Red Grass River

FOURTEEN

April 1920

ONE WARM FORENOON IN LATE APRIL JOHN ASHLEY AND HANFORD Mobley sold three skiffloads of gator hides to a dealer named Phil Dolan on the Salerno docks and then repaired to the backroom of Toomey’s Store down the street to drink a few mugs of cold beer before heading for home. Frank and Ed Ashley and Clarence Middleton were away on another liquor run to Grand Bahama. They’d made more than a dozen such trips now, no longer transporting for Richardson or anyone else but buying loads on behalf of Old Joe to resell to backroom buyers for hotels and restaurants and groceries all along the southeast coast but chiefly in Miami. Old Joe also continued in the moonshine trade, selling most of this product to Indians, though business had grown too large to assign deliveries to the various villages directly anymore and he now dealt with middlemen in Pahokee and at a central waycamp in the Big Sawgrass Slough. The profits were streaming in. Frank and Ed were buying cases of island rum for as little as six dollars each and selling them for sixty in Pahokee, for eighty-five in Miami. They’d fast become old hands at the business. And Clarence Middleton had proved to be as capable at handling a boat and running whiskey as he was at so many things else. The only thing he could not do well was the only thing he would not do at all—take charge of men. Whenever Joe Ashley needed someone to supervise an immediate enterprise and his sons were all occupied with other duties, he gave the charge to young Hanford Mobley who relished the authority and exercised it well. And though Mobley was barely seventeen, Clarence Middleton liked him and admired his grit and willingly accepted his leadership in the absence of the Ashleys.

As always before he went into a town in Palm Beach County John Ashley first checked with his local informants on the whereabouts of the Bakers. Old Joe had made John swear not to show himself anyplace where Sheriff George or Bob or Freddie Baker might be. “Whyever it is you champin to get at him, you keep a tight leash on it,” Old Joe had told him. “I want you to stay wide of the Bakers till I say different and I dont want to hear you didnt.” For months now John Ashley had not laid eye on Bob Baker nor Bob Baker on him. On this day all the Bakers were about their business in West Palm Beach, where they usually were.

Toomey’s backroom was cool and pleasant and smelled of fresh sawdust and seafood and beer. A single paddle fan revolved slowly from the ceiling. They took a foamy pitcher and two mugs and a big iced tray of unshucked oysters to a table against the wall opposite the bar and sat there shucking with their knives and slurping oysters and sipping their beer. A friend known to them as Shadowman Dave sat on a bench next to the pool table at the far end of the room and softly plunked his five-string. Toomey’s trade was strictly crackers—fishermen and trappers, mostly—who were friendly to the Ashleys and took pride in one of their own being such a notorious public figure. Whenever John Ashley stopped in for a quick one, those in attendance would greet him in raucous fellowship and Toomey would nod at his young son and the boy would happily leave off sweeping up shells and go sit in front of the store and whittle and keep an eye for any show of county lawmen not known to be Ashley friends.

The place was nearly empty at this morning hour and Toomey came to the table to sit with them and gossip over a mug of beer. John Ashley had just poured a second mug for himself and young Hanford when the door swung open and someone entered carrying a twin-barreled shotgun and wearing baggy overalls and brogans and a faded black slouch hat. It took a moment for John Ashley to realize he was looking at a darkhaired woman of hard sunbrowned face. As she went to the bar she glanced at them without expression. Her eyes were moistly red and the underside of the left one was slightly swollen and discolored. She was not truly pretty and he would not have argued that she was, yet something in her aspect deepened his breath. She leaned the gun against the front of the bar and slid up onto a stool and the seat of the overalls abruptly snugged into a configuration to engage John Ashley’s full attention. He thought that an ass that looked so fine in overalls must be a marvel in the flesh.

Toomey got up and went behind the bar and said, “Yes mam?” She murmured and Toomey nodded and set to drawing a mug of beer. He cut the head with a spatula and flicked the foam on the floor and finished filling the mug and set it before her. He poured a doubleshot of Joe Ashley’s shine in a glass and placed it beside the beer and scooped up the money she’d put down. He nodded to her and put the money in a box on the backbar and then came back to join John and Hanford.

“They lord Jesus,” John Ashley whispered. “Who’s that?” Hanford Mobley grinned at his uncle.

“Name’s Upthegrove,” Toomey said softly. “Dont sound real, do it? Dont know her first name—nobody does. They say she lives with her daddy way to hell and gone south of Okeechobee in what they call the Thousand Hammocks.”

“I know the place,” John Ashley said. “Naught out there but sawgrass and so many hammocks look alike even a Indian can get lost in em.”

“I heard nobody but Indians ever seen their house,” Toomey said. “She got a brother used to bring Phil Dolan a load of hides ever month or so, but the word is he got sent to Raiford last year for killing a fella in a fight. About five-six months ago she started bringing in skins. Dolan says she brings in ever kinda hide—gator, otter, deer, bobcat. Brung in four goodsize painter skins one time and one of em black as ink and of a size to cover the most of a pool table, Dolan says. He asked her did she kill them big cats her ownself and she give him this look. Said to him, ‘Well, mister, they didnt none of them say goodbye cruel world and shoot theirselfs.’ Got a mouth on her. Just as well she dont talk much.”

“I aint never known a woman to come in here before,” John Ashley said.

“Aint her first time,” Toomey said, “About a month ago she brung Dolan a load of hides and then instead of gettin in her boat and heading right back downriver like she always done before, she comes in here and sits herself right there where she is now and says to me to give her a pitcher and a shot. Place was about half full and you shoulda seen the jaws hangin open. Hellfire, I been runnin this place for five-six years and never had no woman come in here. Shadowman back there was grinnin and pickin and that banjo was the only sound in the place. I musta stood there gawpin at her for a full minute before she say, ‘Well?’ I finally think to tell her this aint no place for ladies, and she says thats just fine because she aint no lady and to hurry up about that pitcher. Well, I’ll admit to you boys I didnt know whether to shit, spit or go blind. Understand now, she’s settin there with that shotgun acrost her lap and lookin like the last thing she’s gonna do is anything she dont want to. So I think it over for about two seconds and figure the hell with it, man or woman makes no difference to me as long as they puttin up cash money. So I pull a pitcher for her and put a mug next to it but she just goes ahead and drinks from the pitcher like a lot of old boys do. I bet she didnt take two breaths before she finished off the half of it. She sits there a minute and then lets go with a burp to rattle the windows. It aint that many men I ever heard burp like that, never mind no woman. Everbody was lookin at her like she was some kinda show but she wasnt payin nobody the least notice. Just drinkin her beer like she’s the only one in the place. Well sir, she’s startin in on the rest of the pitcher when Harvey Roget leaves off his pool game and comes up behind her with a shit-eatin grin. He says loud enough for everbody to hear how her ass looks ripe enough to take a bit out of and he grabs a handful of it. If he’d been figurin to charm her some more he never had the chance to do it because she come around on that stool and laid that half-full pitcher upside his head like she was thowin somethin sidearm. Pitcher didnt bust—just WHONK!—and beer goes everwhere and old Harvey goes quicksteppin off to the side like a man doin a jig and he didnt hardly get his balance before she was off that stool and had the shotgun by the barrels in both hands and smacked him over the head with the flat of the stock like she was drivin home a railroad spike. I tell ye, ole Harv went down like a killed man. Turned out he was only coldcocked but it’s another dent in his headbone he’ll carry to the grave for sure. The one half of his face was swole up all red and ugly and he lost him a eyetooth. By the time he come around she was long gone. The boys naturally give him a pretty good ribbin about getting the shit beat out of him by a woman. Harv got all blackassed about it and cussed a blue streak and stomped on out. Aint seed him since. Dont know where-all he’s been doin his drinkin lately.”

They had all three been furtively eyeing the woman at the bar as Toomey told his story. Now she shifted her weight on the stool and John Ashley felt his cock stir and he sucked a breath between his teeth.

