A. Burdett, checking his watch in the parking lot outside a gas station in Neamathla, turned out to be a heavy man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. Glimpsing a female asleep in the backseat, he jerked his head away. He wore pale spectacles under a big brow with thin hair plastered back on a balding pate, and his pale auburn brows and thin downturned mouth closed a gray face. He was built like his father, Lucius thought, and earlier in life must have been strong, but now—too early—he had the hollow look of someone whose woman had left him years before. The ears and loose-skinned neck and knobby hands seemed too large for his body, and he seemed unsteady, as if he had suffered a small stroke. Without looking at Lucius, he identified himself—“A. Burdett”—at a loss as to what he might possibly say next.
“A for Addison, right?” Lucius smiled to make amends for having rattled this poor fellow over the telephone. Burdett looked wary. A man’s Christian name was his own business, that look said, as Lucius struggled to dispel the clotting atmosphere. He said, “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa’s dock at Chatham Bend.”
“Papa,” Burdett said, tasting the word. “That’s what us kids called Mr. Herkie …” His voice trailed off and he wiped his palms down the sides of his pants, lowering his gaze in gloomy resignation. “Papa,” he repeated, aimless.
A bit desperate, Lucius gazed about the little town. Was it true that Neamathla had taken its name from the great chief of the Mikasuki Creeks?
“How’s that?”
“Do you suppose … I am like a bat that hangs by its claws in a dark cave, and that I can see nothing of what is going on around me? Ever since I was a small boy I have seen the white people steadily encroaching upon the Indians and driving them from their homes and hunting grounds. When I was a boy, the Indians still roamed undisputed over the country between the Tennessee River and the great sea of the south, and now when there is nothing left them but the hunting grounds in Florida the white men covet that. I will tell you plainly if I had the powers I would tonight cut the throat of every white man in Florida!”
Self-deprecating, Lucius laughed at his own recitation, inviting Burdett to cheer up, but Ad just stared at him. “My Lord!” he said. “You memorize that stuff?” He stared at his splotched shoes. “Might as well get going, then,” he said.
Lucius tailed his lump of a half brother west on the county road, wondering why he was looking up the tailpipe of that pokey two-tone car when he already knew Ruth Ellen’s address and could probably get there faster by himself. If Ruth Ellen turned out as obdurate as Addison, he would not stay long. He would not even bother to wake Sally.
In a quiet street of one-story houses shaded by sycamores, Ruth Ellen Parker stood awaiting them upon her stoop. Mrs. Parker hugged her stolid brother, who said, “Hullo, Nonnie.” Oddly, he introduced her to “Professor Collins.” Before Lucius could greet her, Ad launched forth in sudden speech on the subject of his sister’s many triumphs over adversity, blurting his words in the inchoate way of someone with a real horror of human converse. Persisting doggedly even after her hands started to flutter, speaking faster and faster to get it over with, he described how his sister had lived in this small house since her marriage to the late Mr. Parker. Nonnie had always hoped to be a teacher, and later in life, during the summers, had paid her own way to three different colleges in order to obtain a teaching certificate from the state board—
“Well, that’s really something!” Lucius exclaimed, cutting him off as kindly as he could manage, for the sister had fled, leaving the brother to peer mystified at the screen door. Behind Ad, he saw Sally’s blond head pop up in the backseat window and pop down again, not wishing to be observed, far less introduced.
Inside, Ruth Ellen greeted him anew, holding his History in both hands like a hymnal. Not having seen him since she was five, she did not really recognize him, and after five decades, he could scarcely perceive in this middle-aged woman the snub-nosed child in the sun and salt Gulf breezes at Chatham Bend, who had dressed up in her peppermint frock and bright wildflower bonnet to kiss “Woo-shish” good-bye, yet had been so hurt by the abandonment that she’d run away around the house and set up a great caterwaul behind the cistern.
Like Addison, Ruth Ellen had retained the auburn hair of their late father, and her scrubbed pink countenance was plump as a fresh bun. “I believe Mr. Watson’s sister married a Collins,” she told the Professor, who smiled back. It did not seem the moment to remind her that he was a Watson—in fact, her half brother. Politely she offered him a seat, but not before she had backed herself into a stuffed chair under a lamp where he supposed she passed most of her days. From this redoubt, having smoothed her feathers, she permitted herself a better look at him. What do you want with us? her scared eyes said.
On the walls all around were cheerful oils, unframed, including a painted copy of an old photograph of the Bethea homestead at Fort White. Ruth Ellen Parker thanked him kindly for gathering so much information about her family, and Lucius complimented her on her floral still lifes, and Ruth Ellen said she regretted her lack of training. Addison stood awkward in the doorway, hat in hand, anxious to be sent away. When Lucius smiled in his direction, trying to include him, Ad said gloomily, “Besides all this art, she designs and sews all her own clothes and makes fine patchwork quilts—that’s another hobby.”
“Addison, do please sit down,” his sister said, as if he had stood up at his school desk for no reason.
They skirted fifty years of family news but soon gave up on these civilities—the ways had parted far too long ago. Lucius told them of the plan to burn the house at Chatham Bend and asked them to sign a petition which might save it. “You and Ad and little Amy were the last of our family to live there, and anyway, it would help our claim if we could show that the whole family supports it.”
“Who is ‘we’? You and that attorney? Count me out,” growled Ad, shaking his head. His sister sighed.
On a little table set out for Lucius’s arrival were a few mementos from the Watson years that Ruth Ellen hoped might make his visit worthwhile. Her pale fingertips moved these about like counters, to be offered one by one as the spring day ticked past on a big loose alarm clock in another room. The first was a gold wedding ring, inscribed “E.D. and Edna”—perplexing, they agreed, since E.D. had been not their father’s initials but their grandfather’s.
After so many years, Ruth Ellen could not bring herself to say “my father,” only tweaked her pink blouse or crisscrossed her plump ankles at each mention of him. On the other hand, she betrayed no shame or resentment. Such a man had nothing to do with her, her manner said. She had led a God-fearing life, as the world knew, and had nothing to fear in the Lord’s eyes. However, she asked for Lucius’s assurance that he would keep her location and identity a secret.
“All those bad things happened when we were small,” Addison complained, “but to Nonnie we aren’t talking about the past, we are talking about her father, we are talking about horrible crimes in her own family that none of her neighbors know about even today!” His voice was rising, and his color, too. “What would they think of her? Our younger sister won’t mention his name, not even to us! And you intend to write about it!”
“Addison? Please, dear.”
Ruth Ellen touched a few mementos before tendering a photograph of a mother and small infant—“me.” She smiled. Her mother was posed formally in a large round hat of black straw perched atop thick upswept honey hair—a wistful young woman, pretty enough, tense, sensual, large-featured, with a guarded smile. “Mama had hazel eyes,” Ruth Ellen said fondly. The portrait studio was in Fort Myers—on the back was scrawled “Fort Myers 1906”—and Lucius supposed that “Mr. Watson,” as Edna always called him, must have brought his new wife and baby daughter through Fort Myers while tending to his cane syrup business in the Islands.
“I really have no recollection of my … of Mr. Watson, but Mama always said I had his hair.” She touched her auburn hair. “A strong and handsome man, they say! He didn’t have a potato face like mine!” She blushed at Lucius’s protest. “I’ve wished so often I could find his picture, to see if it matched the one in my mind’s eye, but no one in our family kept a photo of him, not even Mama!” Eager, still wary, she was sitting forward. “Do you have one, by any chance?” Told about the Collins picture, she shook her head. “I don’t suppose that I shall ever see it.”
“Nonnie?” Ad growled. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” She smiled at Ad briefly, out of kindness.
In two of her photos dim figures were grouped on the porch steps at Chatham Bend. The imposing man in black suit and black hat, central and dominant in both, was E. J. Watson, but the features were lost in the dark of the hat shadow. “That’s all I remember anymore—that shadowed face!” She giggled uneasily. “A memory of shadows!” Startled by that phrase, she took a great deep breath. “I will tell you everything I can recall,” she said. “Then we’ll be finished with it.”
“Mama’s mother died when she was twelve. A few years later, Grandfather Bethea and her new stepmother encouraged her to go to Mr. Watson. They wanted the grown daughter out of the house, so her own family encouraged her marriage. Mr. Watson had a fine house and plantation, and he came courting in a red buggy with a fine big horse. They were married in May of 1904, and I was born in Fort White in May of 1905.
“Mama’s half brother, William P. Bethea, is only a year or two older than I am, but he claims he remembers meeting Mr. Watson. He says that he liked Edgar Watson and so did all the rest of the Bethea family, he doesn’t recall a single adverse comment. My cousin Pearl McNair felt the same way.”
Ruth Ellen’s curiosity about her father had been intensified a few years earlier by a letter from her Cousin Pearl. When she said this, her brother lunged forward and seized the letter from her little table and shoved it at the Professor, creasing the paper. At his needless intrusion among her things, his clumsiness and ungovernable impulse, her brow knitted minutely but soon cleared again.
Dear Ruth Ellen—
I’m going to tell you a little bit about your father.
Before your mother married him, Mama and I went to see Grandpapa Bethea. The Burdetts lived on a sharecropper’s farm across the Fort White Road. Mr. Joe Burdett had a son and a daughter. Herkimer Burdett and Aunt Edna were childhood sweethearts. The Burdetts would come over and sing and play the organ, guitars, string instruments, etc., pull syrup candy. Fine times we enjoyed! We went to a Christmas tree, and Herkie gave all the kids a present. Mine was a bracelet with blue stones. While we were at Grandpapa’s a Mr. John Porter came by with his wife and little girl named “Duzzie.” What a name for a girl! She had a red dress on. The Porters met Mama and went back home and told Mr. Watson about Preacher Bethea’s widow daughter Lola McNair visiting. They carried him back to meet Mama, but we were about to leave for home. Your father saw Aunt Edna then, fell in love with her instead, and asked for her hand.
I do not know too much about your father but I do remember him. Mama went back there to tend her little sister so we were in your home when Addison was born. Your father had a big plantation, acres and acres of land near Fort White, Florida. I can tell you about the place. You were a baby then, walking but wobbly. My brother and I loved to take your hands and walk with you.
Jane Straughter was the cook. Your father gave your mother a mare named Charlie, gray color with black speckles, a very pretty little horse. A colored man named Frank would hitch up the horse and buggy for Aunt Edna. With you in my lap, we would drive to Mr. Edmunds’s General Store in Centerville, and toffee was always on the list!
Minnie Collins was your father’s sister, a beautiful lady. I dream of her house. It was a pretty place near your father’s place, a large mansion in those days in west Florida.
Mr. Watson wanted to take the whole Bethea family with him to the Ten Thousand Islands. Grandpapa’s wife Jessie did not want to go. Good thing she did not go, because the mosquitoes were so awful down in the Islands that they had to screen the cow stalls! But your father kept plenty of help and had two large boats. Those days men wore a gun belt and a revolver in a holster. Your father was a nice-looking man, tall and handsome. Your mother was treated like a Queen. No doubt your mother lived a romantic life, with lots of excitement. Those were the days! Ruth Ellen, I repeat so much. Take all mistakes for love always.
Pearl
On another occasion, Cousin Pearl had told Ruth Ellen that when she was a girl, a number of things happened that didn’t make sense to her at all. One day at Fort White, she was riding with Aunt Edna and Uncle Edgar in the buggy when Uncle Edgar stopped at a crossroad. He had very small feet, and he put on Edna’s shoes and went over to a fence corner and walked all around there making footprints. He would not explain it, just said it was a joke. Not long thereafter, they received word that Sam Tolen had been ambushed at that very spot.
In regard to her father’s role in the Tolen killings, Ruth Ellen said that her mother’s only comment was “He was found innocent.”
“Addison was born at Fort White in 1907, and Amy was born in Key West in 1910. Amy was a babe in arms when that terrible Hurricane of 1910 struck Chokoloskee. I was only five but I never forgot that night at the little schoolhouse. I was sitting on a bench, children were crying. Mama was crying, too, that’s how terrified we were. I asked her why she was crying and she couldn’t answer. But I can remember seeing that salt water rising several inches deep over the floor. The men were building a raft for the women and children, there was a lot of hammering, and Mama said, ‘Whatever happens, we will stay together.’ We went up the hill. Mr. Walter Alderman lugged me and Ad under each arm, Mama had Amy.
“That hurricane frightened poor Mama to death, she was scared of bad weather the whole rest of her life. And Mr. Watson died only a few days later. On her twenty-first birthday! The twenty-fourth of October was her birthday! And she felt so dreadful, knowing Mr. Watson had been killed because he came back just to be with her on that anniversary. Before he left Chokoloskee the last time, she begged him not to put his life in peril, she told him to go south to Key West while he had the chance. But Mr. Watson was too bold and willful, and he just smiled and kissed her, saying, ‘A promise is a promise.’ For the rest of her life, she would never celebrate her birthday again.
“Poor Mama was just terrified by the shooting, which sounded worse than the Great Hurricane, she said. It’s very scary when a crowd of men turns violent, that’s what she told me. All she could think of was getting her little ones out of those dark islands just as fast as she could go.”
Neither Edna Watson nor her children had ever laid eyes upon Rob Watson. Ruth Ellen had a dim memory of Eddie from her early childhood in Fort White, and thought she recalled Carrie Langford from the time when her family had rested one night at Fort Myers on the way north after her father’s death. However, she remembered Lucius well from her days on Chatham River. Here she blushed and fell silent, not ready yet to accept the author of the Florida history as her lost “Woo-shish.” To cover her confusion, she produced a photo of Carrie Langford and her husband, Walter, which was one of her mother’s few keepsakes from the old days. Carrie had been a few years older than her stepmother, Ruth Ellen said.
Lucius knew this photo well, though it had been years since he had seen it—his dark-haired and beautiful sister, with her pale skin, elegant nose, full mouth and bosom. Walter Langford, newly wed, with pale hair shining on both sides of a broad part, wore a wing collar and cravat. He looked handsome, affable, and ill at ease in a pale linen suit, much less than a match for his Miss Carrie, whose bold brows curved down around large eyes which betrayed that strange white crescent below the pupil.
“I always wondered if those Langfords gave us money for our trip north,” Ruth Ellen said, returning the photo to its precise place on her little table, “because I know that Mama didn’t have a penny, and we received nothing from the sale of her husband’s property.”
“Nonnie?” Ad barked, going quite red in the face. “Nonnie?” He was speaking loudly, like a deaf man. Hadn’t Mama told them that Walter Langford sold off what was left of the property and sent the money to their family, and some of the good furniture, besides? “You said yourself that the money sent by Mr. Langford paid for Mama’s house when we came here to stay!”
“Goodness, dear, I suppose I did!” she said, adjusting the white collar on her blouse.
“That’s what you said,” Ad persisted, looking aggrieved. “And we had a piano, and Mama saw to it that you girls had piano lessons, because she herself could only play by ear. He’s after the truth here, Nonnie, not old family stories.” Beset by honesty, he became short of breath. “We have to keep things straight. And we know because Mama said so that her husband lost all his money—he owed every last penny to the lawyers—so maybe Langford was being kind to send us anything at all.” His voice thickened. “I guess we were kind of charity cases for a while.”
Embattled by her dogged brother, Ruth Ellen showed Lucius an old schoolbook, The History of Ancient Greece. An inscription on the flyleaf read, Edgar Watson, City. “That is our only sample of his handwriting. Apparently he cherished this old history, read it over and over, kept it all his life.” Lucius thought he recalled this book from Chatham Bend, and was mildly surprised that Edna had taken it when she fled north.
“ ‘City’ was Lake City,” Ruth Ellen said. “Mama told us Mr. Watson attended school in winter after coming to Florida. She said that because of the Civil War, there was never time for decent schooling in his boyhood.” She smiled a little. “Mama always called him Mr. Watson. Which is why I refer to him that way,” she added hurriedly.
After Mr. Watson’s death, her mother refused to discuss him with her father. She scarcely visited Fort White before going to her sister Lola in north Florida. Her brother Jack told Herkie Burdett, who followed her to north Florida and stayed and married her, and gave his name to her three little ones, “to spare us scandal. Mama and our new papa were married in November 1911 by the Reverend Sidney Catts, who later became governor of Florida, and they had a little boy together, Herkie Junior, whom we always thought of as our baby brother.
“Our new papa loved my mother very much and my mother loved him. We never heard a harsh word in that house, and we had a very peaceful upbringing. Herkie Junior grew up to be a housepainter like his father, and Ad did, too. We loved our new papa very, very much. But the day before my wedding, he called us together and told us we were not really Burdetts!
“We were bewildered, we felt lost, and our new Papa was distraught. We asked, ‘Who are we, then?’ I felt as if I were nobody at all! He asked if we wished to take his name, and we all cried out, ‘Oh, yes! We do!’ He adopted us legally that very day, so nobody could say a word in church against my wedding. And we never let on but that he was our father, because that is what Herkie Junior thought until one of his high school classmates let poor Herkie know he wasn’t one of us, and told him that our real name was Watson.” She sighed. “There’s always somebody who finds a way to let you know what you don’t need to hear.
“I just could not imagine a Ruth Ellen Watson! I had hardly any memory of Mr. Watson, so how could I think of him as my real father? Even today he is only that dark figure with the shadowed face.” She picked up the group photo and peered into it. “Mama said he was always very good to her, and very kind and loving with his children, and cousin Pearl always said the same, and her mother, too. Aunt Lola never got over how much time that busy man would spend in playing with his little babies—rather unusual for any man in those days!
“For years after we left Chokoloskee, Mama exchanged letters with Mamie Smallwood, who took us in that terrible day and was so kind to us. Later I exchanged letters with the older Smallwood daughters Wilma and Ernestine. When Ernestine was eleven—this was 1918—she sent a postcard showing Charlie Tigertail’s Indian trading post, way back up in Lost Man’s River in the Everglades!
“A few years ago when I visited Chokoloskee, Wilma showed me clippings—showed me terrible things that had been written about Mr. Watson. I didn’t ask to see them, she just showed them to me, I can’t think why. I don’t think Ernestine would have done that. Wilma was running the store by then, she never married. My husband and I could not help noticing how tightly she hung on to her purse, kept it right on her lap when she was eating, kept one hand on it. I guess the Smallwood family decided that Wilma was just the one to run the store!
“Anyway, I was horrified by those clippings, and later I asked Mama if Mr. Watson was the one who murdered our dear cook Hannah Smith, and those two white plantation hands, and Mama said, ‘No, honey, he did not. It was his foreman, a very handsome but cold-blooded young man named Leslie Cox.’ Just mentioning that name got her all nervous, and it seemed she was still deathly afraid of this man Cox, because nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Mama had asked Mr. Watson why he permitted a man like that on Chatham Bend. And Mr. Watson would not talk about it, he only said he was in Cox’s debt and felt obliged to take him in.
