Collier County

According to the morning paper, the driver of the damaged vehicle had escaped unhurt in the shooting episode the night before outside the Gasparilla. Already in custody was the enraged meat carver (the “disturbed veteran,” the “furious Negro”) who earlier that evening had waved a big knife at the victim and “terrified” the other diners. Apparently Dyer had not suspected Rob, for if he’d thought that Rob had tried to kill him, he would surely have reported him, citing his identity as a longtime fugitive. Or would he?

At the Naples church hall, Lucius wondered if Dyer would appear. He worried that if Rob turned up, he might not have sense enough to stay out in the dark. He hoped that Sally Brown was still in Naples.

The Program Director of the Historical Society caught up with him at the side entrance near the podium. Already upset by his tardy arrival and failure to report to her at once, this brisk thistly little person was aghast at his decision to present himself as Lucius Watson, assuring him that “her” audience had not paid good money to hear about Mr. Bloody Watson from his son! Her implication was that the son could not be trusted, and indeed, she mistrusted him herself, having caught him with a plastic glass, complete with swizzle stick. “As you know, Professor Collins, intoxicating spirits are strictly prohibited in multidenominational places of worship.”

“Mineral water,” Lucius advised her. “With a twist of lemon,” he added brightly when she looked daggers at the citrus wedge.

She sniffed. “I see.” And warned him anew that “these very unique senior citizens” (whom she also described as “very special human beings”) might “not exercise the option” of “sharing their cultural heritage,” far less “interfacing with the facilitator,” if they suspected they weren’t getting what they paid for—in short, a bona fide professor, namely L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

Still patient, Lucius pointed out as he had to Dyer that Naples was not far from Caxambas, and that some old-timer in the audience was sure to spot him. It seemed more honest—and a great deal safer—to identify himself right from the start.

She would not listen. Closing her eyes, she shook her head throughout and then said, “No.”

“I’m afraid I’ve made up my mind,” he said.

“So have I.” She waved an envelope which he took to be his check, and her thin lipstick flickered in a basilisk smile less withering than withered. “I owe it to my audience,” she told him. She swept inside to greet a wealthy patron and get her settled up front near the podium.

The Gulf wind clacking in the palms unnerved him, as if all the defenses of his reclusive life were blowing away. He sucked such comfort as he could from the solid glass of ice and vodka in his hand. It was one thing to pass as a historian in north Florida and quite another to use a bogus name with a local audience which knew him well as a broken-down drunk fisherman and chronic loser.

The applause startled him. He was being introduced. With a murderous smile, the Program Director was summoning and beckoning “Professor Collins”—damn!—and he hurried to the podium before he had composed himself. Seeing the glass he had neglected to set down, she raised her eyebrows to the vanishing point, even reared back a little, to separate herself from any blame for his behavior. He resisted her attempt to relieve him of his glass, and they actually tussled for one hate-filled moment before she would let go.

In hard, flat light, he found himself confronted by a wary assemblage of elders, fanning the worn-out heat with their clutched programs. These old-timers had whitish aureoles around their heads like a light manna of star-dust, drifted down out of the firmament in blessing. The women wore gloomy floral prints, home coifs, and pastel glasses, while their consorts—mostly smaller, as in hawks and spiders—favored thin steel specs and nylon pastel shirts, broad collars splayed to reveal the snowy singlets worn beneath. From the aseptic glint of lenses as the heads bent and whispered, he feared that the true identity of “Professor Collins” was already being bruited about the hall.

Though the back rows were mostly empty, a few young men lounged in the rear doorway—rough shaggy sunburned men in black baseball caps and black T-shirts, restless and out of place. One of them whistled and another clapped, urging the speaker to get on with it. The Professor raised his glass in a vague salute and drank off the last of it, all set to go. But when he said, “Good evening,” his audience unaccountably looked elsewhere, as if he had turned up in the wrong room. Resistance to his renovated E. J. Watson would be doughty, he knew that much, for to these old-timers the truth was far less precious than the “Mister Watson” of tradition, who was not to be trifled with by some outsider.

“Tonight,” he began in modest tones, “I’d like to tell you what I’ve learned about E. J. Watson, who he was and where he came from, and also about his foreman Leslie Cox, who as most of you know committed the three murders for which Watson was executed by his neighbors—and also, as you may not know, at least five other murders in north Florida. And if you folks disagree with anything I say, or have heard other versions of these stories, just raise your hand and we’ll get things straightened out.”

In his vodka euphoria, the silence led him to suppose that the audience was open to his reasoning if not yet entirely on his side. Filled with sudden fondness for these tough old-timers, he actually leaned outward over the podium, spreading his arms in symbolic embrace as if yearning for his flock in the manner of the evangelicals whom they were used to. As he did so, he upset his emptied glass, noting from the corner of his eye the dismay of the Program Director in the first row, who clearly imagined that her speaker was on the point of toppling off the podium entirely.

“Now you folks have read for years and years that somebody called Bloody Watson was a psychopathic killer, that he killed dozens, that he killed his help rather than pay them—you all know these stories! There’s no end to them! But none of these writers ever saw Ed Watson, never shook his hand or heard him laugh—they never knew him! Whereas some of you folks here tonight probably knew the man to say hello to, at least your parents did. So perhaps we can clear the record just a little—”

“Now hold on a minute!”

“—because despite all these stories,” Lucius persisted, holding up his hand in a plea for patience, “despite all these stories, there were never any witnesses, no damning evidence—in fact, no proof whatever that he killed anybody! On the contrary, we have plentiful testimony that he was a fine farmer and strong family man, much admired as a businessman and as a neighbor. And as you know, most of his neighbors weren’t afraid of him at all!”

A stir of disbelief had charged the air. Sensing this, Lucius backed off a little, speaking briefly about Edgar Watson’s early life in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and north Florida, about which almost nothing has been written. “Ted Smallwood, whom so many of you knew, wrote in his memoirs that E. J. Watson, coming from Arcadia, arrived in the Chokoloskee Bay area about 1892 or 1893. Based on my research in Arcadia, late 1893 or early 1894 would be more accurate. At some time in 1895, perhaps early 1896, down at Key West, he had a dispute with Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee—”

“Dispute? I guess so! Slit his throat! Pretty close to killed him!”

“Hey! How about them Tuckers?”

“Mister, who the hell are you to come and tell us local people what we know a hell of a lot more about than you do?”

Sally Brown, coming down the aisle, lifted her hand in a small, ironic wave, as Lucius said, “Good! Good! Correct me! I welcome any information!”

An old man rose and took his hat off. On his turkey throat a green shirt was tight-buttoned, and he wore blue galluses. His pupils, enlarged by thick lenses, gave him the round-eyed appearance of an aged child. “I’m Preston Brown,” he told the hall at the precise moment that Lucius recalled who he was. “I’m ninety-four and had a stroke so I ain’t as good as what I was—ain’t as good-lookin neither, so they tell me—but most days I got a pretty good idea what I am talking about. And these old eyes I’m lookin out of here tonight seen E. J. Watson in the flesh many’s the time, and this old voice has talked with him, and this old hand shook his’n. They ain’t too many in this room can say the same.

“Now Watson and Tucker had a dispute over a piece of land. Tucker and his nephew had a shack on Lost Man’s Key, and Emperor Watson went down there and Watson killed him. You could see the blood. Nephew got away, tried to hide back in the mangroves, but Watson had his boy Eddie with him, so he sent Eddie after that Tucker boy, to finish him. We went over there and seen the tracks.” He looked all around the room with satisfaction.

Lucius recalled what Weeks Daniels had told him—that Eddie Watson, growing older, had taken to hinting at participation in the Tucker episode, apparently to lend drama to his life. Perhaps Eddie had himself to blame for these damned stories. However, the story was untrue. Before he could object, Sally Brown had raised her hand—“Excuse me!”—and got up. She smiled briefly at Lucius, then said to the old man, “Tucker and his nephew! You old-timers have been trading that old tale for fifty years, and it’s all wrong!”

The old man squared around to face her. “That so, Miss?” he said. He seemed to be sucking upon something.

“There wasn’t any ‘nephew,’ ” she declared. “It was young Wally Tucker from Key West and his wife Bet. They were friends and neighbors of my husband’s parents, the Lee Hardens, down at Lost Man’s River!”

A slim, fair-haired man who had been shaking hands with the young men inside the doorway had turned his head at her reference to the Hardens, and now he, too, slipped quickly down the aisle, and taking a seat, put a protective arm on the back of her chair. Lucius recognized Whidden Harden, whom he had known since he was born at Lost Man’s River. And Whidden recognized him, too, and raised his eyebrows slightly, with a fleeting grin, careful not to draw attention to their acquaintance. His innate discretion and his implicit trust that “Mister Colonel” must know what he was doing on the podium under the name of Collins reminded Lucius of why he had been so fond of Whidden as a child.

