Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (31) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Wednesday,
August 30, 1922

Well before dawn, seventeen men gathered along Dixie Highway across the Indian River from a spot called Wabasso. There were a few small islands in the river near the east bank, and that was where the Frankenfields had their compound.
    They were about a half mile north of these islands, counting on the current going south to bring them in close without their motors running. The tide was going out, and the “river” was really a tidal lagoon, so it ran in opposite directions every six hours or so.
    They had five boats, and every man carried at least one firearm. Red carried Guy’s Parker and had his Colt in his belt at his back. Every pocket of his overalls and his jacket were stuffed with extra shells. Reverend Stone carried his Browning auto-loader shotgun, and what looked like a Savage .380 in a hip holster.
    Senegal Johnson was there, with two 1911 Colt .45’s and some kind of rifle Red couldn’t make out in the darkness. His two addicts were there with him, each carrying what looked like the blocky Smith and Wesson Military & Police .38’s.
    They seemed far more alert than usual, their eyes wide and staring. Senegal said he had put a heavy dose of China in their morphine, but Red didn’t know what China was.
    Some of the men carried clubs as well as guns, and one athletic younger man carried a baseball bat like he knew how to use it.
    They had gathered at Stone’s place, so they could all get a look at what their enemy had done. In the morning gloom they stared long and hard at the destruction. Some of them were Stone’s workers and would have benefitted from working Red’s farm too.
    Some were men from Grace Chapel, and Red heard Senegal address one of them as “Deacon.” That man was as tall as Senegal, as tall as Red in fact, and wore a dark striped suit and a short-brimmed bowler hat. He was nearly as imposing as the Reverend Stone himself, but he stayed quiet, and Red could tell it was on purpose.
    Most of these men were older than Red, in their thirties and forties. They had jobs, or farms, and families who depended on them. They were here to take revenge for the destruction of a white man’s farm, and Red could think of nothing that had ever happened to him for which he was more grateful. More than the farm was at stake; his and Guy’s very lives were on the line.
    They gathered in the sitting room for coffee and sweet rolls, and the Reverend called for a prayer, and they gathered, clasped their hands down low before them, and bowed their heads.
    “Heavenly Father, we are gathered humbly before You, in a grave and troubling time,” Stone’s rich baritone rolled across the room.
    Amens went around, something Red hadn’t seen before. In the Southern Baptist Church up home, one might say amen during a sermon, but a prayer? Only at the end.

“We are faced with evil men”

    “We are ever-mindful of Your Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Yet today we are faced with evil men who come to destroy us, even as the moth and rust destroy and the thief breaks in and steals.”
    This time Red joined in. “Amen.”
    “And even as Joshua was commanded to go forth unto Zion and slay the Canaanites, and show them no mercy, so we intend to do the same to these evil men. Our people have suffered greatly, Lord, now and in the past, and the time comes when we must seek Justice. We will kill no women or children intentionally, Lord,” and at this the Reverend stared hard into the faces around him, leaning forward and swiveling his whole body, moving more in one moment than Red had seen from him to date.
    “Amen.”
    “We ask from You the mercy on our souls, Lord, that we cannot afford to show to them. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen”
    “AMEN.”

The boats hung low in the choppy waves, small fishing craft unused to more than one or two men each. The motors were mostly Ole Evinrude’s Light Twins, and they were so God damned loud Red couldn’t imagine why every Frankenfield in twenty miles wouldn’t be primed and ready to shoot their asses off just for waking them up.
    He’d never been on a motorboat and wasn’t all that comfortable on the open water. His experience fishing was in skiffs and johnboats on smooth inland lakes and rivers. He was a little surprised to see that Senegal piloted the boat he was in, but then Senegal Johnson had been just full of surprises lately.

A partial moon shone to the west

    A partial moon shone to the west, and even with the clouds there was enough light to see. Red held tight to the right-side rail and got wet as the boat cut across the chop. The wind blew from the southeast and threw spray from the waves all over them. He was glad he had his jacket on.
    The eastern bank of the river loomed, but to call it a bank was to give it more credit than it deserved. The water seemed to end in a wall of mangroves a good fifteen feet high, their roots spreading far out into the salty lagoon. It didn’t end, though. It continued washing up under the trees as if there was no land there at all. Dark, twisted holes in the bushy mangroves could have led to miles of hidden canals or dead-ended in twenty yards.
    Red couldn’t decide if the fat shadowy bulge of land-or whatever it was-ahead of them was an individual island or part of the main eastern land mass called Hutchinson’s Island. He noticed a difference in the look of the water just ahead, where the moon shone on a smooth surface, past a certain point.
    The lead boat, steered by the Deacon, cut its engine, and the rest followed suit. The Deacon pulled his steering bar left, cutting the small craft to the right with their remaining speed, and the others did the same. The tiny armada settled into the drifting southerly tide, now sheltered from the windblown waves by the eastern shore of the barrier island.
    With the motors shut down all Red could hear was the slap of water, the swish of the wind. Each shore or island nearby seemed to sing its own tune in the moonlit gloom. Behind them, some small outlying islands and sandbars slip-slopped to the boats’ wakes, each sounding off in succession as the waves from the men’s passage reached their edges. Then the same wakes caught up with them and slipped and slopped on the sandbars just off their left sides.
    The grim, silent men with their dark hands on the handle of each craft stared hard into the night, watching for the sandbars, the shoals of oysters and rocks, that broke propellers and shear pins and grounded unwary fishermen and rumrunners.

