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Kissme, Woome — Excerpt

Dear Readers:

    If you've followed my work in recent years you know I love to write about mermaids. My fantasy novels, Alice At Heart and Diary of a Radical Mermaid, deal with supernatural goings-on and use a lot of mermaid mythology. Now, in a more realistic vein, here's The Mermaids of Kissme Woomee, a work-in-progress about mermaids, yes, but REAL mermaids. Confused?

    I bet you know what I'm hinting at, if you've ever heard of, or visited, Florida's Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid show. Weeki Wachee is on the Gulf coast down near St. Petersburg. For nearly fifty years, attractive (and very athletic) young women have donned sequined bras and sequined mermaid tails to perform in Weeki Wachee's fabulously tacky mermaid shows. The audience watches the show through a huge glass window in a subterranean theater.

    I thought it would be great fun to work on a novel about women who make their living as mermaid performers. I also wanted to capture the quirky culture of northern Florida, that unheralded top half of the state where you're likely to see cowboys and cattle alongside mermaids and manatees. 

    I hope you enjoy the opening chapters of The Mermaids of Kissme Woomee. As always, please share your comments with me at debbsmith@aol.com. 

Happy reading!

Deb   

The Mermaids Of Kissme Woomee

By Deborah Smith

The Fluid Woman

Lights. Music. Water.

She came alive. The audience was just a wavy blur on the opposite side of the glass wall; the water filtered their applause, distanced it, made it part of her dream. Behind her, the spring's craggy limestone walls glowed in soft pastels, all greens and pinks and turquoise blues, but beyond the stage lights the water faded to stark black, hiding unimaginable depths and dangerous vents, masking untamed eyes. Manatees and alligators, game fish and cottonmouth snakes, the ghosts of drowned pirates and cracker cowboys and conquistadors all lurked in the shadows of the wild Florida spring, wanting her, waiting for her to admit she belonged not to the theater world of tourists in Bermuda shorts but with them, the dead, instead.

Not yet, y'all, she whispered. Not until I've finished swimming. I'm a mermaid first and foremost. Dried-out people need to see that fantasies can be real if you keep them watered. That dreams can come true.

Fearlessly she pivoted and dived, somersaulted and smiled in sync with the music.  Her lungs were plump and happy with stored air. Her glorious manmade tail fins flowed behind her like emerald smoke. Her breasts, spangled in rhinestones, reflected submerged starlight. Pirouetting in a spiral as natural as a periwinkle twisting its way into creamy sand, she disappeared behind an outcropping of limestone, slipped the end of an oxygen tube between her lipsticked lips and gracefully inhaled new breath. Without missing an undulation she merged again with the lights and music; all curling arms and innocent sex appeal and bright underwater smiles. Awed children crept from the audience and pressed their faces to the glass wall, staring, wide-eyed. Muted applause rose to a crescendo of soft thunder.

Dreams are made of salvation and triumph and regret and hope. Success is a place, a way of life, a kind of family, a sense of belonging. Love is fluid. It flows outward from every breath we give it. Passion keeps us afloat.

Sometimes she cried when she performed. She felt safe, assured. Underwater, no one could see a mermaid's tears.

Susan

The Present Time

It was 8:30 in the morning when Mama called from Florida about Grandma's accident in the mermaid tank. I was still sipping my breakfast latte from Starbucks and had just pulled the drapes on my tinted office window so I wouldn't be tempted to day dream over the smog-blue Atlanta skyline. Junior execs for Decon, LaRoche, and Peckum weren't allowed to pick mental cotton. Though the company sounded like a trio of bug exterminators, it was actually one of the south's biggest financial planning firms. I was one of their up-and-coming bug bashers. I mean investment analysts.   

"Susan? Your grandma put on her favorite pink tail fins and went swimming alone in the big theater last night. The glass cracked in the tank's front wall. She's hurt. Badly." 

I spilled the latte on my faux leather desk top and knocked over my faux marble pen holder. My grandmother, injured? Racine Darlene McEvers, the mermaid queen of Kissme Woomee World, mortal?

"Mama, what happened?"

"We've been putting off repairs on the main tank because the budget was tight. I didn't want to tell you. When the glass cracked, the water pressure threw your grandmother to the back of the theater. The night security guard heard noises and got there just in time to pull her out of the cheap seats while ten thousand gallons of spring water spewed out the theater's front doors."

"Grandma's really hurt? She's not just faking it like that time the bank tried to foreclose?"

"Not this time. TV reporters are on their way from Tallahassee, Tampa, and Jacksonville. CNN called. People are either waiting for news here at the park or heading for the hospital. I'm setting up a media center in the gift shop."

"Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"I didn't want to drag you down here for no good reason. Your grandmother's usual posse is already by her side in full force. Howard, Maureen, Beydelle, and Decker – yes, even Decker – Decker flew in on his private jet. Do you understand what I'm saying? After I called him with the news, Decker walked out of a poker game in Argentina. She's that bad. But you stay put. Nothing to worry about."     

I slapped a hand to my forehead. The seed of a migraine pinged its electric beat behind my eyes. Nothing to worry about? "I'm coming. Tell Grandma to keep her flippers up. Okay?"  

"Susan . . . are you listening to me? There's no point in you rushing down here. She's unconscious."

I reached for the asthma inhaler in my desk drawer. "You're kidding, right?"

"No. Her skull is cracked. The paramedics airlifted her to Tallahassee."  

"Grandma had to be flown to the ER by helicopter, but I shouldn't rush down?"

"Look, you know how she is. Always the drama queen. She won't slow down. She won't listen to reason. She's seventy-two years old. She shouldn't have been swimming alone in that damned ancient tank at four in the morning. Wearing twenty pounds of sequined polyester tail fin. What the hell was she thinking?" Mama made a sound like a carburetor sputtering, and I blinked, bewildered. Then I realized what the sound was. My mother. Crying.

I froze with the inhaler near my lips. I was 28 years old and I'd never heard or heard JJ McEvers cry before. Mama. Crying. Picture Hillary Clinton weeping. You can't. Picture Martha Stewart shedding a tear in prison. Forget it. Picture Mama, Hillary, and Martha slugging it out in a World Wrestling Federation ring. Boss Woman Smackdown.

Mama would wipe the floor with Hillary and Martha. Mama would then leave them boo-hooing on the mat while she coolly demanded a two-for-one smackdown bonus from the promoters, re-negotiated her take of the gate, and insisted on seeing all receipts from the concession stands. 

I sucked down some albuterol.

"I'm coming, Mama. Hang on."

I dropped my cell phone, inhaler, and anti-migraine meds in the pocket of my stern blue dress-suit, grabbed my purse, then opened my desk drawer and scooped up a small, seashell-encrusted picture frame.  My grandmother smiled at me from a fifty-year-old colorized postcard.  Bright pink-and-green script spilled across the bottom:

Visit the mermaid queen of Florida!   

Theatrical lights glinted off my grandmother's sequined bra. Her hair, the rust-red Technicolor hue of an old-fashioned day lily, floated in a wavy cloud. Her glorious pastel tail fins streamed behind her in the water.

Eisenhower had been president when she posed for that picture. She always insisted the world felt more hopeful, more innocent, back then. Florida had been an exotic destination for middle-class families fresh off the great war. Children could be enthralled by something as simple as an Indian chief's face carved on a coconut. A vacation trip meant packing the car with a flashlight, a tool kit, a can of gas, a metal cooler with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, and an old gallon pickle jar full of sweet iced tea. Travel required a love for real adventure, and every stop along the way, every mom and pop motor court, every two-dollar diner, and every roadside theme park could be counted on to be unique and even amazing.

"Terrible things will happen to you in your lifetime, Susie," Grandma once told me. "How you survive depends on how well you remember what holds you up. In how well you float. Just remember, people want to believe in ideals that help them float. They want to believe in mermaids."

The McEvers mermaids still depended on that magic, whether we admitted it or not. Grandma, Mama and I had been born hopeful, all three of us. No matter what happened, we always stayed afloat. I was supposed to be the one who had escaped the lure of water, but the water held me in its thrall, just the same. Fifty years earlier, when my grandmother had picked a backwater Florida pond as our once and future ancestral home, she'd given us a rule to live by:

Never sink to the bottom.

"Keep floating, Grandma," I whispered. I tucked the photo in my purse. Her dreams had buoyed so many people, including me. I went out my office door at a run.

Racine

1950

People want to be part of something bigger, something deeper, than themselves. Something that's worth livin' for, worth dyin' for. Something so wonderful they'll risk being laughed at, risk being called crazy, risk swimming alone through the darkest water, determined to dive so far down they find something special, something that can last forever. Something they'll risk lovin' even after that love hurts them. I believe in that something.

Racine McEvers was just 20 years old when she fled up the coast into the wilds of northern Florida on a balmy winter night. Ignorant people looked at her and saw nothing more extraordinary than a green-eyed, sunburned head-turner with a lustrous swoop of auburn hair, an undulating body, and a thick cracker drawl straight out of the inland fishing camps and cattle ranches of the citrus state's rolling highlands.

She'd given birth down in Tampa, only that morning. It felt as if someone had pushed a bowling ball out of her body, and her breasts ached with milk. Even her tiny gold wedding band hurt as it lay heavy on her chest by a Woolsworth dimestore chain, hidden. Her newborn daughter, JJ, slept beside her in a small orange crate on the white cloth seat of Racine's bug-shaped black Ford.

Upon leaving Tampa Racine had hurriedly swaddled the baby in the makeshift bassinet, lining the crate with a pink blanket on which she'd embroidered mermaids, daisies, and several fish that might be whales or might be largemouth bass. Tasteful art was not Racine's forte, either in baby blankets or life in general. Hidden in the trunk were several costumes Racine had stolen when Weeki Wachee Springs had fired her from its mermaid show. Beneath the sequined mermaid tails lay a small black briefcase crusted with dried mud and sand. Inside the suitcase was twenty-thousand dollars in small bills. Racine had carefully wrapped each cash packet in aluminum foil before burying them inside the briefcase. She didn't trust banks. She had grown up on the fading cusp of the Depression, listening to her granny curse them. 

Don't you ever trust bank men or gov'ment men, Racine! Don't trust any kind of man who takes your money and tells you it's for your own good! Don't ever let a man get hold of your money or your skirt tail!

Belligerant independence was a cracker trait, like poverty, like illiteracy, like survival. By the time the first red-headed Scottish McEvers snapped his bullwhip – crack! -- over a herd of wild Florida cattle a Spanish governor had already proclaimed in frustration, "These Crackers are nomadic, like Arabs, distinguished from savages only by their color and language."   

Ever since, generations of McEvers had made their staunchly footloose living as cowboys, farmers, freshwater fishermen, and turpentine distillers in the sub-tropical forests and grasslands of the state's upper peninsula, that less celebrated top half of Florida where a fall frost colors the trees and dulls the wildflowers.

The sweat-stained culture was quirky and tough; especially in the last decades before air conditioning. The weak or unmotivated suffocated. The hardy drank cold, cold water or minted iced tea or moonshine chilled in hidden creeks. People slept under mosquito nets to catch the breezes and napped during mid-day and made love in the cool nights after the hot sunsets. They shaded themselves and squinted in the searing summer sun; no true cracker over the age of 21 had smooth eyes.

