sight from the river, tied it up and climbed out. He slung a small haversack over his shoulder, then headed for a spot down river where there was small draw on the backside of a large sandbar.

This was a fairly isolated area, an island just south of the old White River on the Mississippi River. It was accessible only by boat or plane. Most of the land here was owned by a timber company, but leased to a hunting club. Several well paved roads crossed the irregularly shaped island as well as a short, but paved airstrip. Crops were planted in a couple of small fields. Tom suspected the crops were to provide food and enticement to deer rather than for the purpose of harvest. People didn't just wonder in without an invitation. It also meant that Tom, lacking an invitation, had to be careful about his coming and going.

[Bigguy]

At night he would have just walked down the sandbar, but it was still early afternoon so he stayed in the woods to avoid being seen. In this low wetland, any opening was quickly filled with some green thing hungrily devouring every photon the sun offered. Even at this time of year there were enough leaves still on the trees, though most of them were brown, to obscure any view into the woods. The bramble along the tree line at the back of the bar was almost a solid wall. Just a few yards into the woods, it was fairly open. This space was taken up by the trunks of gum, cottonwood and cypress trees. A few vines clung to them trying to climb above the leafy canopy to reach sunlight. Walking here was easy, and Tom was safe from being seen by anyone on the river.

His black rubber boots didn't leave footprints in the spongy ground. He sloshed through some brackish puddles, and went around others that were deeper than his boot tops. Eventually the ground between him and the river began to rise. He came to a place where the thicket on the rising land was most dense. Tom knew the reason for this was because there was a slash, or draw into the hill from the river side providing sunlight. The ground here was also more fertile than usual.

He had cut a path through the thicket, but purposefully left the opening to it grown up and hard to spot. He didn't want anyone who might be hunting this area to see it. He found the opening and made his way up the path, over the top of the hill and down into the draw.

Even standing within arm's length of its metal side, the barge was hard to see. It was completely covered in dense growth. Small trees were growing up around it and they in turn were thickly covered with vines. Detritus from dead tree limbs and vines were piled up the sides to a height of two-and-a-half feet. What little metal was visible through the tangle was rusted an earthy reddish brown.

[Bigguy]

Tom walked around one end of the barge to the river side. Here a small inward swinging door was hidden behind a stack of limbs and vines. He had stumbled across this little retreat five years ago when everything else in his life had gone to pot. At that time, he still owned a machine shop and was still married. He had fished here for decades, and the large sandbar on the west bank provided a large clear place to layout trot lines and barrel nets. Tom had frequently used it for that purpose. He had been unaware of the draw and the barge until one day when the call of nature and modesty had driven him into the thicket at the back of the bar. He had finished his business, then looked with wonder at the barge.

It was so well hidden, it almost seemed to have been placed there on purpose. He couldn't imagine how it had been moved to this spot. The River would have had to have been at record height for it to have floated in. However, it came to be here, it was obviously abandoned. Hundreds of bags of fertilizer were piled on top. Many of the outer bags in the pile had split and their contents had poured out enriching the surrounding soil, promoting the vigorous growth of concealing vegetation. But hundreds of bags in the center of the pile remained unopened. The fertilizer was ammonium nitrate, originally in the form of white granules. Over time, the granules had melded together until each bag was basically a fifty-pound plastic wrapped block.


At the time he discovered it, Tom needed money. He considered trying to sell the fertilizer, but after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, ammonium nitrate was no longer just fertilizer. Someone suddenly trying to sell tens of thousands of pounds of it would certainly attract attention. Ultimately, he could never find a discrete way of selling it and eventually gave up on the idea.

[Bigguy]

The metal of the barge was another commodity he intended to use. The business he owned was a farm equipment repair shop. He worked with a lot of metal, and selling scrap would not have been a problem. He began bringing tools, a cutting torch, and welder out to the spot a few items at a time. He always came after dark and only carried what he could unobtrusively stow in his boat on any one trip.

He cut the door into the barge to have a place to store his tools, out of the weather.
 Before he had the chance to start actually cutting up the barge, things with the business had gotten worse. When it became obvious he was going to lose the shop, he decided to leave the barge where it was. He could start selling scrap after things settled down. He certainly wasn't going to bust his butt bringing it in, just to lose it to the bank. He also wasn't going to bring the welder and other tools back for the bank to get.

He even moved more equipment out to the spot, including a generator. When he had moved everything he intended to keep hidden to the barge, he busted into the shop one night then claimed the place had been robbed. No one believed him of course, but they couldn't prove otherwise. He stayed away from the barge for six months to be sure that no one following him would find it. During that time the bank foreclosed. He lost the business, his house, his car, and the wife who couldn't follow him into poverty.


[Bigguy]

Jennifer was a beautiful woman. She had definitely been out of his league throughout high school. She was what he and his friends had called a "high maintenance" woman. She had dated the most popular boys from well to do farm families. By senior year, she was attached to Marshall Bennington.

The elder son of the wealthy Bennington clan, Marshall attended college at an Ivy league school and spent his summers in Washington as an intern. Jennifer, from a less well off family, attended a more humble in-State school. Even though separated, she foolishly thought Marshall was hers. She believed that after college they would be married. Marshall did nothing to dissuade her belief. He was stringing her along, to keep her available for when he was in town.

He stayed in Washington for a year after college. Jennifer finally learned why he refused to bring her to the Capitol with him when his wedding announcement came out. He married the daughter of a powerful Senator, and Jennifer became something unusual in southeast Arkansas. A beautiful 23-year-old single woman.


[Bigguy]

Tom had taken a different path. Coming from the lower end of the social spectrum, college had never been a consideration for Tom. But uneducated doesn't equal stupid. In fact, Tom was brilliant. As expected, he went to work as a farmhand right out of high school. His gift with machinery quickly became apparent, and he began earning extra money doing repairs. Tom enjoyed working with machinery.

He lived modestly at first. Most of his contemporaries spent their money on alcohol and loose women, Tom's went into tools and equipment. In little more than a year after high school, Tom owned a modestly equipped machine shop and had developed a reputation as a miracle worker. Farmers would gladly pay Tom a couple of thousand dollars to coax another year or two of life out of a piece of equipment that would cost a hundred-thousand dollars or more to replace. He was highly paid for his labor, and had more business than he could accept. Farmers were actually competing with each other to get their equipment into Tom's shop.


As the years went by, a subtle yet profound change occurred in the general perception held of, and by Tom. He was no longer a farmhand. He was now a business man. In the feudal society of agrarian Arkansas County, it represents the difference in peasantry and nobility.
 Tom was invited to join the Farmers and Businessmen's club. It was an organization that, in form and function, followed the Chamber of commerce found in more urban areas. Its members were also members of the boards of directors for the banks, business, and cooperatives in the area. These were the people who controlled the economy and destiny of the region, and Tom was now a junior member. In his youth Tom had accepted his place in the social order, never expecting or seeking the respect of the "high fluting," folks. Now, their opinions began to matter.

He bought a large house that had potential as a fixer-upper. He began attending the Methodist church because it was where most of the Farmers and Businessmen went. He received and accepted invitations to Sunday school parties, and through the people he met there, was eventually invited to join the country club. That was when things really changed, and two people he had know only distantly became entangled in his life