folk were leanin to the Bakers’ side of the matter. They could see how things was changing. The Ashleys was the sort whose day was done. The frontier life their kind had always lived was slipping away. More and more of the Everglades was giving way to what they call development—to more canals and landfills and roads, to a whole new world. Whole regions of the Glades was little by little getting drained and burned clear and built on. You could see it happening from year to year. Some said a goodly portion of the Devil’s Garden would one day mostly be the Devil’s parking Lot. You could say that Twin Oaks was a good example of the old ways and Miami was a good example of the new ones, and at the time we’re talking about they was passing each other by in opposite directions. The old ways of the crackers was folks living apart and independent and making do on their own, setting troubles between themselfs. The new ways being forced on them and everbody else was people living close together and lots of them strangers and all of them having to depend on courtroom law. It was a world getting a whole lot unfriendier to such as the Ashleys—and a whole lot more needful of such as Bob Baker.
They say Bob Baker seemed different for a time after he heard about John Ashley’s escape. They say you could see it in his eyes, that even when he looked at you he seemed to be lookin at something somewhere else, something cold and mean and not all that far away. You never say him with his wife and daughters anymore. Some said he didnt bring them out in public because he was certain the Ashley Gang was gonna try to kill him and he didn’t want to put his family at risk. You never saw him now without some of his special gang of deputies around him. It was like he was waiting for something but wasnt quite sure what it was. Lots of folk had the same feeling. They said it was like a bad storm building just over the horizon but there wasnt any sign of it yet that you could point to. Like it was building without sound nor smell nor quiver but everbody seemed to know it was out there and headed this way.
One sunny morning in late November not even a month after he broke out of Raiford John Ashley and his gang robbed the bank at Pompano. Him and Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn. The charged into the bank like Wild West outlaws whooping and waving their guns. Witnesses said Middleton and Lynn had a .45 in each hand and John Ashley carried an automatic rifle. They scared hell out of everbody. They none of them wore masks. They got nearly thirty thousand dollars in cash and securities and when they were ready to go Ray Lynn signaled from the door and here came a damn taxi driven by Ben Tracey, judging by the descriptions give of him by witnesses. He was blaring the klaxon and weaving down the street and scattering people ever which way. The gang tumbled into the taxi and they took off laughing. The people who saw it say it all happened so fast and loud it didnt hardly seem real.
Ten minutes later the Broward County Sheriff led a posse of police cars north on the Dixie Highway, hopin to pick up the trail of the robbers and they did. About a mile south of the Palm Beach County line they saw the taxi abandoned by the side of the road. They pulled over and examined the area and saw tires tracks leading off down a dirt and limerock road heading west into the pinewoods. They followed it and about a quarter-mile farther along they found a Nigra man tied to a pine tree. Turned out it was his taxi the gang had stolen for the bank robbery. The Nigra said they came tearing back down the pineywoods road in a truck they’d left parked alongside the highway and waved at him as they went by. One of them hollered to him that somebody would be right along and set him loose. The sheriff told the Nigra to get in the car with him and the posse moved on for another mile or so before it came to where the road ran out at the edge of a cypress swamp and they found the truck—which had also been stole of course—bogged in muck to the wheel wells. There wasnt nothing in front of them but the Everglades. Nothin but the Devil’s Garden. The Ashley gang must of had dugouts waiting for them.
On the drive back out of the swamp the Nigra told the sheriff that John Ashley told him to deliver a message to Sheriff Bob Baker of Palm Beach County. The sheriff said the Nigra looked scared to say what it was and scared of what might happen to him if he didnt. Everbody knew the Broward sheriff couldnt stand Bob Baker, especially not after Bobby’s called him a dump peckerwood right in his own office in front of his own men. But when he heard the message John Ashley was sending Bobby he personally drove the Nigra up to West Palm Beach to deliver it. He said he wanted to see Bob Baker’s face when he got it.
