Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

In a room, a projector clicks.

There are six million operating farms in the United States today. Less than 8 percent have electric lights. Less than 10 percent, running water. Runoff from outdoor toilet systems in conjunction with inadequate food storage has led to spoilage, typhoid, dysentery, undulant fever, ulcerative colitis, and a staggering rise in hookworm.

A projector clicks again. On the wall is a plan for a lock and dam reservoir system 115 feet wide and 580 feet long, with a vertical lift gate and a concrete spillway capable of generating over 162,000 kilowatts of power and transmitting nearly 6,900 volts to previously unelectrified districts.

Think. All the modern comforts of New York and Chicago. Lightbulbs. Frigidaires. Electric irons. Radios. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice in every hick son of a bitch living room from Podunk to Jerkwater. Imagine, at every dinner table an ice cold Coca-Cola, the Lone Ranger on the wireless, rich chocolaty Ovaltine chilling in a brand-new General Electric. Money changes hands. Businesses grow. There is solvency. Jobs. A shining new South.

Let’s break for lunch.

In the cafeteria, they unwrap sheets of butcher paper from sandwiches of corned beef, salami, sardines — grease on their fingers and lips and shirt cuffs. On a napkin, they write: cost of wages for engineers, surveyors, construction crews, dam tenders, local labor, housing; equipment by tonnage, cost of transport, upkeep, materials; permits, filing fees — against five years projected, start to finish. They talk out the numbers, checking them again and again, passing the frail napkin down the table.

Someone takes a dill pickle from between two slices of bread. He lays it on the napkin, brine and all, and the numbers start to bleed.

Say this pickle is the national budget.

He cuts it into eighths.

This is the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The WPA.

He portions it out. Eats a slice.

TVA. The REA.

He eats another. Then another and another until it’s just a nub. Then he eats that too.

God bless this mess.

THEY WENT IN, EIGHT TEAMS of five, through clay sinks, peat pools, chokevine — the low suck of their waders pulling from the mud bed. The swamp was airless, holding the sweat down against their skin, gnats ambering on their foreheads. They read from altimeters and leveling rods. They moved through gullies and berms, mapping a long silt wall along the gravel bar. They took plant samples, soil samples, water samples. At the perimeter line they tied yellow ribbons to low branches, marking the trees for demolition.

With their hatchets and their towlines, they went out — their bodies locked under the conifers, oilskin hoods drawn tight around their heads. They arced their axes into the base, snapping the wood away in clean white wounds. The trees gave and the towlines snapped taut. With each fall a column of rain would open in the forest ceiling.

There were signs of prior human encroachment. Symbols cut into bark, ash pits from old fires, the label off a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. One team found a set of jaw traps hidden in the weeds. A slab of meat sat spoiled on the weight plate. They photographed it, tripped it with a rock, and moved on.

In May they broke ground, and by June there were seventeen dig crews out in the back swamps. It was hurricane season and the Yazoo roiled and crunched. Under hard rain, the crews dug relief basins along the tributaries. The ground was too soft for the crane trucks so they worked by hand — shovels and spades and pickaxes — breaking the earth and carrying it off in thick slippery slabs.

It was George Burke’s team off the main stem who put in the requisition for the slurry pump. Mr. Catkill held the yellow form up to his third-floor window, squinting through his bifocals. It’d been their third requisition since April, having destroyed their first and lost the other. The Panther Swamp project was already over budget, and the signs of incompetence made it harder to secure federal funding. He set the form down on his desk and folded his fingers together, knotting his hands into a praying shape.

At night, in his slippers, he would stir out of his bed, and he’d feel the thing in the room. It was vague, uncertain, and he would catch it only in glimpses. He’d shut his eyes and become still. It would pass above him, stretching like a sheet. Then one morning at the breakfast table, he sat buttering his toast. He watched the metal move against the stiff bread, the band of light that caught on the blade. Then all at once, there it was. Steel and glass and light. The beating pulse of a future.

Mr. Catkill looked out his third-story window and he sensed it just beyond the horizon — driving inexorably toward him. He had read the papers. He had seen the photographs. The crumpled suits. The sod caravans edging toward the coast, and in the cities, bread lines that stretched for blocks upon blocks. What he understood, better than his colleagues, was that this was a darkening world and he would have his place among the torchbearers.

He decided. He would sign the requisition form. He would meet with George Burke.

THE MORNING TRAIN PULLED INTO Yazoo and the city was slate gray with deep veins of light marbled into the sky. A porter wheeled the crate into the hired car and Mr. Catkill pressed a coin into the porter’s glove.

The car carried him under the soft patter of rain toward the swamp. On the drive in, he sat stone-faced in the backseat, his pale hands folded across his lap, watching the mute and desolate country. The road was choked with stones and softening ground. Entering Panther Swamp, it was as if he were passing through a large organism. There were no clear roads, just lanes of stone and red mud, obscured by curtains of overhanging vine. They pressed through into forests of blackgum, dogwood, spruce, tracing a fence of cattails to a river crossing.

Burke’s work site sat on a mud plain twenty yards from the tributary. Safety flags were posted along the perimeter of the dig, and behind it a network of craters and trenches five feet deep and over a hundred yards across. The crew was at work in the trenches, shoveling up the loose mud and reinforcing the walls with sandbags.

The driver pumped his horn and the crew turned toward the car. A man climbed up from the trenches. His body was slick and brown, and he wiped the mud from his goggles. Mr. Catkill recognized him from his file.

He rolled down his window.

You George Burke? he asked.

Who are you?

Arthur Catkill, vice president of operations from the home office.

The foreman straightened and looked back at the site. His men had stopped work and were watching the exchange.

Let’s go into my office, the foreman said.

They went inside a construction trailer where Burke kept a set of cabinets and an old oak-top desk. A kerosene lamp burned from a cross pipe as the rain sounded across the corrugated ceiling. The foreman stripped off his shirt and toweled down his large hairy body. His skin was pale and bloodless underneath the layers of mud. He motioned to a folding stool and Mr. Catkill sat down.

Nasty weather, he said.

Keeps the mosquitoes down, the man said. He offered Mr. Catkill a cigarette from his cigarette case. Mr. Catkill shook his head.

I’ve brought in your requisition. A model six slurry pump. Brand-new. I wanted to bring it in personally.

The man drew from his cigarette.

Much appreciated, he said.

Mr. Catkill could feel the beginnings of irritation prickling beneath his collar. He watched the man smoke, the cigarette pinched between two dirt-scaled fingers, the long deep pulls that dribbled out on his breath. Mr. Catkill cleared his throat.