From farther back, a woman called, “Ain’t that your husband settin there beside you? He knows a lot more than you do about Lost Man’s, so how come he don’t speak up for himself?” Whidden Harden raised his hand in a shy wave, and the crowd snickered. The scent of old bad blood was in the air.

His wife had turned to the prim rows behind her, where the set faces made it plain that this young woman had previously rumpled up their society meetings. “Most of you know who I am. I’m Sally Brown. My mother’s bunch of Browns lived in the Islands a good many years, and now I’m married to this Harden feller, so I guess I know a little bit about Lost Man’s River!”

A loud harsh shout came from the men in back—“Your daddy ain’t no Brown!” Sally, flustered, found no answer, and Whidden took her hand. The woman’s voice said, “How come you don’t use your husband’s name? You shamed of him?” The crowd shifted restlessly, and a man yelled at the big man who had shouted, “That you, Crockett? What say there, Crockett? Hey, ol’ buddy! Crockett Junior Daniels! American damn hero! Been over to Asie, give his right arm for Dermocracy!” The ragged cheer came mostly from Crockett’s own group in the doorway.

Wigwagged by the Program Director, the speaker rapped his plastic glass down on the podium in an inaudible attempt to restore order, as Preston Brown, unperturbed by these interruptions, stood ready and willing to hold forth at greater length. “Well, I ain’t no relation to Sally here,” he told the audience. “Way back someplace, her mama and me might been some kind of Brown kinfolks, but I sure ain’t related to her daddy! And I ain’t related to them Hardens, neither!”

“Lucky for Hardens!” Sally cried. She was still standing, resting her hand on her husband’s shoulder and challenging the churchly silver heads, none of which would turn to meet her eye. Whidden Harden reached and took her hand again, less to comfort her than to urge her to sit down. Failing in both, he looked straight ahead at the stage curtain. In the hush, he said in a dead flat tone, “Any man in this room under forty years of age wants to tell me to my face why he don’t like Hardens, he can find me right outside after the show.” The voice was quiet but it carried nonetheless, like a voice accustomed to being heard across the water.

In the stir and murmur, one of the young men called, “We sure don’t know about that feud! That was way back in Lost Man’s days. But we know Whidden Harden. He’s all right.”

“Yessir, I been fishin and guidin down there around Lost Man’s all my life,” Preston Brown continued. “Know all about it.”

“Whidden was born down there,” said Sally, and sat down.

“Hardens tell you to speak up for ’em? How come you know more than your husband?”

Lucius intervened by pointing at a raised hand. A Northern voice—a winter visitor—mentioned a well-known book about the Everglades in which “Luke Short, a white fisherman,” was identified as the man who fired the first shot at Edgar Watson. “Whatever became of that man Short?” she said.

The men scratched silver ears, viewed liverish hands. Nobody answered. Lucius repeated the question into the microphone lest the visitor feel ignored, and after a few moments, a voice piped up, then another and another, like frog chorus.

“Henry Short, you mean?”

“Henry was a nigra! Still is, far as I know.”

“Dan House Junior claimed he was the first to drill Desperader Watson, on account of Watson drawed a bead on Dan House Senior! Dan claimed that till the day he died right here in Naples!”

“Well, what we heard when we was comin up, them House boys covered up for Nigger Short. My daddy said, ‘We was fixin to go ask him about it, get to the truth of it, y’know, but we never did come up with that sonofagun.’ ”

“Made himself scarce for a few years, ol’ Henry did. Can’t say I blame that poor sonofagun, neither, with hard-hearted young fellers lookin to hunt him down.”

This last speaker, a small man in the front row with squirrel cheeks and merry eyes, smiled benignly at Lucius. His old-fashioned yacht club attire—sky blue trousers, navy blue polo shirt, crisp deck shoes with marshmallow white soles, bright sweater so yellow that the old man looked like a seated lemon—seemed rather at odds with his windburned hide and weather lines. Lucius grinned back at his good old friend Hoad Storter, whose father Cap’n Bembery had run the cargo schooner for the Storter trading post at Everglade and had been Papa’s best friend. Like Whidden Harden, Hoad would be discreet, but Lucius realized that his identity might be exposed at any moment by Crockett Junior Daniels or some other person, and that as at Fort White, the longer he waited, the more awkward it was sure to be. Trying to decide how to go about it, he asked old Brown for some good evidence that E. J. Watson had killed those Tuckers. His query made him feel dishonest, since he knew there was no “good evidence” and never had been—nothing but a vague account related by Lee Harden and his brothers who (with Henry Short) had found the bodies. In his Lost Man’s years, the Hardens had never spoken of the Tuckers, nor had he ever wanted to ask questions. His reluctance to know the truth had disturbed him, even at the time.

“Killed that Audubon warden, too,” snarled an old man with a broken face empurpled by long falling years of drink. The man wore a soiled Panama hat and nobody sat near him or behind him. His arms were folded tight across his chest and he would not face Lucius as he spoke. “Nineteen and oh-five, that was. I was running Watson’s cane plantation for him. That spring, Watson went over to Flamingo with a crate of bird plumes, and the story about Guy Bradley’s murder got back before he did! That’s when our family packed up and got away from there.”

Preston Brown said, “Heck, I knowed Guy Bradley! Knowed him before he went over to Audubons! Him and his brother Lewis Bradley, they was partners with the Roberts boys, huntin plume birds down around Cape Sable. Ed Watson sold his bird plumes through Gene Roberts and I reckon the Bradleys done the same. Then Guy went over to wardenin, he was goin to put Watson in the jail, so Watson shot him—”

Lucius said in a flat voice, “Guy Bradley was killed by a sponge fisherman and plume hunter named Walter Smith, who was tried for that killing in Key West.”

“That’s right. Walt Smith. Knowed him all my life,” said Preston Brown.

“Tried and acquitted,” Fred Dyer insisted sourly. “Cause the word had got around that Watson done it.”

“You know better than that,” Lucius snapped too sharply. People stared at him, alarmed. “I have talked many times with Gene Roberts at Flamingo,” he told the audience, frowning down at Fred Dyer but unable to get his eye. “Gene Roberts was Guy Bradley’s friend and neighbor, he was the man who picked up Bradley’s body, and he knew that whole story better than anybody.”

“Gene Roberts was Ed Watson’s friend, that’s all I’m sayin!” Dyer cried. “Used to come by Chatham Bend when I was workin there! No wonder he spoke up for him, he had no choice about it!”

“Walter Smith never denied that he killed Bradley. He even boasted of it.” Lucius turned to Preston Brown. “Another correction, sir, if you don’t mind. Eddie Watson took no part in the Tucker killings.”

“Yessir! Eddie Watson! Knowed him all my—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Brown. In 1901, Eddie Watson was still a schoolboy, living in Fort Myers with his mother. He never lived down here along this coast.” He gazed bleakly at the audience. “I realize it’s a lot more fun to implicate someone like E. E. Watson, who sits up front in church. But it isn’t true.”

“Well, E. J. Watson, he’s the one I’m talkin about. He liked his alcohol, he visited all the bars,” Preston Brown said. “My dad had nothin against alcohol, he was in there, too. One time there was a bunch of ’em around the bar, with Old Man Watson settin up the drinks. And a couple of nigra women come in there, wanted a bottle—weren’t uncommon, because Key West was more a Yankee town than not. So Watson mutters, ‘Well, boys, I will take care of this.’ And he got up and went outside where their big ol’ bucks was waitin on them women. Might of seed Watson through the window and figured it was healthier outside. One of ’em said real nervous, ‘Evenin, Cap’n,’ and that was about all he got to say before Watson started in to cuttin on ’em with his bowie knife. Never said a word. He had one down, pretty well killed, and the other one, he was pretty well cut to pieces. Might of finished the both of ’em, for all I know.

“So Watson had enough of it and walked away from there, but on the way over to the dock he run into some deputies who was comin to investigate all that hollerin. So Watson told ’em, ‘You boys better get on up to Jimmy’s Bar.’ And they said, ‘Ed, what in tarnation is making all that racket?’ And Watson said, ‘My goodness, boys, they are cuttin up a couple of perfectly good niggers over there!’ Tipped his hat, climbed back aboard his schooner, and went on north to Chatham River.”

Lucius closed his eyes, disgusted. He appealed to the audience’s good sense. “See what I mean? These Watson tales are passed down from our parents and grandparents and we just repeat them, never bothering to find out if they are true.” He was aware that his weary tone was casting a pall over the room, which had started grumbling. He could not help it.

