AFTER THE STORM OF 48
Third in the series
We worked every day after school building a new barn and this time it was huge. We built it about a quarter mile up the road from the house on high ground. Everyone said it was over build but Dad said he never wanted to build another one. We replaced the old outhouse and built a new one too, just a few feet away from it. It took half a day to remove the boat from that oak tree, and the wagon had to be mostly disassembled and let down piece by piece with ropes.
Pierson and I spent most of our free time looking for what ever we could find that had been blown or washed away. We found two of the three boats we lost in the storm but not my pirogue. We found all of our fishing gear on the rack in the chickee right where we left it. Everything was there except the food which we figured a coon or something had found. For days we would find piles of dead animals where they had been washed up together. Many times there would be alligators there working on the carcasses. We found fish a half a mile from the nearest water. When ever anyone found anything that didn’t belong to them, it was taken to the store for the rightful owner to claim. I found some baby doll clothes in a little box that had blown for over five miles. A bath tub washed up in Bigdaddy’s yard but no one claimed it in over a year so we put it on his back porch.
Five days after the storm, Buck and Snort found a whole family that had died in the flood. They were in their truck, washed off the road into Sisters River. Snort didn’t sleep well for a long time after that, and Buck would never talk about it. Those folks had no living relatives that anyone knew of; so no one knew what to do with what was left of their place. The sheriff was seen going thru the house taking items and loading them into his car. Everyone disliked him from then on and he lost the next election. The broken down house and barn rotted to the ground. Their land was untended, and what animals were left ran wild until they took up with other livestock.
We were without electricity for most of a year. Electricity had only been in our community for a little over two years and we hadn’t gotten totally dependent on it yet so it didn’t matter that much. We still used kerosene lamps for light much of the time, and had a wood stove for cooking and heat. In fact most folks in that coastal community hadn’t gotten electricity yet so they didn’t miss it at all. Since the gas and kerosene pumps at Lev’s store were still hand cranked, so the loss of electricity didn’t affect them.
Folks today would be screaming to high heaven if they had to go a week without electricity. They have to get government help to pull up their pants. I wish the government would do its job because some of them need their pants pulled up. I have a low opinion of most folks today because of the way they cry about every little thing.
I should mention here that my dad had three different business concerns. He had a small fishing operation with two boats and crews, and a small fish house. The fishing operation was more or less in our front yard. He also had a logging crew, but that was only natural as our family had been in the timber business for three generations. The barn for the oxen and mules, and other logging equipment was up the road from the house about three miles. We also had a small truck farm with about eight acres of vegetables and fifteen acres of oranges located up by the barn. There was a family (the Canillejoe’s) living at the farm that managed it and took care of the logging animals. There were always lots of folks around their place, because there were 12 in that family.
I mentioned earlier that Pierson and I spent our free time looking for stuff that had been blown away. Well, the truth is, we didn’t have much free time. For the next several months we cut the limbs off fallen trees and dragged the logs into piles to be floated to Uncle Junior’s sawmill. The storm clean up was added to our regular chores. We used an ox from Dad’s logging operation to move the logs. My Dad said his best and gentlest oxen, was Babe, so, that was the one Uncle Joe brought for us when we were cleaning up trees. Some of the trees that had been blown down were oaks over six feet in diameter. Many of the limbs from those trees were over two feet in diameter. Pierson and I moved the smaller trees and cleaned behind dad’s logging crew. Uncle Joe and his crew took care of the big stuff. There were lots of huge pines twisted into twenty feet off the ground and those were left to rot.
On Sunday, nobody worked. We would ride the boat to church. Most Sundays mom would pack fried chicken, biscuits, boiled potatoes, butterbeans, and a jar of tea. We would eat out of tin plates and cups on the tables under the trees by the church. There would be three or four other families doing the same as us. After we ate, mom and R.C would fish and drift down the river while the rest of us would walk in the woods, looking for belongings blown away in the storm. We were not the only family that did that either. It seemed like everyone looked on their way home from church. The first few weeks after the storm, men would gather and form walking parties to search sections of woods along the bays and lakes.
