Tell

By Jeff H Martin

LoveTime TravelMysterious Artifacts

What could possibly go wrong?

John Hardin, an aging, error-prone time traveler finds love and stumbles upon strange artifacts that contradict today's mainstream archaeology. Along the way, he discovers a previously unknown (and somewhat misplaced) civilization in the swampy Mississippi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deer Creek Communications
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218082185

Jeff H Martin

Jeff H. Martin grew up in the mean streets of the Mississippi Delta in the 50's and 60's. He has written six novels and has appeared in many theatrical films and television series. He likes dogs and gardening.

Book preview

1

Tell

Also, by Jeff H. Martin

Journey Motel Court: John Hardin Goes to Memphis

The Sleeper, the Journals of John Hardin

Mississippi Neon

New Africa Road, the Rise of the BlackShirts

1949, A Short Novel

Tell

Jeff H. Martin

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2022

Jeff H. Martin

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

If I could holler like a mountain jack, I'd climb yonder mountain, and call my baby back. How long, how long, baby, how long?

How Long Blues

Pine Top Perkins

Prologue

The out there is still killer.

My name is Richie Hardin. I edit my cousin John's journals when I'm not working on one of my own books. John tells me this is the last one, the last journal. Time will tell.

John's an average guy except for the fact that he can move backwards in the fabric of time. Really. He can. He can also come back to the current time, or CT as he calls it. He writes about his travels in his journals. I never know where he will go next.

I do my best to edit them professionally. Lots of people have read them. Solid people. Upright people. Learned people. Everyday people. Of course, there have been a few kooks who've read them, too.

John lives most of his life in the ether, coming and going, to the past from the present and back again. I submit to you that he's one third a God, and at least half crazy.

Here is John's third journal.

Chapter One

Time is not what you think it is.

Across the muddy expanse, even in summer, and it was most definitely summer, the river was so wide the trees on the opposite side, the Arkansas side, were a green blur. The river was moving faster than I had imagined. There must have been some late snows up north and out west.

As I gathered my wits, I realized I had made two serious mistakes. On one hand I was pleased that I landed on the riverbank and not in the river, and I was on the correct side of the Mississippi. What caused me to kick the ancient sand was the fact that it was too late in the day to get much done. The sun was going down. The other thing … I had forgotten to put a box of waterproof matches in my pocket.

I know how to make fire, but I was too tired and lazy to create the needed friction. So, I slept on the riverbank. I folded myself into a kidney shaped indention into a man-sized mound of sand that surrounded a large log. I made sure the log was not hollow.

I curled up in that pocket and tried to remember if alligators patrolled the riverbank in pre-Columbian days. I was not in the mood to be surprised in the night. I was deathly afraid an alligator might stumble upon me. Were they nocturnal? I couldn't remember. When I thought through this adventure, I did not plan on any encounters with fifteenth century reptiles.

I woke up and I peed on a small dune topped with coffee weeds. I tried to douse an oversized snake doctor who darted around my legs. My stream was too weak to hit the compound eyed curiosity. My issuance was clear and wispy, almost a mist. You got to love those heart meds. They do wonders for an old man's bodily functions.

The air smelled sweet. I sucked it in. It had to have more oxygen than the air we breathe in current time. Breathing was like enjoying a tasty meal.

I was bitten during the night by things I could not see in the light. The brittle, yellow caked sand and whatever it hosted left me itching for hours. I would have dove into the river for some relief, but the current was too strong. I'm not that much of a swimmer.

When morning finally came, I knew I had to move away from the river quickly. My objective, the Somerville ceremonial Indian Mounds, was five miles or so to the southeast.

The Somerville mounds are a major archaeological site in unincorporated Jefferson County, north of Port Adam, Mississippi. It features major earthwork monuments, including more than twelve large platform mounds and cleared and filled plazas. In current time Somerville has been restored to what archaeologist’s think was its pre-Columbian condition. Plus, they added walking trails and a little pond. The site also has a small museum. I've been there many times.

The river at my back was majestic and sacred, but it was a dangerous place to linger. The hungry little critters that lived in the sand had been a nuisance. They were nothing compared to the oversized water moccasins and 200-year-old snapping turtles, green and nasty and big as baby elephants, hiding in the back waters. Pre-Colombian alligators, panthers, bobcats, black bears, melanistic foxes and other omnifarious flesh eaters roamed the riverbank like they owned the place. There may have even been Aurochs for all I knew. Aurochs in Mississippi!

