Red Grass River (5 page)

Anyhow, there used to be a dance every Saturday night in a big auction barn a few miles south of West Palm and the Ashley boys would usually come up from Pompano to dance and meet girls. Even Bill Ashley would come up sometimes just to play his banjo with the band and have a dance or two with his wife Bertha, who everybody liked. They were lively affairs with good string bands and plenty of food and punch and of course every man brought his own jug. One Saturday evening Bobby Baker showed up with a girl named Julie Morrell, a pretty sixteen-year-old who had long honey-colored hair and freckles and a smile to melt a grown man’s heart. Bobby was crazy in love with her and didnt make any secret of it. He’d met her just a few weeks earlier and was telling people he was by God going to marry her one day or know the reason why. The Ashleys were there that night as usual and the brothers took turns dancing with every girl in the place. Frank and Ed and Bob cut in on Bobby one after another but he didnt seem to mind all that much. He was proud of his pretty sweetheart and they say he liked being envied by the other fellas. Then John Ashley cut in on him, and while Julie was spinning around in John Ashley’s arms Bob Ashley sidled up to Bobby and started up a conversation and the next time Bobby looked out to the dance floor neither Julie Morrell nor John Ashley was anywhere in sight.

Everybody knows John Ashley always did have a way with the ladies—with proper ones as well as them not so proper. Just exactly how much of a way he had with Julie Morrell in the darkness of the pines beyond the barn that evening is something nobody but him and her would ever know for certain. But it aint hard to imagine what Bobby Baker thought when he saw they were gone from the barn.

He went running out to look for her and the Ashley boys followed him outside and watched him run around yelling Julie’s name to make himself heard over the music from the barn. When they started laughing at him, Bobby went at Bob Ashley with both fists swinging. Maybe he picked out Bob because he was the one who’d distracted him long enough for John to make off with Julie, or maybe just because Bob was the Ashley standing closest to him at the moment. He was older
and bigger than Bob, but Bob had a reputation as a vicious scrapper who even a lot of the older fellas were afraid of. They punched and kicked and bit and scratched and gouged and pulled each other’s hair and rolled around on the ground all locked up like a couple of pit dogs. A small bunch of spectators gathered round to root for one or the other but most people at the dance never even knew the fight took place. It was fairly even going for about five minutes and then Bobby got astraddle of Bob Ashley and got both hands on his throat and try as he might Bob Ashley couldnt buck him off. When it was pretty clear that Bobby was going to kill him if somebody didnt stop him, Frank and Ed finally stepped in and pulled them apart. They say Bob Ashley was black in the face by then and likely wouldnt of lasted another half-minute. They said his eyes were bloodshot for a week after. They said both them boys looked like they’d been hit by a train.

A deputy sheriff showed up about then and Frank and Ed were explaining things to him when here comes John Ashley and Julie Morrell out of the pines. Julie was blushing and her hair was all messy and with leaves in it and she never said a word nor looked anybody in the eye but just went right on by them all and into the barn. They say John Ashley was grinning like a keyboard and said, “What’s goin on, boys?” Bobby Baker was so beat up and wore out he couldnt hardly stand by himself but he tried to go at John anyway and had to be held back by the deputy. They say if looks could kill, Bobby Baker would’ve put John Ashley in his grave right then and there.

The way the story goes, when Julie Morrell’s daddy who was a grocer heard what happened he wanted to charge John Ashley with rape, only Julie insisted to him it had been no such a thing and swore she’d never lie to the contrary in court. They say he whipped her bare ass bloody with a razor strap. Supposedly he made threats against John Ashley and against Bobby Baker too because he was the one he’d entrusted with his daughter’s safekeeping that night—but it’s probly not true. Like most folk he was too afraid of the Ashley and the Bakers both to of said anything so reckless. Nobody was surprised when he finally never did anything except pack up his family and move away. Some said they went to the panhandle, some said out to Arkansas where he had kin. Nobody knew for sure. A few years later during the war, one of the boys come home on leave from and army aviation school in Alabama and swore up and down he’d had the pleasure of sweet Julie Morrell in a Birmingham whorehouse. Whether it was true or not, it’s what most people come to believe became of her.