You know it’s funny how it never fails. After a tragedy like that, it seems that everything gets built back bigger and better. After the road had been cleared to the old bridge, the community completed a new bridge in just over two weeks. On our place we rebuilt the old barn and built a new barn up the road big enough to hold the 2 horses, 2 mules, and 3 cows in stalls. It had a feed room, a tack room, a hay loft and a tool room. We had holding pens for each kind of livestock. A year later dad added a room onto our house and put in a real bathroom. We had to wait for hot water though. Pierson and I even built Sidney a doghouse on stiles four feet off the ground.
Uncle Junior cut some special cypress boards for my new pirogue. The bottom board was ½”x 30”x16’, and the rest were ½”x16”x16’. All the boards were then cut to shape and the frame parts were made. All that was left to do was dry them in the kiln and put it together.
Bigdaddy bought two dozen chickens so we built a chicken house and pen for them. We cleaned out his old barn and built him a new one twice as big about 200 feet from his house on some high ground. Lev added a new feed room to the store. It seemed like any time someone got the notion they needed a new structure we would build it. We had enough wood to build a town and sometime I thought we might. I recall seeing several rows of 1”x24”x16’ oak boards, ten stacks long, stacked 10 feet high in our barn yard. We had even more stacks of 1”x12”x16’ oak and pine boards. That was what we got from the failed trees just on our land. Uncle Junior’s sawmill storage yard was four acres, filled to capacity with nothing but oak. He used about four more acres of his pasture to stack the pine and red cedar. You could smell the cedar for half a mile; and when that big saw was cutting heart pine it smelled like someone was cooking honey.
One Saturday Pierson and I, with Buck and Snort, took Pierson’s row boat up to the Panther Creek chickee. We were just poking around, not really doing anything in particular. We added a few palm fronds to the roof and cleaned up around it. While on the way home, Buck saw something that looked out of place. We pulled our way thru a thicket and, low-and-behold, up in a palm tree, hanging by its rope was my pirogue. It was over twenty feet off the ground swinging like the pendulum in Bigdaddy’s wall clock. We used the anchor rope from Pierson’s boat to let it down. Then we had the problem of dragging it back thru that thicket. Pierson had to get Buck and Snort back so they could get home. I stayed behind and dragged it the last one hundred feet to the shore. It was almost sunset when I got it to the water. Pierson left my tackle box and his push poll for me to use because mine was long gone.
When I got home, it was well after dark. Mom was so worried she was sending dad and Pierson to find me. They were just about to pull out when she saw the torch on the front of my boat coming out of the mangroves onto the lake. We had a hole cut in the bow of our boats to hold a torch or a lantern poll. I used a lighter knot that I had found while dragging the pirogue. I lit it with matches from my tackle box and stuck it in the hole. They were whooping and hollering when I pulled up to the dock. The wood in my pirogue had dried out and it leaked pretty badly but I didn’t care. I would splash some water out every now and then and continue polling. I filled it with water, tied it off to the dock and left it for four days. After the wood swelled, it stopped leaking and I was back in business.
Uncle Junior asked me what I planed to do with the wood for the new pirogue. I told him that Buck, Snort and I were getting too big for my old pirogue and I needed a bigger one. My old pirogue was good enough for me to fish in alone with Sidney, but I could use a bigger one for me and the boys. A week later he and I started building my new pirogue. We finished it in two weeks and let it soak in the lake for one week. A fine cypress pirogue is a sight to behold when it’s loaded with boys on a fishing trip.
Come spring we took a three day fishing trip up the Panther to the chickee.
Leaving on a Wednesday morning we fished on our way to the camp. This trip was very different because we used both the new and old pirogues. Pierson and Snort were in the new one with all our supplies, and Buck, Sidney, and I were in my old one. The three of us had formed a kinship that no one else would ever understand. Our near death experience during the storm was a bond that was never broken. Our recollections on that trip kept Snort’s and Pierson’s undivided attention for the next two days. When we recognized a tree stump that had been hit by lightning right beside us, we went in to a reminisce that stood their hair on end. Pierson pointed out that Sidney recognized the spot too because he started acting uneasy and all wide eyed.
