Red Grass River

FOUR

The Liars Club

OLD JOE ASHLEY’S DADDY COME TO FLORIDA AS A YOUNG MAN after the War Between the States. Him and his wife. They come from Tennessee by way of more than a dozen years in Georgia and then settled in Lee County, on the Gulf side nearabouts Fort Myers. The story has it he was killed in a timber camp one winter by a rattlesnake bit him in the chin when he woke up from a dinnertime nap under a tree. They say he died with his face all swole up just ugly as sin. Old Joe used to tell folk the only three things his daddy left to him was a scarred-up fiddle, the know-how for making good moonshine, and a damn good reason never to sleep on the ground unless he absolutely had to.

Old Joe moved his family to this side of the state in ought-four, some seven years before John killed that Indian and all his bad troubles began. Besides Joe and Ma Ashley, there were five boys and two girls—and two more daughters would be born some years later. It was no more than a fair-sized family, as cracker families go. They come across in a pair of wagons pulled by mules wearing muck shoes, come all the way through what was still awful wild country along the Caloosahatchee River and over to Lake Okeechobee and on down through the sawgrass glades to Pompano on the coast. In them days only a Indian or a hardshell cracker could make a trip like that across the Devil’s Garden.

Those who first saw them come out on this side of the glades with Old Joe driving the mules along with his whip popping like gunshots said both the family’s wagons was near covered with the hides of all the diamondbacks they’d killed along the way and not a hide under six feet. Old Joe always wore a rattlesnake hatband and a rattlesnake belt. Carried a rattle in his pocket about the size of a kazoo and liked to come up quiet behind an ole boy and shake it hard and laugh like hell to see the fella jump five feet in the air and whirl around all bigeyed. Some called him Rattler Joe and said he never did seem to mind the name a bit.

He told folks he’d made the move because he was tired of trading in hides and furs for a living and wanted some of the steady wages Henry Flagler was paying his railroad workers. Maybe so. But there was a bunch of stories that followed right behind him when he come over from the west side and one of them was that he’d started cutting in on the wrong people’s whiskey business in Lee County. When he didnt take their warnings to quit they busted up his operation and whipped his nigger helper near to death and threatened to burn down his house with everybody in it if he didnt clear out. According to this story Joe and the family was in the wagons and on their way east by the next sunup. That story’d been whispered around for a couple of years when some fella named Witliff in Pompano made the mistake of telling it out loud to a bunch of old boys that included a friend of Joe’s who took it back to him. Joe went to Witliff’s house and called him out and beat him senseless right there in his yard and in front of his family. Told him if he ever told tales about him again he’d cut out his tongue.

Another story said he’d left Lee County after clubbing a young fella near to death with a grub hoe handle for getting improper with one of his daughters. They say he gave that boy a stutter and a useless left arm and a droop-eye the rest of his life. Trouble was, one of the boy’s best uncles was a rich Fort Myers cattleman who was related by marriage to the high sheriff and was friends with all the local judges. Joe didnt much care for the odds, so he packed up the family and headed out on the Caloosahatchee trace. Story has it that the cattleman sent a couple of roughs after him but they never come back. Could be they simply made off with the money they was paid to deal with Joe. Or could be they had the bad luck to catch up to him.

Joe Ashley paid bottom dollar for an abandoned half-burned-down house in the deep pineywoods just west of Pompano and pretty soon him and his boys fixed it up good. They were a tight family that mostly kept to itself but they were friendly enough whenever they came into town or met with a neighbor out on the Old Dixie Highway, which at that time wasnt much more than a bunch of ruts packed with rock in some stretches and with shell in others and hardly wide enough for a pair of wagons to pass each other by. Most who got to know the Ashleys liked them fairly well. But there were some who were quick to believe every mean story ever told about them and thought the whole family was a bunch of naturalborn outlaws. Such folk were just too flat afraid of them not to hate them. The Ashleys always would have admirers, bunches of them, but they’d always have bad enemies too. Everybody who knew them was pretty much one or the other.

For a time after they first got to Pompano, Joe and two of his boys—Frank and Ed—worked as woodchoppers for Flager’s railroad. The eldest boy Bill worked as a chopper a few months too but pretty soon gave up axing to go work in a general store. Not long after the Ashleys moved to Pompano he took Bertha Rodgers to wife. He was the brainy one, Bill, the most serious, though they say he could play the banjo like he’d been born to it and he’d sometimes take a turn with a string band at a local dance. You’d see him around town more often than his brothers, reading magazines or the newspaper in the cafes, coming and going from banks and lawyer offices, taking care of Old Joe’s business matters. He never did get in such bad trouble as his daddy and his little brothers did, but some say it’s only because he did all his crimes with a pen instead of a gun.

