The Rising of Glory Land

Book 2: Glory Land Novel

by Janie DeVos

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

In the earliest days of the last century, a Florida family strives to build a legacy in the burgeoning new city of Miami . . .
 
In South Florida, a region that offers some of life’s richest beauty as well as some of its harshest conditions, a city is rising. Eve and Max Harjo moved to Miami after the great freeze of 1894 wiped out their citrus grove. Eve is busy writing for the Miami Metropolis, Miami’s first newspaper, while Max salvages the ships that fall victim to Florida’s dangerous reefs and violent storms. 
 
Their nineteen-year-old daughter Eliza dives to bring up the salvaged treasures, uncaring that it is hardly woman’s work.  And her stubborn determination to educate local Seminoles—male and female—draws the ire of the tribe’s chief. But Eliza’s greatest conflict will be choosing between two men: a brilliant inventor working on the prototype for a new motorboat, and a handsome lighthouse keeper from the northwest. When a massive storm unleashes its fury on South Florida, it reveals people’s truest characters and deepest secrets, changing lives as drastically as it changes the coastal landscape . . .

Release date: June 19, 2018

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

Acknowledgments

It not only takes people who are greatly educated about an area to help me create a novel worth reading, it also takes folks who have a great love for a place, for they are the ones who breathe life into my stories through their depth of emotion and experiences.

First, I’d like to thank Lisa Mongelia, Executive Director of the History of Diving Museum, in Islamorada, FL. Lisa’s information about diving before the development of the Miller Dunn helmet was instrumental in helping me to paint a concise picture of how dangerous and primitive the world of wreck diving was at that time, and how the introduction of such a helmet helped to catapult the industry into a far safer and more lucrative one.

I’m also very grateful to Gary Bremen, park ranger at Biscayne National Park, who works hard to protect and educate the public on Biscayne Bay’s history, and the importance of maintaining the health of these delicate and most vulnerable waters and barrier reefs. I learned a lot from talking with him, even though I grew up swimming and fishing in the very waters he’s so committed to caring for today.

And I am especially indebted to Eric S. Martin, President of the Florida Keys Reef Lights Foundation, who is the go-to man for all things related to the six screw-pile reef lighthouses along the South Florida coastline from Biscayne Bay, down through the Florida Keys. His insight into the daily life of lighthouse keepers was invaluable in the writing of this book, and it was downright fascinating on top of it! He was most gracious about answering an endless list of questions I had, and was most generous in providing me with pictures and information far beyond what I asked of him. It’s obvious these old structures are a passion of his, and because of people like him, these lighted sentinels will be cared for and preserved so that they will continue to stand majestically along Florida’s southern reefs for generations to come.

Finally, a very special “thank you” to an old friend, Rich Stone. Even though he hails from the north, Rich has an uncanny understanding of the waters of South Florida, probably better than most native Miamians do, and his passion for them runs many fathoms deep. His expertise in the field of nautical mechanics was most helpful when writing about the early days of motorboats. Without Rich’s guidance, my character, Striker, would have only sailed, rather than motored his way through this novel.

My friends of the deep, may there always be red skies at night for you.

Preface

Eliza

Lake Weir Area, Central Florida

February 1895

My world changed as I sat in a wasted orange tree, hidden within the branches, playing hide-and-seek with my eight-year-old brother, Dylan. As I sat silently on the tree limb, refusing to give away my hiding spot, my mother appeared below me and looked around at the devastation that surrounded us. Even at the age of seven, I knew that the amount of damage our citrus groves had suffered was enormous. Thousands of shriveled and pitted-skinned oranges covered the ground, and beyond what I could see was another hundred acres of frozen tangerine and grapefruit trees. Nothing had been spared.

Mama squatted down and picked up a ruined orange, but the sound of a wagon rolling down the road that ran parallel to our grove got her attention, as well as mine. She stood up and looked in that direction. Several rows of orange trees blocked our view for the moment, but just from the creaking, sluggish sound of the wagon plodding along, I figured it was heavily weighted down. When it cleared the trees, I could see that I was correct. The conveyance was piled high with belongings, and crowded in and among them all was Clyde Whitfield and his family. All five of his children, as well as his wife, Grace, looked as beaten down as our groves. But as Clyde turned toward Mama to touch the brim of his sweat-stained hat in greeting, I saw more than just a defeated look on his face. I could see the terrible fear in his eyes asking, What now?

When the first freeze slammed Florida on December twenty-ninth, the temperatures sank to nineteen degrees, and snow blanketed areas from Tampa across the state to Titusville. Even as Dylan and I were making our first snowballs, I couldn’t stop thinking about the things I’d heard during the meeting at our church the night before. Another grove owner, Bob Chapman, said that Armageddon had begun, and since Reverend Short had preached about that very thing just a few weeks before, I knew what Mr. Chapman was talking about. It terrified me. Looking around at the unusually full church pews, I couldn’t help but believe he might be right. We prayed together as “children of a mighty and merciful God” for hours that night, and at first, it seemed as if our prayers might actually have been heard.

