Rumors are spreading in the country. At night in the “Hernando hotel” lounges, we attend the railroad commission’s meeting, presided by the illustrious major Parsons, Bayport’s potentate.

            Before embarking on building the railroad up to Brooksville, the Peninsular Railroad Company wants to obtain from the country’s capitalists an amount of one hundred thousand dollars that it will repay in traffic bonds. A capitalist’s horde  immediately commit themselves, led by major Parsons, and a hundred of land owners who in the absence of money, makes available to the company ,between five and forty acres of land, also collectable in traffic bonds. The capitalists suggest to the company to take the financial responsibility for those plots of land in order to resell them at its own risk, - to its advantage more than probably.

            The following day, all the town’s empty fields had reached a fantastic augmentation of value. In the morning of the day before, one talked about fifty dollars per acre; today, it is two hundred fifty and three hundred dollars. It is craziness, and we all acknowledge it.

This is the effect produced by the prospect of a railroad construction in a country which up to now was isolated of all communication. The land speculation is one of the most active agents in American fortunes, but one should not believe that it succeeds suddenly without any long planning. The happy landowners did not land in the country yesterday; they live here for many years, showed a lot of patience, and the prey was lusted for during days and nights.

It is the case for Major Parsons and his family. A detailed knowledge of the site’s topography precisely allowed him to lay his hands on the lands where it was necessary to build the station, and he gave them to the company under this strict condition, knowing well that this little sacrifice would be properly rewarded by the increase in value of the properties around, which of course belong to him.

Everyone is developing its own layout. One speculator wants to secure himself a bar site, next to the train station; he does not ask the opening permit to the authority, but to his fellow citizens.  The bar candidate is subjected to the election. I see him asking for votes…scattering dollars. His election will cost him about three hundred dollars and he will have to pay to the internal revenue an annual trading license of six hundred dollars, three thousand francs! It is very expensive, but also very lucrative.

Once owner of the bar, he will be the equal of any kind of government official, judges, treasure department employees, police commissioners, every one of them elected by their fellow citizens.

The butcher, in his little shop looking like a fairground stand, is dreaming of slaughtering hundreds of oxen. Here is just passing by a herd of cows intended for the town feeding. The butcher has organized a slaughterhouse in his home. He is going to kill. I will let myself dragged in to witness this butchering.

Cattle Brands

Everything with a handgun in this country! The victim is brought into a narrow paddock where it cannot make a move, and receives at point blank a bullet in the brains. Procumbis humibos. I check closely the owner’s brand marked on its flanks. It is shaped as a pair of glasses in the middle of which signs and letters were designed. This mark is printed in the town’s newspapers with the interdiction to load or park the animals which bear it without the owner’s or its agents’ approval.

Still in anticipation of the railroad and the beneficial effects it will bring to the town, a new sawmill was established one mile from Brooksville. Nice distance to avoid the wood transportation expenses, which are huge. Seeing this, the owner of the sawmill for which Vanier is the foreman is talking about building a wood railroad to cover quicker the ten miles separating it from Brooksville. The tracks are made of wood placed on wooden crossbeams. One saw in four lengthwise a whole pine tree, which are four tracks interlocked end to end, the right angle inside, to give to the wagon wheels a straight and even line. The pulling is either a steam engine or mules.

I go back to the sawmill hoping to see this interesting work starts, and also because a huge project like this one is likely to bring to Johanetville a rapid development. We did not forget that emerging town, located in the sawmill neighborhood, owns me its existence and its name. It’s for its sake that I went to San Antonio and that I am returning from.

            Will we have our church and our school? Are all the fathers asking me?

            - Certainly, but your priest will be more difficult to get. Catholic priests are very scarce in Florida.

            - Well we’ll settle for a pastor, it is the same thing.”

            For them yes, but not for me.

The problem is serious. We need a resident priest. But, to obtain it with a lot of difficulties, from the San Augustine archdiocese, we need to assemble at least two hundred parishioners around the church. We are just one hundred ninety eight short. I convened the catholic council, made up from Vanier and I, and this was what was decided:

Being too late in the season, the construction of the church – school will be pushed back to the month of October, but the framework will be immediately decided. From now one to this period, I will go to Canada in order to recruit Catholic settlers.

Having taken those resolutions, I implement them right away. The church will be erected in the middle of the main square, on the town highest point. It will be twenty meters long and eighteen meters wide, a real barn, surmounted by a kind of gazebo by way of bell tower. Everything like in San Antonio or Bethlehem.