“Mama got so upset by our discussion that she jumped up from the kitchen table, spilling the peas. ‘That’s a closed chapter in my life, girl! I won’t hear another word about Leslie Cox, or Mr. Watson, either!’ She never mentioned those two names again. But I got the feeling it was Leslie Cox, not Mr. Watson, who had truly terrified her, whose very name she could not bear to hear.”
Asked by Addison if he knew Cox, Lucius told them how Leslie had turned up at the Bend in the late spring of 1910, and how he had never known much more about Leslie than he had picked up in the first five minutes. They were the same age, and he could have used a friend to hunt and fish with, but Leslie had no idea how to be a friend, he had to be in charge. He wasn’t fun to hunt and fish with because he wasn’t interested in wildlife or Indians or exploring back up in the Glades, all he cared about was shooting things and bringing back the meat. He stayed mostly half drunk, he liked to crowd people, he prowled around making mean remarks, poking up trouble. Anyway, he only lived there a few months before he committed the three murders which led directly to their father’s death.
Lucius explained that their mother had grown up with Leslie in Fort White, she’d gone to school with him. Knowing who he was, knowing his true nature, she lived in dread of him. She implored Lucius to keep an eye on Leslie at all times because Leslie was pestering her on the sly, complaining that “a man needed a woman,” and reporting how her husband was betraying her with a woman over on Pavilion Key. He was after poor Edna every time Mr. Watson turned his back, and meanwhile, his feud with another fugitive named Dutchy Melville was keeping everyone on edge.
After all that had happened at Fort White, poor Edna was so scared of more violence that she dared not tell her husband about Cox. Every chance she had, in that last hot summer, she had taken her children and gone to stay with friends in Chokoloskee. When her husband protested, she told him that the Bend was bad for little Amy’s health.
“That September, I left Chatham River to fish out of Caxambas,” Lucius told them. “Your mother took you children away soon after that, and a few weeks later, all hell broke loose, just as she feared. How Papa could let things get so out of hand, I’ll never know.”
“So those three killings were all Cox’s fault. Your father … Mr. Watson … he was not to blame.”
“Not as far as I know.” And then he blurted, “Not as far as I want to know, might be more like it.” Later he regretted saying such a thing, which told less about his father than about himself.
Ruth Ellen was anxious to change the subject. “When the goldenrod bloomed, Mama would take hay fever, so finally we all moved south to Neamathla.” She smiled at her brother, who nodded sullenly in affirmation. “My sister Amy would become a teacher. At one time Amy worked in Lakeland, and the woman who ran her boardinghouse was a daughter of one of the House men who led the crowd which killed her father. She was actually bragging about what happened, telling poor Amy dreadful, dreadful tales. I guess that woman had to justify what those men did, but for poor Amy, it was terrifying. To this day, the poor thing cannot bear to hear one thing about her father, and her children know nothing about him. She told them their grandfather died of a heart attack!”
Ruth Ellen looked around as if hearing someone slip into the room, and when she spoke, she lowered her gentle voice to a near-whisper. “Come to think of it, I do remember something from Chatham Bend! I remember that my father hitched a dog to a little red wagon and trained him to pull our little boy, and the wagon tipped over, and Little Ad got scared and cried and cried. I can still hear his voice through all these years! He was only three!”
She gazed fondly at Little Ad, who was staring at the wall. “That’s what Papa Burdett called Ad before he got so big! Little Ad was the first one in our family who went down south to learn the truth about our father.”
“Had some time to kill,” Addison grumped. “But ‘Little Ad’ never cared about all that, not the way you did.”
She stared at him, astounded. “Didn’t care? You went all the way down to Chatham Bend all by yourself!”
“That’s not his business!” Ad Burdett shouted. Pointing at Lucius, he lurched to his feet, hands working, his big gray face so furrowed and menacing that Lucius stood up, too. “How do we know what you’re going to write?” Ad shouted. “Why should we trust you?”
“Please stop shouting! This is Lucius!” cried his sister, speaking this name for the first time. “You must be more careful how you speak, dear!”
“ ‘It’s a closed chapter in my life’—that’s what Mama always said! Let’s leave it closed!”
“Lucius is a historian, Ad! And he doesn’t think Mr. Watson was so bad as a lot of people have made out. Aren’t you glad to hear that?”
Distressed by her distress, Ad frowned, bewildered. “What do I care if the man was bad or good, or what was said about him? I care what people say about our family!” To Lucius he said, “You leave us out of your damned Watson Claim, and your book, too!” He had gone brick red in the face, with heavy breathing. “I told that lawyer I won’t sign the petition! I have no interest whatsoever in what becomes of that old property! I’m not a Watson, I am a Burdett. I made a good name in my profession! I want it kept that way!”
“Those dark things happened a long time ago,” Ruth Ellen mourned. “If Lucius is correct—if that house can be made into some kind of a monument—folks are bound to look at Mr. Watson in a different way! We won’t have to hide him anymore, Ad! We can hold our heads up!”
“It’s important to seek out the truth,” Lucius told Ad. “You said so yourself.”
“The truth!” Burdett said bitterly. He pointed at his sister. “She was toddling around with the Smallwood girls over in the store, she never saw it! But I ran down to the boat landing to meet him! I was three years old, hollering ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ ” Addison’s eyes widened and he waved his arms. “Know what I saw? I saw my own daddy shot to pieces!”
His sister gave a little cry, longing to mother him.
Ad gasped a few breaths before resuming in a dull and quiet voice. “All I remember is that crash of guns, I thought the sky was falling down on top of me. And the dogs. Those dogs were mean and scary, they bit children. Those dogs never stopped barking all night long.” His lip was trembling. “That the kind of truth you’re after, Mister?”
“I’m your brother, Ad, remember?”
Burdett scowled, shaking him off. He leaned over to peck his sister’s head, frantic to go.
Lucius followed him toward the door, where they spoke quietly.
“Why did you let me come here if you didn’t trust me?”
“I was dead against it. I still am. But I knew you would find the way sooner or later.” Burdett was calm again. He shook Lucius’s hand, saying brusquely, “Maybe I’ll think about your damn petition.”
For a little while, they sat in silence, giving the house a chance to get its breath back. Finally Ruth Ellen cleared her throat. “Mama dragged us underneath the store, that’s how scared she was those men would kill us, and her fear scared Ad, too, he was hysterical. He still wakes up smelling the dreadful odor of those dead chickens under there, drowned in the hurricane!” Involuntarily she pinched at the bridge of her nose. “I’ll go to my grave with that odor in my nostrils!” She tried to smile, tried to explain how much of Ad’s hostile manner stemmed from confused feelings. At one time he had actually considered changing his name to Watson—
“His name is Watson,” Lucius reminded her.
She hurried on. “Addison is such a wonderful gardener, he grows lovely vegetables,” she said brightly. “He spends almost all of his spare time out in his garden.” She stared at the clenched hands in her lap before she wept. “He spoke more today than he has spoken in the last ten years together. He is very very upset, I’m not sure why.” She dabbed her eyes. “He’s really a very gentle man, and his life has been so sad. He was a bad sleepwalker throughout childhood, and small wonder! Then he quit school in the eighth grade. We couldn’t get him to go back, finish his education. He worked as a housepainter awhile, got married, moved away. Nobody heard from him for years, not even an answer to a registered letter that we sent when Mama almost died. He only came back a while ago, after his daughter was killed in a car accident.” Only now did she look up at Lucius. “Mr. Watson was a hard drinker, I have heard. Do you suppose there’s a curse of alcohol on the Watson men?”
“I drink too much myself,” Lucius admitted, in answer to the unspoken question, “or so I’ve been told.”
“Lucius? Have you had a happy life? Do you have children?” She flushed and hurried on. “Addison had a few friends in the old days, but since his wife died, he has been a loner. He won’t even come to family gatherings. He can’t take a drink but he drinks anyway. He gets aggressive, very very angry. And we have to ask ourselves if that violent anger is something that came down from his father, and how dangerous it might be to other people.” When Lucius nodded sympathetically but made no comment, she murmured, “Well. We have lots to be thankful for. I mean, everybody has to live with something, I suppose.”
Soon after the Park took over, in the late forties, Ad had gone south to Chokoloskee, and Mr. Bill Smallwood had taken him to Chatham Bend—the first time since 1910 that any of her family had returned there. She had learned of his trip in a Christmas letter from Ernestine Smallwood, because Ad never said a word about it even after he returned.
Of course, Lucius thought. That explained a nagging mystery. “In 1947 or ’48,” he told her, “right after the Park announced its plan to burn all the houses and old cabins, someone went to Chatham River and gave that old house a fresh coat of white paint.” He shrugged. “It might have worked, because the Watson Place is the only one still there.”
“Ad never told me he’d done that! But of course I never questioned him about his trip. If he didn’t want to talk about it, then probably he’d found out something awful. I was scared to death that what he told me might be even worse than the truth I dreaded all my life!” Yet a few years later, Ruth Ellen had made her own pilgrimage to Chokoloskee and was taken to the Watson Place by one of the Smallwood daughters and her husband.
Ruth Ellen sighed, still brooding about Ad. “He would never go see Mama in the rest home, and he was the apple of her eye! Poor Mama was nearly blind, you know, all she had was a darned old parrot to keep her company, but Ad said it made him feel too bad to see her looking so decrepit. He never thought about how Mama might feel, or how much he hurt her.
“Herkie Junior is close to his half sisters, and he tried to look out for poor Ad, too, but even Herkie gave up on Ad after a while—couldn’t get close to him!
“Ad used to be such a big man, you know, and very strong—he took after his father in that way. He seems much smaller now. He was always quiet, always a loner, as I said. Even as a little boy, he never had very much to say, he was always quiet and reserved, always a little troubled. But he wasn’t always off in his own head, the way he is today.”
Her voice had diminished as she spoke. Soon she fell still. They listened to the ancient clock in the other room. When she looked up, she smiled at him politely, and he knew that after her brother’s admonitions, she would speak no more about their father. Perhaps she had told what little she knew and perhaps she hadn’t, but now she wanted him to go.
Standing in her doorway, Ruth Ellen invited him to stop by and say hello the next time he came through Neamathla, though her kind smile told him that she knew he wouldn’t, which was all right, too. And still she looked at him, head cocked ever so slightly—What do you want with us?
On a green and blue day, headed south with Sally Brown beside him, Lucius reveled in a rare sense of new life, and showed off boyishly in his excitement. Crossing the Alachua Prairie, he told Sally that even in his father’s day this was still a trackless country of red wolves, bear, and panthers. Half-wild cattle had wandered through this scrub since the time of the first Spaniards, who had more than thirty ranchos in north Florida by the end of the sixteenth century. Then the British came from Charleston, that was 1704, and killed every last Spaniard and every Indian they could lay bloody hands on, women and children, too—seven thousand Indians was a fair estimate. They slaughtered their fellow men like sheep.
“Fellow men,” the young woman agreed, nodding sagaciously. “Like sheep.”
Sally was smoking one of her “funny smokes,” and now she proffered it, raising it to his lips with warm, light fingers. At her instruction, he drew deeply, holding the smoke deep in his lungs before swallowing, suffusing it upwards to his temples. When he exhaled at last, the smoke seemed to drift out through his ears. His brain was warming and his mouth slid toward a grin.
Because she had been his history student, the Professor could hold forth on Florida history to his heart’s content, spilling a whole lifetime of study into her sweet ears. Yet her interest was real and her teasing of him affectionate, and in his own intoxication and plain happiness, he was delighted to babble on and on about the fugitive siminoli and the escaped black slaves who taught them how to grow tropical crops, and the strong alliance of these peoples against the white men who came to recapture the slaves and kill the Indians—
“Like sheep,” she repeated, still back there in his earlier discourse. And now this soft, unbridled person draped herself languidly on his arm and shoulder, peering around his chin in comic awe, her shining eyes scarcely an inch from his, her lips brushing the corner of his own, until he could scarcely see the road.
He kissed her then. “Back off,” he said, backing off himself. “You’ll get us killed.” The male voice was apart from him, not quite his own.
She whispered breathily, across great distances, “Just a-hangin on my darlin’s ever’ word, is all.”
Alarmed, he struggled to be serious again. “The Indians had rounded up wild horses and cattle. Alachua Seminoles, they called ’em in this part of the country, ran their cattle down here on Paynes Prairie … biggest cattle raisers in all Florida …” But he was feeling neither here nor there, he was getting mixed signals, he was driving very fast, or so it seemed. Did this edible wild girl want to make love? The creature laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear, whispering softly, “You slow down a little, hear me, darlin?”
He nodded, stirred by the fine sweet smell of her hair. The can of frosted beer between his legs moistened his jeans. “You, too,” he said in a blurred voice. Realizing these words made no sense, he began to laugh.
Their road passed through Silver Springs, where Leslie Cox had escaped the prison road gang. Silver Springs was formerly Fort King, the historic site of one of the great episodes of the Indian Wars. On December twenty-eighth of 1835, Osceola had led forty Mikasuki in the destruction of Fort King, while on the same day, east of Tampa Bay, the war chief Alligator—Halpatter Tustenuggee—led his Muskogee in a direful ambush, destroying Major Dade’s detachment of more than one hundred men. Three days later, the war chiefs joined forces in an attack on the troops of Gen. Duncan Clinch, and the Seminole Wars were under way. “Clinch is the Clinch of the Clinch River Nuclear Reactor in Tennessee, and Dade is the Dade of Dade County, Florida, drug, vice, and murder capital of America,” he informed her.
“Clinch is the Clinch and Dade is the daid.” Relapsing comfortably into her cracker accent, Sally took another drag and passed the smoke. “Clinch is the Clinch and I don’t care who knows it! Couldn’t wipe them redskins out with powder and ball, so his paleface spirit has come back, fixin to nuke ’em!”
“How come you’re speaking in the cracker tongue, Mis Sally?”
“Because under my glitterin veneer of international sophistication, a plain ol’ cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.”
“And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your licentious behavior and rough language?”
“It sickens ’em. Just purely sickens ’em. They feel like pukin.” Oddly Sally’s scowl was real, her mind was in a twist, she looked as if she might up and puke on purpose. Rolling another cigarette on the faded denim of her knee, licking the paper, she said quietly, “I do know something about Osceola which you whiteboy historians don’t put in the books. Learned it from Whidden, whose grandma was descended. Osceola was a breed named Billy Powell who was ashamed of his white blood. These days there’s plenty of mixed people would be better off with Osceola’s attitude—ashamed of the white blood, not the dark—but that is neither here nor is it there. Osceola claimed to be pure Creek, claimed he didn’t speak English, but his daddy was a white man, he was stuck with it. And later on, he took black wives along with a few red ones, probably had children on every doggone one. Most of his warriors were black Seminoles, what they called maroons, which might account for the mixed-up bunch that’s running around backcountry Florida today.” She cocked her head slyly. “I bet you damned historians never knew that!”
“Oh, we knew that. Some of us, anyway.” He reminded her that mixing of the races had been widespread since colonial times—in fact, the first soldier to die in the American Revolution was a black-Indian.
“Heck, I seen Injuns got a nap so thick you couldn’t put a bullet through it! And ‘white’ men, too!” Her hoarse smoker’s laugh had a deep rue in it, and he laughed with her. He couldn’t help it, her quirkiness delighted him, he loved her. Their mirth eased the erotic tension, and they set each other off again, over and over and over, down the road. “It’s so nice to see this ol’ gloom-ball professor laugh this way!” Sally cried happily.
But saying so put merriment to death, and she scowled crossly, banging his knee with her own. “Anyway, folks weren’t particular in frontier days. Some of those people around Chokoloskee Bay who are so darn mean about the black people better not go poking too hard at their own woodpiles. Might be some red boys in there at the very least!” She socked his leg. “Don’t laugh at me! I know what I’m talking about! Better’n you!”
A wildness had come into her eye which he sought to deflect before she blurted something angry they might both regret. “Remember those nineteenth-century edicts?” he asked her. “ ‘Eminent domain’? ‘Manifest Destiny’? Pretending to legalize the seizure of Indian lands when we knew those seizures were gross violations of our Constitution? Even today, good jurists understand that this was lawlessness, a dangerous flaw in the very foundation of our nation’s history, but no one talks about it, not even historians, it’s just too dangerous—” He stopped short, for her slight smile was mocking him.
“Dangerous, huh? You some kind of troublemaker, boy? Some kind of a damn ol’ Commie faggot?”
She sat up straight, trying to look bigoted, but after a moment she lay her head back and went pealing off into laughter so gleeful that she brought her knees up to her chest and kicked her cerise sneakers. She did not intend to be provocative, but that heart-shaped round of her bottom in tight jeans, the denim cleft, glimpsed on a curve, caused him to roll two wheels onto the shoulder. Since the ground was soft, he came so close to running the car into the ditch that an egret sprang skyward with a strangled squawk.
Sally took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology, but her mood had swerved toward something bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. After a while, she said in a gritty voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right, Pop? You’re getting your old balls in an uproar.”
He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey listen—”
“Student-fucker,” she said quietly. “Don’t you try fucking me. Don’t even try it.”
“Oh Lord—”
“And another thing”—she was yelling now—“I hated the way you abandoned that poor old man back in Lake City! That was the most heartless thing I ever saw! What are you, some kind of a fanatic, with all your fucking notes, your fucking boneyards! Is that all you care about? The past?”
Injured and furious, he drove in silence, disgusted with himself for even considering anything so grotesque as a romantic liaison with this dope-warped young woman. What he needed was a wise and gentle person closer to his own age, a lovely widow such as Lucy Summerlin or even Hettie Collins—Hettie was no blood relation, after all. He turned to his erstwhile admirer with as much hauteur as he could muster.
“Miss?”
“ ‘Mrs.’ to you, Pop. I’m another man’s wife, in case you were forgetting.”
“I notice, Mrs., that you jumped into my car. You’re not back in Lake City tending to that poor old man unless I’m much mistaken.”
“You want me to get out, hitch a ride back? That what you’re saying? Slow down, Buster!” But a moment later, weeping and snarling, she subsided. “Sorry. I’m a dope fiend. Reefer madness, Prof. I’m really sorry. I’m a mess.” She fished out a pink tissue to blow sniffles.
Soon she lay her head against his shoulder. After a while, she let her fingertips trail from his knee along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, into her own seat, the backs of her fingers were resting in his lap, light as a kiss.
They drove in silence to Arcadia, on the Peace River. That night they drank whiskey, and bad wine at supper, and made love too urgently in the farthest motel cabin from the road. Lucius had thought himself long past this grand old mix of cigarettes and whiskey and intoxicating body smells and rough wild noisy carnal entertainment, and even now, he could scarcely believe that he was back among the living. He felt rapt, shy, and omnipotent, miraculously returned into his body. He felt enchanted.
Afterwards he lay unraveled in the glow and light sweet smell of her, wondering if his desperate devouring had offended her, and knowing it hadn’t when after a time she awakened gently and rolled onto her knees and bent and kissed him as he had kissed her, letting her long hair fall over her face to shroud the act because she was shy about letting him see her do what (she confessed) she had never done before.