“Just last week she brung Dolan another boatful of hides and then come in here again,” Toomey whispered. “She’d just recent got that shiner under her eye and it was lots worse-lookin than now, I’ll tell ye. That eye was swole near shut. Some of the boys thought maybe Harvey give it to her but I misdoubt it. Harvey aint so dumb he dont know he’d only make hisself look worse if he was to beat up on her. All he can do is hope that after a time nobody’ll remember much about what she done to him. But like they say, hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first. Wont nobody who saw it ever forget the way she laid him out nor ever quit tellin about it. Anyhow, this last time, she had herself a pitcher and a coupla shots of your daddy’s good stuff and then left. Never said a word except to order the spirits. And didnt nobody get bold with her neither. Hell, nobody come within four feet of her, not after how she done poor Harvey.”

Toomey gave her a sidelong look and he leaned farther over the table as he said, “I tell you, boys, that aint no woman to get gay with. It’s things about her just aint natural.”

“It’s something about her,” John Ashley said.

“You right about that,” Toomey said. “And it sets on that stool real nice.”

Hanford Mobley chuckled and John Ashley said, “That aint what I mean.”

Toomey and Mobley grinned at him. He said, “Well, it is—but it aint all I mean.” He could not have said what he meant.

Now the woman drained the last of her beer and slid off the stool and took up the shotgun and headed for the door.

“She gonna make he getaway, uncle,” Hanford Mobley said, nudging John Ashley with an elbow.

John Ashley got up and went to the door and watched the woman cross the street to a battered Model T he guessed to be ten years old. It angled awkwardly on a bent frame and its top was in tatters. She laid the shotgun on the seat and adjusted the levers under the steering wheel and took the crank around to the front of the car and fitted it and gave it a hard turn as forcefully as most men might and the motor coughed several times but didnt ignite. She glared at the car and tried again and this time the engine did not even cough. She reset the spark lever and tried again. After she’d cranked the motor a half-dozen futile times John Ashley went across the street and gave her his best smile and asked if he might be of assistance.

She studied him narrowly. She was breathing hard and her shirt was darkly damp and sweat beaded under her chin and nose. Her mouth was set hard and her eyes were shadowed by her hatbrim though he could see they were brightly wet. She looked like she might be resisting an urge to cry. Standing this near to her he was surprised to see she was almost as tall as he was. Now she held the crank out to him.

He used the marking stick to make sure there was gasoline in the tank and then checked to see that gas was getting to the carburetor. Whistling the while to convey an air of casually assured proficiency he made certain all ignition wiring was properly affixed and then went to the steering wheel and adjusted the spark level and throttle and then set himself in front of the car and readied the crank and gave it a turn.

The engine emitted a hollow rasp on each of the first four tries. Passersby averted their eyes when he turned his glare on them. He reset the spark advance. The woman looked on without expression, her arms crossed over her breasts. The motor hacked on the fifth and sixth and seventh attempts but still would not start. When it coughed not at all on the eighth try, he blew a hard breath and muttered “Son of a bitch!”

He was huffing hard and dripping sweat. The woman sat down on the edge of the sidewalk with her elbows braced on her knees and her chin in her hands. He rolled up his sleeves and gripped the crank as though he meant to strangle it. He turned to the woman and smiled and winked and she reacted not at all. He gave the crank a mighty turn but his sweaty grip slipped and he fell to his knees as the crank recoiled and clipped him on the chin and snapped his teeth together with a clack. He saw an instant’s darkness lit with sparks and swayed and nearly fell over but managed to keep his balance. He heard laughter from Toomey’s across the way and turned to glare over there but the door stood empty. He got to his feet and tasted blood and felt of his mouth and found that he’d bitten his lower lip.

The woman was laughing into her hands and he felt a rush of anger—and then pictured what he must have looked like when the crank hit him and he chuckled and shrugged and sat down beside her on the plank walkway. He mopped at his lip with his shirttail and said, “Bedamn if that car aint got it in for me.”