In the yard I choose the necessary pieces of wood, and I order the shingles for the roof. I will have a superb church for three hundred dollars, one thousand five hundred francs! Back in France, I will receive from the generosity of the ladies of the apostolic charity all the cult ornaments.

We are the 10 of April. The thermometer indicates 76o Fahrenheit in the morning, or 24o Reaumur; at noon, 88o = 31o R.; at night, 72o = 22o R., which represent the higher temperature that we know in France. That promises to be fun for the summer.  In Florida, one works the less possible during the hot weather. The sawmill will be closing at the end of the month.

During the spring, a myriad of bugs are coming out, all more or less armed with an ill omen stinger, from the long ichneumon wasp, with its long hanging legs when flying, to the mosquito and the flea. We spend our night scratching, and during the day we fight against the ichneumon wasp whose stinger, very venomous, always try to find a place to sting. At dusk, large dragonflies with colored wings fly in the air: They seem to play brushing against one’s face. After all, as these are damsels, there is not much to say about it.

At night, the forest is glowing with millions of sparkles. These are the fire-flies, or fireflies, flying glowing worms, whose magnificent will-o the wisps shine and disappear into the night like tiny meteors.

During the time I observe this show so new for me, Lewis James the nigger obtain a monotonous melody from his violin, that Mrs. Arnold’s accordion accompanies in the distance. The palm trees lean their heads forwards with the breeze, mine is lost in the clouds.

When the music stopped, other sound harmonies came to charm my ears.

“Sundays and holidays, said Chateaubriand in Rene, I often heard in the forest, through the trees, the sound of the distant bell which called the fields men to church.”

Distant bell of which Rene heard the real twang, for my mistaken ear, misleading harmony! Mysterious nature’s voice which vibrates on the huge wind driven harps of the echoing pine trees, where are you coming from? Are you not the bell which chime at the Loire banks, and are your sounds not reaching me at the mercy of the West’s winds? How many times didn’t I hear you in the forest? Did not I recognize your calls where everything is! Yes, everything is in the bewitched daydreams where the home bell plunges us: religion, family, homeland, and the cradle and the tomb, and the past and the future!

Alas! During the night following this daydream, the mosquitoes’ buzzing reminded me too precisely of the motherland’s mosquitoes! What a deafen concert of troublesome! What tactless stings! I understood the lion’s fury.

Here is the day. The butterflies are asking to the first dawn’s rays to give back the sparkle to their shiny colored wings, the silver spiders are installing themselves comfortably to spend the day in the middle of their web, the doves dip their beaks into the lake. At the same time, every morning, their punctuality is so accurate, that we could assume that their small brains are adjusted by a clock device. All these small animals are making me forget the contemptible nights’ insects.

A roar rises in the distance, muffled rumor, relentless, sinister.

“It’s the fire in the forest” someone tell me with the most perfect calmness.

What! Fire in a pine trees forest, and no one is going ahead to kill, at big axe’s strokes, part of this flail!

No! They smile at my anxiety. But don’t you know, my poor men, that in Sologne or in the Landes, when a pine-wood is in fire, the tocsin calls for the population, the army, the magistracy, the clergy, and sometimes the firemen!

“Here, Sir, in the spring, the livestock’s owners are setting a fire at the four corners of the country in order to destroy the dry grass.

- It is very good for the grass, but the tree, it worth something in the forest! The fire attacks it in his vital element, the resin, this blood running in its veins. Exhausted by this yearly bleed, its growth is stopped. Seeing it so slim and so long, doesn’t it looks like, giving hope to ever put on weight, it rushed to go up in the air, in order to escape the blaze which devours its feet and comes most often brush against its skin up to its beard?

- The horned cattle do not care about trees! They are not edible! One answers me. They cannot see further than the end of their nose, which only business is to graze on the new grass as soon as it shows the first tips of its green needles.”

In my opinion, it is bad thinking. The countries where a big fine and even jail time in inflicted for the forests’ arsonists are better advised. That’s the way it is in the North of the United States and in Canada. Forests make the wealth of a country, especially the big wood, and Floridians are destroying it for a small benefit, livestock condemn to thinness for life.

While I am thinking like this, a white smoke, foretelling the flames, rise one hundred feet from us, for a length that we cannot estimate. The whole country is in fire. In front of it, we can see all the animals from Noah’s Ark, snakes, squirrels, rabbits, deer, and foxes. It looks like a general hunting beat, a relocation of all of this forest’ hosts. Let’s one assess our one shot hunt this day!  It was, in fact, very short: We had to protect the orange groves that I just planted.