“Well, here goes,” the lovely naked creature warned him fearfully from behind the fall of hair, in a comic innocence which touched him so that he laughed joyfully, bouncing her head a little on his belly. He whispered, “Oh I love you so.” Gently he caressed the crown of the small earnest head to give her the courage of her own generous desire, crying out as he dissolved in flowers of delight and earthly gratitude.
In time she crawled back up into his arms and their skins melted one into the other and they lay quiet, listening to the dawn come to Arcadia. Although more happy than he could ever remember—as if he had caught up with his real life at last—his self-doubt was seeping back, he felt himself too old to be her lover. He flinched away, deciding he had better go and brush his teeth. Still half-asleep, she sighed, detaining him, hand straying as if tracking a dropped earring. And he surprised them both with a response—“Oh-fro!” she murmured.
Arcadia had been known as plain Tater Hill Bluff until the advent of a post office in 1886 encouraged the choice of a more classic name. After the Manatee County seat was moved from Pine Level to Arcadia, this capital claimed such frontier comforts as hard drink, whoring, gambling, free-style manslaughter, and common brawling. According to one reminiscence, “There were as many as fifty fights a day,” with “four men killed in one fight alone.” In addition, the untended stock on the roadless unfenced range encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were confiscated by the herd. In 1890 four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. The range wars attracted desperados from the West, and revenge by knife and bullet was an everyday event when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to the memoirs of his friend Ted Smallwood, claimed he slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass. The date of Watson’s arrival in Arcadia, the length of stay, his means of livelihood—no such details were recorded, only that Watson had paid his way out of his fatal scrape with Bass before leaving town.
Since Smallwood’s narrative was the only known account of his father’s sojourn in Arcadia, Lucius was anxious to verify the story. Next morning, he tracked down a Bass kinsman in Kissimmee who told him over the telephone that his forebears had been cattle drovers who moved south from Georgia in 1834 and settled on the Kissimmee Prairie north of Okeechobee. “Getting killed in Arcadia don’t mean Quinn came from there. Most likely he came from right where I’m at now.” The original Christian name was Quincy, and the variations—Quin, Quinn, Quinton, LeQuinn—came along later. At any rate, they were all known as Quinn Bass. “The feller I’m thinking about—and I reckon he’s the one you’re after—is the only one I know of who died violently, but nobody in this family cares to remember how. That tells you right there he was a bad ’un and there was a scandal. His branch of the family is dying down, there’s only a few old ladies left, all very testy. They hung up on me last time I called for some family information, and I was asking about something pretty small. I don’t imagine they will help you out on this one.”
Manatee County had become De Soto after Watson’s time, and the De Soto County Sheriff’s Office had none of the old records, but a deputy directed them to the county clerk’s office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, where Sally located the earliest Criminal Docket Book stored in the basement. They found no mention of any malefactor named E. J. Watson nor any record of the killing of Quinn Bass. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893—his last appearance in the record. Surely this man was the “bad actor” of Smallwood’s account, since there was no mention of any other Bass in this record of every felony committed in this county between 1890 and 1905.
On the way south again, Sally spoke in a flat voice about her marriage to Whidden Harden, referring finally to the ancient feud between his clan and her own. “That old feud was one reason I married him, and also one reason I stayed with him as long as I did. I couldn’t bear to have our families see us fail.
“Since we were kids together in school, Whidden and I had some idea that we could change the ugly racism in our community. But Whidden is too easygoing, too agreeable. He wants to heal the feud between our families by pretending it’s all over, and that just won’t work. He won’t act on his own decent instincts, he stays loyal to those mean no-necks, especially the one who taught him to live his life outside the law—my own damned father.” She shook her head. “Whidden is a kind good man who works with no-good people. He’s not one of them, although he thinks he is, and if it comes to trouble, it’s Whidden who will go to the state pen. He kind of knows that, but he’s stuck in some old Island way of thinking.
“One night he admitted he didn’t much respect those men because they were ignorant and lazy, always blaming the government for their way of life—that’s their excuse. All they’re looking for, he said, is a free ride. Too bad you don’t know that well enough to quit, I said. You have no respect for Whidden Harden or you wouldn’t work with them. He thought a minute and then he said he reckoned it was his wife, not him, who had no respect for Whidden Harden. This wasn’t true, but I thought it might be good for him to let him think that, so I just shut up. By this time my old man was moving over into running guns, and making money off of people dying—that about finished it. I told Whidden I was moving out, and when he didn’t quit, I did.”
“Is that the whole story? Of Whidden and Sally, I mean?”
“It’s all the story you are going to get until I’m good and ready.” She tried to smile. “Why don’t you tell me the Lucius Watson story instead?”
“No, Sally, I don’t think I will. I’m sick of it.”
“I know it anyway, at least from the Harden family’s point of view.” She looked him over, nodding. “As a boy, my husband worshiped ‘Mister Colonel’ Watson. Still does, far as I know.” She was feeling guilt about the night before and so was he.
On the north side of the Calusa Hatchee River, they stopped at a bar. Sally made a few phone calls, and when she rejoined him, said matter-of-factly that someone was in town who would pick her up and take her south for her meeting in Naples with Whidden and their lawyers.
“Today, you mean?” Stung by her willingness to leave him so abruptly, he felt abandoned, and a little panicky. He felt laid wide and as fatally exposed as an oyster on the half shell, mantle curling to escape the squirt of lemon. He knew his feeling was not reasonable—in fact, already suspected that an early parting might be for the best—but he could not endure the idea of losing her just when he’d found her. “You regret what happened, Sally?”
“I’ll never regret it, Mister Colonel,” Sally murmured, taking his hand. “But I’m going to let you go while I still can. Because I know better—and I know you better—than to take us seriously.” Trying to smile, she sang along with the loud jukebox: “ ‘Ah swore ah wouldn’ never be tore up bah yoo-hoo.’ ”
“I do take it seriously!” When she hushed him, he said, “When will I see you? I’ll be in Naples tomorrow—” Again he was routed by her strange expression, knowing that “his” sweet Sally was beyond recall.
Within minutes, a black swamp truck crossed the windows. When a huge silhouette barged through the doorway, Lucius recognized Crockett Junior Daniels, who avoided looking at him and responded to Sally’s introductions with truculent silence. Offered a drink, Crockett growled, “I’ll wait outside.”
Following the one-armed man across the parking lot, Sally took Lucius’s arm. “Going to miss me, Professor?”
“Plain Lucius will do, I think, after last night.”
“Plain Lucius, you’re blushing.”
“No fool like an old fool, ever hear that one?”
“Hey, I like that hokey kind of stuff!” She laughed, but her eyes were serious. “You think it’s easy to give you up, a man like you?” And her eyes misted. “Do you have any idea how rare you are?”
On the truck’s door panel, the name BAD COUNTRY had been slashed in crimson lettering. Crockett Junior hunched over his wheel, a cigarette hanging on his lower lip. Flatulent with beer, he gave Sally a befuddled squint, meant to be ironic. The big wild hair on his shaggy head tossed to the blare of music from the radio while the fingertips of his left hand tappeted on the cab roof in time to bass rhythms whappeting his brain.
“King of the Road!” cried Sally Brown, slapping the truck. “Va-room, va-room! Let’s move it, Junior!” she yelled as she got in. Slamming the door, she reached over and honked the horn twice, loudly and sharply—“Toot back if you love Jesus!”—and the big black-visaged man slammed the swamp truck into gear and fishtailed around and up onto the curb and bounced it hard onto the highway shoulder.
Lucius called after her, “Watch out for his damned dog!”
“Ol’ Buck? Hey, that dog loves me! My leg, anyway!”
Depressed by her exhilaration, he hoped she would return his wave, but she did not, only gazed back at him out the cab window, no longer exhilarated, but hollow-eyed and drained. The black truck forced its way into the traffic. The last he saw of Sally Brown was her sunny hair and soft tan arm in the southbound flow of shiny metal toward the bridge.
Rob was to meet him at the Gasparilla Inn, a new high-rise motel in the royal palms on the river, where Watson Dyer would join them for supper. Inquiring at the desk, he found no word. Depressed by all the chrome and mirrors, he hurried back out into the sun and walked the old riverfront streets he had known since childhood. He paid a visit to the library, then the newspaper, noting some Watson references and dates. Eventually he visited the offices of the Lee County Sheriff, where he laid a copy of his History on the counter to prepare the ground for his request for the old records. The huge ledgers levered from the stacks by bemused clerks had been so long unopened that their stiff leaves exhaled the breath of a half century of desiccation, and the faded ink, once sepia, was almost as faint as the blue watermark.
In the flourished script on the speckled and stained pages, the one name of interest was Green Waller, tried in 1896, 1898, and 1901 for “larceny of hog.” This inveterate pig thief was none other than that Old Man Waller who later found sanctuary at the Watson Place, where he could commune with these estimable animals to his heart’s content. Green’s name appeared also in the Monroe County census for May 1910, where he was listed in the E. J. Watson household as “servant and farmhand.” A John Smith was similarly described, and a Mrs. Smith was cook. The last entry for this household was “Lucius H. Watson, mullet fisherman.” His own name startled him, flying off the ancient page of this old Domesday Book like a trapped moth.
Lucius thought he remembered Green as rather elderly, but according to the census he was five years younger than his employer, Mr. Watson, and therefore plausible if not entirely suitable as the lover of the mountainous Hannah Smith, with whom he would perish at the hands of Leslie Cox. John Smith could be the alias of someone on the run—presumably Cox himself or his third victim, the outlaw Herbert Melville, a.k.a. Dutchy, whom Lucius recalled as a lively young devil whom he had rather liked.
As in Arcadia, the strange dearth of information about E. J. Watson in these ledgers seemed astonishing. The Sheriff’s records for 1910 made no reference whatever to the triple murder at Chatham Bend on October 10, nor to the violent execution at Chokoloskee of the noted planter Mr. E. J. Watson two weeks later, nor to any testimony in regard to either crime. Since Sheriff Frank Tippins had held a hearing at Fort Myers in regard to Watson’s death, how was it possible that no trace of that hearing—not even a mention of the Bill House deposition—appeared anywhere in these exhaustive pages?
That the records in this case were missing (or had never been transcribed) was all the more peculiar in light of the fact that the crimes had been well covered in the Fort Myers Press for October 20 and 27, and in the Tampa Morning Tribune for October 25. True, the triple murders had occurred across the Monroe County line, but the news accounts specified that Lee County Sheriff Frank B. Tippins had traveled south to investigate both events, and that the unnamed “Negro” being held as an accessory to the massacre had spent at least a fortnight in the Fort Myers jail before being turned over to Monroe County Sheriff Clement Jaycox. It seemed incredible that in these records, where a prisoner’s race was invariably noted, there was no evidence of any black man taken into custody in October of 1910, not even a brief notation in the Sheriff’s fees book, which recorded the transport and feeding of all prisoners.
A sketch of Sheriff Tippins’s life in a Fort Myers history found in the library had claimed that Tippins, who “arrested many desperate criminals during his career and acquired a statewide reputation for fearlessness,” had been frustrated for the remainder of his days by the “unsolved killing of Ed Watson. Due to the fact that Watson was said to have killed the notorious Belle Starr and had been suspected of killing many of his employees to escape paying them their wages, his murder attracted national attention and stories about him are still being printed.”
How interesting that Sheriff Tippins (or whoever transmitted Tippins’s recollections to the local historian) would refer to the “murder” of Ed Watson. Since the account made special mention of the thirty-three bullets found in Watson’s body, the choice of that term seemed to reflect the Sheriff’s skepticism that an armed crowd of at least twenty men, putting so many bullets in the victim, had acted in self-defense, as Bill House claimed.
Had the most notorious murder case in Tippins’s long career gone unrecorded simply because it was never brought to a grand jury? Or had the records been eradicated from the books? If so, the culprit must be Eddie Watson, the deputy court clerk at the Bill House hearing, who might also be able to explain why there was no mention of the notorious Ed Watson in the criminal dockets in Arcadia. He would have to go find Eddie and inquire, knowing his brother had never answered questions about Papa and was very unlikely to start now.
“Sheriff Thompson might know where them records are at and he might not,” a deputy concluded, picking Lucius’s History off the counter as if fingering strange fruit, then setting it down in unconcealed relief that he, at least, was not obliged to read it. “We got a feller in the cells back here who might know quite a lot about the Watson case, cause him and Tippins was real tight back in Prohibition. Them two purely loved to swap old yarns about Ed Watson, so what he’d tell might have some truth to it, if he’s feelin truthful.”
The deputy chuckled, leading the way down the back hall. “This feller ain’t in jail exactly, he’s just restin his bad bones in our nice facility. The feds asked us to hold him for a hearin but it ain’t nothin but harassment. He’ll beat the charges same as always, he can walk out any time he wants. But he won’t check out until tomorrow, and that’s because he enjoys livin off the taxpayers when he’s up to town. Receives his business friends right in his cell, cuts deals, rigs payoffs. You’d be surprised who comes in here to hobnob with a swamp rat—politicians and businessmen, you know, that would never be caught out in broad daylight with this feller! County, state, and federal law knows all about him, but those few he ain’t paid off just can’t come up with him, he skitters out of it some way, time after time. Can’t even get him on his income tax, cause he don’t show no income on his books—ain’t got no books! Got all his money in big croker sacks someplace, I reckon!”
Though they had arrived at the cell door, the deputy did not lower his voice but pitched it louder for the inmate’s benefit. “When he come in yesterday, I told him, ‘Boy, you are in real bad trouble this time! You are goin straight to the federal penitentiary to pay for all them felonious activities!’ And he hollers, ‘Nosir, I sure ain’t! They ain’t never goin to touch me, cause they know I’d take half the elected idiots in south Florida to the pen with me!’ ”
The deputy grinned as he fiddled with his keys, shaking his head in admiration. “Claims them feds got nothin on him, and even if they did, they wouldn’t try nothin. Says Ol’ Speck can chew out Uncle Sam any way he wants! In two days’ time, he’ll be back out in the Park, moonshinin and runnin guns and shootin the livin shit out of the gators, same way he always done.”
Lucius stopped short. “Who?” he said. But it was too late, the deputy had banged open the cell door. “How many Specks y’all acquainted with? This one you are looking at is Crockett Senior Daniels, that right, Speck?”
Speck Daniels, sitting on the bunk edge, had been bent over tying up the laces on his sneakers, in some swamp instinct to be ready for whatever was coming at him down the hall, but when the iron door swung open, he sat up slowly, in a kind of coiling, like the sidewinding retreat of a big moccasin among the buttress roots of a pond cypress, then withdrew into the shadows underneath the upper bunk. The deputy showed his visitor into the cell and closed the door behind him.
“Goddammit, Buzz, you frisk this man?” Daniels hollered. “You pat him down good?” When the deputy just laughed and kept on going, Daniels cursed him. Green eyes fixed on Lucius, he emerged slowly and perched on the bunk edge with his hands beside him gripping the thin mattress. In the bad light from the fly-specked yellow bulb high overhead, the saturnine heavy mouth in his hard face was fringed by a dirty stubble.
“That smart-mouth peckerhead is goin on report,” he muttered, tossing his bristled chin toward the door. “Prisoners’ rights ain’t only just the rules, they’re the damn law!” He glowered at his visitor, who remained standing by the door because there was no chair. “What in the hell do you want? God A-mighty! Here I ain’t laid eyes on you in twenty years, then all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out to Gator Hook, and next thing I know, you track me to the county jail! You paid ’em off or somethin? Let you right in and lock the door behind, don’t even frisk you!”
Lucius turned his back to him and spread his arms out wide, hands to the wall. In his dislike, he was baiting Speck a little, and he was astonished when Daniels sprang and collared him and shoved his chest hard against the cement before patting him down, then gave him an extra parting shove before returning to the bunk, where he cursed some more and stretched out in the shadow, one arm flung across his eyes.
Lucius hunkered down against the wall, trying to compose himself, as Daniels shifted his arm and watched him from beneath his elbow, reading his thoughts. “I’m waitin on you, Colonel. If you ain’t here to shoot me, boy, you better remember pretty quick why the fuck you come.”
Lucius said he had been told that a man back in the holding cells might be able to tell him something about Sheriff Tippins’s attitude toward the Watson case. “Turns out it was you,” he said.
“Tell you somethin? Man who put me on that stupid list the way you done? I wouldn’t tell you fuck-all about nothin!”
But when Lucius got up, prepared to leave, Speck waved him toward the corner. “You can set yourself right down on my nice toilet,” he said. If anyone ended this meeting, it was going to be Crockett Senior Daniels, who wouldn’t do it before gaining some advantage.
Daniels acknowledged he’d been close to Sheriff Tippins. Asked his opinion on the absence of any reference to E. J. Watson in the Sheriff’s records, he sucked his teeth as if considering his right to remain silent. He rubbed his temples with iron-scarred brown knuckles, summoning up old talks with Tippins that might lead his mind back to Ed Watson. Then he put his hands behind his head and stared awhile at the straw and broken springs which thrust forth from the bottom of the upper bunk.
E. J. Watson got blamed for plenty killins that was done by other men along this coast—that’s what Frank Tippins told me. Watson was down around the Islands long as most of ’em, but he kept hisself apart. Not many knew him good as what they claimed they did. Ed Watson grew the best sugarcane and the most, nobody near him, so the Sheriff concluded it weren’t no coincidence that Old Man D. D. House who was Watson’s biggest rival in the syrup business was also the leader of the crowd that killed him.
When the Sheriff brought that bunch here to the courthouse, one man, Bill House, give the main testimony and the rest just mostly backed him up. Bein so old, D. D. House got left behind in Chokoloskee, also a young feller by the name of Crockett Daniels. The Sheriff knew about me and that old man. The one he never knew about was House’s nigger.
Them men thought they was bound to be indicted, so they hollered self-defense, knowin there weren’t nobody would contradict ’em. Yet every last one of ’em admitted they had went to Smallwood’s with guns loaded, set to shoot—malice aforemost, that’s what Tippins called it. All his life, Frank Tippins swore them men should of been indicted, first-degree murder.
Bill House deposition, all that evidence, should of gone to the grand jury. Well, there weren’t one. No arraignment, no indictment—nothin! So who’s to say what happened to the record? Sheriff might of tossed out everythin in pure disgust after the Watson family and Banker Langford put a stop to the investigation on account of more scandal might be bad for business. And the dead man’s own son was court clerk, and he backed ’em up.
In them days, Frank Tippins was still green, so he was sniffin hard after the truth. He purely hated bein whistled off his bird by Watson’s family. Ever’ time he thought about that so-called posse they made him deputize after the man was dead, he’d get to fumin like a big ol’ bear with a snootful of beeswax, eyes full of bees and stung real smart and nothin much to show for all his trouble.
