Strawman's Hammock Read Online Free Page A

Hammock had survived for more, in some cases much more, than a hundred years. Their limbs—unlike the slash pine that grew close to tall, slender trunks in uniform rows over endless tracts of company land—spread out widely from thick, heavily barked trunks in stands of trees arranged only by the random deposit of conifers.
    Resin seeped from those ancient trunks like maple syrup. The pinecones were large. They reminded you, when opened, of pineapples. Even the straw was different from the straw of slash pines, bursting from pods of pinecones in circles or starbursts of heavy needles, a rambunctious and native parallel to its polite and manufactured cousin.
    The hammock itself had so far remained unspoiled only because a private landowner refused over the years to sell his acreage to St. Regis, or Buckeye, or any of the other pulpwood mills coveting the acreage. It was rumored that this would soon change, that a probated will would see the land awarded to heirs only too happy to plant the land in regular rows of domestic pine and exploit its value on the market. When that happened Hezikiah Jackson would be forced from the land whose usufruct she had enjoyed, some said, for more than ninety years.
    Hezikiah’s homestead squatted deep inside a tract whose boundary was no more than five miles as a crow would fly from Loyd Linton’s comparatively modern hunting grounds. But unless you were a crow that wouldn’t help you. A single, twisted sandy rut of road wound a serpentine path along the periphery of the Hammock, but did not penetrate to the hammock’s interior. Contemporary hunters lazy with their deer blinds and truck-mounted towers seldom hunted on foot anymore, and so seldom ventured anywhere into Strawman’s Hammock.
    You had to have a good reason to come here. A better reason yet to risk the snake bites, quicksand, and mantraps that threatened pilgrims wending their treacherous way to Hezikiah’s stark homestead. Locals said the place was haunted, the ghost of a slain Creek or Seminole chieftan, Billy Bowlegs, say, or Osceola remaining to torture the souls of Spaniards or U.S. calvary. Hezikiah’s shack was situated on what had surely been the mound of some ancient Indian or marauding community. When rain was plentiful you could see, exposed from the sand, arrowheads or occasionally the rusted crest of alien armory.
    A clearwater spring fed a limestone aquifer that extended east and away from the mound’s ancient site. Hezikiah drew water cold as ice from that underground cistern with a hand-jacked pump. Even her dwelling was anachronistic, a completely unvarnished throwback to the days when cypress-shingled roofs, shotgun halls, and outdoor privets were the common denominator of regional architecture. The shack leaned dangerously to one side now, which suited Hezikiah fine, her bed now canted on an upslope grade. Good for the rhombisis, she’d say, and the sinuses.
    Let ever’thang stretch and drain.
    The single and characteristic breezeway that split the shack in half gave access on the one side to a pair of rooms, one of which housed a single, molding trunk and an unmade poster-bed, the other room doubling as kitchen and what Hezikiah described as “a settin’ place.”
    A man was sat down there, now, in the sitting place, his knotted arms anchored akimbo with leather straps to the rests of a home-crafted chair. The chair was made of cypress, its joined limbs bent when green to take the shape, its leather-lashed armrests now arresting a Latin man, brown and sunbeaten and bathed in sweat before the ancient crone who limped in from her kitchen.
    The settin’ room was completely unsegregated from the kitchen. The Latin American strapped to her childhood furniture could see clearly the cornucopia of herbs and medicinals that Hezikiah had collected over nearly a century of shamanlike administration. Shelves of dog fennel and deer tongue dried open to the air