Within the week, small signs of life began shooting out in green buds on the sturdy older trees. My parents, Max and Eve Harjo, knew that many of our younger trees wouldn’t survive, but they felt that the older ones could, and Papa said those that did were almost guaranteed to give us the sweetest fruit we’d ever tasted. But all hope was lost when the second freeze hit us on February eighth. There was no snow this time, but after the temperatures stayed well below freezing for two straight days, there was nothing left of the trees but shriveled fruit and blown out bark from the sap that froze in the trunks. Leaves and fruit fell from the branches, leaving our once beautiful groves a dying wasteland. My father had said that if Mr. Chapman was right, and Armageddon had begun, then the Bible had gotten it wrong. We wouldn’t be consumed by fire and brimstone, he said, but by an icy cold instead.

Suddenly, I heard Papa calling Mama’s name. “I’m in the third row,” she shouted, and a moment later, he appeared through some of the trees. I knew I should make my presence known, but there’d been too many hushed conversations between my parents lately, and I wanted an unfiltered version of what was going on, so I remained silent and still.

“Did you see the Whitfields?” he asked as he walked toward her.

“Yeah, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to them. I just saw them ride by with what looked to be everything they own piled into that old wagon. Did you talk to Clyde?”

“Yes. They’ve had enough. Since losing most of what they had in the ’86 freeze, they only had the fifteen acres of tangerines left, and most of those were younger trees. The grove’s destroyed. They’re heading back to Brunswick. You ’bout done here, Eve? We need to sit down and settle on what we’re gonna do, and when.”

“Still thinkin’ about doing what we talked about last night, Max?” Mama asked.

“Yes,” Papa confirmed.

“I figured you’d already made up your mind that’s where we’re headed.” She smiled up at him. After ten years of marriage, it was obvious they knew each other pretty well. “James will be thrilled,” she said, referring to her older brother.

I liked Uncle James. He always brought Dylan and me something when he came for a visit, and he looked a lot like Mama, with his dark red hair and brown eyes. He lived far away, south of us, in a tiny little town on the coast. I’d heard him tell my parents more than once that we should move down there, too, but I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. I liked living among the orange groves and swimming in the blue springs, and I saw no reason to change any of that. I had to admit, though, Uncle James’s enthusiasm was contagious as he described the beauty of his new home, and the different and exciting things to do there, like swimming in an ocean of salty water. What a strange thing that would be!

“Well, I’m glad someone will be thrilled about it,” Papa said, “’Cause it’s a pretty rough place. But things will change fast once the railroad gets down there. It didn’t freeze that far south—at least not to the extent that it did here, and I’d be willing to bet that railroad man Flagler knows it, too. Even so, we don’t have to have groves again, Eve, at least not as large as we have now. There’re other ways to make a living, and after what we’ve just been through, I’m leanin’ toward those other ways. There’s fishing, and, soon enough, there’ll be tourists coming down on the trains. James says he’s gonna help build the town up, and I have no doubt that he will. He’ll prosper in a big way because of it, too. And if we get down there while the place is still young, we can do the same, Eve.”

“Still, Max, there’s hardly anything there, or anyone either.” Mama sounded a little unsure. “Like James once told us, it’s mostly dreamers of the hardiest kind or hard people of the most desperate kind that are there now, and we’d be settling our family among them. But I guess we’re pretty desperate now, too,” she said, forcing a smile.

I was reminded of a letter we’d received from Uncle James soon after he’d moved, six months before, when he’d gone down to help design and build a hotel. He’d written that the area had so many mosquitoes, horseflies, and sand fleas that they were thicker ’n thieves at a blind men’s convention and could suck a body dry in a matter of minutes. And if that wasn’t enough to make one turn tail and run, then the fact that the longtime homesteaders and Seminoles didn’t take too kindly to outsiders surely was. Though Mama had laughed and said most of that was probably exaggerated, I figured there was some truth in it, too.

My thoughts of the future were quickly replaced by the present when I heard Mama say that it was nearly dinnertime. “Are you hungry?” she asked Papa.

“I could eat,” he confirmed.

“Let’s find Dylan and Eliza,” she said as she bent down to look beneath the branches of the trees to see if she could spot our legs down one of the rows. “We need to let them know what’s goin’ on.”

As they headed off toward home, I didn’t move from my branch. I needed to think things over for a minute or two, see how I felt about it, and see how it felt to say the name of that strange new place out loud. “Miami,” I whispered. I climbed down through the branches, shimmied down the trunk, and then started for home. “Miami!” I said a little louder. I decided I liked the name. Maybe I’ll decide I like the place, too, I thought, if the ’skeeters don’t run us off before I have enough time to decide.

