The River

Parish

Chapter 5: The River

The Mississippi River at Vidalia, Louisiana, is not a river in the way that people who have not seen it imagine a river. It is not a stream enlarged. It is not water flowing between banks in the manner of the creeks and bayous that feed it, the tributaries that enter the Mississippi the way confessions enter Clem, from the side, from the periphery, adding their volume to the main channel that carries it all south. The Mississippi at Vidalia is a force. It is 2,320 miles of continental drainage compressed into a channel that is, at this point, approximately half a mile wide and 100 feet deep, the depth being the thing that people who stand on the levee and look at the river do not understand, because the surface of the river is flat, deceptively flat, the brown water moving south at a speed that appears leisurely but that is, in fact, four to six miles per hour, and the speed multiplied by the width multiplied by the depth equals a volume of water that is beyond human comprehension, 600,000 cubic feet per second in a normal May, which is more water than most rivers carry in a week, and the Mississippi carries it every second of every minute of every hour, and the carrying is relentless, and the relentlessness is the river's defining characteristic, the thing that makes the river not a feature of the landscape but the landscape's author.

The river made the parish. This is not metaphor. This is geology. Concordia Parish exists because the Mississippi River deposited the sediment that formed the land that the parish occupies. The flatness of the parish is the flatness of a floodplain, the alluvial plain that the river built over millennia by flooding, by overtopping its banks and spreading across the lowlands and depositing the silt and the clay and the sand that it had carried from Montana and Minnesota and Ohio and Illinois and Missouri and all the other places that drain into the Mississippi, the river being the continent's gutter, the low point to which everything flows, and the flowing carries the soil, and the soil, deposited, becomes the land, and the land becomes the parish, and the parish is the river's gift.

The gift comes with conditions.

Clem drives along the levee on a Wednesday morning in late May. He has finished his morning calls — a lame horse in Ferriday, a sick calf outside Clayton — and he is driving north on Louisiana 65, the highway that parallels the river, the highway separated from the river by the levee, the levee being the parish's primary infrastructure, more important than the roads or the bridges or the power lines, because the levee is the thing that keeps the river in its channel and the parish on its land, and the keeping is not natural but engineered, the levee being the human answer to the river's nature, which is to flood.

The levee at Vidalia is thirty-two feet high, measured from the landside base to the crown. It is built of compacted clay and soil, the clay sourced from borrow pits that scar the landscape on the landside, the pits being the negative space that the levee required, the taking-from-here-to-build-there that all construction requires, the landscape bearing the scars of its own protection. The levee's crown is wide enough for a vehicle, and Clem drives on it sometimes, drives along the top with the river on his right and the parish on his left, the river brown and wide and moving and the parish green and flat and still, and the stillness of the parish is the levee's gift, the stillness that the levee provides by standing between the moving water and the stationary land.

He pulls over on the levee road. He stops the truck. He gets out. He stands on the crown and looks at the river.

This is something he does. Not often. Not on a schedule. But when the morning's calls are done and the afternoon's calls have not yet begun and the space between is wide enough to hold a man standing on a levee looking at a river, Clem stands on the levee and looks at the river. He does not know what he is looking for. He does not know what he is looking at, exactly, beyond the water and the current and the far bank, which is Mississippi, which is Natchez, which is the bluff that rises on the eastern side, the bluff being the geological feature that Vidalia does not have, Vidalia being on the flat side, the low side, the side that the river built and that the river, without the levee, would reclaim.

The river is at its normal May level, which is high but not dangerously high, the gauge at Natchez reading thirty-two feet, which is twelve feet below flood stage, which is twenty feet below the levee's crown, which is a margin that is comfortable if you think of it as numbers but that is less comfortable if you think of it as water, the water being the thing that fills the margin when the rains come upriver, when the Ohio floods and the Missouri floods and the Arkansas floods and all the flooding drains south into the Mississippi and the Mississippi rises and the levee stands and the standing is the prayer.

Clem thinks about the levee the way the parish thinks about the levee, which is with a mixture of confidence and dread that is the specific emotional register of a people who live behind a wall that separates them from their own destruction. The confidence is in the engineering. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the levee system after the Great Flood of 1927, the flood that broke the old levees and inundated the Mississippi Delta and displaced 700,000 people and killed 500 and remade the political and social landscape of the South in ways that are still visible, still felt, still carried in the parish's collective memory the way Clem carries the individual confessions, as weight, as knowledge, as the understanding that the thing that happened before can happen again.

