Red Grass River (16 page)

Right after word of John Ashley’s escape reached Palm Beach County, Bobby and Freddie Baker were seen sitting at a corner table in the Oleander Grocery in West Palm Beach drinking out of paper bags and talking low and glaring like they’d like to shoot the whole damn world.

July 1918—December 1919

T
HEY RAN THROUGH THE PINE SCRUBS TO WHERE
E
D AND
F
RANK
had left the Dodge and they all four scrambled into the car and sped away jouncing and swaying on an old logging trail. They threw the flour sack masks out into the palmetto scrub a few miles farther on and just before the trail merged into a wider backroad. They drove north from Palatka and made their way to the ferry and were rope-pullied across the coppery St. Johns. They excitedly pointed out to each other a bald eagle wheeling from the sky with a fullgrown cat in its talons to alight at its nest atop a tall live oak overlooking the river. They pitched pennies at turtles sunning themselves on floating driftwood. They told the ferryman their name was Horton and they were headed for their uncle’s funeral in Daytona. But when they reached the crossroad at Molasses Junction they turned the car north for Jacksonville.

His brothers admired his blue glass eye and asked him what it was like being half-blind and made jokes about how he truly could sleep with one eye open now. John Ashley asked about Kid Lowe and they told him the Kid had flat vanished and nobody had heard a word about where he might be. They talked then about their brother Bob and told Tom Maddox about some of the funny things Bob had done when they were boys and when they ran out of stories about him they fell silent for a time. Then Ed asked what it had been like in there. John Ashley shrugged and said it hadn’t been all that intolerable. His
voice was distant. His brothers raised their brows at Tom Maddox who shrugged and turned to look out at the passing pines.

The primitive roads of sand limerock sometimes narrowed to hardly more than wagon trails winding through dense brushland and pine forest and they three times had to stop to repair flat tires and spell each other on the air pump before they made the Duval County line. Frank and Ed had brought several jugs of their daddy’s product which helped to ease everyone’s irritation with the delays.

As they puttered through the streets of Jacksonville in search of their sister’s address they passed a police car and raised a hand in greeting and the two cops did likewise and all the while the Ashleys and Tom Maddox too had their other hand on a pistol. They found the house and got out of the car and their sister Daisy came shrilling out the door to greet them, her husband trailing her with a smile and leading their three-year-old boy by the hand. She hugged and kissed her brothers and let them swing her around in their arms and pat her fondly on the rump and she made a special fuss over Johnny, mussing his hair and kissing him all over his face and crying in her happiness to see him. As they trooped into the house Frank told her that Daddy sent his love. She looked at him and laughed and said she knew that wasn’t one bit true. Frank flushed and shrugged and said, “Well, he ought of.”

Her husband Butch had served a short sentence in Raiford for armed robbery back before Daisy knew him but he had since forsworn the criminal life. They’d met at a dance in Stuart four years ago shortly after his release from prison and while he was working with a crew building a cargo dock at Salerno on the Indian River. A few weeks later he asked her to marry him and move to Jacksonville where he had a good job waiting. Old Joe had no objections to the marriage but he was set against his daughter moving away from home. He offered to take Butch into his whiskey operation and told him he’d make more money in a month than he’d make in six months in a shipyard. When Butch politely turned him down Old Joe took umbrage and said he couldnt have Daisy’s hand, not if he was going to take her away. “Ashleys dont desert they home,” he said. To which Daisy said she’d damn well be the one to say who could or couldnt have her hand and whether she would or wouldnt move away. She had always known her own mind and this was not the first time she and her father had been at odds but this was their most serious set-to yet. “Then to hell with ye,” Old Joe Ashley said, and left the room. By that night she and Butch were married and on their way to Jackson
ville. That had been four years ago and she had not seen nor heard from her father since. She corresponded regularly with her mother, however, and Ma Ashley had been at her bedside to assist in the delivery when she’d borne Jeb. Ma later told her in a letter that Old Joe couldnt hear enough about his new grandson. She said she was sure he wanted to find a way to tell Daisy he was sorry. Daisy wrote back that all he had to do was say it. So far he had not.

