Delta File: Shake Davis #9
by Dale A. Dye
Excerpted from Dale Dye’s latest adventure in the award-winning Shake Davis series.
The big house was empty. Rambling aimlessly from room to room, up and down the stairs, following dust motes dancing in mellow afternoon sunlight, he moped. A house like this one, stolid and rough-hewn like its bare oaken floors, shouldn’t be empty. It should be a switching station for domestic traffic, full of people, busy and bustling. There should be kids barreling around in minimal clothing, barefoot and oblivious to the chili pepper heat that kept them from playing outside. There should be dogs chasing them or at least watching through tolerant eyes from some shadowy corner.
If he thought about it — and he often did — the house had his- tory, and he believed history of all sorts was valuable — and often entertaining — only if it was contemplated and reviewed every once in a while. If you were willing to do that, a house like this one spoke volumes in every creak and groan of its old timber skeleton. It was so much more than simple shelter.
On a little catch-all table at the foot of the stairs, there was a letter from the Texas State Historical Association claiming that back in 1860 or so Texas Governor Sam Houston had given one of his fiery anti-secession speeches to a crowd gathered in the shade of the two live oaks that still stretched long serpentine limbs over the front yard. The house hadn’t been built then. Those were the days when Comanches watered their ponies in the creek that still ran along one side of the house. There were chipped flint arrowheads to be found on the banks of that creek, and he contemplated digging a bit in the black mud. Who would he show them to if he found an artifact or two down there?
He lost interest and wandered onto the screened back porch where he could see the surrounding land and a solid slice of the little town that had grown like Topsy in the years before and after the house was built around 1915. Perched like an old sentry on the edge of that town, the house occupied a strategic site that overlooked a stretch of the old Chisholm Trail where Longhorn cattle and other market beeves were driven from Hill Country ranches toward stockyards or railheads. The surrounding lawns this time of year were carpeted with bluebonnets, and their fragrance carried through the back-porch screens on the same little breeze that brought the aroma of hickory fires from the barbecue joint up the street. It would be suppertime before long, but he wasn’t hungry. He was lonely.
He could see a stand of Indian paint brushes pushing through a patch of backyard weeds that needed his attention. He contemplated rolling out the riding mower and making a quick pass be- fore sundown, but it didn’t seem…well, it just didn’t seem right. Joy in that chore came from watching his big dog barking and running in circles as if the mower was a giant cat or some kind of motorized squirrel sent to torment him. Bear, the Golden Pyrenees who now claimed all sectors of the house and surrounding lands, was on temporary duty helping out as a comfort animal at a children’s hospital in Austin. Mr. Bear was doing time in an impromptu petting zoo where kids with cancer could visit and play with pets who provided unconditional love. Bear was the kind of big, lovable teddy bear that could sense when someone needed a morale boost. It was tough to loan him out, but Bear was in good hands and would revel in the attention lavished on him for a couple of weeks.
A stiffening wind advertised beef brisket smoked to Texas perfection, and he glanced at the clock on the mantle over the fireplace. It was a bit early for a snort but — what the hell — when you’re alone, Happy Hour is when you say it is.
In the kitchen, he glanced through the front windows to see if the family of white-tailed deer that lived in the woods below the house were thirsty enough to brave a drink from his bait ponds before full dark. Still too hot for thirsty deer, he decided, but he was a little more royal than they were in the animal kingdom. He splashed TX bourbon into a semi-clean glass fetched from a sink cluttered with too many dirty dishes and reached for the pitcher of branch water he kept on the windowsill. There was just a splash left in the pitcher. He’d have to make a trip before long down to the little dam he’d made in the creek to collect a bourbon mix tastier than what flowed from faucets in the house.
His wife was always worried that he’d ruin his health with his evening drinks. She didn’t mind whiskey as much as she worried about parasites or ugly bugs in the creek water. He didn’t really think so, but maybe she was right. She was about a lot of other things. Anyway, he had another month of whiskey and water drinking to find out, and he was feeling a bit Nietzschean about that. Whisky that does not kill me makes me strong, he thought with a grin, and drained off half the first snort of an evening that loomed lonely and uninspiring. His wife might find a bloated corpse when she returned from her three-month sabbatical at National Chengchi University in Taipei, but he doubted that would happen. He’d swallowed an ocean or two of whisky in his years in uniform during which it was part of mandatory fun, and his liver was still managing to cope.
