Blake - Red grass river: a legend

As for man, his days are as grass: as a
flower of the field, so he flourisheth .

For the wind passeth over it, and it is
gone; and the place thereof shall know it
no more .

Psalms, 103:15

The terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons .

Jean Renoir

IF THE DEVIL EVER RAISED A GARDEN THE EVERGLADES WAS

THE BOY POLED THE SKIFF ALONG THE WINDING SAWGRASS CHANNEL

SHE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL breasts and

FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE PALM BEACH COUNTY JAIL he

OLD JOE ASHLEYS DADDY COME TO FLORIDA AS A YOUNG MAN

THE GALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFERent

ON A CLEAR HOT SUMMER SUNDAY JUST DAYS AFTER JOHN

MIAMI WASNT BUT ABOUT FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE

FOLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM BOBBY BAKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS

THEY GOT OUT OF THE CAR AT THE BEND IN

THE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED BOYER. WITH

THERE WASNT ANYBODY TO GET EVEN WITH, THAT WAS OLD

THEY RAN THROUGH THE PINE SCRUBS TO WHERE ED AND

ON NEW YEARS DAY BILL ASHLEY AND HIS PRETTY BUT

ONE WARM FORENOON IN LATE APRIL JOHN ASHLEY AND HANFORD

LORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT JOHN AND LAURA! THE

THE ELSER PIER WAS AN ORNATE THREE-STORY BUILDING THAT stood

OVER THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS THEY HIJACKED NEARLY OF DOZEN

A FEW MONTHS AFTER JOHN WENT BACK TO PRISON ED

HE WAS LOCKED INTO A SEVEN-BY-NINE CELL IN A SPECIAL

THEY HIT THE STUART BANK FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT OPENED

THE RUMOR WAS EVERYWHERE THAT OLD JOE ASHLEYD HAD A

THEY TRIED HARD TO BELAY THEIR DESIRE UNTIL NIGHTFALL BUT

CHILL WINTER DAWN. THE EASTERN SKY SHOWING GRAY AT THE

BOBBY BAKERS RAID ON THE ASHLEY CAMP MADE HEADLINES THAT

HE FISHED AND HUNTED AND HE TOOK HIDES OF ALL

THEY DISEMBARKED IN KEY WEST AND MADE INQUIRIES AND found

BY THE TIME ELMER PADGETT, SLEEPLESS AND HAGGARD, HAD tracked

THE FIRST ANYBODY HEARD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WAS WHEN A

A GUSTY GRAY EVENING OF UNSEASONABLE RAIN A FEW DAYS BEFORE

The Ashley Gang is a historical reality. Most of the characters in this novel did exist, and most of its major events did take place. Still, this is a work of fiction, and those familiar with the facts about the Ashleys and the Florida of their time will discern the liberties Ive taken with the record.

The Liars Club

I F THE DEVIL EVER RAISED A GARDEN THE E VERGLADES WAS IT . T HE biggest and meanest swamp youre ever like to seebigger than some entire states of the Unionits pineywoods and palmetto scrubs and cypress heads and tangled vines but mostly its a river, a river like no other on this earth. Its sixty miles wide and half-a-foot deep and runs from Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the state over a layer of muck thats got no bottom. The whole thing covered with sawgrass sharp as a skinning razor. Not a thing else in that sawgrass country but here and there some hammockshighground islands of hardwoods and palmsand most of them never been set foot on. Out there the world looks a whole lot bigger and theres no end at all to the sky. They say its hardly another place in the world where you can look farther and see less. And all of it green of one shade or another except at sunrise and in the dying light of day when that great grass river goes so red it looks like its on fire or stained with blood.

Only the godawful desperate or the plain goddamned could ever live out there. Its ever kind of thing in the Everglades to cut you or burn you or itch you or sting you or poison you or eat you up whole. Its quicksand and gators and panthers and snakes and mosquitoes and ever sort of bug in hell to drive you insane. In summer the airs so hot and wet its like trying to breathe boiled cotton. Lord only knows what-alls been swallowed up in that rotten ooze under the sawgrass and wont never again see the light of day. Its bones in that muck a million years old and bones aint been there a week. Animal bones. Bones of men. Its ten thousand stories buried out there aint nobody heard but the devil.

Yessir, the Devils Garden was as right a name as was ever give to any place there is. Even on todays maps youll see the name on a portion of wildland just east of Immokalee. It was the early crackers who come up with the nameand big as the Glades is now, in them days it was even bigger and took in most of the region to either side of Lake Okeechobee. A cracker is somebody who grows up in the swamp country and provided his daily bread mostly by hunting and trapping, though some did a little hardscrabble farming, some a little cattle ranching, some a little of it all. The first of them to show up in Florida come from all over the South but most of them from Georgia. They got their name on account of the sound their whips made as they drove their stock ahead of them. Some of them latigo whips was so big they had to hold them with both hands. They cracked loud as rifleshots and you could hear them from miles away.

No white people ever knew the ways of the Devils Garden better than the crackers. And no crackers knew them better than the Ashleys.

Its only a few of us oldtime crackers left anymore who go back that far and knew the Ashleys in the living flesh. I mean were old, the bunch of us, old and aching ever kind of way and all of us needing a cane at the least and a couple of us a damn walker. Hardly a man among us dont wear specs as thick as bottle glass, or says What? ever time somebody says something to him, or can sleep through the night without having to get up a time or two to piss. But near all of us knew the Ashleys when we was kids, leastways knew them well enough to say How-do to and get a Hey in return, which was about as well as anybody who wasnt kin ever got to know an Ashley. They was a clannish family and hard to get to know personal, but we all of us saw one or another of them ever now and then, and we heard talk about them all the time.

We grew up hearing a hundred stories about the Ashleys and about John Ashleys gang and the crimes they did. We heard all about the bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker and about the war the Ashleys had with Yankee bootleggers who tried to cut in on their territory. We heard a dozen versions of what happened at the Sebastian River Bridge when the gang was finally put to an end. We still tell them stories ever time we get together in the park to sun our old bones and pass the time and talk about something other than whether theres a Democrat alive who can win the next election.

The thing is, so many stories about the Ashley Gang have been told for so long by so many who have bent the facts so many ways that theres hardly no way of knowing anymore whats the true facts and what aint. It probly dont really matter all that much. Everybody knows that the plain and simple facts about something dont necessarily tell the truth of it. Some people can lie all day long with nothing but the facts, and what goes on in most courtrooms is proof enough of that. On the other hand, sometimes a story that stretches a fact here and there can tell more of the real truth of a thing as youre ever like to get. Leastways thats what the bunch of us think.

Our growed-up children tend to smile and wink at each other and shake their heads at the tales we tell, but theres been a bunch of old farts like us in barbershops and cafes and courthouse squares in ever town there ever was. Thats for damn sure the way of it down South. Back when we was pups a bunch of graybeards used to sit around in the town square and tell stories about the War Between the States and the bad old days of Reconstruction and the doings of the Klan and such. Everybody used to call to call those oldtimers the Liars Club. And its what everybody calls us too.