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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Friday,
August 18, 1922,
12:00 PM
Red sat at the plank table in his new house, which stood just about where Guy’s still had been, the last time they’d worked the cutting. The raw wood of the table and chairs had burrs and splinters, as did the rest of the house, because the lumber was green as new grass. Green oak or pine would warp so badly the house would be unlivable in a year, but this was cypress. If you needed to build it fast, you cut cypress. The splinters would smooth out in no time, with oil and a little use.
The houses had been built just like a Seminole chickee, with cypress trunks sunk in the ground upright, supporting a framework of smaller log lintels, and beams of logs that met in the peaked center. The roof was thatched with palm fronds and bundled cattails, in the finest Seminole tradition.
There were two distinctions between the house and a real chickee hut; the first was that generally the Seminoles didn’t bother with walls at all. Their chickees were open to the elements on all sides. This was more nature than the whites, blacks or Mexicans were used to. After several weeks of camping out in the wet season, they were all ready for warm dry houses with solid walls. This caused the second distinction.
When a Seminole wanted to enlarge his chickee, he simply added new tree trunk poles wherever was convenient, and roofed it over with poles and thatch. The shape didn’t really matter. Most chickees originated as small rectangles with young couples just starting out in life, but larger structures went with the flow of the land as they and the families living in them grew, often incorporating live trees.
If you wanted solid walls, they had to be straight |
Red drank coffee from a new, blue-enameled coffee mug, purchased in Okeechobee along with pots, pans, utensils, iron cookstoves, and all the tools needed to log an area effectively. Skeeter Willis had put down ten thousand dollars for equipment and supplies. Red’s mind still balked at the number, as if it couldn’t be real. He could estimate the number and type of nails for a house; he’d never figured enough for five, but he could do it. He didn’t have to, at that, he had Joe, who also looked after all that money, which was just fine with Red.
He and Guy had separate houses, with Jenny there and all, and they both hung suspended floors in their houses, spiking joists into the cypress trunks holding up the roofs and laying planks over them to get off of the dirt.
Guy ran the saw table, while Red and the four boys did most of the work, Red laying out the floor plans with the boys humping lumber and digging post holes. Red, who was “Mis’ah Red” to Jasper and Rufus, and “Senor Roja” to the Mexicans, explained to the boys that they would build Mr. Guy and Miss Jenny’s house first, because ladies came first as all men should know, and the boys looked at each other and nodded solemnly.
The Mexicans were prepared for this. It was how un Patron spoke; as if he was a father. The black boys could sense the authority in Red’s voice, and were ready to hear whatever wisdom he had to offer.
He said after Mr. Guy’s and Miss Jenny’s, they would then build the two houses for the pairs of brothers, and his and then Joe’s, last. He did not, he told them, want the boys to be exposed to the rains and mosquitos any longer than necessary.
The boys all stood back a bit at that, but it was Rufus who spoke up. “No suh, Mis’ah Red, dat ain’t right. It ain’t ’bout what color we is, it be you bein’ de Boss. You our elder, you de Boss, you cain’t be havin’ yo’ house built las’, jus’ ain’t right. Beside, Daddy’d snatch us baldheaded, we was t’ sleep in a house while de Boss sleep out, an’ I like my hair jus’ the way ’tis, thank you. No suh, cain’t have it, jus’ ain’t right.” He nudged Jasper, who nodded, looked down, and wrung the poor hat in his big hands until bits of straw fell to the ground.
“You are our Patron, our Boss” |
Red Dedge was not only surprised, but realized that he was proud as well. These were fine young men, raised right. Just Like Harlan Middleton had said about him and Guy. If their own upbringing was what had got him this bonanza of good fortune, then the least he could do was pass it on.
“Well boys, that’s about the nicest thing I ever did hear, at least about me. My own daddy told me once that a boy becomes a man when he begins to act like a man. I gotta say, my daddy would be proud of y’all standin’ up like men today, and I am too.”
They all grinned hugely, including Jasper; he even momentarily stopped abusing the hat.
“So, bein’ as how y’all have been so polite an’ all, I reckon we’ll build my house right after Mr. Guy and Miss Jenny’s, jus’ like y’all said. And if y’all are serious, well then Mister Sumner is your elder too, so his should be next.”
The boys all approved, nodding and smiling. In two days, they had the poles and walls of Guy’s and Red’s houses up, and were working on the floors.
The third day, several Indians showed up from nowhere, leading a mule cart full of thatch, and Red thought back to the small group he’d seen out on the prairie the last time they’d been there. They obviously lived nearby, but he never saw any chickees, no smoke from cooking fires, no paths he could tell from game trails.
The two men spoke aside with Joe, while the three women unloaded the piles of palm fronds they had gathered on the way. They pulled several watermelon-sized balls of brown twine from the cart, laid them on the palm leaves and covered them with more leaves.
