Into the pines, we came to a small gray shack in a clearing, behind a prone dog.
“Jewel. Her name is Jewel.”
The redbone hound was lying in a tiny cloud of shade. Raising her chin from her paws, ears up, she stared at us through the snowy eyes of wintry blindness, nostrils flaring, thirsting for information. At the mention of her name, a tail wagged once and then stilled.
“Best you don’t touch her,” he warned. “Unless you intend to give up picking a banjo.”
“I won’t.”
“Later, she’ll up herself and stretch for a while. Then allow her to come to you. After she does, you can love her and scratch her neck to all content.” Mr. Nocker bent to stroke her head. “Good dog. We got company, Jewel. So favor us a mite with manners. Hear?”
He went inside. Mr. Nocker didn’t ask me to enter his shack. Just as well, as I doubted that there would be room for two. My eye judged it to be about ten foot square, and even less than a ten-foot cube. A low roof, and flat. Reappearing, he carried a leathery object, one that seemed to be under construction, yet solidly built.
“It’s near finish.”
He handed it to me. Taking it, I was surprised at its mass. Hefty. But sturdy and artistically crafted. Quite smooth. Some leather is so cold. This was cozy.
“Mule collar,” he told me.
“You keep a mule?”
He didn’t answer. Perhaps because my question was, in retrospect, more than a bit silly. Why else would he be fashioning a mule’s tack? Certainly not for Jewel.
Mr. Nocker cooked.
We ate outdoors on a bench. Controlling both caution and curiosity, I gagged down what he served me, chewing it with gritted teeth, swallowing as my craw earned a medal for valor. Scraping the bent tin plate with my fork, I thanked him.
“Good supper,” I said, raking a sleeve across my mouth and waiting for Ed to explain, after the fact, our menu.
He didn’t. But from the taste still haunting my mouth, I guessed possum. This, I decided, was real research, the kind that no author could uncover in a library, absorbed not into the brain but down the gullet.
Jewel came.
To her, perhaps, there was no difference between day or night. All was darkness. Mr. Nocker fed her a few scraps from the black cooking pot that had prepared our meal. He chewed for her, offering her half-gnawed chunks of meat from his mouth to hers, allowing her to smell, then swallow. “Her teeth are most missing,” he explained. Her body was leaner than a dry-spell bean. A rib counter. One of her back feet was missing, snubbed off at the first joint, so I asked how it had happened.
“Gator.”
Jewel, I noticed, was beyond feeble. Lame to almost halt. And blind. When, at last, Jewel did stagger over to investigate me, and then accept me, I rubbed and petted her for a time. Then she flopped down as if in considerable pain, and stared at me with her frozen eyes.
“If Jewel will pardon us,” Mr. Nocker said, “let’s go around back.”
We went.
He pointed out two graves: one large, the other small and empty. The large grave was merely a mound of grassless and weedless red sand.
“Esme,” he said, “is buried here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We lived together better’n thirty year. She pulled her weight, Esme did. Never once had to lick a stick to her.”
My face puzzled at him. Perhaps he was joking. Although it was possible that a hermit such as Ed Nocker could get away with wife beating, as there were no neighbors to hear her screams.
He sudden laughed.
“You know,” he said softly, “I teached Esme how to shake hands. People’d stop by, years back, to see her do it. Esme was stubborn. She’d only shake with me. Not nobody else. A stranger wouldn’t have the luck of a gigged bullfrog. He’d just stand there, looking fooly, with his hand out and fingers open, but Esme wouldn’t offer.”
“Why not?”
“Can’t say. Stubborn. But I’d still have to credit Esme. She was a worthy mule.”
Mule?
Before I could speak, or even stutter, Mr. Nocker pointed at the other grave, the smaller one, recently dug, as the fresher and darker earth indicated.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Mister … forgit your name … don’t guess I can perform what I ought … for Jewel.”
“This grave is for her?”
He nodded. “You pack a pistol,” he said. It sounded more as a question than a statement. “I ain’t going to pretend I can handle it, because the Lord didn’t built me strong enough.” Turning, he faced the sunset with his back to me. “You probable think I’m a sorry old fool.”