As for the Ashleys and Bakers, well, Old Joe and Sheriff George
were seen having a drink together in a Pompano saloon not a week after the fight and joking about how a pretty girl could sure make the bucks lock horns. And about a month later a dozen witnesses saw John Ashley meet up with Bobby Baker on the New River trading docks. John poled up in a skiff and was pulling a second one loaded with plumes. Bobby was there helping his cousin Freddie to patch the bottom of his fishing boat and was still carrying scars from the fight with Bob Ashley. They say John Ashley greeted him as friendly as you please although nobody made to shake hands. John had a round of beers brought out to the dock from the trading store and told about his plume hunt in the rookeries southwest of Okeechobee. He told Bobby they ought to go fishing together in the Indian River again sometime like they used to. If anybody had Julie Morrell on his mind nobody said so. Neither Bobby nor Freddie hardly said a word the whole time. Then John Ashley said so long and got in his skiff and poled away. They say the Baker boys watched him go and then poured out the bottles of beer they neither one had taken the first sip of. Far as anybody knows, Bobby Baker and John Ashley never did go fishing together again.

In nineteen and eleven the Ashleys made theirselfs a new homestead in the piney swamps a few miles southwest of Gomez. Old Joe bought sixty acres set about midway between Peck’s Lake and the south fork of the St. Lucie River. Not a neighbor for miles around. About three-quarters of the place was nothing but pine swamp, but there was a wide high clearing in the middle of the property and him and his boys built a good-sized house on it. It was a dogtrot—had a breezeway between the two halfs of the house—with a full wide porch both front and back and a steep-pitched roof and a chimney at either one of the gable sides. Had a big kitchen out back. They built the thing of Dade County pine and shingled it with cypress to let the heat out through the roof. That Dade pine’s about the best lumber in the world but it’s mostly all been cleared away and you cant hardly find a stick of it anymore. It’s so fulla resin you can work it real easy while it’s green but once it ages and that resin dries up you cant drive a nail in it with a sledgehammer. Termite’ll bust its teeth on it is how hard it gets. The bad news is, a house made of Dade pine ever catches fire it’ll burn down quick as a kitchen match on account of all that resin. They call it lighterwood out in the Devil’s Garden because it’s so easy to start a campfire with it.

The house was shaded by a big live oak to either side and had a
clear view for forty yards in all directions right up to the edge of the pine swamps all around. The two shade trees were pretty near the same size and the reason Old Joe named the place Twin Oaks. There was dozens of creeks and waterways all around the property connecting it east and west to ever part of that region between Lake Okeechobee and the Indian River lagoon and south to the sawgrass country. But there was only one road into the property—a narrow roundabout trail they’d cut through all that swampy pineland between the house and the Dixie Highway. It was awful rough going for a motor vehicle, but that was the idea, to make it damn hard for anybody to drive up to their place, especially at night. That trail was hardly wide enough for a wagon except at a couple of points where they’d broadened it enough so a car could make a turnaround—just in case it ever had to.

Joe pretty soon had him a whiskey camp about three miles southwest of the Twin Oaks house—out at the Crossbone Creek at the edge of the Devil’s Garden. Even after he built his other camps this one was said to be his favorite. It was the biggest and about the best hid. His next one was set a few miles farther south in the Hungryland Slough. By then he was making deliveries as far north as Fort Pierce and as far south as Miami and his business was better than ever. Then that Indian turned up dead in that Lauderdale canal and Palm Beach County Sheriff George Baker charged John Ashley with murder.

A lot of people couldnt understand why all the to-do about a damn dead Indian. But Sheriff George said he had to do something about it because there was a witness who’d seen John Ashley do the deed and there was other evidence besides. The “evidence,” as he called it, was a bunch of otter furs John Ashley’d sold down in Miami. That struck lots of people as pretty damn slim evidence because one bunch of otter furs looks just like every other bunch and how was anybody gonna tell em apart? As for the witness, he was a low breed named Jimmy Gopher and such a naturalborn liar that if he told you water ran downhill you’d have you doubts. He was lying if he said hello. He’d vanished into the Everglades just as soon as he was set loose from jail and didnt nobody ever see him again. There was talk Bob Ashley hunted him down deep in the Devil’s Garden and killed him so he couldnt never testify against John Ashley but there never was any proof of it. It might of been just talk from those who hated the Ashleys and would tell any sort of lie to try to put them in a worse light with the law.

