It was a brutally frank description of a motorboat cruiser which had floated down Hopefield Bend, awash and waterlogged, but held afloat by air-tight tanks:
In the cabin was the body of a man, apparently about 30 years of age, with a whiskey jug clasped in one hand by the handle. He was face downward, and had been dead two or three days. It is supposed he was caught in the heavy wind-storm of Wednesday night and drowned.
The river had planned again. The river had acted again. They went to look at the boat, which was pumped out and in Ash Slough. It was Carline’s cruiser. Then they went to the morgue, and it was Carline’s body.
Nelia broke down and cried. After all, one’s husband is one’s husband. She did the right thing. She owned him, now, and she carried his remains back home to Gage, and there she buried him, and wept on his grave.
She put on widow’s weeds for him, and though she might have claimed his property, she ignored the will which left her all of it, and gave to his relatives and to her own poor people what was theirs. She gave Parson Rasba, whom she had brought home with her to bury her husband, $5,000 for his services. 244
Then, after the estate was all settled up, she returned to Memphis, and Terabon met her at the Union Station, dutifully, as she had told him to do. Together they went to the City Clerk’s and obtained a marriage license, and the River Prophet, Rasba, with firm voice and unflinching gaze, united them in wedlock.
They went aboard their own little shanty-boat, and while the rice and old shoes of a host of river people rattled and clattered on their cabin, they drifted out into the current and rapidly slipped away toward President’s Island. Parson Rasba, as they drifted clear, said to them:
“I ’lowed we uns could leave hit to Old Mississip’!”
THE END