She laughed harder and covered her face with her hands and rocked to and fro and stomped a foot on the ground and people passing on the sidewalk glanced at them and gave them wider berth. He felt himself grinning. He looked across to Toomey’s and saw a pair of heads at the door pull back from sight.

And then she was crying. He gaped and wondered what he’d done to upset her so suddenly. He stammered, “What’s—what’re you—” He put a hand to her shoulder and said, “Hey now, darlin, what’s all this? What’s the matter?”

She dropped her hands and turned to him, her face bright with tears, he eyes bloodshot. “All I want is to get em back,” she said. “It’s all I want to do. But nothin ever works out right, not a goddamn thing! Now the goddamn car’s no good and I cant get out there to get em back.”

“Get what back?” he asked. “What all you talkin about?”

“My kids, goddamn it—my kids. They all I got and I want them back and I dont know how I’m gonna get out there to get them without no goddamn car!”

“Kids?” he said, as though he’d never heard the word.

“It’s all I want from him,” she said. “But noooo, he cant let me have em. Says they ruther be with him, the liar.”

“Who wont let you have em?”

“My son of a bitch husband, who you think? Lord Jesus, I wish he’d drop dead this minute. I wish he’d dropped dead a long time ago. I wish his momma’d sat on him when he was just a baby. Goddamn it, I wish I had a car!”

“Hey, darlin,” he said, “I got a car. And thats the same as you got one.”

She wiped at her nose with her sleeve and looked at him.

“I’d be proud to take you to get them children.”

Once again her eyes went thin. “Oh yeah? And just why you want to do that? You dont even know me.”

“Well I know you’re a nice person. And I know you need a car to go get your kids. And I know I can help you with that. What else I got to know? Let’s just say I got a hankerin to help. Course now, if you don’t want my help….”

His hankering went well beyond wanting to help out, of course, but he knew that the best way to approach these nervous half-crazy ones was slowly and roundabout.

Her name was Laura Upthegrove. Her husband was E. A. Tillman but she had never taken his last name for her own. She called him Eat.

She sat leaning against the passenger door as John Ashley drove his Model T roadster over the narrow and dusty rockfill road flanking the St. Lucie canal that ran through scrub pine and palmetto prairie in a long easy curve of about twenty miles southwestward from the lower fork of the St. Lucie River to Indiantown and then went on another dozen miles or so to Lake Okeechobee. The sky was palely blue and fathomless, the sun as light yellow as a baby chick. The wind was from the south, soft and redolent of rips sawgrass and spawning bream. Osprey nests showed in the high pines and the parents raptors wheeled in hunt far out over the savannah.

She’d wanted to bring her shotgun but John Ashley wanted no part of spousal murder and had told her there’d be no need of it. He’d given it to a passing boy to take across the street to Toomey for safekeeping.

“Eat’s not only his initials, it’s what he likes to do best,” she said. “And it’s about what he’s done to ever old boy who ever messed with him—just eat him up.”

She looked at him carefully when she said this last, and he grinned and said, “Well I aint fixin to mess with him. I’m just takin a friend to get her children is all.”

Snakebirds stood on the canalbanks with their pointed beaks up-thrust and their wet black wings spread to the sun. White herons—which some called johnny cranes—winged gracefully over the prairie and bore south to roosting destinations in the sawgrass country.

He asked if Eat Tillman had been the one to black her eye and she nodded. “I guess I give him reason,” she said, biting her thumbnail and looking out at the passing pine stands and the vast stretch of savannah grass behind them. He tried not to gawk at her shirted breast where it swelled out from under the overall bib or at the snug cling of the denim to her crossed things. “I just did miss takin his head off with a frying pan,” she said. “Caught him a little on the ear is all. Shoulda seen, though—it was swole it up like a damn plum. I was just fixin to swipe at him again when he laid one on me to make me see stars for the next night and day.” The fight had been ten days ago when she tried to take the kids from him. She said she wished she’d thought to shoot the bastard while she had the chance but she was so addled from the punch she didnt think of it until she was miles away from Indiantown and by then the sun was set and she was feeling too low to turn around and go back and kill him.