He carried a freshened drink toward the dining room where there were two dusty boxes piled on his wife’s prized table, a stodgy, stained, and stocky old platform that had likely been used to butcher hogs at some point in its colorful history. Before she left, his wife had compiled a short list of long-ignored chores that she thought would keep him semi-sober and focused while she was away. The boxes represented part of that. They were filled with old photos and papers from his side of the family, and she wanted him to sort them, then take her on a little trip through his ancestry when she got home.
Shake sighed, shook his head and went back to the kitchen for the whisky bottle. He squinted at the level and then reached into a cabinet for his back-up. A mind-trip back to Southeast Missouri with whistle stops to visit a cloud of dimly remembered country kinfolks was at least a two-jug exercise. There were ghosts and discomfiting haunts back in those bayous.
Most of what he found as he pawed through the first box was stuff he hadn’t seen, and certainly hadn’t thought about, for years. It was baby Shake mementos, so far removed that it seemed irrelevant, just dim cues that failed to spark any conscious sense of a younger version of the man he was now. And how could they? When does effective memory really begin?
In a shabby little album made of brittle craft paper with a molding cardboard cover, he found the telegram informing his father, then serving on a warship somewhere in the Pacific, that a male offspring had entered the national census. Mother and son doing fine, the telegram said. And they probably were about that time in the waning years of World War II. There was work for anyone able, and family farms were thriving in an effort to keep the country nourished while forces on the other side of the globe struggled to tear each other apart. Who would imagine in those war-weary days that the scowling and birth-wrinkled little prune in a collection of fading newborn photos would grow into a scarred veteran of other wars down a line that America was even then drawing in the sands of time?
It didn’t appear that he’d suffered any deprivations as an infant. Elsewhere in the box he found a couple of wartime ration stamp booklets filled out in his name — Sheldon Davis. It would be a decade or two later when he became known as Shake and the Sheldon of his birth certificate faded except as it appeared on official civil or military documents. There were ration stamps re- maining in the booklets that authorized purchase of milk and formula. So it appeared he’d gotten fed, watered, and clothed in those early years without undue sacrifice. No middle name on any of the documents from his childhood, not even on the kitschy little certificate proclaiming him runner-up in a local Most Beautiful Baby Contest. Shake remembered asking about that, but couldn’t recall getting any kind of definitive answer. His paternal grandmother, a pioneer woman who was Minerva Woody before she married grandfather Everett Davis, once told him that a little boy so special didn’t need more than two names. There was a full- size portrait of her in the box showing a slightly frumpy woman with rimless specs perched on a strong nose. Grandma had the look of a determined survivor in that photo. She certainly was that, a farm-bred woman, reared in hardship, who knew how to raise a family and get things done as and when they needed doing. Shake poured more whisky in his glass and grinned at the woman who had been most influential in his early boyhood years after his parents split over booze and bad-tempered disagreements concerning the direction of their post-war lives. There was a story he loved about his grandparents, really the only familial legend that he could recall. Grandad had been elected Sheriff of Scott County, the only Republican to hold that office in a yellow-dog Democrat region of bootheel Missouri that considered itself a traditional stronghold of the Civil War south in spite of mid-western geography. On a day when Grandad was down with the flu, a gaggle of prisoners he’d locked up for bootlegging moon- shine hooch attempted a jailbreak. The story goes that Shake’s father, then a pre-teen Boy Scout, had rushed home to inform Grandpa that his prisoners were about to fly the county coop. As Grandpa was too ill to do much about it, Grandma Minerva stormed down to the lock-up with a loaded double-barrel 12- gauge and put an end to the disorder. The first time she’d told him that story, Grandma had proudly showed Shake the shotgun that she still kept handy in a kitchen broom closet. Among the formal portraits, each lovingly retouched to blur any real-life blemishes, there was one that he thought he ought to frame one of these days — maybe next to a current photo of him- self, just for a startling contrast. It showed a chubby, laughing baby, sitting fat and sassy in a light blue jumper, an image that conveyed innocence and pure joy at just being alive. Someone had paid to have that photo taken. It was hand tinted by the photographer who added twinkle to his blue eyes and a rosy blush to his fat little baby cheeks.
He pulled a faded ribbon from a batch of odd-shaped photo- graphs, different cameras and different drug-store formats. Someone — likely his mother — had collected the photos in chronological order with dates and ages scribbled on the reverse. Baby Sheldon was posed with his Mom in a miniature man suit with a crop of straw-colored hair carefully parted and lacquered. His mother looked down on him lovingly, mirroring the smile he showed for the camera. Her teeth were present and pearlescent. Her son was missing a few. And there was a shot of the Davis family on the front porch of a rented four-family shotgun house. It was dated a year after the war ended, but Shake could see the stain of dark memories clouding his Dad’s face.
