Red Grass River

RED GRASS RIVER

A LEGEND James Carlos Blake

For

Len Richardson

a good old boy and damn fine man…

and

the coterie of my Bowling Green days:

Fare ye well, gents and ladies, each and all.

As for man, his days are as grass: as a

flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is

gone; and the place thereof shall know it

no more.

—Psalms, 103:15

The terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons.

—Jean Renoir

Author’s Note

The Ashley Gang is a historical reality. Most of the characters in this novel did exist, and most of its major events did take place. Still, this is a work of fiction, and those familiar with the facts about the Ashleys and the Florida of their time will discern the liberties I’ve taken with the record.

PROLOGUE

The Liars Club

IF THE DEVIL EVER RAISED A GARDEN THE EVERGLADES WAS IT. THE biggest and meanest swamp you’re ever like to see—bigger than some entire states of the Union—it’s pineywoods and palmetto scrubs and cypress heads and tangled vines but mostly it’s a river, a river like no other on this earth. It’s sixty miles wide and half-a- foot deep and runs from Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the state over a layer of muck thats got no bottom. The whole thing covered with sawgrass sharp as a skinning razor. Not a thing else in that sawgrass country but here and there some hammocks—highground islands of hardwoods and palms—and most of them never been set foot on. Out there the world looks a whole lot bigger and there’s no end at all to the sky. They say it’s hardly another place in the world where you can look farther and see less. And all of it green of one shade or another except at sunrise and in the dying light of day when that great grass river goes so red it looks like it’s on fire or stained with blood.

Only the godawful desperate or the plain goddamned could ever live out there. It’s ever kind of thing in the Everglades to cut you or burn you or itch you or sting you or poison you or eat you up whole. It’s quicksand and gators and panthers and snakes and mosquitoes and ever sort of bug in hell to drive you insane. In summer the air’s so hot and wet it’s like trying to breathe boiled cotton. Lord only knows what-all’s been swallowed up in that rotten ooze under the sawgrass and won’t never again see the light of day. It’s bones in that muck a million years old and bones aint been there a week. Animal bones. Bones of men. It’s ten thousand stories buried out there aint nobody heard but the devil.

Yessir, the Devil’s Garden was as right a name as was ever give to any place there is. Even on today’s maps you’ll see the name on a portion of wildland just east of Immokalee. It was the early crackers who come up with the name—and big as the Glades is now, in them days it was even bigger and took in most of the region to either side of Lake Okeechobee. A cracker is somebody who grows up in the swamp country and provided his daily bread mostly by hunting and trapping, though some did a little hardscrabble farming, some a little cattle ranching, some a little of it all. The first of them to show up in Florida come from all over the South but most of them from Georgia. They got their name on account of the sound their whips made as they drove their stock ahead of them. Some of them latigo whips was so big they had to hold them with both hands. They cracked loud as rifleshots and you could hear them from miles away.

No white people ever knew the ways of the Devil’s Garden better than the crackers. And no crackers knew them better than the Ashleys.

It’s only a few of us oldtime crackers left anymore who go back that far and knew the Ashleys in the living flesh. I mean we’re old, the bunch of us, old and aching ever kind of way and all of us needing a cane at the least and a couple of us a damn walker. Hardly a man among us dont wear specs as thick as bottle glass, or says “What?” ever time somebody says something to him, or can sleep through the night without having to get up a time or two to piss. But near all of us knew the Ashleys when we was kids, leastways knew them well enough to say “How-do” to and get a “Hey” in return, which was about as well as anybody who wasnt kin ever got to know an Ashley. They was a clannish family and hard to get to know personal, but we all of us saw one or another of them ever now and then, and we heard talk about them all the time.

We grew up hearing a hundred stories about the Ashleys and about John Ashley’s gang and the crimes they did. We heard all about the bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker and about the war the Ashleys had with Yankee bootleggers who tried to cut in on their territory. We heard a dozen versions of what happened at the Sebastian River Bridge when the gang was finally put to an end. We still tell them stories ever time we get together in the park to sun our old bones and pass the time and talk about something other than whether there’s a Democrat alive who can win the next election.