“No I don’t.”
“Well, you got cause. Here I be, trying to finish making a work collar for a dead mule. I got reason. Years back, her old collar got wore to sorry, so I promised Esme I’d fashion her ’nother.”
I wondered what I should do. Thank Mr. Nocker for my supper, tell him that I didn’t have any cartridges in the pistol, and leave?
Such would prove me a coward.
“Jewel’s in torment,” he said. “In the night, she tries to roll or git up, and the stiff makes her howl. It ain’t a hunting bugle. That I recall. It’s her death wail. She’s begging me to let her go home. Only reason I chew her food to keep her alive is because Jewel needs me. Esme don’t need me no more. Nobody do. It’s a crime for me to keep Jewel alive for so flimsy a reason. Ought to hang my head.”
I swallowed. “All right,” I told him.
“You’ll do her?”
“Yes.” I stood. “Mr. Nocker, do you want me to carry her to where you’ve dug her grave?”
He shook his head. “No. She mine and I’m hers. It’ll be the final thing I can perform for her. Our last walk together. I’ll burden her in a bit, after we say so long.”
I waited.
Mr. Nocker came, carrying Jewel, his unburied treasure. He walked slowly, perhaps to feel needed for one extra bonus of time. When my Ruger fired, Mr. Nocker clutched at his own heart, eyes clenched, as though the bullet had torn through him as well. He buried her. I offered to help but he wouldn’t allow. As I left, he took my hand. His palm was gritty with sand from the grave of a dead hound named Jewel. I had a hunch he wouldn’t soap it off.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
“I hope you finish Esme’s collar.”
“Oh, I will. I got it planned.”
“You have enough leather?”
Ed nodded. “Yes, and just enough days.”
Charlie Moon Sky
I OWN A SPECIAL KNIFE.
Charlie Moon Sky, a very senior Florida Seminole, made the knife for me. And to honor him and his tribe (providing they destroy no more panthers to prove their manhood), his knife will ride my leg.
During my lifetime, I have collected few trophies. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand:
Infantry badge, WWII
Chief of the Indian Guides
Mark Twain Award
Senior Games gold medal
One Seminole knife
Believe it or doubt it, I wouldn’t barter away any of the above in order to accept a Pulitzer or the Nobel. What little I have, I’ll keep, because all five fit me. Better yet, touching them continues to please. Secret ego trips. Not to be displayed, but tucked away somewhere, in a worn-out saddlebag.
Charlie Moon Sky and I met three decades ago, near a small South Florida town, Immokalee, east of Fort Myers. He knew the Okaloacoochee Slough as though he had planned it for a backyard garden. South of there is a mythical tree, perhaps even sacred, and I suspect a part of Charlie’s personal religion. A tall, very thick cypress, one that takes nine men, arms extended to link their fingers into an endless circular chain, to stretch around its great gray trunk.
And its legendary name is Nine Man Tree.
Charlie and I got to meet, and to distrust each other, in a span of minutes. He had just downed a panther. A magnificent f
emale. Worse yet, she appeared to me to have been pregnant.
“Are you ashamed?” I asked him.
He stiffened. “It is a part of my religion,” Charlie Moon Sky told me. “A tribal rite. It is a Seminole’s right to slay a panther. His heritage.”
Facing him square, I said, “Oh, is that so? Well, it just happens to be my religion to kill a Seminole. Unless I do, I won’t feel that I’m fully a man; not until I stretch a Seminole hide to dry on the side of my barn.”
His eyes blazed.
Yet, for the sake of a beautiful dead animal that had been needlessly slaughtered, I felt like making him squirm. With a bit of a swagger, I informed him that there were panthers in Vermont, and in Canada, much larger than their puny Florida cousins. This is true. “Panthers of this size,” I said, sneering at his kill, “are hunted by children, or by old women who are crippled or blind.”
He scowled.
But then, following a long pause, it became his turn to sneer. “How large,” he asked me, “are the panthers you kill?”