All five of the Ashley brothers were close, but Frank and Ed were said to be fraternal twins and so naturally they was extra tight. And John and Bob were special-close because they were the youngest and grew up together hunting and trapping in the Everglades from the time they were big enough to shoot a rifle. John wasnt but eleven at the time the family moved to Pompano and Bob about a year older, and while Frank and Ed were cutting railroad ties with their daddy the two pups were bringing home meat for the table and gator and rattler hides to sell at the trading posts. Trapping and hunting was what they liked best but they could do lots of other things real well. Old Joe always could do damn near anything with his hands and he taught his boys the same. John was fourteen when a doctor down in Miami hired him and Bob to roof his house and over the next thirty years that roof never lost a shingle, not even in a hurricane. They worked in a Pompano packinghouse for a time and were said to handle a butchering knife as good as anybody in the place. But they didnt much like working for wages and went back to trapping for their daily bread. They got to know their way all over the Glades even better than their daddy—and Old Joe was as much at home in the Devil’s Garden as a cottonmouth. John and Bob were the wildest of the Ashleys, everbody pretty much agreed on that, though John wasnt nearly the hot-head Bob was. They say John was generally one to think a thing through before acting on it, leastways if he had the chance. Bob, he was always quick as a struck match to flare and burn. Which is exactly why he died the way he did.

They were the best shooters in the family too, John and Bob—not counting their daddy. They said Bob could shoot the whiskers off a rabbit at over a hundred yards with his old lever-action Winchester, but John was even more of a deadeye. At a traveling show in West Palm one time there was a .22 rifle shooting gallery with a line of little tin ducks steady moving across the far end of the tent on a conveyor belt in front of a backboard. The five brothers had a contest and by the time John and Bob were the last two left they were shooting at the ducks from forty feet outside the tent. They’d drawn a crowd by then and Old Joe was looking on too. When John finally won from some fifty feet out, the onlookers gave him a big hand and he bowed like an actor on a stage. He wasnt but fifteen at the time and loved to show off. Then Old Joe took the little .22 from him and backed up another ten feet and bang-bang-bang he knocked down a line of twelve ducks without a miss. Then he gives the rifle back to John and the boy didnt hit but nine of his twelve. The crowd gave Joe a bigger hand than they had John. When it came to showing off, Old Joe never was one to be outdone by his boys.

They’d been in Pompano about six years when word got around that Joe had set up a still somewhere in the pines and gone in the whiskey business. Gone back in the whiskey business is what most said. And because Bill had such a good head for account books and such, Ole Joe made him his business manager. The Ashleys didnt have any local rivals in the trade except for a couple of swamp-rat shiners named Runyon and Aho who’d been around for years and years although hardly anybody ever saw them because they never come into town but once in a blue moon. They had a cabin somewhere in the Devil’s Garden and shared an Indian woman who lived with them. She never come to town. After Joe started making and selling whiskey on this side of the state neither Runyon nor Aho ever come to town again and nobody ever saw them anywhere else either. And somewhere along the way Joe took over their stills as abandoned property. There were some mean stories told about what might of happened to the swamp rats, but the plain and simple of it was that nobody knew if the Ashleys had anything to do with their disappearances and nobody cared a thinker’s damn anyhow. The only thing for sure was that Old Joe’s product was way better than what the swamp rats had been peddling. Everybody who ever tasted the stuff will tell you that Joe Ashley’s shine was the finest ever made in the south of Florida. He soon had a steady line of customers from Stuart to Lauderdale and was using his boys to deliver the loads. And it wasnt much of a secret that he was selling to the Indians.

There’s something more to tell about Runyon and Aho. It was a common story that one or the other of them sired a child by the Indian woman who lived with them, a boy they named Hector. When the kid grew up he used the name Runyon but that dont mean Runyon was his daddy. Some say he just ruther have that name than Aho, and who could blame him. You’d see him roundabout the Indian River towns a lot more than either of the two men because he was the one they sent in to get whatever supplies they needed. Like most breeds he looked more Indian than white. He was brownskinned and his hair was as black as ink and he wore it long from the time he was a child. But he had blue eyes and the inside of his forearms was pale as any white man’s.

He was bad-dog mean, that boy, everybody said so. Sometimes he’d come into a town for no reason but to pick a fight with another boy and then just tear him up. He’d as soon gouge out your eye in a fight as not, as soon bite off your ear, your damn nose. The only boy who wasnt afraid of him was Bobby Baker, who was a few years older and some bigger, and for some reason they got along. Far as anybody knows, Bobby was the closest thing to a friend Heck Runyon ever had.

When he was about fourteen he was accused of stealing a farmer’s horse off a farm and the man wanted him throwed in jail. Sheriff George went out in the Glades to look for him and came back saying he couldnt find hide nor hair of him anywhere. But there was some who said he’d found him all right—and then helped him to get away to DeSoto County where he got work as a cowhunter, which is what they called a cowboy in Florida in them days. That all happened around ought-eight, a couple of years before Joe Ashley started up his whiskey business and Runyon and Aho vanished.

It wasnt till seven years later that Heck Runyon showed up again on this side of the state. At the time he come back he was still wanted for stealing the horse but the farmer dropped the charge a few days after Heck went to live in a hut out behind the Baker place. Some said Sheriff George made a deal with the farmer. A story went around that Heck had been working the last couple of years as a regulator for a rich DeSoto County rancher. A regulator was somebody paid to stop rustlers, and they say Heck Runyon stopped a bunch of them as stopped as they could get by shooting them graveyard dead. Then he got in a saloon fight with a cowhunter and cut the fella up pretty bad. Ruther than stick around and see what the law might say about it, he’d come back to his old stomping grounds. He’d been back about six months when Sheriff George made him a Palm Beach County deputy.

Not too long later he killed a prisoner. He was bringing the man back to the county jail in West Palm Beach after the fella was convicted in a trial in Stuart and they were sitting in the coach while the train made a whistle stop in Jupiter. Witnesses said the prisoner called him a mongrel dog and spit in his face and Heck Runyon clubbed him to death with his revolver right then and there. Women and children saw it and was screaming and running off the train. They say it was a bloody mess. There was talk that Heck Runyon ought be charged with murder since the prisoner had his hands cuffed at the time. The newspaper said he ought for sure at least be fired, that the county didnt need any deputies who thought they were judge, jury and executioner. Sheriff George argued that Deputy Runyon had been strongly provoked and had just cause, but he was enough of a politician to know when to give in to popular opinion and so he fired him.

Heck Runyon hardly ever showed himself in town after that but it was said he was still living out on the Baker property and that Sheriff George was still using him to track down fugitives who made off into the Devil’s Garden.

The bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker started over a girl, which aint such an uncommon story. Leastways thats how most tell it. John Ashley was fifteen at the time and Bobby about nineteen. They’d knowed each other since the Ashleys moved to Pompano. They werent never exactly friends, but during those first few years they’d been friendly enough. They say Bobby Baker was the one showed John Ashley all the best fishing spots in the Indian River and John taught Bobby plenty about tracking game in the Glades. Their daddies got along all right too—at least in the years before John’s trouble over the Indian. Old Joe and Sheriff George would take a cup of coffee together in Lucy’s Cafe in West Palm sometimes or buy each other a drink at Blue’s store at Lake Towhee and talk about mules and dogs and fishing. Like with their boys, nobody’d go so far as to say they were friends, but Old Joe made it plain he appreciated that the high sheriff was one to live and let live when it came to whiskeymaking. The way. Sheriff George saw it, if the federal government wanted to tax the whiskey a man made, it could damn well send its own men to collect it. Sheriff George was anyway known to take a drink ever now and then and was said to be pretty fond of Joe Ashley’s product his ownself.

Anyhow, there used to be a dance every Saturday night in a big auction barn a few miles south of West Palm and the Ashley boys would usually come up from Pompano to dance and meet girls. Even Bill Ashley would come up sometimes just to play his banjo with the band and have a dance or two with his wife Bertha, who everybody liked. They were lively affairs with good string bands and plenty of food and punch and of course every man brought his own jug. One Saturday evening Bobby Baker showed up with a girl named Julie Morrell, a pretty sixteen-year-old who had long honey-colored hair and freckles and a smile to melt a grown man’s heart. Bobby was crazy in love with her and didnt make any secret of it. He’d met her just a few weeks earlier and was telling people he was by God going to marry her one day or know the reason why. The Ashleys were there that night as usual and the brothers took turns dancing with every girl in the place. Frank and Ed and Bob cut in on Bobby one after another but he didnt seem to mind all that much. He was proud of his pretty sweetheart and they say he liked being envied by the other fellas. Then John Ashley cut in on him, and while Julie was spinning around in John Ashley’s arms Bob Ashley sidled up to Bobby and started up a conversation and the next time Bobby looked out to the dance floor neither Julie Morrell nor John Ashley was anywhere in sight.