“Just as well you didnt,” John Ashley said. “If you’d killed him and the police run you down for it, you’d gone to prison and been separated from your kids anyhow. Most like for a long time.”

She looked at him. “I aint afraid of the damn police.” She said this as though it were something he ought well have known. “I didnt think you were neither.”

“Me?” He smiled. “What you know about me?” He had told her only that his name was John.

“I know who you are,” she said. “The law’s been after you forever. I heard about them different color eyes, how you got one shot right out of your head. I reckon you must be tough to kill as a gator gar.”

He looked at her and then back at the road ahead. “I guess so far,” he said.

“They say you killed a half-dozen Indians. Killed a coupla white men too, they say—some gambler in Miami, and a guard when you made your getaway from prison. They say there aint a bank in South Florida you aint robbed.”

“They say a hell of a lot, dont they?” he said, irritated by such reckless general surmise about his crimes but a little proud of his notoriety as well. “Too bad they dont know what in the hell they’re talkin about.”

“You mean you aint done all them things?” she said in a tone of disappointment. Because she wasnt smiling he couldn’t be sure if she was teasing. He couldn’t see her eyes in the shadow of her hat brim.

“I expect there’s probably a bank or two I aint robbed.”

“Not yet, anyway. Desperado like you, you’ll get around to them, I’m sure.” And now she smiled out at the road and he felt himself grinning.

“If I’m such a dangerous fella and all, how come you ridin with me way out here in the big empty where any ole thing might happen?”

“Oh I’m scared to death,” she said in a voice of mock fright. “I’m just hidin it real good. And I’m ridin with you cause you takin me to get my kids.” She looked out at the road ahead for a moment and then back at him. “I never woulda figured such a bad man like you bein scared of the police.”

“Oh yes, mam, all the damn time.”

“You are not, neither.”

They rode in silence for a time and then she said: “And I wouldnt of thought a man like yourself would hold with a man beating up on a woman.”

“I didnt say I hold with it,” he said. “I said you’da made things worse for youself if you’da killed him. My daddy raised us to know there aint never a right excuse to hit a woman.” He mulled for a moment before adding, “Unless she be looking with some other fella. But thats the only reason.” He paused again, and then: “Or if she tried to steal your money. But thats it, them’s the only two reasons. No, wait—there’s one more: if she kicks your dog. For damn sure if she kicks your dog.” He twisted his face in mock hard thought. “Or if she’s late with supper on the table, almost forgot that one. Or if she wont leave you be.” He looked sidelong at her and saw that she was trying to look put out but her smile would not be restrained.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “It aint no excuse but whatever one you got to hand.” They both laughed.

She told him Eat Tillman was a dredge operator her daddy had brought home to supper one evening after Eat had stopped to help him get his car out of the mud. It was raining hard and the shoulder of the South Shore road had given way and he daddy’s car had sunk on its right side to midway up the wheels. Eat chained the cars together and after several tried in which he’d almost got his own car stuck, he managed to tug her daddy’s car free. They put up the cars at Bobby Raines’ shop in South Bay and got in her daddy’s skiff and went down the canal a few miles and then portaged the skiff over the canalbank and into the sawgrass channel and poled a few hours more out to the Thousand Hammocks. She said Eat started making eyes at her from the minute they were introduced. Two months later they were married and living in Indiantown where Eat had inherited a small house from his daddy who managed a trading post. That was seven years ago.

“I didnt do it cause I loved him,” she said. “I liked him well enough I guess, but what I really wanted was to get away from home and, I dont know, do somethin else. Somethin…excitin.”

They were clear of the pines now and she looked off to the savannah horizon and blew a long breath. “He’s the quiet sort, old Eat. Dont never get drunk and hardly ever raises his voice and never hit me but a few times and never once used his fist. Not till this last time, and I guess any man would at least use his fist if you took a frying pan to his head. The thing is, what he most likes to do when he aint out workin on the dredge is sit home and play his harmonica. Lord.” She rolled her eyes.

About seven months ago she’d finally got to where she couldn’t stand the boredom of Eat Tillman another day. She packed a bindle and took her shotgun and a few tools and headed off in a skiff to live in her family’s house in the Thousand Hammocks. Her parents had left it to her when her daddy got his foot bit by a gator and was left too crippled to make his living by taking hides anymore. They had moved back up to Georgia to live with kin on a farm. She’d long ago learned to hunt and trap from her daddy and she got along just fine on her own, getting whatever money she needed by selling hides every now and then to Milt Jessup’s store in Jupiter or, lately, to Dolan’s in Salerno, which was worth the longer trip because she could usually get a better price. She didnt say anything about her brother in the penitentiary and John Ashley didnt ask.

Eat didnt come looking for her. “I guess he was as glad I was gone as I was,” she said. The kids were five and four by then and she figured he could take care of them well enough. “I anyway didnt think I’d miss em all that much, truth to tell. And I didnt, not for the longest time, not till about last month. I asked Eat for em but he said no and so I stewed about it for a time and then last week I went and tried to take them anyway and thats when we had the fight.”

She stared out at the vista of scrub and grass. “I guess I miss em,” she said. “I mean, all of a sudden I come to have this feelin of somethin missin real bad and must be it’s them because it sure’s hell not him.” She paused and took out a pipe and tin of tobacco and packed the bowl and got it burning with the fourth match and puffed on it a few times and then looked over at John Ashley and said, “You know, I dont usually talk this much.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said—and they both grinned.

The sun was huge and pale and only slightly past its meridian when they hove into Indiantown, a hamlet sprung up around a longtime trading post. It was composed of a combination store, a grocery, a small tannery hung with drying hides of every description, a smokehouse, several boathouses, a small cafe, a few houses scattered near and about in the meager shade of scrawny oaks. A trio of men in widebrimmed fisherman’s hats stood smoking and drinking beer in front of the cafe and turned away from their conversation to watch them go by.

The air was cast in a thin haze of smoke. On the far side of the canal stood a cluster of Indian chickees—raised platform huts with open sides and roofs of palmetto fronds—and a row of dugouts along the bank where an Indian in white shirtdress and a black bowler was gutting a deer hung on a gumbo limbo branch. She directed John Ashley to drive on for another quarter-mile until he came to an abutting road and then turn onto it. The road was of raised rock and sank and ran through a stretch of marshland flanked by high pines. Then they were out of the trees again and a half-mile farther on arrived at a small shadeless house with a railed porch.

He turned into the sandy yard and shut off the motor. One of the porch posts bore the skin and rattles of a diamondback more than six feet long. A rusting old landaulet of uncertain make without canopy or windscreen stood just off the porch. Behind the house the pale green savannah extended flat as a carpet to the horizons west and south.

The children were playing in a dirt patch alongside the landaulet, the boy and his younger sister both wearing only short pants and digging with spoons and tin bowls and their faces and limbs smeared with mud. For a moment they sat gaping at the woman who stepped out of the car and smiled broadly and opened her arms wide to them. John Ashley slouched behind the wheel and rolled a cigarette. As the woman stepped toward them the children scrambled to their feet and ran around the side of the house, the boy yelling “Pa! Pa!” and the girl at his heels glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.

“No!” the woman called. “You get back here, Billy! I’m your mother, dammit!”

John Ashley lit his cigarette and reflected that unrequited affection was for certain sure one of life’s most melancholy circumstances. As the woman started after the kids, a man appeared from around the other corner of the house and she looked over and saw him and stopped as short as if she’d hit the end of a leash. The man was very large and his sleeves were rolled and his arms were blood to the elbow. He held a skinning knife in one hand and a raw length of indigo snakeskin in the other.

