Shadow Men (14 page)

“Mr. Freeman, the investigator, I presume,” he said, a professional smile on his face.

“Yes, Reverend,” I said. He’d caught me off guard. “A fine cleric and a clairvoyant too?”

His laugh was less formal. “Yes, well, I knew you would be coming sometime. I suspect I’ve always known someone would.”

An hour later we were alone at a picnic table under the oaks. Jefferson had made the rounds with his people, consoling, blessing, promising visits and agreeing to commitments later in the week. When it became awkward for him to simply keep introducing me as Mr. Freeman without elaboration, I wandered over to the open table and sat inspecting the sparse moss hanging in the oak limbs and trying to identify the birdsong coming out of a nearby field. With only a few cleanup volunteers on the grounds, the reverend had finally walked back to join me.

“You are originally from the Everglades City area. I don’t have that wrong, do I, Reverend?” I said, cutting straight to it.

“That’s correct.”

“And your father and grandfather before him?”

“We left in 1962, Mr. Freeman. My parents moved to Naples the year my grandfather passed.”

His face was calm and emotionless. I’d seen the look before, years ago, when I’d come to the home of a Germantown woman in North Philly who’d aborted her child. It had taken the squad and the M.E. several days to track her down and she’d been waiting for us when we arrived. Jefferson had the same resigned and haunted look, as though he were waiting for me to announce his arrest and cuff him.

“Reverend, I’m looking into the disappearance of three men. A father and his two sons. We have reason to believe that they may have been killed when they were at work on the Tamiami Trail in 1924.”

Jefferson’s eyes had closed when I mentioned the two sons, and he kept them closed.

“We came across some letters written by the missing father and he specifically mentions a marksman named Jefferson who, the letter indicates, watched over the laborers. Could that Jefferson have been your grandfather, Reverend?”

He opened his eyes and at first seemed to be focused on something far behind my left ear. I might have turned to look if I hadn’t known that there was only a wide and knurled trunk of oak behind me. Then his eyes shifted back onto mine.

“If it had to do with killing and evil, Mr. Freeman, then it most likely did have my grandfather Jefferson’s hand in it,” he said in a flat and somewhat defeated tone.

“Sir?” I said. The bluntness of the statement had jarred me.

“You see, Mr. Freeman, John William Jefferson was an evil man. Some in that place and time may have thought of him as the devil himself.”

With that the pastor crossed his arms over his chest, took a deep and brave breath and told me all he knew about his infamous relative.

John William had come to the Ten Thousand Islands sometime around 1920. He brought his wife and a sum of money that was unusual for the time. He bought a prime piece of land along the Turner River that was among the most elevated of the shell mounds in the area. It was consequently valuable since it had the potential to be farmed. But John William was not a farmer. He was a slight man, with delicate hands that his grandson would inherit, and he always wore a wide-brimmed hat that put his eyes in constant shade. The first rumor about him was that he was dumb and could not speak a word because it was so rare than anyone other than his wife ever heard his voice. Ted Smallwood down at his post office and store at Chokoloskee would eventually dispel that rumor. In his few dealings with John William, Smallwood knew that not only could the man speak, but he could also read and write and was highly proficient and meticulous in documenting his finances.

The second rumor was that the new arrival was, in fact, a criminal, a killer who had fled the law in Missouri and come to the virgin outpost of southwest Florida to hide. Unlike the other rumor, this one never died, and was in fact built upon throughout John William’s life. Stories of his exploits held few if any provable facts. The only truly witnessed detail of the man was his prowess with a rifle. That ability was known by his family and those in the sparse and isolated community. But the speculation about that ability colored everything else he was.

He was not a lazy man, though his industry was the focus of many wagging tongues. On his river land he built one of the finest houses in the area, along with a stone cistern to gather fresh water and a solid barn that was considered ostentatious by his neighbors. But though his land was envied for its precious inches of rich topsoil, and his location next to the river for its easy access to the bay, John William did not farm or fish for profit. He was a hunter, and as the Reverend Jefferson’s mother often said in her late night stories to him, he answered to no God or man other than himself.