As the story goes, when we thought we could go no farther, we pulled up to a mangrove and tied off. We wanted to rest but we were bailing the boat. We still had a few gallons to bail when all of a sudden our hair started to stand up and our skin started to tingle. Just then lightning struck a tree not twenty feet away. I don’t know if it was the splinters and chunks of wood or the concussion that knocked us down, but something did. There were fine splinters and chunks of wood from one foot long to five feet long floating all around us, and in the boat too. Smoke hung low on the water; and in the rain, it looked like something that might have been left after a visit from Lucifer. You could taste, and smell the ozone and sulfur. The tree stump had exploded to below the water line and the smoke was bubbling up thru the muddy, steaming water. The trees next to the lightning’s victim were scorched and steaming. We had to look no farther for our second wind; it had found us and we were more than ready to press on. Pierson laughed uneasily and said, “We’d better get a move on too.”
As we made our way deeper into the mangroves toward Bad Weather Pond, we came up on the smell of smoke, like a camp fire. We thought we were the only ones who ever came up here. We were the last house on the lake and we saw anyone who went in that direction. On the back side of Bad Weather Pond was a swamp that no one wanted to cross. This trip was to be four days long, and we had plenty of time to explore so we decided to investigate the smoke. It was coming from a thicket that none of us wanted to traverse either. After a while, we found a narrow cut that seemed to circle around the thicket and decided to try it. We slowly paddled our way around and eventually came into a small pond about 100x 200 feet. The smell of smoke was stronger here but we still saw very little trace of it. What smoke we did see lay low on the water and hung motionless in the trees. The fire must have been of good dry wood. As we reached the back end of the pond, we could hear someone singing an old gospel song. Pierson and I recognized the voiced right away, it was Jonah Ball.
Jonah was the man who worked dad’s big fishing boat. When dad wasn’t aboard, Jonah ran the operation. The other fishermen liked Jonah, and would do almost anything he asked of them. We had no idea what he was doing up in these woods but we soon found out. As we pushed our way into and up a spring fed creek at the far end of the pond, we saw where the smoke was coming from. “A whisky still,” whispered Buck. “Yeah, a lot like the one granddaddy lost to the storm,” whispered Snort. There we were stuck in a creek too narrow to turn the pirogues around with a moon shiner who had been enjoying the fruits of his labor. We weren’t afraid of Jonah; he was a friend to all of us. Still, none of us wanted him to know that we knew what he was up to. Does that make any sense to you?
Everyone in the community knew Jonah loved his brew and no one really cared. He was a good and honest man except for when it came to whisky taxes. He went to church every Sunday and he took care of his mother, sister, and retarded cousin. Most of his family had been taken by the fever many years earlier. There were only four members of the Ball family left, but once there had been 18 of them. Jonah’s father had been a farmer and worked about eighty acres of good rich land. They came to this part of the country in a wagon with few clothes, enough food for two to three months, five kids, two mules and two goats. Mr. Ball and those boys worked for my great uncle Peter until they bought a small piece of land a few miles up the road. Mr. Ball kept adding to his place until it was eighty acres, and was about to buy fifty more from my great uncle Gene when the fever hit.
When dad was a kid their Billy goat left a scar on my dads behind that always bothered him when he sat in a hard chair, like a pew in church. My great grandfather made dad a chair with a seat of woven rope, and a cushion of ox hair and hand made cloth. He used it at the dinner table his whole life. Dad was just a boy when that goat hooked him and he hated goats ever since unless he was eating them. He took great pleasure in eating barbecued goat. He used to say “My favorite goat is the barbecued one.” He would rather have pork but the thought of eating a goat made him smile.
Jonah and dad were friends all my life until Jonah passed away of old age. He and I became good friends too over the years and I miss him to this day. Jonah and I spent many hours on the water together working dad’s fishing boat. Dad would have me ride with Jonah when he sent him to Tampa or anywhere else far off. I was the navigator for him because he was illiterate. I remember (miss reading) a map and we wound up thirty two miles in the wrong direction. Jonah never said a word about it to anyone else and never teased me once. That was the day I knew he was a good friend. I confessed to him that day that I knew about his still and how I knew where it was. I also told him that we boys made a promise to each other that we would never tell anyone. The subject never came up again.
Jonah would tell me of his adventures in the Philippines during world War Two as a tank driver. Some of the things they had to do just to stay alive would amaze me. He told of tank battles with shells exploding around them and trees falling on the tanks. He said they would dig a hole in the ground, drive the tank over it, and sleep in the hole at night. He said once the fox hole filled with water while they were asleep. The water was so warm that no one noticed and when they awoke it was up to their necks. The top of his left ear was missing from a bullet ricocheting around inside the tank. I was one of the few people he ever told that story to. He had been wounded badly in his shoulder and chest, but he never complained. He had a tattoo of a heart with mother scripted across it on his forearm. Jonah was a hero in my eyes, and still is to this day.
We never did figure out just how Jonah got back and forth to his still without us seeing him, but he made whisky back there for years.
We eased our pirogues back down the creek and fished the rest of the day in Bad Weather Pond. We caught lots of big fish but they were not what we wanted. We wanted something for our supper and the smaller ones were better eating. The fish in there were so plentiful that we decided to go elsewhere. We wanted to go someplace where it took some skill to hook and land a fish. Mostly we were afraid those big fish would tear up our tackle.
About half way back to the chickee, we settled into a little slough to fish for our supper. The fish there weren’t as large as those in Bad Weather Pond but we soon had just what we wanted for supper. We each caught two good Mangrove snappers about 14 to 16 inches long, and just as fat as they could be. We cleaned them right there in the boat and threw the remains over the side. It wasn’t unusual to do that because the carcasses would attract varmints and gators into camp, and the last thing we wanted was something waking us in the middle of the night. Bigdaddy found a panther in his boat one morning licking the cleaning board where he had cleaned a mess of fish the day before. Two weeks earlier on his way home after a good day fishing Pierson had three wild dogs follow him along the river bank. He had a good mess of fish in the boat and the smell must have attracted them. After getting back to the chickee, we made our supper and got in bed. We planed to get up early the next day and go back to Bad Weather Pond and catch a big load of fish to take home for Jonah to take to the market.
Dad would pay us eight cents a pound for dressed fish, the same thing he paid a grown man. We overloaded the big pirogue to the point of almost swamping it. Pierson and Snort had only about three inches of freeboard and they had to be very careful not to lean too much one way or the other. Buck and I had a good pile of fish in the bottom of our pirogue with a tarp over it and Sidney perched on top. The trip home proved to be a long and arduous one. Because his pirogue was drafting too much water Pierson had to make a slight detour around one grass flat that we would usually paddled across.
When it was all said and done, we had 391 ¼ pounds, of snapper, snook, trout and redfish. That was a long day but it was fun, and we made $31.30 to boot. That translates into $7.82 each, not a bad day for a kid back then. In those days the minimum wage was $1.05 an hour, but most places didn’t pay that. We fished for less than four hours. Then we traveled for about five hours. While one would paddle the other would clean fish. After a little while we noticed an alligator about five feet long following us eating whatever we threw over the side. When he got his fill, he just swam over to a shady place in the mangroves and went to sleep. We helped Jonah ice our catch while dad got our money. Man we thought we were something special that day. Word got around about how much we caught and everyone wanted to know where we had fished. Not one of us told of our honey hole. We all understood how important it was to keep that kind of information under your hat.
After that trip we would never tell anyone out side our families where we were going, or where we had been. We wouldn’t tell anyone how much we caught either. Often we would make up a story about where we had been and tell our folks what we were telling others. The last thing we wanted was for Bad Weather Pond to become a known fishing paradise. It wouldn’t take long for some of the guides from town to be taking those rich fellows from up north back in there. We had seen that happen before and they would ruin a fishing hole in just a couple of years. I don’t think any of us wanted a bunch of tourist coming by the house trying to rent boats, or bringing who knows what around either. Those folks had a bad tendency to treat us locals like white trash, and we didn’t care for that kind of attitude.