Shaking my head, I admitted the truth, that I had tracked them but never successfully. Recently I’d tried finding panthers in a Florida swamp and never saw one. Only scat and paw prints. No cat. I confessed that, between the two of us, he was the better hunter.
In agreement, he nodded slowly.
“This panther,” he said quietly, “I stalked and killed with an arrow. One arrow. I don’t own a gun. Do you?”
“I own guns, but I don’t like killing animals for sport. Only for food. But that was yesterday, back when I was young and my hair hung black to my shoulders.”
“You are honest,” he said, “for a white man.”
It was time to play my ace. So, I informed him that my grandmother (her Indian name before marriage was Nellie Saint John the Baptist) was an Abenaki Indian, from Canada. Her father’s name was Iron Knife.
Almost on cue, he pulled his knife. “I bet,” he told me with a slight smirk, “that so great a woodsman as you knows how to skin a panther.”
“No,” I said. “But if you’ll allow me to watch, I’m willing to learn. In fact, I’ll lend you a hand if I can.”
I watched him using the knife. There was little to be gained by more talk. Sometimes, when two men work silently together, more gets done.
He used the knife well. Even though wanting to stand closer, to observe, I kept my distance, more for Charlie than for me. After three days in the swamp, my body and my clothes didn’t smell very social. Seminoles inhale well, I imagined. Therefore, it was not my intention to allow Charlie Moon Sky to wrinkle his nose, proving that my clan smelled muckier than his. Earlier, I’d been caught in an Everglades downpour. My khaki shirt, already soiled with sweat, stunk beyond ripe. Without thinking, I moved an inch closer.
“You smell,” he told me.
“I do today. Not always. Please remember that I’m a long way from my home in Orlando.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he told me, “you said the word please. My ears do not hear that often.”
“I’ll say it again. Because I want to own a knife like yours. Please make me one and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”
He held up his weapon. “For a knife?”
“Yes. A new knife, with no panther blood to disgrace it.”
“I will do it,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed. “What if I make you a knife but you don’t return here to get it?”
Handing him a one-hundred-dollar bill, I said, “In that case, you keep the money and the knife.”
He didn’t accept the money. Instead, he gave it back to me, and I returned Ben Franklin to his distinguished company.
Looking at me, he said, “You and I become ocholotatees.” (I can’t spell or speak it right.)
“What’s that?”
“Enemies who talk.”
“We are not enemies,” I said. “Both of us have American Indian blood.” (I avoided that insensitive term Native American.) “We, in different ways, respect panthers.”
Standing close to him, I blessed my British bloodline that helped me to grow to four inches over six foot. Regardless of what you may think, height means leverage. I smiled down at him.
It pleased me when he slyly returned my grin from below, and then told me, “I would have made you a knife for only fifty dollars.”
“A bargain is a bargain. I’ll pay a hundred. But I expect the best knife that a hunter could ever own.”
Over two months passed until I returned to South Florida, to his territory. Because he was a loner, Charlie wasn’t easy to locate. Finally did. No, he hadn’t yet made me a knife, because his sister had died. It would be improper to prepare a weapon during a period of mourning.
“How long will you mourn?”
To answer, Charlie Moon Sky held up all of his fingers, five times. “Fifty years.” Then he relaxed his face muscles and informed me that he had made a joke. We ate together. Gator tail. It tastes like burnt chicken. Without telling me what it was, he served some to me on a roasting stick. Luckily, I recognized it, as some Floridians would.
“You want a knife?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still have the one hundred dollars?”
Yanking it out, I showed it to him.
“Good. I make a knife.”
During my third visit, the knife became mine to keep. It was crudely handsome, sturdy, and I told him so as I paid him. Its sheath was much longer than the knife itself. He explained why: As a man’s hand hangs down from his shoulder, it rests exactly beside the knife’s handle. The sheath is secured from above by a belt; from below, by a leg thong, a shoelace-thin lanyard of twisted deer gut, a substance also used to make a bowstring. No knife is properly worn at a man’s hip, but rather at the outside of his upper thigh. Here it stays, unless it’s being used. At night, Charlie Moon Sky said, the knife sleeps in another scabbard.