Then Tippins and his coroner went down to Rabbit Key and done an autopsy, and after he seen how much lead was shot into that tore-up body, he couldn’t never swaller their damn story. For years he’d holler, Now goddammit, Speck, you was right there on the landin, son, you seen ’em shootin! Damn people must of emptied out every last load! Them bullets was just a rollin out! Filled a damn coffee can! Said even when his coroner quit, he figured they was more slugs left in that putrid carcass. Thirty-three bullets! Not countin buckshot! If thirty-three struck home, how many missed? Goddammit, boy, you goin to look a lawman in the eye and tell him that was self-defense?
Course I don’t rightly know if it was self-defense or not. Couldn’t hardly see nothin over the crowd. By the time I seen an opening and upped and fired, the man was fallin, deader’n a doornail.
After the autopsy, Tippins wanted to reopen up the case, but he never could figure how to go about it, not with all of ’em confessin they was in on it, and every last one of ’em in his damn posse—not your common murder case at all!
What I never could figure was why Frank took it so hard, and why he could never let it go, not for years afterwards. But I believe what dogged him most was this rumor that a nigger in that crowd had raised a gun to shoot at E. J. Watson. Now that would eat at Frank B. Tippins, I can tell you! Frank got on all right with Injuns but he never did see eye to eye with niggers. Course most of us was that same way, though these days some will try to tell you different.
The way that nigger story got out, a feller snuck up alongside of the Sheriff when he brought them men north to Fort Myers on the Falcon. This feller hinted that the man who fired first—the man who nailed Watson right between the eyes—weren’t nobody else in the wide world but some fool nigger who had lost his head. Said the rest of ’em only shot afterwards, to cover up for him. Said he’d swore on his honor he would never reveal that nigger’s name, and he never had to, cause there weren’t but the one colored man on Chokoloskee.
Well, Tippins reckoned that this snitch was lookin out for his own skin, cause none of the rest would back that story up. Whoever told you that told a plain lie, them others hollered. Us boys don’t need no goddamn nigger to do our shootin for us! Said they knew how to take care of their own business, and they done it. And the hard way they said this made Tippins conclude that some of these fellers, maybe all of ’em, knew what that day’s business was before Ed Watson ever come ashore.
Tippins could not tolerate that any nigger would even think to raise a gun against a white man, and least of all a white man like E. J. Watson, who had every coon in southwest Florida scared up a tree. Over here in Colored Town, “Mister Watson” was the bogeyman hisself. You doan jump inter bed dis minute, Mist’ Watson gone gitcha! Hell, he’s still the bogeyman right to this day, though they ain’t a soul can hardly recollect who Mr. Watson was or what he looked like!
So the Sheriff chewed over what he had been told, and in later years, when he heard that same damn story, he commenced to snoopin all around about that nigger, huntin up a good excuse to take that black boy into custody and work some truth out of him. By then, o’ course, that boy had made himself real scarce, he was livin way off by hisself, down Lost Man’s River.
Nigger Short—pretty good nigger, too, had a real light skin. Good worker, handy, got the job done, and all the while so polite and quiet it was like he wasn’t hardly there at all. From what I known of him, Henry Short was about the last nigger on this earth would raise a gun to fire at Ed Watson. But first time me and the Sheriff done some business—this was five years later—he asked me straight out, Did that sonofabitch shoot at Ed or didn’t he? Well, I never seen it if he did, that’s what I told him, not carin to admit I was so far in the back that I couldn’t hardly see nothin at all.
As for the other nigger in the case, that boy who showed up at Pavilion Key? They took him to Key West and let him off! We all thought he had fell overboard on his way down there, but Tippins had a Miami clippin the Monroe sheriff sent him, and I seen it myself in later years—Florida Times-Union, December first of 1910! That sonofabitch went and testified how he helped butcher that big white woman and sink her in the river, and they let him off because he claimed Cox made him do it! Even give him some clothes and a ticket and some money, sent him home to Georgia, told him to stay in touch with the Sheriff in case Cox was caught! Oh, Tippins was boilin mad, I’ll tell you! That’s a Key West jury for you, Speck! Yankees and damn foreigners, is all that is! He wouldn’t have got away with that here in Lee County! I mean, Good God A-mighty, Speck! He had his damn black hands all over her! I sure heard our Sheriff holler that a time or two!
One night a few years later in Key West—we was in a bar down on Duval Street—a friend of mine was tellin me how they had at least two niggers there in town who was pickin up drinks by claimin it was them who escaped from the Watson Place to report the killins. And I said, why, goddammit to hell, we got one in Fort Myers claims the same damn thing! But the real one went on home to Georgia, and they never caught Cox so I don’t guess he come back. Sip Linsy, he called himself, somethin like that.
The Sheriff believed till the day he died that us fellers took and lynched Ed Watson, said we was waitin there to gun him down. Said, “Maybe you held your fire till he raised his gun, maybe you didn’t.” Said Bill House was sincere, all right, believed the hell out of his own deposition, but somethin was missin in his story all the same. So Tippins called Ed Watson’s death an unsolved crime where most wouldn’t call it no damn crime at all. That was the first time, Frank would say, that he never done his duty as a Sheriff. Weren’t the last time by a long shot, but he didn’t know that in the early days. Might been the Ed Watson case which got him so disgusted up, when you come to think about it. The Sheriff said, “The law’s the law.” And killing Watson was against the law because Watson never had no chance to plead not guilty.
As for them official records of that case, here’s my opinion. Eddie Watson was court clerk and he swept his daddy’s case under the desk and wiped the books, and probably Banker Langford put him up to it.
Eddie, he’s retired now, over here on Second Street, but that don’t mean he ain’t up-to-date on his neighbors’ business. He is a real nosy old poop and that’s a fact. Likes to fish up other people’s mail out of their box. Not only reads it but jots down his personal comments on the envelope. Friend of mine was a deputy for Tippins back when Eddie started up that hobby. There was complaints, so this feller went on over, had a talk with him. Eddie denied it and promised he would quit, all in the same breath, that’s how nervous he was that the deputy might get away before he could sell him this old shootin iron—single-shot, bolt-action, looked like a made-over rifle with a shotgun barrel. Hell of a lookin thing! Eddie claimed this was the gun used by the famous desperado Bloody Watson on the day he died, swore up and down that this gun was well known to be his daddy’s from some kind of a black scorin on the stock. Not only that but this selfsame gun had killed the famous outlaw queen Belle Starr—no extra charge! Said it was priceless, so naturally this feller give him fourteen dollars for it. Might been priceless but it weren’t what Eddie said it was.
One time I hefted the real-life gun Ed Watson was totin—I ain’t rightly sure who’s got her now. Twelve-gauge Remington ridge-barrel, twenty-eight- or thirty-inch double barrels, one of the earliest models ever made with smokeless steel. Didn’t have no rabbit ears—that’s outside hammers I’m talkin about, like on old muskets—but a real old-fashioned shootin iron just the same. Had a short forearm, wood was split but put back together pretty solid with quarter-inch squarehead screws. The safety was busted, welded back, busted again—that sound familiar? Course the wood on the stock was all raggedy-lookin from bein shot up so damn bad that day, and the barrels all pitted from layin too long in the salt water. Nobody give it a wipe of oil before the Sheriff took it for court evidence. Looks like some excited young fool flung that shootin iron into the bilges of his boat. Never stopped to think that one day that historical-type gun might be worth big money. And you know something? That fool might of been me!
Speck Daniels had taken off his boots and stretched out on his bunk, hands behind his head. After so much talk about the old days, he was feeling almost amiable, and sat up, annoyed, when the deputy came and opened the cell door.
“Had enough?” the deputy asked Lucius.
“Enough what?” Speck demanded. “We had enough of you already, and you only just showed up!”
The deputy departed, laughing, leaving the door open, and Lucius rose to leave.
“Set down a minute!”
Lucius waited in the doorway. Speck winked in a poor attempt to appear friendly and relaxed, but was scowling again almost at once. “Don’t care for my company?” he said. “Well, that is natural, I reckon, for a man that’s livin in the past like you been doin. But if you’re still thinkin about shootin me, just remember who give you that Bill House deposition for your book!”
“You sent that?”
“I saved it out from bein lost, let’s put it that way. Found it myself, in Tippins’s desk—he never missed it. Ol’ Frank is dead now, he’d of wanted me to have it. Ain’t goin to thank me?” Speck’s voice rose when Lucius did not answer. “Don’t matter who sent it, it was mine by rights, and it was stole off of me! Think I don’t know what that thing’s worth?” He studied Lucius meanly. “As a souvenir of the famous day when us boys went and wiped out Bloody Watson?”
“You admit that, then.”
Speck Daniels squinted. “When your daddy died, I was startin out as a young gator hunter, not much more than a boy. I happened to be visitin that day from Fakahatchee, and I follered my uncle Henry Smith over to Smallwood’s. Figured I might’s well join that line of men, see what was goin on. I never had one thing in the world against your daddy! I just hated to miss out, is all it was.”
“Hated to miss out on a lynching?”
Speck was short of breath and short of temper, too, he was actually thrashing on his bunk, like a cottonmouth pinned by a stick. “I looked up to your daddy,” he muttered finally.
“That makes it worse.”
Speck considered this a moment. “Weren’t none of us fellers was born killers exceptin maybe Horace Alderman, and we didn’t know that about Horace, not that day. Even Horace didn’t know it, hardly, till years later. So I was bothered some and will admit it. Your dad had daughters by two females in our family and he always helped take care of ’em, always treated us like kinfolks, in a manner of speakin. Them two ladies has been dead awhile so they can’t scold me no more for takin part at Chokoloskee, but their children ain’t speakin to me to this day!” Daniels laughed unpleasantly, shaking his head. “Colonel, you ain’t got a thing to be ashamed about, is all I’m tellin you. Ed Watson was his own man, done what he thought was right. Never killed a livin soul who didn’t need some killin.” The moonshiner was grinning a sly vicious grin, as if to recover the pride lost from having tried to make excuses for himself. “Here is a nice story you’ll be proud to write up your book—story my aunt Josie used to tell about how good she was took care of by her man Jack Watson.
“One fine day they was settin there eatin their supper on the Bend, had nice fresh peas. And there was a gang of cane cutters that ate at that big table, and this man was findin fault with Josie’s peas. They wasn’t salted—wasn’t this, that, nor the other. So her Mister Jack, he started in to rumblin and he warned the man to be more careful not to hurt Miss Josie’s feelins. This cutter shut up, but pretty quick he commenced to grumblin again, bad as before. Knew bad peas when he seen ’em, this feller did.
“Well, Mister Jack didn’t have no more to say about it. Finished his dinner, set his fork down, wiped his mouth. Then he pushed his chair back and got up, lookin ever so calm and quiet and respectful, like a good citizen in church leavin his pew. And there come a hush, and this field hand stopped his eatin, cause he knowed that somethin terrible was comin down on him. But he was too scared to try to run, he only set there kind of bug-eyed starin out the winder, like that big ol’ croc that used to hang around that stretch of river was clamberin right out onto the bank, comin to get him.
“Takin his time, Ed Watson walked around to that man’s place. He laid his hand on this man’s head, drawed his head back by the hair—didn’t yank it, Josie said, her Jack wasn’t rough with him or nothin. He laid his bowie knife acrost his throat and said, ‘Folks, please excuse this unfortunate interruption.’ He stood this feller on his feet because his knees weren’t workin good no more and walked him outside before he slit his throat, so’s not to mess up Aunt Josie’s nice clean floor.”
“Christ!” Lucius swore. “No wonder he’s got such an evil reputation, when people like you spread stuff like that!”
Speck Daniels shrugged, not in the least put out. “Now Aunt Josie never did deny that Jack Watson put that knife to her own throat a time or two when he was in his liquor, get her to simmer down, shut up, or mind what she was told. Aunt Josie would been the first to say it—‘When my Jack told you to do somethin, you done it, cause he never was a man to tell you twice.’ ” He spluttered, frowning hard to show that this story was serious. “See, nobody cared much for that hired hand to start with, that’s how Josie explained it. He was some kind of a damn criminal, they figured, had some kind of a damn criminal mentality, and probably a damn criminal record to go with it, least that’s what her Jack told them other diners when he come back in from out of doors and washed his hands and set down with ’em again to eat up Josie’s lemon-lime cream pie.
“When Jack Watson finished up his pie and got done wipin his mouth, he said he were a patient man but could not be expected to put up with such a criminal at his own table. Said, ‘Darn it all, the world is just plain better off without that darn of criminal!’ As Josie recollected it, her Jack still had some lime cream on his mustache when he hitched his chair around to get a better look at the dead body, layin there barefaced in his boots out in the yard. Said, ‘Look at that darn criminal sonofabitch! Layin out there like he owns the place!’ ”
Speck Daniels was struggling not to laugh into Lucius’s face. “Oh yes! Them were the days when men was men! They don’t make no Americans like that no more!” Unable to maintain his poker face, Speck doubled up with mirth, hacking and coughing with emphysema, farting joyfully, and Lucius gave up on indignation and laughed with him, a long deep hopeless laugh that came all the way up from his belly. That laugh took him by surprise—how very long it seemed since he had laughed like that! And for some reason that he could not fathom, tears rose behind his eyes.
Mercifully, Speck was too carried away to notice. “So whilst they was washin up the dishes, they all agreed it might be best to say nothin more about it, let bygones be bygones. They took that damn ol’ criminal and flung him to that big croc in the river, then done their best to forget all about him and his criminal ways. Maybe somebody give him a prayer, maybe they didn’t—the Watson Place was pretty busy in the harvest season. But Aunt Josie always told young Pearl that one reason she never did get over her Jack Watson was on account of how sweet he was that day about her peas, how darn considerate about her tender feelins.” Speck nodded a little. “Nice romantical little story for your book.”
Lucius rose again to go.
“Think I’m a liar? Think I’m makin up them stories?” Angry again, Daniels yanked opened the top buttons of his denim shirt and dragged out a heavy necklace of small leaden lumps, dull-burnished. He pushed the rough hemp string of leads at Lucius. “Count ’em. Thirty-three. Know where they come from?”
Lucius’s heart stopped. The last time he had seen these lumps, they were black with coagulated blood, dropped one by one into a rusty coffee can on Rabbit Key.
Speck Daniels nodded with him. “Yep. Got ’em off the coroner’s man, Willie Hendry. For good luck. I wouldn’t take a million dollars for ’em,” Daniels said.
Still brooding about why he had come, anxious to poke and prod his visitor to see just how he worked, what he was up to, Daniels followed Lucius out of the cell door. “Speakin of Tippins, he was the first one to show me that fuckin posse list of yours.” He grinned when Lucius turned. “He was holdin it for evidence, y’know. In case you was to go crazy, start in shootin people. Such as myself.” Speck uttered a snide laugh. “And you know where Tippins got it? Eddie Watson!”
Lucius nodded, hiding his astonishment. Had Eddie stolen it from Lucy Dyer or had Lucy been so foolish as to show it to him?
“Course your brother is crazier’n hell, like all you Watsons, but that don’t mean that he done wrong showing that list to Tippins. Might been worried that little Lucius could get hisself killed down in the Islands.”
“Eddie had no right to it. I want it back.”
“You want it back? What the hell for? I ain’t even got that thing no more. Cause it was stole off me!”
Old furies had struck all color from Speck’s face, as if he were suffering a stroke and could not breathe. His mouth was stretched open, taut as a knothole. His hair stood on end, and his rigid forefinger was pointed at Lucius’s face. The moonshiner’s mahogany hide was draining to a blue-gray hue as dead and cold as gunmetal, and he leaned against the wall, wheezing and gasping. Then he reeled backwards, sat down on the bunk, and grabbed his sneakers. Breaking a rust-rotted shoelace, he yelled—“Sonofabitch!”—and kicked that sneaker off. He hurled himself back on the bunk and with his sneakered foot kicked the upper bunk so hard that he split the pine slats under the torn mattress. “Ever think how a man might feel, seein his own name on a death list? Ever think what kind of crazy man would even make a list like that?”
But the fit had passed, and he sat up again, cursing his sore foot. “Might been found with a bullet in your head, back up a creek, ever think of that?”
Lucius said nothing. In this sort of man, fear was more dangerous than anger. He watched Speck’s instinct to conceal that fear take over. He was grinning again, and speaking calmly. “Course that ol’ list don’t mean a thing no more. All of ’em’s dead.” He winked at Lucius. “All but the one,” he added, bowing a little. “Unless you would count niggers.”
Daniels awaited him with his one sneaker on. Lucius kept silent. The silence refired the man’s rage, but this time the rage was low and even, cold as the strange blue mineral flame in a wood fire.
“Chokoloskee folks might be real interested to see that list, don’t you think so? Cause ever’ last one of them old-time families has names on there. And even if them men are gone, there ain’t nothin to keep you from killin a man’s son.” He paused a moment, nodding a little. “Unless you was put a stop to first.” He wiped spittle from his unshaven mouth with the back of his hand, which he stropped on his pant leg.
“By you, maybe?” Lucius’s own voice had gone tight, and sounded froggish.
“All I’m sayin is, if I was you, headed down into that country, I wouldn’t turn my back no more’n I had to.”
Lucius said, “I lived down there for twenty-five years after I made that list and never harmed a soul. What makes you think I’m ready to start now?”
“I’ll tell you why.” Speck Daniels nodded cannily. “Because I seen plenty of ’em go kind of loco when their life never worked out the way they wanted. Especially queer old bachelors without no family.” This meanness seemed to appease him just a little. “Fair warnin, that’s all, Colonel. Here’s another warnin, take it or leave it. If you’re writin a book, don’t go tellin no secrets on your damn attorney.” Speck lowered his voice a little to draw Lucius closer. “Big-time attorney, y’know, big-time attorney! He’s the fixer for all the fat boys in this state, from Big Sugar and the Ku Klux Klan up to the governor, and he’s got his own political future to look out for. He don’t want no story comin out about how he is Bloody Watson’s crazy bastard. He’ll get a choke hold on your book in court, then hit you with a lawsuit, and if that don’t put you out of business, he’ll be comin after you, and he is goin to get you, and he don’t care how. You might get beat up, get your house burned down, or you might get a bullet. Whatever it takes. They say he’s got Cubans over to Miami will do a nice clean job for fifty dollars.”
“How come you’re warning me?”
“Settlin old accounts, as you might say. But don’t show up so sudden next time.” He nodded, holding Lucius’s eye.
“That a warning, too?”
“Don’t talk to me no more,” Speck said, rolling over on the bunk, facing the wall.
Lucius headed toward the river, passing the red Langford house between Bay and First streets where he had lived with his mother in his school days. In the river park, a gaggle of pubescent girls in snowy sneakers, bouncing and giggling and squirting life, were observed without savor by leached-out old men, scattered and fetched up in the corners of the benches like dry leaves whirled across the hard park ground. In the river light, the tableau was surreal, as if these stick figures were arranged around the troupe of dancing nymphs like isolated pieces of a single sculpture. And one of them, thought Lucius with a start, might be a drink-worn syphilitic Leslie Cox.