“Who the hell is we?” a voice shouted hoarsely. “You come from around here?”

“Hell yes, he comes from around here! I know this feller!” Fred Dyer had hauled himself straight up in his seat and was pointing a bent arthritic claw at Lucius, who took a deep breath, braced for the worst. “That ain’t no professor! That is Lucius Watson!” Dyer actually stood up, staring wildly around him, but no one would let him catch an eye, no one would look at him, as if so many years of drunkenness and reckless tirade had invalidated anything that he might say. Knowing this, he protested no further but sat down slowly, alone and aggrieved, refolding his arms upon his chest. Under Lucius’s gaze, he shrugged and looked away.

“Well, it sure weren’t Colonel Watson killed them Tuckers!” Preston Brown declared. “I knowed Colonel all my life, and a nicer feller you would never want to meet! Colonel been on my boat about a thousand times. Sweetest person that you ever seen—good sense of humor! Oh yes, I fished with Colonel Watson many’s the time. He liked his whiskey!”

Lucius had never drunk with Preston or set foot on his boat. “No, it wasn’t Colonel,” he said quietly, embarrassed by the old man’s exaggerations and plain lies and suffocated by the greater lie he himself was perpetrating.

“How come you know so much about them Tuckers?” an old woman hollered at the podium. “They’s only the one feller could know so much, and that’s the one who done it.”

“Know somethin funny?” Preston Brown was pointing at Lucius. “This feller right here, he’s the spittin image of ol’ Colonel Watson!”

Fred Dyer groaned loudly. “Ain’t that what I said?”

“Well, let’s see now,” Hoad Storter interrupted. “Old Man Watson had four boys that he owned up to. There were just four brothers”—he paused ever so slightly—“that we want to talk about.” His chipmunk cheeks rounded a little when other people laughed. “The oldest boy who ran away after that Tucker business, no one remembers him anymore”—he stopped Preston Brown with a raised palm—“not even Preston. Next one was Eddie, who stayed there at Fort Myers, wouldn’t surprise me if he’s up there yet. Then came Lucius—well, some of us know Colonel. Never met a man yet who had bad words for Colonel Watson, not even the men who were on that list he took so many years putting together, scaring everybody half to death, himself included!” He winked at Lucius. “Then came the youngest—the little boy who saw his daddy killed.”

“How about that other little feller, supposed to been drowned in the Great Hurricane? The one Speck Daniels always claimed to be!”

“Well, Speck’s mama,” a woman called, “got herself hitched up to her own first cousin, and a good half of their ten, twelve head of kids come out not so smart or something worst.”

Somebody hee-hawed but the rest of the hall filled with coughs and chair scrapes, whisperings, and indignation. “Well, Aunt Josie had a girl named Jenny,” another woman said carefully, “and she was supposed to been a Watson, too!” And the first woman said, “No, no, honey, what they claimed, Jenny was raped by Mr. Watson!” This was vehemently disputed by a third. “Say what you like about Mr. Watson, he were not the kind to go around rapin his own daughter!”

“Ain’t that Jenny Everybody we’re talkin about?” Preston Brown inquired, in the first lull in the tumult. Detecting titillation, he cried out over the hubbub, “Yessir! Called her Jenny Everybody! Cause she weren’t particular!” He looked confused when his joke was met with a disjointed silence. The elderly audience fretted and knitted, shifted, itched, and coughed in disapproval. “Called her Jenny Everybody cause she weren’t so particular,” the old man repeated without heart.

“If Speck was in that bunch, he got the brains of all them other ten mushed into one!” an old voice cackled. “That feller been called names aplenty, but nobody never called him Not-So-Smart!”

“Nobody that ain’t lookin to outsmart hisself!” Crockett Junior bellowed. Whidden Harden gazed straight ahead, expressionless, as Sally rose and hurried toward the rear.

Preston Brown came forward to peer more closely at “Professor Collins.” His prolonged scrutiny was already encouraging cranky speculation from the audience about whether this darned know-it-all professor should be trusted. Concluding his inspection, Old Preston brooded. “I always heard it was Young Ed that helped his daddy—heard that all my life. Them old-timers had no reason to lie to us. Seems kind of funny this here man would just walk in here and go to sayin that our old folks would lie to us like that.” Pointing at Lucius, the old man said, “You’re coverin up for Eddie Watson, ain’t that right?”

Lucius turned toward the night windows, imploring forgiveness from the old man who might be out there in the dark. He said quietly, “No. It wasn’t Eddie. The most likely witness—if E. J. Watson killed the Tuckers, and if there was a witness—was the oldest boy, who left this part of Florida long, long ago.”

“I never heard about no older boy in that darned Tucker business.” Old Brown pointed accusingly at the speaker. “You must be some kind of a Watson. ‘L. Watson Collins’—they got that wrote right down here on my program!”

“L. Watson Collins is my pen name,” Lucius told him. He smiled at his friends, then lifted his gaze to the whole room. “Mr. Brown is correct. My name is Lucius Watson. Most old-timers on this coast know me as Colonel.” He scanned the audience for Watson Dyer. “The late Mr. E. J. Watson was my father.”

The silence was broken first by a low groan, then a squeaked “I knew it!” then “No wonder!” An old man called out, “How you doin, Colonel? I’m pleased to meet up with you again! I was just tellin these folks here how much you looked like you!” But an old lady toward the back held up his History. “If I was to ask you to sign this book, which name would you sign? If your daddy never murdered nobody, the way you’re telling us, how come you’re so ashamed of him that you don’t put your own name on your own book?”

In the hard light, the church hall hummed with anticipation. Preston Brown cried, “Didn’t I tell you this was Eddie’s brother? See why he claimed it weren’t Eddie killed them Tuckers but that older boy?”

“It was the older boy, you cock-eyed old idjit! The man is telling you the truth!”

At that slurred shout careening through the window, the young men in the doorway rushed outside. Lucius jumped from the stage and hurried up the aisle. In the door he was blocked by the one-armed man, who grasped him by the shirtfront. Crockett Junior growled, “Don’t come no further south, you understand me?” Shoving Lucius away, he went out into the darkness. Sally Brown was dragging at his arm, entreating him not to follow. By the time he fought his way outside, the men were gone.

Most of the audience, disgruntled, was rising to leave, and Preston Brown had taken advantage of the speaker’s absence to regain the floor. “See, nobody wanted to go up in that wild river looking for Watson,” he was shouting. “But there was one deputy was running for Sheriff, and his platform was, I will arrest Ed Watson, bring him up before the bar of justice. So he went up to Chatham River and Watson got the drop on him and took his guns away and put him to work in the cane harvest. That feller come back in two weeks’ time with a neck bad sunburnt and calluses on his hands, and very very glad to be alive. Said Ed J. Watson was as fine a feller as any man could ever hope to meet, and the only planter worth a damn on that whole coast.”

“That’s quite a story,” Lucius told the audience as he reached the podium. “Does anyone else have anything they’d like to add?” Upset by Rob’s folly in coming here at all, he was anxious to bring the evening to an end.

Old Brown stood there in his high black shoes, the last of his life aglimmer in his eyes, and still he would not take a seat, as if afraid that his decrepit apparatus might never propel him back onto his feet. His fingers worked the back of his steel chair. When he raised his hand again, clearing his throat, Lucius interrupted gently, observing how helpful it would be if these old stories had any sort of documentation. He invited the audience to empathize with the frustrations of the historian, who had to be conservative about unconfirmed stories, however colorful. Lucius had hoped that this approach would be approved by an old-fashioned community which felt not only protective about “Mister Watson” but superior in their inside knowledge to people from outside the county. Nosir, Ol’ Ed weren’t near so bad as what outsiders try to tell you, not when you knowed him personal the way we done. How often he’d heard old-timers say that!

Realizing that his testimonies had been discounted, the old man suddenly sat down, and his chair creaked loudly in the hush of disapproval. In questioning an elder’s recollections, consigning them to myth, the speaker had undermined the integrity of local legend and tradition, and now his hearers made it plain that any diminishment of the Watson legend, even by his son, would not be tolerated. The faces pinched closed in their suspicion that this fake professor had tried to pull the wool over their eyes. More old people tottered to their feet with a loud barging of chairs and the rest followed, as Lucius called, “Good night! Thank you for coming!”

He remained at the podium, shuffling his notes into some sort of order, upbraiding himself for letting the evening collapse so swiftly into such a shambles. The plastic glass, with its tired lemon, was a silent rebuke in the corner of the rostrum, but mercifully the Program Director had fled. Only Hoad Storter came up to shake his hand, and even Hoad, who was keeping people waiting, had to leave quickly, saying he hoped to see Lucius in a day or two at Everglade.