Chapter 1

The Price of Paradise

Miami, Florida

April, 1906

The Biscayne Bay House of Refuge sat glistening in the noonday sun, patiently waiting for the next group of shipwrecked survivors who would need the safety of its shelter and the meager but life-sustaining supplies stocked within. Numerous houses of refuge sat scattered along Florida’s eastern coastline, but the Biscayne Bay house was the one nearest to our home on the Miami River. My twenty-year-old brother, Dylan, helped to maintain the shelter whenever the usual keeper needed a break, and he’d been out at the house for the last month. My parents were bringing fresh supplies to him and I accompanied them in our single-mast sailboat. We knew that as much as he needed supplies, he needed company, too, for boredom and loneliness plagued refuge keepers. The curse of isolation was a constant with them, and lighthouse keepers as well. In many ways, those keepers at the offshore lights had to endure the worst of it for they could go days without seeing anyone other than the occasional fisherman.

After dropping off the supplies, the four of us would try our luck at some surf fishing. Mama was hoping to catch red snapper, and she’d been optimistic enough that she’d brought along a head of cabbage to make slaw, and corn meal for hushpuppies. The day was brilliantly bright and hot, and since it was Sunday, we would take full advantage of the opportunity to spend some time together.

“Eliza, throw me the stern line when I’m done tying up the bow,” Papa said, startling me. We’d arrived at the refuge house’s dock. Quickly jumping out of the boat, my father tied the bow line to the wooden piling as I hurried to the back of the boat for the stern rope. As I waited to toss it to him, I pushed the blowing strands of my hair away from my eyes and looked out at the bay. It was a beautiful, deep bluish-green, but there was a stiff breeze coming out of the northwest, creating white foam that topped the waves like a froth of meringue. Hurricane season was nearly upon us, and it was anyone’s guess each summer which town would be struck down, or how many folks would still be alive the following day to tell about it, much less have homes to gather in for the telling.

The majority of winter tourists had boarded the train at Miami’s Fort Dallas Station just the week before to return north for Easter. With the large exodus of wealthy people, our population had shrunk considerably. It would become bloated with visitors again once hurricane season was over at the end of November, taking the dense humidity and heat with it. Then the full-pocketed, well-dressed Yankee tourists would return to the place the Seminoles called “Myaamia,” meaning friends, so they could bask in the warmth of the winter sun. And many of the northerners had become friends during the ten years we’d lived on the Miami River, but there were others who treated the year ’rounders as nothing more than “ignorant crackers,” who were simply put on God’s green Earth to make their lives as comfortable as possible.

“Rip currents today,” Papa said, drawing my attention back toward the beach. I saw that my brother had posted a sign: No Swimming. Rip Currents. Just the month before, two tourists from Boston had drowned off the beach near Cape Florida, when they’d been caught up in one of the deadly currents. Instead of swimming parallel to the shore until they were out of it, they’d tried swimming through it. The current had won. It always did. There was hell to pay for living in paradise, and a wide variety of ways to make payment.

Dylan came out of the house and hurried across the sand to help us unload the boat. The wind whipped his shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair across his face. “I started to wonder if y’all would end up not coming,” he said as he reached down from the dock to take a box of supplies Mama held up to him.

“It’d take more than five-foot seas to keep us in port,” she said.

“No,” Papa clarified, “to keep you in port.” Laughing, he directed his attention back to my brother. “How are things goin’ here, son?”

“It’s been pretty quiet lately,” he said as he grabbed a basket from me. “Those stronger light bulbs out at Fowey Rocks have made a huge difference in preventing wrecks. I know that’s good news and bad news for you, Pa,” he added, smiling.

Our father had started salvaging wrecks soon after we’d moved down to Miami, and it had been a far more lucrative way of earning a living than his other job, taking tourists into the Glades to kill gators. And my father preferred it. Though he’d always hunted, he’d hunted for a reason: to put food on the table, or to sell the meat and skins to folks who couldn’t go hunting. But my father had a bad taste in his mouth about taking some over-privileged, under-worked tourist into the back country for the sake of mounting some poor animal’s head on the wall and boasting about the danger he’d put himself in to capture it.

“Naw.” Papa shook his head. “I’m glad for the stronger beams.” He finished securing the boat’s lines to the pilings, then jumped back in to help us unload. “There are already enough wrecks to work. No need to add any more to that list. Too many lives have been lost to those old reefs and sandbars. But stronger bulbs or not, those jagged rocks are still gonna create plenty of casualties. It doesn’t matter whether the crews can see the reefs or not. When the winds are strong enough, they’re gonna toss boats and ships around any which way they choose.”

