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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Friday,
July 28, 1922,
concluded
“Okay, Joe, so, how do we do the surveys?” He’d done a bit of surveying himself, with one of his uncles up in Mayday Georgia, to determine logging rights, just like here. He also knew if somebody thought you’d jiggered the survey and stolen some land, you could get yourself killed over it.
Joe had a mild face and an almost sweet smile, and he smiled it and said, “They are already done. Rosalijo and I did them this spring, not long after you left. You see, Mr. Middleton and Mr. Willis have been thinking this over since they…introduced themselves to you, last April. Your arrival was fortunate, timely, and not entirely unexpected.”
It was Red’s turn to shake his head. “Wait a minute. Just hold on, hold on,” he held up a hand.
Everyone at the cutting was just standing there looking at them talk. Red looked at his brother. “Guy, rather than stand there like a bump on a log, why don’t you get these boys set up to cut some wood? Give the keys to the car to Rosalijo, and make sure all our stuff is out of it first. Then get that truck jacked up so’s we can put the strap on the saw table.”
Guy nodded once; he knew when it was time to go to work.
“Miss Jenny, ma’am,” and she beamed at Red, but it seemed she was looking past him at Joe. Trouble, he thought. “If you wouldn’t mind, maybe you’ll see to getting’ up some breakfast for these boys? They done brought us some good stuff from Ma Middleton, I can tell you for certain.”
She smiled some more and went off, while Rosalijo followed Guy over to the car, leaving Joe and Red alone as the rest of the camp got busy.
Red turned to the Indian |
Joe folded his arms, his smooth manner soothing Red a bit before he even spoke. “In a way, Mr. Red, it was. Planned out, I mean. But no one is trying to manipulate you; they are trying to help you. The fact that they benefit as well is just…the way of the world. I believe only bad things are to be found in the mouths of gift horses, but if it eases your mind, Mr. Willis and Mr. Middleton are good friends with your good friend, whom I believe you know as the Judge. As am I.”
Red thought his eyes would bug out. In a matter of weeks, he’d gone from near dirt-poor to what his daddy would have called “nigger-rich,” meaning a hick fool who would be soon parted from his new-found money. While he intended to allow no such thing, he had then landed a gigantic contract with some apparently really-rich swamp-rats, doing exactly what he was good at—logging. And it all went back to his sitting down to lunch with Greyson Stikelether one day, worried about the Ashleys and looking for information.
As if he had read his mind, Joe said, “There is another way in which all benefit from this arrangement, Mr. Red. You, Mr. Guy, the Judge, and my employers all share a blood-feud with the Ashleys. As do I.”
Red felt like his head was spinning on his neck. When he tried to put this whole puzzle together, see it all at once, it was like looking in one of those penny kaleidoscopes you got at the county fair. It kept changing, so fast he couldn’t ever quite focus on it.
He shook his head again, trying to clear up a muddled picture. “You? What’s your beef with the Ashleys?” It was all he could think of to ask, something to get a handle on this.
Joe stiffened a bit, but smiled—not so mildly this time—and dropped his arms. “I use that ‘Joseph Sumner the Third’ shit to impress white folks, and my Dad was Joseph Bainbridge Sumner the Second, but my Mom was an Indian, obviously. His second wife, all legal; my Dad was a good white man, and always made sure everyone knew that he was nobody’s inferior and neither were we. Sent me to the best schools and all that.”
“I’m an Oxford man, you know” |
Red’s eyebrows twisted a little. “Oxford Miss’ssippi? I been there. Hotter’n Hell in the summer. Hate pickin’ cotton.” Red wasn’t sure why a man would brag on goin’ to Oxford, or what to make of the look on the Indian’s face at that point.
“Ah, no, sir, I, ah, went to Oxford College, in Oxford, England. Dad wanted me to go for the law, but ma insisted I take an honest job.”
If it was a joke, Red didn’t get it.
Joe sucked in air, gave a big, huffing sigh. “My Indian name is Osceola Billie Tiger. DeSoto Tiger was my cousin on my father’s side, and like a brother to me. And that son of a bitch John Ashley killed him, shot him in the back like a God damn coward. Over a lousy canoe full of otter hides.”