John Ashley came upright in the car seat. The man looked unhappy to see this woman who was yet his wife. He tossed the snakeskin onto the porch and wiped the knife on his pant leg and slipped it into a belt sheath. He glanced at John Ashley in the roadster and then shambled over to the woman and stood before her with his hands on his hips and said something to her that John Ashley couldn’t make out.

He reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 Colt and checked the loads and slipped the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back. He got out of the car and closed the door and stood leaning against it with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. The man looked at him again and then said to the woman, “I done tole you and tole you—they stayin with me. Hell, girl, you dont really want them except I do.”

“They’re my children too, Eat,” she said, her voice strained.

The man turned to the front door and called, “Billy! Rayette! Come on out here.”

The two kids came in view behind the screen door and hesitated, and then the boy pushed it open and he and his sister stepped out on the porch. “You kids,” the man said, “your momma’s still wanting you to go with her. Either of you changed you mind and wanna go, you can. Do you? Either you?”

Both kids shook their heads and the man said, “You gotta says yes you do or no you dont. Say it so she can hear.”

“No,” the boy said, glowering at his mother. He looked at his sister and nudged her and she said, “I dont wanna go with her.”

“All right,” the man said. “Get back inside.” The kids disappeared into the interior darkness. The man looked at the woman and turned up his palms. “I guess it aint nothin else to say, is there? Why dont you just quit all this anymore and go on and leave us be?”

“I want them kids, Eat.” Her voice was drawn to an edge. She smacked her fists on her thighs. She turned now to John Ashley who thought she looked becrazed. He was suddenly sorry he’d come out here, but there was nothing to do now but see the thing through. He stepped forward and said, “Look here Mister Tillman, everybody knows kids ought be with their momma. It’s the most natural—”

“Who the hell are you?” Eat Tillman asked, his voice utterly absent the placatory tone he’d used with his wife.

“I’m a friend of Laura’s come to help her take her children home.”

“They are home, hoss, not that it’s any your business.”

“I aint leave without them kids, Eat,” Laura said. “Not this time.”

“You sure’s hell not leavin with em,” Tillman said, looking from John Ashley to her and back to Ashley.

“You talk like some kinda hardcase,” John Ashley said. “You a hardcase, mister?” He noted now how very large Eat Tillman’s hands were, noted their scars and sizable knuckles.

“I’m all I need to be to deal with you.”

“You fixin to deal with me with that skinner?” John Ashley said, gesturing at the knife Tillman wore on his belt.

They were slowly sidestepping further out into the yard where they would have more room. Tillman withdrew the knife and half-turned and threw it end over end to impale quivering into the porch pole opposite the one with the rattlerskin.

“I don’t need no weapon,” Tillman said. “Not for you.”

John Ashley reached around behind him and brought out the Colt. Tillman’s eyes narrowed and his mouth went tight and he nodded as though confirming his own suspicions that this stranger was not a man to be trusted. For an instant John Ashley considered holding him at gunpoint while the woman snatched up the kids. How much easier it would be that way. Then he turned and held the pistol out to Laura and said, “Hold this. That’s all you do with it, hear? Just hold it.” Then he took the glass eye out of its socket and handed it to her too. “And this while you at it.” For a moment she stared at the eye in her palm like it was some object of rare imagination, and then smiled at him and put it in her overalls pocket.

He turned to Eat Tillman and said, “Winner says who gets the kids.”

Tillman was gaping at the empty eyesocket in John Ashley’s head. “I dont know I can fight a man got but one eye,” he said. “Dont seem fittin.”

“How fittin’s it gonna seem to you when that one-eyed man stomps your sorry ass whether you fight back or not?” John Ashley said.

Tillman shook his head resignedly. “All right, mister, suit yourself,” he said. He started to take off his shirt and John Ashley hooked him hard to the belly and crossed him to the jaw. The man staggered back a few steps but his eyes held their focus. His thick belly was firm as a shipping-sack of sugar and his jaw stung John Ashley’s hand. Well hell, John Ashley thought. And knew he was in for some pain.

