The Orchid Thief (26 page)

After the funeral, Weedon sneaked back to the burial site and reopened the casket, removed the head, and smuggled it out of the fort. There exists no authoritative explanation for why he took Osceola’s head, but it is true that one of Weedon’s great-granddaughters wrote in a memoir that the doctor was “an unusual man.” He embalmed the head using his own homemade embalming formula, and for a while displayed it in the window of the drugstore he owned in St. Augustine, Florida. Weedon kept the head at home for a number of years, and would hang it over his young sons’ beds as punishment whenever they misbehaved. Eventually Weedon gave the head to one of his sons-in-law, Daniel Whitehurst,
who also was a doctor. Whitehurst had studied with a Dr. Valentine Mott, who was then the country’s preeminent surgeon and pathologist. Mott was accustomed to dealing with renowned figures; he once examined Edgar Allan Poe for brain lesions. Mott owned a large medical library and an anatomical-specimen museum in New York City that was the largest of its kind in the country and was said to be “particularly rich in tumors, aneurisms, and diseased bones, joints, arteries, and bladders,” most of which were products of the doctor’s own surgeries; he is said to have amputated more than one thousand body parts in the course of his career. Whitehurst wrote to Mott in 1843 and sent him Osceola’s head for inclusion in the museum’s “cabinet of heads.” The 1858 illustrated catalog of the museum noted that Specimen No. 1132 was “Head of Osceola, the great Seminole chief (
undoubted
). Presented by Dr. Whitehurst, of St. Augustine.” (The word “undoubted” referred to the three authentications of the head that Weedon had solicited from army officers who had known Osceola and who were willing to attest that the head was indeed Osceola’s.) Mott apparently worried that the specimen was too valuable to keep in the cabinet of heads and, as he wrote to Whitehurst, “the temptation will be so strong for someone to take it” that he promised to keep it in his study at home instead. It is unclear whether he did indeed keep the head at home or whether he kept it in the museum. The museum was located in the University Medical College on Fourteenth Street. It burned down in 1866 and most people believe the head was destroyed in the fire. The rest of Osceola’s body remains in its Fort Moultrie grave.

Osceola fought on principle, was captured ignominiously, died prematurely, and left behind an unconquered people. Even though he led the Seminoles only briefly he has never been forgotten. Walt Whitman celebrated him in poetry, the
portraits painted of him in prison toured galleries across Europe, his artifacts were preserved in museums around the world. At least twenty towns and counties around the country named themselves Osceola in his honor, and almost half of the Florida Seminoles use Osceola as their last name.

—

Laroche maintained that one of Osceola’s many legacies was the right of the Seminoles and their agents—namely, himself—to harvest ghost orchids out of the Fakahatchee Strand. The day after the judge released her ruling he called me to gripe. “I was crucified!” he yelled and then started coughing like a seal. “I told you I would be crucified. Fuckin’ crucified. The judge is a moron. She didn’t know shit about Indian rights and she doesn’t know shit about shit. And if she thinks she can keep me out of the swamp she’s insane. And let me tell you something. I swear to you, Buster is going to get himself a bulldozer and go back into the Fakahatchee and tear the whole place apart if he don’t calm down.” He stopped coughing and started to chuckle. The sound dragged out of his throat slowly as if it were traveling over gravel. Talking to Laroche was always a bountiful aural experience: there was his cigarette hack, and the funny round pronunciation he gave to certain words such as “well,” which came out sounding like “wahl,” and “Fakahatchee,” which came out as “Fok-uh-hawchee,” and then there were all his nuanced laughs, such as his “ah-huh-huh-huh,” which meant he’d just given a description of himself outsmarting someone, and his “Ha!” which meant something like Wait a minute! and his scratchy chuckle, which he used to highlight something he thought was crazy, which was inevitably something that someone else had done. I thought it was fascinating that a guy who could have easily been considered crazy himself considered so many
other
people crazy. I was coming
to realize that Laroche believed all human beings, with the sole exception of one John Laroche, were afflicted with constricted and unsubtle minds—that, for instance, park rangers couldn’t think about anything broader than the preservation of the park, and the Seminoles couldn’t see beyond their sense of injured pride, and the judge had no grasp of anything outside conventional legal boundaries. Laroche prided himself on possessing flawless logic and reason—the way he saw it, he did poach orchids, which is illegal and unethical, but he would poach only a limited number at a time and he would never strip every one off a single tree and, most important, he would be poaching so that he could help the species in the long run by propagating it in his lab and making the orchids cheap and available. He trusted himself alone to balance out pros and cons, to disregard rules and use real judgment instead. He thought that no one else in the world could see things his way because other people had attitudes that were as narrow as ribbon and they had no common sense at all. For a single-minded lunatic like John Laroche, this seemed like a very bold position to take.

