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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Wednesday,
July 19, 1922,
continued
They sat on the log sections they had left for stools. The termites and wood ants had been at them since last season. Next year they’d be falling to pieces. For now, though, they were comfortable enough, eating their sandwiches by the fire, the sun still streaming red banners in the west. It wouldn’t be full dark till after eight o’clock this time of year.
“Sweetie baby,” Guy said to Jenny, “would you go get us a jug from behind the seat of the car?”
She got up and sauntered away, while Red looked sideways at his brother. “’Sweetie baby’?”
Guy stuttered, “W-well, she likes that stuff…”
Jenny returned with the jug. She swung it over her shoulder, her finger through the glass ring, and slugged it.
Exactly, Red thought, the way they’d seen Harlan Middleton do it, on that very spot, some months before. Just like a mountain man. He shook his head, snorted, under his breath, “sweetie baby.” Then: “Hey, ‘sweetie baby,’ how’s about handing that there jug over?”
Guy whined, “Now, doggone it Red…”
Guy whined, but Red put up a hand. He took the jug and got a good slash, then another. “That’ll be all for me. I got an errand to run ’fore it gets too dark, and on my way back I hope to put some fresh meat in the tree.”
Wild hogs would eat anything, even each other |
“Guy, you need to sketch me up a still, with dimensions, an’ right quick. I mean to get it a’buildin’ tonight, that’s part of my errand.”
Jenny brought Guy a pad of dress form paper and her seamstress’s pencil and he went to work.
Red tramped down more weeds on his way back to the car. In no time the camp would be a flattened mat of grasses, easy on the feet and cooler than marl or sand. He slapped his straw Stetson hat on his head, pulled Guy’s parker shotgun from the tool bag.
“Where you lightin’ out for?” Guy asked, though he didn’t seem upset at the prospect of having time alone with Jenny.
“Well brother, we got a chunk of money, and I seem to recall an important part of a moonshine still that left out’a here under the arm of Skeeter Willis, headed for parts south. I aim to buy it back from him, and sell him some logs.”
Under the circumstances, Red had just decided that treating Guy’s whore like a lady was the only path ahead of him that didn’t lead him into the swamp, so he took off his hat and asked politely, “Miss Jenny, ma’am, would you mind if I borrowed your Colt?”
She gave him a beaming smile and said, “Why, Mr. Dedge, you just help yourself! Make sure you fill that second magazine now, you hear? One never knows when a little extra insurance is called for.”
Red touched his hat with two fingers, returned her sweet smile, and gave the southern gentleman’s answer: “Much obliged, ma’am.” Red turned to see Guy grinning by the fire, knowing his girl had won Red over at last. “And you,” Red Dedge pointed a stern finger at Guy Dedge, “had better take good care of Miss Jenny while I’m gone.”
“I won’t let you down, sir!” |
Red headed southwest from the logging camp, cutting across prairies of knee-high sorghastrum, switchgrass and panic weed. The meadows were dotted with thick stands of head-high saw palmetto, the spindly pines standing overhead with their feet hidden among the spiky leaves and saw-edged stems.
He knew those saws could cut like a knife. One local boy, out hunting the hogs that bedded up in the stands, had gotten cut, contracted an infection and died. The saw-edged stems wouldn’t cut the hogs though; their hides were too tough.
This was on Red’s young mind as he made his way swiftly across the landscape, his long legs eating up the three or four miles around the south end of the lake and up the west side to Blue Cypress Creek, where Middleton had his fish camp. He noted landmarks on his way, but he was also looking for hog sign. Right about sundown, the wild hogs would head out to water and then on to a night spent rooting in their wallows, and along the banks of the creeks. He hoped to be well on his way back by the time they stirred for the coming night.
He reached Mudfish Slough ten minutes out of camp. Sure enough, he came across hog tracks just east of the water by about a hundred yards, from the same palmetto head that had provided them with that nice sow the last time out. He slogged through black, mucky water that, thanks to a dry spell and a sand bar, was only as deep as his knees.
The sun drifted grudgingly to the west, still spitefully searing the dry grasses of late summer but bouncing harmlessly off of the spiky, shiny leaves of the palmettos. He ran for a spell to dry his overhauls and boots, but they barely had time to dry before he had to cross Padgett’s Branch, which was also low this time of year, but a lot clearer than Mudfish, which lived up to its name, at least the mud part.