The 1927 flood is the parish's founding trauma. Not the founding — the founding trauma came earlier, with the plantations and the slavery and the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the layers of damage that the parish has absorbed and incorporated the way the land absorbs and incorporates the river's sediment. But the 1927 flood is the trauma that is specific to the river, the trauma that the river inflicted on the parish, and the infliction was a reminder that the river's gift — the land — comes with conditions, and the conditions are: the river can take back what it gave, and the taking-back is not malice but nature, the river being a natural force that does not know it is destructive, that does not intend the destruction, that simply does what water does, which is flow downhill to the sea, and the flowing is the thing, and the thing does not care.

The levee was built to contain the not-caring. The levee is the human answer to the river's indifference, the engineered structure that says: We will stand between the water and the land, we will hold the water in its channel, we will impose our will on the river's will, and the imposition is the levee, and the levee is the prayer, and the prayer is: Hold. Hold. Hold.

Clem stands on the levee and the prayer is in the ground beneath his feet, in the compacted clay, in the thirty-two feet of engineered soil that stands between the parish and the water. He can feel the levee's solidity, the mass of it, the weight that is the counterweight to the river's weight, the two weights pressing against each other the way all opposing forces press, the levee pushing against the river and the river pushing against the levee and the equilibrium being the parish's existence, the parish existing in the balance between the pushing and the holding, the balance that has held since 1928 when the new levees were completed and that has been tested and reinforced and raised and strengthened in the decades since, the maintenance of the levee being the maintenance of the parish itself.

He looks across the river at Natchez. Natchez sits on the bluff, two hundred feet above the water, the bluff being the geological advantage that Natchez has over Vidalia, the advantage of elevation, the advantage of being above the river instead of beside it, the advantage that the Spanish and the French and the English recognized when they built their forts and their houses on the bluff, the building-above being the old answer to the river, the answer that says: We will live above the water, and the above is the safety.

Vidalia does not have the above. Vidalia has the beside. Vidalia sits at river level, on the flat alluvial plain, on the land the river built, and the sitting-at-level is the vulnerability, and the vulnerability is the reason for the levee, and the levee is the reason the town exists, the town's existence being contingent on the levee's existence, the two existences bound together the way all existences in the parish are bound to the river, which is to say absolutely, without negotiation, the river being the non-negotiable fact around which everything else is organized.

The bridge is visible from where Clem stands. The Natchez-Vidalia Bridge, US 84, the bridge that crosses the Mississippi and connects Louisiana to Mississippi, Vidalia to Natchez, the low side to the high side, the bridge that Clem crosses when he takes Renee to dinner in Natchez or when he drives to the farm supply store on the Mississippi side or when he takes the truck to the mechanic in Natchez because the mechanic in Natchez, Raymond Tate, is the only mechanic Clem trusts with the F-250, the trust being the relationship that a man has with the person who maintains the machine that maintains the practice.

The bridge is also the boundary. The bridge is the line between the parish and the outside, the line that the parish crosses reluctantly and that the outside crosses rarely, the bridge being the threshold that defines the parish's identity, which is: we are on this side, the low side, the river side, the side that the river made and that the levee protects, and the being-on-this-side is who we are.

Clem knows the river. He knows it the way the parish knows it, which is intimately and from a distance, the way you know a thing that can destroy you, the way you know a God, with reverence and with fear and with the particular gratitude of a people who understand that the thing they fear is also the thing they depend on. The river provides. The river's water irrigates the soybeans and the cotton. The river's commerce — the barges that Clem can see from the levee, the long tows of grain and petroleum and chemicals moving south to New Orleans and the Gulf — is the parish's connection to the national economy, the barges carrying the parish's soybeans to the markets that buy them, the markets being the other end of the chain that begins in the field and passes through the river and ends on a table in a city where no one knows the name Concordia Parish.

