The Styx Read Free

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    She finally spun to him and appeared surprised, but turned instantly in control. “Mr. Martin. Fetch us a calash, quickly, please. We need to take Mizz Fluery home.” She kept moving with the older woman.
    The bellman stopped jogging but still had to lengthen his walking stride to keep up with them. He hesitated at the request but had to consider it, coming as it was from a superior’s daughter.
    “Uh, ma’am, there’s no one down in the Styx tonight, ma’am,” he said, trying to be pleasant and deferential. “They’re all across the lake at the festival, ma’am. I, uh, could get a driver to take you all over the bridge to West Palm.”
    The elderly woman had yet to either acknowledge the bellman or slow her stride. But Marjory McAdams snapped her green eyes on the man and sharpened her voice:
    “Either get us a calash, Mr. Martin, or I shall fetch one and drive it myself, and you know, sir, that I am quite capable.”
    The bellman whispered “shit” as the women continued on, and then he turned and ran back toward the hotel.
    They were already onto the dirt road leading through the pines and cabbage palms to the northern end of the island when the thudding sound of horse hooves and the rattle of harness caught up to them. Marjory had to take Miss Fluery by the elbow to pull her to the side as Mr. Martin slowed and stopped next to them. Without a word they both scrambled up into the calash before the bellman had a chance to get out and help. As they settled in the back, he turned in his seat:
    “Miss McAdams, please ma’am. All of us was asked to stay out of the Styx tonight. It might be best…”
    “Mr. Martin, can you now smell that smoke in the air?” Marjory said, meeting his eyes. Martin turned to look into the darkness, even though the odor of burning timber was now unmistakable.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, without turning back to face them.
    “Then go, sir.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said and snapped the reins.
    The horse balked at the darkness with only the light of a three-quarter moon to guide it, but it moved at the driver’s urging. Miss Fluery kept her eyes high and forward and could see the gobs of smoke that caught in the treetops and hung there like dirty gauze. In less than another quarter-mile, she stood up with a grip on the driver’s seat, and Marjory could see the new set of the woman’s jaw. She too could see flickers of orange light coming through the trees as if from behind the moving blades of a fan. Despite his reluctance, Mr. Martin urged the horse to speed.
    “It may only be a wildfire,” Marjory said carefully, but the old woman did not turn to her voice of hope as they pressed on.
    Minutes later the carriage slurred in the sandy roadway when they rounded a final curve and came to a full stop at the edge of the clearing. The horse reared up in its traces and wrenched its head to the side as the heat of some two dozen cones of fire met them like a wall, and the white, three-quarter globe of the animal’s terrified eye mocked the moon.
    Marjory had been to the Styx before, having talked Miss Fluery into letting her walk the distance to see some new baby the housekeeper had described. Marjory knew she was defying all social rules, but her inquisitiveness had long been a part of her character. The Styx was the community where all the Negro workers—housemaids, bellhops, gardeners and kitchen help—lived during the winter season, when the luxurious Royal Poinciana and the Breakers were filled with moneyed northerners escaping the cold.
    Marjory had not been shocked by the simple structures and lack of necessities in the Styx. She was not so naïve and sheltered in her family’s mid-Manhattan enclave not to have witnessed poverty in New York City. She had seen the tenements of the Bowery and had secretly had her father’s driver, Maurice, take her through the infamous intersection of Five Points to witness the sordid and filth-ridden world of the Lower East