Last to depart was old Fred Dyer, who limped past in a syphilitic shuffle, evading the speaker’s eye. When Lucius followed him up the aisle and touched his elbow, the empurpled man tottered around in a half circle with a grimace of alarm, backing like a crayfish into a row of seats. “You remember me, Mr. Dyer?” Lucius asked quietly. “I guess I wasn’t much more than fifteen when your family left the Bend.”

“Family!” The man spat upon the church hall floor. “My own children would like to see me dead, they’re so ashamed of me!” He kept on going, but Lucius moved beside him.

“Your son—”

“He’s your damned kin, not mine.” Fred Dyer stopped short and looked Lucius in the eye for the first time that evening. “What’s that ungodly bastard up to anyways? Couple months ago, he shows up real friendly where I drink, buys me a round or two while he sits there sucking a damn cherry soda. Says, ‘You still tellin people that I’m Watson’s son?’ Hell, yes! ‘You willin to sign that in a affidavit?’ Hell, yes! Next thing I know, there’s a legal paper settin in front of me which says it is the opinion and sincere belief of the undersigned, Fred Dyer, that Watson Dyer, born December fourth of 1905 on Chatham Bend in Monroe County, is the natural son of the planter E. J. Watson!” He shook his greasy head. “Here I been sayin that same thing for forty years, and now this damn contrary bastard wants me to sign it!”

Yet Fred seemed bewildered, even a little hurt. “I said, ‘Wattie, for Christ’s sake, what’s this all about? Ain’t it a little late in life to renounce your name?’ And he told me, ‘Fred, you got sick of living a lie, and I feel the same.’ Said he aimed to live in truth just as soon as he could get around to all the paper work. Called me Fred! Made me feel funny—the cold mean way he said my name. When I signed that paper, he was grinning like a alligator. Tucked it away, stood up, and winked. Never said so much as a good-bye.”

At the door, Fred Dyer yanked his bent straw hat onto a head of yellowed silver hair, which straggled to his collar. “You was always a pretty good feller, Lucius, even as a boy. Only thing, you never done right by my little daughter.” He went on outside into the night.

Sally and Whidden greeted Lucius at the door. When he had seen Whidden last, a few years earlier, Lee Harden’s son had been pretty close to thirty, a fishing guide and gator hunter and a hell-raiser. Outwardly, he had changed little—more weatherworn, perhaps, still lean and fit. The wheaten hair had iron wisps and the sun-squinted green eyes had crow’s-feet in the corners.

“This here’s my ex-husband-to-be,” Sally said affectionately, taking Whidden’s arm. “I guess you’ve known him a lot longer than I have.”

“Watsons and Hardens always been in friendship, right back into the old century”—Harden smiled—“and Mister Colonel was my dad’s best friend from 1919 until we left the Islands.” As her husband spoke, Sally’s expression entreated Lucius to put their recent intimacy behind him and let it stay there.

Lucius gazed down the dark street where his brother had disappeared with Crockett Junior and his men. The Hardens kept him company, peering around them. “Maybe it’s all a mistake. Maybe they’ll bring him back and let him go once they’ve had a talk with him,” Sally said. Whidden shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don’t think so. I believe them boys come huntin him. That’s why they was here.”

To free them to go home, Lucius told them he would walk down to the Gulf while he was waiting, leaving a note for Rob in his car window. But they were solicitous, and in the end they accompanied him to the beach and walked out on the long pier in the faint light of the stars, which descended to the Gulf far out to westward. By the time they returned to the church hall, the town was empty. With the crowd gone and the doors locked, there were only the caves of gloom around the streetlights, the clacking of royal palms in the Gulf wind. While Whidden went to fetch their car, Sally told Lucius she’d decided that she loved her husband after all. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Any regrets?” he said. She shook her head. “How about you?” she inquired, not much interested in his answer. “I’ll always love you, Prof,” she said. “I mean it.” And she hugged him.

Persuading Lucius to leave his car behind, they took him home to the ranch house in North Naples from where Whidden was starting a landscaping service for winter residents from up north. “Them snowbirds don’t know one darn thing about scaping land,” he grinned, “and I don’t neither.” On the way there, Whidden said that if Mister Colonel was planning a trip to Chatham Bend, they would be proud to take him on the Cracker Belle. “She’s just settin down there rottin, so we might’s well use her.”

At the house, they sat Lucius at the kitchen table and asked him if he’d like some coffee. “I bet he’d like beer or whiskey a whole lot better,” Whidden said, and Sally rapped her spoon. “You’ve given that up, remember, Whidden? We don’t use liquor in this house,” she told their guest, ignoring his raised eyebrows.

Still upset by the church hall meeting, Sally denounced the local attitude toward Whidden’s family. “Mister Colonel ain’t writin his book about my family,” Whidden warned her. But when he was asked the Hardens’ opinion of what actually happened to Ed Watson, Whidden said, “Well, Sal could tell you better. She talked to the old folks, hours on end, and she got the details on my family down better’n I do.” Whidden waited politely for Sally to speak, and when she wouldn’t, he frowned and cleared his throat, then sat forward reluctantly and folded his hands before him on the table in sign that, to the best of his knowledge, what he would say was responsible and fair as well as true.

“Lee Harden knew some days ahead that them Chokoloskee men would be layin for Ed Watson, cause even way down in the Islands rumors traveled fast. He aimed to warn him. But after the hurricane, when Mr. Watson came back to Chatham River hunting Cox, our Harden family never seen him. If my dad could have got to him first, he might never of gone back to Chokoloskee.

“Lee Harden declared for the rest of his whole life that E. J. Watson had got flat tired of running, or else he had a purpose no one knew about. Said E. J. was too smart not to know that some of them men was out to make their name by killin Bloody Watson, and that the rest was jealous because he made so much money on his syrup. They was jealous because he had ambition, and wanted a good education for his children.

“Course rednecks never give a hoot about them things. Want their kids to grow up with the same religion and the same old set of prejudices that was passed down to ’em from their own pappies. They never let go of an old notion once they got it nailed down in their brain. Ain’t got no room for new ideas, and they are proud about it.”

“Mr. Watson kept apart from all their lowlife goings-on,” Sally said, “and they never forgave that.”

“Well, I reckon that ain’t fair,” said her husband mildly. “The most of ’em—Houses included—are very good people in their way. Churchly people, hardworking and honest. All the same, I am very proud there weren’t no Hardens in that crowd at Smallwood’s landing.” He winked at Lucius. “Us Hardens wanted to be redneck crackers, too. Couldn’t join up because folks’d never let ’em, you remember?”

Sally cried, “How can you speak up for Houses, Whidden! They were snobs, just like the Smallwoods! Mamie Smallwood was a House, and she was meaner to your family than anyone on Chokoloskee Island, that’s what your ma told me! And I bet Mister Colonel knows that, too!”

“After 1910, I hardly went to Chokoloskee,” Lucius admitted, “but I talked with Sadie Harden plenty of times. Right or wrong, she had it in for Mamie Smallwood.”

“You think she was wrong?”

“Mamie was judgmental, all right.” Lucius shrugged. “But she was a good strong woman in her way.”

Whidden put his hand on his wife’s arm, to stop an outburst. “Know what my mama believed? That Mrs. Smallwood resented our family because we were kind to Henry Short. She had grown up with Henry, don’t forget, and bein good Christians, the Houses might of felt guilty way down deep cause they made a good Christian eat off by himself all them long years. Mamie liked Henry well enough, I reckon, so long as he kept his place, but she never forgive us for having him eat with us when he showed up at Hardens’ with her brother Bill. Bill House might of minded it some, too, but not enough to say nothing about it, cause him and Henry was good friends in their way, they done everything together since they was boys.

“Them few black people who set foot in the Islands, they never stayed no longer than it took to get away. But if one showed up hungry at the Hardens’, he was treated the same as other men and that was that. Grandpa Robert said, ‘Set down and eat,’ and Grandma Maisie put it on the table. We was taught to believe that God made man in His own image, so He never give a hoot about the color. Any man had the right to sit at the table with the rest—that’s what Grandpa said. Grandpa Robert was born ornery. He had no use for Bay people and he lived as far away from ’em as he could get. He couldn’t never understand how them Bay people could call themselves good Christians, then go treat a feller Christian in ungodly ways; said no man was created in God’s image only to sniff scraps in the corner like a dog. So rumors got back from some them fishermen who ate with Hardens, first at Chatham Bend, then Mormon Key, and later on at Lost Man’s River, too. Said, ‘We seen a nigger eatin at them people’s table.’ That’s the way they put it, and word spread. Some said we was ‘spoilin a good nigger,’ and others called us ‘nigger-lover,’ and a few started in to saying that if them damn people was lettin niggers eat with ’em, they must be niggers or leastways mulattas, and bein mulattas, they didn’t have no right to them good fishing grounds. Well, that was the beginning of the Fish Wars, which went way back to the turn of the century, when Hardens was workin them good sea trout banks north of Mormon Key. And that skirmishin followed ’em when they went south to Lost Man’s River.