A half-dozen witnesses saw the Broward sheriff stand in front of Bobby’s desk and say to him, “Fella here’s got somethin for you from John Ashley.” The Nigra was scared shitless, naturally, being in a room fulla nothin but cops, but the Broward sheriff told him, “Go on, boy, give it to him.”
Sheriff Bob put his hand out and the Nigra put a rifle cartridge in his palm. A Winchester .30-30 round.
“Mistah Ashley say give you that,” the Nigra said. Bobby had a .30-30 of his own and always kept it in his car, but they say he looked at that round like it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen.
The Broward sheriff told the Nigra to go on and say the message that went with it, told him dont be afraid, he would only be repeating what Ashley had told him to say and the Palm Beach Sheriff wouldnt hold it against him personal. They say the Broward sheriff was just grinning and grinning.
And so the Nigra told Bob Baker that John Ashley said to come and get him if he was man enough. Told him he’d be waiting in the Devil’s Garden with another bullet just like that one with his name on it. Said he wanted to deliver it to Bob Baker personal. Deliver it right in his heart.
TWENTY-TWO
October—December 1923
THEY TRIED HARD TO BELAY THEIR DESIRE UNTIL NIGHTFALL BUT shortly before supper they could stand it no longer and slipped away to the sidehouse so ravenous for each other they did not take time to remove their clothes except for her overalls so she could open herself to him. They tried to mute themselves with kisses but their concupiscent groans and outcries carried around to the porch where Old Joe sat in his rocker and sipped from his cup of shine and grinned. Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey sat in cane chairs facing him with their cups in hand. Ma Ashley and her two youngest daughters, twelve-year-old Jaybird and thirteen-year-old Scout, were setting the table and plying between the house and the kitchen out back and each yelp from the sidehouse tightened the mother’s lips and widened the sisters’ blushing smiles. Ray Lynn seemed undecided whether the caterwauling was funny. Ben Tracey looked becrazed by it. His glance kept going past Joe Ashley to the Scout girl whose breasts were already bloomed and filled her shirtfront snugly. Ray Lynn wanted to tell him to quit his gawping before Old Joe caught him at it but Joe Ashley was absorbed in the lovers’ loud likerish reunion and far enough in his cups to be unlikely to notice.
Earlier that day, after they’d hidden the blue Chevy in the pines well back of the kitchen building, John Ashley had introduced Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey to his family and Laura Upthegrove. He could tell that Old Joe liked Ray right off but was unsure about Ben. Yet he knew that any man who’d taken his side in a prison fight and maybe saved his life would receive the benefit of his daddy’s doubt.
Clarence Middleton was not with them. He was staying with his girl Terrianne in St. Lucie. Bill Ashley had been here earlier to greet John and meet Lynn and Tracey but had then gone home to Salerno to tend his wife Bertha who was down with a fever. Hanford Mobley’s parents, a polite but shy couple, had walked over from their shotgun house a quarter-mile from Twin Oaks to welcome John back. They smiled and nodded on being introduced to Ray and Ben and then took their leave and went home too. Joe Ashley had a half-dozen lookouts posted between the highway and the house with orders to come running the minute they saw anything that looked like it might be a posse. Every man at Twin Oaks went armed with a pistol. Their rifles and shotguns were stood all around the porch.
Now John and Laura came out of the sidehouse and around to the front porch and the men tried to restrain their smiles and then Old Joe laughed and Tracey and Lynn joined in. John Ashley grinned back at them. Laura blushed and put her fists on her hips and glared at them and said “
“You’d been in a fine fix if a posse’d come tearin in here when you all were in there foolin,” Old Joe said. “You’d been what they call caught with ye pants down.” He gave her a mock leer and waggled his brows. She stuck her tongue out at him and he chortled and slapped his knee. John Ashley hugged her around the neck and looked at her like the man in love he was.
It was a plentiful supper—the table laden with platters of fried ham and catfish filets and cornbread, with bowls of beans and greens and grits, roasted yams and molasses, rice and gravy. Old Joe told about paying off