Joe’s mild manner was gone, Red thought, like a fart in a hurricane. The anger and sadness were clear in his voice, in the way he stared off at nothing, seeing somewhere else, another time.
“Fucking otter hides. DeSoto would have been the Chief! Chief of the Cow Creeks! Do you know what that means?”
Red was sure he didn’t. “So, this Cow Creek is a big deal?”
Joseph Bainbridge Sumner the Third stared at Amion William Dedge for a long hard second, as if he thought he was being made fun of. He didn’t look mild anymore; his teeth gritted, and his nostrils flared with his hard, angry breath. He didn’t look mild at all.
He looked, Red thought, like he was considering pullin’ out that long-ass Seminole pig-sticker and finding out for himself what Red’s guts might look like, was they on the outside. He was glad he had his gun in his back waistband, but at this distance wasn’t sure if he could get it out before Joe could open him up like a gutted hog. He had Young Matthews’ .45 Army Colt, which he’d forgotten until they unloaded the car their first day here, and it was a lot quicker than cocking and firing the old Colt revolver. There was a round in the chamber and the safety lever, Red had discovered, had been broken off, so it no longer blocked the slide no matter what.
He still wasn’t sure he could stop the Indian from cutting out his gizzard if he took a mind. They stood so for another few heartbeats.
Joe kept his right hand from the knife handle, which Red only now noticed was made from some sort of bone or ivory, decorated with carvings of fish and birds.
Red kept his hand at his side, not reaching behind him for the pistol they both knew he had.
Red Dedge truly didn’t know |
“Our tribe, of which DeSoto would have become Chief, is a Creek-speaking tribe known as the ‘Cow’ Creeks because at one time we had more cattle than anyone else around these parts. ‘These parts’ being north Florida, southern Alabama, some of Georgia and North Carolina, and little bits of northwestern Louisiana to boot. Good cattle land, but they’ve worn it out with cotton. Have to make do with beans and tobacco for a few years. But we’re not Seminoles from Cow Creek, there is no ‘Cow Creek’. We’re Creek Seminoles with a lot of cows. Or we were,” and his eyes went for another little trip somewhere else.
“Maybe you don’t know, but the Seminoles are not really a tribe at all anymore; there was a large confederation of Seminoles in the Five Tribes with the Muskies out in Oklahoma about a hundred years ago, but most of us these days are Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chiaha—you call them Miccosukes—been in north Florida a long time.
“Some of the old Timucuas are still around, but they’ve interbred so much they look like Creeks; they used to be much darker than they are now. Descendants of runaway slaves, British deserters, and Spanish holdouts from the old days when Colonel Jackson rampaged around the coast here before the Civil War. You’ll even find some Calusas and Tequestas if you scratch some ‘Seminoles’ deep enough.
“The Ais are gone; the Caribs ate them all. I guess the Tequestas were just as bad as the Caribs; they ate some of the Caribs right back. In any case, they weren’t wiped out like the Ais.
“That’s who your ‘Indian River’ is named for; a bunch of Ais who got themselves eaten by Caribbean cannibals. They were peaceful farmers and fishermen, trappers. They weren’t any good at war, so the stories say.”
Red was still a little in the woods; he hadn’t bargained on a history lesson. “So, it is a big deal…?”
“It is a very big deal, Mr. Red” |
Joe said it with a thin, sarcastic smile, and Red remembered those words from somewhere.
That’s right; the Judge had told him that Jimmy Gopher, the drunken Indian trapper and inveterate thief who’d fingered John Ashley for DeSoto’s murder, had always made fun of that phrase, “the Great White Father.” Jimmy Gopher was a Cow Creek Seminole.
Joe, or Osceola, was not only telling the God’s honest truth, but he was also telling Red that he now had several new allies against the Ashleys, with just as much blood in their eyes as he had. Powerful new allies.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
Roger, allow me to test my surmise about Joe's reply here. Did you invent it to adjust your story's timeline?:
ReplyDelete“They [the surveys Red has just asked Joe about] are already done. Rosalijo and I did them this spring, not long after you left. You see, Mr. Middleton and Mr. Willis have been thinking this over since they…introduced themselves to you, last April. Your arrival was fortunate, timely, and not entirely unexpected.”