“Henry Short had to fit in with the Bay people so he done his best not to make any commotion. Because he passed most of his days steerin clear of trouble, he never talked much, and it got so those Bay folks clean forgot Henry was there. But there were times he got so lonesome for human company that he would go to visit with the Hardens, and the time came when he placed his trust in us. Took him years before he learned to do that. Our family listened to him with an open heart, and he told ’em things he wouldn’t tell nobody else for fear the men would come for him and lynch him.”

“He could never, never trust another soul,” his wife agreed. “Maybe the House family knew Henry longer, but the Hardens knew him better, and maybe that’s why Mamie House resented them.”

“It was Henry Short who warned Lee Harden that the Chokoloskee people, and Smallwoods especially, resented Hardens even worse after the Watson killing. Our family could never figure out the Smallwoods’ attitude, cause we were Mr. Watson’s friends and they were, too. We agreed with Ted and Mamie that judging E. J. Watson was God’s business or the business of the law, not something to be took in their own hands by vigilantes.

“When Ted Smallwood give his opinion that his friend Ed Watson had been lynched, the House family got very, very angry. Old Man Dan House once declared where Henry heard it that his son-in-law was two-faced about Watson’s death. Said Ted always wanted to be known as Watson’s friend but in his heart he dreaded him, and wanted him out of the way as bad or worse than the ones who done the shooting. What he ducked out of, Houses said, was going down there with his neighbors and looking his friend E. J. in the eye and taking his share of the responsibility for their community.”

“Smallwood’s excuse was, he had flu that day, malaria,” said Sally. “Said if he didn’t get better pretty quick, he might send Henry to fetch Sadie Harden to come doctor him. I don’t know if she’d have gone or not. Sadie told me herself she would go all the way to Everglade to trade at Storters’ rather than go to Chokoloskee, because Mamie flew across the store and perched right over her like a fat little old owl every time she came in for her supplies. Declared right out for all to hear how afraid she was that one of these mixed people was aiming to steal her whole store out from under her—”

“—said that to Mama! Who never stole a grit in her whole life!”

Sally looked at Lucius a long time, tears in her eyes, until he had no choice but to look back. “Does this look like a mulatta man to you?” She pointed at the fair-haired man beside her.

“Now, honey,” Whidden sighed, “the man just got here.”

“Talk about big frogs in a small pond!” his wife exclaimed. “And now they’re all split up and bickering over their land while Hardens are doing fine. Those Bay folks can’t stand it that those darn people they used to call mulattas are more prosperous than they are, all around Lee County and Collier, too!”

Sally seemed almost feverish with the injustice. “Hate and envy and mistrust! Nobody could trust anybody on Chokoloskee Bay, and that’s because a lot of ’em came down from criminals and fugitives. Otherwise why would they settle the most godforsaken wilderness in the whole country? At least Robert Harden would admit that. He deserted from the Confederate Army and never denied it. He said, ‘Why should I die for their Great Cause, which I don’t believe in? Why should a poor man have to fight the rich men’s wars and lose the only life he will ever have on God’s good earth?’ ”

“My granddad took no chances, and they never caught up with him,” Whidden said. “He changed his name three or four times, hid away down in the Islands and stayed down there until he died, watchin the wars go by. Before he give up in 1946—and a good thing, too, because the Park come and drove us out the very next year—he told his family how he’d lived through five American wars, not countin Injuns, and couldn’t recall to save his life what even one of them damn things was all about.

“Grandpa Robert Harden said, ‘I love my country! I love the U.S.A.! Ain’t no place like it here on God’s green earth! But all I know about them wars is thousands and thousands of poor brave young fellers screamin out their lives in woe and terror, with no more dignity than screechin hogs—shot, bayoneted, torn limb from limb in a barrage, bloody and dyin in their own mess and stink!’ Grandpa took one look at that craziness and deserted from the War, lit out for the farthest frontier he could find, cause he just couldn’t see no sense nor justice to it. War made him furious! Said, ‘War ain’t nothin to wave flags about! War is pure stupidity and sacrilege, a terrible insult to the Lord above and all Creation!’ ”

Whidden himself was a combat veteran. His voice had grown stony as he spoke. Not used to such intensity from her soft-spoken husband, Sally listened respectfully, but she was not to be deflected from her subject. “Old-timers get things bogged down in their heads, and they’re too cranky and worn-out to change opinions,” she resumed after a while. “If their gossip was true, I could accept it, but I can’t stand people slandering my husband’s relatives, who were the first pioneers to settle in the Ten Thousand Islands and the last to leave!”

“Well, things are better now.” Whidden grinned slyly at Lucius. “Least they ain’t shootin at us.”

“Don’t make dumb jokes like that!” cried Sally angrily. “What was done to Hardens can never be forgiven or forgotten!”

“Not by Sally Brown.” Harden closed his eyes, and his mouth set in a line, and his wife backed off a little.

“All I’m saying,” she complained, “is that people who are prejudiced, and have to worry about who they are supposed to be, because that is all they have in life—well, that is pitiful!”

“Is that right, Sal?” Her husband’s voice was quiet but no longer mild. He opened his eyes again. “How come it’s all you talk about no more if you ain’t worried about it?”

“I beg your pardon? It’s your family I’m worried about!”

He said, “That’s right. My family. And my family has been gettin by a good long while without your help.”

“Whidden?” She paused. “Have you been drinking?”

“You think I got to be drunk to speak the truth?”

She rose with a bored cold exhausted look. “I was going to mention a few things,” she said to Lucius, who was busy with his fork tines, tracing the lacy patterns on his plastic doily. “But I think I’ll let Whidden air out his opinions.” And she left the room.

Whidden drummed his fingers, glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Darn it now if my own wife ain’t put me in mind of some bush lightnin. You join me in a drop if I could find some?”

“You know something? I bet I would!”

Whidden came back with blue tin cups and a brown jug of moonshine. “Yessir, I love that pretty woman and I always will, but I might be the only one in my whole family that sees her good points, other than her looks. All that ugly hate and gossip was died right down until Miss Sally Brown come swoopin in to denounce that old-time prejudice that our younger ones never even heard about. She got that poison all stirred up again with that big heart of hers, is what she done.

“That was one reason we split up, a couple of years back—that and the fact I was workin for her daddy. I was drunk one night and told her to shut up about the Hardens, mind her own business, and she said she’d be very glad to do that, cause she weren’t goin to bother her head no more with no pathetical damn drunk sonofabitch—” Here his eyebrows shot up and he whistled in astonishment, and they both laughed. “Good thing I knew it weren’t her husband she was talkin about!” He shook his head. “No pathetical damn drunk sonofabitch so shiftless or so spineless, likely both, that after all that happened to the Harden family, he would still go out and do his dirty work for a crooked mean-mouth bigot like Speck Daniels!

“Bigot!” Whidden raised his eyebrows high in awe. “And she meant every word! Next thing I knew, that pretty thing had left my house and home! Went back to college for a while to pick up some more of what her daddy likes to call her nigger-lovin communistical ideas.” Whidden grinned broadly. “A while ago, I sent her a nice card: W. T. Harden has the honor to announce he has left the employ of Crockett Senior Daniels. She didn’t believe it but she reckoned she’d have a look, and day before yesterday, there she was! Peerin all around, sharp-eyed and flighty, like a wren sneakin back onto the nest. Pretended she was here to see the lawyers!

“Well, I don’t say a word, not even Hi, honey! cause one wrong move and that li’l bird would fly. Her first word to her darlin was, Any spirits in this house?’ And I says”—he reached across to slosh more into Lucius’s cup—“I says, ‘Spirits?’ I says. ‘Good gracious, no, God bless your li’l heart!’ ”

Sniffing his liquor, Whidden was still smiling, but his eyes seemed sad. “Born to tell lies, I guess.” He sighed in regret over his sins and slumped back with relief on the wooden chair, lifting long denimed legs and work boots and resting them on the corner of the table. His wheaten head, laid on the chair back, cocked his blue baseball cap far forward on his brow, shading his eyes, as Lucius brought him up to date on Speck and his activities at Chatham Bend. Afterwards, Whidden was quiet for a while, sipping his shine, pulling his thoughts together.