These were sun-baked people, as tough as clay. People who dealt stoically with wasps and rattlers and gators and poverty; women who rained honey from palmetto palm bees, who skinned hogs and beheaded chickens and peppered wild game in iron skillets to feed their families; women who sat, legs spread not in sexual invitation but in comfortable, ordinary defiance atop up-turned cypress logs in their front yards, aiming shotguns toward murderous wild hogs who threatened their children at play. In old Florida, day care wasn't about teaching your children to read Latin or calculate equations, it was about keeping them from becoming something's dinner. About survival, not mere prosperity. Prosperity was a prize, not a right.

Being called a Florida cracker was no insult to a true cracker; it was a heritage of self-sufficiency and tough defiance. But Racine, though a proud standard bearer of cracker womanhood, had never been meant for a cracker career on dry land.

She was a mermaid. She had known so since her childhood years in the wild blue water of the woods.   

1

A no-account mother can run away, a cowhand father can die under the horns of a bull, and a bitter grandma with nothing but a fish camp cabin for a home can raise an abandoned child with no more love than she'd give a mangy dog, but if that child finds a dream to hold onto, she'll survive. Racine had found her dream early on, in the water.

She grew up in the lean years before World War Two on the shores of a small, spectacular bluewater lake hidden in the steamy inland forests just south of the Florida-Georgia line. Granny McEvers worked there as a cook for well-to-do businessmen and politicians who came by train and private car to rough it in cabins stocked with bourbon and cigars and whores, while casting their lines for giant catfish and bass.

The lake was named Coohatchee Spring. Locals snickered and called it Catch-a-hoochie-coochie Spring, because of the prostitutes, since coochie was slang for a woman's privates. But in Creek Indian the word hatchee meant water, and  though nobody could say for sure where the coo in Coohatchee came from,  even as a small girl Racine adamantly ignored the taunts of other kids.

Your mama was a bad woman and your granny runs a hoochie coochie house.

Smack. Punch. That'll show you.

Racine pummeled the naysayers into submission and preserved her fantasies like pretty paint on rusty tin. Style and substance can sometimes be the same thing, if you believe hard enough. She decided the coo in Coohatchee came from the flocks of soft, cooing gray doves who adopted the lake each summer. Everybody else said the doves were nuisances and beggars, rats with wings, but the doves at Coohatchee didn't agree. They cooed and strutted happily among the showier herons and egrets and kingfishers on the spring's dock. Like Racine among the flashy businessmen and prostitutes, they refused to be ignored.

The small lake was deep blue, like turquoise sky surrounded by magical forest dripping Spanish moss; to Racine, swimming in it was like flying, like being a dove, escaping from the heat, the mosquitoes, the loneliness. Racine searched for something that only seemed to exist in a fluid state, and she found it in the water. 

"Little lady, did you know you're swimming in the tiptop of a fluid world so deep it goes all the way to China?" a visiting fisherman had asked Racine once. The man studied the ways of water for the state government, so Racine figured he knew what he was talking about. Plus he wore gold-rimmed glasses, and he was Jewish. Granny McEvers said southern Jews were smart and hospitable, no worse than Catholics or Unitarians in regard to future damnation. Northern Jews, on the other hand, were destined to burn in eternal Hellfire, like all Yankees.

The bespectacled government water man somberly read newspapers from Europe, and he did not dally with the camp's women. He was a gentleman, Granny said. A true gentleman! Plus a southern Jew in general, and a Florida Jew in particular. Which made him, in Racine's eyes, triply impressive.    

"This lake goes down all the way to China?" she had whispered, transfixed. "The old folks like to say if you dig a hole deep enough you might go all the way through to the bottom of the world, and hit China. Sir, do you mean to say it's true about water, too?"  

He smiled at her over his reading glasses. "Yes, indeed, little Miss. A spring's not the same as a lake, you know. A lake's just a puddle on the surface of the earth; it gets its water from the top – from rain, from the creeks that feed it, from run-off. But a spring, ah! A spring gets its water straight from the heart of the planet. Spring water bubbles up through cracks and caves in the limestone bedrock. This whole part of northern Florida is sitting on that bedrock, as if planted on top of a flat rock sponge or a slab of Swiss cheese. There's water trickling beneath every step we take, water slipping up and over and down and in and out through wondrous tunnels and caverns until it finds an open bowl in the limestone right up at the top, like this little spring, in the sunshine. And so that, little lady, is what Coohatchee Spring is. A bottomless limestone bowl."

"Bottomless?" She clasped her hands to her heart, trying to imagine. She was only twelve at the time; bottomless was the half-hour walk up an isolated dirt road to meet the lumber truck that served as the local school bus. Bottomless was listening to the whores talk about life as they fanned gnats aside with saw palmetto fronds. They moaned about the war over yonder. Over there. Somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean. Racine wasn't quite sure of the details. But it sounded bottomless.

"Yes, bottomless, indeed," the government water man said. "Because somewhere way down in the deepest, coldest pit of this spring you'll find the spring's pipes. Where the water squeezes up through layer upon layer of limestone."

"If I dived down to the bottom I could swim inside one of those pipes?"

"No, even this tiny fishing puddle of  a spring is too deep for you to do that. I'm sure its limestone caves and tunnels are too narrow for even a little girl to squeeze into. But just you picture it! Endless roots of water, stretching from this very place where you swim down through the limestone, down and down and down through the aquifer to --"

"All the way to China!"

The man had smiled and nodded. "All the way to the other side of this cruel and war-filled world." His face saddened. "Where we can only hope that it is sweetened by the innocence of other children sure as yourself."

Racine never forgot his description of the Coohatchee. He confirmed what she felt, that she swam in a magical realm, connected to exotic and distant dreams. Dreams of innocence as World War II unfurled its bloody wings over the seas.

"Nothin' but a bunch of hooey," Granny McEvers drawled at such ideas. She knew her place in life, and it wasn't built on fantasies. She cleaned and packed the fishermen's catches in metal coolers of ice for the trip back to the city, or she'd cook up the fish for the men to gobble down right there at the camp's picnic tables. She even cooked for the whores, who discreetly tucked dollar bills in Granny's coffee can and just as discreetly taught Racine to apply make-up and dance a Cuban rumba. Granny pretended not to notice either the tips or the wickedly alluring dance lessons.

Granny McEvers was brutally practical, a stout old manatee of a woman. She said no truly strong girl needed men and lipstick to make a life for herself, but she scared Racine with horrifying true stories of abandoned women who were murdered by their lovers and gave birth to diseased babies. Granny always smelled like onions and grease, sweating in a straw hat and baggy overalls, her thick, reddened hands dropping cornmeal-battered fish and crackling hushpuppies into huge cast iron skillets bubbling full of melted lard over a coal cook stove. Her kitchen was a screened porch overlooking the Coohatchee. Granny chewed tobacco and spit the juice out a hole in the screen mesh, fouling the water below.

Yet Racine loved her, the worst kind of love, unrequited. When Racine swam as a child she often lifted her head from the water to catch the scent of Granny's open-air stove.  The aroma of the skillets was her grandmother's way of calling her home, a sign of love that needed no words, some slim proof that Racine might be wanted, even just a little.

Granny McEvers was no ordinary woman. She had power; she was a Boss Woman. She bossed the whores, she bossed the callused, sunburned white men who delivered vegetables and blocks of ice to her kitchen, she bossed the colored men who did yard work around the spring and its cabins. I'm not payin' you whole-ass wages for half-assed work, she'd say loudly to any man who didn't meet her standards. Racine had seen her swing a heavy wooden meat mallet at a truck driver who made the mistake of cursing her over a money dispute. She caught him just above one ear  and knocked him down. As he lay on the sandy ground moaning she counted out three silver dollars from her metal cash box, threw them on his chest, and then spat tobacco juice on him. "Only God has the right to curse me, mister."

Occasionally, some preacher would make his way to the camp, either by horse or in an ancient Model T, wisely waiting until the wintertime when few of the men visited – poor, sinful women were a much easier audience than rich, sinful men – and the preacher would stand on the shore of the spring, facing the deep, mossy woods and the beautiful blue water and the sin-soaked cabins, and he'd wave a Bible and yell a sermon.

"Jezebels, repent!"

This made Granny mad and the women nervous; they didn't want publicity, spiritual or otherwise; preachers spread gossip, and gossip brought trouble. The sheriff had been paid off, but other do-gooders might come. Finally, after three preachers in one winter season, Granny walked outdoors with her shotgun, pointed it at the latest reverend's feet, and peppered his shins with buckshot. Racine was about eight at the time -- in other words, old enough to sneak outdoors and watch the spectacle first hand. The women hooted and applauded. As the preacher limped toward his car Granny spat tobacco in the bloody sand and called out, "Next time you take a notion to make trouble for hardworking women you best remember that Jezebel was a whore but she was a queen, too, and she could sure as shit whip the likes of your sorry ass."

Granny McEvers only gave Racine one tender gift in all those years, a book she bartered from a peddler. The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Anderson.

Racine read it until the pages fell apart, then glued them back together and read them some more. The tragedy, oh! The beauty of the little mermaid's courage when she traded her fins for legs, the heartbreaking unfairness and betrayal when her prince fell in love with an ordinary mortal! The story wasn't so much a fairytale as an anthem for unsentimental inspiration.  

I won't ever stop lovin' the water, Racine decided. It's the only thing that'll always love me back. The only kind of love that's bottomless.  

She promised herself she wouldn't end up moping for a prince who didn't appreciate her, that she'd never give up her fins for ordinary legs. Mermaids were destined for greatness, even given their darkest tribulations on dry land.

*

Granny dropped dead in her kitchen the year Racine turned seventeen. A week after the funeral Racine took a bus down the coast to Tampa, her first visit to a real city. Her eyes opened wide.

Long before there were interstates and international airports, before the hotel chains moved in, before Disney cleared miles of pine forest and orange groves around Orlando, before all that, Florida wasn't just real, it was surreal. There were tiny mom-and-pop motels shaped like teepees or igloos or any other thing the imagination could fathom, and restaurants built like pirate ships or castles, and candy shops tucked inside fake plaster volcanoes, and real alligators swimming decoratively in the blue concrete creeks of fake jungle gardens. There was Cypress Gardens and Alligator World and the glass bottomed boats of Silver Springs. All symbols of surreal beauty. Florida was the land of daydreams and entrepreneurial whimsy. Along the slow, sunny routes to the beach, the colorful, gaudy, and outright bizarre attractions lured visitors and their money. It was honest hucksterism, unadorned. Among all those oddball wonders of the world, Weeki Wachee Springs, with its underwater mermaid show, stood out, in Racine's opinion, as a pinnacle of true art.   

Courtesy of the fish camp women, who donated clothing, a suitcase, and the bus fare as going away gifts, she wore her favorite color -- pink shoes, pink gloves, a small pink hat, and a primly fitted dress with a voluminous pink skirt embroidered with a mermaid holding a conch shell. After she got off the bus in Tampa she walked and hitchhiked along a winding two-lane until she stood in the  hot sun, gazing up in all her pink, nervous glory at a tall wooden sign painted in beautiful blue and white.       

Welcome to Weeki Wachee Springs. Mermaid Shows. Gift Shop. Alligator Pond.

Racine took a deep breath. She just hoped the mermaid show and the alligator pond weren't in the same spot.

2

The first time she swam at Weeki Wachee Springs Racine looked down happily at the soft, mysterious, turbulent darkness far below the spring's surface. Hello to all you Chinamen down there.

In terms of water power, Weeki Wachee dwarfed the Coohatchee. It's sparkling depths filled a craggy limestone pool as big as a football field, then overflowed into a river deep enough to allow entrance to  sweet, ponderous manatees who sometimes nuzzled the performers in the midst of a show. During the war Navy divers in heavy suits and helmets had explored more than a hundred feet down, but still found no bottom. They were nearly bowled over by the spring's powerful vents, where water shot from limestone bedrock as if from fire hoses, threatening to tumble or trap even the strongest swimmer. The divers reported that the spring rose out of grand underwater caves tall enough to stand in. Who knew how far those fabulous and mysterious roots might reach?

Racine loved everything about working at the theme park. It was no small honor to be selected as one of the twenty girls in the legendary swimming troupe. A mermaid had to be able to hold her breath while smiling, miming the words to a song, changing costumes behind a rock, and even pretending to eat a banana or drink soda -- a bit of razzle-dazzle that always brought wild applause from the audience. 

A mermaid had not only to be pretty, athletic, and graceful, but also brave enough not to panic when small alligators and manatees occasionally joined the show. After all, the auditorium was part of the spring's open basin. The theater's pastel wooden structure curved along one shore. Audiences walked down steps to tiers of seats sixteen feet beneath the spring's surface, where a long glass wall made a window into the spring's beautiful water, glowing with pastel lights.   

"This place's like a huge fish tank, and we're the fish on display," one girl said with a shudder during the auditions. "I bet some folks tap on the glass just to see if we'll hide like trout."

"I'll never hide," Racine told her. "I'm not a trout. I'm a princess of the water, and people are meant to admire me."

Indeed, at Weeki Wachee she became a star. The audience loved her. People wanted to pose for pictures with her; children wanted her autograph, and cute college boys from the University of Florida, over in Gainesville, asked her out on dates, which was against Weeki Wachee policy. She obeyed the rules proudly and dreamed of a long future in the bright lights beneath the water. She even worked as an extra in a Hollywood movie filmed at the springs. Mr. Peabody And The Mermaid, starring William Powell.  Her scene had been cut from the final movie, but still. There she was, immortalized on film, at least in spirit. 

"I'm a mermaid and a movie actress," she took to telling people.

And a good mermaid virgin. Truly. Unlike The Little Mermaid, Racine waited wisely for a prince who wouldn't ask her to sacrifice her fins.

One day, she found him. Or thought she had.  

*

John Van der Vondray the fourth, of the Massachusetts Van der Vondrays, came to Florida for the same reason as every other red-blooded college student. Sex. Otherwise known as Spring Break. Weeki Wachee Springs was supposed to be just a quick pit stop for him and his Harvard fraternity buddies after two days of non-stop drinking and driving. They were headed to the Gulf beaches. All they really wanted were some wholesome Weeki Wachee postcards to send Mumsie and Dads as evidence that Spring Break was about good clean fun.

For Racine, posing in full fin for visitors and their boxy little Kodaks was usually a great part of the job. She smiled as old men kissed her cheek and teenage boys gawked in blushing arousal; she was super-nice to the women and teenage girls so they wouldn't think she was a tramp or stuck-up.  She doted on the children, who gazed at her in utter wonder. 

"Every girl is a mermaid at heart," she'd tell them, "and every boy has to earn the right to a mermaid's love. Being a mermaid means a girl is true and strong and trustworthy. Like being a Scout, only with flippers."

But she didn't like the college boys. They were jerks. They leered and laughed.  They showed no respect. They made her feel low, like a Coohatchee whore. They reminded her she had barely graduated high school. And that it was her job to be nice to people, no matter what.

Hey chickie, what's hidden in your tail? Is your lipstick waterproof? Let me test it.

This lanky, tall boy walked up they were tormenting her. He frowned then turned to the others and said in a stern, exotically crisp, Yankee accent, "That'll be enough, you apes."

They hunched their shoulders. "Hey, what's the problem? We were just joking."

"Your sense of humor eludes me. Leave her alone."

The apes shrugged, laughed tightly, then wandered off as if they owned the sunshine because they could afford polished loafers and fancy slacks and golf shirts. She stared at the stranger. Racine's world slowly came to a stop. Time stood still, she would tell JJ, years later. When I met your daddy, the clocks stopped ticking.

Racine's rescuer frowned. "I apologize. You must put up with a lot of junk from ignorant people."

An aura of quiet confidence radiated from him. He held her gaze without dropping his eyes to her heavily pleated bra, even once. At least not when she noticed, okay. He was tall and lean and handsomely long-faced, with big, sweet, dark-blue eyes and a broad smile. He had mustard on his white cotton shirt, and his khaki's were wrinkled, and he carried a book along with his sunglasses. Something about marine biology.

She coughed. "It's. . .well, okay. Not everybody knows how to talk to a mermaid."

 "I'm not sure I know how, either, but if you'll help me, I'll try. You're. . .you're incredible, you know. I'm babbling, right?" 

No one had babbled over her before. Racine felt as if she were floating in his gaze, lost in ethereal water instead of perched on a blue-painted granite rock by a TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH A WEEKI WACHEE MERMAID sign. She had never been speechless before in her entire life, yet there she was, deprived of a tongue like a demon-strangled woman she'd seen once at a Pentecostal tent revival near Palatka.

"It's bad luck," she finally managed, "to treat a mermaid with disrespect. I'd say you're doing just fine."

He didn't laugh at her nonsense. "Good. May I sit down? Will you tell me what it's like to be a creature of fantasy?"

Racine went speechless, again. She pointed to a small bench beside her rock. He levered his tall form onto the kid-sized bench without any obvious embarrassment.  "Let me introduce myself," he said. And he did.

Racine Darlene McEvers the First, meet John Crispin Van der Vondray, the Fourth.

Racine blurted, "I have never in my life heard a last name as long as yours. How wide do they have to make the grave stones in your family cemetery? How do you sign a check without scribblin' off into thin air? When the teacher called out the ‘who's here' list in first grade, did she have to break for a sip of water after your name? And you're the fourth one they've named thisaway? Your folks sure must have a sense of humor."

He laughed so hard he almost turned the bench over. Racine grinned at him and gently flexed her tail fins in the sweet spring air. When he quieted he wiped his eyes and shook his head. "No, I'm afraid my family has no sense of humor whatsoever. Just a great deal of unbending tradition."

"Where did they come up with a name like Vander . . . Vandervoodle, or whatever you said?"

He explained that the surname had been cobbled together somewhere in Europe five-hundred years earlier, long before his ancestors set sail for Plymouth Rock. "Dutch and German," he told Racine, "with a bit of royalty thrown in. The Vander is a Dutch suffix, like saying ‘son of,' and the von means German nobility. The dray comes from Drayfus, which has Jewish origins. So you might say it means I'm a son of the royal Drayfus. "

"So you're a royal Dutch German Jew Yankee," she said, nodding as if she met such a combination every day. "No wonder you need a long name to cover all that."    

He smiled widely. "A Yankee? I suppose the Massachusetts accent gave me away."

"Yep. But I got nothing against Yankees. I'm modern. I wave a flag at Confederate Memorial Day parades, but I don't have any hard feelings." She flexed her fins again. Flirting with visitors of Weeki Wachee Springs was forbidden, but who could say that a little bounce of the flippers was anything but natural mermaid instincts? He hunched forward with his chin propped on his hands and his elbows propped on his updrawn knees, looking silly and charming on the little bench, his attention riveted to her. "Please," he said. "I really want to know what it's like being a mermaid."

 Racine started talking and couldn't stop. And he listened. He really listened. He was special. She loved him, by then.

Eventually he mentioned that his father was in shipping – as in owning a fleet of cargo ships, to Racine's astonishment – and that he had other business ventures as well, including some connected to Joe Kennedy. That name meant nothing to Racine, except that John mentioned playing touch football at Hyannis Port with a Kennedy son who planned to run for U.S. Senate.

"So?" she said, flustered. "Running for something and gettin' it are two different things." 

"You're just not impressed by much, are you?" John answered. "Not impressed by money and college boys from Yankee states, that's for certain."

"Nope. Because I know who I am, I'm an aqua theatrical actress.  I uphold a tradition of mermaid womanhood that is smart and classy and choosy. I grew up in a fish camp knowing how to catch brim and bait a crawdad trap and make hushpuppies out of coarse corn meal and lard and a little sugar. I won't ever go hungry. I know who I am, and I'm a mermaid. So I don't need to be impressed by much." She paused, feeling her face turn hot, her eyes wanting to be shy. "But I am impressed by you. Because you know who you are, too." 

"I'm the guy who's going to marry you," he answered.

After another speechless moment, she agreed that he was right. 

*

What is instinct? What is impulse? Could it be that we have a true inner wisdom that whispers to us for the best against all pragmatic advice? Racine believed so. She staked her dreams on passion, on hope, on risk.

She had grown up among greedy-eyed businessmen armed with fishing poles and money. Among practical whores. Among staunch crackers who lived by the faith of God's chosen poor. Among the hardy, lusty fish and fowl and flora and fauna of the vast, floating catechism of rituals that was the sensual paradise of nearly submerged Florida.

She didn't fear the depths of her own heart. Decades before self-help gurus and TV therapists began telling timid people to ‘Go for it,' Racine went.

*

Two days later she and Johnny drove to a foreign place, that is, all the way across the state's dangling peninsula to the Atlantic side, Daytona Beach, a sparse, friendly town on the tides. Sand blew in their faces. Crabs scuttled across unpaved lanes. It was the year the weathermen began naming hurricanes. A little one, named Easy, would whirl through in the fall. Stock car racing was just becoming famous on the town's hard, wide beaches.

Not far to the south, the U.S. government had recently  bought thousands of acres at an isolated coastal town Ponce de Leon had named Cabo de los Corrientes, Tip of the Currents, four centuries earlier. Cape Canaveral was its modern name. In 1950 there were more mosquitoes than people on Cape Canaveral and its barrier islands, but those hardy seaside residents included a growing population of government agents and scientists. Soon the U.S. military would launch the space age by firing a 56-foot missile over Cocoa Beach. Ordinary people stood in awe of the future. Some said maybe atomic bombs could be used to blow up hurricanes. They had watched the tropical winds kill families, seen the soggy carnage left by giant waves. If the atomic bomb could stop that, they didn't mind splitting a few atoms recklessly.

"Oh, Johnny," Racine said, "we're living on the edge of a strange new world."

She and Johnny honeymooned at a tiny blue concrete motel cabin with a rattling window fan. Sand sifted under the door, and the cypress plank walls smelled like turpentine. They ate sandwiches they packed in a metal cooler and drank Coke from little glass bottles the motel sold from a wooden ice box.

At night Johnny's pale, patrician feet hung over the foot of the cabin's double bed, and once, when he feverishly mounted Racine, she threw both tanned hands back in ecstasy and scraped her knuckles on the periwinkle shells glued to the bed's pine headboard in the shape of palm tree.  They sweated and heaved and loved in the spring heat, as fertile as the sun. She had never felt happier or safer in her life. The daughter of a cowboy and a lost woman, the granddaughter of a fish camp madam, a purebred Florida cracker and mermaid, had won the heart of a rich Yankee knight.   

A few days later he kissed her goodbye, promised to come back in June with a plan for their future, insisted she take his checkbook and use it freely, and said this last thing: "We have a great life ahead of us on the waters of the world, Racy."

Racy. No one had ever given her a nickname, before. Or ever promised her his future.

*

"Racine McEvers?" the burly state patrol officer asked as she walked out of the Weeki Wachee theater two nights later, fluffing her damp hair and hurrying home to wait for Johnny's phone call from college. Racine stared up at the officer. He spoke in a clipped drawl that chilled her skin. The police. In cracker parlance, the law. Never a good thing.

"Yessir?"

"Mrs. John Van der Von Dray?"

Her knees went weak. Racine hugged her pink make-up case to her stomach. "What's happened to my. . .my husband?"

 "It looks like he fell asleep at the wheel up around Virginia. His car went off into a hollow. He's passed away, miss. I mean, Ma'am."

Racine did not weep, or collapse, or demand that the officer repeat what he'd said. She simply turned and headed back toward the darkened spring, past the shuttered theater and concession stands, past the mermaid rock where she and Johnny had met. She dropped her make-up case, and she plummeted into the water.

They did not coax her out again until nearly dawn.

3

John had been right about his family's nature. The Van der Vondrays had no sense of humor. They also had no compassion for girls with plain last names who married their son during spring break.

Racine didn't get much time to mourn the husband she'd known for less than a week. By the time the state patrol found the marriage license in John's luggage and called her, his family had already taken his body. It was if he'd vanished. 

"Are you Racine Darlene McEvers?" the stranger demanded. He looked like a mortician, standing at the base of the long, narrow wooden stairs of the Tampa row house Racine shared with three other Weeki Wachee mermaids. 

Racine stared downstairs at his pinstripes, his thick gold tie tac, his fine leather briefcase, his perfectly tilted fedora. The air was thick and hot, but his face didn't even shine. What kind of man didn't sweat in Florida? Fear pooled in her stomach. "Yessir. But the name's Racine Von der Vondray."

"Miss McEvers, I want you to listen very carefully. I'm an attorney. I represent John Van der Vondrays' parents--"

She gasped. "Please, please, will they let me see him? See his . . . see him. Please."

"Absolutely not."

"Please. Just let me go to his funeral. Wherever it is. I'll get to Massachusetts. I've got some money saved. I'll pay for a train ticket. Please."

The man looked at her without any hint of mercy. "A memorial service has already been held in Boston. Mr. Van der Vondray's body has been cremated."

Racine swayed a little. "What's that mean?" As far as she knew, there was only one respectable way to treat a person who had passed. You put the body in a coffin, set it out for polite viewing in your front parlor, cried over it, sat with it, prayed and sang over it, then took kitchen breaks to eat fried chicken and potato salad with the other mourners. Next you took the body to church, nodded as the preacher listed the departed's virtues, and tried not to gag on the scent of mums. Finally, you toted the body to a nice churchyard, one with shade trees and good drainage, and you buried it.

The lawyer gazed at her as if she were too stupid to breathe. "Cremated," he repeated coldly. "The body was burned to ashes."

Racine put both hands to her mouth. A shriek mired in the bile that rose in her throat. The air squeezed out of her lungs. "What kind of people do such things?" she whispered. "How could they do that to Johnny?"

Her knees gave way. She sat down hard on a step, clasping her mouth harder, fluid rising behind her fingers. The lawyer calmly squatted in front of her, pinning Racine with a dispassionate gaze. "Miss McEvers, I have a simple message for you from John Van der Vondray's parents. All records of your marriage to their son  have been destroyed. If you attempt to claim otherwise, the Van der Vondray's will – let me put this in layman's  terms even you can understand – they will charge you with lying and take you to court. You won't get a penny of their money."

"Money? Their money? I don't want their money!" She coughed and retched, then furiously dragged a hand across her lips. "I didn't marry him for money and I wouldn't take money from people so low and mean they burn up their son's earthly remains!" She staggered to her feet. "You get off my steps! You get away! I've seen water moccasins with more human eyes than you got!"

The lawyer grimaced as he rose from his squat. "Stop this melodramatic display.  It's not convincing."

Racine shrieked. "I never believed demons could really take human form until now!" She flung out both hands, wet with bile. "Get thee away from me, Satan!"

Vomit speckled the lawyer's face and hat. His face froze with revulsion. His fingers shaking, he slowly pulled a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his face. His eyes had gone black. "At the bottom of the stairs is a briefcase filled with money. Take it. Don't ever mention your so-called marriage to Mr. Van der Vondray again."

He left her there on the steps, gagging. It was a crystalline moment, a moment when she saw down through the black water beneath the blue, finding that jewel of truth, of self awareness, of knowledge. Everything she'd been up until then, the orphan, the unwanted grandchild, the kid coddled by smooth cheeked businessmen and hardworking whores at Coohatchee, the starstruck mermaid hred by Weeki Wackee to do what mermaids are meant to do, that is, luring mere mortal men to the sin of longing for eternity, to their deaths; that girl, that young woman, crumpled on the sun-bleached concrete of a Tampa stoop, humiliated at the feet of love, and saw the world in a flash of invigorating clarity. 

Never beg for mercy. And never look back.

Racine buried the briefcase full of money, for safekeeping.    

*

A couple of months later, when she realized she was pregnant, she tried to hide the fact and keep performing at Weeki Wachee. It was easy at first; Racine's tummy bulge only gave her a more voluptuous look. She sewed panels into the girdle-like tops of the mermaid tails so they'd expand around her growing waist, and secretly let out the straps of her costume tops to accommodate her fattening breasts. She fantasized about giving birth in secret then hiring some nice country woman, colored or white, to watch the baby during the day while she went back to work. It would be as if nothing had changed.

But when Racine was six months along the costume manager caught wise, and Racine's mermaid career cruised to a dead stop. She was fired. Racine retreated to a boarding house in Tampa. She told the landlady her husband was away in the Navy, then took a job as a Woolsworth clerk while she waited for the baby to come. She intended to give birth alone in her rented room. Racine didn't want to answer any tricky questions at the Tampa hospital, besides, why get doctors involved in something Mother Nature – the original mermaid – intended to be, well, natural? After all, she herself had been born in a pine-board cabin at the fish camp, and she had turned out just fine.

Racine didn't count on going into labor two weeks early, while standing behind the Maybelline counter. She watched in horrified fascination as fluid stained her pink maternity skirt and dribbled in small rivers down her nylons, finally making puddles in her pink pumps. The next thing she knew, she lay flat on her back on the linoleum floor, clutching her belly, and someone had called an ambulance.

The next morning, after hours of groaning labor followed by the drugged nothingness of a modern 1950's hospital delivery, Racine looked up groggily into the beady, bespectacled eyes of a white-capped nurse. The nurse stared at her over a clip board.

"I'm filling out a birth certificate for your girl.  We didn't get your last name. Your married name. What is it? And I need your husband's full name. And how to get in touch with him. I can send a telegram for you, if he's out of town."

Racine tried to focus, to think. Don't say a word. Don't tell the nurse anything. You don't want Johnny's family to find out about the baby. The room shifted and twirled around her. Suddenly it faded away, opening like a melted curtain, and there stood Johnny, tall and smart and wonderful, smiling at her with the bright springtime  ocean and sky and beach behind him. Just as he had on their honeymoon. She would love him all her life. He had respected her dreams. He had believed in mermaids.

"Dead," she said brokenly. Warnings curled through her mind like alligators.  "Dead." Racine felt like crying, but the alligators scared her out of it. Mermaids couldn't cry around alligators. You had to show them who was the boss of the water.

The nurse scowled. "Dead? How'd he die?"

"In his. . .convertible."

"Where?" 

Racine gagged at a whiff of starchy powder. Just tell her enough to make her go away. "On the highway between. . .here and. . .his school up north. . .called Harvard. You. . .go. . .on, now. You. . .smell. . .dried out. . .to me."   

"Look  here, Little Miss Wise-Acre, I need to know where to find this dead husband of yours. Where's he buried?" Her voice could crack the shell on a snapping turtle.

"He's not . . . buried. He's . . . sprinkled." 

"What?"

"Nevermind."

"Have you got a marriage license?"

"Not. . .anymore."

"I see. Where did you get married?  What county? What town?"

"Justice of the Peace."

"Then there'll be a certificate on file."

"Not . . . anymore."

The nurse stared into Racine's eyes. Racine tried to stare back but her vision wavered. She saw a pair of blurry, mean eyeballs framed by the twin wings of black reading glasses.  The nurse snorted. "You better come up with a better story than a dead husband who's been sprinkled instead of buried, or I'm calling the county child welfare office to come see whether you're of sound mind. Whether you're fit to raise a child."

Racine panicked. The alligators were breathing right in her face. They wore wing-tipped glasses and chewed peppermint gum that didn't quite hide the stink of a bad tooth. She wobbled upright in bed, swaying. "Where's my baby?"

"She's being fed in the nursery. You'll get to hold her as soon as you give me the information I want."

"I want to see her now. I'll feed her. You bring her." Racine waved in the vague direction of her breasts. "I've got milk. Gallons of it, feels like."

"This is a modern hospital. Only animals feed their young that way. Only poor coloreds and white trash."

White trash. Fighting words to a cracker. Racine straightened slowly. "I'm a mermaid. Mermaids know what. . .what titties are for. You're so damn dumb you don't even know. . .that you got a pair."

The insult hit the nurse right between the eyes and trailed down her face like spit off a hard rock. Her crow-winged eyes narrowed to slivers. "White trash," she repeated. "I'm calling the child welfare office." She walked out.

Racine pushed herself out of bed. Her legs collapsed. She sat down hard,  spreading her hands on the cold tile floor, searching for something to hold onto. Johnny's people had shoved money at her, had told her to get lost and never use his name as her own, but what if they found out he had a daughter? Would they want the baby? Would they try to take her?

Racine swore softly. "I'm not givin' up anything else I love." 

She crawled to her purse and overnight case, perched atop a metal dresser. It seemed to take hours but she finally managed to pull on a plaid blouse, pink peddle-pushers, and penny loafers. Racine staggered down the hall to the nursery. A dozen babies were asleep in their bassinets, and all the nurses were busy elsewhere. Holding onto an empty incubator for support, Racine rolled straight to a tiny baby girl with a pale fluff of red hair. She knew it was her baby before she lifted the tag on the bassinet.

Baby McEvers, Girl, the tag read.

Racine carefully lifted the baby into her arms. "Time to head for warmer water, sweetie," she whispered. "This is an awful, dry world you've been born into."

Racine toted her out a back door, weaving as gracefully as a tired angel fish under the hot winter sun.

*

Light-headed and in pain, Racine swigged a bottle of tepid Coke-a-Cola with four aspirins and two packets of BC headache powder in it, trying to dull the pain between her legs as she drove that night. Sweat dappled her plaid blouse and pink peddle-pushers. Moths and bats darted in front of the car. With the window down to catch the tepid winter breeze, she worried that they might zoom inside.