—

I first met Buster Baxley, Laroche’s boss at the Seminole nursery, when I’d been at the court hearing in Naples, and I had eaten a steak dinner with him at my hotel the following night. I liked him right away because he seemed smart and funny, but I could never figure out what he made of me. Buster was a husky man with puffy jowls and some freckles and longish hair the color of a basketball. Most of the times I saw him he was dressed in casual cowboy-style clothing, amulets, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. There was an air of deep seriousness about him. He had an unnerving sidelong glance and a skew of his head that felt strongly opinionated. Whenever I’d ask him a question, he would pause a really
long time before he answered—during the pause I had no idea whether he was going to mock me or refuse to talk at all or be chatty and cordial and tell me interesting things about his life and the tribe. One time, when he
was
chatty and cordial, he took me to lunch at a restaurant near the reservation called the Black-Eyed Pea. We ordered tacos and iced tea, and while we were eating he told me that he was a member of the Seminole Panther clan and his wife is a member of the Bird clan, and that it had been a controversial match because cross-clan marriages were regarded skeptically; that Seminole clans were matrilineal, so his kids were Birds, not Panthers, but mostly he worried that they wouldn’t stay in any clan or in the Indian life at all; that he himself was actually three-quarters white, but he’d grown up on the reservation and felt entirely Indian—maybe even more than people who were all Indian and took it for granted, since they’d never had to choose the way he had to; that he was in charge of the tribe’s business, which meant he spent much of his workday dealing with the white world, with white people, feeling like just another south Florida businessman, not a Seminole businessman, but as soon as he was done with work and on his way home he saw himself once again entirely contained within the shell of Indian life.

One of the businesses Buster oversaw was the nursery, so that day at lunch I asked if he’d show me around. He shook his head and said, “Well, I can’t right now. I’ve got those Japanese investors here and I’ve got to take care of them.”

“Is that keeping you busy?”

“Too busy,” he said. He picked up the little cardboard tepee listing the desserts of the day and started to read it. He looked up and said, “I told those Japanese to fly from Japan to Orlando so they could have a day at Disney World. Then I picked them up there and drove them to my ranch up in
Brighton, and I fed them just a huge feast of Indian barbecue and swamp cabbage and fry bread and pumpkin bread. They were sort of in shock. They’d never seen so much food in their lives.”

A couple of days later he called and said the Japanese were gone, the lemon deal had fallen through, and he had a little time, so he could take me to the nursery. I drove over to meet him at the tribe offices, a group of trailers and small buildings off Stirling Road. Across the street from the offices was a huge construction site where the new permanent tribe headquarters were being built. When I pulled in, there were about half a dozen vehicles in the parking lot, and all except one of them were pickup trucks. The receptionist told Buster I had arrived and then went back to cracking her gum. I thumbed through a couple of rodeo magazines and listened to someone in a nearby office on the telephone saying, “Look, you said you’d be done with it by now and when someone tells me he’ll be done with something I assume they mean they’ll be
done
with something, do you see what I mean?” After a while Buster came out of his office. He looked a little grouchy and he didn’t say much. He led me back to the parking lot and into his pickup truck and turned the ignition, unwrapped a piece of chewing gum, and then roared onto the street. After a series of turns under a highway overpass we drove past a little building with a sign saying
INDEPENDENT BIBLE BAPTIST CHICKEE CHURCH
and past blocks with new sidewalks and small houses that he said belonged to members of the tribe. At a traffic light he took a long look at me and then said, “So what did you think of that judge at that hearing in Naples?”

“I guess she was okay.”