Then there were the mound builders themselves. Archaeologists know more today about the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians than they know about these people. Who knows how they would react to an aging white man from the future? An old man with a pacemaker/defibrillator in his chest for God's sake! Maybe they would think I was Quetzalcoatl. Hell, it's possible. More than one person has told me that talking to me was like talking to God.

I worked my way through the thick woods all morning. One good thing, there were no man-made levees to hump. There was nothing to stop the river when it chose to overflow. I was okay on flat land. I feel like a young man with an old soul, but I'm not. I'm an old man with a good mind, good legs and half a heart. For a man who had suffered a massive heart attack just nine months earlier, I felt good. I felt feral. I was feral, a feral old man.

All I had to help me survive the Mississippi Delta of over 500 years ago was a forged steel hatchet, a good pair of boots, a sturdy walking stick I was lucky to find, my heart meds, two pair of underwear, some CBD oil, a small bottle of Kirkland PM, a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament, and great anticipation. I wanted to see those man-made structures in their nonnative state, to see what they were like before white men like me swept across the Mississippi Valley and destroyed them by the hundreds as we cleared the land for tobacco, cotton, and soybeans.

I was truly fortunate. I had traveled to a spot along the river I knew well. It was a few miles south of the grand confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, where waters from both halves of the North American continent articulated with purpose and will, then surged vigorously to the Gulf of Mexico. This was a place of real power. I'm sure the mound builders understood it.

Martha's Landing is what the people in Port Adam called it. This place could have been on a ley line for all I knew. It had authority, beauty. I went there often when I lived in Port Adam, usually alone. No matter how numb I was from weed and whiskey, or how profound my blues, or stone cold broke I was, Martha's Landing had a way of making me feel better about myself and the cosmos. It was one of those places with the power to pry you away from your fragile malaise. It was a subtle thing, like the way a good cup of tea or a Van Morrison tune can lift you up ever so slightly and turn abject inkiness into dirty moonlight.

My cousin, Richie Hardin, proposed to his first wife, Raven, at Martha's Landing. She was a beautiful twenty-five-year-old Port Adam girl. Richie worked with her at the television station. She was so pretty. Lord, she was a pretty woman. So fresh! So clean! So Christian. Even though he had convinced himself that she would say yes, he popped the question at Martha's Landing to hedge his bet. He used its dynamics to his advantage. They made love on the riverbank that afternoon and put on quite a show for the deckhands on the towboats that navigated that pronounced bend in the river around Choctaw Bar Island.

People in Port Adam named it Martha's Landing after an early settler named Martha Whitaker. They say she brought Methodism to the settlement to the south that would become Port Adam (Lord knows, someone had to.) and named an especially lawless stretch of riverbank north of town Bachelor's Bend.

No decent woman was to be seen at Bachelor's Bend unless she was accompanied by a man, preferably her husband, brother, or a member of the clergy.

Editor’s note: I did propose to my beautiful first wife at Martha's Landing as the towboats passed by on the river. Now the world knows.

In the Great Flood of 1927, a one-mile section of the Mississippi levee collapsed and was shoved aside by the raging flood waters. Back then the levees were built along the banks of the river, with no buffer zone to allow for the flood waters to spread and diminish their destructive force. As the river came around the long bend of Choctaw Bar Island it gained power and then became squeezed in this area and easily overtopped its banks. The resulting crevasse carved out two giant blue holes each over one hundred feet deep, both of which still exist today and can be seen if you make a stop in this vicinity during low or medium water levels. At high water levels the blue hole gets flooded along with the adjacent forests and there is nothing to see except for an expanse of muddy waters surrounded by woods.

The crevasse led to the flooding of all the Mississippi Delta below this point, from Rosedale to Ruleville to Greenwood and everything south. The flood water flowed gently but firmly along and swallowed farms, houses, railroad lines, bridges, commissary stores, cotton gins, barns, and everything in its path in between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, until it was funneled down above Vicksburg, where it swept back into the father river and caused it to swell anew (leading to other breaks downstream on the other side, now in Louisiana.) This is the famous break that led blues legend Charlie Patton (alleged half-brother of Sam Chapman of the Mississippi Sheiks) to pen his High Water Everywhere Part 1 and High Water Everywhere Part 2 in 1929, a popular tune thereafter, covered thematically by Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan.

Flood victims, black and white, never outlived the experience. Richie's first wife, Raven, interviewed several flood victims for a proposed documentary that never materialized. Their stories were gripping

Many told of standing on their rooftops in dozens of different small Delta hamlets, watching in fatalistic horror and fascination as the rampart of water marched toward them.

