Red Grass River

EIGHTEEN

Liars Club

A FEW MONTHS AFTER JOHN WENT BACK TO PRISON ED AND FRANK Ashley went on a whiskey run to Grand Bahama like they’d done a hundred times before, only this time they didnt come back. Nobody was sure where that story came from but at first nobody believed it. We all thought it was a phony rumor put out by the Ashleys themselfs for some reason of their own. Ed and Frank were hiding out from somebody and the Ashleys wanted everybody to think they were dead—that was what we told each other.

But the story persisted and picked up a little more detail as it made the rounds. After a time we had to believe it. We heard Old Joe sent Clarence Middleton to West End to ask after Ed and Frank. Clarence was told they’d been there and bought the biggest load they’d ever taken on—more than seven hundred cases of Canadian whiskey done up in burlocks. The Ashley boys packed the hams into every foot of space in the Della’s hold. With that much whiskey on board, the Della’s gunwales couldnt of showed hardly more than a foot of freeboard. To make it worse a black storm was bearing in from the northwest. The harbormaster advised the boys to wait it out. They just laughed and said the Della was sealed tight as a cork and they were old hands at crossing the Stream in ever kind of weather. They cast off and set for home and that was the last anybody saw of them. The storm was a rough one and tore through West End a half-hour after the Ashley boys left. The harbormaster told Clarence it likely caught up to them before they’d cleared the Gulf Stream and took them down.

They said Old Joe refused to believe the boys had drowned. He said they were too good a sailors, Ed and Frank, and the Della was too good a boat. What they’d done was, they’d taken the load someplace else for some reason and would show up any day and explain things. They say Joe Ashley held tight to that idea for more than a month. Then one night everybody at Twin Oaks was woke up in the dead of darkness by what sounded like a yowling panther got into the house. It wasnt but Old Joe, wailing with realization that his sons were dead at the bottom of the sea.

All the happened in the fall of nineteen and twenty-one.

Bobby Baker was reelected sheriff in 1922. He campaigned on his record for cutting crime in Palm Beach County and as the man who put John Ashley back behind bars. Even some of the folk who liked the Ashleys couldnt help liking Bobby Baker too. The man was becoming a real smooth politician. He gave talks to political organizations, to women’s clubs, to classrooms full of schoolchildren. He showed up at ever damn civic function in the county, at ever holiday parade. He almost always wore a suit with vest and tie now, even in the summer heat. He passed out little American flag pins to everybody he met. He’d never been one to take his family out in public, but now you’d see him at the moviehouse with his wife and three little girls. You’d see the whole family of them at a restaurant or eating a lunch together on a blanket under a tree after he’d give a speech at some holiday picnic. She was a quiet but gracious woman, his wife Annie, and his little girls were always perfectly well behaved. More and more the pictures you saw of him in the newspapers had his family in them too.

We didnt hear anymore such stories, neither, as we used to about what Bobby Baker had done to the Ashley whiskey camp lookouts. Some who used to believe them stories now said they always knew they was bullshit. Bobby Baker wasnt the kind of man to do such a thing, they said, they could see that now. That’s what a lot of folks said. But there was some of us always figured it took a special kind of man to handle himself with the Ashleys, and if Bobby Baker was that kind, well, then there had to be sides to him nobody wanted to believe or even think about.