The thing is, so many stories about the Ashley Gang have been told for so long by so many who have bent the facts so many ways that there’s hardly no way of knowing anymore what’s the true facts and what aint. It probly dont really matter all that much. Everybody knows that the plain and simple facts about something dont necessarily tell the truth of it. Some people can lie all day long with nothing but the facts, and what goes on in most courtrooms is proof enough of that. On the other hand, sometimes a story that stretches a fact here and there can tell more of the real truth of a thing as you’re ever like to get. Leastways thats what the bunch of us think.
Our growed-up children tend to smile and wink at each other and shake their heads at the tales we tell, but there’s been a bunch of old farts like us in barbershops and cafes and courthouse squares in ever town there ever was. That’s for damn sure the way of it down South. Back when we was pups a bunch of graybeards used to sit around in the town square and tell stories about the War Between the States and the bad old days of Reconstruction and the doings of the Klan and such. Everybody used to call to call those oldtimers the Liars Club. And it’s what everybody calls us too….
ONE
December 1911
THE BOY POLED THE SKIFF ALONG THE WINDING SAWGRASS CHANNEL and heard now a faint chanting through the bird cries from the hardwood hammock just ahead. He knew it was the Indian come to meet him and that he was drunk and not alone. He let the pushpole trail alongside the skiff and considered his circumstance as the boat glided slowly through the sawgrass that stood higher than his head. His father always said a drunk Indian could be the easiest delivery in a day’s work or the most troublesome, depending on the Indian. The boy knew this Indian for the troublesome sort. But if he shied from making the delivery just because you never knew what a drunk Indian might do his father would mock him for a nancy forever. He spat into the sawgrass and leaned into the pole and pushed the skiff ahead, feeling the comforting press of the revolver at his back where it was tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.
His name was John Ashley and he was eighteen years old.
In the west the high enpurpling sky showed streaks of orange and reefs of red clouds flanking the lowering sun. To southeastward rose a high black column of boiler smoke where a dredge was digging a canal. This earlywinter’s day had begun dry and almost cool but had since assumed a hint of unseasonable rain. The air was sweet with the smell of swampwater and vegetation, with the redolence of the approaching hammock’s ripe earth under the canopy of magnolia and gumbo limbo trees. Even if there had been some elevated vantage point as near as fifty yards of him from which an observer might scan the vast encircling vista of sawgrass and scattered hardwood hammocks and pine islands (and the only such vantage points were the tops of the hammock trees where at this hour the birds were coming to clamorous roost), the observer would not have spied either the channel or his movement through it, so high was the grass and so narrow the waterway and so smoothly did he navigate it. Only a circling fish hawk high overhead bore witness to his progress.
The Indians’ chanting ceased as he poled into the shadowed green light under the heavy hardwood overhang and the sawgrass fell away and the canoe carried into the natural moat of copper-colored water that girt the hammock. The roosting birds were quieting now. Their droppings shook leaves on the lower branches, flashed whitely to the ground, poked ripples in the pool. The hammock rang with the croaking of frog colonies. He made toward a rough-sloped mudbank where the root vegetation had been hacked away to shape a landing for canoes.
He smelled the Indians before he caught sight of them in their baggy white shirts and black bowler hats on the higher ground in the darkness of the trees. Two of them. Sitting crosslegged and watching him and passing a jug between them. At the edge of the landing a single long dugout was tethered to a jutting root and now the scent of the otter skins piled within carried to him under the smell of the Indians. The water surface shattered lightly as a school of fingerlings broke away from a rushing bass.
He pulled hard on the pole and the prow bumped up onto the muddy landing and the skiff’s abrupt halt shook the wooden cases nestled toward the bow and there was a clinking of jug on jug. The smaller of the Indians grinned whitely. Mosquitoes raged at the boy’s ears. A gray haze of them quivered about the Indians’ heads without settling on their skins. He spotted a shotgun propped against a tree behind the Indians but saw only knives on their belts.
“We been hearin you from a mile off,” the bigger Indian said. His voice was wetly raw. “Been hearin you comin like a fucken steamboat.”
John Ashley doubted that. This big one—whose name was DeSoto Tiger and who resold to other Indians in the deeper Glades most of the moonshine he bought from the boy’s father—was said by some to be a good man who took after his daddy and his uncle, both of whom were chiefs in local Seminole tribes. But John Ashley knew him for a mean drunk and had for years heard terrible stories about him. He was said to have beaten a wife to death for infidelity and to have cut the dick off the man who put the horns on him. He was said to have drowned a Negro in a creek for trying to steal his traps. The boy’s father had told him that most of those stories were lies DeSoto Tiger had himself concocted to keep other Indians in fear of him. But other white men believed the big Indian was every bit the bad actor his reputation held.
John Ashley had known him only to nod to until almost a year ago when he and his daddy had come on him one day at Blue’s store on Lake Towhee and the Indian asked the boy if he wanted to go for alligator hides in the Okaloosa sloughs with him on shares. He said he wanted a white partner so he could get a better price for the hides on the New River trading dock and he’d heard the boy was a good enough skinner to go shares with. John Ashley had turned to his father who affected to study the clouds in the distance. He did not really want to work shares with the Indian but he wanted to show his father he was not afraid of DeSoto Tiger. He told the Indian he’d do it if he would agree to take no whiskey on the hunt. His daddy had smiled without looking their way and DeSoto Tiger laughed and said that was fine, he anyway never drank when he was working.
They’d gone south with a string of four empty dugouts and over the next fortnight killed gators through the nights and skinned the carcasses through the mornings and slept through the afternoons and did not talk much the whole time. They piled three of the dugouts high with hides and another with the tailmeat, which they could readily sell in the Negro parts of town. En route to the trading docks they came upon a whiskey peddler and the Indian bought a quart bottle. John Ashley gave him a look and the Indian said, “Hell, boy, the work’s done.”
When they arrived at the New River trading post DeSoto Tiger was drunk. Their boat no sooner bumped up to the dock than the Indian spied a tribesman named Henry Little Bear who he believed had been trying to steal his sweetheart’s affections. A loud row ensued and knives came into play and it required several dockhands to subdue the big Indian and hold him until the police arrived and took him away to jail. Henry Little Bear was sopping with blood as he was borne to the nearest doctor with his belly gashed and most of his nose missing and half his face flensed to the skull. Like the other witnesses John Ashley had been impressed by DeSoto Tiger’s spectacular proficiency with a knife. For the next few days the talk on the docks was of little else but the Indian fight. The boy sold the hides and put aside the Indian’s half of the proceeds.
Because Henry Little Bear didnt die but had only been mutilated—and because DeSoto Tiger’s father and uncle were chiefs in the regional Seminole confederation and often proved of assistance to the white authorities in their Indian dealings—and because the law didnt much care what Indians did to each other anyway as long as they didnt disturb decent white folk by it, DeSoto Tiger was obliged to serve but ten days in the county lockup. When the Indian got out of jail John Ashley retrieved his share of the gatorhide money and met him at Blue’s store and turned it over to him. DeSoto Tiger stared at the money and then at the boy, his eyes hard with accusation. John Ashley took insult and told him he could check the price he’d got with Mister Williams, the hide buyer. The Indian said he knew better than to ask any white man for the truth. He spat on the ground between them and stuffed the money in his pocket and stalked away.
They did not see each other again until three months ago when the boy’s father sent him to make delivery to this hammock in the sawgrass country southeast of Lake Okeechobee, one of several waycamps DeSoto Tiger was reputed to have in the region. Although John Ashley had told none but his brother Bob of the Indian’s accusation