For supper they barbecued huge smoking slabs of pork ribs on the backyard firepit grill and drank cold bottles of beer. Butch enjoyed hearing about the Ashley boys’ exploits and telling them a few from his own outlaw past. Frank asked Tom Maddox which was the toughest jail he’d ever been in and Tom said his own house when he was married and they all had a good laugh over that. One first meeting his Uncle Johnny, the boy Jeb had stared in fascination at his eyes and said, “You got a blue eye and a brown eye—thats funny!” And John Ashley had said, “You think
thats
funny? Lookee here!” He removed his glass eye and held it out to the boy. The child’s face went to horror and John Ashley hastily explained that it was made of glass and rolled it across the floor so the boy could see it was not real and nothing to be afraid of. He let the boy handle it and told him to wash it off and then showed him how to put it back in the socket. The boy was so taken with the glass eye he said he too was going to get one when he grew up.

Later that evening they went dancing at a riverside pavilion where a band was playing and there were lots of pretty girls and they had a swell time. Tom Maddox took a fancy to a bold red-lipsticked brunette from St. Augustine who was visiting her widowed cousin. She invited him to visit with them in St. Augustine for a few days. He told the Ashleys he was going to do that and would later make his way down to their Twin Oaks house.

The next day they motored to the beach after making a brief stop at the home of a fellow Butch knew who brewed the best beer in town and they had bought a dozen quart bottles and put them in two cartons of ice. At the beach they body-surfed in the big breakers and the Ashley boys helped their young nephew to build a sand castle. They all got sandy and sunburned and ate the sandwiches and boiled eggs and potato salad Daisy had packed. The men got half-drunk on beer in the sun and ogled and pointed at all the passing girls whose black wet washing suits clung so closely they could see the jut of their nipples. Daisy said all men were disgusting sex fiends. “I believe you absolutely right,” Butch said, and grabbed her breast. She yelped and pummeled
him with both fists and he pulled her down on the blanket and they ended up kissing deeply as Butch fondled her bottom and the brothers whistled and applauded. She broke off the kiss and stuck her tongue out at them any young Jeb laughed with delight. On the drive home into the setting sun they sang in horrid but vastly enjoyable harmony: “By the Sea, By the Sea” and “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” and “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabama” and “For Me and My Gal.”

Over cigarettes and late-evening cups of coffee after Jeb had been put to bed the brothers all remarked how wonderful Daisy looked. Frank said life in Jacksonville had sure enough agreed with her. She told them how well Butch was doing at his job at the shipworks and Butch nodded and smiled shyly. She said they all ought to stay in Jacksonville too. “You can get jobs at the works with Butch,” she told them. “You can rent a place until you get enough money together to buy you a house. It’s no need for you all to ever go back to that trouble down there.” Ma Ashley had kept her informed of circumstances.

The brother shifted uncomfortably and exchanged sidelong looks. “Well,” John Ashley said, “the thing is, Daddy needs help with the business.”

“How is that any problem of yours?” she wanted to know.

“Hey, Daze, it’s
Daddy
,” Ed said, looking about to laugh, about to cry.

She looked about to spit. “You mulletheads, all you. You dont owe that man a solitary thing. He’s used you all your lifes for his work. All you are to him is nigger labor.”

“Quit that talk now,” Butch said. “It’s your brothers you talkin to.”

“It’s all right,” Frank said. “She aint never been one to hide what’s on her mind. We used to it.”

“Why?” she asked. “
Why
you all got to go back there? You go back you cant even live in the house no more—not with police watching it all the damn time. You’ll be livin out in the Everglades the rest of your lifes. What kinda life is that, livin out in the damn Devil’s Garden?” She slumped deeper into the couch, her arms crossed tightly, her foot tapping in agitation.

John Ashley was sitting on the couch with her and reached out and put his hand under her hair and stroked the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and sighed and rolled her head under his caress.

“We just goin home, baby,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, Johnny,” she sighed. “It aint no kinda home, not no more. It’s just a trouble place is all it is.”

“It’s our home, Daze,” John Ashley said, kneading her neck. “Trouble or not.”

The next morning when they were all three in the car and ready to go, Daisy told them once again that they always had a place to come to, no matter why. Butch said that was for damn sure and shook hands with all of them one more time.

