Freeman Island

A Novel
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937674-07-6
Verlag: Barkley Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 212 Seiten

The Island takes place on an ageless 800 acre duck hunting club on the Illinois River, land where the Illini Indian Confederation dominated for centuries before the white man came to North America. One can feel their presence. Hank Edson owns the island and it's more than a playground for this Chicago contractor, it's built with his sweat and dreams, the very essence of Hank's powerful life. But the island comes with its own legacy, the old time market hunter and local redneck, Gart Haggard. Not a young man, Gart's life-long reputation is that of an outlaw poacher, hot-headed and dangerous one moment, soft-spoken and generous the next. In his unsettled mind, the island is his by some strange birthright and the only way to achieve his goal is to drive Hank off this land. Fire is and always has been his weapon. A chilling story of two men in deadly conflict, the one honorable and immovable, the other arrogant and unstoppable, their confrontation growing as slowly and inexorably as Spanish moss. Hank is not a man to be driven off anything, particularly this ancient and mystic land that's so much a part of his soul. And thus the story unfolds. Set in a last best place where hunting ducks is inseparable from the character of the land, anyone who has sat out a cold, wet morning in a duck blind will be drawn to The Island.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freeman, Jim

Leseproben

Chapter One It was gonna be a hell of a fire. He hoped he didn’t get blowed out of the water. The old man poled the johnboat silently across the night-black waters of Eckles Lake, the motor shut down and raised out of the water. He was alone, standing on the stern seat, working the pole against a mud-bottom just a few inches deep, watching for the darker shadow that would tell him he was where he meant to be. He shoved, listened to the slap-slap of thin water against the squared off flat-bottom, then pushed again. A fingernail of moon showed briefly through scudding clouds as though a door had swung idly open just a crack in a night-darkened drafty house, to reveal a flickering candle in the hall. The moon was no use to him, an annoyance of exposure. The lake and the big river that fed it was known to him, lived-in a lifetime, each creak on the stair a comfort, every slap of water as natural as a ticking clock. He was old, but not insignificant in his years as city people become, the decades ambushing them in the shaving-mirror. Certainly not a man you’d pass on the street without notice, notice fairly screamed from his silhouette. Erect and purposeful, a Moses descending. Alone in the boat, he’d easily pass for just another duck-hunter out in predawn to set a spread of decoys, a common enough event in this far southern Illinois hunting country as the opening of the season approached. As natural to the casual observer as the structure he approached, a duck blind. Not a modest hide some local farmer might throw up on a weekend to try his luck after crops were in, but a massive double-sided blind, its camouflaged shooting platforms separated by a covered and brushed boat-slip large enough to shelter an eighteen-foot johnboat. Christ, you couldn’t miss it, fingernail moon or not. Seventy some years in these waters and he could have made the trip stone blind. Would have, too. A serious piece of work this blind, looking for all the world like a small floating island, camouflaged to the water-line with willow. Room enough for six shooting north or, if the wind were to switch, shooting south with equal ease. A dog-ramp trailed down into the water from each corner for the alert Labradors, thick-coated Chesapeakes or Water Spaniels shivering with anticipation. Inside, lined against the back walls, convenient benches faced racks awaiting steady old Model 12 pump-guns, gleaming inlaid Purdy doubles, heirloom Winchester 21’s, Berettas from Italy and the less fancy but reliable Remington 1100’s. Good gun. Shot one his own self. Ducks were shot seriously in this backwater country along the Illinois River. Millionaires from Chicago missed the opening of the Opera with their bejeweled wives to shoot shoulder to shoulder with college professors, garage mechanics, stockbrokers and plumbers drawn to this shared activity not by social or economic class, but by a migration stronger than either. Equal among equals, squinting into dawn skies, their wives and businesses abandoned as they murmured over shared coffee, listening to the sky more than looking, always listening. But no decoys lay piled in the old man’s johnboat, no dog stood alert in the bow. True enough a shotgun lay alongside him, loaded but not for ducks, not this time anyway. For the old man to move across land or water without a gun in his hand or at his side would be out of his character. Where stacked decoys would lie several weeks hence, four five-gallon cans of #2 fuel-oil rode heavily ahead of the middle seat, two with proper caps, two more stoppered with flannel torn from a long-discarded shirt. He chuckled to himself and at precisely that moment the moon chose to show itself as two hundred mallards, startled by this gliding apparition wakened and rose ahead of the johnboat in panic. It made him itch. All those birds and no punt-gun fastened to the bow, string to trigger. The way it was done by market -hunters in sneak-boats by the covering darkness of similar nights and he’d taken