Red was scared as hell

    Red was scared, scared as hell, but the men around him showed no fear, and so he wouldn’t either. He did slip a hefty flask from the one pocket not filled with bullets and shotgun shells and gargled the rum like Guy always did. He sat back, shaking his head and letting out a loud “Ahhh!”
    Chuckles came from the darkness around him, and he handed the bottle to the man on his left.
    More bottles appeared and were passed around, bumped together. Red heard a clink or two from the other boats ahead and behind, a few words and laughs.
    A faint glow grew in the east as they drifted down on the first of three substantial islands, in a string north to south only a few hundred feet west of the main island.
    The Deacon’s boat sprouted oars, and two men in his own pulled some from under the seats and began pulling to follow where the lead boat was headed. They cut left to go between the main island and the smaller ones, and then right. They rowed right up onto a beach where four motorboats had been run up on the sand and tied off to trees.
    The Deacon pointed his finger at them, then at two of his men. They nodded and jumped out in the last foot of water and headed for the other boats. The rest of the raiders in the other craft stayed just off the shore, and Red could hear the Deacon’s men pushing the Frankenfield’s boats off the sand. It looked like they were bunching the boats together, just off the little beach in maybe ten feet of water. He smelled the sharp tang of gasoline on the humid air.
    In a minute or so one of the men came back and grabbed his weapon. Red recognized the man with his bat in his hand.

The Deacon knew all about the Frankenfields’ island hideout

    The raid had been planned by Ezra Stone and his deacons, three of whom were here tonight, although only one was called, somewhat fearfully, the Deacon. And the Deacon, according to Reverend Stone, not only had a personal beef with the Frankenfields, he knew all about their island hideout.
    He’d told them after their prayer that Frank Frankenfield and his wife Emma lived on the southernmost island of the three.
    Kenny Frankenfield lived in a house just north of them on the same island with his wife Celia and their son and daughter, both younger than ten.
    Bobby lived in a shack on the south point of the middle island, a larger and more complicated piece of land than the others.
    Scott “Cooter” Summerlin and his wife Mags, Frank’s daughter, took up the northern three quarters of the island and ignored Bobby unless he was starving. They all ignored him.
    The northern island, about the same size as the southernmost, was given over to a couple of ’shine stills, net-drying racks, a tanning shack, a smokehouse and two storage sheds for fishing equipment and to stash the liquor until it was time to load it in one of the boats and deliver to customers up and down the river.
    The Deacon left two armed men on the shore and returned in his boat to the empty vessels. A lucifer flared, was tossed into the boat, and a burst of flame whooshed upward from the tied-together hulls.
    All five of the attackers’ vessels began rowing quickly back around to the western side of the island and headed south. The narrow eastern channel toward the barrier island was unpredictably shallow and overgrown, a morass of impenetrable mangroves and choked canals. Although it was a few minutes more to take the side towards the main river it was a far safer bet, to avoid getting entangled or running aground.

They would divert their enemies’ attention

    The plan was that the two men left behind would cause as much noise as they could to divert their enemies’ attention north. Then the main group of men would arrive at the southern end of the island chain and attack Frank Frankenfield’s house. He was the patriarch of this small crime family just like Joe Ashley was to his and killing him alone would cripple them.
    By then the boat fire, which also denied their enemies an avenue of escape, should be noticed, and be causing the entire clan to look or run that way. According to the Deacon, the first thing they would think was that their stills and sheds were being attacked. It was the kind of thing the Ashleys, and they themselves, often did to competitors. They hoped that the menfolk would take the bait and run to the fight, leaving the women and children at home.
    Each house would be emptied at gunpoint, any men killed, and the house then set afire. They had fifteen men, and to add to the confusion the two left behind would in fact break open some liquor stores or a storage tank and set it afire too. They would then take cover and open fire on and kill any man coming to defend their livelihood. Every structure on all three islands would be burned to the ground.
    In the meantime, the main force of attackers would sweep in from the south. Ten men would jump out of the boats in knee-deep water, counting on any noise of their presence being masked by the wind and waves, and that the clan’s focus on the expected attack on their moonshine business would blind them to the real threat.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens