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Palmettos fidgeted lazily in the soft breeze of southern inland Florida, and nowhere was there hurry. In this cattle and farming area, flatlands unpopulated to the point of eeriness, lay Flat County, west of the big lake Okeechobee; east of the Gulf and its tourist-teeming highways.

Flat City, the county seat, had a population of 1,495 persons, no Chamber of Commerce and no particular interest in growing to 1,500. Newcomers were made welcome to a degree dependent on the individual newcomer, but newcomers were not sought. However, with the month of April in 1958 came a strange rumor and Police Chief J. S. Williams thought he was the first to hear it.

He walked briskly into Flat City Pharmacy, wearing the smugly portentous look of a man with a shiny new nugget of gossip. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the Silex, stirred deliberately and noisily until Druggist Bake glanced up from his Wall Street Journal (Flat City was only geographically rural; spiritually, it was cosmopolitan) and said irritably, "Don’t wear out the dime-store cups. They’re heirlooms."

Casually, still stirring, Chief Williams said, "Guess you’ve heard the old Space place is being sold."

"No!" said Jim Conklin, who worked at the feed store, and who was standing at the magazine rack thumbing through the photography magazines in his never-ending search for naked women. "Who to? Smithsonian Institute?"

"Nope" said Druggist Bake.

He smiled thinly at a point over Chief Williams’ head.

Then he said, deflating Williams’ role as town crier, "Somebody’s going to live there. Yankee woman was down looking at it yesterday. I hear the deal’s practically through."

Chief Williams frowned, and vengefully put three more spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee, stirring furiously.

Then, seeking his lost prestige, Williams said, "Old Willingham down at the paper said the fellow buying it is a New Yorker, in public relations."

"In what?" said Mrs. Perkins.

"He must be out of his mind," said Jim Conklin.

"Oh, I don’t know," the druggist said. "It’s got mighty fine timber. It’s well built. Old Ronald Space bought nothing but the best. And me, for one, I never thought Ronald was near as crazy as they said."

"Ha!" snorted Williams. "He was strictly for the squirrels. Remember when they fined him for shooting fish and he said he shot them because he couldn’t stand to take the hook out? And how he tried to file charges against the State Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission for encouraging cruelty to animals? By not letting people shoot fish?"

"That must of been the year Alfred and I were in Europe," Mrs. Perkins said, sipping her cherry phosphate.

"Hell," said Jim Conklin. "A fish ain’t no animal."

"Tell you one thing," said Druggist Bake slowly, pulling at his mustache, which he wore as a prop in his capacity as town sage. "Whoever bought that place is an individualist. A downright one."

"I was trying to think how much old Space got fined that time," Chief Williams said, trying to think. "Can’t remember. Quite a bit, though. I remember he paid it all off in Indian head pennies."

"Yep," said Mrs. Perkins, "that must of been the year Alfred took me to Europe. He said he always wanted to ride on an ocean. ‘Alfred,’ I said, ‘Alfred, let’s go while we can. None of us are getting any younger.’ And we went! He hated every minute of it."

Jake Baldwin, who owned the feed store, waddled in, his face round and enigmatic. Jim Conklin took one last look at Nude in Tree and sidled out. Jake hooked his thumbs in his belt and said importantly, "Well, folks, hang on to your hats. I got news."

The news moved fast through Flat City, that April. The old Space place is sold. . . .

The old Space place was four miles out of Flat City, on Devil’s Lake where the Withlahatchee River fed in. Some folks had wondered what ever would happen to the Space place, but the wonder had been diminishing with the years as it became evident that nothing, apparently, was going to happen to it.

When Ronald Space had been alive, the rumor had been that Ronald—who was known as Harrington Space’s crazy brother—had a gold bathtub in his home. A young real estate editor on one of Harrington Space’s newspapers once gained fame—of a nature even more temporary than most fame, inasmuch as he was promptly fired when he sobered up—by calling up Harrington Space’s crazy brother long after midnight to ask a question. The newspaperman had an inquiring mind. He was a seeker after knowledge.

"Mr. Space?" he said, when Ronald stumbled sleepily to the phone. "Tell me. What is the best way to get a ring out of a gold bathtub? I got to worrying about it, and couldn’t sleep."

"I know you, John Riley, you son of a bitch," said Harrington Space’s crazy brother, Ronald, who was a far cry from being crazy. "I’m going to tell my brother on you."

He did, and Harrington Space fired John Riley, not out of any sympathy for his brother but because Harrington Space had a firm rule about staffers charging long distance calls to the office.

John Riley, who had been working on Florida newspapers for years without ever getting caught up on his car payments, went into the real estate business and in a relatively short time made so much money he turned Republican and received ovations at luncheons by saying N.R.A. stood for Nasty Reds Association.

Ronald Space, who had started with one dragline and made a quarter of a million dollars in drainage work in the Everglades area, died a couple of years later on a drizzly August day in 1942, the result of absent-mindedly chopping a tall Australian pine down on himself.