WHIDDEN HARDEN

The huntin and fishin all around the Glades was the best in the whole U.S.A., wouldn’t surprise me, but when they started messin with the water flow, that was the beginning of the end. Plume birds went first, then panther, bear, and otters. Then the federal Park took over, in the same year as that first red tide—think that red tide was a warning from the Lord? Killed fish all around this coast, and the fish never come back, not like they was, cause the Glades water system they depended on for breedin was just shot to hell.

Right up till a few years ago, we was huntin gators all the year around. Had some state laws protectin ’em but nobody didn’t pay that no attention, just come in and laid their gator flats right on the dock and nobody never said a thing about it. Salt down the belly flats, dry ’em in the sun, roll ’em and stack ’em in a good dry place till the day when the law gets changed and there’s a market—that is their idea. Only thing, them flats don’t keep good once the damp gets to ’em, so mostly all them gators was killed off for nothin.

For many years, the number-one gator poacher was Crockett Senior Daniels. Speck is still livin off the land, he says, by which he means livin off the Park. It ain’t a secret, ever’body knows it, Park rangers included. Speck loves the Glades but he don’t love the Park and never did—don’t want to hear about it, even. Far as Speck’s concerned, it don’t exist. “That’s the last of the wild country,” ol’ Speck likes to say, “and she’s still wild, boys, never you mind how many stupid signs them greenhorns go to slappin up along their so-called boundaries. That is our territory, and Uncle Sam hisself ain’t got the right to tell us born-bred local fellers what to do with it!”

Course Speck was talkin mainly about gators. By the time the Park come in, the gators was killed out about ever’where—Georgie, Mi’sippi, Loosiana, too—and after they was all but gone, the state of Florida give the gator full protection. That suited us gator hunters to a T cause it drove the price up. The state fish and wildlife boys never messed with us too much. A man on a state salary, now, he’s got to think twice about riskin his neck goin up against mean swamp rats that don’t take kindly to any man who gets in their way.

It ain’t like the old-time gator poachin—Joe Lopez and Tant Jenkins, a few other fellers, skiff and pole and rifle and a pot for coffee. Swamp rats has to keep up with the times the same as ever’body. With gators so few, we rigged us a couple them new airboats so’s to cover more country, even rented an ol’ crop-duster biplane to map out every last damn gator hole in the Big Cypress. Pretty soon, them Cypress gators was all gone, the only gators left to hunt was the ones across the boundary in the Park. So one night, bouncin along over them Loop Road potholes, Speck says, “Boys, this ol’ swamp over here to south’ard is supposed to be some kind of a national damn park, and what I’m lookin for is a damn boundary marker so’s we don’t go breakin no federal law. Any you boys see any sign of that darn boundary? Cause I can’t never make it out too good, nighttimes especially.”

Well, us poor fellers always did believe that the Glades was took away unfairly by the U.S. government, so when Speck said, “Boys, we best go get them gators”—well, that is what we done. Swooped in and out of there like hawks. That national park become national headquarters for poachers, to where we had strangers infestin in the Glades from other counties and from all over the South. Gator Hook was where we divvied up and where we partied, we had us a regular Redneck Riviera! Shipped hides by the damn thousands right up there to Q. C. Plott Raw Fur and Ginseng in Atlanta, which was doin real good with wild animal parts in the hide export business.

Takes a smart feller like Speck Daniels to work out all the fine points. Sets up his moonshine still and huntin camp inside the Park out of harm’s way, where he ain’t got no damn local sheriffs nor state cops snoopin around that has to be paid off. Don’t hardly make no bones about it, because that’s his own home territory, the way he sees it. Old Man Speck sets back on his old boat and counts his money while his lawyer takes care of somebody at Parks who keeps them patrols away from Chatham River.

I reckon you know that Speck’s camp is at Chatham Bend. Works real good for his night runs by airboat. Follow the rivers back up into the Glades, head northeast over the sloughs and out over the saw grass to his drop-offs along the Loop Road. Or sometimes he uses them broad levee banks where his buyers can bring a truck south from the Trail. After the feds got on to that, Speck would be tipped off before the rangers, never lost a cargo. Stead of headin north up to the roads where they was waitin for him, he run his hides downriver to the Gulf. Hauls ’em offshore to a coast vessel that runs up a new Panama flag, crates ’em up as caiman hides marked “South America,” then imports ’em back into Florida at Tampa Bay.

Course today the feds are keepin the wildlife trade under surveillance, they are crackin down inside the Park and out. But one thing they ain’t done yet is catch Speck Daniels. Can’t catch that man out in that wilderness, can’t run him down in the shaller rivers on this coast. He drags out their channel markers fast as they put ’em in, leaves any boat that tries to chase him stranded high and dry on some ol’ orster bar. No matter what they try, he stays one jump ahead.

Huntin gators was good business for a while. A lot of Chokoloskee men done that when it was legal, me included, and a few of us went ahead after it weren’t. Tant Jenkins and the Lopez boys, they never paid much attention to the law, and a couple of them Browns, they was real professionals, and other fellers done it on the side. But all of ’em has quit the business now, because them poor dumb things are mostly gone.

Still got the laws but ain’t got no more gators. Speck don’t hardly poach no more cause they ain’t enough gators left to bother with. Few years’ time, there won’t be no place to hunt except way south around Florida Bay, and no place to ship the few hides a man might get. But God created Crockett Senior Daniels to take and sell just about anything so long as it ain’t his, so if he has to, he will rob rare bird eggs, or butterflies or ferns or orchids, or green tree snakes, or a coral snake, or maybe them peppermint-striped tree snails that’s mostly gone now off the hammocks. A dealer he’s got over to Miami knows how to get them pretty things to rich collectors, them very few that don’t die along the way.

Case you might think I am tellin all Speck’s secrets, none of this ain’t no secret at all, not to nobody around the Glades country. Ol’ Speck been gettin on in years, claims he’s retired now, lives on his old boat out of Flamingo on account of the heat his boys is drawing around here. Into his sixties and still gives the wardens fits. Don’t need the money, he has made so much, and that ain’t even where he’s makin it, cause wild things today ain’t nothin but his hobby. He’s got his boys runnin guns for South America, in and out of the Ten Thousand Islands, just like he run bird plumes and liquor in the old days.

While Speck was over to Miami settin up deals for moonshine and gators, and payin people off, he seen that by our Florida law there weren’t no kind of damn firearm you couldn’t buy over the counter, and that runnin weapons to the Caribbean or Latin America, where they are kind of loose about their licenses, might be a nice sideline for a gator hunter who was huntin himself right out of business here at home. Speck went right over into haulin guns, and he’s already thinkin about haulin marijuana, because that is where the real big money will be comin from ten years from now, in Speck’s opinion.

You know and I know that our federal government don’t put nothin in the way of businessmen, don’t matter how greedy or cold-blooded dirty that business might be. If marijuana gets goin good, the big tobacco companies will take it over from the little fellers, put it out in fancy packages, you wait and see. Them corporations pays big money to get their errand boys elected, and after that, they tell ’em what kind of laws to write and how to get ’em passed. Hell, them weapons makers, they do just as good in peace as they do in war! Only hassle they might come up against is right here at the Florida end, with all the paperwork.

But ol’ Speck says, “Why Godamighty, boys, them forms and export permits don’t mean nothin! I aim to get them weapons out or know the reason why!” Next thing you know, he’s buyin up heavy-duty ordnance that’s labeled for home use or huntin or whatever kind of sportin fun us rednecks might get up to while there’s still a few wild critters left to kill—assault rifles for turkey shoots, bazookas for blowin deer away. Lob a hand grenade into good cover, you might come out with a whole covey of quail! Some of that sportin hardware is so big, it comes on wheels! Truck that ordnance over here to the west coast so’s not to mess with federal surveillance at Miami. Collect enough for a big shipment, haul it out beyond the three-mile limit to that Panama amigo, and run that cargo south to them poor countries where they got some kind of a cryin need to kill people.

It’s like Speck told me once before I quit—“What they do with them weapons ain’t none of our damn business, Whidden, on account of the customer is always right.” Says, “Ain’t that the motto that made this country great?” Told us about the American Dream and all like that. Ol’ Speck talked so doggone patriotic, it like to brought tears to my eyes, least when I was drinkin.

All the same, I quit. I’d been thinkin about quittin anyway, because them boys was gettin too darn ornery even for me. Killed out gators all across the Glades, kept killin till it made no sense. Had gator flats piled up by the damn thousands when there just weren’t no call for ’em no more. We was waitin on a market that weren’t goin to come back, not before them stacks of hides moldered and rotted.