We no sooner heard about the warrant for John Ashley than we heard Bobby Baker and Sammy Barfield had caught up to him and
his brother Bob in one of their waycamps—but the Ashleys had somehow got the drop on them and took away their pistols and disabled their car and made them to walk home. A Palm Beach deputy found them sitting by the side of the Dixie Highway the next morning. What made it even more embarrassing for Bobby was he’d lost his artificial leg. He said he somehow got it caught in a hole in the limerock trail they’d been walking on and it was stuck so fast he didnt have no choice but to unstrap it and leave it there. Sammy Barfield didnt have much to add to the story except to say it was just the way Bobby told it. Poor Sammy looked pretty shook up for a time afterwards. He always was strung too tight for police work and he got out of it before much longer.

When Sheriff George sent some men out into that piney swamp to fix the car and bring it back they found Bobby’s leg in it. All anybody could figure was that somebody had come along and found it and knew damn well who it belonged to, especially with the county police car just down the trail. Whoever it was had got it unstuck and throwed it in there.

Nobody roundabouts saw hide nor hair of John Ashley for the next two years. Some said he’d gone to Alabama, some said out to Oregon. Others said he hid out someplace in Texas where he had kin who ran a hotel. Wherever it was he went, two years later he came back. Just walked into Sheriff George’s office one day in the company of his daddy and a lawyer and give himself up.

April 1912—June 1914

T
HE
G
ALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFER
ent from those he’d known in Florida. The fitful breezes off the Gulf moistly warm as dogbreath. Hordes of mosquitoes. Regular evening rainstorms that flared whitely at the windows and rattled the glassware with their thunder and sometimes became downpours that lasted for days. All such was familiar to him. But winter’s occasional blue northers were an alien brutality that made his teeth ache and burned his face raw and made him think his feet would never again be warm.

He’d arrived on a boat from New Orleans, where he’d steamed to out of Tampa. His father had sent word ahead to his sister July of John’s troubles with the Florida laws and asked her to take him in for a time. When he showed up one early afternoon at the front door of her pink two-story clapboard on Post Office Street in a part of town long known as Fat Alley, Aunt July welcomed him warmly. She was a lean darkhaired woman who looked younger than her forty-four years except in the eyes which looked to him to have seen everything. While they took lunch on the back porch off the kitchen she said she had friends who could get him work on the Galveston docks if he was interested. John Ashley said he had given the matter of a job some thought on the voyage from Florida and believed he was well-suited to work for her as what was commonly called a bouncer.

“Houseman, we call them,” Aunt July had said, looking surprised,
“or mostly just the man.” Her gaze turned appraising. “Well, you’re certainly of size for the job,” she said, “but you
are
awfully young. Besides, the house already has a man.” She turned toward the kitchen and called out, “Hauptmann!”

A beefy balding man in a collarless striped shirt and suspenders came to the screen door and looked out at them without expression as he noisily ate an apple.

She looked at John Ashley and arched her brow. John Ashley smiled at her and then turned to the man at the door and said, “Hey, Hauptmann, why dont you just get your hat and go? Or if you ruther, you can step out here and we’ll settle who’s man of the house.”

Hauptmann’s forehead furrowed and he stopped chewing. Then he snorted and said, “There aint but one man of the house here, sonny, and you lookin at him.”

John Ashley stood up and took off his coat and draped it over the porch railing and said, “Come show me.”

Aunt July looked from one to the other and said, “Now boys, I wont stand for you either one getting bad hurt. No knives, you hear me?”

They stepped down to the weedy courtyard shaded by white-blossomed oleander trees and stripped of their shirts. Girls flocked to the rear windows of both floors to witness the job competition. Hauptmann was the bigger man but he’d grown soft and slow with whorehouse life and in minutes his nose was broken and one of his ears was a ruination and one eye was swelling and closing fast and he told John Ashley he’d had enough. Ten minutes later Aunt July had paid him his wages and he was gone. And John Ashley sat in the kitchen and smiled and had his skinned knuckles tended by a pair of girls as Aunt July explained his duties to him.

He rarely had to use force to put anyone off the premises and even then most of the rowdies were too drunk to put up much of a fight and he easily enough muscled them to the side door and pitched them into the alley and their hats after them. When he did have to get tougher a hard hook to the belly or a punch to the neck was usually sufficient to quell all dispute. He had expected a rougher patronage but Aunt July’s regulars were mostly a tame bunch and he now and then found himself wishing some old boy who could scrap would start trouble simply to relieve the boredom. To exercise himself to a sweat he’d several times a week set loose all the chickens in the little coop in the courtyard and then chase them down again to the delight of the spectating girls.

