The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  She kissed him and sealed the pledge of their troth.

  They began to swim toward Arkansas, but both were tired, and after several long minutes their arms began to fail them. Sam rolled over onto his back and pulled her to him, and held her to him while he continued back-stroking the water with one arm and kicking with his feet. It was slow, but it kept them afloat and gave her time to rest so that she could swim some more.

  When the sky began lighting up in the east, it was not the fire of the smoldering Sultana but the beginning of dawn. Something grabbed his ankle, and he feared that once again he had been caught by a desperate drowner; this time, however, it was the topmost branch of a tree that had snagged him. He turned and looked and saw other treetops nearby. The shore itself still could not be seen.

  He was completely exhausted. “Adeline, sweetest,” he said, “I jist caint swim another blessit lick. Let’s grab aholt of one of these treetops and rest a while.” Though he picked the stoutest tree he could find, the branches of the top of it were still not strong enough to bear their weight, and just barely strong enough to provide a handle to keep them above the surface of the water. The water was not so swift here as in the middle of the river. In the gentle eddies of this protected spot they would wait until rescue came or their strength returned enough to swim to land. While they waited, he spoke to her at length, soothingly, telling her of his bright dreams for their ultimate haven in the Ozarks. Could she endure living in a small town? Or would she rather live on a farm? Then the mosquitoes began biting them. Not a lone scout looking for flesh, but whole hordes of them, clouding the lightening sky, hovered over them, and bit, and bit. They slapped themselves and each other. Soon, as full daylight came, the mosquitoes were joined, or replaced, by buffalo gnats, so called because, although mere black flies, they can bite through a buffalo’s hide, and bite with a venom that swells the surrounding flesh. Sam tried periodically dunking his head and shoulders beneath the water to keep the bugs off and urging Adeline to do the same, but this was only a momentary solution: they were chewed to pieces. He began to wonder if this were not a worse fate than either burning alive or drowning. He talked faster to Adeline, as if this might divert the both of them from their miseries. He told her his whole life’s story in the vales and hollers of Blount County, but his constant voice was punctuated by the sounds of their palms slapping their flesh, until he thought he would go mad.

  He was still babbling the story of his life when Frank Barton of Mound City, maneuvering a canoe among the treetops, found him and pulled him into the canoe.

  Frank, late a lieutenant of the defeated Confederacy, had been awakened during the night by his father-in-law, John Fogleman, who had been awakened by the explosion of the Sultana’s boiler, although it was miles upstream and could be so easily mistaken for thunder. John Fogleman had become a light sleeper because of the high water, and when he heard the sound he knew it for what it was: the instant fragmentation of boilerplate by the uncontrolled expansion of steam. “Get up and start coffee,” he told his wife as he dressed. First he went to the homes of his sons LeRoy and Gus, and roused them from sleep. John Fogleman knocked at the “mansion” of his son-in-law Frank Barton, and told him to get his brothers Jim and R.B. The only other families in Mound City were the Malones, the Lumberstons, and the Berrys; John summoned the head of each household. By the time the summoning was finished and these men had dressed, the Sultana had already drifted downstream into view, a ball of fire. None of the men owned a skiff or any other boat except Frank’s canoe, and he wasn’t going to paddle out into that water. One of the men was sent upstream to the Mound City woodyard, fuel stop for the steamers that still burned wood, to alert Bill Boardman, who ran the woodyard and who owned a skiff. Then the other men, directed by John Fogleman, began the construction of a makeshift raft, twelve-foot logs lashed together with rope. With homemade paddles and long poles to propel and steer the raft, John Fogleman and his sons set out into the tide, and, during the long night and the day following, with innumerable trips back to shore, they saved at least seventy-five of the survivors and recovered the bodies of twice that many, until the veranda of John’s house, and his parlor, too, became a morgue; the ladies of Mound City brewed endless pots of coffee and tried to feed and clothe the survivors and treat their injuries. The dozens who were badly scalded by steam could only be temporarily soothed by the application of salves and talcums before they died.

  Almost from the beginning, it was apparent to John Fogleman and his townsmen that these men they were saving or recovering were Union soldiers, and there was still bitterness in Mound City toward the Yankees, who had burned the village two years earlier, during a senseless raid. Major James Barton himself, along with his brother Lieutenant Frank Barton, had just recently surrendered what was left of their units to Union officers from Memphis. Now all of these ex-Rebels were risking their lives to rescue the ex-Yankee parolees. Frank Barton in particular, with his canoe, swifter and more maneuverable than the Fogleman raft, was finding a large share of survivors. As dawn broke to make visibility possible, he seemed to discover a Yankee or two in every treetop; since he could take only one or two at a time back to the safety of land, he sometimes had to use his paddle to fight off swimmers desperate not to be left behind.

  Frank Barton was a very tired man and a very bug-bitten man, who had already rescued two sergeants, several corporals, and a captain, when he found Sam Dunlap, whose sleeve revealed the remnants of a private’s single stripe. He recalled feeling like a fisherman who is tempted to throw the small ones back in. But he prodded Sam with his paddle to see if he was going to fight, and then told him to get into the canoe carefully so as not to capsize it. Sam said he would not go without “her.” An argument followed, during which Frank sought to convince Sam that there was no “her.” Finally Frank made as if to leave him and demanded, “Are you coming with me or not?” Sam came.

  Sam was taken to John Fogleman’s house, where the ladies sought to feed him and apply some salves to the hideous swellings of his insect bites. He refused food, accepted some coffee, and sat on the edge of the veranda for the rest of the day, not even watching the constant comings and goings. The hull of the Sultana had drifted to shore almost within shouting distance of Fogleman’s house. There had been a few men still clinging to the unburned bow, and Fogleman’s raft had removed them. As the last raftload of survivors was leaving it, the Sultana continued burning and slowly sank into the shallows off Fogleman’s Landing.

  That day and the day after, steamboats and ferries from Memphis came to Mound City, removed all the survivors to the hospitals of Memphis, and took away the dead. Mound City returned to normal. But one survivor remained behind, at his own insistence. “I aint fixin to cross that river again,” he said, and refused to go with the others. John Fogleman gave him a room of his own, where he stayed for several days, until the bloated disfigurements of his face and head began to subside and his appetite returned; then he joined the Foglemans at table and listened silently to the continuing news of the disaster. Each day hundreds of bodies were found along the river’s banks, or floating miles downstream. Crows and hogs were seen feeding on the corpses. Of a total of six hundred survivors in Memphis, two hundred died of their injuries and burns. It was estimated that fifteen hundred of the Sultana’s passengers had perished, making this the worst maritime disaster in the history of man’s movement on water.

  The ladies of Mound City put together a new outfit of civilian clothing for Sam Dunlap, and the men of Mound City made him a present of a horse. For the first time in six months, this former cavalry soldier found himself upon his favorite means of transportation. One of the men gave him a demijohn of whiskey, and another gave, him twenty Confederate dollars, still spendable in parts of Arkansas, although the war, everybody told him, was entirely over, done with, finished. He thanked everybody and turned his horse northwestward, toward the Ozarks.

  In the weeks that followed, he never found a single person who ha
d heard of the Sultana. When he stopped at small towns—Lake City, Loyal, Buffalo City—he would declare, in response to inquiries, that he had survived the Sultana, and be required to explain what the Sultana was. When he reached a place called Sulphur City, whose name reminded him unfavorably of Sulphur Branch Trestle, where his whole regiment had surrendered, he met a man named Mankins who had heard of the Sultana, and, despite his dislike for the name of the place, he stayed.