Fifteen minutes later his fact felt overlarge and numb and his vision was blurred and every huffing breath ached in his ribs. He had thrown up his breakfast and had to spit blood constantly to keep from choking on it. Now Eat Tillman hit him in the face again and again he fell down. He saw the blue sky whirl and he rolled over and pushed up on hands and knees and rested a moment. He tasted mud and blood. The first time Tillman put him down, the man had kicked him even as he tried to get up and Laura had cursed her husband and shrieked for him to fight fair goddammit. John Ashley had told her to shut up. But Tillman had not kicked him again.

John Ashley stood up and swayed and wiped blood from his good eye. Tillman waited with fists ready, showing one swollen eye and bloated lips and an ear outsized and purple. But he could still see clearly and looked hale in contrast to John Ashley. He moved with the quickness of a truly dangerous big man.

John Ashley charged with his head down and grabbed him about the waist and tried to pull him off his feet, hoping to straddle him, pin his arms with his knees and then punch him until he couldnt punch anymore. But Tillman stood fast and hooked him hard with left and right to the ribs and kidneys and then braced himself and brought his knee up hard and John Ashley went sprawling.

He got to hands and knees and then set one foot on the ground and rested with an arm on the raised knee. And now heard Laura crying and wanted to tell her to stop it but the effort of speech was too great to muster. He tried to stand and his head spun and he fell over on his side. And then hacking and gasping began the struggle to rise again.

A gunshot shook the air and John Ashley flinched on all fours and looked up to see Laura with her arms stretched in front of her and holding the revolver in both hands and pointed at Eat Tillman. She was crying and Eat Tillman’s hands hung at his sides and he was staring at her and looking very tired. “I’ll put the next one in your teeth.” she told him. She snuffled hard.

“You gone have to shoot me you want them kids,” Eat Tillman said in a voice now deeply nasal.

“Just dont you hit him anymore,” she said. She looked at John Ashley and said, “Get on up and kick him in the balls if you want.”

John Ashley spat blood and sat back up his heels with his hands on his thighs. He slowly shook his head. He could not stand by himself, never mind kick anyone. She sidled over to him and held a hand to him. “Come on, baby,” she said.

John Ashley took her hand and she helped him to his feet. With an arm about each other they shuffled to the car and she helped him get in on the passenger side. Then she went around and got in behind the wheel and kept the pistol on Eat as she held out the crank to him and told him to turn the motor. He did it and the engine fired up and he handed the crank back to her and stepped away from the car.

John Ashley said, “I dont think it’s anymore need of that gun, do you?” but so battered was his mouth that she did not understand what he said and he had to repeat it before she nodded and laid the pistol on the seat.

As she backed the car around in the yard John Ashley saw the children come out of the house and go to their daddy and each one hug tightly to one of his legs while he stroked their heads and told them it was all right, there was nothing to cry about, not anymore.

Then they were rattling down the road and past the pines and then came to the crossroads and turned toward Indiantown and sent up a flutter of chickens that had wandered out from a nearby yard. As they went through the hamlet they once again drew stares. And then they were down the road and around the bend and Indiantown fell away behind them.

“Eye,” he said, and held out his hand. She gave him the glass eye and he fitted it in place and then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes and thought of nothing at all.

After they’d driven in silence for a time she pulled over one the shoulder and stopped the car. He sat up and saw but the road ahead and behind and boundless blue sky and nothing else to see in the world but open prairie and distant hammocks and the bluegreen horizon shimmering hazily in the rising heat like a world badly imagined.

She slid across the seat and up against him and hugged his neck and kissed his battered face. He flinched and her face drew with concern and she kissed him more softly. He said he was sorry he didnt get her children back. She said she wasnt. She said that while he was fighting for her she’d come to understand that what she’d been missing wasnt the children at all but something she hadnt even known existed. What it was she’d been missing in her life was him.

She straddled him on the seat and kissed him again and then stroked his hair and looked down into his one-eyed face. Her eyes bespoke a tenderness beyond any he’d ever known. He saw then for the first time that her eyes were green. And that one of them held a tiny gold quarter-moon.