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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Saturday,
November 1, 1924,
10:47 PM
Terry Miller and Steve Davis were drunk. They’d been to Miss Lottie’s for the cheap drinks, but they had some money tonight due to Terry’s uncle, and another’s leavings didn’t suit them this night. They were headed to Senegal’s Sumptuous Palace of Delights, to sample some new flesh reported to have arrived recently enough not to smell like old fish.
Terry was the nephew of Andrew Young, mayor of the Village of Vero and a State representative, who the very next year would break Saint Lucie County’s stranglehold on the Village and spearhead the creation of Indian River County.
The issue that would divide them was Saint Lucie’s blue laws that, among other irritants, prevented movies being shown on Sundays. Young was also the owner of the Strand Theater, outside of which Red Dedge had shot Roy “Young” Mathews to death not so long ago. The unsolved killing had boosted ticket sales so much, Young considered remodeling and changing the name, and he finally did.
The red paint on the shot holes was quite the tourist draw |
The boys pulled up at the red lantern on the chain and were shocked to see cops jump out all around their car.
“Who the fuck are you?” shouted one, who looked like a door walking on tree trunks.
“T. R. Miller,” Terry said shakily, using his initials, just like his daddy and grandaddy did. “This h’yere’s S. O. Davis. What’s a’goin’ on, officer?”
The deputy sniffed at the booze on him, looking disgusted, and Terry was afraid. Afraid of being arrested for drinking, but it was more than that.
This man was dangerous. They didn’t know then that he was Elmer Padgett, but they would, in time.
“Y’all wanna get your asses out of here,” he said, then his eyes shot back south down the Dixie Highway. In the distance he could see headlights bumping down the worn and potholed road.
“God damn it! Too late! Stay in the car! Everybody, get back out of sight!”
Red didn’t know when this Palm Beach County deputy had become the boss, but his three men jumped, so everybody else did too.
The boys, now terrified, sat where they were.
The deputy turned back to them and snarled in the open window, his head sideways. “I mean it. No matter what happens, stay in the God damn car.”
Terry smelled piss, and turned to Steve, who was hiding his face. “Yes, sir,” he said, not even looking at the deputy. They stayed, shaking, as the next car slowly approached, the lights bouncing now and then when they hit holes in the marl road.
Red never understood later how somebody as smart as John Ashley would ever drive into what was so obviously an ambush.
The big Ford touring car pulled up behind the boys’ open coupe |
Sheriff J.R. Merritt, aiming right into the windshield, shouted from behind his Remington Model 10 12-guage pump trench gun. “Don’t try nothin’ stupid you Ashley boys, or you’re sure as hell goin’ t’ die right now!”
It was no brag. One blast from his scattergun could easily have killed every man in the car. That’s what a trench gun was for, used in the Great War to kill as many men as possible, as quickly as possible. It had a short barrel and no choke at all, which spread the nine pellets in a load, each about the size of a .38 round, very widely, at very close range. It only took one to kill a man. Such guns were commonly known as “crowd pleasers”. When the Sheriff called out the gang by name, Miller could swear he smelled fresh piss from Davis. He shook his head, suddenly sober as a judge. His Uncle Andrew was going to kill him.
“Handsome” Hanford Mobley was behind the wheel, his hands in the air.
Tom Middleton rode shotgun, literally. A double barrel stuck out his window. He held his hands out the passenger side where the posse’s lights showed he didn’t have a hand on it.
Ray “Shorty” Lynn was behind Mobley, eyes wide and hands up.
John sat behind Middleton, his arms crossed, a disgusted look on his face. Like he was tired of the whole thing, Red thought, looking in at him.
But he only had eyes for Tom Middleton, and he kept the Parker dead on him every second. He was sure as the day was long that that shotgun pointed up out the window was the one that had taken guy’s leg, and that Tom Middleton was the man who had fired it. He was here tonight to see that this man, of all of them, did not live to see the sunrise.
“Get ’em, boys!” Merritt yelled, and the men were dragged from the car, their weapons snatched from them, and handcuffs cranked down hard on their wrists.
Only Shorty was pussy enough to cry out as the steel bit into his arms. The others didn’t resist. They’d all been in prison, they knew to just to stumble along as they were hit and kicked and dragged over to the east side of the bridge, and the chain the posse had hung across the bridge was used to lock them to the railing.
