God of the Rodeo by Daniel Bergner

Author:Daniel Bergner [Bergner, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76586-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI HAD BEEN SURGING. WITH Easter six days away, the river at Angola’s bend climbed past record height and was starting to flood the prison. I traveled again into the warden’s domain.

I carried the notion that one of the inmates I knew might, on Holy Thursday, kneel down in church to wash another convict’s feet. The rite of forgiveness was limitless in need. It was an effort to love perfectly, if only for a minute, as the self dissolved in servitude. It was an obliteration of the origin of all sin and wrongdoing. And for the one whose feet were being washed, it was a touch of this unmitigated love which, for the vast majority of humanity that feels undeserving, was hard to welcome, even painful to absorb. I went down that week to see men healed, for an instant. I found the penitentiary about to be washed away.

“We need to talk tonight,” Cain said quietly in passing, on Monday, before he went off to battle the river. It was above the level of 1922, when it had swept over the levee in a bank of white water that looked, in pictures, like a mini-Niagara. Back then, the inmates had been packed on barges while their camps were submerged. By the time the river crested, parts of Angola were under sixteen feet of water, and all you could see of the buildings were the peaks of their roofs. The main levee was four feet higher now, built up over the years by inmates and the Corps of Engineers. But by Monday a secondary, peripheral levee had already been flooded; the Mississippi had claimed something closer to its natural shape; and a paddle boat full of roulette-playing tourists had lost its way amid the wider channel and cruised onto prison grounds, gamblers waving at the guard towers. One fifth of Angola was already underwater. The river wouldn’t crest until Friday.

But the big problem wasn’t height, it was pressure. While the Mississippi sat just a foot or two below the main levee at Camp C, while alligators lolled near Camp F and hundreds of white pelicans converged on the fish that had been sucked over when the outer levee became a waterfall, it seemed that an unusual northern snowmelt had added as much to the river as it could, and that the local rains had stopped, that the Mississippi couldn’t rise much more. So it tried to break through. The main levee couldn’t hold the force of all the extra water. The banks were saturated and starting to let the river tunnel in. Brown water boiled up from the ground on the prison side. Tiny lakes formed around the percolations. There were fifty, sixty, seventy of them, the count growing every hour. Teams of inmates stacked sandbags around the pools, trying to create enough counter-pressure to stop the inflow. Then the river drove at another spot. If the levee caved, the prison would be under twelve to twenty feet within twelve hours.

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