After dinner the men were seated in the dining room enjoying their cigars when Ernest Hemingway lumbered in, his arm bandaged from a recent accident. He was red-faced and joking in Spanish with Juan Miguel Pinto, the ranch foreman. In the two hours it took Juan Miguel to chauffer Hemingway from his Miami hotel, the writer and the ranch hand had apparently forged a friendship.
It was to be a quick stop for Hemingway, enroute to Key West, making this detour to shake hands with two of America’s great geniuses, gab a little around the bonfire, and drink some first-class whiskey with the legendary Earl Hammond Sr.
Earl Junior could have cared less about the lightbulb man or the manufacturer of the Tin Lizzie. But he was enthralled with Hemingway and dogged him all evening. At the campfire he sat on a log behind the great man and memorized his every move.
President Hoover appeared well after dark, accompanied by a single federal agent. There was a one-bodyguard rule at Coquina Ranch, for otherwise Earl Hammond feared the place would be overrun with Pinkerton men and gun-toting thugs, and the camaraderie between the guests would be compromised. Hoover saluted the others, and they returned the greeting with affection—all but Hemingway. By then well drunk, he began to fume about the fatheaded Quaker and his prohibitionist policies, until Earl Senior stepped in and quieted the writer down.
The logs burned and young Earl watched the vines of sparks twist up into the dark sky as if they meant to take root in the heavens. The discussion ricocheted from topic to topic so quickly the ten-year-old could barely keep up. Earl’s father congratulated Hemingway on his new novel, which he believed was the best war story he’d ever read. The praise sent Hemingway rambling on about his exploits on the Italian front in that long-ago conflict. Everyone listened politely to the familiar narrative until finally the writer paused to take a long swallow of whiskey.
President Hoover cleared his throat and remarked on Mr. Edison’s many contributions to the war effort, perhaps less well publicized than Hemingway’s but of critical importance in the ultimate victory. The president ticked off a few of Edison’s wartime inventions: a ship telephone system, an underwater searchlight, anti-torpedo nets, and navigational equipment. The list seemed to come as a surprise to Hemingway. After that young Earl caught the author giving the half-deaf inventor respectful glances.
Prohibition took its turn as a topic, and Hoover had his say, mostly religious tripe. Ford, a teetotaler, chimed in with a homily about the devilish effects of liquor on his workers. Sulking in silence, Hemingway sipped his drink and stared into the fire, his cheeks flushed as if the flames of the log fire were singeing them.
Finally the matter that lurked in the background all evening broke forth. The stock-market crash of the previous October, the rising rate of bank failures, and the economic misfortunes that were spreading poverty and gloom across the land.
In a somber voice, President Hoover described a certain gala that Henry Ford had hosted the previous fall in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s invention of the lightbulb. Hoover, along with the major political and financial leaders of the country, showed up in Dearborn, Michigan, for the event. It was Hoover’s view that in the fifty years since the lightbulb first flickered on, Edison, Ford, Firestone, and Durant had transformed America from a third-rate power into the world’s industrial giant. Then, tragically, only seven days after those festivities in Michigan, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression was under way.
“Well, there’s a pretty picture for you,” Hemingway said. “A gang of Neros fiddling while the world catches fire.”
Nobody had a response for this cynic of the new generation. Young Earl shifted uncomfortably as the other men looked away from his hero and stared into the flames or into the dark woods that surrounded them.
Hoover broke the silence with a short address on the need for voluntary and local responsibility when it came to feeding and caring for the growing population of poor. It sounded like something he’d lifted from one of his speeches.
“This is not the time to grow the government larger. This is the moment for churches and neighborliness.”
In Ford’s opinion, the downturn was going to be a very good learning experience for the country. His only concern was that it might not last long enough, in which case people would not have ample opportunity to learn enough.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Hemingway got to his feet, waving a dismissive hand at Hoover and Ford. “What we need is a big goddamn war. That would put things straight. And send everyone back to work in a hurry. Maybe Mr. Ford can put a word in with his buddy, Adolf.”
“What did he say?” Edison asked Ford.
Ford leaned close to the old man’s ear and gave him the sanitized version.
It was then that Earl Senior motioned to his son. Time to be off to bed so the men could speak freely.
Time for young Earl to dutifully march back to the lodge, climb up to his bedroom. Time to lie on his cot and sniff at the wood smoke clinging to the sleeves of his shirt, to stare at his own palm, which had touched the big paw of Ernest Hemingway. Time to lie awake and imagine what extraordinary things were being said around that campfire on the edge of the wild Florida pinelands.
When he finished the story, Earl rose, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and swabbed the sweat from his brow. He stretched his arms and blinked at Claire as if surprised to find her there. He smiled, turned his eyes back toward the darkness.
“So why that story, Earl? What’s it mean to you?”
“Just some ranch history, how it used to be.”
“But Coquina Ranch is still that way. Great men passing through, sitting around the campfire, having their mysterious talks.”
“We’ve been a little short of great men lately, wouldn’t you say?” Earl looked at her with curiosity.
Claire rubbed her palms on the legs of her jeans, cleaning off the sticky film of the wildebeest’s blood.
“That’s what you’re saying? You’d like to improve the guest list?”
He flinched as if such a thought was painful beyond imagining.
“Dad, if you don’t like how Browning’s running things, sit down and discuss it. He listens to you. He respects you.”
He shook his head as if somehow she was missing the point.
“That creature you’re skinning,” he said. “How do you feel about all that?”
It was Browning’s idea to convert two hundred acres of the ranch into a safari-style hunting preserve and import exotic African game. A scheme to wring more profit from the ranch. He’d selected a remote area of pastureland, pine forest, and scrub on the western edge of Coquina Ranch. It was the natural place, since the tract had been fenced decades before to hold German prisoners of war—a plan the war department canceled just weeks after the vast fence was completed.
These days corporate hotshots used the Hammonds’ landing strip, bunked in the primitive hunting camp on the preserve, and chased the game in dune buggies and ATVs. Most returned home with an exotic trophy. But because the initial outlay for the imported game had been far costlier than Browning had expected, so far the enterprise had failed to turn a profit.
Though neither man discussed it openly, Claire knew the safari scheme had created discord between Browning and Earl. Not because it was a bad investment, but because those exotic creatures violated the longstanding tradition of the Hammond clan of maintaining the natural history of the ranch, keeping the land unspoiled and the flora and fauna as close to native as possible.
“That story,” she said. “Were you suggesting Hemingway and Henry Ford and the others somehow cooked up World War II?”
Earl smiled.
“No, nothing that dramatic. But we did get a pretty nice lake out of the deal. That levee around Okeechobee, you might say that was Hoover’s gift to my dad.”
When she first arrived at Coquina Ranch and was acquainting herself with the area, Claire had driven over to the lake several times and hiked up the steep banks of the levee. It
was only forty feet high, but it towered above the flat landscape, allowing for an unbroken panoramic view.
Over a hundred miles of embankment circled Okeechobee, making it the second-largest freshwater lake in the United States. Only Lake Michigan was bigger.
The Hoover Dike had been built to prevent another flood like the one after the ’28 hurricane, which had drowned thousands of people in that farming region, but over the decades that dike’s unintended consequence was to fuel the explosive growth of Miami and the rest of South Florida. These days seven million souls relied on that reservoir for their drinking water.
“What I was getting at,” Earl said, “is that over the years a lot of good came from those campfires. Things that had nothing to do with profit or power. Positive things that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It pains me to see that go.”
“You think there’s a risk of that?”
He looked out into the murky night, his silver mane glowing in the lantern light, his brown eyes weary and evasive.
He swallowed, braced a shoulder against the doorway.
“Browning’s had six years to find his way,” Earl said. “I’ve tried to steer him the best I could, but I think we can see where he wants to take the ranch. The kind of men he’s surrounded himself with, and where that’s likely to lead.”