Miller and Davis watched as the handcuffed men were bound to the bridge. The man who’d held the trench gun, that Miller had pegged as Sheriff J.R. Merritt, handed it to one of the Saint Lucie County deputies and walked over to the boys’ car.
“Give me a ride to the end of the bridge” |
Miller and Davis were confused. Why was the Sheriff of Saint Lucie County leaving the scene of the greatest gangster arrest in their whole young lives? “Well, sure, Sheriff, I guess so,” Miller finally said.
He opened the door and stepped out, letting the Sheriff into the back seat.
The chain that had stopped them was now wrapped around the bridge railing, with the remnants of the notorious Ashley gang handcuffed to it. The low, yellow light from kerosene lanterns and the crappy surplus military flashlights cast the scene in an evil glow.
The crowd of men, both black and white, Miller noticed, bristled with guns and determination. The headlights of the cars were the brightest thing there. As he drove past the angry men, he could not help thinking something very bad was about to occur.
“So, boys, where y’all headed? The Palace?” the Sheriff asked.
Their silence was answer enough.
“That’ll do me just fine too. Carry on, young man.”
When Miller got to the north end of the bridge, there was no chain, and no lantern.
Like it never happened.
Saturday, November 1, 1924, 10:53 PM
Both Padgett boys, L.B. Thomas and Henry Stubbs stepped into the light on the posse’s left, not five feet from John Ashley and what remained of his formerly rich and famous gang.
The Deacon, Reverend Stone, Red Dedge, Donny Marshbanks, and Senegal Johnson all stepped forward in the middle. Wiggins and Brown from Saint Lucie County took the right flank. They all held their guns on the gang as Lynn began begging for his life.
His cries were so desperate, his promises of ratting out his comrades so disgusting, that Tom Middleton’s face was a red mask of rage.
“Don’t move! I’ll shoot!” |
Donnie Marshbanks drew his elegant, lethal little pistol and trained it on Middleton too.
A couple of the deputies looked at them in surprise, but “Three Fingers” didn’t. Elmer Padgett didn’t. None of the black men did, they just glared at the outlaws.
Wiggins spat tobacco juice on the roadway, his bloodshot eyes on Ashley. Elmer Padgett rubbed his midnight shadow of a rough black beard, his hard eyes on Ashley too.
Padgett looked at Wiggins, and Red would have sworn they came to an agreement, without speaking a word. He then looked to the Reverend, who didn’t look back, but dipped his chin a fraction of an inch. Judgement had been made. Atonement was at hand. John Ashley, at least, would not leave this bridge alive.
So that left Tom Middleton to Red Dedge, and that was just fine with him. This murdering, maiming son of a bitch would join Ashley in Hell this very night, if Red had to do it with his bare hands.
It was John Ashley that set off the inevitable bloody cataclysm that night. Middleton was ready to murder Lynn right in front of armed deputies.
John had softened over the years. He regretted the death of Kid Lowe, mourned the deaths of his brothers, and had come to see Tom Middleton as what he was: a truly heartless murderer. John had never killed anyone he didn’t have to, other than DeSoto Billie Tiger. And that was only because DeSoto, his good friend, had fucked John’s girlfriend, Vienna Pitt, and John had regretted that killing ever since.
All the people he had killed were either the law or helping the law and therefore had signed up for the risks. Hell, most of the civilians coming after them worked for money just like he did. He was tired of people dying, and right now, life in Raiford sounded better than being killed on this bridge.
When Middleton went for Lynn, John stepped after Tom, hands straining forward against the chains, trying to prevent them all being killed.
Wiggins and Padgett seemed to fire at the same instant |
Tom Middleton was leaning down to strike Lynn, who was on his knees, and Red’s Parker slammed a shot into his left side, nearly severing his arm and plowing through his body like a brick. That was the first of a hunter’s load, a slug, just like that bastard had shot at them that day at Guy’s old still on the very river that flowed under this bridge tonight, almost within sight.
Most of the others had shotguns that held only buckshot, and the damage they caused was horrific. At this range the shotgun blasts didn’t have time to spread, and just blew large holes in the men you could have seen daylight through.
Donnie, beside Red, had emptied his autoloader into Middleton and Ashley, and was slamming a new magazine into it.