“No way was she okay,” he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “By the way, you know, don’t you, that the
Seminoles have never signed a peace treaty with the government. We’re still at war with the United States.” The light changed. We rode along for a moment, and then Buster said, “Look, I know everyone thought John was exploiting those Indian boys so he could do his poaching and set his own nursery up. Well, I was the one who authorized it. I told them to go out and gather what they needed. John brought me the statute he found saying Indians were exempt from laws about plant gathering, and we thought the nursery should have some wild plants for propagation and display. I asked John about it several times because I wanted to be sure about it. I made him wait a month so I could go do the research myself. What we did was within the law. It’s our
right
. The state of Florida better not mess around with what’s my right.” He took a deep breath and said, “Otherwise, if they mess with me, I’ll go in there and take every single thing in the Fakahatchee that’s alive.”

—

He pulled into a driveway and past a fence that surrounded the nursery. Most of the plants Laroche had ordered hadn’t yet arrived, so at the moment the nursery was mostly a couple of acres of gravel and dirt and a few potted things. Near the fence there was a stack of sawhorses and cedar planters and plastic bags of mulch and the skeleton of a shadehouse—an upright row of metal hoops that looked like gigantic croquet wickets. There was
no
shade. The light was so bright that the gravel and dirt glinted. A breeze jiggled the string of plastic flags that Laroche had hung above the gate. At the far end of the lot three men were sorting through a pile of more metal hoops and a stack of nylon shade cloth. After a moment they came over and chatted with Buster. I recognized one of the men from court. His name was Vinson Osceola, and he was one of the three Seminole men who had
been arrested along with Laroche. He was a smooth-featured guy with a long black braid and meaty shoulders. That day he was wearing a green T-shirt decorated with dozens of skulls. After Buster introduced us he said hello and then added, “I’m not going to talk to you too much. It’s nothing personal. It’s the Indian way.”

Laroche’s office was in a beige trailer set on concrete blocks near the entrance gate. Vinson motioned toward it and said Laroche was inside. On the trailer door was a flyer saying “Maydell’s. Best Food on the Res. LUNCH specials Stew Beef or Spam and Tomatoes over Rice $5” and another in Laroche’s handwriting that said “Tuesday Jan. 24 GRAND OPENING of the Nursery. All tribe members invited for a free steak cookout.” Buster pushed the door open and then we made our way through mounds of papers and boxes and gardening journals to Laroche’s office. Laroche was sitting behind a metal desk reading a magician’s supplies catalog when we came in. He pushed the catalog aside and held up a postcard. “Hey, look at this postcard I got from my friend Walter. He’s in Botswana,” he said. “Walter is
crazy
about water lilies. He’ll go anywhere the minute he hears about a rare one. Sometimes he collects, mostly he just goes to look at it. I’m happy to report that this is a very cheerful postcard. It says, ‘John: Plants are good. See you soon.’ ” He put down the card. “You know, Walter’s pretty crazy.”

Buster stood in the doorway of the office and ignored Laroche while he was talking about Walter. That moment I got the feeling that they viewed each other as useful but irritating—a combination of mutual appreciation and mutual disrespect. Buster pointed out the window. “John, how’re those boys working out?”

“
Fine
, Buster,” Laroche said. He drawled so that it sounded like a longer word—
foi-oi-oin
. “We got orders for
thirty-two thousand dollars’ worth of weeds and an order for nine thousand saw grass plants. State of Florida. They wanted seventy thousand saw grasses to plant on the median strip of that new highway from Tampa to Naples, but we can only give them nine thousand right now.” Laroche put his feet up on the desk and started rocking back and forth in his chair. He has a wispy little mustache that comes and goes, and that day it looked to be gone. He was wearing droopy camouflage pants, a Miami Hurricanes hat, and a Chicago Blackhawks T-shirt with team logo of an Indian chief. He later confessed to me that he has no interest in the Blackhawks at all, but the shirt was only a dollar and he thought it would be fun to wear so he could piss off the Seminoles. “I’ve got some good stuff on the way,” he said. “Pigeon peas, figs, frangipani, governor’s plums. I’m going to order some guava. And I got something today called a confetti shrub.” He yanked the bill of his cap and said, “You know, Buster, it’s hotter than hell out there today.”