"Get away, you wild things, I got a new baby in here," she yelled, then downshifted the Ford and blew the horn. A startled deer bounded across the road and disappeared into the pines like a shadow. The head lights flicked past the stoic face of a small black bear, peering from the woods.     

Northern Florida was hot, even in the cold months, semi-tropical and steamy except in the worst winters, when it became a crisp, gray-green paradise punctuated by leftover Christmas poinsettias blooming in pots on patios and lawns. In the summertime it was a lush, seductive soup, primordial, a feverish jungle over 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity every day from June to October, a place where cold gin and sugar infused iced tea were the only hopes of survival.

Racine pressed the brake as the road narrowed to a rattling, one-lane wooden bridge. Lost and exhausted, she squinted through the narrow tunnel of light the dusty Ford's headlights made on pale macadam flecked with crushed oyster shells. Pitch black forest and pine swamp crowded the road on both sides; there wasn't a streetlight or house light to be seen in any direction. Frogs sang loud enough to drown out a hellfire preacher yelling about Communists on the radio, and the occasional low grunt of an alligator sounded from the woods.   

U.S. 1, the old federal two-lane that funneled wood-paneled deluxe station wagons full of tourist families down the east coast to Florida's Atlantic beaches, was less than an hour's drive east of Racine that night. If she aimed the Ford due east she could make St. Augustine, on the Atlantic, easily. If she aimed the car west she could make Panama City, on the Gulf, by dawn. The state's northern coasts were still mostly wild places of beautiful dunes and shifting sea oats, speckled with only a few pastel motor courts and diners, reptile exhibits and parrot shows.

But on that night Racine only trusted the wild, quiet backbone of her state, far from the tourist lights, her home territory, where the crystal clear waters of the ancient aquifers percolated up through the sand and rock to form springs so magical that swimming in them was like visiting the underwater castle of a princess. She needed a dose of that homegrown fantasy again. She needed a plate of black-eyed peas, corn fritters, and fried trout; she needed to swing slowly in a front porch hammock; she needed a backwoods tent preacher to lay his palm on her head and pronounce her heeee-aled! without a shred of doubt; she needed refuge. 

Racine pawed at the radio dial. Screech, scratch, squawk. Saturday night preachers, baseball, the Grand Ol' Opry, and evil, seductive rock n' roll. Finally the tuner struck gold.

I don't care if the sun don't shine, I get my loving in the evening time, when I'm with my baby.  Patti Page was one of Racine's inspirations, born barefoot and dirt-poor in Oklahoma, but now so rich and famous she had a title, like some kind of queen. Patti Page, The Singing Rage. Racine adored her music but couldn't bear listening to her newest song, The Tennessee Waltz. It was too heartbreaking. All that lost love. I was dancing, with my darling, to the Tennessee Waltz, when . . .

Racine switched the radio off, then mulled her tongue in a dry mouth and glanced nervously in the Ford's rearview mirror. "I guess if anybody had cared enough to chase me they'd have chased me by now, JJ."  The frog chorus seemed to rise in response. She clutched the steering wheel hard with her sweaty left hand and fumbled across the seat with her right one, gently coming to rest on her newborn daughter's velvet-skinned forehead. "JJ, baby, you just ignore these ol' wild noises and keep on sleepin', honey, 'cause I'm not gonna let nothin' or nobody get the best of us again. And nobody's ever takin' you away from me." The green glow of the dashboard lights gave the newborn an aquamarine tint, as if she was floating underwater. "My baby mermaid," Racine whispered. "I'll find us some water to live by."      

JJ uttered a soft, smacking sound then yawned without opening her eyes. Racine looked over at her anxiously. Her head was shaped like a mashed orange and her complexion had the ruddy, pink, vein-speckled appearance of boiled shrimp. But she seemed content enough, and she was the most beautiful sight. Love washed over Racine.

"I'm prayin' for us, honey. Granny McEvers always said I have no common sense. But who wants to have something that's ‘common?' Just low and ordinary and boring – is that what common sense is? Just makin' do with the mud hole God stuck you in? If God didn't want me to meet your daddy, then how come I did? If God didn't want me to be a mermaid, then how come God gave me the dream? If God didn't want me to have you, how come you're here? No, baby girl, God didn't set me up to take a dive. I know the world is low and mean and common and dry as a bone, but I intend to swim for glory, anyhow." She hesitated, fighting tears. "But God better hurry up and give me a sign that we're not up a creek without a paddle."     

Racine guided the Ford around a wooded curve. An odd pink light winked at her through the pines ahead. She leaned forward, squinting. A light in the darkness.

The woods opened up a little. A dirt lane curled off to the right beside a white mailbox on a leaning wooden post. Beneath a pink light bulb covered by a rusting tin shade hung a pink metal sign in the shape of  a cow. The cow's tail pointed down the lane.

Cow Pie Springs Motor Court And Diner.

Window Fans

Fresh Ice

Home Cooking

See The Most Beautiful Spring In These Parts

Racine sucked in a long breath. A motel with a spring. Wonderful! Even if it was named for cow manure.

She downshifted and woozily stuck out one hand to signal the turn to any phantom cars behind her. Then she slowly steered the Ford down the lane beside the pointing cow. Steadying JJ's orange-crate bassinet with one hand, Racine clutched the Ford's steering wheel as it bounced and bumped. Pines leaned inward over the lane, curious and watching, trailing gray moss, making the road feel like a woody tunnel in places. Yet the sides were prettily lined by daisies amidst the sharp fans of palmetto shrubs. This place bloomed, even in wintertime.

After about a minute the woods opened up. A dimly lit oasis of six pink-washed, tin-roofed cabins rose like an island from the earthy loneliness of soft, sweaty forest. To one side sat a little pink cottage with a pink-lit OFFICE sign in the window. Huge oaks trailed Spanish moss above a graveled parking lot lined with big rocks painted pink with white tops, like craggy nipples. The forest rose behind that oasis, a protective wall. Other than an ancient red truck parked beside the cottage, there were no other vehicles in sight. The Cow Pie Springs Motor Court wasn't exactly a hotspot on the east-west tourist route.   

Racine didn't care. Her eyes went straight to the silver gleam of the large spring out front. Big cypress and oaks hung over it. The shore was a pretty path of mown grass with a few wildflowers mixed in. A ramshackle picket fence surrounded the spring, tilting and wandering, a carefree whitewashed ribbon following the soft, grassy shore with no serious intent to keeping cows or gators or any other creature from reaching the water. At the end nearest the cottage the spring pulsed its water into a deep, pretty creek bed that ran beneath the lane where Racine sat in the Ford. One of the biggest oaks dipped one gnarled arm into the spring, the bend of the oak's elbow forming a natural bench out over the water.

"It's beautiful. It's magic," Racine whispered. "It's safe."

Cow Pie Springs was no Weeki Wachee – maybe only half that size, meaning any football game played on its surface would start at one goalpost and end at the fifty-yard line. Racine, barely breathing, eased the Ford over a narrow bridge made of coquina stone. It was like driving over a tiny pale reef that separated the outside world from the watery kingdom of the Cow Pies.   

"Oh, honey, oh sweetie," she crooned to the spring as well as JJ. She pulled JJ's orange crate closer. "Come to Mama."

Racine parked the car with its headlights turned on the spring. Carrying JJ, she stumbled to the ribbon of knee-high picket fence, clambered over it, kicked off her loafers, then sank down on the muddy shore and thrust her bare feet so deep into the water it soaked the calf-high hems of her peddle pushers.

"Revival," she moaned.

She laid the baby on her thighs. Moaning and rocking, Racine scooped a hand into the spring. "We'll start over. We'll start fresh. I'm gonna christen us. First, me."  Racine splashed water on her face. "I'm Racine Darlene McEvers Van der Vondray. Even if I can never tell anybody. I'll never forget you, Johnny." Crying just a little, Racine scooped up another handful of water, let most of it dribble through her fingers, then gently smoothed the moisture on JJ's forehead, cheeks, and lips.

"I christen you Johnetta Jane Esther Van der Vondray. The fifth. But I can't ever tell you that. You'll just have to be happy bein' plain JJ McEvers. We gotta be what we're meant to be, sweetie, and a name's just a name. I can't let the Van der Vondrays find you. But I'm namin' you after your daddy. Johnetta. And Jane, just because I like the way that name flows." She paused. "And Esther. For Esther Williams."

JJ yawned and gurgled. She was a happy baby, or maybe just hard to impress. Racine leaned back, eyes shut, letting the spring soothe her fear, worry, humiliation. Head up, she sighed a long breath of release, then opened her eyes. The Ford's high beams cast a misty spotlight all the way to the spring's far edge. There, near the grand oak with its arm bent over the water, stood a big, bright, hand-painted sign.

FOR SALE

THIS MOTOR COURT AND OWNER'S HOUSE

ON 52 ACRES

INCLUDING  THIS PRETTY SPRING – NONE NICER!

ALL YOURS, FOR ONLY $6,000

Racine's mouth opened in a silent gape of awe, a voiceless, mermaid-under-water prayer of amazement and gratitude.

"Hello? Girl, are you and your baby okay?" a gnarled old-man voice twanged behind her. "You need to rent a cabin? You all right?"  

Hypnotized by a sense of destiny, Racine twisted slowly. As if in a dream she looked up into a pair of kind, sunburned faces. Backwoods folks. Cow people. Crackers. The sort of folks who understood the love of hidden water. The spring's guardian angels. They had just been waiting to hand the legacy over to her.  A Massachusetts college boy named John Van der Vondray had given her the means and the daughter; these people had given her the way.

"I'm buying this place," she said. "I've got cash."

The mermaid was home.

The legend had begun.

4

Racine didn't realize it that first night, but she'd settled in a community as colorful as her own imagination. A right turn out of the driveway at Cow Pie Springs followed the state two-lane – SR 108 – further westward toward the county seat, along a wandering route through handsome forest and broad pastures, over pretty creeks and past breathtaking marshes rimmed in stubby palmetto shrubs and cabbage palms. A few small orange groves posed bravely at the edges, remnants of nineteenth century orchards that had frozen to their roots in one disastrous cold snap during the late 1800's. Mother Nature was patient in northern Florida. She would lull fruit trees with decades of mild winters, then kill a generation of citrus harvests in a single frigid night. Still, a few  orange trees hung on. They sprang from the forgotten roots, they sprouted from the ruined stumps.

Citrus, like daydreams, would not be denied.

On a cool winter day – meaning any day below 70 degrees – the occasional whiff of chimney smoke mingled, not unpleasantly, with the burnt-tar scent of creosote in the roadside air. SR 108 proudly sported that grand symbol of post-World War II modernity – its first electrical poles, so new the breeze caught the raw scent of their oiled wood. To natives the smell of creosote was a kind of comforting tonic, conjuring the preservative fragrance of coal and train tracks, warmth and adventure.  Some day soon the poles might sport telephone lines, too.

It was typical for drivers to halt their cars while men on small, lean horses herded cattle across the pavement. Sometimes the cattle were modern Black Angus or Herefords or golden Jersey milk cows, but just as often, like many of the horses, they were cracker breeds, descendents of livestock left by the Spanish, centuries before. Cattle and cowboys were a common sight in northern Florida, as comfortable on a range of cabbage palms and shell-cracked roads as any old-west cowpoke among sage brush and mesas.