Ronald had been a prolific writer. It was, in fact, his hobby and pastime there in the big house where he lived alone in south central Florida. However, his writing had been largely limited to what he termed Outdoor Sonnets, plus a few miscellaneous essays denouncing such organizations as the Rosicrucians and the American Medical Association and he had failed to get around to composing and writing a will.

His estate, more or less by default, went to his brother Harrington. The estate consisted, as far as anybody ever found out, of the huge house he had built in the most deserted part of Florida he had been able to find; a gallon jar nearly filled with Indian head pennies, and a list in unbreakable code headed: "Saving Accounts, east of Mississippi."

The huge old house rared above the grove of scrub oaks which were raffish in hanging and tattered Spanish moss. There were many trees of many kinds in this flat wild country Ronald Space had chosen. The big house looked out over the big black lake and the Withlahatchee River curled through one corner of the land. It was a disheveled house. After a couple of years things began to fall off it. Harrington Space forgot he owned it. He had many properties in progressive areas. And he was occupied with his newspapers.

His newspapers, both dailies and weeklies, spotted Florida. Harrington Space considered himself the William Randolph Hearst of the Sunshine State, or at the very least the Joseph Pulitzer. He knew little and cared less about the section of Florida where his brother had built his crazy house.

Harrington had few subscribers and no advertisers at all in that section of Florida, simply because there weren’t many people in that section.

Main highways also etched across the interior but none came through that part of Florida. Ronald Space had built his castle in solitude and the highways turned away the invaders, like a moat.

He was far from the coast where the surf called the Yankees, far removed from the Tamiami Trail with its whizzing tourists, far south of the ridge country with its bustling citrus gamblers, far north and inland from the neons of Miami.

Even during the first boom the outside world had hardly touched Flat County, Florida. When the 1950’s came, after Ronald Space was gone, even the second and much larger boom didn’t touch it either. The only tourists to get into Flat City were bemused individuals who had taken a wrong turn in Fort Myers or somewhere.

These individuals, irritably, would ask a Flat City native what became of the broad highway. The native would point silently back whence the outlander came. The tourists would roar away.

They were in a hurry to get to Florida and brooked no delay; humping over the wheel, zooming through Flat County.

Greenly and serenely Flat County lay, quietly and anciently calm. Hump-backed and indolent Brahman cattle munched at tall, untrodden St. Augustine grass. Moist mango trees gave shade and ripe guavas fell, plump, where no ear heard.

The sun beamed peacefully on the lakes and the land, and the moss swayed.

Far away, this way and that, the black-etched highways were busy. Flat County picked deep-red tomatoes and munched them with a little salt, lying back under a lime tree and eyeing the soft sky for showers.

Its people were a breed no Florida-seeker ever knew without first being fully accepted. It was a self-contained little town. Its citizens had a serenity. Their faces were tan, their hands were hard and their humor was tongue-in-cheek. Except for the young men, few Flat Citians ever went to Miami. The older folk seldom even went to Fort Myers.

Flat City had taken the many and varied breeds to arrive at its site and in an astonishingly short time blended its own personality type, recognizable to even the most obtuse, an individualistic personality—unique. Adventurers had built this town, as adventurers built San Francisco, although neither would have welcomed the comparison.

Flat City was a cracker town. There is no easy definition for a Florida Cracker. The literal-minded say he is simply a Florida-born native. This has nothing whatsoever to do with it. A man can be born a Yankee and a Cracker in the same lifetime, although it is true only a limited number of men are equipped to do this. Most of these, however, end up as Crackers. The rest wonder all their lives what is wrong.

Arthur Bake, for instance, who ran Flat City Pharmacy, had lived until he was forty-two years old in Pittsburgh although now those years seemed to him like a murky dream. And now that he was seventy he wasn’t sure but what they had been. His son, born in Florida, right in Flat City, lived in Orlando where he was a highly successful embalmer but he would never in his life be a Cracker. His daughter, born back in Pittsburgh, lived now on Park Avenue with a Yankee broker husband but she would never be anything but a Cracker.

The term is not easy to define. You are or you aren’t. A cracker is inclined to gamble, and knows when it’s going to rain.

Like San Francisco, Flat City had a large first or second generation population. Families had come from places with exotic names like Racine and Providence. Some of the tribal elders had snapshots of snow. The kids equated snow with brownies—they believed in it, but it wasn’t real.

Around Flat County for a period of years after Ronald Space’s death one of the favorite pastimes of the children was playing in and around the old Space place. It was a fine place to play although, sadly enough, years of effort had failed to furnish the house with a believable haunt.

One reason may have been that it is difficult to envision the average ghost having much of a sense of humor and Ronald Space, in his own way and despite himself, had possessed a sense of humor. Warped, perhaps, but definitely there. Or, at least, a sense of the ridiculous. Naturally, his house imitated him.

For one thing, the house had no front door.

It had a screened porch, a big one. But it had no front door. The front wall went straight across. There was a deep psychological reason for this. Ronald Space only liked back doors and side doors. He didn’t like front doors.

