The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

The first thing I saw at first light was a catfish with its mouth open at the top of the water, gulping like a man who had run too far.

Then I saw the next one, and the one after that, all along the bank.

Then I saw the second thing. The three electric paddlewheels that should have been churning our pond white were not there.

There were three bare spots on the levee where the grass lay flat, and drag marks in the dirt running north.

It was 5:40 in the morning on a Thursday in August, in Humphreys County, Mississippi, and it had hit 101 the afternoon before.

I stood on the levee in my boots with the oxygen meter in my hand and could not make my feet move.

I had been out at 3:10 that morning. I had dropped the probe off the end of the levee and read 3.8 parts per million, low but holding, with all three aerators running and the motors humming.

I had gone back to bed and set the alarm for 5:30.

In two and a half hours, somebody had unplugged three ten-horsepower aerators from the panel on our power pole, chained them up, and dragged them off down the levee.

I did not have to wonder who. There was only one man in this county who would drive onto Whitlock land in the dark and move things like they were his.

I dropped the probe in the water and watched the numbers fall and settle. It read 1.1.

Catfish start to die somewhere under 2, and under 1 they die fast, by the hundreds, and float up white along the bank by breakfast.

My name is Marnie Whitlock. I was 38 that summer. My husband, Boone, and I raised channel catfish in one 12-acre pond on the edge of his family’s land, south of Belzoni, where the fields run so flat you can see a pickup coming for three miles.

Twelve acres sounds like a lot until you know what is in it. We had about 3,500 pounds of fish to the acre that August, close to 42,000 pounds in all, nearly market size.

At a dollar ten a pound to the processor, that pond was worth about $46,000.

It was also everything we had. Boone drove a feed truck days for the mill to pay the note on the pond and the note on the house.

I ran the pond. I checked oxygen through the night from May to October, fed by hand off the back of the feeder truck, and kept the books at the kitchen table.

Boone had left at 4:45 that morning for a load to Yazoo City. Our boy, Roscoe, was fifteen and asleep in the back bedroom with the box fan going.

And my father in law, Orrin Whitlock, 67 years old, ran four ponds of his own on the other side of the section road.

I knew where my aerators were. I just did not have time to go get them.