The noise was like a car wreck, a train crash, a thunderstorm. The bitter smoke from the gunpowder was a noxious cloud.
John, behind Middleton, was down, not moving, but bullets were still thumping into him. Every man in the posse was firing.
“Handsome” Hanford Mobley went down, back turned, not so handsome anymore, his face and upper body smashed to bloody ribbons. Bullets still ripped his stylish blue sport coat.
Lynn was blown back against the bridge railing, legs splayed, half of his chest gone.
Red gave him the second barrel of the Parker for luck |
You will die, you bastard, he thought. That’s for Guy.
That load of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot ended the fight. It blew Tom Middleton’s massive frame completely over the railing of the bridge, and he pulled up short against the chains, hanging by his wrists over the placid Saint Sebastian River as it ran out into the Indian River Lagoon.
What blood he had left was dripping into the water, drawing the fish and crabs, as the posse, some shocked by the noise and death and destruction, some driven by their own fears and hatred, stopped firing and went to look down on him.
Holding their lanterns out over the bridge like they were crabbing, they looked at each other, eyes wide, no one speaking.
The evening wind had died, and the air was filled with gun smoke, a fog of cordite stinking like sulfur. Over it Red could smell the blood. He’d smelled enough of it when Skeeter Willis had slaughtered the great cattle herd he’d gathered out at Blue Cypress Lake. Not that a farm boy didn’t already know what blood smelled like.
Handsome Hanford Mobley, on the gang’s far right, had tried to turn away after taking a mutilating shot to the face and had gotten dozens of bullets and shotgun pellets in his back and sides.
John Ashley had been caught in the left side as he’d turned and tried to stop Middleton and was piled in a bloody heap like dirty laundry. His arms were splayed out and what was left of his face stared with one open eye.
Between Ashley and Lynn, there was a gap left my Tom Middleton, marked by the chains trailing over the rail, his body still swinging, after the killing, in the eerie quiet down below.
“All right boys,”, Wiggins said, “let’s get him up.”
He was the ranking deputy with jurisdiction, and aside from the black men they all went to haul the body back onto the bridge. “The whites can deal with their own, the good and the bad, just like us,” the Reverend murmured to Senegal and his boys. The Deacon didn’t speak.
Red helped the Sheriffs and Donnie pull Middleton over the rail, where what was left of him landed on the roadway with a wet bloody splat. Just like killin’ a hog, thought Red Dedge, and he meant it.
“I hope it hurt, you son of a bitch” |
Wiggins and Padgett looked at him with something like respect.
Donnie put his hand on Red’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.”
“Reverend,” Senegal Johnson called out in his commanding baritone, “might we have a prayer?”
Red stepped up next to his friend and took off his hat. “Yes, please, sir.”
The Reverend glared around with his granite face like a rock cliff.
Even the deputies, who looked a little green around the gills at the carnage, doffed their hats and bowed their heads. Blood showed on their uniforms, mostly from Middleton’s remains, but some had come just from their proximity to the men they had blown to ribbons of flesh with shotguns.
“Almighty Father,” intoned the Reverend, and other than Red the white men shuffled their feet, even Donnie. They weren’t used to being prayed over by a black preacher; Red was.
“May you look down upon this awful and momentous work we have done this day in Your Name, to spare the fine people of this land further depredations by these evil men, and find it good. Comfort our souls, Lord, that we have acted rightly, and that we bear no guilt for the terrible end these sinners have brought upon themselves. May you have mercy upon us, and may you have the mercy upon these men’s souls that we could not show to their bodies. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
The deacon spoke one time. “Amen.”
Every man there gave a hearty, head down amen as well. They either truly wanted some absolution for this horror or wanted to look like they did. They were a silent, grim crew as they unchained the dead outlaws from the railing and took off the handcuffs.
“Make damn sure you wash them cuffs off down to the river,” Padgett said, and if he’d had any doubts before, Red now knew for sure the fix was in.
He got a strong whiff of the Judge from this |
He could now marry his girl and settle down. Raise some kids. Stop looking behind him every second of every day. Look his brother in the eye.
But the optimistic young Red Dedge who’d enjoyed sunrises and birds and the beauty of a simple farm in Gifford was gone. In his place was a harder man. A man who’d killed, and would kill again.
