Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (77) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Thursday,
October 7, 1923,
5:30 PM

With belts and cleats, Red Dedge had gone up near the top of a towering cypress, with Rufus, also belted onto the tree, as his second saw man. They gauged the wind, the slight angle of the tree itself, the seemingly insignificant branches high, high up here on the top. Branches that contained much of the water sucked up by these massive swamp giants, tons of it.
    They hitched around in their belt rigs to get on either side of the first branch, then Rufus dropped a line over the branch, letting both ends trail to the ground. Below, the crew tied a two-man drag saw into one end, then Rosalijo hollered “Aqui vengo!” “Here I come!” and Miercole and Jueve hauled on the other end, sending the saw up.
    The crosscut drag saw was shaped like a one-man saw, and had a conventional saw handle on one end, and an upright peg handle on the other. It was designed for a man and a boy, where the boy would pull the upright peg to help the man bring his saw forward, and the stronger man would do most of the work pulling back hard for a deep cut.
    It was a rake-toothed saw, with teeth that alternated left and right for a wider cut. A wider cut helped prevent the blade from binding on a log between two saw donkeys, but up here they had no worries about that. Cutting from the top, gravity would work to draw the channel open.
    They started out with Red using the conventional handle, but since Rufus was nearly as tall as he and getting more muscular every day, they always traded off. The problem was making sure the limb didn’t break off too soon, although cypress wasn’t too bad about splitting off. It was wet and would bind, but soft enough to cut easily. You just had to make sure to hook your belt over the branch being cut, not under, because if it did split off, the wood it peeled off the trunk with it would drag you by that belt to your death, eighty or ninety feet below.
    Red yelled “Alli voy!, I’m a’comin’!” and the first branch fell away clean, to thump on the loamy ground below. They were hitching their belts up to the next of three they figured needed to be cut before it would be safe to top the tree, when Rufus pointed his chin south, over Red’s shoulder.

“Missah Red, Missah Joe be comin’, in a hurry”

    “Missah Red, look like Missah Joe be comin’, in a hurry.”
    Red screwed his head around, and sure enough, Joe was coming on pretty quick, throwing up a trail of dust in the dry October air.
    In an age when an average man could get “any color car he wants, as long as it’s black,” Joseph Sumner had managed to get a green one. The dark doors and side panels were lightened by the yellow dust that covered them.
    Joe usually drove like an old woman, which Red Dedge generally approved, but now he sped around the curves, bumping over the rutted dirt and clay roads, which told Red his news was something big. And, experience told him, like as not it was something bad.
    He wasn’t disappointed.
    Grudgingly he belt-slid down the tree, leaving Rufus to wait with the saw. As he dropped, he yelled up, “Get the wedges up there, and the two-man. And just wait!”
    Red Dedge did not like to stop in the middle of a job, and Rufus, now used to his patron’s moods, just nodded.
    “Yessah, Missah Red.”
    Red hit the ground, pulled the release handle on his belt rig, and dropped the heavy webbing on the ground. He stood his ground by the tree in his cleats. They were a pain in the ass to put on and off, and if you walked in them, they would go dull quicker’n you could say shit. He was God damned if he would do either; Joe could come to him, which he did.
    He wasted no time getting to it. “John Ashley escaped again. Near two weeks ago. Jumper says they’re trying to keep it quiet, but it’s all over the place now.”
    Jumper Chili Fish was a fountain of information, and had his informants, really just his family, who told him everything they saw. One was a cook at Raiford State Prison.
    John Ashley had simply disappeared from his cell. No fancy run-off from a road gang; John had been restricted from leaving the prison walls. Yet leave them he had, and no one knew how.

Red cogitated on it a while

    Red cursed, while Joe waited patiently; he knew Red would get to business soon enough. Red cogitated on it a while. They had been left unmolested for months, but he was champing at the bit to rid the world—and himself—of the troublesome Ashley Gang.
    Red and his people had passed through cattle season, the herds arriving through May and June, building into the bellowing mass of beasts he’d had to listen to day and night for months. When the grass from the rains of summer had gone, chewed and trampled by the swelling number of cattle, the ranges he had fenced off became huge feed lots, supplied by Skeeter Willis’ army of young men and women. Feed troughs emptied as fast as they could be filled. Mexicans, Indians and white boys, mostly older kids, regularly pulled up in one of the farm trucks or on a tractor with a trailer, unloading bales of hay and bags of corn. Sometimes they dumped huge loads of citrus fruit rinds from the juice processing operations to the east and northwest, or piles of unsold rotten watermelons, late in the season. The cows fell on this fodder as happily as anything else.
    By August the herds had been auctioned off, bringing blessed quiet to Red’s sleep. Huge cattle drives had headed southeast towards Fort Pierce to be shipped up north, and southwest towards Punta Gorda, to be sent down to Cuba or South America.
    This did not allow a rest for his lumber crew; Skeeter and Harlan both had kin and Indian friends coming to live with them and help run the booming business, bringing their growing clans along. They all needed houses, barns and fences.
    Red knew much of his good fortune was due to the barbed-wire wars, or skirmishes really, that had troubled Florida for twenty or thirty years. Farmers, Indians, legitimate cattlemen, and even ’gator-skinned hardcases that dragged brush cattle out of the cane breaks at a dollar a head, all battled over one thing: barbed wire.
    Skeeter Willis had avoided the conflict by building with wood. For some-odd reason, nobody got so bent out of shape over wooden fences. So, Red and Guy had benefitted, while Willis got to keep things quiet, and the Ashleys left them alone. Looked, Red thought, like that was all coming to an end. “Son of a bitch.”

“You want to come with me now?”

    Joe nodded, knowing Red had made his decision. “You want to come with me now? Or wait until we hear something?”
    Red stared off to the pines spiking the horizon. “Naw, come get me, you hear anything, anytime, day or night.”
    Joe knew it was true; you might roll up to Red Dedge’s house at four in the morning anxious about waking him up, to find him tossing his last coffee dregs off the porch.
    “Never mind the case of the ass Tom Middleton has for me, John has gotta have bigger fish to fry than me, at least for now.”
    He turned to Joe, took his hand and spoke for Joe’s ears alone. “You told the Judge what I said?”
    Joe nodded again. “He says he will talk to both Sheriffs about it. He says they are usually happy to have extra guns.”
    If and when any raids were made on Ashley holdings, Red had requested to be there, strictly as a volunteer. The Sheriffs knew what that meant: he was one more man who wanted them dead. He was on their side, and they were glad to have him.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens