I backed them out on the deck. The moment I saw what the man had hidden aboard that boat before he disappeared, I set the screwdriver down, because it was a ledger book wrapped in oilskin, and the first page said MARRIAGES.
Captain Elmore Dade held a Florida notary commission and a master’s ticket and he married people on the water from 1958 until 1979.
Four hundred and six couples in that book. Date, names, witnesses, and his signature under every one.
Most of it is what you would expect. Snowbirds, servicemen out of the base, kids from Palatka whose mamas wanted a boat wedding.
Then there is a run of them that is not.
Between 1959 and 1967 there are thirty-one entries where he wrote both names, put only initials in the witness column, and ran a thin line down the outside margin of the page.
He was marrying Black and white couples in the state of Florida in the years when that was a felony there, out on the water, at night, in front of two witnesses whose full names he would not put down.
That is why the book was under a bunk with brass screws in it.
On the inside cover, in the same hand as the entries:
Kept out of sight on purpose. Every couple in here came to me because somebody else would not, and if this book is ever read out in a courtroom it will be read against them and not against me. If you have found it and the law has changed, then take it to them and not to the paper. It is theirs.
The law had changed a long time before I ever put a screwdriver on that bunk.
He disappeared in September of 1979. Tied that boat up, walked off, and nobody in that county laid eyes on him again, and the version everybody tells involves a debt.
I do not know what happened to him and I have not been able to find out.
What I could do was the other thing.
It took eleven months and a genealogist in Ocala who would not take my money. Of those thirty-one couples we have found nine families, and three of the people who signed that book are living.
Ruby Dansby is eighty-four and lives in Sanford. She and her husband were married by Captain Dade on the fourteenth of June, 1963, at nine at night. Her husband passed in 2011. She had not seen that book in sixty-two years because she never saw it in the first place.
I drove it down to her. She put her finger on her own line and did not say anything for about two minutes and then she said, well look at that, he spelled it right.
The book is at the state archive now. That was Ruby’s call, not mine. She said her line ought to be somewhere a person could go look at it, and the nine families all agreed and it was not close.
The boat is still rotting and I am still working on her. The bunk is back in. I put those brass screws back in the same holes, and there is nothing under there now, and I put them in tight anyway.