Everybody knows John Ashley always did have a way with the ladies—with proper ones as well as them not so proper. Just exactly how much of a way he had with Julie Morrell in the darkness of the pines beyond the barn that evening is something nobody but him and her would ever know for certain. But it aint hard to imagine what Bobby Baker thought when he saw they were gone from the barn.

He went running out to look for her and the Ashley boys followed him outside and watched him run around yelling Julie’s name to make himself heard over the music from the barn. When they started laughing at him, Bobby went at Bob Ashley with both fists swinging. Maybe he picked out Bob because he was the one who’d distracted him long enough for John to make off with Julie, or maybe just because Bob was the Ashley standing closest to him at the moment. He was older and bigger than Bob, but Bob had a reputation as a vicious scrapper who even a lot of the older fellas were afraid of. They punched and kicked and bit and scratched and gouged and pulled each other’s hair and rolled around on the ground all locked up like a couple of pit dogs. A small bunch of spectators gathered round to root for one or the other but most people at the dance never even knew the fight took place. It was fairly even going for about five minutes and then Bobby got astraddle of Bob Ashley and got both hands on his throat and try as he might Bob Ashley couldnt buck him off. When it was pretty clear that Bobby was going to kill him if somebody didnt stop him, Frank and Ed finally stepped in and pulled them apart. They say Bob Ashley was black in the face by then and likely wouldnt of lasted another half-minute. They said his eyes were bloodshot for a week after. They said both them boys looked like they’d been hit by a train.

A deputy sheriff showed up about then and Frank and Ed were explaining things to him when here comes John Ashley and Julie Morrell out of the pines. Julie was blushing and her hair was all messy and with leaves in it and she never said a word nor looked anybody in the eye but just went right on by them all and into the barn. They say John Ashley was grinning like a keyboard and said, “What’s goin on, boys?” Bobby Baker was so beat up and wore out he couldnt hardly stand by himself but he tried to go at John anyway and had to be held back by the deputy. They say if looks could kill, Bobby Baker would’ve put John Ashley in his grave right then and there.

The way the story goes, when Julie Morrell’s daddy who was a grocer heard what happened he wanted to charge John Ashley with rape, only Julie insisted to him it had been no such a thing and swore she’d never lie to the contrary in court. They say he whipped her bare ass bloody with a razor strap. Supposedly he made threats against John Ashley and against Bobby Baker too because he was the one he’d entrusted with his daughter’s safekeeping that night—but it’s probly not true. Like most folk he was too afraid of the Ashley and the Bakers both to of said anything so reckless. Nobody was surprised when he finally never did anything except pack up his family and move away. Some said they went to the panhandle, some said out to Arkansas where he had kin. Nobody knew for sure. A few years later during the war, one of the boys come home on leave from and army aviation school in Alabama and swore up and down he’d had the pleasure of sweet Julie Morrell in a Birmingham whorehouse. Whether it was true or not, it’s what most people come to believe became of her.

As for the Ashleys and Bakers, well, Old Joe and Sheriff George were seen having a drink together in a Pompano saloon not a week after the fight and joking about how a pretty girl could sure make the bucks lock horns. And about a month later a dozen witnesses saw John Ashley meet up with Bobby Baker on the New River trading docks. John poled up in a skiff and was pulling a second one loaded with plumes. Bobby was there helping his cousin Freddie to patch the bottom of his fishing boat and was still carrying scars from the fight with Bob Ashley. They say John Ashley greeted him as friendly as you please although nobody made to shake hands. John had a round of beers brought out to the dock from the trading store and told about his plume hunt in the rookeries southwest of Okeechobee. He told Bobby they ought to go fishing together in the Indian River again sometime like they used to. If anybody had Julie Morrell on his mind nobody said so. Neither Bobby nor Freddie hardly said a word the whole time. Then John Ashley said so long and got in his skiff and poled away. They say the Baker boys watched him go and then poured out the bottles of beer they neither one had taken the first sip of. Far as anybody knows, Bobby Baker and John Ashley never did go fishing together again.