Asked if anyone had seen Eddie Watson, one of the elders, taking his time, removed his toothpick and pointed it enigmatically at Lucius himself. The wet toothpick glinted like a needle in the sun’s reflection off the river, transfixing Lucius for one piercing instant in the other’s unimaginable vision. A second man was pointing a bone finger at a third man on a bench, who was waving gently like a pale thing in a current.
“Colonel? I sure thought that was you!” The small silver-haired man, eyes round and kindly behind glasses, shifted a little to make room on his bench. “I was savin that place for Honey,” he warned, looking over his shoulder for his wife. “We sure ain’t seen you in a while. We always wondered what become of Colonel.” Weeks Daniels did not seem to recall that they had scarcely laid eyes upon each other in the last quarter century. “We’re retired now, y’know. Tryin to get used to it.”
The old friends talked at angles for a while, finding their way. Lucius mentioned Speck, and Weeks nodded with distaste. “We ain’t related hardly. He’s one them black-haired Cajun Danielses, look like wild Injuns and probably are. This feller fought his family from the age of one, and he weren’t much more than about ten when he run off for good.”
Honey Daniels, coming up behind, stood patiently, not wishing to interrupt. Like her husband, she was slight and rather frail, with the same clean silver hair and innocent gaze, and even the same style of silver glasses. As young folks, Lucius recalled, they had looked like brother and sister, making it difficult to conceive of sex between them. When Lucius stood up to offer her his seat, she smiled, uncertain.
“Remember Colonel Watson, sweetheart?” Weeks took her hand and drew her down onto the bench between them, telling her what he’d just told Colonel about Crockett Daniels. Honey nodded. “Yes, I heard you, Weeks. I believe you said that Speck was not related.”
Red spots jumped to her husband’s paper cheeks. “Well, I ain’t so much denying him, I just ain’t proud about him.” Frowning, Weeks looked away over the river, where gulls slid down the wind between the bridges. “My dad had no use for that feller since Speck was a boy. I ain’t no different. My dad was captain of the clam dredge, and he was always friends with E. J. Watson. You recall him, Colonel?”
“Yes, I sure do. Your dad was Henrietta’s brother, right?”
“Aunt Netta? I believe he was.” The old man glanced at him, a little guarded.
“And Josie Jenkins was their half sister, right?”
“Don’t know what Aunt Josie was, darned if I do. Aunt Josie picked up a slew of names before she give it up, but she might of been Tant Jenkins’s sister if she was a Jenkins to start off with. Mind-boggling, ain’t it? Anyways, they are all kin some way or another, no getting around it. Speaking about that bunch puts me in mind of that feller got hitched so many times that one day he looked up and said, ‘I’ll be darned if my own dad ain’t my damn son-in-law!’ ”
Though his joke was an old one, Honey Daniels smiled freshly at her husband, creating a little space around his dignity. “Aunt Josie was real good to you back in the old days,” she reminded Lucius, not certain what he might wish to remember. “Little lady with big curly black hair, plenty of spirit? Had the same mother as Aunt Netta, I believe. They both worked awhile at Chatham Bend, and both had daughters there.”
“My half sisters, you mean.”
“Well, now that you mention it, I guess that’s right. Aunt Netta’s child was Minnie, named for your dad’s sister. Married a nice man from Key West. You ever see her anymore?” When he confessed he’d never even met her, she hurried on. “Well, we always heard that Minnie had her daddy’s color, blue eyes, auburn hair. She loved her daddy, he would see her in Key West, but she never wished to belong to the Watson family. After your daddy died, Netta liked to recall how Minnie’s father had forced himself upon her. And when we reminded her how often she had claimed that Minnie was a love child and that Jack Watson was the nicest man she ever met, she would cry out, ‘Well, that’s true, too, but Jack took me by storm!’ ”
“ ‘Jack took me by storm!’ ” her husband marveled. “Aunt Josie, too. When Aunt Josie was drinking, she would always claim how Watson ‘ravished’ her.”
Honey frowned a little. That word was too strong. ‘Aunt Josie’s Pearl was five years younger than Minnie, I believe. Pretty, kind of skinny blond. She favored her half brother Lucius. You two were very close when she was small, and she never forgot that.” Honey reached and squeezed his hand when he looked guilty. “Pearl always spoke so lovingly about her brother! She was so worried about you! Used to go all the way south to Hardens’, just to warn you, you recall? Tell you how much talk there was, how you were making the men nervous, and how your life would never be safe, so close to Chokoloskee.” Honey smiled, remembering Pearl Watson. “Tried to mother you, and here she was half your age!” She gazed at Lucius with the greatest fondness. “Know something, sweetheart?” she exclaimed, taking his wrist. “We’re just tickled pink to see your face again!”
Her husband was still brooding about family matters. “I recollect how them ladies and their kids got talked about as ‘Watson’s backdoor family.’ ”
“Well, those ladies weren’t ashamed about him, they were proud about him.” Honey Daniels said. “They loved him dearly and their kids did, too. And at the end of it, Josie had his little boy. Poor little feller was just five months old when he drowned in the Great Hurricane.”
“Ol’ Speck was in the bar one night when someone was tellin about that, and Speck spoke up, said Watson’s little son weren’t nobody in the world but Crockett Daniels! Claimed he never drowned in the Great Hurricane because his uncle S. S. Jenkins—that was Tant—Tant upped and saved him! Them men at the bar was all agog, as Aunt Josie used to say. Speck told how Tant had hid the babe, just like Moses in the bulrushes, then got one of them Daniels girls to raise him up and give him a name to spare ’em all a scandal. Said if anyone had doubts about his story, well, here he was, the living proof, as big as life! And any man with something smart to say could step outside with him and settle it right now!
“Trouble was, the one with the worst doubts was Uncle Tant! Swore he never knew nothin about it! And Josie yelled, ‘That boy’s tellin people I’m his mother? Must of been some kind of virgin birth or somethin!’
“Speck was only havin fun, least to start off with.” Weeks Daniels shook his head. “Cause them folks knew that Speck was in the gang that had shot Watson. As Tant used to say, ‘I knew that young feller was born mean, but I never believed he would take a gun to his own daddy, not at the age of only five months old!’
“Those ladies weren’t his only ones,” Weeks cackled. “There was another backdoor boy besides that little feller. Course we won’t talk about that one cause he don’t admit it, but local people know who he is, and we got long memories—that’s about all we got, seems like to me!”
“Weeks, you don’t know that for a fact.” Honey warned Lucius to pay no attention to her husband. “The man denies it and I imagine he should know. Better’n you.”
“Him and Speck ought to get together, then, cause that feller is a Watson and says he ain’t, and Speck ain’t a Watson and says he is.” However, Weeks Daniels raised his hand to show that, out of deference to his wife, he would make no further comment on Watson Dyer. “Nosir, Speck weren’t born a Watson, he were born a liar. Ain’t never had firsthand experience of the God’s truth—pays no attention to it cause he flat don’t care about it. Speck always took credit for bein in the posse, but what Speck mostly done that day was come up afterwards with other boys and shoot into the body. We were told that for a fact by one of them boys was in it with him.”
“He’s talking about my brother,” Honey Daniels sniffed. “But Harley Wiggins didn’t always speak the God’s truth, either.”
“Yes,” Weeks said, “Aunt Josie and Aunt Netta called your dad Jack Watson. That was the name he brung back from the Nations. Josie claimed her Jack never done but the one wrongful killing in all the years she lived at Chatham Bend. Said he went down to Lost Man’s River and shot a man who was settin in the sun patching his britches. Feller done him wrong.”
“Tucker?” Lucius asked after a moment.
“We don’t recall the name,” Honey said carefully.
“Of course you know your sister Pearl married Earl Helveston from Marco.” Honey Daniels smiled. “Folks called ’em Pearl ’n’ Earl. If Earl ever laid eyes on Mr. Watson, we never heard about it, but he always swore he loved that man, and nobody understood how that could be. Crockett Daniels was another one claimed he loved Mr. Watson, never mind he raised a gun and fired at him. Your daddy had quite a strong effect on these young fellers.”
“He was some fisherman, Earl was!” Weeks Daniels said. “But he was a cutter, pulled his knife too fast when he was drinking. Earl Helveston was rough even for Marco, and that was a rough place. Course them Marco men was always jealous they did not kill your daddy, so they went and killed a lawman later on. In Prohibition. Couple of them Helvestons was in on that one.”
Lucius recalled that when Pearl first came to visit him at Lost Man’s River, in the twenties, she would turn up on the runboat that stopped by three times a week to pick up fish and leave off ice. In later years, she would appear with her baby and her husband in Earl’s “hobo houseboat,” a little raft with a cabin perched on top, towed by an old skiff with outboard motor. Lucius felt neglectful and a bit downcast over Pearl, who had worked for years at the old Barfield Heights Hotel there at Caxambas. She was a pretty girl and a kind girl, too, but her life had always been a sad one.
Poor Pearl, he thought, had never had a chance to get her bearings. She had been born on the edge of society and stayed out there. Sometimes she called herself Pearl Jenkins, sometimes Pearl Watson. She had spent her life outside the window looking in. “Her people never had a home to call their own, and home was what that girl had always longed for,” he reflected.
“She’s inside of a home right now,” Weeks said. He had gotten things confused and his wife hushed him. “Her mind gave out on her,” Honey explained, “and they took her to some kind of institution over in Georgia.” She looked down at her lap. “We never called to see how she was getting on. We don’t know how to talk to Pearl when she’s not right in her head.”
Subdued by the story of Pearl Watson, they stared away across the broad brown reach of the Calusa Hatchee. Westward, toward Pine Island Sound, the lilting gulls caught glints of sun where the current mixed with wind in a riptide. “Honey and me moved here to live around the time you went south to the Islands, and we will die here, too, wouldn’t surprise me. When Caxambas got took over for development, what was left of our old bunch come up here, too, Josie Jenkins, Tant, and Pearl, along with other Daniels kin and some old friends from that section. Uncle Tant conked out in a rest home, and Aunt Josie done the same when she come of age. That was along about 1939.” Weeks Daniels sighed. “Ain’t much more to say about that branch of our family, cause it’s finished. Ain’t one Jenkins left.”
His old friends said they knew just where to find his brother. Honey took their arms, and they walked upriver toward the Edison Bridge. She was still rummaging around the old days. “When I was little, five or six years old, your daddy would come to our house to get his supper. Mr. Watson ate many a meal in the bosom of our family. Wasn’t a boardinghouse or anything, it’s only that Mama had extra room when we lived at Chokoloskee. There were times your daddy spent the night, and sometimes his wife, too—oh, she was just a beautiful young woman, very sweet. As I recall, her name was Edna, but he called her Kate. All I remember was a fine strong-looking man who wore nice clothes, he was the sporting kind. His Kate called him Mr. Watson, but to my father, he was E. J.—Mr. E. J. Watson.
“My brother Harley, who was just a boy, he couldn’t get over Mr. Watson, used to spy on him hoping to see his guns, and listen to his tales of the Wild West. Mr. Watson was always kind and quiet-spoken, but all the same us little girls were all dead scared of him. We’d heard so much about how dangerous he was, and when he came, we just skedaddled, ran like quail. But Mama wasn’t afraid of him—she wasn’t afraid of anybody. He was always respectful and mannerly to our mama.
“One time, we children went with Mama on a visit to Chatham Bend. That must have been in 1906 or 1907. You were there, you were called Lucius then. I bet you don’t recall the little Wiggins girls. We spent a week! Our daddy knew that his friend E. J. was a perfect gentleman, he absolutely trusted him to take good care of us. And sure enough, your father was so hospitable, so nice to us kids, so nice to his young wife—why, our own brother or daddy couldn’t have been nicer! And the food his cook put on the table, we never saw so much food in all our life! All the same, we children were still scared of him a little bit. In early 1910, Daddy moved our family to Fort Myers so we were not at Chokoloskee that October, but I still recall how shocked we were to hear that news!”
Weeks blurted suddenly, “Your daddy was crazy some way, Colonel, only he was the dangerous kind that never showed it. That’s what fooled folks. How could a body ever suspect such a fine-looking man? I guess there aren’t too many like that, but every once in a while one comes along. Look and act like everybody else, joke and talk and go about their business, and all the while committing murders one after the other. Mr. Watson had a screw loose in his brain, and there wasn’t a thing his family could do!”
“Weeks? You think poor Colonel likes to hear this kind of thing?” Though Lucius smiled out of affection for Weeks’s inability to mince his words, Honey patted his hand in her distress over her husband, as poor Weeks stumbled forward and broke more, trying to mend things. “All I meant, folks used to tell how E. J. Watson would murder all his colored help on payday! But those women in our family who lived there at the Bend, they knew Jack Watson good as anybody, and they never recollected that at all!”
Lucius said quietly, “Those rumors about ‘Watson’s payday’ always sounded like some local excuse for why my dad was doing better than the other planters, Houses included.”
Honey Daniels nodded. “Will Wiggins grew cane for years at Half Way Creek, but he always remained a good friend to your daddy. He never wanted to believe those bad old stories.”
“Never wanted to believe ’em, no, but in the end he did.” Her husband cleared his throat again, frowning and worrying, torn between tact and integrity. “Our Jenkins-Daniels bunch stayed loyal to your dad, but speaking for myself—talking straight, now, Colonel—I never been too sure.
“Me and my brothers Fred and Harvey used to fish them sea trout flats northwest of Mormon Key, and one early mornin before light—we was still anchored, half asleep—we was awoke by the sound of your dad’s boat, comin down out of Chatham River to the Gulf. Wasn’t nobody around the Islands then who didn’t know that pop-skip motor from a long ways off.”
Lucius nodded. The Brave had been the first motor launch on that coast, thirty-foot long and nine-foot beam, with a trunk cabin forward, canvas curtains aft, hull painted black. Local fishermen nicknamed her the May-Pop, he recalled, from the eccentric popping of her one-cylinder engine.
“Well, next thing they knew, this black boat come slidin out that narrow mangrove channel. One minute there weren’t no boat in sight, the coast was empty, and the next minute, there she was, popped up in front of them green islets like she had come downriver underwater. And darn if she don’t swing off her course and head in our direction, never hailed us, just circled where we was anchored! Round and round she went, two-three-four times, slow and steady as a shark, and nobody on deck, no sign of life.
“Us Daniels boys had our guns loaded, cause folks was nervous around Watson territory. And we was set to shoot, that’s how darn spooked we was! And we was boys who reckoned we was friends with Mr. Watson, him bein so close to our whole Daniels family!
“I can still see that boat today, as clear as I am looking at you now. She made them circles, then come in from dead abeam like she aimed to slice our fishin boat in two. We couldn’t figure what Mr. Watson wanted or what he might do next, all we could do was sit tight and wait him out. I believe he was warnin us off them fishin grounds at Mormon Key, and was just scarin us. Well, we was scared all right, we stood up and waved our guns, but Harvey had sense, he was the oldest, and he told us to lay our guns down quick, and make sure Watson seen us do it. Harvey told us to get set to jump, cause we could swim for shore if we had no bullets in us. He didn’t care to trade no shots with that man we couldn’t see inside that cabin. But at the last second, when we started hollerin out of our fear he meant to ram us, that launch sheered off and headed out toward Pavilion.
“After that day, my brother Fred was bone leery of Watson. Couldn’t talk about nothin else but Watson, Watson. Fred Daniels weren’t but nineteen years of age, afeared of nothin, so bein so bad spooked was hard for him to handle. Fred never killed a man, but you knew straight off he could do that if he had to. It was somethin you seen in certain men, he was that kind. And Fred Daniels was a feller could pick up his rifle and nail the head of a terrapin spang to the water.
“Now at that time our dad was captain of the clam dredge and my brother Harvey was the engineer on the old Falcon, which carried the clams north to the factory. On his day off, he worked on other boats as a mechanic. He’d done a lot of work on Watson’s boat and was owed eighty-five dollars, which could buy you a pretty good motor back in them days. I recall the sight of Ed Watson at Pavilion, working on his boat with Harvey, the broad strong back of him stretchin the stripes on one of them old-time mattress-tickin shirts, and the black hat, and them sunburnt ginger whiskers. Mr. Watson was a good boatman, and generally a good man to do business with, but this was along toward his last year when he was dead broke from his troubles in north Florida, and had fell behind on all his debts for quite some while. At this time when he scared us so bad, he had not give Harvey what he owed, and had tried to put him off another month.
“So hearin that, Fred Daniels said, ‘Well, now, Harvey, let’s go pay that feller a night visit. We’ll set in the reeds across from his damn house, and at daybreak when he comes outside, I’ll pick him off for you.’ He meant it, too. But Harvey was the other kind, thoughtful and careful—he’d sooner lose money than see some man gunned down. And he knew his brother was hotheaded, and might not have such a good plan as he thought. So when Fred swore he would go ahead without him, Harvey took him by the shoulder and he shook him. Said, ‘Maybe you ain’t doin this to settle up my debt, ever think of that? Maybe you just can’t live on the same coast with a man who scared you for the fun of it.’ Well, Fred gets hot and hollers at his brother, but bein dead honest, he can’t fool himself, and in a minute he admits it, comes right out with it. But that don’t mean he ain’t still furious, and he hollers out how one of these days he’d fix that sonofabitch so he don’t scare nobody no more!”
Weeks’s eyes were wide behind his glasses. “That goes to show you how much fear and anger people felt, and just how near Ed Watson come to being killed before they killed him.”
The wind tossed the royal palms along the river. As they walked along, Weeks glanced unhappily at Lucius, who showed no expression. “Folks was deathly scared of Mr. Watson, that’s a fact. It was always told how killing people never bothered him a bit, he would kill women if he had to. They said Belle Starr weren’t the only one, not by a long shot. Had another woman working for him, great big woman, this was in the last of Watson’s days. She was the one whose body floated up out of the river, she was the one led Watson to his grave.”
“He did not kill Hannah Smith, that I can promise you.”
“Nosir, I ain’t claiming that he killed her. But I ain’t never been so sure he weren’t behind it.” Weeks stopped walking. He turned to look his old friend in the eye. “You ain’t askin my opinion, Colonel, and likely you don’t want it, but I better tell you anyways, just so we’re straight about it.” He took a deep breath. “I reckon the whole thing come out just about right. E. J. Watson was a coiled rattler, you never knowed when he was going to strike. I said that once where your sister Carrie heard it, and she told me she would not forgive me till the day she died and maybe a good while after!”
Honey sighed, shaking her head over her husband. “Carrie has had a dog’s share of misfortune, but she’s still full of life! Everyone in town knows Carrie Langford! Course we aren’t in her social circle but we know her, too!”