Before I set off on this trip to the archaic Delta, I studied several old maps of the Mississippi River. When I saw all its undulations and crazy bends over time, I knew I had to go to the one place I knew was a constant, the confluence of waters north of Port Adam.

Geography was just part of the challenge. I wanted to go back to around 1450 AD, when the mound builder's civilization was in the latter stages of collapse, when the people scattered. It was a worrisome, enigmatic time, for those who studied the mound builder’s civilization. No one really knew what happened to them. No one.

Chapter Two

I'm not crestfallen because I can't travel to the future. I couldn't remember it anyway.

I suddenly felt tired not long after setting out for the mounds. This happens to me occasionally when I travel back in time more than a few decades. I don't know why. I think it screws up my blood for a while. Plus, it was hotter than I had anticipated. Also, my nose had begun to bleed, again. I leaned against a massive oak tree and held my head up. The bleeding stopped. I took a nap.

Editor’s note: At the request of several readers, I am compelled to point out that my cousin’s journal is in bold italic text. The Editor’s comments, my comments, are in plain Garamond.

I had a disturbing dream. I found myself in a dystopian setting with a group of Baby Boomers, people my age. There were no other signs of human life anywhere. We happen upon a small, abandoned theater. The stage could use some work, but it was functional. A skinny guy with a Foo Fighters t-shirt shouts let's put on a show! The group quickly decides to stage a revival of Picnic! A skinny woman with bug eyes announces that she will play the role of Madge Owens, the role Kim Novak played in the movie.

Note: in my dreams I’m not depressed. I'm pretty much normal, whatever that is. Everything is an adventure. There's a cut in my strut. I feel a lightness of being. Regardless of how old I am in the dream (and I'm never this old) I feel like I am a twenty-year-old.

Perhaps you are wondering why I am attempting this dangerous mission all by my lonesome. While it is true that I am a loner, I'm not the archetypal pariah that that word connotates in twenty-first century America. I can be a team player when necessary. Sometimes I like to be just one of the guys, a plodder like the rest, but this isn’t one of those times.

The thing is there aren't many folks who can do what I do. There is only one guy that I know who can do what I do. His name is Carl Gercich and he lives in Kansas City, Kansas. He used to be a police detective there. He gave up police work when he married a beautiful lawyer from Wichita. He pops up frequently in my earlier journals. Gercich has been in my life for a long time.

Gercich is a descendant of one of the original Croatian families who came to Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas to work in the meat packing plants in what is now KCK, around the turn of the century, 20th century that is.

I found Gercich standing in front of an English dance hall near RAF Boddington in Gloucestershire, a few weeks before D-Day. He was up to no good, of course. He was passing himself off as Captain Jim James, U.S. Army Air Corps, or I should say, the dashing Captain Jim James. He combed his hair back like a young Clark Cable and carried himself like a man's man about to wage righteous war against the Nazis. The English girls could not get enough of him. They pawed his faux bemedaled chest and fixed his collar though it seldom needed fixing. He was the embodiment of the cocky, square jawed, mysterious American Army Air Corps officer.

Gercich was not there to liberate Western Europe or fight the Hun. He was there for the abundant, English girl trim. There seemed to be no end to it.

Since then, he's made a few trips back with me, and even more on his own. We saved a civil rights icon's life on one trip. It was truly our most noble endeavor. On another we helped win the cold war. Really. We did.

Gercich can be a real jerk sometimes. I have no idea where he is right now. I miss the cocky bastard.

Thank goodness I've got my cousins Richie and Johnny. I would be one lonesome soul without them in my life.

I have so much random shit in my head. I looked up at the canopy of trees I walked beneath as I headed for the still unseen Mounds and thought of a curious thing a lady friend said to me one time. She said she was a victim of canopy ideas. I should have said me too! I'm glad most of the women I've known were way smarter than me.

People have described my cousins Johnny, Richie, and me as brothers from another mother, a tight unit of a special kind. For third cousins, we are supernaturally close. We each have other cousins. I have tons of them on my mother's side. None of those other kin are part of our three-man Trust. Never have been, and never will be.

We share our great grandparents. old Joseph and Evelyn. They had land and money, social status in the socially stratified Delta of their time, and a drop of culture for good measure. Everything was going great until Joseph blew his brains out in his livery stable in 1910.

We were all born in 1950, the watershed year of the Baby Boom. I am the oldest and Richie is the youngest. Johnny is the best looking. Richie and I think we are sixes or sevens, but really, we aren’t anything to write home about. Oh, and one other thing: each one of us is an only child. Go figure the probability of that.

What happened to my cousin Richie was truly a shame. Poor ol' Richie