Upbound

Twenty-five barges instead of thirty, loaded to nine foot even instead of twelve. Same boat, same crew, same fuel, half the beans. Nobody was careless — it has not rained between the Rockies and the Alleghenies since April. And a ship at Baton Rouge is on a charter that cancels noon on Tuesday the thirteenth.

Then the survey comes off the printer. The crossing at Four Ninety-Six has moved, a dredge is working it, and the cut is two hundred feet, one-way, a boat at a time. His tow is a hundred and seventy-five feet across. Every degree he crabs her costs seventeen, and a crossing wants three.

Thirty barges of fertilizer on a dock in Louisiana, bound for a shed below Cairo and the ground in the third week of April. Planting does not move, and no second boat is coming behind this one.

The river has come up half a foot a day for two weeks. On a Saturday the high-water limits go on the Vicksburg reach: two hundred forty horsepower a loaded barge, two hundred eighty at the next rung, and the forecast has the next rung inside three days. So he builds Wednesday's tow on Sunday, against a forecast — and once eleven hundred feet of barges are wired up, nobody takes four out of the middle.

The twenty-fourth of January. Twenty-eight loaded hoppers of beans, four wide and seven long, fifteen hundred and forty-three feet from the head of the tow to the stern of the boat, and the Della Kittering has her head up in a sand bar at Mile Eight Thirty-One. From the chair the first two barges are there, the third is a shape, and after that a flat white floor lies on the water.

The gauge reads thirteen foot and not moving, and the gauge is not the trouble. A river has a direction, and a man can be wrong about it and still be wrong in a direction he was watching. This has none, and no forecast anybody will put a name on. There is a fleet at Seven Forty-Six holding a place, a boat scheduled to take the tow off him, and his relief crew on the same sheet. Every evening he hangs half a page on a clip by the door for the man who will have her at midnight.

Thirty loaded barges out of a fleet in June: twenty-eight hoppers of corn and two tank barges, and the master put the two inboard with steel on both sides of them because that is where he puts them. There is no rule about it, nobody made him, and nobody is going to check.

One night a nineteen-year-old deckhand puts a lamp down into the two-foot gap between two hulls, turns it off, counts to ten, turns it back on, and comes in and says he thinks maybe. It is a seam, a foot above the water, and the river is taking it away aft in a ribbon two hands wide. Sixty miles below there is a pipe in the bank with a town on the other end of it, and the water is doing five miles an hour, which is twelve hours. There is a card ninety feet out along that barge's deck that would say what it is. Nobody is going out on a leaking barge in the dark, and the mate says so first.

The *Della Kittering* is up the river in a yard with her plant opened up, so Jessup Deane is on relief on a harbor boat at a fleet, twelve days into twenty-eight. A fleet is not a tow. Nothing gets under way and nothing arrives; the work is barges lying against each other in the current with wire holding them.

Wofford has a framed diagram of the place in the shack. He borrows a marker that is nearly dead and draws the whole fleet on the boat's whiteboard anyway — the bank, the four tiers, every box in them, loads as loads and empties as empties — because the drawing is the only way to find out what he does not have. Then a gauge on a wall a hundred and thirty miles below them goes past twelve, and above a certain reading a fleet of eight or more barges has to have a radar-equipped towboat attending it, and Wofford's own boat is down the river all week.