Black River by Tom Lowe

canoe farther out of the current. Two white herons, stalking fish in the shallow water, took flight, beating their wings, sailing across the river. Max hopped from the canoe onto soft sand, Billie following. They walked up a slope, past a huge cypress tree, into a small clearing covered in lush ferns and wild red roses. Near the edge of the clearing hundreds of gnats hovered in flight above the ferns. The air smelled of wet moss, black mud, and fish.
    O’Brien held up the picture. He walked about thirty feet inland and then turned around, again holding the picture. “More than 160 years later…the woman in this photo stood right about here. The trees and foliage have changed, that cypress tree was small, but the river is basically the same. I canalmost see her standing in front of us, her back to the river. Photography was new, so she might have been a little hesitant.” He glanced down at the woman in the photo, and then studied the landscape. “She may have been hesitant, but she didn’t look nervous. This spot is beautiful…and so was she. I wonder where she’s buried.”
    Billie shook his head. He watched two roseate spoonbills slowly walk around knotty brown cypress knees protruding from the river at the shoreline, the birds pink feathers a stark contrast to tea-colored water. “Sean, this most likely is the area where she stood alive…see the width and the bluff…but it wouldn’t mean she died here. Why are you interested in her grave?”
    “Just trying to put the puzzle pieces together.” O’Brien looked across the wide expanse of river, the forlorn call of a train whistle in the distance. “She may have taken the secret of the river to her grave. You mentioned something your ancestors spoke about on the river. You said it was bizarre, very dark. What was it?”
    Billie stood next to O’Brien and pointed to the far shoreline, almost a mile wide. “Over there. Pretty much opposite where we are standing. The elders spoke of a great sailing ship that went under the river. But it didn’t go all the way under. They watched, hidden in the bushes, as the soldiers sank it. The ones in the gray coats. They didn’t blow it up. They bored holes in the hull. ”
    “Confederates?”
    “Maybe. The ancestors said that night the river ran red with blood. The blue coats and gray coats were fighting all night. Gunboats everywhere. Smaller boats going down. Bombs exploding. Men screaming and swimming for their lives. Many were injured. They tried swimming to shore. In those days the gators were larger and a lot more of them in the river. The elders heard the crunch of bones, screams of men being eaten alive.”
    “Causalities of war that never made it into the history books.”
    Billie nodded. “Bad as all that was, the thing I remember hearing as a kid, spoken from the lips of a very old medicine man at the time, was what happened to one man captured by the blue coats.”
    “What?”
    “It might have had something to do with that huge sailboat that was sunk. The soldiers caught this guy and later that night they hung him fromthe highest mast that was sticking out of the water like a big cross. They say it looked like the soldier was crucified rather than just hung.”
    “How so?”
    “Because they used a hook, a boat anchor. Tied his hands behind his back and ran the hook through his shoulder. Then let him hang from the tallest mast, swaying in the breeze, and dying. A foot over the river. An easy leap for the gators. It was ugly. The remaining band of Seminoles slipped further into the Ocala Forest to let the whites fight it out. The elders retold that story for generations.”
    O’Brien said nothing. He stared across the river.
    “Sean, I don’t know if what I told you is the secret of the river you heard mentioned, but I’m sure it’s something, once done, was so wicked it was kept quiet. Never discussed. Especially by the soldiers who did it. You think the woman in the photo was somehow connected to