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.
FIVE
April 1912—June 1914
THE GALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFERent 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
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