Red wondered why they bothered keeping the twine dry and asked Joe how it could hold up as a roof if it couldn’t get wet.
“You will see, sir. When the roof is finished, none of the twine will be exposed. It still breaks down, and between that, rot, and palm leaf-worms, a roof needs to be re-thatched every five or six years. Fortunately this is not difficult, and often two or three layers are used over old ones before the roof beams decay and the whole structure requires renewing.”
They watched as the women turned the mule about and headed back towards the palms that lay to the south, where the Indians had come from, clearly to cut more palm leaves.
In two weeks, they were all under roofs, warm and dry |
His and Guy’s had two rooms, with six poles in a rectangle, and a light wall of thatch separating the bedroom from the front.
The black boys had a small shanty, a house with only one room, as did the Mexican kids and the man Red could not help but thinking of as “In’jun Joe.” Joseph Sumner, he noticed, preferred walls on his dwelling as did the whites, and a wooden floor under his feet.
The pairs of brothers were satisfied with the swept-dirt floors of their homes, although they weren’t really dirt so much as clay. A few inches below the surface in some areas was a thick layer of light orange clay, that Joe told Red was preferrable for building homes with tree trunks sunk in the ground, partly because the clay made a passable floor and partly because the clay areas were less prone to termites.
Red knew all about termites; he and his family were loggers and carpenters and built their families’ and friends’ houses collectively, as many farm communities did. They had old-fashioned barn-raisin’ type get-togethers after church on Sundays and built new houses for newlyweds and additions for couples with growing broods. And every single structure they had ever built was plagued with termites.
White folks used stone or concrete piers under a house and put tin shields on top of them to prevent the white ants, the ground termites, from building their tunnels up to eat the floor. Nothing could stop the dry wood termites, the ones that slowly ground a wooden house to grains of termite turds that looked like coffee grounds. The Indians, it seemed, had somehow made a treaty with the termites, instead of fighting them.
Red Dedge walked out on his front step, tossed his coffee dregs in the fire pit to the right of his door, where his enamel coffee pot still sat on a flat rock. It would be there when he came home for dinner, and again for supper. He would drink a whole pot with every meal, a habit A.W. “Red” Dedge would continue until the day he died.
The sun was up, shining through the pines on the far eastern horizon. The boys were up and stirring, Jenny was at the fire in front of their house, brewing Guy’s coffee, and Joe was already off somewhere, probably scouting out more cypress to cut.
Those pines on the horizon, any fool could cut those. They didn’t grow much out here on the prairie; it was too wet. Pines didn’t like their feet in the water, buy cypress trees did.
Cypress was harder to cut but was far more valuable |
Red went over to Guy’s door and hollered inside. “You ain’t up yet? That still ain’t gonna build itself!”
He heard muffled cursing, and Guy appeared in his union suit, which could not conceal his huge morning hard-on.
Red was the first to admit, Guy had a cock like a draft horse. No wonder Miss Jenny liked him so much. And Red knew he was being unfair; the still was coming along just fine. He didn’t care. He was messing with his brother, something he considered to be his God-given duty and that he would never shirk.
Guy knew it, would have thought something was wrong if he hadn’t, and he took his own shots at Red when got an opening. He just wasn’t as good at it.
Red walked on to see the boys all together, cooking breakfast on a communal fire. The houses all faced a central square. The boy’s homes were to the south of Red’s and Guy’s, facing north, while Joe’s house sat to the east, facing west, towards Blue Cypress Lake.
The Mexican boys had raw coffee beans that they would roast every morning, then grind between two stones, a flat one and a round one. They roasted the beans about dawn in a giant black cast-iron frying pan, before they started in on breakfast, and the smell was so good it never failed to bring Red out of his short night’s dreams with a smile. Good strong coffee was a weakness he had, near as strong as for tobacco or ’shine. Maybe more. He could go a day without smoking, a night without drinking, but a morning without coffee? He shuddered in the warm early breeze.
“Mornin’ boys,” Red said to them, and they answered back politely.
“Buenos dias, Senor Roja,” said Miercole, and Rufus touched his forehead. “Mo’nin’, Boss.”
Jasper stared at the fire, where Jueve was stirring fat bacon, and was ready to crack eggs into the fat. A firepit always held whatever pan was used at a slight angle, and Jueve used that to his advantage. He gathered his bacon on the high side to crisp up, while he broke eggs into the puddle of pork grease that gathered on the low side. The boy deftly cracked a dozen eggs one handed, two at a time, popping the shells open with a thumb and finger and not breaking a single yolk.