As the road meandered closer to town, small frame houses – cracker cabins, tried and true -- began to peek from clearings beside barns, chicken coops, and gardens. Built of whitewashed pine with shallow tin roofs, they leaked heat and let in breezes, a perfect Florida combination. Hunting trophies hung from the rough-hewn porch posts – bleached white turtle shells, antlers, a gator skull or two. If an animal could be battered and fried, it could be eaten. God blessed even the poorest cracker with cornmeal and milk gravy.

Narrow dirt roads, dusted with gray sand, curled off into the woods here and there. Many were marked with hand-painted signs graciously pointing visitors to the local springs, of which there were an extraordinary number. They were lovable signs, made of weathered cypress and sometimes ornamented by gator skulls and graying conch shells. Some of the springs had been named for obvious physical features or interesting history. Big Rock Springs. Deep Springs. Indian Camp Springs. Hideaway Springs.

The Ballard family tended a massive pair of  Rose of Sharon shrubs on either side of their lane's entrance. Mandevilla and clematis vines swirled up the road sign, a little charred by a recent chill, but still contributing pink and white flowers.  

There was only one family who didn't invite strangers to turn off and visit. Thick gray tabby posts, two-feet wide and ten high, framed that brick-paved driveway. Twin sides of an elaborate, wrought-iron gate hung from the posts, meeting over the drive's center to form a cameo swirling around a florid letter P.

Polket Springs Plantation. Private.

Polket Springs was the ancestral lair of the wealthy Polket family, leaders of society, nemeses of the Ballard's. They pronounced their name Po-kay, not Pole-ket. The Polket acreage was so vast and tentacled that a section of it even curved all the way back to the forest behind Cow Pie Springs. Making the Polket's, with their florid P and fancy French vowels, Racine's backyard neighbor.

The entrance to Polket Springs marked the unofficial border between rural folks and town folks. The two-lane abruptly minded its manners after passing the Polket gate. Its power poles began to sidle from view, hiding their naked utilitarian purpose and creosote perfume among sumac and pines. They began to piggyback a few telephone lines, a mark of nascent sophistication.  

The road soon narrowed and became curvier, following old, meandering carriage paths into a tunnel of ancient, moss-draped oaks, hunched and blue-gray with shadows. The road's surface took on the patina of an aged lady, the pavement carefully mended with patches of tar, like a liver-spotted hand.

Glimpses of smooth-worn red brick peeked out here and there, evidence of a turn-of-the-century roadbed the Polket's had built to smooth the ride from their country home at Polket Springs to their town house. This was no post-war macadam, built by government dollars to lure farmers to market. This was a road built in the wild and woolly 1910's by people who even then insisted upon genteel paths for their new-fangled automobiles. This was where the cracker path ended and Main Street began.

Town houses appeared among the oaks like exotic orchids in a garden of daisies. Victorian gingerbreads. Federal saltboxes. Neo-colonial colonials. Craftsman cottages. They sat on prettily fenced lots big enough for shade trees and sunny backyards, for storage sheds and narrow garages and flower gardens in manure-fed beds in the sandy soil. Big and fancy and fine. 

Some of the smaller homes, the bungalows and cottages, had been ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Up until the war the giant company had sold not just the kitchen sink but the kitchen to put it in. A family could pick out a house design, order it, and the materials would be shipped by train from Chicago, to be assembled on the customer's site like an elaborate puzzle. An entire house by direct mail. Only townsfolk could afford such marvels.

New-fangled television antennae sprouted from the rooftops of only three houses in town – in all of Saginaw County – and all three of those antennae were owned by Polkets. The two-lane paused for the crosswalk at Paul Wolford Polket Elementary School, again at a crosswalk for the small granite grandeur of the Katherine M. Polket  Library, then burst onto a shady town square lined with small buildings and shops, including Ballard's General Hardware And Feed and the City of Fountain Sheriff Department and Jail, Pawley M. Ballard, Sheriff. There was a clear Polket/Ballard duality in Fountain. The Polket's claimed the uppity public venues, most of which had been built with their donations and political influence; the Ballard's claimed the ordinary mercantiles and public service jobs, built with their dogged devotion and laidback pride.

Even in 1950 a visitor might still find a mule and wagon hitched among the cars parked on the square. In the center, under a canopy of evergreen live oaks, stood an exotic and beautiful two-story courthouse of gray coquina stone. Its arched windows were rimmed in colorful mosaic tiles, and it was topped by a Moorish bell tower. Moss and algae greened the roof of rust-red Spanish tiles. In the yard of the courthouse stood a truly awesome coquina fountain, topped by a life-sized bronze statue of Juan Ponce de Leon, weathered to a soft verdigris hue.

The brass plaque on the fountain's round base said it all:

City of Fountain

Established 1892

Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon

searched

for the fountain of youth

and decided this beautiful spring

must be it.

The statue was famous and had been photographed many times over the decades, most notably for a recent issue of Life magazine. No one could deny it was handsome and well made. But it was also unintentionally funny.

Ponce de Leon looked like Bob Hope. A goateed, conquistadorial Bob Hope. He  gazed perpetually at his upheld right hand, where water trickled from all four fingertips and the thumb. Ponce de Leon, his palm heavenward, his fingers open and slightly curled,  didn't seem to be pondering the miraculous spring waters imprisoned inside his pipes so much as wondering why his hand had sprung a leak.

We got our own way of christening newcomers, the wags liked to say. We just drag ‘em over to see ol' Ponce, and they break down laughing.

Abusing Ponce de Leon's statue was a civic tradition in Fountain. Every October he could be discovered holding a football with SCHS scrawled on it, for the Saginaw County High Seminoles, and every summer someone stuck a baseball in his hand and plopped a major league cap on his greenish bronze helmut. In between those seasons he could be found holding any number of items, including purses, brassieres, baby dolls, plastic cemetery jonquils, and political signs. In recent years, Ponce de Leon had campaigned both for and against Truman.

The truth was, the Spanish explorer had never set foot anywhere near modern Fountain. He trod the sandy shores of northern Florida in 1515, more than 300 years before the first intrepid white settler even dared to tiptoe into its wild heartland. No record existed of him ever marching inland after he landed at a beach cove he named St. Augustine. He planted a flag, dropped off a few soldiers, cattle, horses, and pigs, fought the heat, the mosquitoes, and the local Indians, climbed back in his boat, and left. 

Fountain's real founding father arrived in 1830, in the form of a balding Scottish Presbyterian minister and blacksmith named Ethro Ebenizer Ballard. The Reverend Ballard and his family built a pine log cabin beside a pretty little spring sheltered by live oaks and sweet gum at the intersection of two Seminole Indian footpaths, unloaded a mule wagon filled with general goods, set up a pine cross and a blacksmith forge, and ordained the site Ballard's Trading Post and First Presbyterian Church.  

Reverend Ballard hoped to bring both religion and retail sales to the Seminoles, who, in those pioneer days of the 1830's, still controlled Florida's spring-fed hinterland. The Seminoles rejected the religion but liked the Reverend's blacksmith work so well that, a few years later, when the government began rounding the tribe up for removal, the Seminoles used the Reverend's hand-forged hatchets to chop up a few soldiers and several of the Reverend's pioneer neighbors.

Reverend Ballard and his immediate kin barricaded themselves at the trading post, but they didn't have to worry. The local chief spared their lives – in return for more hatchets. The Reverend, being pragmatic, quickly pounded out some new ones.

That act of  pioneer survival won the Ballard's a spot in the cracker hall of fame as an icon of plain common sense. Ballard's were content to preach, blacksmith, run the general store, and do a little cattle ranching on the side. They saw no need for fancy airs or formalities, and their ambitions were modest. Like most Southerners of Scots-Irish descent, they owned no slaves and had little in common with the coastal aristocrats of antebellum plantation fame. By the late 1850's Ballard's Trading Post, then known as Ballard Town, was a pretty village surrounded by family farms. A freed black couple named Moses and Winnie Clayton raised fine hogs and cattle on acreage they bought from the Reverend. They donated a rear pew in the ten-pew First Presbyterian sanctuary, and occupied it every Sunday with their seven children and a pet squirrel. The Reverend named his eleventh child after Moses. 

Then the Civil War came. Ballard's saw it as a crusade for states' rights, so they fought for Florida. Northern Florida, that is. Some died near the Georgia line at the battle of Olustee, one near Tallahassee at the battle of Natural Bridge, some in skirmishes, and one in the Cow Calvary, a home guard made up of ranchers and cowhands fighting Union cattle rustlers.

By the time the war ended the family was decimated. The only surviving Ballard male of marrying age was Ebenizer's oldest son, Parkus, a 47-year-old widower and war veteran, deaf from cannon fire and limping from an ill-healed thigh bone shattered by shrapnel. Family letters described his role in Ballard history bluntly:

If there are to be more Ballards in this land, Parkus had best get to the task of making them.

He found his mate in Gloria Dade, a 20-year-old backwoods weaver who'd lost her fiancé at Gettysburg. She wanted a yard full of kids as much as Parkus did. She also wanted a yard full of sheep for her weaving work. Parkus promised her both. She married him.

Some of Gloria's kin weren't impressed:

Why did you want to go and pledge yourself to a crippled old man? her cousin wrote from Tallahassee.

Gloria wrote back: The part of him that needs to work, why, it works just fine. You could say he has a way with wool.

What an understatement. Parkus and Gloria birthed a whopping 14 baby Ballards, ten boys and four girls, and, even more remarkable, all of those baby Ballards lived to adulthood and produced even more Ballards. Still, it wasn't enough to save the legacy of the old trading post from an invasion worse than bluecoats.     

The Polkets.

Vincent DuLane Polket and his family fled their coastal Georgia cotton plantation just ahead of General Sherman's troops, taking with them a hundred slaves and a trunk full of gold. The Polkets discovered miles of cheap, fertile, well-watered land in upper Florida, around Ballard Town. Vincent Polket bought thousands of acres, then set his freemen to clearing the pines and cabbage palms and rounding up wild cattle to breed. In less than a few years' time the Polkets turned their empire of cotton and hoop skirts into an empire of steers and cowboy boots. 

They made money hand over hoof. After the Civil War Florida became the country's largest exporter of beef. Cracker cowboys drove enormous herds down to Tampa and other ports to be shipped to Spanish Cuba; big ranches sprawled over the open heartland. Polkets quickly became known for owning one of the top ranches in the state.     

The Ballard's – broke and forgotten -- retreated to the forests and swamps. Slowly they rebuilt their lives and became comfortable again, but there was no stopping their rivals, the Polkets. The family diversified their cattle operation into timber and oranges and politics. Polket turpentine camps sprang up in the pinelands around Ballard's Post, where the grand old trees were milked for sap.

There's not a tree in sight that doesn't wear a cat-faced scar on it, a Ballard wrote to friends. Since the Polket's got old Vincent's sons elected to the legislature they feel free to put their brand on everything and everybody.     