The End
Afterword
Amion William and Guy Dedge lived in what is now Gifford, Florida, in the 1920’s. Guy was a notorious moonshiner, and that was Ashley territory. The Ashley Gang didn’t like competition. Though most of the events here are fictional, many are not, and most of the details and characters are historically accurate. I have tried to bring the vernacular of these people to life. My representation is accurate, if possibly actually a little on the mild side for the time; Florida was as wild as any wild west you could imagine, and words we now abhor were spoken regularly by adolescent boys.
Herewith, a list of historical characters, and apologies to their descendants for presenting them as bad actors when in fact I have no evidence whatsoever for dragging their good names through the mud: Of course, Red and Guy Dedge, and Lola Bostick, were my relatives. Everyone mentioned in the Ashley Gang. Henry “Z” Zeuchs and his engineer Henry Kimball. Sherrifs J.R. Merritt and W.P. Monroe. Marshbanks and Stikelether are the names of two of my good friends; G. Stikelether, Esq., was a gentleman farmer and lawyer who would in fact show up at his office in a spotless long-sleeved white shirt, “overhauls,” and cowboy boots with cow poop on them, and ate fried catfish and hushpuppies with abandon. Jimmy and Lily Owens, no relation I know of, who ran what was actually the Orange Blossom Café in Vero Beach until around 2000. Wild Wilbur was a man I once knew, pretty much as presented, but was not a doctor. Roy Couch, who would not see the Sebastian Inlet finished until 1948. Teddy Canova. Desoto and Tommy Tiger. Jimmie Gopher. Jumper Chili Fish was a real Seminole chief in the 1800’s. Sheriffs George and Bobby Baker. Raiford Warden J.S. Blitch. The Frances P. Flemings, senior and junior. The Barnetts. Dr. Aristades Agramonte, who in fact worked with Walter Reed to prove mosquitos caused yellow fever, and was never mistreated by the U.S. And a host of others. If I say someone ran a store, hotel, cattle operation, citrus grove, or bank, they did.
Some pioneer family names used: The Middletons, Storys, Rices, Summerlins, Upthegroves, and many others, for disparaging whose good names I once again apologize.
I have no evidence Laura Upthegrove was sexually abused |
The bodies of John Ashley, Clarence Middleton, Hanford Mobley and “Shorty” Lynn were displayed in pine coffins on the sidewalk outside the Saint Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, just like in the Old West. An era of terror and lawlessness came to an end. Laura Upthegrove later died, some say intentionally, by drinking cleaning fluid.
Amion Willam Dedge and Lola Bostick were married in their actual hometown of Ray City, Georgia, on December 25th, 1925. They and Guy lived in Gifford, Florida, until the 1930’s.
There is not one relative left alive that could tell me how my Uncle Guy actually lost his leg. Given that chronic smoking can cost one a leg due to poor circulation, I have concluded it was likely the continuous Camel non-filters he chain-smoked for his entire life until he passed. Once when I was about 16, Grandpa Dedge took me fishing. He let me smoke, and when I ran out of “store-boughts,” as he called them, he sneeringly handed me his Bugler tobacco and rolling papers. Without thinking, the young stoner that I was rolled a perfect cigarette, and Grandpa never believed it was “my friend who was in jail” who taught me; Grandpa never could roll worth a damn.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
Roger, I wonder how many readers will agree with me that your afterwords are fully as delightful, if not even more delightful, than the historical fiction that precedes them. I even wonder whether some budding neuro-scientists are already beginning to investigate how they might acquire your brain (after you pass) in order to study how you could have woven so much substance together so naturally, prior to pickling it for posterity to admire side by side with Albert Einstein’s. Thank you for letting me share all of this with our readers, who will be hounding you, no doubt, for an autographed copy of the published book. (I know I will.)
ReplyDeleteAw, shucks. Thanks so much as always for your help and support. I don't know if I could have embarked on this voyage without knowing you would be there to help me get it done and get it right. I do intend to seek a commercial publisher, something else I doubt I would ever have considered without your expertise and mentorship. I do believe that between A Killing and Dancing at the Driftwood, the subject and style of any further writing I may do has been set. The early 20th century in America and particularly Florida is not only fascinating to me, but I know a lot about it. The life these people led is disappearing, just like the Florida they lived in, and I see the one as an analogy of the other. Hemingway said write what you know. Good advice. Believe I'll take it. Merry Christmas!
ReplyDelete