His right hand.
Overall, this variation of Seminole knife is about thirteen inches long, including a four-inch handle. The wood is oak, now quite hard, but cut when the wood was green. A sprinkle of tiny colored stones, fragments, are embedded in its handle wood as decoration. Then the entire handle is dipped in warm resin, as a coating. The iron blade is smelted from ore, flattened by a hammer, honed by grinding it on a whetstone. It is crude, yet artistic.
“A knife is like a coral snake,” Charlie Moon Sky told me. “Not long, but beautiful and bloody.”
He showed me how to draw a knife. Never snatch the handle. Instead, in one graceful motion, a hand merely wipes the knife from its sheath. The thumb is forward, pointing downward, and the fingers guide the handle upward until the knife becomes horizontal. A blade is low and raw, ready to strike with its single fang of death.
I had to ask him a question.
“Has your knife ever stabbed a person?”
“No. A man carries a knife not to cause pain, but to prevent it. To protect kindness. All of Nature has weaponry. A pretty flower can be armed with thorns.” He smiled. “Besides,” he said, “for me, a knife isn’t a weapon. It’s a tool.”
Again and again, I kept pulling my new toy from its sheath, to look at it and to heft its balance in my hand. “Charlie, this is the finest knife I will ever own. Thank you for making it.”
“Good.” He nodded once. “I am pleased for you. Now it is yours to carry. Be careful. The blade is sharp.”
“I’ll be cautious. You have my promise that I will not dishonor you by abusing your knife.”
“Be sharp enough to own it.”
Charlie and I stopped being enemies, yet never became friends. In a sense, we were the last Mohicans, two men representing ancient tribes at war. Too old to continue battle. I confess, I never really liked him. Nor did he take to me. Perhaps we fascinated one another: a mongoose and a cobra.
Knowing him, I once mused, was close to having a citrus rat in your flower bed. It might be folly to get too close, or to trust it. There is a gap between a truce and a trust. I felt
Charlie didn’t trust me. Why should he? I was never forced to live on a reservation, or railroaded to Oklahoma, or humiliated, or denied my way of life. There was, I always sensed, a quiet fire inside Charlie Moon Sky. Contained yet smoldering, graying to ashes.
Charlie died a number of years ago.
Did he die as he had lived, alone? Knowing his time had come, seeking the endless sea of grass in South Florida, perhaps to climb a cypress so old and so tall that it reaches beyond the sky?
Is there a Nine Man Tree? If so, no living man, young or old, could ever hope to climb it.
Only a soul.
Warm Quilts
FLORIDA FELT CHILLY THAT MORNING.
I’d stopped for gasoline at an outdated two-pump station beside a red-clay road on the Florida Panhandle.
Research, for my dough, is not library work. It’s finding the back paths—lonely, beckoning—and scouting rural areas. Prospecting. There are dirt roads aplenty here, connecting Florida and Georgia and Alabama. A good place to strike gold among grit.
A frayed rope had been strung horizontally from the front corner of the fill-up station to a pine tree that stood seventy feet away. The rope sagged with homespun merchandise. On the pine, a crudely lettered sign read:
WARM QUILTS
I’d seen close to a dozen signs for QUILTS along these roads and had resisted considering a purchase. This particular sign felt cozy. Warm.
Nearby stood an elderly woman wearing a ratty old Army coat, a gray scarf, no stockings, and a pair of man’s shoes. Knowing nothing about shopping for roadside bedding, I walked to the nearest quilt, one in two colors. Yellow and white. The quilt’s maker had somehow captured sunshine and woven the strips of cloth into a rectangle of solar strength.
My hand touched its softness.
The old woman approached me. “I call that’n ‘Sunday Morning,’” she said, in a voice as gentle and comforting as her quilt. “I give ’em all a name.”
Walking along in front of the row of quilts, I stopped at each one, allowing the quilter to introduce us.
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