8

Bayou Ridge, Missouri

Meara came home to nothing. He'd become invisible both to the residents of the rural Missouri town where his folks farmed and to those who lived their sanitized lives “back in the world."

There were vague months in California, then a return east, a mission overseas with some other vets, and various and sundry warm bodies who'd hired on as mercs. It proved to be an abortion.

He kicked around for a few years until, in 1981, he was notified that his folks were now dead and what remained of the family farm was his. That was the first time he learned his dad had been dead for over two years. The three hundred acres were now a hundred and sixty, the best hundred and forty having been liquidated to pay bills. The rich bottom ground was gone.

The choice was simple enough: either sell off what little was left and blow the money, or try to eke out a living with the ground. And this was how Raymond Meara had become a farmer.

He'd been working on the fence that ran through the woods bifurcating his primary soybean ground and J.J. Devenny's farm. J.J. had a couple of horses and it seemed as if there was usually fence down someplace in the woods. If you farmed, there was always something to do, and in your free time you could try and keep your fences up. There was an old axiom—good fences make good neighbors.

The winter sun felt good. He laid the heavy spool of wire down and walked over to the door of the pickup, pulling out his battered billfold and counting money and checks onto the front seat. His badly worn wallet was stuffed thick with unpaid bills, important papers, receipts, even a check or two. His file box.

One hundred and forty-two dollars in cash. Doug Seifer's check for two hundred he'd been holding for a couple of weeks. He squinted at the post-dated numbers. He'd deposit it today when he went in to get the fan belt. The old John Deere was still running, that was something. He'd have to put some money on the seed bill. Hell, he thought, why not go ahead and pay it? Have to sooner or later.

Meara reached over with a grunt of effort and dug a stump of pencil out of the glove compartment, adding up numbers silently for a minute or so. Then he wrote down what he had left of the money from the gin, less what he'd been docked.

He crammed all the bills and paper back into the beat-up leather and shoved it back in his hip pocket. He might make it through the year without borrowing. If he hadn't added wrong. If he didn't eat anything. If his tractor didn't break down again. If the weather didn't conspire to screw him. If he got his wheat out and put in early beans behind it and if he could manage to keep the Johnson grass out and if his preemerge worked and if his poor ground'd hold still for yet another crop and if the gin didn't dock him too bad for moisture and if he could get this combined and that levelled and if...

The big if was the one on the letterhead of the Committee on Public Waterways in the U.S. House of Representatives. He snatched the pile of crumpled papers out again, spread them in front of him, and read that the chief of engineers, in the interest of “flood control, commercial navigation, and related purposes,” had been requested to undertake the Clearwater Trench Reconnaissance Study. It was an undertaking long since completed. Meara had heard their choppers over the farm a dozen times. His crumpled pile of papers included their assessment, and he looked at the line map that accompanied it.

The drawing was roughly in the configuration of a pistol with a misshapen trigger guard, the barrel of the gun beginning at the inflow point in Illinois, north of Cairo. The blue feature was the Mississippi River, as it traveled down past Columbus to the curving trigger guard, Bayou City. The sides of the pistol were a pair of levees: the set-back main line levee on the west, the front line levee to the east. The blue line divided Missouri from Kentucky as it headed south. Raymond's ground was pinched between the two levees, a small dot approximately where a screw would go on the grip of the pistol. Screw, to be sure, was the appropriate nomenclature.

The study's conclusions were that it was indeed feasible to divert floodwater from the mighty Miss by cutting, by means of high explosives, the front line levee and so allowing excess waters to bleed off into the relatively unpopulated lands north of the pistol's butt, Clearwater Trench. This act, however, would place Raymond Meara's bean and wheat fields at the bottom of the Mississippi.

He put the papers back where they belonged, thinking things couldn't get a whole lot worse, so they'd have to get better. But, once again, he was dead wrong.