The sawmill staff applied itself to this task the most ingenious way possible. Following the country’s tradition, everyone equip himself with a pine tree branch well furnished with green needles or a small stick. One dusts the fire!

In order to well understand this process, one needs to know that the fire runs, without leaving any other traces but ashes behind it. The flames line, which only progress is no more than forty centimeter wide. We easily smother this thin fire using the process that we just described.

As for the trees, after burning their bark to a height of two to three meters, the fire stops by itself. Sometimes it takes huge dimensions when it encounters a dry tree laying on the ground. If this resinous, as one call it, is next to one or a few live pine trees, a huge fire forms itself at their feet and devours them. On all the path of the brushfire, small fires  of this kind stay like witnesses during few days.

To protect the houses, the fences, and the plantations, one use to, every spring, plow all around them, three or four furrows, which stop the fire. Taken by surprise by it before having taken this precaution, we had to fight its advancement smothering it all along the front line.

I though that Mrs. Arnold, surrounded by the flames with her little boy, had to have been caught by a huge panic. I found her perfectly calm, and only busy getting bored as usual.

Obviously, in this country, one plays with fire, one is familiarized with it and all its forms: First the sun, very bright fire, then the lightning, the wood houses' blaze, the forest fire, the fireflies!

Yesterday, during the night, I attended the most beautiful blaze. In an half hour period, a huge wood house accommodating Doctor Marshall's pharmacy, in Brooksville, was reduced to ashes. it was a little bit isolated, otherwise the whole town would be gone. The neighboring constructions already had a strong smell of burning, and the resin was roasting with a desire to go up un flame. It was time for the house to fell with noise.

The very same evening that preceded this disaster, fortunately covered by an insurance, I did bought a stock of medications from Dr. Marshall, lint, bandages, and other useful accessories necessary for a first wound-dressing. I came in town for this purchase. During the day, the worker using the planing machine, had his right hand cut by the blades. The wounds are ugly to look at, but luckily not deep. I wanted for the injured to come to Brooksville to be treated. He refused, claiming to be more confident in me than in the country's surgeons, who have a vague knowledge of butchery.' you are French, he told me, you must be a good doctor."

This confidence honored too much France and one of its most inexperienced child in the art of medicine,  for me not to answer with an ironclad goodwill. After fifteen days, I had the satisfaction to give back to the injured a perfectly scarred hand, but in no way paralyzed in its moves.

With each dressing, this nice man was asking me how much he owed me.

Invariably I answered: " nothing."

He was looking at me with a touching eye and could not believe this eye. Like a good American, he was staggered that one could help others for nothing, for the love of others.

This wonderful treatment brought me a lot of clients. I was turning down people, I picked up a specialty, the one of the cut hands and fingers, from which I did not want to get out of, for anything. Think about it! people come to see me for a boil, I was asked to pull teeth, finally people came to me for a childbirth!

In America, luckily, Valere and Lucas' arguments are not followed against the stubborn doctors, and I was not beat up for refusing the role of The Mock Doctor.

I had at my service to do my cooking, a tall black, a small black and two small whites; I had only to criticize their dirtiness and their laziness, their stupidity and their complete ignorance of cooking. Most of the time I was forced to be their cook, and they found very nice for the roles to be reversed. One of the little whites, I should say one of the little yellows, as he looked made out of wax, was left to me by a bystander who took pity on him. His master was beating the living daylights out of him. I treated him, as per my temper, with kindness, and was thinking that, being happy in my home,  he would do everything in the world to stay.  He was so grateful that he even wanted me to do the dishwashing! he found this job well beneath him: right away, he was fired. Previously I was very patient not to push things further in the following circumstance:

I was in my bedroom, I was writing a letter. In the most charming manner, he came in, stood next to me and was trying to decipher my letter, written in French. I turn around, he backs up and go and lean back against a door. Curious to see up to where this incredible bad manner would go, I start to undress myself: he does not take his eyes of me. I get in my bed, he does not move. I blow out the light, he stays at the same place. seeing this, I relight the lamp, take him by the arm and throw him out.

This little American citizen, my equal except for his service, my superior working s a servant, is fourteen years old, at least he thinks so, because he does not know where he was born, and does not know what happened to his father and his mother. He believes that he left them in Georgia.

He will not turn out to be a worse American than another one, provided that his bloodless veins get filled with a generous blood.