The river provides and the river threatens and the providing and the threatening are the same thing, the way the sun provides light and heat and also sunburn and heatstroke, the way the land provides food and also the labor of growing the food, the provision and the threat being the two sides of every gift, and the river's gift is the parish, and the parish's cost is the vigilance, the watching of the gauge, the monitoring of the levee, the readiness for the moment when the river says: I am taking back what I gave.

Clem has seen the river high. He has seen it at flood stage, the water brown and angry-looking, though anger is a human attribution and the river does not feel anger, the river does not feel anything, the river is water following gravity and the following of gravity is not a feeling but a law, the law of physics being the law that the levee defies, the levee being the human defiance of gravity's law, the defiance that says: The water will flow downhill but not here, not through the parish, not across the land where the cattle graze and the soybeans grow and the people live in their houses and keep their animals and raise their children and confess their sins to the veterinarian who stands on the levee looking at the water.

He has seen it high and he has seen it low. September low, when the river drops and the sandbars emerge and the channel narrows and the barges must navigate carefully, the pilots reading the river the way Clem reads a hoof, looking for the structure beneath the surface, the depth beneath the appearance, the channel that is the river's truth, the truth being: the water flows here, in this channel, at this depth, and the depth is the thing you must know, the thing that the surface does not reveal.

He stands on the levee and thinks about the things the surface does not reveal. The river's depth. The parish's history. Earl's grief. Marie-Claire's fear. The farmer's shame when the horse is thin. The rancher's loneliness when the wife is gone. The surface of the parish is the surface of the river: flat, moving, apparently calm, the brown water carrying what it carries without displaying it, the current doing its work beneath the surface, the work that is invisible from the levee but that shapes the channel and moves the sediment and carries the logs and the debris and the accumulated runoff of a continent south to the Gulf.

The parish's surface is flat. The parish's surface is green fields and gravel roads and small houses and churches and the one-room library and the Piggly Wiggly and the feed store and the co-op and the gas stations and the dollar stores and the people moving through their days at the pace that the parish sets, which is slow, which is not laziness but the pace that the heat dictates, the heat slowing everything the way the river slows when it widens, the pace being the adaptation to the conditions, the conditions being the heat and the poverty and the distance from the cities and the particular isolation of a place that is bordered on one side by the river and on the other sides by other parishes that are equally isolated and equally poor and equally beautiful in their poverty, the beauty of a place that has nothing to offer but itself and that offers itself completely.

Beneath the surface, the current. The current that Clem feels when he stands in the chute with his arm inside a cow and the farmer tells him the thing the farmer has never told anyone. The current that moves through the parish the way the river moves through its channel, carrying the sediment of the parish's life, the accumulated weight of the stories and the griefs and the fears and the hopes and the loves and the losses, the weight that is the parish's depth, the depth that the surface does not reveal but that Clem knows because Clem has been reaching into the parish for twenty-eight years, his hands in the parish's body, feeling for what is wrong, feeling for what is right, feeling for the calf that is growing in the dark.

He gets back in the truck. The levee road stretches north toward Waterproof, south toward Vidalia. He turns south. The river is on his right. The parish is on his left. Between them, the levee, the thirty-two feet of compacted clay that is the prayer, the engineered prayer, the prayer that the parish has been praying since 1928 and that the parish will continue to pray as long as the river flows and the rain falls and the water seeks the low places and the low place is here, is this parish, is this flat green beautiful vulnerable place that the river made and that the levee holds and that Clem drives through with the veterinary box loaded and the confessions carried and the morning turning into afternoon and the afternoon stretching toward evening and the evening stretching toward night and the night bringing the calls that come in the dark, the calls that say: Something is wrong, I don't know what, I didn't know who else to call.

The river moves south. Clem moves south. The levee stands between them. The parish continues.

Below the levee, on the landside, the batture — the strip of land between the levee and the river, the land that is sometimes dry and sometimes wet, the land that belongs to no one and to everyone, the land where the fishermen park their trucks and the teenagers drink beer and the coyotes hunt rabbits and the cottonwood trees grow tall and then fall when the river rises and undercuts their roots, the cottonwoods being the trees that live on the river's edge and that accept the river's terms, which are: you can grow here, you can stand here, but you stand at the water's pleasure, and the water's pleasure is inconstant.