I hated that part worst—the waste of life. Felt like my own heart was leakin, some way. So when Speck’s baby daughter asked me to quit and left me when I didn’t, I thought about it awhile, then said okay. Sally could live with the moonshine business, she could take or leave the gators, but gun-runnin was somethin else, because innocent people was goin to come up killed.

Course Speck will tell you how some shipments of his weapons was used to put a stop to some damn revolution. Felt pretty proud about his war against godless Commonists, I can tell you. But Sally found out that most of them guns was goin to dictators and criminals, and most of the victims was Injun people down in them poor countries who made the mistake of tryin to resist gettin burned out, run off their land, maybe stomped and killed, just to make Speck’s customers more money. Seems like small brown people are always in the way.

Whidden stopped talking to listen, then tossed off his cup as Lucius did the same. His legs came off the table and he hauled himself upright in his chair, and his boot heel nudged his jug back underneath it as Sally appeared in the door. “A while back you was askin about Henry Short. Bill House had a son could tell you something.” He stretched and yawned as if unaware of Sally. “Andy House, he’d know about Henry good as anybody. Might even tell you where to find him. And Andy knows some things about your daddy, too, cause Bill House talked about Ed Watson all his life. Ted Smallwood’s children would remember things, and Old Man Sandy Albritton in Everglade, and some of them older Browns at Chokoloskee.”

Sally was glaring at Whidden’s blue tin cup. “Smallwoods! Houses! Browns! How about Hardens? Your family knew him a lot better than these flea-bitten old-timers who are still slinging it around about Ed Watson, how their daddies told Watson this and he said that! Just to show they know something important, which they don’t! The little they know that’s not hand-me-down lies and bragging from their daddies comes straight out of the magazines and books, most of it wrong!” This was true and Lucius nodded but Sally ignored him. Her gaze remained fixed upon her husband with a look that promised she would settle with him later. “Lee Harden called Old Man D. D. House ‘the leader of the outlaws.’ So why would you send Mister Colonel to listen to a House?”

Whidden said quietly, “The House boys thought what they done that day was right. They did not back away from it or talk their way around it, not like some.”

But Sally knew he had been drinking and went storming off to bed, and after that, they remained silent for a while. Looking forward to putting his boat into the water, happy they were headed for the Islands, Whidden contemplated his guest with affection. “Seems to me,” he said at last, “I been settin around with Mister Colonel Watson since the world began. And them good old times are startin to come back.” Swaying erect, heading for bed, he nodded and smiled, eyes shining with fond reveries, but for an hour afterwards, before Lucius finally slept, he could hear the reverberation of their voices, rising, falling.

Next morning when Lucius awoke, Whidden’s truck was gone. He listened to Sally run a bath, heard the rub of her pretty hip on the porcelain tub, and suffered a sad aching sense of loss. When she came in, she smiled affectionately and said, “Plain Lucius!” but she wasn’t flirting.

Barefoot, Sally fixed his breakfast, steamy and fresh as a pink shrimp in her white towel bathrobe. Observing her movements at the stove, he longed to retreat between her legs, never to be seen on earth again. Feeling weak and hungover, he murmured finally, “You are very beautiful this morning, Mrs. Harden. And I miss you.”

She turned to investigate his expression, the long fork dripping grease into the pan. “Don’t, Lucius. Please.” She turned her back on him. “I’ll take you to Naples as soon as you’re finished,” she said coolly and carefully, in warning to them both.

In a while, her voice came brightly, “Ol’ Mister Colonel! Whidden sure talked about ol’ Mister Colonel after he came to bed! Just went on and on about the old days!” She faced him again. “Made me feel funny, as if I’d lied to him about you, though I haven’t. He has never asked. I just lay there listening, as if I knew hardly anything about you!” Her eyes were misty as she turned back to his bacon.

WHIDDEN HARDEN

After E. J. Watson’s death, folks reckoned they’d seen the last of that man’s family. Camped and squatted in the Watson Place just as they pleased, and over the years they took away pret’ near everything, nailed down or otherwise. So it must of been hard for his younger boy to come home to the Islands and see what that old place had come to.

When he first showed up around nineteen and nineteen, Lucius Watson—he was still called Lucius—spent a fortnight at his daddy’s place, then kept on going south to Lost Man’s River. First thing he done was offer Chatham to Lee Harden, on the condition he could live there, too, in the little Dyer cabin down the bank. Pa told him how a certain family had sold the quitclaim to the Bend to the Chevelier Corporation, and he got all hot and bothered, saying his dad’s title was still good, no matter what.

Only trouble was, Pa didn’t want the place, no more’n my Grandpa wanted it before him. Hardens was fishermen, not farmers. They did not care to see forty acres of good ground goin to waste. Also, most local fishermen had motorboats by then, so Chatham River was already too close to Chokoloskee. And though Pa hated to admit it, the Bend spooked him.

Lee Harden had always been uneasy on the Bend, right from a boy. Bad power there, that’s what he was told by his cousin Cory Osceola. Finally Lucius Watson gave up on the Bend, moved south, built a small shack on our shell ridge back of Lost Man’s Beach. And after that day, in all the times he went up Chatham River with Lee Harden, he hardly never went ashore, not even when Pa stopped to pick guavas or ladle up some water from the cistern. Fell dead silent, passin that gray house and that big old raggedy plantation out behind it, hardly never took a look in that direction. Colonel Watson was the lonesomest person on the earth, that’s what my ma told me.

Mister Colonel—that’s how I called him then, how I still think of him—was kind of my adopted uncle, and Lost Man’s River was his adopted home. For the better part of thirty years, he lived just down the beach there at South Lost Man’s. He was a well-built and good-lookin man maybe six foot tall, fair hair bleached out by the sun but thick dark brows and a brown skin from long days on the water. According to his sister Pearl up to Caxambas, he took after his mother, kind of wishful-looking, same gray eyes and little sideways smile. Spoke very soft when he spoke at all, and had real nice manners like his daddy. Mr. Lucius Watson was a real old-fashioned gentleman—a regular Kentucky Colonel, that’s what my ma called him. Tant Jenkins heard that, and one day sung out, “Good mornin, Colonel!” And pretty soon the man was goin by that name, though us kids put a Mister to it, out of respect.

Mister Colonel never cared for his new name. “I am no Colonel, sir,” he’d say when he was drinking. “I am Machinist’s Mate Second Class Lucius Hampton Watson! U.S. Navy!” He’d put on a loony dangerous look when he talked like that, to make us children laugh, but all the same, he kind of enjoyed the sound of that old stuff. “I was born in the Indian Country in 1889, the year that Belle Starr died by an unknown hand!”—he enjoyed the sound of that one, too. I’ve heard him come out with it even when he thought he was alone, just to let the birds in on what ailed him.

Us Hardens sure liked Mister Colonel, everybody on this coast liked Mister Colonel, even them men who was afraid of him, but nobody could figure out just what he wanted. He was pretty close to thirty then but acted like a lanky homesick boy—a homesick boy who talked too quiet, walked too quiet, and could shoot pretty near as good as the man who taught him. He could drill a curlew through both eyes so’s not to waste no meat, and that kind of shootin scared them men that was ready to be scared of Watsons in the first place. They figured Ed Watson was crazy, and if the father was crazy, the son might be, too.

By the time he come home to the Islands, the tales about his dad was worse than ever, and them terrible stories made the son withdraw from people. Even Browns and Thompsons who was his dad’s friends was very uneasy around Watson’s son, they couldn’t figure what this man was thinking, they didn’t really want nothing to do with him.

Course Mister Colonel made things worse by askin questions of anybody who might tell him anything about what happened that October day of 1910. A lot of ’em he spoke to knew more than they let on, and some knew less, but nobody didn’t care none for his questions. Then one day he was seen writin somethin on a scrap of paper, and next thing you know, them rumors started that Colonel Watson was takin down the names of all the men who fired at his daddy. If Colonel weren’t such a sweet-natured feller, some edgy darn fool would of put a bullet through him long ago, that’s what my pa said. Said if that man don’t move very careful, they might do it yet.

Every man down in the rivers had growed leery, and maybe Bill House and his brothers most of all. Once that family heard that Watson’s boy was back, they kept a real sharp eye out, cause they never knew when he might be comin nor what he might do after he got there. There weren’t no knowin where he might be headed, and he didn’t always wave. He was a loner. A man might sense something and glance around, get maybe no more’n a glimpse of that blue skiff crossin a narrow channel between islands. Hardly no wake at all, no more’n a alligator. On land, that man could come up on you soft as a panther, even on a crunchy old shell beach, and he could disappear in that same way. You looked around and that blue skiff was gone.

Mister Colonel fished up and down the coast, but his home was with our Harden clan at Lost Man’s River. The men of Chokoloskee Bay was feudin with our family, and Watson’s son throwin in with us that way—though we was glad to have him—made things more dangerous for him, and for us, too.