We finished unloading and started up toward the house with the supplies, but a clap of thunder sounded off in the distance, startling us, and we looked up to see ominous charcoal-colored clouds billowing up in the west.

“Weather’s comin’ in,” Dylan said. “But Lord knows we need the rain. It’s been so dry.”

“Yeah,” Papa agreed, taking one last look toward the sky before climbing the porch steps and seeking sanctuary in the well-made refuge house. “But you know how that goes: What Mother Nature withholds from us now, she will more than make up for in the future.”

Looking off to the west just in time to see lightning backlight the rapidly building storm clouds, I wondered if the future might have just arrived.

Chapter 2

Life is Calling

I slid another stack of pancakes onto Dylan’s plate, and then sat back down at the kitchen table.

“So you’ll be at Fowey for just a week, you think?” Papa asked before taking another sip of coffee. We’d been forced to eat breakfast for supper since we’d been unable to fish that afternoon. The skies had opened up, chasing every living creature into shelter, including us. Now, with the wood-burning stove going, the room was cozy. It was late April, so there was still a little coolness to the air, especially on the beach in a storm, but we wouldn’t have that luxury for too much longer. Within another month, heat and humidity would force us to get out of the kitchen as soon as a meal was over, and the choice of meals would be contingent on how long one would have to stand over the stove to cook them.

Once, during a dinner that was being prepared by the ladies of the First Presbyterian Church for a fourth of July celebration, I heard Elotta Aims remark that she wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that a woman who was condemned to spend eternity in hell wasn’t sent to some lake of fire but banished, instead, to a kitchen in Miami, in August, with a fully fired-up wood-burning stove. “Now that,” she’d emphasized, “is what I’d consider hell.” We’d all laughed, heartily agreeing as we wiped the perspiration from our faces with our already-soaked handkerchiefs and continued frying chicken. The heavy cotton or linen blouses and wool shirts we were expected to wear in social settings nearly gave us heat stroke during the summer. As soon as I returned home, I always shed the miserable clothing for either a lighter cotton dress or a pair of canvas pants and a cotton or denim shirt, just as Mama did. As far as we were concerned, living in South Florida’s oppressive heat meant throwing the old rules of etiquette out the window and wearing clothes that wouldn’t kill us.

“Pass me the sugar, Ma, would ya, please?” Dylan asked before answering Papa’s question about his expected length of stay out at Fowey Rocks lighthouse. I assessed my brother across the table from me, and thought about how kind he was and how he’d make some lucky girl a fine husband. He was a good-looking man. Though he was fairer than me, we had the same angular facial structure, and his eyes were an exact copy of Papa’s. They were dark blue, penetrating eyes, and when Dylan looked at you, it seemed as though he could look right through you. Truly like father, like son, I thought.

“I’ll be at Fowey Light at least a week,” Dylan said, stirring sugar into his coffee. “I’ll man it with Striker until Adam Wilson gets back from shore leave. I appreciate y’all taking me out tomorrow. There’s got to be at least two men there at all times. Adam was just getting ready to leave for the mainland when Jim Altman fell off the oil tank’s ladder and broke his ribs. Lucky for Jim, Adam hadn’t left yet, or Jim would have been stuck there until the next boat came by to haul him back to shore. It’s tough--there’s no way to send a message for help other than to hang the flag upside down and wait for a passing ship to notice it. Crews are good about keeping an eye out for it, though, and stopping when they see a distress signal. They know somethin’s goin’ on. But it sure would be nice to have a telegraph machine or phone line out there. Anyway, I’ll stay when Adam gets back so Striker can get some shore leave, especially if Jim isn’t back by then. Apparently, he got banged up pretty badly.”

“Listen, Dylan, how’s Striker doin’ these days? And how long is he plannin’ on stayin’ out at the light?” Mama asked as she gathered up some of our dishes and took them over to the sink. Paul Strickland, or Striker, had become a friend of Dylan’s soon after we moved to Miami. People who didn’t know Striker well thought his name was just a shorter version of his surname. But he’d actually gotten the moniker because of his uncanny luck getting a “strike” almost every time he threw a fishing line into the water. He was a couple of years older than Dylan, and had lived with his parents just downriver from us to the west.

Mae and Jerry Strickland, Striker’s parents, had also been citrus growers who were ruined by the freeze that had wiped us out. But their enormous groves had been south of us, in Leesburg, Florida. Just as my parents had decided that running an enormous grove was a thing of the past, so had they, and the Stricklands became involved in boat building. They mainly built glade skiffs, the flat-bottomed boats used to navigate through the marshes of sawgrass in the Everglades, but they built some small sailboats, as well. Paul, their only child, had shown a real affinity for building the boats, and before too l. . .