As the Waters Rose

The newspapers ran stories about the recovery, and things were getting better, I grant you.The war in Europe helped.Still, there were a lot of men wandering around the country looking for work, and I was one of them in the summer of 1940.I'd been making brake assemblies for Oldsmobiles in a little factory in Gary, Indiana, but they shuttered the place in May.It was just chance that I saw TVA's notice.The description only said labor.If you grow up on a farm, then you know about labor, so I applied and they took me on.TVA was building dams, and I'd hope to be learning a good trade.When the man at the office told me I'd be digging up bodies, I was taken aback and disappointed, but in no position to turn him down.Chickamauga Dam was already beginning to hold water.As the lake rose, a lot of people had to be relocated, and some of those people were dead.It was TVA's job-my jobto move them.I was on a crew with two other men.Hal Sokol was the silent type, and I never found out much about him.He was tall and skinny, and his bones showed through his pale skin as if he was a signpost for what we were doing.Tom Morgan gave me a ride to and from work every day.I'd found a room in Cleveland, up the road from Chattanooga, and Tom lived nearby on a farm covered with weeds and rusty implements.Tom was a heavyset man running to fat.He was a good driver except for his tendency to ride the clutch.He kept two shotguns in a rack behind the seat of his truck, and there was always more or less whiskey in a bottle in the glove compartment.The whiskey was rotgut, but he kept it in a Jack Daniels bottle.That was his only affectation.Otherwise, he looked, talked and acted like exactly what he was: a Tennessee redneck descended from a long line of the same.I boarded with a Mrs. Spring.She lived alone in the top floor of a little commercial building on Ocoee Street not far from Park.Downstairs was a small grocery and an