“Is this about that rapper and his girlfriend last month? Because that wasn’t Browning’s fault. The guy just showed up out of nowhere. I agreed to take him on a hunt. So blame me.”
“No, Claire. You’re missing my point. It goes much deeper than that.”
“Well, what’re you saying?”
“I’ve made a difficult decision, Claire. Coquina Ranch is about to change. It’ll be a radical new direction. There’ll be those who won’t like these changes, but that can’t be helped. I’ll leave it to your husband to explain the details, but I wanted to tell you face-to-face why I did it. Because as I see it, my duty is not simply to you and Browning and the children you’ll have someday. I have an obligation to my father, and the generations of Hammonds who have been faithful stewards of this land, working hard to preserve its traditions and natural beauty. I can’t let all that just disappear. I’ve tried to do what I thought best for all of us and for the land we love. One day, I hope you’ll come to agree.”
“What kind of change, Earl? What’s going on?”
He closed his eyes for several moments. When he opened them again, he drew a long breath as if he were hitching an enormous burden back onto his shoulders.
“I’ve said enough. Browning will have to explain the rest.”
She moved closer to him, opening her arms to embrace this man who was more father to her than her natural one, to give him what consolation she could provide. But she was a second late, for Earl Hammond missed the gesture and stepped away into the shadows of the corral, heading back toward the faint light of the lodge.
FOUR
* * *
ON THE SKINNING TABLE, THE wildebeest was spread-eagled on its belly. Blood drizzled into the stainless-steel gutters and drained into the spouts that disappeared into the concrete floor. Claire Hammond worked with quick, efficient strokes, slicing first at the middle of the rib cage an inch before the front legs and continuing up and across the shoulders.
When she’d finished that radial cut, she cleaned the blade on her towel and moved around the table to make another incision above the animal’s knees, then sawed the blade around the tough hide until she met the first cut. She wiped the blade again, then slid the tip into the back of the leg and carved downward to intersect with the incision above the knee.
The wildebeest was an African antelope with a long tufted tail and upturned horns curved inward like parentheses. The one lying before her was nearly four hundred pounds, its coat a bluish gray. The vapors rising from its pelt were funky with the manure scent of the marshland, and its dark blood was as plummy and sweet-smelling as a lush Merlot.
After she completed the knee cut, she stepped to a side table, switched on the grinding wheel, skimmed the blade against it, and bent into the shower of sparks.
Twenty-seven years old, Claire Hammond had a lanky build and shoulder-length hair the color of ripe peaches. She had her mother’s brown eyes and her dad’s prim mouth and fine, straight nose.
At least the nose started out that way. Now there was a pearly crimp at the bridge where she’d broken it playing volleyball on the university team. Her side lost the game, got knocked out of the regionals. Though, as her roommate, Sabrina, used to say, Claire scored big that day.
Lying on the gym floor, blood spilling from her broken nose, she was scooped up by none other than Browning Hammond, who whisked her off to the campus infirmary, then hung around till she was released two hours later.
Wild Dog Hammond, as he was known in those days, was cocaptain of the Miami Hurricanes, second team All-American defensive end, famous for batting down passes and body-slamming quarterbacks. Turned out he’d had a crush on Claire forever and came to all her home games. On several occasions her teammates had spotted him in the stands. How could you miss the guy: six-seven, two-eighty, shoulders out to there. But none of the girls had a clue who he was coming to watch. Until the day Claire went up to block a spike, her hands spread a little too wide.
After that day, Browning courted her with unstinting devotion. He arrived with bouquets at every date, Russian chocolates, books of sonnets. He had a round, boyish face with pale skin, bright red cheeks, and hardly any beard at all. He blushed easily and often. He was simple, plainspoken, calm, and unhurried. It was a steadiness she believed he’d acquired from growing up in a stable farming family and living close to the measured cycles of the land.
