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fauna, but the flora would get no end of what it needed to survive. Bug spray and herbicide. Fertilizer and irrigation. Seed engineered to make the plants impervious to Mississippi.
    There wasn’t much on this earth that could touch a modern Delta crop if the ag school in Starkville had decided it was better off unbothered.
    The soybeans eventually yielded to rice. The rice gave way to wheat. The wheat was eclipsed at last by several thousand acres of corn, all of it over head-high and meticulously level. A red crop duster, an Ag Cat, was flying back and forth dousing that corn with something. It banked steeply over the road as we passed beneath it and doused us a little as well.
    Time and ingenuity had drained the heartbreak out of Delta farming. It was primarily about money now. If you could buy the land, afford the seed, the tractors and the diesel, pay for the chemicals and the poly pipe, hire the dusters and the combines, you were all but sure to realize what the market would allow along with what the government would subsidize.
    These days a man could run a ten-thousand-acre Delta spread with a handful of tractor drivers and the odd combine operator, which left most everybody else with little or nothing to do.
    You could work in a catfish plant, but those jobs came and went with the price of feed. You might find some hourly clerking job in a box store on the truck route, catch on at the Long John Silver or repossess TVs, supplement your monthly government check with scattershot larceny. Or you could do what the bulk of people had done and simply pack up and leave.
    As a guy who’s spent his share of time knocking around the South, I’ve never come across a place as empty as the Delta, and it’s double desolate because the towns are still standing but the people are mostly gone. The folks remaining either couldn’t afford to sell off and get out or were comfortable enough already so they could stay no matter what.
    The place would probably be better off razed with every arable acre plowed under. The soil is black and loamy, tailor-made for agriculture, so it’d be smarter to let the people congregate around the edges and give John Deere and Allis-Chalmers the general run of the place.
    Life in the Delta demands sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness. Heat and mosquitoes in summer. Scouring wind in winter. Anemic prospects lingering through the year. People steal and drink. They work when they can, get along as best they’re able, and the mood of the place extends to the local police as well. Except for fools like Dale, no lawman in the Delta ever gets too terribly worked up. Such a wealth of civilians about are given to rampant shiftlessness that a cop with his gun out would find himself faced with too damn many people to shoot.
    I was still new to the place, maybe eight months in, and hadn’t fully acclimated. I wasn’t yet used to driving an hour and a half to get anywhere I needed to be, hadn’t acquired a taste for Kool-Aid pickles or venison tamales, wasn’t entirely at ease as part of the puny white minority.
    I was getting there, but I’d spent my last decade in the eastern Virginia uplands, working as Deputy Nick Reid in the middle of nowhere much. The hillbillies up there had come by their parsimony from Scotland, their marksmanship from Daddy and Daniel Boone, and their dunderheaded obliviousness from taking cousins for wives.
    They didn’t have any manners, barely had language I could understand, and seemed to live for hunting out of season and beating each other up. I’d passed the bulk of my time sorting out the same couple of dozen people until their children came of age for proper charges when I got to sort them, too. I don’t think I did an ounce of good the whole time I was up there, and once the job had brought out the Dale in me, I’d had the sense to quit.
    I’d lit in the Delta because I could tell it was something else