John William made his living killing things. In the early years, when the fashion for ladies’ hats in New York and the rest of the Northeast turned to outrageous displays of bird-feather designs, men with John William’s talent were in demand. He knew the region, the nesting patterns of southeast Florida’s pure white egrets and stunning pink flamingos, and being the finest marksman in the region, he became a hired “guide” for the acquisition arm of the distant hatmakers. Other locals in the same business would tell of coming upon hidden rookeries of the snowy egrets far from the more easily accessed nests around the islands. As the birds became sparse, they themselves spent days getting there by skiff, but if the wind was right, they could smell that they were too late. When they finally cleared the last curve of water they would spot the carnage—an acre of trees and the wet undergrowth covered with the mutilated and rotting carcasses of egrets. The larger ones had been killed with a single shot, the few valuable feathers plucked and the rest of the animal tossed away. Nearby a pod of fat gators would be rolling in the shallows or sunning themselves on mats of grass, lazy with the easy meals so plentiful that they could not begin to clear the area.

“It appears Mr. Jefferson gone an’ beat us to it again, boys,” would be the refrain, and another rumor would be piled onto the marksman’s name. Later, with the rookeries all along Lake Okeechobee already wiped out by the plume hunters and southwest Florida facing the same eventual slaughter, the state banned the practice. But as long as there was a market, even an illegal one, the poaching continued. John William had long determined that it was his birthright to kill things for money. No government edict passed down from a capital city eight hundred miles away was going to stop him. It was less than two years later that the first Audubon officer sent to the Ten Thousand Islands area to enforce the law was found dead on a mangrove outcropping along the western edge of Chevalier Bay. The warden had been missing for a week when a group of fishermen found his body. From a distance they thought he was still alive. At first glance in the early morning light, he appeared to be standing on a solid clump of land, waving. It was only when they got closer that they realized the warden was sunk to his knees in the gelatinous muck at the base of the mangrove, his arm caught high in a limb, the wrist wedged in a V-notch. When they got closer they could see that he had been killed. A single gunshot had entered at the back of his neck and then exploded outward from his throat. The body had been left with no effort on the part of his assassin to hide it. Speculation in the community as to the identity of the killer settled in its usual place.

The sound of a screen door slapping shut stopped the reverend’s recounting and we both looked up toward the church.

A woman carrying a tray with a pitcher and two glasses was walking toward us. She was dressed in a long printed dress and was tall even in the flat shoes that resembled black dancing slippers. Her honey-colored hair was up, and I could see touches of gray at the roots above her ears. Her eyes were red-rimmed and anxious, as though she had been both crying and angry at the same time.

“Ahh, thank you, Margery,” Jefferson said. “Mr. Freeman, this is my wife, Margery. I believe you have spoken on the phone.”

I stood up to greet her, but when she set the tray of lemonade on the table she did not offer her hand or look me in the eyes.

“Yes,” she said, and then to her husband, “Are you all right, William?” The look in her eyes had changed to one of legitimate concern.

“Yes, Margery,” he answered. “We’ll be fine.”

I could tell that “we’ll” meant the both of them. She nodded and walked back to the church. When she had gone Jefferson poured the glasses. The coolness of the drink on my throat made me suddenly aware of the moist heat that was rising all around us in the canopy of shade. It was past noon and out in the sunlit meadow, grasshoppers were flying. I was about to ask Jefferson if he wanted to take a break, but held back. I had been in police interview rooms where you learned that once a guy started talking, you let him. The reverend was in his confessional; I bowed my head and listened.

“It was not an easy situation for my father and mother. The constant rumors. The fear,” he said, looking out and seeming to find the grasshoppers himself.

