Captain Clarke "Little Doc" Hawley told of a certain deckhand on the DELTA QUEEN, in the late '50's, who did his work well, but kept to himself and rarely associated with anyone else beyond the limits of his duties aboard the boat. This fellow had no personal friends among the crew, but because he "pulled his own weight" when it came to his many steamboat chores, he was generally respected but left alone and no one attempted to penetrate the invisible wall he built around himself. So secretive was he that his surname was known only to the Mate who kept track of the days he worked and the Purser who handed him his pay envelope every Friday at noon.
In those days, Natchez-Under-the-Hill was not the tourist attraction it is today. Then, all that remained of the once turbulent and exciting quarter beneath the steep loess bluffs upon which the respectable and beautiful city of Natchez was built were but a few crumbling brick and wooden buildings on the only remaining road, Silver Street, that centuries before,
Spaniards had carved into the face of the yellow-clay cliffs. From within those few relics, now saloons and bawdy houses catering to the lees of Natchez society, the perfume of old cypress and the pungent aromas of sour beer, sweat, and the accumulated grunge of two centuries often assailed the unwary in sudden cold blasts in harsh contrast to the heat of Mississippi delta afternoonsOne of these bars was a favorite among many of the crew of the DELTA QUEEN, and on a blazing summer afternoon as the steamboat lay shackled to the iron rings set into the sides of the Spanish trail, this enigmatic member of the deck department, his work completed before those less industrious than he, found himself in the bar alone except for the barkeeper and a young girl of about ten years of age who was the proprietor’s daughter. The deckhand sat silently on a high, ragged stool at the crude bar and sipped upon a warm draft beer. He noticed that his image, reflecting in the bar room mirror, peered from within the gloom of the encrusted glass like a phantom face gazing from a foreboding and dreadful place.To anyone else, this would have been disturbing, but the deckhand savored the moroseness, and only the scratchy tune playing on the jukebox in the room beyond stood in sharp contrast to the gloom wherein he had sought solace. He didn’t notice that the jukebox had stopped playing as he finished the last warm dregs from the bottom of his mug.
When he stood up to leave, the girl was standing next to him and she reached up and tugged at his shirt tail and begged, "Gimme a quarter, Mis'ta. Ya hear me? Gimme’a quarter fo' da music." The deckhand was at once taken aback, not only by the girl’s unexpected presence, but also because he was unaccustomed to such demands being made upon him. In his eagerness to get away from the annoying child, he roughly refused her request by scolding, "Get ta hell 'way from me, girl," as he turned toward the door and walked outside and into the blast of the Southern summer sun.
As the solitary boatman walked slowly toward the DELTA QUEEN, just several hundred feet further down the slope of the sandy riverbank, he enjoyed the slight intoxication of the warm beer. Unknown to him, however, was that immediately after he refused to give the barkeeper’s daughter a quarter for the jukebox, she ran to her father and told him that the man, then stepping out the front door, had said vile and terrible things to her when she asked him for a quarter to play the juke box. A terrible rage overcame the father when he heard his daughter’s tale and he resolved to avenge the honor of his child.
The DELTA QUEEN lay only a hundred feet ahead when the deckhand heard a horrendous screaming behind him. As he looked around he saw the bartender running toward him waiving a huge pistol and screaming at the very steamboat man who, just minutes before, had been seated at the bar sipping on the warm beer served in the ramshackle establishment. The deckhand had no idea what was happening, and the only thing he understood was that he had to reach the safety of the steamboat that lay just a few more steps away. So he began to run toward the landing stage that bridged the gap between the boat and the shore.
Two explosive reports from the forty-four caliber revolver swept down Silver Street and stunned the crew who were standing on the head of the DELTA QUEEN. As they looked toward the source of the deafening racket, they saw the deckhand tumbling through the aie like he had been fired out of the very gun that was now killing him. His arms and legs thrashed wildly as he was propelled toward the stage by the impact of the bullets that slammed into his back, and the horror that twisted his face into a mask of terror was that of a man looking into his own grave.
By the time the deckhand crashed into the brown sand where the head of the four-ton stage was imprinted, he was dying. Several well-meaning members of the crew who witness the drama rushed out to help their fallen comrade. A couple stout fellows were lifting him from the sand and were fixing to bring him aboard the boat when Captain "Old-Doc" Carr came running out to the head of the stage and ordering them to stop and lay the dying man back onto the ground by admonishing, "Don’t bring that man aboard the boat! He’s liable to die, and if he does, it’s gonna take forever to get the DELTA QUEEN out of here!"
The deckhand who preferred to stay to himself, without making friends among his own crew, died on the warm sand at the foot of Silver Street. As the DELTA QUEEN pulled away and headed upstream, the deckhand's lifeless body lay where it had fallen though now covered in a brown wool blanket- a gift from the crew he chose not to know.
(C) Captain Donald J. Sanders 2006