There was a lot more, but Shake had cracked his back-up bot- tle and decided to move on to the second box. That contained more mysteries than memories. Some of the photos and the odd certificate or two concerned his matriculation at Missouri Military Academy for his high school years. No clouds over that. It was what started him on a long, bumpy road to a career in the U.S. Marine Corps. Someone had even saved the three rejection letters he got after failing to score well enough on his academic exams when he was trying to bull his way into the Naval Academy. He pondered dumping those in the trash but put them back. Couldn’t hurt to remind himself of why he started his military ca- reer as a buck private at Parris Island rather than a Midshipman at Annapolis.
Three photos caught his attention and he laid them out on the table where he could examine them in the soft, early evening light streaming in from west-side windows. Someone had juxtaposed them in a little plastic accordion arrangement. There was a shot of him on the deck of a bull-nose tugboat, looking cotton-topped, skinny, and deeply tanned. It was from one of the best summers he could remember of his teenage years, the summer he spent as a deckhand on a Mississippi River tug pushing or pulling barges from St. Louis south to New Orleans and back. The next one was of the SS Admiral, an old art-deco paddle-wheeler homeported in St. Louis that offered excursion cruises on the river when he was a boy. Shake remembered running all over that ship with his friends and cousins, watching in awe as the big side- mounted wheels churned muddy water and the adults sat be- lowdecks drinking cheap Budweiser. The final photo of the three showed an older gent who looked remarkably like photos of Mark Twain when the great author was Samuel Clemens piloting steam-powered paddle-wheelers up and down the Mississippi. The subject was posed in a naval-style frock coat with brass but- tons and wearing a pillbox hat featuring an embroidered name. The hat was Navy blue but the frock coat was a lighter color, not white, likely some shade of grey.
Shake got a magnifying glass for a closer look and determined that the man in the photo was a crewman — more likely the captain given his brass buttons — of a ship called the Natchez. It was one of those posed shots — subject standing stiff and still, with one hand tucked away in his coat — reminiscent of photos he’d seen from the Civil War era. A penciled date on the back confirmed that the shot was taken some time in 1862. A scrawl below that date caused him to grin and reach for his glass. “Pewter follows Uncle Fielding down the river.” Pewter he knew. It was a nickname his grandparents had started to call him when his unruly hair began to take on a lighter cast, an exasperating phenom- enon that led to the premature advent of white hair at around age 23. But who the hell was Fielding? If he was a great uncle, Shake could not remember ever hearing the name mentioned. He couldn’t detect any familial similarities behind the shaggy eyebrows and walrus mustache.
He was about to head for the computer in the den to do some research when another photo on top of a nearby stack caught his eye. This one showed a World War I soldier in uniform complete with doughboy high collar, pie-plate helmet and wrapped leggings. The uniform was mud-spattered, but the 1903 Springfield rifle the man held by his side was clean and looked well-main- tained. Closer examination with the glass revealed that the man was a Marine. The emblem on the front of his helmet was an early version of the eagle, globe, and anchor minus the fouled ropes, and Shake could just make out part of the Indian Head patch on the man’s left shoulder. It was dated 1918 and taken of someone called “Uncle Tanner” at Bois de Belleau. That didn’t need clarification for Shake or any other Marine. The man was a veteran of the epic WWI Battle of Belleau Wood in France, the epic struggle in which the German enemy had reportedly branded the U.S. Marines, then serving as an element of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, with the Teufel Hunden sobriquet which later morphed into Devil Dogs.
But whose uncle was he? If Shake had a relative who fought with the Marines in World War I, he damned sure wanted to know the details. Across all the years he’d listened to war stories from the males in the family, he’d never heard of another Marine. The Davis clan, by birth or marriage, all seemed to have fought in the nation’s wars as either soldiers or sailors.