The Polkets staged a full coup over Ballard Town in 1892. That was when they concocted the Ponce de Leon myth and named the new town Fountain. They wanted to name it Ville de Polket, but the Ballards fought too hard. The old trading post cabin, still in use as a post office, was torn down and replaced by the weirdly Moroccan courthouse. The spring – a watering hole enjoyed by every kid, mule team, riding horse, and thirsty coon dog that happened through town -- was imprisoned in limestone and bronze, from thence forward pumping trickles of unhappy water out of Ponce de Leon's fingertips.

No one, not even a mule, wanted to drink from a conquistador's pinkie.

An equally fierce feud raged between Polket's and Ballard's when the county was chartered. Polket's naturally wanted to name it Polket County. Ballard's collected the signatures of two hundred Confederate veterans on a petition asking the governor to intervene and name the county Ballard, in Parkus's honor.

The governor, being a wise politician, appointed a naming committee to take the blame. The committee appointed a history professor at West Florida Seminary, the panhandle's premiere repository of higher education, which would one day be known as Florida State University, a top-five party school. That history professor, a wry Yankee from Michigan, perhaps foreseeing the time when his alma mater would best be known for football and beer-chugging contests, said to hell with academic integrity. He made up  a solemn account of a Seminole chief named Saginaw and suggested the new county be named after him.

Both Polket's and Ballard's figured that was the best compromise they'd get, though the Ballard's pointed out that, in all their trading with the Seminoles, they'd never heard of a Chief Saginaw.

With good reason. The Saginaws were a Michigan tribe. No Chief Saginaw had ever existed, at least not further south than Detroit. The history professor kept quiet about his prank.

I did not wish to be used for alligator bait by the local crackers,  he wrote in a memoir, decades later. They are a singularly humorless people when the comedy is conducted at their expense.      

So be it. Welcome to Saginaw County, Florida. Where Ponce de Leon didn't find the fountain of youth and a tribe of Yankee Indians living on the shores of the Great Lakes didn't spawn a Florida Seminole chief.     

It took over twenty years for the historical society of Saginaw County, Michigan to write to the historical society of Saginaw County, Florida, asking a polite question about their Saginaw's origin. A little research finally exposed the truth.

Saginaw County Residents Red-Faced Over Fake Redskin, said a 1914 headline in the Tallahassee newspaper.

Determined to save face, the Polkets pooh-poohed the evidence and insisted Chief Saginaw had been real. "The confusion arises from a simple mispronunciation in pioneer times," proclaimed the Polket who  headed the historical society. "The proper aborigine articulation of our noble namesake's moniker was Sac-in-noseolo, but early settlers shortened it and gentled the tones with a French inflection, pronouncing it Saginaw." Darn those nineteenth-century Scottish, Irish, and English crackers. Parisian snobs.    

Oh, well, a good legend always beats a boring fact. Vincent's grandson, Deckard Polket, defiantly commissioned an official portrait of the fictitious chief. It still graced the courthouse lobby. Chief Saginaw resembled Abraham Lincoln wearing a feathered headdress and earrings. 

Even now, the Ballard's grinned every time they looked at the painting. And every time they stuck a football or a bra in Ponce de Leon's hand. The professor from Michigan had been wrong. When it came to humiliating Polkets, even a Yankee's joke was much appreciated.

Soon Racine would have to choose sides in that very old feud.

5

Racine unfurled a state map and pinpointed her new home. Saginaw County. When she hammered the map to the rough pine door of her cabin at the Cow Pie Springs Motel, the nail went right there, top and center. "A good place to hang your hat," Racine proclaimed. She rolled the name on her tongue. Saginaw County. It tasted sweet, it could be a kind of sugar.

Saginaw Brand. Sweetens even the saddest times.    

To Racine's delight, the county was pockmarked with blue splashes – as much water as land.  Cow Pie was its largest spring but there were at least ten others big enough to name, plus dozens of creeks, ponds, and a good-sized blackwater river, the Oscecala. It curled through the county's middle, headed for a southward merger with the famous Suwanee. As in Way down upon . . . by Stephen Foster.

She found the county's only town. A tiny dot. She had to squint to read the name. Fountain. A big name for such a speck.  

"Fountain, Florida," Racine whispered. "I like it." She held JJ over the map and gently guided one fat little forefinger to the dot. "Our new hometown. Fountain, honey. Even the town is named on behalf of water."

The old couple who owned Cow Pie Springs, whose name was Starke, stared speechlessly at the sixty hundred-dollar bills Racine counted into their hands. There she was, a twenty-year old girl with a newborn baby, no obvious husband, and the kind of cash no female could have earned easily without taking off her clothes. They thought she was crazy to buy their shabby motor court, their wild, moss-tangled forest, and the spring-fed pond that had once been, in Old Man Starke's childhood, a watering hole fouled by the mud and manure of his daddy's cattle.    

"Thank you, Jesus!" Mr. Starke finally said. He was no fool.

Racine sighed with relief. "Y'all told me you've lived on this land all your lives. Where are y'all goin' to move?"

Mrs. Starke smiled. "Everywhere! We're buying a campin' trailer and going off to see the other side of the country. The Grand Canyon, the Alamo, Carlsbad Caverns. You name it."

"You won't miss this place?"

"This place is goin' with us. Right here." Mrs. Starke put a hand to her heart. "But it doesn't own us. We might go all the way to California and take a look-see at the Pacific Ocean."

Racine pointed at the spring. "There it is. You're looking at it right now. The waters of the world are all connected."

The old couple gazed at her as if she were truly touched. But she only nodded and repeated, "It's all connected. All the waters. They go right to each other, from the tiniest creek in the mountains to the biggest blue sea. Right here—this spring—if I could dive in it like a fish, I could swim all the way to China without ever even coming up for air. Where there's water, there's the world."

The Starkes chewed their lips for a few seconds, trying to polite. "Well, now, that's a pretty idea," Mrs. Starke said.

They loaded their pick-up truck with a pair of big trunks, a few pots and pans, some handmade quilts, and a kerosene parlor lamp that had belonged to the old woman's grandmother. They left the rest of their household goods with Racine, as part of the deal.

"Here's our spare rifle," the old man said. "It'll scare off gators and bears, kill a cooter if you're in the mood for some turtle stew, and put the fear of God into any customer who won't pay his bill or tries to get fresh. We'll tell the sheriff to look in on you regular. And if you need anything, head fifteen minutes on up the road --" Mr. Starke pointed west -- "and you'll come to town."

"Can't miss it," Mrs. Starke added. "Just look for a big statue of Ponce de Leon with water comin' out of his hand."

"Beg pardon?"

"You have to see it for yourself, honey. I can't do it justice with words." The old lady laid a hand on Racine's arm. "Are you sure a pretty young thing like you wants to live out here in the wild woods, alone?"  

"I'm not alone," Racine said quietly. "I've got my baby. And the spring. It talks to me."

The old couple pondered that odd remark for a second, gave up, and waved goodbye. "Oh, and don't mind your neighbor, Katherine Polket," Mrs. Starke called out the truck window as the engine backfired. "She won't be too happy that we sold this place to you, but she'll get over it. You paid full price, and she wouldn't. It's her own fault."

Racine cupped a hand to one ear. "Who, ma'am? What?"

"Bye, now!"

As Racine watched their truck rattle its way up the lane into the forest, she wondered what the old lady had tried to tell her and how anyone could be happy living in a camper. An aluminum can on wheels. But lots of people were doing that, taking to the new highways, seeing the world. The world had become a much bigger place since the great war. Racine wanted to pool that bigness in one small, deep place she controlled. A place so safe, such a sanctuary, that neglect and injustice and death couldn't weigh her down. 

The stillness of the woods settled on Cow Pie Springs like frosting on a cake. Yellow swamp finches and bright redbirds fluttered to the edge of the spring for a sip. Three gray cranes sailed up, landing in the top branches of the oaks like feathered ships on a green sea. A mullet jumped in the spring, making a silver arc above the blue water. Even in winter, the first of the spring frogs trilled their love songs. To Racine, the frog songs had lyrics.

Find a mate.

Make babies

Move fast and stay on guard.

Before the raccoons wake up,

hungry. 

Racine shut her eyes and drew a deep breath. I didn't stay on guard. That's why the raccoons got Johnny. She cried silently for a moment, then calmed herself. The air smelled clean and new, predicting that the remainder of the northern Florida winter would be frost-free, maybe even balmy. Good news for the dozen hardy orange trees growing behind the cottage. They prospered because the spring was nearby. Its water warmed the air a little, protecting the orange blossoms from frost.

She wiped her eyes and looked around. The small grove made a bountiful backdrop for the tin-roofed pink home, which wasn't a cottage so much as a three-room pink cracker shack. But Racine loved it. She had never lived in a home she owned, before. It had charm. One side wall was covered in the woody vines of muscadine grapes, and clinging tendrils climbed up the rock chimney.

The Starkes left the cottage full of solid homemade pine furniture, with good screens on the windows, a big fireplace, an electric stove and refrigerator, and a sturdy modern commode conveniently located behind a curtain on the back porch. By the standards of 1950, the cabin was luxurious. But more than that, it belonged to her and JJ, and no one could take it away.

Racine gingerly walked inside. She wondered how long it would take for her body  to stop hurting, how long it would take before she could think of Johnny without crying at night. She put the rifle on pegs over the metal kitchen sink, retrieved JJ from the orange crate, then went back outdoors and sat down cross-legged by the spring. Opening her blouse and pulling up one damp cup of her bra, she guided JJ's mouth to a nipple. JJ bit, suckled, and sighed with happiness. She loved to eat. 

The spring made a soft chuckling sound, a kind of watery purr, as if contented with its new owner. Racine smiled wearily. "You and me are kindred spirits," she told it. "We don't have to travel to see the world. We're gonna make the world travel to see us."     

*

The girl seems real nice. Polite. And flat-out beautiful. But she's got strange notions about water. No sign of a husband, but she's toting a brand-new baby, and she's got cash money. Lots of it. In a suitcase. That girl has some secrets. That girl's got a past. Y'all keep a close eye on her. Oh, and yeah, she says she's going to turn Cow Pie into some kind of underwater theater. Says she's a mermaid.

Before they rolled out of Fountain on their world camper travels Mr. and Mrs. Starke sprinkled the known details of Racine's life like rock salt in an ice cream freezer. The sweetest fame sometimes requires the hardest chill. Funny how the last part, about being a mermaid, came as just an afterthought. In the colorful mythology of Saginaw County, finned women didn't sound an alarm.

At any rate, when she drove into Fountain the first time Racine was already notorious. Women wearing their Saturday curlers lifted their cigarettes like antennae and peered out the window of the Fountain Beauty and Barber Emporium. Bankers and salesmen rose from their morning coffee and smokes at the green formica counter at the Fountain Diner. Farmers looked up from the grain-dusted loading dock of Ballard Feed. Children hugged their Howdy Doody dolls and hid behind their parents.  A stranger! A pink one.

"Everybody's staring at us," Racine whispered to JJ as she guided the car into a spot on the fading brick apron outside Fountain Drugs. "There's so many eyeballs glued to you and me right now somebody could rob the county bank and not a soul would notice. They're all too busy lookin' at us." Racine frowned, then relaxed. "Publicity! Good!"

She tucked JJ, swaddled in the crocheted mermaid wrap, into the crook of one arm. Then she swooped out of the Ford with a dramatic flourish of her voluminous pink skirt.