Clem has delivered calves on the batture. He has treated horses that graze the batture grass in the dry months. He has walked the batture with Arceneaux when Arceneaux was looking for a missing person's belongings, the river having taken the person and the belongings having washed up on the batture, the river returning what it takes in its own time, in its own way, the returning being partial, always partial, the river keeping what it wants and giving back what it does not, the transaction between the river and the parish being conducted on the river's terms.

He passes the Vidalia waterfront. The landing where the ferry used to dock, before the bridge was built in 1940, the ferry that carried people and vehicles across the river, the ferry being the old connection between the low side and the high side, the connection that was slow and unreliable and dependent on the river's mood, the ferry not running when the river was too high or too fast, the connection being conditional in a way that the bridge is not, the bridge being the unconditional connection, the bridge that operates regardless of the river's mood, the bridge being the human triumph over the river's conditions.

But the ferry landing remains. The concrete ramp descends into the water. The pilings stand in the current. The landing is a relic, a remnant, a reminder that the parish was once more isolated than it is, more dependent on the river's goodwill, more subject to the river's terms. The landing is a monument to the parish's old vulnerability, the vulnerability that the bridge reduced but did not eliminate, because the vulnerability is not in the crossing but in the living-beside, the daily fact of a town at river level on a floodplain behind a levee, the daily fact that is the parish's defining fact, the fact that shapes everything, the buildings and the roads and the crops and the cattle and the people and the stories and the confessions and the prayers.

Clem drives past the landing. He drives past the municipal park, where the grass is green because the city waters it and the watering is the city's gesture toward beauty, the maintained lawn being the town's declaration that this place, despite the river and the heat and the poverty, is tended, is cared for, is worth the effort of the mowing and the watering and the maintaining.

He drives through Vidalia. Population 4,100. The town that sits where it sits because the river put it here, the river's gift being the location, the location being the low flat land where the ferry once docked and the bridge now crosses and the people have built their lives in the shadow of the levee, the shadow not a metaphor but a literal shadow, the levee high enough to cast a shadow on the landside in the morning, the shadow falling on the houses and the streets nearest the levee, the houses that are the closest to the river and the closest to the danger and the cheapest to rent, the proximity to the danger being the inverse of the property value, the people nearest the danger being the people with the least ability to move away from the danger, the geography of poverty being the geography of risk.

Clem knows these houses. He knows the people in them. He knows the dogs and the cats and the occasional goat or chicken that the people keep, the keeping of animals in town being the town's connection to its rural identity, the connection that the poverty makes necessary, the chickens providing eggs and the goats providing milk and the dogs providing the security that the parish's thin law enforcement cannot provide, the animals being the infrastructure of a poor town's daily life.

He has treated these animals. He has gone into these yards and these houses and these lives with his bag and his stethoscope and his hands and he has done what he can, which is sometimes medicine and sometimes advice and sometimes just the presence, the being-there that is the thing the parish needs more than the medicine, the being-there that is the levee, the standing-between, the holding.

The river moves south. The parish holds. Clem drives home. The day is ending. The levee stands in the evening light, the crown golden, the grass on the slopes green, the engineered wall between the parish and the water, between the people and the force that made them and that could unmake them, between the present and the past that is always present, the 1927 flood that is always happening in the parish's memory the way Marie-Claire's husband's violence is always happening in Marie-Claire's body, the happening that is not the present tense but the continuous tense, the always-happening that is the parish's relationship to the river, which is: the water gives and the water takes and the levee is the prayer and the prayer is: Hold.

Hold.

The levee holds. The parish continues. The river moves south. Clem pulls into his driveway on Carter Street and turns off the truck and the refrigerated unit hums its last and goes silent and the silence is the evening and the evening is the space between the day's work and the night's rest and the space is where Clem lives, in the between, between the calls, between the confessions, between the river and the levee, between the parish and the world, between the holding and the letting go.

He goes inside. Renee is in the kitchen. The smell of dinner. The sound of the news on the television in the living room. The ordinary evening of an ordinary day in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where the river moves south and the levee holds and the veterinarian comes home from his rounds with the confessions in his body and the mud on his boots and the weight of the parish on his shoulders, the weight that he carries because carrying is what he does, and the carrying is the practice, and the practice is the parish, and the parish is home.