Roberto (Bobby) Canillejoe got in a lot of trouble over in Tampa for fighting one of those “high hatten” Yankees. The sheriff said, “The yank was asking for it, but Bobby didn’t have to hurt him so bad”. When I saw Bobby the day after the sheriff brought him home, he didn’t look too good either. If he got the upper hand, that yank must have taken a real beating. There were never many fights in our community, but when there “was” one, it was usually legendary. There were a lot more babies born than fights, if that tells you anything.
We must have done a good job of keeping that fishing hole to ourselves, because never once did anyone come around asking. By the end of that summer we had found three more little ponds like Bad Weather Pond that were just brimming with good fish. Dad didn’t mind that we fished most of the summer because it was a good supply of product, and it stayed in the neighborhood.
One day about half way thru the summer, dad told us to start using his motorboat. We would daisy chain our pirogues to the stern and head out each morning. What had been a five hour trip to Bad Weather Pond was now about an hour. When we got to the narrow spot where the motor boat would not pass, we would tie it off and go the rest of way in the pirogues. We could fish longer and load the pirogues with our catch and tow them home. The only drawback of this arrangement was that it took us a lot longer to clean our catch; and when the yellow flies were out, it was pure misery.
The same week dad gave us use of his motorboat, we got electricity in the fish house. Mr. Canillejoe (Bobby’s dad) rigged lights in the ceiling and a big fan in the back wall. We could clean fish in the late afternoon while it was cool and the fan would keep the yellow flies blown away. Shortly after that dad got a bank loan and had an addition built on to the fish house. He bought an ice machine at a government auction. It had been in a fish house in Tampa, but the owner got caught bootlegging. So they auctioned the place off and put him in the poky. When the ice machine was installed, it required a pump to be put on our well so dad had the house plumed at the same time. That is when we got our bathroom. Running water was a big deal for us. Bigdaddy had plumbed his house several weeks before. He said you could wear your arm off trying to pump enough water to fill the bathtub that floated up during the storm.
Mr. Canillejoe had worked in a fish house with an ice machine in Cuba so he, along with my dad, my uncle Junior, Jonah, and Bobby Canillejoe did the install. They had help from some of the neighbors too, because often times someone would be standing around in the way watching this new fangled thing being built. Dad would say, “Well if you’re gonna stand around you might as well lend a hand, or else get out of our way.” Some of the older men called dad crazy, because as long as you could get salt why would you need ice to preserve fish. Old habits die slowly in places like this.
Dad saw the work ethic in Bobby and hired him to run the icehouse. Jonah was made the boss over the entire fishing operation and Bobby ran the fish house and shipping. Dad bought a boat that had been sunk in the storm and rebuilt it to take the fish to Tampa. Jonah began to buy seafood from all the other fishermen in the area because now we could store it cold and take it to market. I recall seeing a line of boats coming thru the pass from the bay to Lake Ocala on the way to our place, “The Gulf & Ocala Seafood Company”.
We didn’t just handle seafood we also sold ice to many of our neighbors and a few oyster houses just out the pass by the bay. They would bring their boats and trucks up to our dock and load huge blocks of ice. For an extra charge they could get crushed ice in bulk. The blocks would be loaded into the crusher and it would grind the ice into chunks the size of railroad rocks. The boats would pull up to the side door of the icehouse; a shoot would reach out over the boat and drop the crushed ice into boxes on the boat’s decks. We also sold 100 lb. of crushed ice in big waxed paper bags. Some of the oyster houses had conveyers to move the ice from the boats to the coolers, others used manpower and shovels, and some would use chain hoists. Work on the docks was hard and not everybody was cut out for those kinds of jobs. There were men with big t-handled hooks dragging boxes of ice and fish, and other men carrying fillet knives, wearing bloody aprons and splashed around in their rubber boots. In the heat of the day the ice would melt and seep between the boards of the floor. I remember it looked like it was raining under the fish house. The steam off the ice would roll out the doors across the dock and over the side, sinking in the hot air, dissipating into just a cool breeze. The fish house was about eight feet above the water and sometimes we would swim under it. In the summer the water in the shade of the fish house was always a few degrees cooler than the ambient water temperature. The melting ice made a chilling rain on the hot days. There was always fish blood in the water so it wasn’t the safest place to swim and mom would yell at us if she saw us there. We always kept a sharp eye out because we sometimes saw gators or small sharks lurking around. Bobby kept a rifle handy and would shoot them, then bring them in, clean them and give them to some of the sharecroppers. Nothing was wasted. The culls from cleaning the fish were given to the crabbers to bait their traps. We always had more than the crabbers needed so we would run the leftovers to some of our favorite fishing holes. We kept several holes baited.