He reclosed the boxes, dusting them and stacking both in a corner. He snapped a fingernail on the two most interesting photos and carried them to the den where they kept a powerful computer his wife used in her academic work. With a second puzzled look at the WWI photo, he set it under a desk lamp and made a mental note to call a buddy in the Marine Corps History Division at Quantico early the next morning. There was a guy, a retired Marine working there, who owed him a favor or two. In fact, he thought as he fired up the computer, that very guy — Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Rowe — was a dedicated World War I buff who knew just about all anyone could know about Marines in what some short-sighted optimist back in 1918 had called The War to End All Wars. With a little coaxing, Charlie would probably be able to provide some help identifying the old Marine in the photo or at least give Shake a place to start a search. If he was an uncle, Davis was probably the family name. And how many guys would be on the muster roles with a first name like Tanner? He snapped on the lamp and shot a cell phone photo of the picture. He’d upload that and send it along in an email to Charlie before he called.
Google was full of stuff on Mississippi river boats of the paddle-wheel era. He scrolled past all the Mark Twain material and found an interesting treatise on some of the more well-known river steamers. There was a Natchez listed. In fact, there were seven boats by that name ranging through the “golden age of steamboats” on the Big Muddy from about 1830 to 1880. Given the date on the photo, the second to last of the steamers named Natchez was most likely to be the one he wanted. The text said Natchez VI was a Cincinnati-built boat that measured 273 feet stem to stern. It was primarily a cotton hauler from southern to northern ports along the Mississippi and could carry about 5,000 bales.
What made Shake think this particular boat might be the one in the photo of someone’s uncle Fielding was the stuff about its role in the Civil War. The Natchez had reportedly carried Jefferson Davis from his river plantation home at least part way to Richmond, Virginia after he was elected president of the rebel alliance. The paddle-wheel steamer was also used to transport Confederate troops to Memphis, Tennessee and other riverside battle sites during the war. After Union forces captured Memphis, the Natchez reportedly escaped to a hideout on the Yazoo River where it was burned to keep it from falling into enemy hands.
Shake leaned back in his chair and contemplated the computer screen. The longer he stared at old, soft-focus photos of the river boats, the more intrigued he became. He rose and fetched the photo of himself working on the Mississippi tug and brought it into the room where he put it down beside the others. He re- membered the muggy days working on the boat, doing the dirty work that older, more experienced hands wouldn’t do, listening at night to the stories they told about adventures at ports up and down the big spill of water where their muscular tug pushed or pulled a balky string of overloaded barges.
And they had some terrific tales, told with profane glee. Stories familiar to them from overtelling and embellishment but fascinating to a teenage boy. Stories about roaring times on the water and in every waterway transportation hub from St. Paul down through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. It was like one long, lurid adventure tale out of American history, and Shake had been mesmerized. He spent much of his off-duty time tossing in a hot rack belowdecks imagining himself as one of those river rats, a swaggering hard-ass, up for anything and everything, a sailor on the great artery that split the continent and fueled the commerce of America in the days before airplanes, trucks, and interstate highways. He sat there in his Texas Hill Country house, separated by many miles and years from that place and those days, sensing intriguing shadows of teenage dreams.
Maybe intrigued wasn’t the right word. His heart was beating a little faster than should be expected after a couple of stiff drinks, and he felt a tension is his facial muscles. Glancing up at a mirror hung on the wall to his left, he noted that he was grinning. Or what passed for a grin. It was more like an evil grimace, if he was honest about it. But it was familiar. He slugged at his whiskey again, closed his eyes and contemplated the tingle in his belly that crawled up from bowels to chest and then steamrolled right into his brain. He knew the feeling intimately. It was a form of curiosity, he guessed, that sense that he needed to know what happens next, what was on the other side of that hill between imagination and reality. He’d felt the tingle many times in his past, not so much lately, and found he missed it. Sometimes, particularly in a combat zone or when he was immersed in some dicey mission for an alphabet soup federal agency, he felt that same tingle. A clawing, irresistible curiosity. What’s next? What momentous, potentially deadly thing is about to happen…and can I survive it? The answer, the only way to scratch that persistent itch, was to just go, get into it, do the dance, pull the trigger….
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About the Author: Marine officer Dale A. Dye rose through the ranks to retire as a captain after 21 years of service in war and peace. Following retirement from active duty in 1984, and upset with Hollywood’s treatment of the American military, he went to Hollywood and established Warriors, Inc., the preeminent military training and advisory service to the entertainment industry. Dye has worked on more than 50 movies and TV shows, including several Oscar-and Emmy-winning productions. His current project, No Better Place To Die, — for which he is the writer and director — is a World War II drama about the airborne Normandy landings on D-Day. Tom Hanks has signed on to both act in and executive-produce the film.
Find the complete File Series, featuring Shake Davis, along with Captain Dye’s other books here.
