Go ye forward, then.
Les Standiford
Miami, Florida
August 2020
Part I
Original Gangsters
Pineland
by Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Goulds
(Originally published in 1925)
Larry Gibbs was thankful that the roughness of the road took all his attention, because he had no idea what to say to a woman whose son has just been hanged. She sat like a stone beside him in the front seat of the car. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her cheap black skirt covering her bony knees and the worn toes of her shoes to which still clung some particles of sand from around Joe McDevitt’s grave. The heavy black veil which muffled her hat and her face gave off the acid smell of black dye. Her hands in black cotton gloves with flabby tips that were too long for her fumbled with a clean folded handkerchief in her lap.
All around them the white brilliance of the Florida noon poured down upon the uneven road from the burial place, caught on the bright spear points of palmettos and struck into nakedness the shabby houses among stumps of pine trees of this outskirt of Miami. The light and the hot wind seemed whiter and hotter for the figure of Sarah McDevitt in her mourning.
It was Jack Kelley, the man who had turned state’s evidence on the Pardee gang case, who had told Larry he would loan him an automobile if he would take Sarah McDevitt home. It was the same Jack Kelley who had started the fund to provide Joe McDevitt’s body with decent burial. He had seen to it that his own figure had a prominent place in the newspaper photographs of the grave, which next morning would assure all Dade County that the Pardee gang, including the McDevitts, was at last broken up, either by being driven from Florida or doing endless terms in prison camps, like George McDevitt; or like Joe here, made safe for Southern progress with a stretch of rope, a pine coffin and a few feet of Florida marl.
“Go on now,” Jack Kelley had said, pushing at Larry with large, firm pushes. “There’s a story in Sarah McDevitt yet. The last of her boys gone and she going home to sit and listen to her pine trees, see? A nice little front-page story, see? And you might just mention the canned goods I’ve put in the back of the car for her. Enough to last her a month. Here you are, Sarah McDevitt. Larry Gibbs will take you home, see?”
Larry wondered miserably if she were crying behind that stuffy veil. He had not seen her face yet. He had never seen her before.
She had not come to the trial, although he wondered a little why Joe McDevitt’s lawyer had not brought her in for her effect on the jury. He thought of Joe McDevitt as he had been then, lounging, copper-haired, a sleek reddish animal, his veins crammed with healthy life. He had not shown much interest even when the facts about the bank robbery and the cashier’s death were made damningly evident.
Now Joe McDevitt was dead. It had made a tremendous impression on Larry. It was his first big court case since he had been on the paper. He had written home to his mother that he was seeing the real bedrock of life at last. He pictured his mother reading it in her breakfast room in Brookline, turning the pages of his letter with that little look of amused horror on her distinguished face. She would hope he would not be obliged to come in close contact with miserable creatures in jails.
He had written with affected carelessness about interviewing McDevitt the man-killer, but secretly he was thankful that he had not had to cover the hanging this morning. The other court reporter had done that. But this business of taking home the mother was almost as bad. It made him feel perfectly rotten. She was so quiet.
“That road,” she said to him suddenly, and he flushed and jerked the car around on the way she had pointed. He was taken completely by surprise that her voice could be so clear and firm.
“This is... this is the Larkins Road, isn’t it?” he asked hastily to prevent the silence from forming again. “I didn’t know it was surfaced yet.”
But she said nothing, and he continued to stare forward at the road paralleling the shine of tracks, the shine and glitter of palmettos on the other side. The sky ahead was steely and remote, and it made his eyes ache. A corner of her veil snapped outside the car. Every once in so often her hat joggled forward over her forehead and she pushed it back and wiped her face with the wad of her handkerchief. He was somehow sure that it was not tears she wiped.
He turned to ask her if she would not like to have him stop somewhere and get her a glass of water, and saw for the first time that her skin was pale and clammy with heat. Her mouth, with the deep soft wrinkles on it of an old woman, was half open and panting. But as he spoke she closed her lips in a tight line and looked at him straight out of faded gray eyes within faded lashes. There was nothing feeble in her glance. She pulled off her hat abruptly and her thin gray hair blew against the brown skin of her forehead.
When they had passed by the stores and railway station of Larkins she began slowly to take off her black gloves. She rolled them into hard balls, working and working at them sightlessly until he thought she would never let them alone. Her hands were curiously like the look in her eyes, vigorous in spite of the blotched brown skin stretched over the large-boned knuckles.
“What did Jack Kelley think he was going to get out of sending me home with a lot of canned goods?” she asked suddenly.
“Why — I don’t know,” Larry said. “He — I think he was just — I mean I imagine he wanted to show you he was sorry that you — that your—”
“Huh!” she said, and her voice was dryly deliberate. “Any time Jack Kelley spends money you can bet he knows right well where he’s going to get something for it. I guess maybe he figured you’d put something in the paper about it.”
Larry was always sharply conscious when his fair skin reddened. “But, Mrs. McDevitt, I wouldn’t write anything you wouldn’t want me to write. I—”
“I could tell you to write something Jack Kelley wouldn’t want you to write, about the time he tried to do me out of my homestead. I guess he wouldn’t relish that much.”
“When was that?” Larry leaped eagerly to the question. He felt easier, now that she was talking. The only sense of strain of which he was aware was the slow dry way she talked, as if her tongue were swollen and sticky. “Tell me about that, won’t you?”
“Oh — it wasn’t much. Nothing to put in the paper. He just wasn’t so smart’s he thought he was. It was one time about two years after I come down on my land here. McDevitt’s mother up in Vermont wrote me that George was awful sick. I’d been working in Miami, waiting on table like I did in the six months they let you live off your homestead, and it was time I went back on it, but I got permission from the land agent to leave long enough to go north and look after my children.
“In Jacksonville I met this Jack Kelley between trains, that I’d seen coming into the restaurant time and again, and the minute he saw me he knew I was supposed to be on my land. ‘Well, Sarah McDevitt,’ he says to me. ‘So the pineland was too much for you, was it?’
“‘When you see me giving up my pineland you can have it yourself, Jack Kelley,’ I says to him, and thought no more of it. But don’t you believe it but that man turned right around and come back to Miami and started to file a counterclaim against my property. And now he thinks he can fool me with canned goods. Jack Kelley. Huh!”