Back then there were lots of fish that were considered trash fish, like Triggerfish or Amberjack. Triggerfish are hard to clean if you don’t know what you are doing and Amberjack is a little strong if you don’t know how to cook it. Snapper, Grouper, Snook and the like were more plentiful back then so if it wasn’t easy to cook and clean, nobody wanted it. Now-a-days, what we once used for bait is a high dollar meal in the restaurants. For myself, I’d rather have a big meal of Triggerfish than Snapper any day.
Dad heard of a new seafood buying point that had opened in Tampa. He, Jonah, and Bobby took one of the small motorboats down to meet the owner Mr. Prayder and see what kind of deal they could work out. After meeting the owner they walked around and looked at the operation. That is when dad decided he wanted nothing to do with that bunch of trash. He said there were more children working there than adults, and some of them looked as if they had been beaten. They were all in rags, no shoes and many had cuts and bruises. He saw one little boy hard at work and crying at the same time. When dad asked Prayder what was going on, he asked dad “What the hell are you doing in here?” Dad told him that he was just looking to see how they were set up. The man said “If you want to bring your fish here fine, but how I run my business is none of your concern.” Dad told him, “Well if that’s how you treat your labor and your costumers we won’t be doing business.”
As I understand it, there were other words between the two of them which ended with the man actually getting in dads boat to fight. Like I said, it ended there. No one would tell just what happened but rumor had it that dad hit him with an anchor, which is how Prayder lost several teeth, and went overboard. The dock workers started to help the man but stopped when they saw Jonah with a shot gun.
I overheard mom and dad talking one night right after that about how trash like that was the reason for the newly passed Child Labor Law Bill. Dad said it was a crying shame how those children were being treated. He said maybe he should mention it to the sheriff. Mom said maybe just an anonymous letter might be the wise way to handle it. Dad went into town the next day. The sheriff said he couldn’t do much about it as it wasn’t in his jurisdiction, but he would report it to the US marshal. Dad asked why he couldn’t save some time and just tell the sheriff in that county? Sheriff Dixon told dad that it would be about the same as telling Prayder what was going on in his own place. As it turned out, that sheriff was in cahoots with Prayder. Our sheriff had gotten some bad reports on that sheriff and Prayder in the past.
A few weeks later we woke up to a fire under the fish house. One of the boats had been set on fire and pushed under the fish house. Because the floors were always wet with melting ice it wouldn’t burn. Dad managed to pull the burning boat away from the fish house but couldn’t put out the fire. Some crabbers down by the mouth of the lake saw a boat with two men headed south about that time of night. They said they could hear the men laughing and talking. One had a heavy Cajun accent, and the other was Cuban.
Two days later when Jonah and Bobby were in Tampa with a load of fish. On their way home in one of the back canals, a Cuban and a Cajun confronted them. The Cuban got a surprise when he grabbed hold of their boat to come aboard. Bobby put an ice hook in the back of his hand, nailing him to the gunnels of the boat. Jonah throttled up and turned away, dragging him over the side and down the canal. The Cajun followed, but at a distance because Jonah had his shotgun out and ready. They didn’t release the Cuban until they got a name. The name they got was that of the Cajun running the boat as the Cuban was calling to him for help. The Cajun’s name was Pitre. Bobby released the Cuban just as Jonah turned the boat to catch the Cajun. Before Pitre could get his boat turned Jonah had come along side. With one deafening blast the shotgun put a whole the size of dinner plate just below the waterline. Pitre’s boat was taking on water and sinking in a hurry. As Jonah pointed the gun at him, Pitre dove over the far side of his boat and swam between two boats tied to a near by dock. The Cuban was pulling himself out of the dirty water of the canal with one hand, and slipping on the slimy wooden seawall when Jonah yelled to Pitre. “I know your name Pitre and I know who you work for.” Pitre’s boat sank about 400 feet up the canal with the motor running.
There was no shortage of witnesses as the nearby docks filled with onlookers, some of them laughing. Jonah heard one old man yell to Pitre, “Looks like you met somebody who ain’t afraid of you and your bunch now Pitre.” As they putted down the canal there were people standing on the docks staring, some smiling, some not. Jonah said, “It was easy to tell where we was welcome and where we weren’t”. When they saw several men standing on a dock smiling, Jonah pulled to. One man said “It was high time someone put the fear of God in those two.” Jonah asked if anyone knew the name of the Cuban. Three men at once said “Concha.” Bobby said “Concepcion”; an old Cuban nodded and smiled, then said, “Watch your back.” as he walked away.
When they returned home and told their story, dad got very concerned and told us to find something to do. He wanted to talk to them in private. Their conversation lasted about an hour; then they all left without saying a word.
About two hours later dad returned with two of the men who worked on the logging crew. A little while after that Uncle Joe and one of his hunting buddies came around in his boat. They both had guns. Jonah and Bobby came back with guns, lanterns, and their bed rolls. The men from the logging crew had guns, food and bed rolls. Uncle Joe and his friend left in his boat and the loggers left in one of our boats. The two boats headed for the pass where they anchored on each side out of sight, and spent the night. Jonah and Bobby took turns standing watch in the fish house. The next morning the boats returned and the men went home to rest. That night Dad and one of the men from the fish house took Uncle Joe’s place at the pass and two men from the community took the loggers’ places.
Six nights later, three men in a motorboat pulling a bateau (a shallow draft, flat bottom boat) motored quietly thru the pass. Dad and the men sat without giving their up positions. The saboteurs killed the motor and drifted to a stop where they anchored. All three men got in the bateau and polled their way toward our place. Our two boats followed them, quietly sculling. When they got to the anchored boat, they dropped its motor over the side and set it adrift. Both boats continued to scull quietly behind the saboteurs. Bobby and Jonah were just changing shifts when Bobby heard the ripples in the lake slapping on the bottom of the bateau. Jonah had a flounder light which was made with an automobile headlight rigged to a car battery. When he touched the ground wire to the battery post, it lit up the three men and they began to turn and run. Their escape run was about fifty yards and into the hands of dad and the boys. They had guns but the only shots fired were those of my dad’s. The men put their hands in the air and drifted to a stop. Sure enough it was Pitre, Concha, and a very big redheaded man named Dumas Wheeler.
Dad and Jonah had built two sets of leg irons with heavy cement blocks attached just for this occasion. They attached Pitre and Concha together with one set and the biggest man had his very own set. The men were placed in the lake, in about two feet of water, and left. Just for the fun of it Jonah dropped a few fish heads in the water around the men. Jonah and Bobby took turns watching the prisoners. Sidney, our very ugly and sometimes mean dog spent the night growling at them from the shore. Every little while, Jonah would shine the light across the water to light up the gator eyes, just to keep the saboteurs on their toes.
The men remained for two days and nights in the water. They were allowed no food and only one gallon of fresh water between them each day. They were sunburned and sick when dad dragged their sorry souls up on shore. Sidney had to be chained. On the third day Jonah gave them one piece of salt fish each and one extra quart of freshwater each. On the fourth day when dad got the sheriff, they were ready to tell him everything. Sheriff Dixon asked dad, “Why did you call so soon, or even at all”?
François Pitre, and Concepcion Santiago Ruiz told the sheriff everything they had planed. Old man Prayder had told them to burn the fish house, the icehouse, and the boats. He said to shoot any one who came out to put out the fire. He also told them that if they could, to burn our house too. Pitre and Concha were to set the fires and Wheeler was to do the shooting. Wheeler was wanted for the murder of a crabber down on the south end of the county. He was under suspicion of killing two other men in the next county north and wanted for questioning. We got a $500 reward for his capture, which dad gave to the men who helped.