Weeks Daniels nodded. “Yessir, your sister has plenty of spirit, and she sure needed it after Banker Langford died! Remember when she opened up the Gulf Shore Inn, down at Fort Myers Beach? That was back in Prohibition times, you was in the Islands. Had kind of a speakeasy in back, but Sheriff Tippins never bothered her at all. Carrie was along in her late thirties, she’d put on some heft, but she was a fine-lookin widder woman all the same. Anyways, she got hooked up with a fish guide at the Beach. Capt. Luke Gates on the Black Flash—”
“Oh goodness, Weeks!” his wife protested. But her husband wore that dogged look, having no idea how to go about not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God. “So one night I was in there when Gates’s wife come in—thin scratchy little blonde, she was just a-stormin! Run right over and tore into her husband where he was settin at the poker table. ‘See you, raise you five,’ he told them men. Never lifted his eyes up off the cards. And when his wife picked up his whiskey glass and let his liquor fly into Luke’s face, he never blinked. Never even reached to wipe his face! Kept right on studyin the cards with the whiskey runnin off his cheeks like nothing happened, like that hard little blonde weren’t even there.
“Makin no headway at the poker table, his wife let fly an ugly speech about Carrie Langford’s morals or the lack of ’em, and how Carrie had come by her bad character real natural, on account of her daddy was the well-known murderer Ed ‘Bloody’ Watson. Well, darned if this banker’s widow don’t ring open the cash register, take out a revolver, and bang it down hard on the bar. And she said, ‘Let me tell you something, honey, that kind of mean and dirty talk is not permitted in my place just because some little fool don’t know how to hang on to her man!’ And seeing that gun in the hands of Watson’s daughter, that little blonde cooled off enough to run outside where it was dark. She yelled her dirty stuff in through the window, but nobody didn’t pay her no attention after that, and maybe her husband least of all.
“Yes, your sister had some spirit and she had some style, and she could talk rough when she wanted. She liked to drink, have a good time, just like her daddy. She never mentioned him or tried to defend him, but she would not lie low or act ashamed about him. Some of her bootleg liquor trade might of come from the kind of nosy people who wanted to say they had a drink with Watson’s daughter, but nobody said nothing bad about him around Carrie.”
They paused at the foot of the Edison Bridge to look at the white-painted brick mansion on the corner opposite. Walter Langford had built this house in 1919 and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1920. For a banker, poor Walter had never had much of a head for figures, Lucius recalled, and what he earned went mostly for appearances, so he’d left his wife with more debts than inheritance. Carrie got her two daughters married off, but she’d had to sell this fine brick house to do it, buying a smaller place down the street which in later years she opened up to lodgers. After Prohibition ended, and the Gulf Shore Inn, she had started a small restaurant on First Street called Miss Carrie’s Chicken. Being generous, Carrie spent too much, but she made shrewd investments, too, and was comfortable enough by the time the smoke cleared.
“Methodists own that property,” Honey was saying, “but Eddie Watson is so proud of it that he comes over here most every day now that he’s retired. Likes to tell the tourists all about the good old days.”
Shading his eyes, Weeks peered across the road. “That’s him skulkin in the corner of the porch,” he said, “so I reckon we’ll say good-bye and let you go.” Lucius confessed that he’d been estranged from Eddie, and would appreciate it if his friends would help him ease matters a little, so the Danielses accompanied him across the street. At the porch steps, Weeks doffed his hat to the bulky figure, who came forward and said good morning a bit loudly.
“Yes?” E. E. Watson moved to the top step, to bar their way. “What do you people want here, Daniels? This is private property, church property—” But before he could crank himself too high, Honey introduced the noted historian Professor Collins, and Eddie stepped back with a sweeping gesture of his arm. “Indeed, sir! Welcome! I am honored! E. E. Watson, at your service, sir!” He stuck out a moist hand. “Yessir, if it’s history you’re after, you have come to the right place.” Grandly he waved them up onto the porch. “My brother Lucius, he’s a historian! Comes here to consult me all the time!”
“Eddie?”
Despite the heat, Eddie Watson was dressed formally in unclean linen suit, white shirt, green tie, the whole ensemble yellowed and flecked with sad traces of repasts long forgotten. He peered at Lucius, looking worried and confused. For all his large manner, there was no life in his eyes, and Lucius pitied him.
“Eddie? Forgive me—”
“This was the Langford house, of course. My sister’s house. Her Langford in-laws lived over there between Bay and First, a big pink house, it’s now the Dean Hotel. Her husband was the president of the First National Bank, and Carrie and Walter entertained the Thomas Edisons and their friend Mr. Henry Ford. I believe Mark Twain—”
“Eddie? You really don’t know who I am?”
“What’s that?” Eddie peered again, in great alarm. “Of course I know! What do you want?”
Lucius reached out to touch his arm, trying to calm him. “I need your signature on a petition. To save Papa’s house. And I’m preparing a biography of Papa, and there are some questions—”
“Oh no, you don’t!” Eddie Watson pushed past him and tottered down the steps into the sunlight, where he turned and pointed an unsteady finger. “Damn you, you’re just stirring up more trouble, same way you always did! It’s family business, will you never understand? It’s family business!” He waved wildly at the house. “You never even came to see your sister, and you broke her heart!”
“And I have to check with you about a list of men that I sent years ago to Rob—”
“I took care of that darned thing, don’t worry! I took care of that!” But his eye did not hold, and he glowered at the Danielses. “None of you have any business here! You are trespassing upon church property! I am calling the police!” And he rushed off down the street, waving his arms.
They perched like three birds on the porch steps, watching him go. “Will he really do that?” Lucius asked.
Weeks Daniels nodded. “Poor Eddie’s always calling in complaints. Kind of a hobby. They don’t pay him any mind at all.”
Far up the street, Mr. E. E. Watson, hobbling wildly, disappeared around the corner. The hollow street of the old river town stood gaunt and empty, as if that silhouette of his lost brother had lifted up into the sun like a stray cinder. He wondered if they would ever meet again.
“Eddie always tried to be like Carrie—uptown people, wealthy kind of people,” Honey reflected. “Not that you ever spoke against ’em, Colonel.”
“I never spoke of them at all!” he mourned. “I always thought they were ashamed because their brother was just a fisherman. Who drank too much.” He smiled unhappily. “E. E. Watson and his Augusta had to keep up appearances, after all. My brother is a gentleman, as I’m sure he is the first to let folks know!”
“Oh, he’s not so bad, I guess.” Honey worried that she and Weeks might have been unkind. “In his younger days, Eddie was so friendly, remember, Weeks?”
“Maybe too friendly,” Weeks decided, after a pause. “Big hearty man, big but not strong. Always dressed up tight cause he wanted to look like Banker Langford’s brother-in-law, wanted folks to call him Mr. Watson. But I think he knew folks never took to him, not the way they took to his younger brother. Colonel was always just plain Colonel, just himself. He could go into any house in Florida and be all right.” In his spontaneous surge of affection, Weeks Daniels went red, glaring fiercely at the tourist traffic coming off the river bridge, as if expecting the arrival from the north of a long-lost friend. “I never heard one bad word about Colonel Watson.”
“Better go talk to Speck, then,” Lucius protested, feeling disloyal to his brother and somehow fraudulent.
Anxious to finish, Weeks Daniels ignored him. “I reckon Eddie done the best he could. Having his sister here in town gave him the heart to stay. Used to let on how his rightful home was back up north where he was born, used to talk about retiring one day to Columbia County, but the years came and went and he’s still here.
“E. E. Watson, Insurance. New customers would say, ‘You the Ed Watson? You ain’t fixin to murder me, are ye, if I don’t pay up my premiums?’—joking him, you know, slapping him on the back. And Eddie never blinked an eye, he made the same answer over and over—Better watch your step, all right!—and went right on filling out the forms. Never occurred to them damn jackasses that Watson’s son might be a tender kind of feller with real feelings. The few that even noticed that the poor man minded, they would blame their own stupidity on Eddie. Said, ‘Why hell, if that feller can’t take it, he ought to have left town long ago, either that or change his goddamn name!’
“Mostly he stayed pretty calm about it. In his own way, Eddie Watson is as mulish as his daddy. He aimed to be a fine upstanding citizen no matter what. Got himself seen regular at church and stuck to business, went bird hunting once in a while, played golf at the new country club, tried to fit in. For a while he even headed up the Masons! Eddie would not back up, no matter what, and he weren’t about to change his name.
“Only thing, in recent years, he kind of forgot to keep up his appearances. He even give up on Mr. E. E. Watson for a while, begun to call himself Ed Watson, Junior. Took a kind of pride in that—not in his daddy, not exactly, but in being the son of somebody so famous. Made him a somebody in his own right, and it brung in customers. People might stop by the agency to take a gander at Bloody Watson’s son, and buying a policy was their excuse to shake his hand. Eddie was always a businessman, first and foremost, and he discovered that a nice dark past paid off!
“Them last years before he lost the agency, Eddie got to hinting to the winter visitors that he was some kind of a chip off the old block. Local folks always thought of him as pretty meek and mild behind his bluster, but to outsiders he might hint he had a violent streak, same as his daddy. Even hauled out this darn list he’d put together of those Chokoloskee men who finished E. J. Watson, and let on about how he went down there and took care of the ringleaders. ‘Didn’t have no choice about it,’ Eddie said. ‘Had to defend the honor of the family!’ ”
Lucius took a long deep breath but he said nothing.
Honey was getting to her feet. The day was late. “Of course one untruth leads to another,” she murmured. “His Neva was hardly laid to rest before Eddie took his secretary to marry, and he hardly got that woman home before she upped and left. So he took a third one, never bothered to let on about the second!”
Weeks smiled at Lucius, clinging to his hand an extra second. “When you first went back to the Islands, Colonel, you used to say you had no family to speak of, but you always had our Jenkins-Daniels bunch. Well, you still have us, what is left of us. Come see us, hear?”
Lucius took their hands—all three held hands—so that they stood in a small circle on the sidewalk. “I was lucky to have the Jenkins-Daniels bunch,” he murmured with emotion, “and I’m truly sorry I lost touch. Never taking the trouble to find out what became of Pearl—that’s inexcusable! I never was the brother to her that I should have been.”
Honey said, “Colonel? I have Pearl’s phone number right in this purse someplace.” And Weeks Daniels said, “You accepted her as your sister. That’s a lot more than the others done.”
Pearl had been nine or ten when their father died, a self-starved creature, a pale fugitive from the sun. Even in those days—she clung to this sad adornment most of her life—she wore a thin white ribbon in her thin blond hair. It was that ribbon which gnawed at his heart now. Pearl had been struck speechless by her father’s death, while Aunt Josie, who had lost the dead man’s baby boy in the hurricane only the week before, had torn her hair and fled down the storm-rutted cart tracks at Caxambas, shrieking in woe.
His sister Pearl, he mourned, his sister Carrie. Lucy Summerlin. How would dear Mama have judged his failure to protect the tender lives and eager feelings entrusted to his care? Hearing Pearl’s thin voice over the wire, he was stricken by sadness, self-disgust.
Who are you? Who is calling me?
Pearl?
Who is calling me? Hello?
This is Lucius! Your brother Lucius.
Brother Who?
Pearl, this is Lucius! This is Colonel! I called to say hello! I called to see how you were getting along!
Why are you hollering? Did you say Colonel Watson? Oh Good Lord! Oh Colonel Lucius honey, are you sure you are all right? I was so worried, sweetheart! I went to see Miss Lucy Summerlin to ask where you were and she told me how she only wished she knew! She was so sweet to me, you know! She said I looked like you! Miss Lucy loves you dearly, do you know that? Why did you abandon her? You broke her heart! O yes I know, I know, that was some years ago. Lucius? Can you believe our life has gone so fast? Do you look as terrible and old as I do? Where are you? What are you doing there? Why are you calling me? What do you want?
I don’t want anything, Pearl. Please don’t be upset. I only wanted to speak to you, see how you were. Pearl honey? I feel just terrible that I haven’t called before, that I didn’t even know what had become of you!
Well, what’s become of you, sweetheart? What are you doing?
I—well, I’m gathering information for a book about Papa.
Who?
About our father.
Our Father Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom Come—that’s my Father! Who Art in Heaven! Those men blew your father to Kingdom Come—
Pearl, listen, he was your dad, too—
Do you know about the J for Jack? In E. J. Watson? My mother was married to Jack Watson! She was a lovely person! My mother was married seven times—one husband twice—and she outlived the whole darn bunch! But she only had one daughter by her E. Jack Watson—that was me!
Pearl, listen to me—
Lucius? Remember how you always stopped by to see us on your way north and south from Chatham? Remember those beautiful days on the salt water? When we went everywhere by boat because there were no roads? It was hard times—a lot of work and children and hard times, remember, Lucius? When did we stop calling you Lucius? Lucius, how come you forgot about me? What do you want now?
Honey, I wanted to ask about your memories of Papa—
He’s dead. I am retired now. Who gave you my phone number? What are you going to do with my information? I really don’t care, I am so glad to help you. Oh, I’ve missed you, Colonel!
Pearl? Don’t cry—
It’s late in the day to try to understand what happened, but don’t you give it up, you keep on trying. One man who claimed to be real close to your daddy, that was Wiley Bostic. Old Man Bostic got drunk one night at Barfield’s, he told me he oiled up Daddy’s shotgun cartridges so’s they wouldn’t fire, said he didn’t want to see nobody hurt! You believe that? Because everyone claimed a lot of things back at that time.
Everyone wanted a claim on Mr. Watson, for some reason.
My mother was married to your father and you used to come visiting at Caxambas and now here we are, right on the telephone! It’s a small world!
Well, yes, it is, Pearl.
Jack Watson died while my mother was married to him. He was with Belle Starr before that. Also Jesse James and that crowd. A lot of people didn’t like him, but I loved him.
I imagine your mother loved him, too.
Yes, she did! The only thing, she was leery of his temper, he might put a razor to her neck. I don’t know if he had a drinking problem or what. Course all the men drank. They never considered heavy drinking a real problem back in those days, not the way they do today.
Pearl, I wanted to check somebody’s story with you. Did your mother ever speak about the hired hand our father killed at Chatham Bend because this man insulted her nice peas?
No, I did not hear about insulted peas. Which doesn’t mean that he might not have killed somebody.
Did he ever threaten you?
No! No! No! He loved all his children! You know something? I saw the man who killed him. After we got run out of Caxambas, we were living across the canal in Naples, which was not Colored Town back then. They had real boundary lines to keep out black people. Only the whites could cross, isn’t that crazy? Because our local coloreds never bothered people, it was those ones from up North who caused the trouble. Anyway, my mother pointed her finger. She said, “That mulatta over yonder killed your daddy.” I don’t recall his name. I do recall he was very light in color. But my mother never held a thing against him, no she didn’t. Said he never would have done that on his own, he was put up to it. She blamed the white fellers.
Pearl? You must be talking about Henry Short—
That’s the one. Before Earl Helveston run off on me, we had a talk about my daddy. Earl just purely loved Jack Watson, maybe because he was practicing up to be that way himself! He discussed some things, bad deeds, y’know. Swore me to secrecy! Said them Marco boys would kill him just for the knowing of it. I have got it all wrote down someplace. Earl always said, “I love that man no matter what he did.” Said, “That man tell me do something, I would jump to it.”
That’s the effect he had on some people, all right.
One time he sent word to Lost Man’s Key to tell this man to get off of his property. Said, “I will give you so much time, then you better be gone.” Cause if he had something coming to him, he wanted it right then, he didn’t care to wait until tomorrow. But the man sent back a sassy note—that was his finish. It’s like Earl said, “If Jack Watson told you he would kill you, he would do it. Being a man of his word, he expected the same integrity in others.”
Sounds like the Tucker story. Down at Lost Man’s Beach.
Those young folks were killed and had rocks around their necks and they were found out in the water by the Harden men and that mulatta feller I was talking about. And after that, this Henry Short grew superstitious about Papa, he was scared to death of him. This stuff didn’t come from any book, my Mama told me. Earl said to me, “Know something, Pearl? A lot of people did not care for your daddy, but I loved him!” It was only lately I figured out that when our daddy died, Earl Helveston was only ten, a kid like me! So I can’t for the life of me figure out how he knew my dad so well, but he sure loved him! Earl and Speck both.
Isn’t that something? A lot of young men—
My mother was in that Hurricane of 1910 and lost her baby. You know who that baby’s daddy was?
It was all so hush-hush, you know, back then.
Did you ever hear the rumor that the baby lived?
Speck tell you that one? He’s a damn liar, then! Excuse my language, sweetheart! But I never knew why Speck wanted so bad to join up in our family, when all the rest of ’em were trying to get out!
Hello? Are you still there? Hello? Can you still hear me, Pearl?
Who are you anyway? Whoever you are, you must be a liar! My brother Lucius would have called me before this! He would have called me! I’m his baby sister! They say I look like him! Lucius loves me more than anybody in the world!
Please don’t cry, Pearl. Please don’t be upset. I am ashamed I never called. I’ve thought of you so often—
Who are you? Who is calling me? You tell my brother to call me, hear? I’m all alone in this sad place! They won’t let me go home because they say I have no home. They say Mrs. Barfield’s Hotel is gone, can you imagine such a thing? They say I have no job there anymore! It’s been years and years since anybody came to see me! Lucius Watson never came! And my name is Pearl Watson! I’m his baby sister!
Lucius rang up Eddie’s daughter the next morning—she who had led her unbeloved stepmother to the cemetery and told her the truth about E. J. Watson—whichever truth she had decided to bestow, since as she now declared over the telephone, she knew “nothing worth knowing” about Grandfather Watson. She had little information about family history and no interest whatever in acquiring more. “I scarcely heard Grandfather mentioned until I was sixteen, and even then, I was only told that he came from good family in South Carolina and died of a heart attack. Aunt Carrie’s daughters, Faith and Betsy, they were told the same!”
Having scarcely laid eyes on him since she was a child, she did not hide her suspicion of this stranger on the telephone, who might or might not be her long-lost uncle Lucius. She finally agreed to receive him at her clothing store downtown, but when he turned up, she rushed to intercept him even before the little bell over the door had finished tinkling.
In place of the rather pretty girl he had remembered stood a cracked vessel in bony horn-rimmed glasses and a mad red dress. Katherine Watson was bitter, offhand, sharp, with a pained laugh like the rasping of a tern. “Why did you ask about my mother? If you are Uncle Lucius, then you knew my mother. Neva Watson died in 1924. I suppose you remember Dorothy? Your own niece? My sister was very beautiful, like Aunt Carrie’s daughter, but she died many years ago in an automobile accident up north, as you would surely know if you are who you say you are. That’s every last thing I know about the Watson family, so you needn’t waste any more of your good time!”
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Katherine. Why did you agree to see me?”
Katherine’s voice went a little higher. “Your phone call startled me, I wasn’t thinking! You told me you were Lucius Watson, but I have no idea who you are or what you’re up to!”