The eggs bubbled in the fat and smelled wonderful |
Jueve added sliced polenta, something like a sweet cornmeal sausage, browning it on both sides and dishing it out to the boys, whose enamel plates waited in their eager hands. They fell on the little corn-cakes like starving rats, while Jueve scooped up the eggs and bacon on a steel spatula and shared it around.
Jasper, the biggest boy there, grinned and hummed as he ate; he seemed happiest when eating, and big as he was, Red could see why. That boy was gonna make a great big man one day.
The houses had been good practice, Red thought, and they were ready to begin lumber production nearly a month ahead of Skeeter’s prediction. They would have over eleven weeks to provide the planks and posts they’d contracted to make, and the weather this time of year was fine for logging.
Red had told Joe that Guy was as competent a sawman as they could find, and Joe’s skills were needed elsewhere. First and foremost, to secure title to the land.
Somehow Red’s Southern Baptist upbringing had grown deaf, or mute, or something. The idea of somebody else cadging prime land off of some-other-body else, and him and Guy making out like bandits in the meantime, just, well, didn’t seem to rouse any fire and brimstone in his Southern Baptist soul.
The next thing, Red said, was he needed more men to cut and haul logs. “What always held me and Guy back was keeping the saw busy. It takes two men to cut a cypress tree, three’s better, but we had to cut it, haul, then saw it. It sometimes took us a whole day to get one or two logs to the saw. We could sell ’em uncut, but they wasn’t worth half as much that way. With three cuttin’ crews, we can keep that saw singin’ sun up to sun down.”
Joe told him he would look into getting some more workers, and before long two more Mexicans and another Indian showed up. The Mexicans, hefty cousins in their twenties, needed another shanty house.
The Indian, who said his name was Jumper Chili Fish, was a Miccosukee Creek. He proudly proclaimed he’d been named for a prominent chief from the 1800’s, and Joe backed him up on his story. He was related to Joe by marriage and said he could bunk with him until he got his feet on the ground.
“Fair enough,” Red said. “Let’s get to work.”
He set Miercole and Jueve to cutting smaller trees for fenceposts, while Luis and Ramon, the other Mexican boys, cut much larger trees to make planks for the rails. Rufus and Jasper were to cut some middling trunks for the new boys’ house, then help them with the plank cutting, all to feed the saw.
Guy was a workhorse, wooden leg or not |
The truck had been jacked up and set on a tall section of stout tree trunk, that held it canted up towards the right rear. This was to allow the drive strap to be mounted on the drive wheel, and not have the bumper hit the strap. The gear was set on first, and a branch held the accelerator so it ran the saw “about right” as Guy reported, after sawing the first few planks.
Planks involved long cuts and were much harder than cutting posts. They had a makeshift prayer meeting on that Sunday morning, then threw together the new boys’ house by about three in the afternoon.
The thatch Indians, as Red thought of them, had appeared as if by magic, joined in the prayers, and were ready to put the roof on the minute the crew got the lintels and rafters up. By then Jueve had both haunches of a pig Red had shot on Friday, that he had prepared with dressing fat and salt, roasting on a fire he’d made of all the firepit rocks in camp.
There wasn’t much rock in Florida and Jueve needed them all to cook for more than a few. A heavy iron grating the size of a door was laid across one end of the oblong of stones he’d piled up, and Red was pretty sure it had been salvaged from a jail somewhere.
The other end of the pit was where Jueve added wood to his fire, and as his wood caught and burned to coals, he raked it in under the grating to where it would cook the food on top. He used a heavy cane rake, with a hand-like spread of sharp spikes the size of a bear paw on a long ash handle.
Red wasn’t the only one glad of someone who could cook; even Miss Jenny took a back seat to the young Thursday.
The Seminole women put pots on the grating and boiled ears of corn, and one stirred a pot of sofke, ground corn soup sweetened with cane squeeze. They mixed cattail flour with water from the creek, added salt and sugar, formed it into rounds, and baked flatbread on the hot stones.
Jasper, who’d been drooling over the half a pig on the fire, now turned his hungry eyes on those cakes. The Indian women seemed to sense he was childlike, and teased him gently, giving him little bits of sweet flatbread dipped in the sofke.
In no time, with the house up and the pig roasting, it turned into a party. The thatch Seminoles, who Red knew were Cow Creeks, wanted to hear all about the Miccosukee Creeks up near Ocala and Micanopy, from Jumper.
They pulled flasks, and Guy was right there with a jug, and the Indians rejoiced. Red rolled a cut stump by the fire to sit on, the Indians sat on the ground, and they passed the jug, and ate corn on the cob and slurped sofke, and pulled their knives and hacked pieces off of the roasting hog. It was a good night, Red thought. He hoped their luck would hold.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
A beautiful scene of domesticity, the cooking and eating, the construction of houses and real chickee huts, people living convivially in community. Thank you, Roger!
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