Nobody wanted mudfish nohow. They were ugly as hot sin, looked like something prehistoric, like that fish they’d caught in the 1890’s that was supposed to be extinct for millions of years. They also tasted just exactly like mud, and not just any mud. Slimy, stinking blackwater mud, like what was still weighing down his boots until he got to Fisher Creek. He’d kept a mudfish once, and tried everything to make it edible. In the end not even his dog would eat it.
At Fisher Creek the graded road came in from the west and crossed a bridge, then wound through a stand of cypress. Once over the bridge, he went down to the creek. Cypresses, like giant telegraph poles with only little pointy bits of green way up on top, a hundred feet overhead, shaded the bank.
Knobby cypress “knees” poked blunt points from the water around the massive, buttressed trunks. He pulled off his boots and socks, stuck the boots upside down on one of the knees, and placed both the guns and the extra shells, along with his Buck knife, on a dry spot up the bank. He carefully laid his large flask of Ashley ’shine with the other necessities. He then stripped naked and waded into the water with his clothes in hand. A quick sand-and-water scrubdown got the mud and sweat off him, and he worked his pants, shirt and union suit around in the clear water, rinsed them, then wrung them out and spread them across the knees to dry. His socks went neatly over a couple more knees of the cypress trees.
He collected his Buck, of which he was just a little too proud for his Baptist upbringing to be comfortable with. Story was, a blacksmith, or maybe a blacksmith’s apprentice, wanted to make not just a good knife, but one better than anything else available, something that would keep an edge longer. His method was to make his knives by hand from used file blades, although in the twenty years since the Buck knife was introduced, they had taken to buying new file stock, some of the hardest steel in existence.
Buck knives were legendary, and although it was more difficult to sharpen them because they were so hard, when you took the time to do it right your knife would stay sharp for weeks or months.
Buck knives were also damned expensive, and beyond anything Red Dedge could have previously afforded legitimately; his Baptist upbringing wasn’t too happy that he’d won it at a game of five-card draw at one of Senegal’s gambling tables, either. His Baptist upbringing would just have to get used to it; he was keeping the knife.
It cut smoothly through a bunch of panic grass growing along the graded road, which he used to brush off his boots, inside and out, then he hung them back on the knees and took a long, satisfying slash of the rum.
The relentless sun had warmed the liquor, and quickly dried his clothes, at least as dry as they would ever get. Even if you started out in Florida bone dry, in five minutes you’d be soaked in sweat like you’d had buckets poured over you anyway.
Life was good |
“Well young feller, you look a mite familiar but then again I ain’t never see’d yore bare ass a’fore.”
Red whirled at the voice that came from behind him, to find Harlan Middleton grinning at him with those crinkly little piggy eyes of his, his face wrinkling with swallowed laughter. His shotgun nestled in the crook of his arm like he’d been born with it.
Red Dedge was right touchy about bein’ laughed at by any man, but he had to admit he’d been caught acting a fool, and seein’ as how he’d come to ask this man a favor, he decided not to argue about it.
Red hid his embarrassment as best he could, and said, “Good eve’nin’ Mr. Middleton. I was just a’comin’ to visit you, and thought a bath was in order. Make m’self presentable, so to speak.”
Middleton was nodding. “I recall y’all havin’ real good manners, young man, ain’t nuthin’ speaks so well fer a feller than bein’ polite. If you promise your table manners are equal, I’ll have you to supper if’n you have a hankerin’. Yer brother ain’t a’comin’?”
Red pulled on his union suit, buttoned his shirt and stepped into his Levis. He buckled his belt, then shrugged into his suspenders. “No sir, he’s back at the cuttin’, keepin’ an eye on things.”
He had a proposal |
Middleton brayed, “Haw haw haw, ol’ Skeeter prob’ly ain’t never been called ‘Mister’ by nobody but some damn game warden! Mister Willis…hee hee hee…”
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
How can Red even THINK of Miss Jenny as a “whore,” or entertain using the word of her? For such a strong, manly man, he seems bereft of benevolence, impoverished, a character to be pitied rather than lauded.
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