His niece glared at him in alarm and dislike. He scarcely recognized the tight-pinched mouth, the worried hair, the famished shins. Was Walter’s funeral the last time he had seen her? “This is family business!” she cried fiercely, darting sharp flashes off sharp corners of modern spectacles into his eyes. “I can’t recall one thing worth speaking of about our family,” she repeated, “because nobody bothered to remember anything. That’s the way the Watsons are—indifferent!”
He could not seem to reassure this frantic person, and, in a sense, what she had said was true. Compared with his siblings and their children who had lived out their lives in the deep shadow of the scandal, he was not “family” but a feckless drifter.
“You see, I’m kind of a historian, apart from being your uncle. I’m trying to dispel some of those lurid myths about your grandfather. And I have to ask about a list of names—”
“It’s family business!”
The lone customer turned to look at them. His niece gave up trying to back him through the door to the bright street and herded him instead into the shoe department.
“Did Eddie—did your father ever speak about his older brother?”
“No! I can’t remember! An older brother? A half brother visited just once that I remember—I was still a child then, eight or nine. He didn’t stay long. This man came in search of Uncle Lucius, and became unpleasant because my father didn’t know or care where Lucius was. My father and his brothers were never close. My father always told us that his younger brother—is that you?—had upset the family by wasting his good education and going to live among lowlife rednecks in the Ten Thousand Islands. He said he never saw you after that. But as I said, I don’t think it was hostility so much as plain indifference!”
He sought to reassure her by relating a few details of his recent visit with her cousins in Fort White. She interrupted him. “I beg your pardon? They told you my father cooked when he came to visit? I never knew he cooked. We always had a colored person to do the cooking. Aunt Carrie never went back to Fort White, but my father lived there for some years after his mother died. He considered that place home, don’t ask me why! We had to go there every summer, stay at the Collins farm, and my sister and I just hated it! They were nice people, I suppose, good country people, but as poor as church mice!
“My father trained us to be snobs from an early age. We were poor ourselves a good deal of the time, but he was determined to be snobbish all the same. Oh yes, he always had a darkie, to keep up appearances, but he never had nearly as much money as Uncle Walter, so he had to be extra friendly to make up for it. When he had money, he joined up—what? Just about everything there was to join! A real glad-hander. He flattered folks, he made bad jokes, he bragged.
“What’s that? Why do you say that? Did you like him? I don’t think compensating for his father’s reputation had a thing to do with it! That’s just the way he always was—a braggart! Yes! My father is a braggart and his wife’s a fool. Augusta reveres my father for some reason, but that woman is nothing but a fool. She tries so hard to be genteel, but she never had one nickel she could throw away. And now that he’s retired, of course, I have to help them—well, that’s not your business, I’m sure,” she added bitterly.
“Actually,” he said gently, “I was hoping you might help me with a question that I’m afraid your father just won’t answer.” Had she ever heard about a list of names of the men who’d killed Grandfather Watson? A list given originally to Lucy Dyer? Lucy Summerlin? “I’m trying to find out who has this list—”
“No!” Katherine cried, rising abruptly in her torment, hard heels clacking on her hard new floor like hooves in a stone court. “I’ve already told you! I’m not interested in my family! I’m not interested in your lists and pictures! I don’t even care that we are related, if we are related! Why should I bother my head about an uncle who fled this godforsaken family when I was a little girl? Not that I blame you, Lord knows! I don’t blame you! I’d have done the same!” She gasped for breath, pointing at his notes. “If my grandfather was a monster, I can’t help it! It’s got nothing to do with me, that’s all I know!”
“Katherine, go ahead and take care of your customer—”
“No!” Beside herself, his niece hurried him toward the door. When he turned to say good-bye, she snatched off her glasses and wiped frantically. Without her horn-rims, she looked strangely naked, like a baby bird. She blew again upon her glasses, wiped them with another tissue fetched up from the hard bodice of that cantankerous red dress, then set them on her nose again to get him back in focus. “I guess you’re Uncle Lucius, all right,” she complained. “But I told you I couldn’t help before you came. So if you’ll just excuse me, please, I have a customer!”
Was she saying that he should not wait? She nodded gratefully. “I’m sorry,” she said, polite now that he seemed to be departing. And once again, glimpsing the prettiness that had forsaken her, he was touched by this bristling niece of his, though he couldn’t for the life of him think why.
The customer departed and they watched her go.
“I’m sorry, Katherine.”
“And don’t you go pestering Aunt Carrie either! She has not been well!” She banged the door, with its small bell of greeting and farewell.
Carrie Langford lived nearby in a small house in a court off First Street, almost in the shadow of the bank. Dreading recriminations, he had not announced his visit, and turning the corner, he found Carrie outside fetching the newspaper. In pale blue breakfast gown, she straightened by the gate of her rose fence, unkempt gray head in a bright morning aura of trellised wisteria and bougainvillea. At the sight of him, her hands rose to her hair, her temples, and she tottered a little before steadying herself on the white post.
“I was just going out. You almost missed me.” Cross that her poor lie was so transparent, Carrie fussed with the pink satin on her collar. “You could have called first, Lucius.”
“I’m sorry, Carrie.” He paused at the fence. “I suppose Eddie warned you I was here.”
“He said you were hobnobbing with those Daniels people. The Backdoor Family,” she added coldly. “I never thought you’d bother to come here.”
“I ran into them. They are good old friends.”
“Good old friends. And how about your sister?” She raised her palm to ward off any blustering. “Well, come on in, since you are here. I suppose you want something.”
It made things more painful that his sister moved like an old lady. Slowly she led him up onto the porch, swinging her left leg first for each upward step, and he held the screen door as she preceded him into a small sitting room stuffed up with dark antique furniture from the much larger house at the Edison Bridge. “From the good old days,” she said, with a tired wave. In the louvered shade, in the whir of fans, the dark and silent room seemed to bar the southern light, as if somewhere within, Walter’s body lay in state.
Carrie indicated a hard chair by the door, in sign to him that his stay should be a brief one, and he perched well forward on the edge to show that he understood this, and would depart promptly when the time came. Carrie herself sat on the sofa, but she sat erect, hands folded on her lap, awaiting him. He handed her Dyer’s petition form in regard to Chatham Bend.
“This why you came?” She glanced over the paper. “Should I trust you, Lucius?” She signed it carelessly and tossed it back.
“It was my excuse to come. I wanted to see you—”
“Spare me.” She raised her hand. “No, it was not Eddie who warned me you were here, it was his daughter. You mustn’t mind our poor unhappy Katherine. She just can’t bear any talk about the family. Never cared for her father, let alone her stepmother, and her husband went off with someone else, and her sister died in an auto accident up north.” She gazed at him. “You missed the funeral, of course. Dorothy Watson, in case you don’t recall her, was the most beautiful girl in all Lee County.”
“Carrie, listen, I don’t want to make excuses. I know what a poor brother I have been. But I always thought that you and Eddie disapproved—”
“Don’t lump me in with Eddie, if you don’t mind! Whatever you may think of us, Eddie and I are not consulting about Little Brother!”
“Good.” He offered a small smile. “I mean, he might persuade you not to see me.”
“He knows better than to try any such thing.”
To ease matters, he talked about Ruth Ellen and Addison, reminding Carrie that her Faith was about Ruth Ellen’s age. Those two little girls must have stared gravely at each other when Papa’s new family came through town on the journeys between Fort White and Chatham River.
“Our dear stepmother was eight years younger than I!” Carrie shook her head. “I scarcely remember their names,” she added curtly. “I’m afraid I have always thought less of Edna for running away before a decent burial could be arranged. And then, of course, she changed the children’s names. Made everything much easier, I imagine.”
But Carrie had no heart for her own unkindness. Abruptly she faced him, her face crumbling. “Lucius, you refused to understand what I had to deal with, how much my in-laws disapproved of Papa. Walter got upset every time he came, reminding me over and over that his father-in-law’s reputation ‘was not exactly an asset in the banking business.’ You may remember Walter as quite wild in his youth, but later on he was conservative, extremely strict.” She laughed despite herself, that delighted laugh that he’d almost forgotten. “Dear Walter could be so darned dignified that our girls joked about it—how their daddy had ordered stiff-collared pajamas!”
Her mood shifted again, like a wind gust over water. “I honored the family decision about Papa, but those dreadful writers pestered me year after year, they would not let that scandal die a merciful death. And sure enough, someone would show me another lurid article about ‘Bloody Watson,’ just slapped together in a hurry to make money, no regard for truth. Well, the rest of that day I would just sit quiet, all shrunk up into myself, looking straight ahead and not saying a word. On those days I told my girls not to come near me. And it was on those days that I thought to myself”—here she looked up—“how badly I needed my dear brothers, how much I longed for Lucius to come see me.
“It made me sad, of course, that I never saw Rob either, because I loved him, too. But the little brother I adored, who lived right here in southwest Florida and never bothered to inquire how we might be getting on even when he was right here in the city!”
Though Carrie wept in her pent-up emotions, she was less sorry for herself than overjoyed to see him. “I know, dear, I know! I do! You had all you could handle, maybe more! I never forgot that, and I never stopped loving you all these years—”
He was close to tears himself. “I don’t forgive myself, Carrie. I—”
How sad, he thought later, that just as they drew near, a visitor should come tapping on the screen, a small man in a dark suit with sallow skin and dark pouches under his eyes. Seeing Carrie, he entered, then stopped short at the sight of Lucius. Carrie introduced them, adding, “Mr. Henderson is my kind neighbor, my gentleman caller. Stops by every day to ask if I am dead, and if I am not, offers to run an errand.”
Lucius smiled and she smiled back, but she was not quite ready to be mollified. She did not send Mr. Henderson on his way, as Lucius hoped she would, and the man perched himself like a chaperone on a side chair, folding cold hands together. Carrie paid him no further attention, as if he had been leaned into the corner, but her tone with her brother had turned cool. “Faith and Betsy are your other pretty nieces,” she reminded him, directing Lucius’s attention to piano pictures of her daughters and grandchildren.
In a photo of Walter and Carrie taken in New York City about 1917, Carrie made a handsome subject, proud-bosomed in a white dress, and Banker Langford in a houndstooth tweed appeared portly and prosperous. His hairline, slicked back hard for the big city, had receded, but his lifelong amiability seemed undiminished. If he no longer resembled the lean-faced young cow hunter of Ruth Ellen’s photos, neither did he look the least bit like a man whose liver was to fail him three years later.
“You were off in the World War when that was taken. Walter had to meet people from New York City, he had to go there now and then, and the president of our First National Bank couldn’t very well behave like a cracker cowboy! In New York City, he hired a governess to teach his children manners, teach his wife how to conduct a formal dinner—all of the things our family had to know in order to do well in the banking business. And we studied hard right beside our children, read the same books of etiquette, learned how to dress.”
“Oh I’m sure there was no need of that!” Mr. Henderson exclaimed, and Carrie laughed, delighted by his consternation. She cried, “Oh yes, Mr. Henderson, yes indeed there was! Folks couldn’t believe what that cowboy and that Oklahoma tomboy had turned into! We could go anywhere and feel that we belonged! But Walter never became snobbish, he always remained a kind and generous man. We had our beautiful old colonial house on First Street, then the brick house near the bridge, remember? Did you ever see it?”
“Carrie? I came to Walter’s funeral! I arrived late—”
“Forgive me. Of course you did.” Carrie Langford nodded. “But that was very long ago, and I don’t really know you anymore.” Unable to hide the tremor in her voice, she would not look at him. Then she relented, and her eyes misted. “Lucius, I needed you back then. I got almost no help from Walter’s partners, and could not accept charity from others, even my own brothers. Had they offered it. Which they did not. For different reasons. You, at least, were always generous when you had anything, I will say that.” Again, she raised her hand to ward off explanations or regrets. “I made my own way and did my best to be gallant in misfortune, as poor Papa had to do so often! I was never a good businesswoman, but even fools do famously in real estate. I saw to it that my daughters married well, and we came out all right in the end. Betsy was always after me for money, and she always got it.”
Her gentleman caller shot a warning glance, which she ignored. He cleared his throat as smoothly as an undertaker. “Carrie Langford is one of the most gracious hostesses in all of Florida,” he intoned. “Before Mr. Langford’s untimely demise, she entertained Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison in her gracious home, and also their friend Mr. Henry Ford, and many other prominent Americans.”
“My goodness, Mr. Henderson, you sound like a brochure!” Bemused, she contemplated this circumspect little man before turning her attention back to Lucius.
“Two years ago I wasn’t well, and I thought, Darn it all, I want to see Lucius before I die, so I told Eddie to go hunt you up. He learned you were living scarcely thirty miles away, on some old houseboat! I wanted you to come for Christmas, a real visit, but Eddie said you were drinking too much, that all you wanted was to rot on your old boat, live like a hobo.” She paused, searching his eyes. “Said you seemed to think your family was ashamed of you, and that it might be best if you stayed away.”
Lucius had never said such things to Eddie, whom he had scarcely seen before today, but he’d said them to others, it was true—he had said as much this very day. When he did not defend himself, she said, “Well, those words broke your sister’s heart. Were they supposed to?”
Mr. Henderson hitched forward in his chair in case Mrs. Langford needed his assistance. However, he flinched when Lucius looked at him. Lucius stood up.
“Perhaps I should come back later, Carrie.”
“Now, now,” she teased him. “Mr. Henderson is like one of the family, which cannot be said for you!” More kindly, she added, “Did I ever show you what my Faith wrote about her grandpa in her school paper?” Carrie located the paper in a desk, read it aloud:
“ ‘I remember my grandpa with his big chest and broad shoulders and bright blue eyes and ginger brows and beard a wiry dark red, with silver in it, and his skin deep sunburned, a deep reddish brown, and always a nice warm smell of fine tobacco. He was so jolly and kind around us children—we just loved him!’ ” Reading this, Carrie smiled at her brother fondly. “ ‘He would come to our house and perch me and Betsy on each knee and tell us stories about the big old owls that lived on Chatham Bend. And as he told about the owls, he would pop his eyes open, like this!’ ”
Imitating her child, Carrie popped her eyes at Lucius, then gave that clear peal of delight which brought back their warm childhood days in a great rush.
With both parents dead and Rob and Lucius vanished from her life, the loss of her husband and her two girls married, all Carrie had left in the way of family was her brother Eddie. So it was fortunate, she said with a small smile, that Eddie so adored her. Lucius said with the same smile that he’d always supposed that their esteem was mutual. Carrie cocked her head. “Let’s just say,” Carrie said gently, “that dear Eddie felt a little more kindred to his sister’s spirit than she felt to his.”
As her gentleman caller peered at them, they nodded at each other. They were starting to have fun.
“Eddie can be very courtly, as you know. He has a sort of old-fashioned charm, at least he used to. And in the old days, he would laugh a good deal more, although his eyes would never, never smile. And that was because the poor old thing has never relaxed in all his life, he is always out to gain something or prove something.
“You were always the opposite—quiet, rather melancholy. But when you smiled, your whole face lit up, and your eyes, too.” The memory of his smile made her smile herself, and he was smiling with her. “See?” she said, pointing at his eyes. “As a young man, you were very handsome, Lucius. You still are. All the Watsons were handsome—beautiful or handsome. But like all the rest, you drank too much.” She took a deep hard breath, and her face darkened. “The Watsons were all handsome, and they all drank too much, myself included,” Carrie told Mr. Henderson rather too harshly, “and I married another handsome drunk while I was at it.”
Beside her on a bare table lay a simple leather book with a single bookmark. “I’ve waited for thirty years to show you this.” She opened the journal to the bookmarked page and handed it across to him.
January 16, 1921
Not long after Walter died, Eddie came over with a thin bearded stranger in worn and dusty clothes. We were still in our brick house. Eddie said shortly that this man was our long-lost half brother (Eddie said “half brother” right in front of him!). Robert is not a Watson anymore, he said, rolling his eyes in suspicion for my benefit. These days he is calling himself R. B. Collins.
I had not seen Rob in twenty years, and would not have recognized him, yet the moment his name was spoken, I knew him—that jutting black hair crudely hacked off, the dead pale skin, with feverish red points on his cheeks, the big dark hollow and wild eyes, like a religious martyr in old paintings. I go by my mother’s maiden name, Rob told me in a flat voice, not dignifying Eddie’s contempt with an explanation.
It’s you, Rob? I inquired shyly, and he nodded and extended his hand formally, making no attempt at an embrace. I said, Oh Rob! For goodness’ sake! I took his stiff thin body in my arms, and he gave me a quick wiry strong hug. Oh Rob! I cried. Do you remember the last time you saw me? That afternoon before my wedding, right out here on the riverside, when you sailed away with Papa to the Gulf? We waved and waved and then you vanished from my life! Until today!
With this foolish outburst came a flood of tears. Rob looked dismayed but could find no words so he gave the poor small speech he had prepared. Sister, he said in a cracked voice, I am sorry to learn that your husband is deceased. May I meet your daughters?
He’s looking for Lucius, Eddie interrupted, sulky and impatient. It turned out Rob had chastised him in front of Neva and the girls for his indifference and unloving attitude toward our little brother. I can’t help him, Eddie added.
I was forced to confess that I couldn’t help him, either. I felt dreadfully ashamed. We have no idea where Lucius might be living. I wonder why, Rob said, cold and sardonic. When Eddie told him that Lucius might be living in the Islands, I said how much it worried me to have my brother at the mercy of those people. You are right to be worried, Rob said. I am worried, too. That’s why I came. Eddie said sourly, Sure took you long enough! and Rob snapped back that he could not have come here any sooner. He seemed just as angry and restless as the Rob of old who defied Papa every chance he got!
I gave him Lucy Summerlin’s address, saying she’d been close to Lucius and might know his whereabouts. Rob said he would not stay for supper but must use this time to locate Mrs. Summerlin. That same evening, he would travel south to Marco, where a boat might be found to take him on to Lost Man’s River.
To escape from Eddie, who remained sullen, we went outside. I took Rob’s arm and walked with him a little way downriver. I said, Here you turn up for the first visit in many years and you won’t stay for dinner!
I never learned if he found Lucius in the Islands. I never learned if he had a family, or where he lived, or what his life might be. I have never seen Rob since, or Lucius either.
Lucius set the journal down. Carrie retrieved it, holding it upright like a hymnal on her lap. “If only you’d come back from those dreadful islands and married poor dear Lucy!” She smiled, encouraging a confidence. Unable to think of one, he rose to go.
His sister accompanied him to the door, waving back Mr. Henderson, who was so accomplished in the social niceties that he could frown at Lucius without meeting his eye. “Please don’t stay away forever, darling. Please come back,” she whispered. “Please, Lucius dear.” They took each other’s hands. “I will,” he said simply, and she knew he meant it, for she went up on tiptoes like a girl and kissed him on the cheek. At last they hugged each other. “I’m counting on you, Lucius!” Carrie whispered. “Don’t forsake me.” He waved from the rose gate.