The old man’s smile on greeting John Ashley at the front steps of the Twin Oaks house was the first anyone had seen on him since Bob’s death. He gave John a light punch on the arm and asked how he was keeping. John stood before him with his hands in his pockets and ducked his head at him and said he was doing all right, how about himself, and Old Joe said he was just fine as a froghair split four ways. He asked if they’d seen his grandson. Ma had told him the brothers were going to see their sister and he wanted to know if Jeb looked healthy and if he had a proper portion of wit. They told him all about young Jeb—but when they started talking about Daisy and Butch the old man dismissed the subject with an irritated wave of his hand.

John Ashley then went unaccompanied on the sandy path to Bob’s grave a quarter-mile into the pinewoods behind the house. The trees were thick with squalling crows. In the high-ground clearing that was the family burial ground were two gravemounds—Bob’s, and a smaller one where lay the remains of the youngest Ashley brother who’d twelve years ago died within hours of birth and was never named. Joe Ashley had buried him behind the house in Pompano but when the family moved north to the Twin Oaks property the old man had dug up the tiny coffin and brought the child’s remains with them to be reburied here. Both graves bore simple oak markers at their head. The smaller darkly weathered one stated, “At Peace.” The larger one read: “Bob Ashley. A good son and true brother.” A light breeze soughed in the pine branches and the clearing was spattered with yellow sunlight. He stood gazing on Bob’s grave for a time. And then said, “I’da done the same for you but I guess you know that.” He looked up at the patches of sky showing through the pines and he felt a hot tightness in his throat. After a while he went back down the narrow trail to the house.

They sat to dinner at a long table set up on the front porch—cooter stew, rice, greens, fried tomatoes, hot-peppered swamp cabbage, hush puppies, cornbread and gravy and sweet potato pie. Ma and the girls
laid out the table and served the food and went back inside the house. At the table with the Ashleys were Albert Miller and a blond and ropily muscled young man named John Clarence Middleton. Ed and Frank Ashley had met him one day a couple of months before when they were driving through Stuart and spied him fighting three men in an alley. They stopped the car to watch the fight and were much impressed by the smooth cool way Clarence was holding his own against the three. He punched one of them down and fended even better against the others until the first one got up again and this time had a knife in his hand. Ed called “Hey!” and they all looked over at the idling Model T and he brought up his revolver and everybody stood fast. He beckoned the blond fellow and said, “Well come on, bubba, if you coming.” The fellow came on the jog and hopped into the backseat and Ed waved goodbye to the other three as Frank got the car underway.

On the drive out to Twin Oaks John Clarence Middleton introduced himself and thanked them for saving him the trouble of breaking the knifer’s arm and maybe having to cut him with his own blade. He said he did not need any more legal problems. “What you mean
more
?” Frank asked, grinning at him. Clarence said he’d had to leave Miami in a hurry after a misunderstanding about a stolen motorcar. He was easy-natured and quick to laugh and had a tattoo of the U. S. Marines’ globe-and-anchor insignia on his right forearm. He didnt mind at all when Ed was Frank said they’d call him Clarence because their brother was named John and one John in the bunch was enough. The rest of the family took an immediate liking to him. He volunteered little about his past, yet none of the Ashleys was either so rude or so curious as to inquire into it. But they all admired his variety of skills. He’d learned to box in the marines and he displayed his fistic talent to them at a carnival in Fort Lauderdale where a challenger could pay a dollar to get in the ring with a carnie fighter and win five dollars if he could stay upright for three minutes. In the first two minutes Clarence broke the carnie’s nose and closed one of his eyes and the carnie said fuck it he’d had enough.

He was an able woodsman, Clarence, and a good skinner, and impressively familiar with a variety of firearms. Through a military connection in Miami he had recently acquired four cases of Springfield rifles for about one-third their value and had let Joe have a case in gratitude for taking him in and had sold the rest to some Cuban insurrectionists who’d come across the strait to buy weapons. Clarence himself carried a new army .45 automatic. He’d let the Ashleys fire it one
day and they were all taken with the piece’s smooth action and striking power and Clarence promised to get one for everybody in the gang.

Having dinner with them too was Hanford Mobley, now fifteen and apprenticing at the whiskey trade with Old Joe and beaming proudly in the company of the uncles he revered. “That boy aint feared of a damn thing,” Joe had told his sons before they sat to eat. “Got balls like coconuts. And a good head. Learns quick. Aint got to be told somethin but once. I always did say he was gonna be a good one and he is.”