This anemic's successor was a same age little boy, but stocky, sharp eyed, a real forest's boy. He read perfectly well, write and calculate, meaning everything an American must known. His father built a very comfortable house for this area, on his homestead ( his concession), located two kilometers away, and he planted a small orange groves and a small garden. The little Ross Kellish, the same one we took with us to Bayport and who left us afraid that, if we could not manage on our own on the wikiwachee, we would need his help, Ross Kellish, I said, only thought to earn dollars, and he was doing everything for that. sometimes he was cooking for the sawmill workers, sometimes he was carrying the wood sawdust, sometimes he worked for me. His ambition was to earn fifty cents per day and to be fed. If one did not agree to his terms, he preferred not to work  and went to help his father. One day, I found him at the bottom of a well, filling up a bucket with dirt which was brought up by his father with a hoist help.

When he was tired of the paternal house, he would leave on his own will, came back to the sawmill, or disappeared for one month without worrying his begetter by his absence. Despite many serious flaws ( who would be exempt from with such an education?) , Ross was a appealing boy and for me a odd type to study. Resourceful to the extreme, real true Robinson by dint of running though the woods, he will end up making  his way, not as a cook, for instance!

My tall and my little negro would have deserved to be beaten, but "French cannot beat" as the negros  were saying during slavery time, after receiving a series of whiplashes. This negro saying, which was recently reminded to me by an old Floridian slave, grey beard on black canvas, delightfully tickled my ear. What most beautiful praise to do to French humanity than this debility which suddenly paralyzes our hand, strong to hold a sword, inept to swirl in the air the whip which must lash the patient's shoulders? This incapacity certificate for the executioner role given by the victim himself, isn’t it the most honorable from which France can pride itself on? The larger switcher of negros, it is the Spaniard. The Frenchman is neither a whiplash giver, like the German, nor a five leather strip whip, like the English: and when in the past he was forced to use a whip, he had something in the palm of his hand which prevented him to hold it tied, it was his heart.

Besides, the negro was not short of good masters, of every nationalities, evidence the Garay family, of Brooksville, who does  not own more devoted servant than the old James family, the fiddler Lewis James' father and mother. Thanks to her, these older slaves live in great ease, own a good house in Brooksville, an orange groove not far from town, well located lands and well cultivated fields. The father still works during the day, the mother cooks a cuisine well praised buy the travelers at the Hernando Hotel, Lewis serves  the host table, helps the butcher to cut up the beefs, catches the horses which escaped in the forest, hunts the deer during the night and is always smiling. His sister plays the harmonium like a caretaker's  daughter. Very strange this instrument, even stranger its music. I glance through her notebook: among the negro dances, party-man by nature, I find the "Cloches de Corneville" waltz!

A lot of whites are not furnished as well as this negro family, without any doubt the more titled of the colored aristocracy. A living room, please, where they  greet me simpering like apes. I admire the colored lithography nailed to the walls. Suddenly I have the idea to offer to the black young lady a picture of Joan of Arc riding a horse, an Epinal picture, published by Herluison, of Orleans. At once, it is hanged up between Washington and La Fayette. Not badly done, this heroes' gathering! If by any chance a Frenchman passes through this place, I can just picture his surprise  to find the Heroic Maid of Orleans.

One day, Lewis James enters my home.           

"He is dead, the old man, the old one, " he says.

I jolted. Maybe one can remember that in this country, a shady looking  character , with little facetious eyes, exploiter of others, contractor of huge businesses dead before their starts, was so named. He had in his mind a spectacular project, the usage of plants, textile according to him, which grow in huge swamps, in the lake Okechobee's Everglades, but which, in everyone's opinion, would not have been enough to make a rope to hang him once put together.

He had hired Lewis James and was gone with him. Lewis james came back alone, what happened to the old man?

Before answering this question, we have to teach to the reader what are the Everglades.

The Everglades are swamps, with no limit other than the sea. they take up the whole South of Florida, from the ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the 25th to the 27th degree of latitude North.

"Once there, said father Jabry to the Marquis de Compiegne, you will be in the land of fevers and misery, putrid swamps and mosquitoes, Seminole Indians and rough out laws (outlaw peoples) a lot worse than them."

This picture is not full. It is unfinished: countless rattlesnakes, frightful alligators, ferocious panthers, huge bullfrogs, live in those dens, under  a scorching sun. Happy are the outlaws when at night they can only say, with all the horror Victor Hugo putted in his verse:

And one feel under his foot the flabby back of a toad !

The Everglades are the container, the tank,

 

 

LEFT OFF PAGE 198- HALF WAY

(Translated by Gataen Gasset, November 2008- Copyright © 2008- 2010 by Jeff Cannon)