The old Fort Myers cemetery lay within walking distance, in a faded neighborhood off the river road which ran east to La Belle and Lake Okeechobee. In banyan shade by the cemetery gate, under dark branches which extended out over the street, a small figure in Easter hat and white lace collar sat in her old auto looking straight ahead. He trod heavily so as not to startle her as he came along the sidewalk from behind, and Lucy Summerlin did not look around or even stiffen—he admired that. Even in a run-down neighborhood, her stillness said, a Southern lady waiting outside a cemetery was inviolate, and no self-respecting thug or hooligan would dare to interfere with her in the smallest way.
“Goodness gracious, Lucius Watson, is that really you?” Her voice on the telephone had faltered a moment, then returned briskly. “Have you paid your respects out at the cemetery? Well, meet me there! I’ll be the rickety old contraption by the gate. Me, not the automobile—oh, don’t be silly! It’s high time I got out there anyway, saw to the flowers!”
At his approach, she emerged from her car, wincing a little at the loud creak of the hinge, or her own stiff joints, or both. “This pesky flivver,” she declared, “is as out of date as I am!” When she slammed the door, it screeched again. “My auto and I,” she said, smoothing her dress. “We’re in this darn thing to the finish.” Still unable to look at him, she went around to the far side and reached in through the window for her graveside flowers. Half-hid behind the shield of blossoms, she raised her eyes, then burst into a joyful smile, laying the flowers on the hood and holding out both hands. “Oh Lucius!” she whispered. “Oh my darling!”
Still at arm’s length, he held her small white hands in his brown rough ones. He cleared his throat, inept and shy. “Miss L,” he murmured.
“Miss L!” she cried, with a fleeting shiver of her brow. “Indeed! The very one! None other!” For all her frailty and evanescence, she was still vital, she had never lost that petal skin and delicate neck and waist. She wore a long, simple, and expensive dress of a faint shade of lavender—as faint, he decided later (trying his hand at an elegaic poem) as “the bougainvillea petal which masquerades as its own blossom—as light and evanescent as a leaf of peach hibiscus, spinning in the sunlight corner of a spider’s web.” In the tumult of that evening’s events, this ode to Lucy, like most of Lucius’s poems, was quickly put away and as quickly lost.
“For pity’s sake, don’t stare! It won’t improve matters!” She turned away, preceding her long-ago lover through the gate. Over her shoulder, in a sprightly voice, she told him that she’d seen a notice of the forthcoming meeting of the Southwest Florida Historical Society tomorrow evening in Naples, which would be addressed—and she turned to curtsy—by “ ‘the noted historian and author L. Watson Collins!’ ” She pirouetted in a quick neat circle, dancing out into the sun on the far side of the banyan into the suspended time of the old graveyard.
He waited on the white shell path while her lavender figure turned among the stones to offer flowers at a grave under an oak—the last resting place of the late Mr. Summerlin, he supposed. She pointed him toward the Watson plot, where he went without her. “On your right, remember?” Lucy called. “Just by the path.”
The stones were grouped close around a WATSON marker, and Papa lay where he belonged beside Jane Dyal Watson. The sight of his mother’s small white marble headstone brought a peculiar prickling to his temples. Only once had he visited her grave since her death a half century before, in a cold north wind on the December day of Papa’s burial.
E. J. WATSON
NOVEMBER 7 1855–OCTOBER 24 1910
In late October of 1910, Lucius had accompanied Sheriff Tippins and the coroner to Rabbit Key, on the outer coast south and west of Chokoloskee, and made himself look down into that hole at the crusted carcass. Returning north on the gray toiling Gulf, hearing the lumpish thing that had been Papa rolling and bumping dully in its box, assailed by that stink that would lurk forever in his sinuses, seeping forth whenever that dreadful image overtook him, he had puked and coughed into the waves that turned along the hull. At home, he discovered that none of his family wished to hear about the autopsy, and perhaps their reluctance had been sensible, but at the time—he was twenty-one—he thought it typical of the family’s unworthy effort to elude scandal. Shouting back that this policy of silence served the interests of the First National Bank far better than the family honor, he had stalked out of the house, walking eastward on the river road to the Alva Bridge and west again as far as Whiskey Creek, dry-eyed and dry-hearted, heart bitter as stone. Early next morning, he and the coroner, gagging into bandannas tied bandit-style over their faces, had dragged his father’s black Sunday suit onto the foul cadaver and nailed it back into its coffin for reburial. Carrie had come, and she did her best to help, though they scarcely spoke.
With no river breeze to stir the dusty leaves, the burning banyan seemed to writhe and shimmer. The thick fig leaves looked black, the graveyard white and black, no color anywhere. The air swarmed with black specks—midges or soot. In the pitiless sun on the white monoliths, the shine on the live oak leaves, the hot scent of lime and drone of bees, his brain was smitten by bare light, causing swift vertigo. He sank down abruptly on a grave.
Lucy drew near, calling a question to cover her concern. “Did you find it?”
“Find what?” Struggling to clear his head, he spoke more brusquely than he had intended.
She reached for his hand, offered an airy arm. Grateful that she asked no questions, he let her lead him toward the shade of the great banyan. “Kinfolks,” she said, patting her hand on the glazed stone of a sepulchre, encouraging him to take a seat beside her. “Won’t bother ’em a bit.”
With her fingertips, Lucy traced the incised name, then turned and took his hand in both of hers and gazed full at him. “I was terribly in love with you, did you know that, darling? Even after you went off to war and never told me … never sent word. Oh Lucius! After the way we were—!” Her cheeks went scarlet but she held his eye. “I was never angry, please believe that, dearest. I knew who Lucius Watson was, even back then, I knew the man I had dearly hoped to spend my life with. And even knowing who you were, I wish you’d married your lovelorn Miss L! Have you ever heard of anything so pathetic?” In his silence, she added quietly, “People so often say they love someone. But so rarely do they really mean they love them as they are, including the behavior that is hurtful.”
Lightly he touched her cheek, her temple. What was there to tell her? He longed to take Lucy in his arms and pretend that all that joy in life had not been wasted. He was heartbroken by their life loss, yet scared and eager, too, and also disgusted with himself, indeed infuriated—all these emotions! How could he have been such a weakhearted fool?
Lucy was studying her small livered hands as if to say, Can these really be mine? “You think I’m being foolish, don’t you, Lucius? You think it’s much too late for us and that we are too … old?” She lifted her gaze then, and her eyes pled with his. “It’s just that I’m so happy to see you, dearest.… It’s just … Well, I’m just babbling, I know!” But she was undone by his expression. Patting his wrist, she said, “Now never mind.” She slipped a leather diary into his hands. “Perhaps you’ll understand things better written down. Looking into each other’s eyes only confuses things.” She touched the journal in a kind of parting as she rose. “It’s a love letter, I suppose. I thought about ripping these soppy pages right out of my life, but there’s so much of my heart in it, and the writing it all out consoled me so, that I can’t bring myself to burn it. The only way to set myself free is to offer it to the person it belongs to.”
To spare them, Lucy added brightly, “I have your History in the car! Will you inscribe it for me?” He nodded vaguely, and she squeezed his hand and moved away among the blinding stones.
THE LIFE OF MR. LUCIUS HAMPTON WATSON
by Miss L. Dyer
Lucius Hampton Watson was born in Oklahoma in 1889 (“in the year that Belle Starr died,” as my dearest of dear men declared when he’d been drinking). As a boy of seven he went to live in Columbia County and from there to southwest Florida at Chatham River. But his mother thought Mr. Watson’s place was dangerous for the children, and as she was very ill and weak, she came to live at Dr. Langford’s in Fort Myers and put her children into school. Her stepson Rob remained with Lucius’s father in the Islands.
Lucius was twelve when his mother died in 1901. For a time, he and his brother Eddie lived with their sister Carrie Langford. In this same period, Mr. Frederick Dyer contracted as a carpenter and foreman there at “Chatham,” looking after the plantation while Mr. Watson was establishing a second farm in Columbia County.
Lucius Watson spent his summers at the Bend. Even in his gangly teens, he was very strong and quiet, very handsome, with deep shadowy rather wistful eyes and the same curved lashes that I noticed later in his sister. He was always graceful, though there was nothing soft about him nor unmanly, and he was modest and soft-spoken, rather shy. Though he fished and hunted to help feed the plantation, he was merciful and quick with trapped or wounded creatures and took great pains in removing fish from hooks. He was easy and affectionate with puppies, chicks, and piglets, and tender with all of our young animals, including a certain peculiar little girl who adored the ground he walked on, imagining him to be some sort of angel. After he asked her to kindly stop pestering him, her tearstained face was poking around corners everywhere he went. The child, scarcely five, was much too young to behave like such a fool, but Lucius paid this horrid little Lucy no more mind than a grease spot on the knee of his patched britches. He never raised his voice nor became rough with her.
The one creature he treated harshly was himself. All his life, he set impossible standards for his own behavior. He prided himself—if he prided himself on anything—on making do with little, or doing entirely without, sometimes quite senselessly! For a whole year after Mama sewed new mosquito bars for everyone on the Bend, Lucius slept without netting simply because the Indians had none! He was in “life training,” he would say, as if even as a boy he knew that he would need endurance.
When Eddie went north about 1904 to work on their father’s farm in Columbia County, Lucius stayed on in the Islands. Boarding with the Storter family, he attended school in Everglade, but the rest of the time, he lived and worked at Chatham. After his mother died, he lost all interest in Fort Myers, though he would go occasionally to see his sister. Lucius thought of one thing only, which was pleasing his father, he revered this strange and powerful man who would do so much harm to his son’s life.
Lucius closed the journal. So much harm? What nonsense! His father had loved him very much, in his own way.
Lucius had returned to Chatham Bend in 1902, not long after a new foreman had been found to replace the Tuckers. Fred Dyer, though small, was a handsome, wiry devil, with too much energy for anybody’s good. When on the Bend, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building the cistern and the boat shed, and also his small family cabin just downriver, which was later taken over by Green Waller.
As foreman, Fred Dyer was away often on the schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for hardware and dry goods and materials. According to Papa, who was sometimes with him, he prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he knew how to handle, picking fights. As long as the work got done, Papa never harassed him, though always free with harsh comment about others. Not until years later, comparing notes with Lucy, had Lucius realized that his father might have encouraged Dyer’s wanderings just to get the man out of the way.
Mrs. Sybil Dyer was a seamstress and made most of the clothes—a lovely creature, “pretty as a primrose,” Papa called her. This was before Papa met Edna Bethea. He had been lonely as a widower, and confessed to his son that he was “very taken with Miss Sybil,” though he never presumed nor did he claim that she was drawn to him. For such a strong, hard-minded man, he would go to pieces around Sybil Dyer, chuckling and blushing, turning to mush before their very eyes. In quest of Mrs. Dyer’s good opinion, he took to reading the Bible aloud on Sunday mornings, and leading them in spirited renditions of “Jesus Loves Me” and “The Little Brown Church in the Dell.”
When Papa was drinking, he would talk to Mrs. Dyer about his childhood and about the loss of family land at Clouds Creek, South Carolina. He had also assured her—for she told this to her daughter, who confided it in later years to Lucius—that much of his bad reputation in the region had been spawned by envy. His innocent seamstress inevitably concluded that she alone was privy to the secret heart of Mr. Watson, so generous and kind despite his ill repute. And perhaps she imagined, as so many had before her, that “the love of a good woman” was all that was required to cause this man to mend his sinful ways.
Out of Sybil Dyer’s presence, Papa was often restless and short-tempered. He could be jolly in an ironic sort of way, and he dearly loved to amuse his son with sardonic teasing, but when he was drinking, his teasing turned cynical and brutal. Upbraiding the help, both white and black, he advanced the opinion that their small brains, laziness and insatiable stomachs would send him straight into the poorhouse.
In 1905—the year Gene Roberts brought the news about the murder of Guy Bradley in Flamingo—a little boy was born to Sybil Dyer. This boy was christened Watson Dyer, known as Watt or Wattie. Lucius supposed that the foreman wished to flatter his employer, mostly because, for all his lip and strut, he was afraid. Out in the world, Dyer had heard tales of those young Tuckers who had preceded his own family on Chatham Bend, and that summer, his nerve was broken by these wildfire false rumors that Ed Watson was Guy Bradley’s killer, too.
Not long after the autumn harvest, the Dyers fled, in forfeit of a whole year’s pay. They left Chatham River on the mail boat, returning to Whiskey Creek, outside Fort Myers. Papa, who was absent in Key West, never forgave them, and he never paid them. Feeling bad about that withheld pay, Lucius introduced Mrs. Dyer to Carrie Langford, which led to a modest livelihood as dressmaker to Fort Myers ladies, not only the Langfords but the Summerlins and Hendrys and in the winter season Mrs. Edison, upon whose bust Sybil Dyer would make clothes to be sent north to New Jersey in the summer.
Years later, Lucy would confess that she had cried for a whole week after her family left Chatham, so lovesick had she been for her lost Lucius! She also revealed that her mother had wept when the news came of Mr. Watson’s violent death. Some years later, after Fred Dyer left his family, Lucy asked her mother if Mr. Watson’s feelings for her had been reciprocated, and instead of teasing back, Sybil Dyer wept anew, declaring that Mr. Edgar Watson had the most mysterious blue eyes she ever saw. Yes, he had told her that he loved her, and yes, she had loved him, though even in the early days she had heard that he would declare undying love to a lot of women. She excused him, saying that in his deepest heart was a great big aching hole which the poor man could never fill.
Pretty Lucy was fourteen when Lucius saw her next, at Dancy’s food stand on the pier at Fort Myers. He treated her to the ice cream she was buying, and they perched on the pier end, swinging their shoes over the current. Lucy told him how sorry she had been to hear about his father, who had been so kind to her, and a moment later, blushing boldly, lifting her chin and gazing straight into his eyes, she said, “I hope you know that for the rest of my life, I shall always be devoted to your family.” The next day, out for a stroll, she spontaneously took his hand and, as a young girl will, swung his arm violently out of her nervousness and high spirits as they wandered west along the river, talking of the good old days at Chatham Bend.
Though aware of the coltish tumult in her—and embarrassed by the twitch in his own trousers—Lucius had been thunderstruck when this innocent river walk caused a near-scandal. “She’s only a schoolgirl! Scarcely fourteen!” he protested indignantly to Carrie after Eddie had denounced his behavior, telling him it was high time he grew up. “I married Walter at thirteen,” Carrie retorted, causing her husband to withdraw into the pantry.
Eventually he and Lucy spoke of the rumors about the little brother born at Chatham Bend. By the age of four or five, Wattie Dyer was reminding people of Ed Watson, and not long after Papa’s death, Fred Dyer had confronted his wife, mostly on the evidence of her own grief. Sybil Dyer denied that Mr. Watson was the father and became angry that her husband dared abuse her after all of his lowlife infidelities, which were well known. But his suspicions rose from day to day, and his voice, too, and in the end, driven to distraction by his hounding, Sybil Dyer acknowledged that Edgar Watson—although never her lover—might have been Watt’s father, since on several occasions in the period in question, he had broken in and taken her by force.
Fred Dyer raged, “Goddamn you, woman, why didn’t you tell me!” And she cried out, “For the same reason you didn’t want to look! Because then you would have had to act, and he would have killed you!”
For a few years the Dyer parents chewed on their hard situation. Meanwhile the boy resembled his namesake more with every day, until at last Dyer got sick of looking at him and drove him out. Sybil Dyer, whose dressmaking paid their rent, ordered her husband to depart instead, and he went away enraged, fatally bitter. For years thereafter, in his cups, he would swallow down his last pride with his whiskey and rant about his wife’s affair with Watson—No, no, boys, weren’t no damn rape about it!—and relate how he would have killed that sonofabitch if the House boys hadn’t beat him to it. If it was rape the way she claimed, how come she never used the gun he give her to run him off when he was drinkin? How come that bitch give her bastard boy that name of Watson? By now poor Fred had long forgotten that the name Watson Dyer was his own idea.
Lucius had never quite made up his mind about it. That his father had taught Mrs. Dyer to use the revolver he had given her seemed a strong proof of sincerity, for E. J. Watson had never deceived himself, he knew how liquor crazed him, Lucius believed his father truly loved her, but love alone might not have deterred rape. Papa would deride Fred Dyer’s “intolerance of alcohol,” but Papa himself was the most dangerous drinker his son had ever known.
Yes, Papa was courtly with the ladies, exceptionally considerate and tender, but when he drank, he was a buccaneer and an unholy terror. Jack Watson took all he wanted when he wanted it, and he took it the way he wanted, too, his Caxambas ladies whispered, with shy sly smiles which looked strangely askew. “When I fuck ’em, they stay fucked!” Papa had shouted at the virgin Lucius, the first time he took him to the noted palm-thatch whorehouse on Black Betsy Key. Though he made that claim in drunken braggadocio, he meant it.
I suppose it’s hard for people nowadays to imagine how awful it was for the Watson children—not only the violent murder of their father but the dreadful scandal. Fort Myers was still provincial then, a beautiful small town with white colonial houses and white picket fences to keep strayed range cattle out of the gardens. The whole downtown section was on First Street by the river, a single block along a white oyster shell road of commercial buildings, with a livery stable and a faucet for watering horses. The women convened for small talk at Miss Flossie’s clothing store while the men talked under the live oaks and we children pounded up and down the new wood sidewalks.
Two days after Mr. Watson’s death, I was having an ice cream soda in Doc Winkler’s drugstore when Carrie Langford came in with her Faith and Betsy. Doc Winkler was the only doctor in Lee County, and his prescription shop sold ice cream sodas. Miss Carrie looked just beautiful, as usual, but that day the poor thing had gone dark around the eyes, and her wonderful thick hair had lost its shine. And little Faith whispered, kind of scared, “Mama’s been crying all day long, we don’t know why she’s crying so!” And I came busting out with it—“She’s crying cause some bad men shot your grandpa!”
Oh, when my mother heard what I had done, she almost killed me! I was only ten but that was no excuse, I don’t know what came over me! Hearing those terrible words, poor Faith became hysterical, that’s how upset she was, at least until she realized she might miss her ice cream soda! As for Betsy, who was only five, she started hollering, “Grandpa, Grandpa!” because she needed some attention, too.
Well, just that moment—can you believe it?—the first Indian we children ever saw came into the drugstore in a high silk hat with an egret plume and a long Seminole men’s skirt. It was like he’d walked straight in out of the Glades! Faith stopped crying right away. She said, “Mama! Is he going to kill us?” Because in those days, people still talked about the Indian Wars, and most of the few Indians left were still hiding from the white settlers out in the Cypress. The Mikasuki Seminoles forbade their women to speak to a white man or even look at him. If an Indian woman had a child by a white man or a negro, both mother and child were put to death! Later I learned that this Mikasuki man at Doc Winkler’s soda fountain had been threatened with death by his own people for coming in too close to the white people and learning to speak English, and for eating ice cream sodas, too, for all I know!