(Power by Joseph McFadden cont.)

Then there was the drainage ditch. To rid the fields of flooding, he aligned it, too, straight into the swamp. The whole community gathered to watch as the dynamite ripped a seam progressively across the land in a walking blast, and before the last clod fell back to the ground, the swamp aroused and slowly began to drain itself, flowing backward into the new field ditch. He would have to blast half a mile through swamp he did not own and through the river bank to drain it the other direction. Watching him silently, Mabel hung her head and grieved. Willard now had two fields instead of one, and a never drying ditch of mud to prove his abilities.

She always wanted him to make peace with the land, just plant it where it waits to be planted, go around the stumps, leave the swamp alone. There would be plenty for everyone if land is allowed to produce in its own way. She tried to reason with him. He made no reply, gritting his teeth, his face closed and white with anger, his blue eyes flinty.

She thinks surely this must be the Chickasaws' revenge against the white man who took their abundant land, and now ruin it trying to grow money: The beavers, the buzzards, the deer, the snakes, the weeds, the bushes and trees, the rats and mice, so laboriously pushed aside, infringe the edges, awaiting the first opportunity for resurgence, to retake the land.

Mabel cherishes their little spot because it alone still nurtures the virgin pine and oak and cypress, while the countryside surrounding their domain lies ravished by rapacious waste, the timber destroyed: Heart pine used for stove wood; heart oak split and burned; the streams muddied; the animals and fowl slaughtered. The surrounding rolling hills of red clay once covered in a silky loam from centuries of plant compost now lie denuded by erosion, gully washed, fallow, barren, packed brick hard in summer, turning to slick gummy mud almost impassible in wet weather; and the bottom land clay, gray and sticky, packed into rock-hard clods. Only rain and floods can dissolve them. This land does not tolerate abuse, and remains tricky and capricious even in gentle and frugal hands. She hopes Willard will not get a notion about the trees and do something to destroy them.

Mabel has been bent now a little more each year by the relentless cycles: The weather burns crops to wilted stalks or floods the bottom land to tassel height in the midst of summer rains; diseases take people indiscriminately; insects wipe out entire fields overnight; weeds defeat the strength of any creature with a bent for labor. The land reduces men, who must depend entirely on it in the blazing heat, to torpor and rapacious indolence. This sorry state earns them the sobriquet: red-neck. Willard has an income, a steady little government income. But he never puts it in her frugal hands, so he has a penny more or less to place him a step above those who live by crops alone. With this edge of power he throws himself and his resources into the incessant labor of controlling the land. She feels the warnings of despair and her resistance dying.

Mabel understands another Willard ambition: He not only wants to be known for his success with the farm which he imagines and dreams of showing the community, but also to be known as a good man. So he will stop whatever he is doing, leaving his own work undone, to do a neighbor a favor regardless of what his own family needs. He believes people say, Willard Mills? Now, never a finer man ever lived. Why, he would give you the shirt right off his very back. Willard belongs to the misguided horde of the obscure who try to obtain with insubstantial beneficence a recognition money won't buy.

After the ditch, in Willard's dynamite phase, Mabel thought maybe he would stop, the ditch running straight as an arrow now into the swamp, silvery with a ribbon of water standing permanently across the field. But he then turned to other ideas and moved closer to the house. Her silence deepened, her alarm increased. He went to another part of the recurrent dream, a pecan orchard. He would plant one, but he would first dynamite each hole to loosen the soil so the tree roots could grow. "Willard, how do you think all the trees in this world grew before you came along with dynamite?" she asked. But he blasted the soil anyway. He bored holes very deep, far deeper than he would plant the roots, and the charges only made the earth rumble and shake, and blew nothing into the air. All the pecan trees, transplanted with great effort, died even though he hauled water in an old rusty oil drum from the creek in the dry days of summer and poured it by hand around the roots, sweating, toiling in the heat. But he would not give up.

--#--

<= Page 4    5    Page 6 =>