pleasure and profit in that illegal work until the fancy restaurants in Chicago were made to account for their wild-duck l’orange. It made him itch. There were nights he’d killed two hundred ducks in a single pull of the string at a dollar a piece, in times when men worked for a dollar a day and there was no work. Sneaking out before, after, during the season on lakes that might easily hold ten thousand resting ducks, rafted up together with heads under wings---pole his way in, just as he was doing now, then nearing the edge of a raft make one quick whistle and pull the string. A thousand heads raised, the punt gun strapped down like a small cannon in the prow of the boat, loaded with carpet-tacks because they were cheap. Kill two hundred before they even took flight. Don’t bother with the cripples, just pick up the dead and get out. A farmer waking to the single 2am blast would recognize it for what it was and merely roll over, figure three more hours ‘till milking. A warden would hear and know he’d been snookered once again and try to figure which lake among hundreds the shot came from and where the landing might be. It made him itch. His johnboat nudged the blind and he could smell the new lumber, rough-sawn and recently nailed, tar-papered, chicken-wired and camouflaged with green willow fresh cut and layered in. Nice job, as nice a piece of work as he could have done himself and he admired the work as he prepared to destroy it, splashing one can, then another over the structure. It took the better part of half an hour, but he had the time and this was a labor of love. Not an act of revenge against a man, although he’d handled a few of those in his time. Hank was an okay guy for an outsider and he’d stood to buy him a beer from time to time just after he’d ravaged some small or large part of Hank’s duck hunting operation. He wasn’t quite sure why he did that, the offer of beer that is, maybe because he did like him, liked the way he leaned right into the work and valued the island like he valued the island. He knew why he ravaged. There was a kind of greed in those confrontations over offered beers that went unaccepted, both men knowing the truth and one of them daring the other to put a stop to it. But it didn’t matter, not really. There was no stopping a man who won’t be stopped. Took him twenty years to close down the original club. Bastards, they all had money, Chicago money and they paid to rebuild what he burned, replace what he stole and tore up until they all got old and tired of paying, spending more time drinking and playing cards than hunting and finally they all went home for good, all but Hank Edson. Damn the luck, before the old man could find a backer, young Hank stepped in and bought the place. Rightfully his place. It made him itch. Oh, he’d maybe never of owned it, but it was rightly his place all the same and if he could never own it, no man would be comfortable on it. Not while he drew breath, while he could pole a johnboat in the pitch dark and come up with the scratch for twenty gallons of fuel oil. So Hank hung in for twenty years as well, but he was losing, you could tell he was losing if you had eyes for it. The old clubhouse leaned a bit more with every season and it was hard to get share-croppers to put up with the only access to the island being a hand-ferry. Not easy cranking a semi of corn or beans across the cut that formed the island. Yeah, he’d a figured Hank to wear down sooner, but he’d wear out all the same and he reached for the last can. Gonna make a dandy fire. The cans empty, the old man backed off some and studied the sheen of oil on water. Satisfied, he bent to strike a wooden match, the glare momentarily reflecting his turquoise and silver bracelet. He flipped the match against a side wall, a corner of the willow branches caught, stuttered as if to go out, then spread into fingers of side-fire and suddenly woofed into sheeting conflagration. A thousand mallards left the lake, maybe two thousand, it was a little early for the migration. It made him fucking itch. *** Hank Edson and Dwight Twill sat on the bow of Hank’s big eighteen foot johnboat, hip waders cuffed like firemen’s boots, legs hanging in the water at what was left of number sixteen blind. There wasn’t much. She was burned to the waterline, a portion of the west wall still standing and blackened, charred timbers held together by nothing more than chicken-wire, most of the pilings merely smoking stubs barely above water. Hank swung his legs in slow circles, ripples on the lake widening to gently rock a scurf of ashes. It was six-thirty and neither had eaten the breakfast begun at the clubhouse, a carton of eggs open on the counter, refrigerator door still hanging wide where Hank rummaged for bacon and orange juice when he heard Dwight’s exclamation from the dining room. “Oh, Jesus.” He’d just stumbled out his bedroom off the far corner of the dining room, a cluttered nest he’d occupied since becoming Hank’s help, hunting companion and best friend eight years earlier. Sleepy-eyed and half awake, hopping on one sock-foot from the doorway, pulling a muddied pair of jeans up his other leg and thinking about coffee, he’d glanced out the dining room window to check the weather. Weather was the heartbeat of the island---every activity and plan depended on it. Far down across the yellowed cornfield, past the boat ditch and out in the direction of Eckles lake, a dwindling pall of smoke rose above the tree-line. “Jesus what, pardner?” Hank’s hand hovered over the orange juice. “Fire on...