In nineteen and eleven the Ashleys made theirselfs a new homestead in the piney swamps a few miles southwest of Gomez. Old Joe bought sixty acres set about midway between Peck’s Lake and the south fork of the St. Lucie River. Not a neighbor for miles around. About three-quarters of the place was nothing but pine swamp, but there was a wide high clearing in the middle of the property and him and his boys built a good-sized house on it. It was a dogtrot—had a breezeway between the two halfs of the house—with a full wide porch both front and back and a steep-pitched roof and a chimney at either one of the gable sides. Had a big kitchen out back. They built the thing of Dade County pine and shingled it with cypress to let the heat out through the roof. That Dade pine’s about the best lumber in the world but it’s mostly all been cleared away and you cant hardly find a stick of it anymore. It’s so fulla resin you can work it real easy while it’s green but once it ages and that resin dries up you cant drive a nail in it with a sledgehammer. Termite’ll bust its teeth on it is how hard it gets. The bad news is, a house made of Dade pine ever catches fire it’ll burn down quick as a kitchen match on account of all that resin. They call it lighterwood out in the Devil’s Garden because it’s so easy to start a campfire with it.

The house was shaded by a big live oak to either side and had a clear view for forty yards in all directions right up to the edge of the pine swamps all around. The two shade trees were pretty near the same size and the reason Old Joe named the place Twin Oaks. There was dozens of creeks and waterways all around the property connecting it east and west to ever part of that region between Lake Okeechobee and the Indian River lagoon and south to the sawgrass country. But there was only one road into the property—a narrow roundabout trail they’d cut through all that swampy pineland between the house and the Dixie Highway. It was awful rough going for a motor vehicle, but that was the idea, to make it damn hard for anybody to drive up to their place, especially at night. That trail was hardly wide enough for a wagon except at a couple of points where they’d broadened it enough so a car could make a turnaround—just in case it ever had to.

Joe pretty soon had him a whiskey camp about three miles southwest of the Twin Oaks house—out at the Crossbone Creek at the edge of the Devil’s Garden. Even after he built his other camps this one was said to be his favorite. It was the biggest and about the best hid. His next one was set a few miles farther south in the Hungryland Slough. By then he was making deliveries as far north as Fort Pierce and as far south as Miami and his business was better than ever. Then that Indian turned up dead in that Lauderdale canal and Palm Beach County Sheriff George Baker charged John Ashley with murder.

A lot of people couldnt understand why all the to-do about a damn dead Indian. But Sheriff George said he had to do something about it because there was a witness who’d seen John Ashley do the deed and there was other evidence besides. The “evidence,” as he called it, was a bunch of otter furs John Ashley’d sold down in Miami. That struck lots of people as pretty damn slim evidence because one bunch of otter furs looks just like every other bunch and how was anybody gonna tell em apart? As for the witness, he was a low breed named Jimmy Gopher and such a naturalborn liar that if he told you water ran downhill you’d have you doubts. He was lying if he said hello. He’d vanished into the Everglades just as soon as he was set loose from jail and didnt nobody ever see him again. There was talk Bob Ashley hunted him down deep in the Devil’s Garden and killed him so he couldnt never testify against John Ashley but there never was any proof of it. It might of been just talk from those who hated the Ashleys and would tell any sort of lie to try to put them in a worse light with the law.

We no sooner heard about the warrant for John Ashley than we heard Bobby Baker and Sammy Barfield had caught up to him and his brother Bob in one of their waycamps—but the Ashleys had somehow got the drop on them and took away their pistols and disabled their car and made them to walk home. A Palm Beach deputy found them sitting by the side of the Dixie Highway the next morning. What made it even more embarrassing for Bobby was he’d lost his artificial leg. He said he somehow got it caught in a hole in the limerock trail they’d been walking on and it was stuck so fast he didnt have no choice but to unstrap it and leave it there. Sammy Barfield didnt have much to add to the story except to say it was just the way Bobby told it. Poor Sammy looked pretty shook up for a time afterwards. He always was strung too tight for police work and he got out of it before much longer.

When Sheriff George sent some men out into that piney swamp to fix the car and bring it back they found Bobby’s leg in it. All anybody could figure was that somebody had come along and found it and knew damn well who it belonged to, especially with the county police car just down the trail. Whoever it was had got it unstuck and throwed it in there.

Nobody roundabouts saw hide nor hair of John Ashley for the next two years. Some said he’d gone to Alabama, some said out to Oregon. Others said he hid out someplace in Texas where he had kin who ran a hotel. Wherever it was he went, two years later he came back. Just walked into Sheriff George’s office one day in the company of his daddy and a lawyer and give himself up.