Racine loved pastels; it was always Easter in her fashion world. Her dress was a sweet pink bell of post-war extravagance, topped by a fuzzy pink sweater and a white Peter Pan collar Racine had embroidered with tiny pink mermaids. Even her white gloves bore tiny mermaids at each wrist, and her pink pumps bore ocean-wavy white stripes across the toes.

Her auburn hair streamed over her shoulders in pin-curled scrolls; that hair alone was enough to make people talk. Modern women were now bobbing their tresses or wearing them up in twists, not flouncing them like a come-hither Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Va-voom! Racine had seen that movie a dozen times at nickel theaters in Tampa. In her mind, Gilda was nearly as tragically noble as the Little Mermaid.   

Men fall in love with Gilda but wake up with me, Rita told interviewers.  The glamorous siren had been born in plain Brooklyn, New York, christened Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. Dolores. Clearly, Rita, aka Dolores, knew how it felt to live a disguised life of impossible expectations.   

I will not disappoint people's idea of glamour, Racine told herself. I will not let them hear my heart pounding inside this damned sausage girdle. 

Thanks to years of acrobatic swimming, Racine's figure had survived pregnancy without much dilapidation. She was packing an extra ten pounds of post-baby fat at the moment, all in her breasts and hips, plus she'd padded her industrial cotton bra with folded dishcloths to absorb her leaking milk. The effect looked luscious, early Marilyn Monroe-ish, especially since Racine had also hour-glassed her entire torso in a longline rubber girdle.

"Damn girdle," she said again, fanning herself. "Why is it that women have to bind up all their good parts but men don't?" Her body sweated from rubbered armpit to rubbered thigh, even in the cool January air, even though the girdle was air-conditioned by dozens of tiny airholes that sucked her skin up like hungry eels. Pink polka dots speckled her from bosom to butt every time she shucked the girdle, but the exterior containment was worth it. Every man and boy on the loading dock at Ballard's Feed stared at her with addled smiles.

Stifling a burp from girdle reflux, Racine started toward the drugstore. She planned to perch on a stool at the soda fountain, show off  JJ and sip a Coke float with extra syrup. She would introduce herself to her new neighbors. Racine smiled widely and fluttered her free hand at the women in the beauty parlor, then at the men on the loading dock. She let the hand float dramatically to her hat, as if its jaunty tilt needed just a gracious little adjustment. The hat sported a satiny pink bow in front. Racine would become a flamboyant pink memory in the history of Fountain. No one would ever forget the first time they saw her.

As she reached the drugstore's door she turned her head to the right, presenting her best profile to the scattered audience as she felt for the door handle. From the corner of her right eye she glimpsed  Ponce de Leon's statue on the courthouse lawn.

She turned slowly, transfixed.

Yes, Ponce de Leon looked like Bob Hope dressed as if he were about to break wind or launch into a conquistadorial duet with Bing Crosby. Weeee're off, on the roooad, to the In-quis-i-tion! But the statue's silliness didn't faze  Racine. To her, whimsy and fine art were the same thing: Tonics for a dry, cruel world.

"Ponce de Leon," she whispered, awed. "With trickling fingers."

Hugging JJ to her chest, she rushed across the street past lacy mimosas and evergreen live oaks with their gnarled arms spread wide and low, as if they wanted to block her. She dodged several curious town dogs and a sleepy winter lizard on the tiled sidewalk to the fountain. Racine halted in front of the bronze statue of Ponce de Leon and the exotic Moroccan courthouse with its Arabian Nights bell tower. She looked from one to the other adoringly.

"JJ, these people know how to make believe! We're home! How much more perfect could this place be?"

Racine sank onto the fountain's limestone ledge, tugged one glove off with her teeth, and scooped a handful of water to her nose. She sniffed it the way a wine drinker sniffs a fine riesling, then dabbed a few drops on the baby's nose. JJ just yawned. Racine, however, burst into gales of laughter. She covered JJ's face with a corner of the swaddling blanket then, drunk on the fountain of youth, flashed her hand into the water again and again. She flung silver droplets into the air and turned her face up to catch them as they fell.

"Miss? Ma'am?" a stern drawl said behind her. "This isn't a baptismal pool. And it's not a bird bath."  

Racine pivoted and looked up.  

The biggest, beefiest, baldest sheriff she'd ever seen in her life stood there  frowning shyly at her beneath bushy gray eyebrows. He had no more than ten strands of gray-brown hair on the top of his head, all of them Brylcreamed into a shiny, sideways oil slick. His name plate and badge was pinned to red suspenders over a red-plaid flannel shirt. The suspenders held up baggy khaki trousers. A long, holstered pistol hung from a thick black belt embossed with what appeared to be blossoms and vines. The flowery black belt struggled to peek from beneath the dewlap of his belly. Last but not least, the beefy hands he'd planted on his hips served as curtain ties for the winged-back sides of an intricately knitted black sweater. The sweater's buttons were carved from the tips of deer antlers.   

Why, he's just a sweet ol' cracker Santa Claus, Racine decided. With a flowery gun  belt and a deer-huntin' granny sweater.

"Hi,  Bubba Santa. Sir."

His brows arched. He blinked. "Are you sassing me?"

"No, sir!"

A crowd of about twenty people – women in curlers, men still holding coffee cups from the diner, wide-eyed children – walked up behind him. All gazed at her, curious or  disapproving. Racine took a deep breath. Don't panic. Sink or swim. She quickly uncovered JJ's face so the crowd wouldn't think she was hiding her. Then she pointed at Ponce de Leon.

"This," Racine said loudly and solemnly, "is a work of true art. I didn't think anything in the whole world could make me laugh out loud again. But this funny statue sure did. That's why it's true art. That's what true art's all about. Making people laugh or cry or think. Making people remember to feel alive."  

People traded uncertain looks. Like a Ballard, she instinctively knew the statue was funny. But, like a Polket, she took it seriously. In the social politics of greater Fountain and Saginaw County, she therefore sat squarely on the fence. A rarity. A hybrid. A mule of the middle ground.  Everyone turned their gaze to the sheriff for a judgment. Was she welcome or not?

He grimaced. "I'm Sheriff Ballard. Pawley Moses Ballard. And I've already heard about you. Miss, uh, Missus --"

"Missus," Racine supplied quickly. "Missus McEvers. My married name. But y'all just call me Racine. And this is my little girl. Johnetta Jane Esther McEvers." She propped JJ up so the crowd could get a better look. "JJ. Say hello to our new neighbors, JJ." 

"Why, she's fresh out of the tomato patch," a woman gasped.

"Oh, she's older than she looks. Born down in . . . Miami. Yes, ma'am. Waaaay down in Miami. About . . . two months ago. We've got kin there."

Racine held her breath. Lies were awful, but they'd do in a pinch. Sheriff Ballard watched her even closer. "Missus McEvers, I don't mean to upset you, but I need to ask you some questions --"

"Sheriff, I know what you want to ask. It's true. I'm alone with my baby. My husband's passed on. He died tragically, and I can barely stand to talk about it. I'm a little unhinged right now, I admit it. I know how it looks."

Heads craned. Ears perked. Now, this was the good stuff. Sheriff Ballard gave a curt nod. "All right. Keep talking."

Racine put a hand to her heart. "He wasn't from these parts. He was from out west. A rancher! I met him when I was sent out there by the Baptists to do missionary work with the Indians. He owned thousands of cows. In . . . Wyoming! He was killed last fall in a . . .he was  killed by a buffalo."

Everyone leaned closer. "A buffalo!" one man said. "Do tell."

"Yessir. There's still a few buffalo out there, you know. Big things, those buffaloes. Mean as snakes." Racine raised her voice dramatically. "What happened was this. Some Indian kids were out riding their ponies, and a, a buffalo charged ‘em. My husband rode his horse his, hmmm, his wild mustang that he had tamed, right into the middle of the trouble and jumped off and bulldogged that buffalo with both arms around the buffalo's neck. So the kids had a chance to gallop for safety.

"By the time they told me and I raced out there on my horse . . . my, hmmm, loyal pinto mare . . . it was too late to get John to a doctor. Me and the ranch foreman – an Indian, a Sioux Indian, my husband's best friend since boyhood – his name was . . . Runnin' Bear.  Runnin' Bear and me, well, we found John in a ravine. He was dying, but he managed to say that I should sell the ranch and go back home – to good ol' Florida, here -- to have our baby. So that's what I've done. And he . . . he said I should find a wonderful piece of land to buy, and that I should follow my dreams. And so, when I saw Cow Pie Springs, I just knew that's what he had in mind. So I bought it. In his honor." She shut her eyes and bowed her head. "May he rest in pieces. I mean, rest in peace."

Amazed silence. Finally, a curlered woman said sharply, "You must be so proud. His last thoughts were of you and the baby. He said all that to you, as he was dyin'."

Racine ignored the suspicious tone and blinked back real tears. Oh, Johnny. "I'll never forget him."

The tears worked. A more sympathetic woman clasped the bosom of her flowered dress. "That is the sweetest story I've ever heard! My husband can't think of that much to say to me when he's feelin' fine, much less if he was about to pass away!"

Other women nodded. Racine was winning them over. The men frowned at Pawley. Tell us what to think about her. Quick.

His brows furrowed so hard they looked like cotton swabs with feelers. He counted the mermaids on Racine's clothing. Two on her collar, one on each glove, and a whole fleet of tiny mermaids on the baby blanket around her daughter. He looked straight into her eyes.

In his twenty years as county sheriff he'd tracked chain-gang convicts through palmetto-palm swamps filled with wasps and rattlers, faced down violent KKK'ers intent on harassing the county's negroes, wrestled armed drunks at Cooter's, the local roadhouse, and upheld the peace during all manner of domestic squabbles. He'd calmed feuds over liquor stills, knocked heads to solve petty thefts, and even solved a rare murder case or two. Not to mention keeping the peace between prickly Ballards and  Katherine Polket. He was not a man to be easily buffaloed by a buffalo story, not even one told by a pink mermaid.

Racine touched the sleeve of his sweater. "Sheriff, by the way, whoever knitted this, they ought to be proud. This sweater's the cat's meow."

Racine had a knack for divining what made people special, what made them gaze into the crystal ball of a deep spring and see China. She had seen into his knit-one-purl-two heart. Straight to the heart of a cracker wool heritage. He'd knitted the sweater himself. After all, he was the grandson of Parkus Ballard and the wool-working Gloria.

His yarn work was such an ordinary fact about him that friends and family thought nothing about it. His fellow sheriffs might occasionally poke fun, but he ignored them. He was 45 years old, 300 pounds, a hunter, fisherman, armed and more than able to shoot a man with the Colt belted below the hem of  his cable-knit. His wife, Betty Jean Parmenter Ballard,  who ran Ballard Hardware and Feed with the cool efficiency of a born businesswoman, couldn't knit a basic stockinette stitch if her life depended on it. Neither could hers and Pawley's two daughters or their son, Ethan Moses Ballard, who was finishing up veterinary college at the University of Georgia.

But Pawley had won  prizes for his knitting at the Saginaw County Fair since he was old enough to hold a pair of pine needles. Knitting was in his genes.

Pawley sighed. All right, Racine McEvers didn't se