He was majoring in business and intended to take his book learning back to the ranch and run the place more efficiently when it came his turn to take charge. Not a sophisticated thinker or an intellectual in the usual bookish way, but smarter than any of the assorted jocks and college smoothies Claire had dated.
Socially he was backward, slow to hold her hand, slow to kiss her, slow to move beyond kisses, clumsy in bed at first, but enthusiastic and open about his lack of skill and willing to be tutored. Happy to go slower, use a lighter touch, read her rising cries, and try his best to time his orgasm to hers. He threw himself into learning about her body and its responses with the same dedication he’d used to master college football.
Though she kidded him about treating lovemaking as a sporting event, she did admire his devotion and his belief that with enough hard work there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish. Unlike Claire, he was not a natural athlete. On the football field, where he could have traded on his strength and bulk alone, Browning never slacked, but worked tirelessly to master the subtle spins and feints the best players in his position used to slip past blockers and attack the ball carrier. He was, in Claire’s view, a coach’s dream: physically gifted, hardworking, coachable, and a faithful team player.
Browning was so strikingly dissimilar to any man she’d ever been with, so dedicated to his family and its traditional way of life, so sentimental that at times he could be downright corny, so formidable in body and spirit, that against all reason she found herself falling for him.
After Browning Hammond entered her life, her careful career plans whipsawed in a new direction. A Connecticut girl, premed major, her idea was to return to New Canaan and partner with her dermatologist father. Now at odd moments, looking around Coquina Ranch, it still astonished her, the person she’d become instead. A Florida rancher’s wife who employed her limited surgical skills on creatures she hadn’t known existed six years before.
As a college girl she’d explored every nook of South Florida and indulged in its full array of diversions. The sugary beaches, the decadent clubs, the ethnic cafés, the tiki bars with reggae booming out across the bay. In four years she’d mastered the gaudy landscape, the overheated driving, the spicy salsa of cultures and languages, and the triple-espresso pace. She’d earned he
r South Florida green card. Sand on her bare feet, gold American Express tucked in her string bikini. Fluent in the glib and jaded lingo of her generation, and with just enough Spanish to get by.
But on those first trips with Browning, driving an hour beyond Miami’s fringe to visit his grandparents, Claire was blown away to discover another Florida a century out of step with the urbanized coast. Rodeo gals and shit-kickers and migrant laborers in cowboy shirts. Pickup trucks plastered with pissed-off decals and shotguns racked in the back window. Lettuce fields, sod farms, and black plumes of dust rising from pastures of muck. Rundown Dairy Queens, RV parks, abandoned sugar mills, and roadhouse bars with no signs out front. Men gathered in parking lots wearing sweaty work clothes and snakeskin boots, reeking of cigarettes and malt liquor and pesticide. Country music twanged on every radio, at every gas stop, and the endless scrubland was as flat and unforgiving as the plains of Texas.
Then came her marriage into the Hammond clan, followed by a crash course in ranch life, full immersion in rural Florida. Year by year the culture shock wore off and Claire became a convert, sincere in her admiration for Rachel Sue and her husband, Earl, both still hardy in their eighties after a lifetime spent cultivating the land and making do with its austere pleasures, thriving in its brutal heat and isolation.
Their life’s greatest challenge had been the loss of their only son, a grief from which they never fully recovered.
Earl Three, as they called him, was a reckless child of the sixties. From the looks of the photos hanging in the dining room, he was part playboy, part hippie, a dashing young man with a careless smile, while his wife, Deidre, had the waifish body and stoned eyes of a teenage runaway. She, in her long flowered dresses and silky hair, and he, wearing paisley tunics and a shaggy Beatles mop, seemed younger and more lighthearted than Browning or Frisco ever were. The young couple named their two sons for the cities where they were conceived—Frisco during their flower-child phase, and Browning christened for the town in Montana where Deidre and Earl Three had gone to ski. In their middle thirties, the couple perished in an avalanche on a downhill run on Mont Blanc, leaving behind their two boys for Rachel Sue and Earl to raise. Frisco was seven at the time, Browning barely a year.
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