  Years later, in the beginning of our key year, 1886, some men in Ohio, veterans of the Ohio regiments who had mostly drowned at Mound City, organized a Sultana Survivors’ Society and planned a big reunion at which the survivors could renew their thanks to the Lord for their deliverance and swap thrilling stories of their experiences during the disaster. They went to great effort to locate each and every one of the known survivors, including Sam Dunlap in Arkansas. But though they invited him to join them, he was indisposed. Later he was invited to contribute his personal narrative to a book written by a fellow survivor, now a minister, the Reverend Chester D. Berry, Loss of the “Sultana” and Reminiscences of Survivors: History of a Disaster Where over One Thousand Five Hundred Human Beings Were Lost, Most of Them Being Exchanged Prisoners of War on Their Way Home After Privation and Suffering from One to Twenty-three Months in Cahaba and Andersonville Prisons (Lansing, Michigan: Darius D. Thorp, 1892). But Sam Dunlap, who by that time could not even recall what Adeline’s last name had been, declined to participate in the project.

  Kim notices that the black mud is rising toward her ankles, and she steps carefully back into Zephyra and removes her shoes. She looks for something to wipe the mud off her shoes and the floor mat. There is the copy of Julie’s article in the Arkansas Times, and her eye falls upon the information that the Titanic’s sinking took thirty or so fewer lives than the sinking of the Sultana. She does not wipe mud with the magazine but finds a box of Kleenex and uses up several. Then she gets herself and Zephyra down off the levee and goes to meet Julie Longnecker, whose car she follows along the base of the levee a short distance to a ranch-style house where a man named Sam Oliver lives.

  Sam Oliver, age forty-two, is the second son of Dearmont Oliver, a Missourian who bought up six thousand acres that had once belonged to the Bartons and the Foglemans. For his father he cultivates several hundred of those acres in soybeans, the cash crop that has replaced cotton throughout most of the Arkansas delta, and the oil from which has replaced James Barton’s cottonseed oil as the main ingredient of contemporary shortening, margarine, or salad oil, but is just as likely to be metamorphosed into paint, printing ink, cosmetics, or pharmaceuticals, while soybean meal makes up the larger part of the diet of all our beef and poultry.

  Recently one of Sam’s hired hands, driving a tractor out in the soybean field, plowed up some pieces of iron that looked like the boiler of a steamboat. Since an 8-year-old local legend had it that the Sultana sank in that vicinity, Sam, who came from Missouri only four years ago, began poking around in that soybean field, collecting more fragments of scrap metal: an iron grate, lengths of chain, strips of copper, pieces of plumbing that wouldn’t have been found in a building on the banks. He took them to an expert, who examined them and said they came from a nineteenth-century steamboat.

  As legends will, the legend of the Sultana had locally grown to the point where its hull was filled with gold and silver and the skeletons, if not the preserved bodies, of hundreds of the victims. But Sam Oliver had no greed for the treasure, and he went ahead and planted the field in soybeans, which grew tall and obscured the site, until one day he encountered a stranger sitting in a car beside the field, with a bunch of maps and charts spread out before him. The stranger asked Sam Oliver if he knew where the Sultana was buried. Oliver, suspicious of him, said, “Naw.”

  The stranger showed him the map in his lap and pointed to a spot on it, saying, “I’ve done a lot of research on this, and I believe the Sultana is right there.”

  Sam studied the map. “You’re wrong,” he said, and jabbed his finger at another spot. “It’s about fifty feet north. My tractor driver plowed up pieces of boiler when I cleared that field.”

  The stranger was Jerry Potter, a young lawyer whose office in Memphis has a twenty-first-floor view of Mound City and environs. He has made a consuming hobby out of the story of the Sultana, and hopes to write a book about it. Now that he had located the owner of the soybean field, if not the exact location where the steamboat was buried, Potter had an ally in the search. He and Oliver devote all their spare time to it.