The girls were the job’s grand compensation. Eight inmates as they
called themselves resided in the house and only a couple were older than he and none were less than pretty and nearly all freely available to him when the business hours were done. Besides deferring to his status as the man of the house and as their employer’s favored nephew the girls were anyway attracted to him for his youth and good looks and pleasant Deep South manners—and for the mystery of his past which included the rumor that he’d killed a man. They admired and took comfort in his adeptness at dealing with trouble. He made joyful daily claim on this sexual perquisite during the whole of his first year in Galveston. Only two of the girls would not permit him in their beds—Laraine who was married and truly loved her husband and would not cheat on him by having congress with any other man but a paying customer, and Cindy Jean who said he so much reminded her of her brother Royal back home in Fort Worth that it would feel like the awfulest sin. He took the other six in turn, a different one every night, and so each week had one of them twice—once on Sunday and again the following Saturday.

At the dinner table one afternoon Aunt July mock-admonished him for his unflagging concupiscence. “It’s a scientific fact that a man can go crazy doing it as much as you do,” she said. “It’s all that constant friction. Sends way too much heat up your tallywhacker just like a fuse and on up your spinebone and when it reaches your brain, why, it just cooks it like an egg. Too much hokey-pokey has been known to turn a man into a drooling fool fit for nothing but a freak tent.”

To which John Ashley raised his face to the dining room ceiling and bayed like a moonstruck hound and his aunt couldn’t help but join in the girls’ laughter.

Wiser heads might have warned him that ever-ready pleasures cannot long endure, that sexual indulgence requires respite and even occasional lack in order that its enjoyment not jade. He was young and did not know these things and would anyway not have believed them had he been told and so was obliged to discover their truth for himself. By the end of his first year in Galveston he was beyond surfeit with pleasures of the flesh. He took to waking in the forenoon before the girls arose and slipping out of the house and staying away until early evening and the hour of his employ. At supper the girls began to look at him askance but they held their tongues. Not until he’d kept his distance from them for more than two weeks did a roanhaired inmate named Sally make bold to inquire: “Dont you like us no more, Johnny?”

He heard the injury in her voice and saw in her face and in the
faces of the others that a man’s failure of desire for them was the harshest of rebuffs. He felt mean for making them feel unwanted.

“
Hey
now, girls,” he said, turning up his palms, “I just need a little rest from you all or like Aunt July says I’ll sure enough go loony from way too much of a good thing.”

They smiled with ready acceptance of this explanation and winked at each other with relief and fell to their suppers with a happy clatter of dishware.

He did resume his visits with the girls but now dallied only twice or thrice a week—often enough to avoid giving further offense but not so often as to glut himself again. He spent the larger portion of his days walking the city and at last acquainting himself with it. He bought a white suit and wore it everywhere against a light blue shirt and black tie and all under a widebrimmed white Panama. He went to the bayside docks and watched the loading and unloading of cargoes of every sort and heard seamen speaking in the tongues of nations whose names he did not know. He daily joined the crowd that gathered every afternoon to see what the fishing boats brought in and one day marveled with them all at a fourteen-foot tiger shark with a girth twice his own as the beast was hung up by its tail and the captain dissected its belly and among the contents to issue onto the dock were a rum bottle and a horseshoe and most of a woman’s bare arm as yet hardly digested and whose finger bore a gold wedding band. The sight reminded him of a time he’d cut open the stomach of a bull gator he’d shot at the south rim of Lake Okeechobee and therein found a boot containing a pale hairy foot.

He ambled along the Strand and admired its ornate Victorian architecture and several times attended matinee theater performances and once and only once a matinee at the opera house. He liked walking in the drizzling rain after dark in the misty glow of the streetlamps. He took long noonday strolls along the seawall so recently completed after the hurricane of 1900 that killed 6,000. In the saloons they yet told stories of workgangs impressed at gunpoint and given whiskey rations through the day and night that they might stay halfdrunk and abide the labor of heaving corpses into the towering bonefires on the beach. The fires blazed for weeks and hung the island with a dread and hazy stench. Now the city streets rattled and honked with more than 200 motorcars and pedestrians scurried aside with hardly a glance at them and only the most nervous horses still stamped and kicked at their passing. The speed limit in town was ten miles per hour but there were daring motorists who raced each other on the beach all the way
to San Luis at the west end of the island. In the parks he watched baseball games and boxing matches and bicyclists and schoolchildren at their gymnastics. He put on a bathing suit in a beach bathhouse and went for long swims in the mirrorsmooth morning sea. And yet, in this his second year of exile in a modern city whose pleasures he could not refute, he could not deny either his increasing yearning for home.