This, in years past, had been the cause of deep frustration to the occasional country peddler or salesman who all unawares dropped in. It is a rending experience for a journeyman front door knocker to find no front door. Ronald never explained the lack, or addition, whichever it was. He never explained anything. And, having picked his homesite well, he was not called upon to explain anything.

Flat City had its normal share of idle curiosity but it was leavened with a facet of its own personality. Flat City did not give a happy damn, not really.

Flat Citians, the breed, demanded little conformity. Adventurers—even inadvertent adventurers—never do. They merely accepted the house, as they accepted the sun and the summer rain, with an unthought-of awareness. The house was just there, as is. The legend about the gold bathtub was dead; the first assault wave of children after the house became vacant disproved that story. The bathtub had only a peculiar, comfortable backrest, done in waterproof gilt.

The years clawed at the house ineffectively, for it had sturdy rafters and thick walls and its cypress had served a long apprenticeship standing in swamps, and cypress knows how to ignore time, better than most things.

It was a big house, of many rooms. One could get lost in it. Halls stopped for no particular reason.

It seemed to swell in the second story, giving it somewhat the look of a stockade; actually the second floor was larger, due to a tight-lipped feud Ronald Space had carried on with the architect and builders.

Space, dissatisfied with the architect’s plan, had insisted on laying out the plans himself for the second floor. The architect’s pride was wounded, but his bank account was low. He had compromised with his art to the extent of muttering, all right, let the bastard try it.

(The architect was already shaken by Space’s insistence on, among other unorthodox innovations, no front door and by the demand for a trap door in the parlor floor to sweep dirt into.)

Consequently, the first- and second-floor plans of the dwelling were done independently of each other. Space and the architect had ceased to speak to one another. When the puzzled contractor attempted to point out that the two floors didn’t seem to fit, both Space and the architect, independently, told him not to get bogged down in details and to get on with the job.

The builder was enchanted by this problem and did the best he could. The result was the stockade effect with overtones of Moorish dome. The house looked as if it had some strange organic swelling in its upper reaches or as if the attic were packed too full. The builder, an Irishman, of some creative pride himself, ended up speaking neither to the architect nor to Space until finally the only common communicative ground was a Flat City native named Funnelthroat Freely who worked that summer as a carpenter. Funnelthroat was an ant rather than a grasshopper, working faithfully each summer so he could stay inebriated the rest of the year; one of the few village drunks entirely self-supporting in this age of creeping socialism. The builder followed plans to the letter and as a result the completed house had no stairway from the first floor to the second.

Ronald Space did not deign to notice the oversight. He had a staircase built outside, on the opposite side of the house from the chimney, feeling it lent a nice balance; also lending impetus to the idea that he had wanted an outside staircase, rather than that he had forgotten any staircase at all.

The architect later came down with severe hypertension in the midst of designing a Christian Science edifice in Jacksonville.

After Ronald’s death, and after the house acquired that atmosphere of public property which surrounds all long-empty buildings, children used the outside staircase as a shot tower, melting solder in a tin can with a blowtorch and dropping the molten metal in droplets to a tub of water below. The slingshot pellets were fine for small game and insulators.

So, it was bad news that came in April to the local small fry—that somebody was going to live in the Space place. To some of the older fry, who played their own games down near the lake and the river on the lawn at night, it was bad news also.

("But we’ll always think of it as our place, won’t we, Stu?" inquired a Miss Annie Mae Timmson on a moonlight April night on the grassy lawn by the century plant near the front porch. "Yeah," said Stu. "We better go now, though. Your old man thinks you’re at the Baptist Young People’s Union.")

The curiosity around Flat City had mounted, for even in this latest of Florida’s booms few Yankees moved to Flat City.

"I always hear about public relations men," said Baldwin to Druggist Bake. "Exactly what does a public relations man do?"

Everybody thought it over, but nobody knew.

They discussed it, with growing interest, there in Flat City Pharmacy, and they offered various theories, and the argument mounted in intensity.

"Oh, a public relations man is not an advertising man," said Bake, in reply to Chief Williams. "And he’s not just a press agent. He’s—well, I—it’s . . . oh, hell."

"Well, it all sounds mighty suspicious to me," sniffed Mrs. Perkins. "My husband’s cousin never could explain exactly what he was doing, either. Two men from the government came and took him away one day."

"Ha!" said Williams. "Here comes Willingham. He’ll tell you, Bake—you’re such a know-it-all!"

Editor Theodore Willingham of the Flat City Ledger walked in, nodded. He was a tiny, white-haired man with startlingly blue eyes under white eyebrows thick as caterpillars.

"You worked on big-city paper," said Williams. "Tell Bake here—what does a public relations man do?"

Editor Willingham thought it over at length. He shifted his tobacco from one jaw to the other. He concentrated on the question. He finally said, "You know, I never did find out."

That was in April; Flat City lay quietly and undisturbed, under the peaceful sun.

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