  Wherever the Sultana finally went down, the fickle Grandfather has long since covered her beneath twenty feet of sand and silt. One popular theory was that the boat, coming to rest at the head of the Mound City Chute, had blocked off that chute and forced the Grandfather to take a different course eastward. All along the Grandfather are his little grandchildren: bowed lakes which were once his main course but in the endless process of his meandering and cutting off have become closed away from him. The mass of soybean acreage between the Mound City Chute and the present course of the Grandfather is still known as Chicken Island, one of the brood of “Paddy’s Hen and Chicken Islands,” and somewhere in that thick alluviation of rich silt is buried the Sultana.

  Jerry Potter and Sam Oliver are using a magnetometer and a water probe to hunt for her. The magnetometer has helped them zero in on an area of 100 by 300 feet within which the 40-by-260 hull of the Sultana probably lies, and the water probe, a jet-spraying pipe inserted through a four-inch casing, has flushed up telltale debris, particularly charcoal, which could only have come from the burnt timbers of a steamboat.

  The next step is to begin actual excavation, but that would be a very costly process, perhaps $500,000 or more. Sam’s wealthy father, Dearmont Oliver, is willing to subsidize the project in the hope of recovering the whole hull, building a museum around it, and turning it into a tourist attraction. Bright dreams surround this endeavor, although few of the people involved in it have stopped to wonder why any tourists would go out of their way to see the remains of a steamboat that nobody has heard about. Still, anything that might bring life back into Mound City…

  Kim finds Sam Oliver to be a patient but quietly excited adventurer with a respect for the past and an honest, unselfish approach to the quest for the Sultana. “Are you sure of its location now?” Kim asks him.

  Sam nods eagerly. “Uh-huh. We sure are.” He tells her that the next step will be to dig a test trench down to about twenty feet and then, if they find the hull, excavate a gradual slope that will accommodate heavy earthmoving machinery. “We don’t think we’ll find anything inside the hull,” he says. “But what’s important is just the history, and proving that it is the Sultana.”

  “What do you think is really there?” she asks.

  “Oh, maybe just some brass buttons off the uniforms. There might be some bones. There were so many people died on that boat. Sometimes when you’re out there digging around, you get a kind of weird feeling, almost gruesome, like digging in a cemetery, so I don’t know how I feel about getting into that boat. At one point we thought we might as well leave it alone once we found it: just mark it and let it be. But I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: it might be my boat, because it’s on my land, but the history belongs to the people, and we owe it to the people to uncover the boat. The phone calls and letters I’ve been getting—and Jerry, too—some of them from descendants of the people who died in the Sultana…”

  As if in response to the mention of his name, Jerry Potter arrives. He doesn’t look like a Memphis attorney; he is dressed to go rabbit hunting, or to probe for buried steamboats. Kim reflects, not for the first time, upon the habit people have of becoming her contacts promptly when she needs them. After the introductions, Kim asks him the same question she asked Sam Oliver: “Are you absolutely certain that what you’ve found is the Sultana?”

  “I would probably be the most surprised person if it’s not the Sultana,” he declares,
but he presents the lawyer’s case against the evidence: the charcoal they’ve found could have come from, say, a burning log jam in that area, or the remains of a burnt building that washed away into the river. But they’ve also found fuel coal, which could only have come from a steamboat’s engine room.

  Sam Oliver says, “I think the next day we work over there we’ll hit the hull. We’ve gone through the elimination process, and we’re ready to hit it. We’ll be excited….”

  Both men are clearly obsessed with the search, and Kim wonders how they will really feel when they do find the Sultana. “I’ll probably become depressed,” Jerry admits. “I’ll have to find a new hobby. My wife will be relieved—I’ve been so devoted to this thing for years. But we’ll have such a sense of accomplishment, as if we’ve uncovered a page of American history that very few people know about. It’s amazing how few people know about the Sultana.”

  Kim knows all too well that the romance of the search is greater than the joy of the actual finding. In her explorations through these lost cities she hasn’t found very much, not even the ruin of a major building that would be comparable to the ruin of the Sultana, but the search itself—the questing, the asking, and the wanting to know these towns and their reasons for existence—has been enough: the means better than the ends, the questions better than the answers, the looking better than the seeing.