His mother was a local girl from Everglades City, extremely religious. She knew the stories, the devil warnings about the Jeffersons who lived by the river. But Clinton Jefferson was her own age and they went to the only country school within fifty miles and the boy was polite and shy and nearly friendless. When she began coming by his house, she did not recall ever having heard Mr. Jefferson say a word. When she convinced Clinton to join her at Bible study, the father did not oppose it. When they were married at the age of eighteen, he did not attend the wedding. His wife excused him as being off on business. But Clinton Jefferson would not leave his parents despite being tainted by his father’s reputation. He could not leave his mother to bear it on her own and he moved his new wife into the river house. The two women grew close—the reverend’s mother was the first to hear about the pent-up pain of the wife who’d shared her husband’s strange isolation and odd justifications for so many years.

“My mother was the one who then shared the stories with me, doling them out little by little as I grew,” Jefferson said. “She wove them in with lessons of God’s plan and his forgiveness. It was the beginning of my religious education.”

“And you moved away after your grandfather died?” I said. It was the first question that I had asked.

“Killed himself,” Jefferson corrected me sharply, and the retort brought my head up. “My father found the body in the barn on a winter day in 1962. He had shot himself with his own rifle.

“My grandmother survived for only a few years afterward. I was twelve when we left and I remember my father locking the front door to the river house. We drove away with only what we could fit in the truck and never went back.”

The reverend’s eyes were still on the meadow when I asked him if his own father would remember any more of the details of John William’s activities in 1924 and his work on the trail.

“I’m sure he would have, Mr. Freeman. I believe my father lived through, and was visited by, every suspicion and every true exploit that my grandfather performed or was quietly accused of performing. In a place like that, one wrestles with his own conscience alone and with only God to forgive.”

“Is it possible for me to speak to him, just to see what he might recall?”

The reverend waited a long silent beat before answering.

“My father died by his own hand fifteen years ago, just after I took this church posting, Mr. Freeman.”

He stood and picked up the tray his wife had delivered and started walking back toward the church. When I followed and stepped out into the sun, the brightness and sudden heat caused me to flinch, and the vision of Jefferson framed in the steeple shape of the church blurred and shimmered out of focus for a second and any words I might have offered were even further washed away. When he reached the back door he stepped inside without a word and I stopped and was considering my long drive home when he reappeared. His hands were empty and he had settled a light-colored straw hat on his head. He met my eyes and there was a look of determination on his face, like something had been settled.

“I need you to follow me, Mr. Freeman. If you would, sir, I have something for you.”

I trailed his dark sedan through town and saw at least three people wave at him as he passed by the small hardware store, the barber shop with an actual working red-and-white-striped pole, and a sign outside a plain brick storefront that said
HAIR AND TANNING SALON
. Two miles later he turned off onto a side road going west. Two-story farmhouses sat back from green lawns, with stands of pines to either side. Another mile and he turned north on a dirt road; the dust boiled up behind his car and I backed farther off, out of the swirl. Finally I saw his brake lights flash and he pulled onto a two-track drive that led through a column of oaks and up to a white, clapboard house. There was a wide veranda across the front and an American flag flying from the corner post. He parked next to an older model van, and I stopped behind him and got out.

“This is my home, Mr. Freeman—excuse me for not inviting you in,” he said with a voice of true apology, before leading me toward the back. Behind the house was a thriving garden that appeared to cover at least an acre, with more open land back to a windbreak of tall trees. The ruts of the two-track led up to the sliding front door of a small barn, and the reverend continued that way. He offered no comment, no expression of pride or information on his land, and I did not probe. He rolled the bare door all the way open, letting the sun pour in to illuminate the open bay and its array of tools propped against the walls, the workbench at the back, and the old iron tractor parked in the middle of it all. The smell was of dust and dry grass, gasoline and heat-cured, rough-cut wood. He went to the bench and took down a two-foot-long pry bar and then crossed to the base of a simple staircase. There he snapped on a light switch, but I couldn’t tell where, or if, a bulb had gone on. I followed the line of stairs and saw that planks covered the back half of the barn’s thick ceiling joists and served as an upstairs floor. The reverend started up and I followed. He waited for me at the top step, and when he moved to give me room, the plank creaked under his slight weight.