He often went fishing from the beach in the afternoons and sometimes thought of Bobby Baker who’d shown him the best places in the Indian River for trout and how to read the weather—taught him that when you saw sand sharks jumping between dawn and sunrise you could look for sporadic southwest winds in about five or six hours, that when the whip rays jumped in the morning you knew a northwester would soon hit and rough up and silt the water, but when the morning cobwebs were thicker than usual you could bet on good weather for fishing out on the salt.

John Ashley felt almost friendly toward Bobby Baker in his recollections. He had always considered him a good old boy who seemed to have no lack of grit—as he’d proved on such occasions as the first-fight with his brother Bob and the attempt to arrest them that night at the waycamp, the night he’d sent him home on one leg.

But as he cast into the gentle surf one afternoon it occurred to him that Bobby Baker wasn’t likely to forget the humiliations of Julie Morrell and being stripped of his gun and leg. It struck him and Bobby might evermore seek to get even for those public humblings. The notion that Bobby might even be pleased to see him dead came quite suddenly and made him at once melancholic and angry.

These feelings confused him and would not dismiss. They persisted for the next several weeks and because he could not say why he felt as he did he became even more nervous and irritable. He twice in one week badly battered troublesome patrons he could easily have handled without letting blood. Aunt July gave him a reprimanding look in the first instance and a severe rebuke after the second, reminding him that she needed no additional difficulties with the police or from some young muckraker’s righteous journalistic denunciations of the whoring trade. He had thought that the fights might soothe his gloomy agitations but they did not. He ached for an action he could not name.

One morning just a few days after Aunt July’s scolding he was walking by a bank a block removed from the Strand and chanced to look into the lobby just as a customer was receiving money at a teller’s window. He paused and watched the man tally the bills and then smile and say something to the teller who seemed a sulky young man and who
showed not a hint of smile in return but simply nodded. The customer folded the money and put it in his coat and came out and gave John Ashley a polite smile in passing. John Ashley glanced at the bulge in the man’s coat pocket and then watched him cross the street and go into a restaurant. Then he looked back into the bank for a long moment, at the polished wood floor gleaming against the yellow sunlight slanting through the windows. He made his way back to the house by a slow roundabout route, noting carefully the lay of every street and alley as he went, stopping in at a pharmacy to buy a small package of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape. By the time he was back at the house his melancholy had lifted, his nervousness dissipated like blown smoke.

Early the next morning after the house had turned out its last patron of the night and everyone had gone to bed and only the domestics were moving about at their housekeeping and cooking duties, he cleaned his pistol at the small table by his bedside window and then loaded it. He dressed in his white suit and from his suitcase withdrew a floppy-brimmed black felt hat and pair of overalls no one in the house had ever seen and he put them in a large paper sack together with the pistol and the gauze and the roll of tape. He descended the stairs quietly and slipped out the back door and went to the tool shed at the rear of the property. The day was cold enough to show his breath. In the shed he emptied the sack and changed from his white suit into the overalls and tucked his long hair up into the hat. He had let his hair grow nearly to his shoulders because several of the girls had dared him to do so and then all of them had said they preferred it like that. He neatly folded his white suit and put it in the bag and cached it in a corner. He slipped the pistol into the bib pocket of the overalls and then carefully set a wide strip of gauze over his nose and cheekbones and taped it in place.

Five minutes after the bank opened for business he walked in and stood at the central counter and on a withdrawal slip wrote “Give me all your paper money.” The guard was a uniformed big-bellied fellow engaged in conversation with a young female clerk at her desk in a corner and the only other customer of the moment was in discussion with the bank manager at his desk at the far end of the room. There was but one other teller on duty and he was busy with a ledger.

John Ashley went to the sulky teller’s window and pushed the slip of paper at him. The teller read it and looked up at him and John Ashley leaned close against the counter and exposed enough of the revolver in his bib for the teller to see what it was.