A month had passed when a man who no one knew came to the fish house looking for dad. He stayed there all afternoon until dad came in from the woods. When dad got to the fish house, the man introduced himself as Reverend Chalker from Tampa. Dad had heard of him but never had the pleasure of meeting him until then. Reverend Chalker told dad that Prayder was overheard planning to send a gang of men to take care of some old business. He didn’t know what old business but that dad should keep his eyes open. The plan was to send some men by boat and others by truck. The Reverend said Prayder had so many enemies it could be almost anyone, but that dad should not take any chances.
That after noon Jonah left work early in dad’s truck, but returned shortly with three of the neighbors. Everyone had guns. This was looking like the old west. Bobby came back with his brother Paco and said that Fico (another brother) would be coming as soon as he finished in the barn. Most of my uncles started showing up with friends. Uncles Joe, Junior, Lawrence, Henry, and James all showed up within an hour, carrying guns. Bigdaddy walked up with his double barrel 12 gauge. In all there were 24 of us, and more awaiting instructions if needed. They decided to position ten men in boats on the far side of the lake, and the others around the property. Pierson, and I were sent to Mr. Willy’s house to be with mom and the other boys, and Paco Canillejoe was sent home. We were given instructions by the sheriff on what to do and where to go if we heard gun fire.
The first night went by without a sound. No one slept much and just before sunup the boats came in to regroup. That group of men was sent home to rest and a new group of men started showing up about the same time to take their places. Most of the men didn’t go home but slept on the porch of our house or at Bigdaddy’s. In the afternoon just before sundown the night shift started showing up to get instructions.
Several of the men from the day watch were at Lev’s store on their way home when a truck with eight men made the turn toward our house. Nobody recognized any of the passengers so they assumed the obvious. After they had gone down the road a little piece, Lev fired a 12 gauge shot gun two times into the air to warn the men at the fish house. The men at the store loaded into a truck and headed back to our place. On their way there were trucks and cars headed south to our house. Men were standing on the road catching rides to the fight. In a little while more gun shots were heard coming from the pass as there were two boat loads of men headed in our direction. The men in the woods on the far side of the lake started blocking any escape. The sheriff said he didn’t want any of the intruders to escape; and if they were all killed, it would be okay with him. Each of the men on our side had been deputized by sheriff Dixon.
Just before the intruder’s truck got to our place, three of the men jumped out and ran into the woods. All three were captured before they knew what was happening. They were each laid face down in the mud; a good size log was placed on each one’s back. Their hands and feet were tied to each other over the log. The odds of getting away were not good. Bigdaddy was coming out of the outhouse with his double barrel 12 gauge when he saw the truck come into the yard. Without hesitation he unloaded both barrels into the two men standing in the back of the truck. Before the truck could stop he had dropped the shotgun and drawn his revolver. Before he could get off a shot one of the men in the truck shot at him twice missing both times. The sheriff was on our back porch and fired into the windshield wounding all three men inside. One of the men in the truck jumped out and made a run for it but was soon caught by Sidney. Sidney did more damage to his captor than Bigdaddy’s shotgun did to the ones he shot. When the men in the boats saw how badly they were out numbered they gave up. They were all tried for attempting to murder and convicted. Old man Prayder was found guilty of murder in two other cases and electrocuted. Dumas Wheeler was killed while working on a county road gang. No one was ever charged with the murder because no one saw what happened. His body went missing from the morgue down in Tampa and was never found. The sheriff of Hillsboro County was convicted of murder and several other crimes. He was bludgeoned to death while serving time waiting to be electrocuted.
Sheriff Dixon was re-elected six more terms. It was years before there was another murder in our county and that was committed by a hobo.
The children who had been made to work for Prayder were taken to foster homes around our area. One of them became the Mayor of a nearby town. Most of them turned out to be good upstanding citizens. One was adopted by a family in our community and became a dear friend of mine.
COPYRIGHT 2007
LARRY T. BROWN