I was born at Lost Man’s River and grew up mostly with my folks, so I grew up with Colonel Watson, too. Hardens had knew his daddy well but nobody spoke too much about him, only me. After I heard about how he died I asked Mister Colonel some hard questions, sneakin up on him real crafty so’s he wouldn’t know what I was gettin at. And he tolerated this because I was a young boy, and also because he was good-hearted and knew the Hardens meant him well no matter what. And over the years he told me what he knew.

When he first come, Mister Colonel had a plan to repair his daddy’s house for a Miss Lucy he had planned to marry, though he never mentioned her except when he was drinking. She had lived on Chatham Bend as a little girl, he said, she was his true love. Well, he weren’t in the Islands hardly a year when his true love married someone else. Mister Colonel had a lovin nature, and for a long while after that, I believe he was half in love with Sadie Harden, but bein a gentleman, he never said nothin nor done nothin, so Hardens never give it no thought neither.

Lee Harden used to tell about this stranger who turned up in a skiff one time at Lost Man’s Beach. Wiry feller with a black head of hair and a thin beard, spoke short and crusty. He was dead pale with smooth soft hands but seemed to know what he was doin in a boat. They said, “You off a ship someplace?” and he said, “No, I rowed down here from Everglade.” His hands was raw, all blistered up, but the man was tough cause he did not complain. Pa said, “Well, that’s far enough for a man ain’t used to pullin oars. What can we do for ye?” He thought this feller looked some way familiar.

Feller said his name was Tucker, John D. Tucker. He claimed to be Wally Tucker’s nephew, said he wanted to pay his last respects where E. J. Watson killed his aunt and uncle. So my folks took him over to the key where the Tuckers was buried back in 1901, and when they come near that burial place, this John Tucker come out all feverish and sweaty and he could not hide it. So when he asked the whereabouts of Lucius Watson, Hardens got the idea he had a feud to settle, so they told him that the last they heard, Lucious Watson had left south Florida for parts unknown. The stranger give ’em a hard eye, cross and dissatisfied. He said, “That’s what they told me in Chokoloskee, too.” And Lee Harden laughed and said, “Well, for once them goddamn people told some truth.”

They wrapped this feller’s hands in rags and watched him row away back toward the north. From his questions they had figured out that he knew more than he should about the Tuckers, considerin there weren’t no witnesses that could of told him. Then it come to Pa why he looked familiar, beard or no beard. This man was Rob Watson, E. J.’s oldest boy, the one that run away in 1901.

Rob Watson had not believed them people when they told him his young brother had moved away. By the time he got to Lost Man’s River, he was likely wonderin if these Island people had killed his brother and buried him someplace back in the mangroves.

When Mister Colonel come back from Flamingo, he started fishin commercial with Hoad Storter. Them fellers would always bring their catch to our Harden fish house at Wood Key, hose ’em and weigh ’em, ice ’em down, go get some rest. Like everyone else, they got their nets tore up on all them orster bars, but Colonel never minded. He’d whittle him a new needle out of red mangrove, which God made tough and limber for that purpose, then set in the sun and mend net all day long. Watchin him perched like a egret on his bow, hour after hour—that was my first real memory of Mister Colonel. You couldn’t never guess what he was thinkin.

Though he never said straight out about it or complained or nothin, he talked sometimes how he come back there to represent his father’s family and show the Bay people that Watson’s son—or this son anyways—was not ashamed of him. Said nobody put that duty on his head except Lucius Watson, but all the same, he felt obliged to live his life there. Made a livin as a fisherman, read all them books he had there in his shack, and drank rye whiskey. Whiskey was his enemy, I guess.

Mister Colonel was well educated, he knew much more than he would ever tell, but he was modest, always set himself aside. He meant it, too, it weren’t a humble show like some people. As Pa would say, “Colonel Watson is a real fine man that don’t appreciate himself.” In that way, he reminded us of Henry Short.

Them two good men was both close to my family but could never be friends. Mister Colonel knew about them foolish rumors that Henry was the man who killed his daddy, but he never spoke bad about Henry Short and he didn’t hate him, not so far as anyone could tell. My ma told him more’n once what Henry Short told her, that he never took part in killing Mr. Watson, but because Mister Colonel would only nod when she said that, and never made no other sign about it, she warned Henry Short to stay away from him.

Mister Colonel never spoke against his family, never spoke of ’em at all. When he would tell us that he had no family, what he meant was, no one to go home to. All he had was that Daniels-Jenkins bunch around Caxambas that his people at Fort Myers never spoke about. Sometimes he might mention how he missed his sister Carrie or his brother Rob, especially after Hardens told him how Rob come huntin him that time, then went away again. Otherwise he never let on about how lonesome his life was, though from time to time, when he was drinkin, he would remind me and my older brother Roark how lucky we was to have such a fine family of lovin folks to raise us up. Sadie Harden said that all poor Colonel wanted was to find a place in life where he belonged. Said that all his life, all he was lookin for was the way home.

Mister Colonel wore shoes most of the time, which few men did in them days in the Islands. He stayed clean and neat in his appearance, very—that man bathed and shaved most every night! Harden women done his washing and they darned his socks. Outside, he wore a cap or hat, but always pushed it far back on his head, or rolled the front, so’s nobody wouldn’t take that hat too serious. Comin inside, he’d take it off, tidy his clothes. Never came to the table without first brushing his hair. He was our adopted uncle, and he brought us presents. We was poor, so if he hadn’t brought some, we’d of never got any. Bring us kids a whole bushel of bubble gum—three hundred pieces!

Mister Colonel ate most of his Sunday meals with us. He kept his own shack down the beach but was always invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas. He loved to cook and was real good at it, and he canned a lot of vegetables with my ma, but behind them smiles he offered at our table, he always seemed a little sad to us, watching his own life pass him by. At Lost Man’s, neighbors was few and far between. There weren’t no spare women on that coast, and he didn’t hunt one. He was forty or fifty when our ma told him, “Colonel, don’t let the past eat you alive! You’ve never let yourself have any happiness, and it’s time to start!” And Mister Colonel said, “Might be too late to teach old dogs new tricks, seems like to me.” And he’d grin that sideways grin of his, to make sure nobody took him no more serious than they took his hat.

He would not whine. Never talked too much about his dad, only when drinking. “My dad might of been all right,” he might say sometimes, “if they’d told the truth about him. It was all those lies that got him so riled up, like how he murdered his own friend Guy Bradley.” Mister Colonel would never say if his dad had killed people or not, he would only relate how kind he always was to his wives and children, how he looked after ’em so well, and was always generous to his friends and neighbors. “It’s so hard to believe all those terrible stories, don’t you think so?” he might say, “How a good kind man could turn overnight into a coldhearted killer?” And Hardens could not explain that either, they could not help him.

Mister Colonel was huntin the truth about his father, he wanted to find out who he really was, but he couldn’t never find a truth that satisfied him. That’s why he could never let go of his death. People will tell you Colonel Watson never spoke about his father—well, he tried, but after a while he give it up. It was the Bay people who would not discuss Ed Watson, not with Colonel! Even old family friends would go dead quiet on him, kickin the ground. They were afraid of him, Lee Harden said, knowin Colonel’s belief that lynch law had condemned and executed E. J. Watson. They never knew who he hated worst, the ones who gunned his father down or his father’s so-called friends who stood back by the store and watched ’em do it. Hardens was about the only ones that weren’t in one bunch or the other. By the end we was the only family who made him welcome, knowin he didn’t hate no one at all.

When rumors started about his list of names, there was plenty of talk about gettin Colonel first. The men figured he was dead set on revenge—just a matter of time, they said, before this nice soft-speakin feller went dead crazy and picked off every man on that damn list he could draw a bead on. But years went by and nothin happened and nobody ever seen no list, and meanwhile poor Colonel never harmed a soul. Finally the Bay people figured out that Colonel Watson weren’t cut out to kill nobody, he was too gentle, too kindhearted, and never meant no harm. When still in his younger years, he had come home to the Islands, and he went and become a older feller right beside ’em, and all that while, he was neighborly and friendly, even to them that spited him and cut him cold. But it was too late, they had lost their chance to be in friendship with him, so some of ’em said what a pity it was that he was so standoffish like his daddy, and never give nobody no chance to know him.

That year the Park come in, Mister Colonel had to move out of the Islands same as everybody. Most of us Hardens went to Everglade, where I took a couple years in school. From all our good tutorin at home, I could read-and-write-and-rithmetic better than anybody in my grade except a sassy girl named Sally Daniels who had a snappy brain to see her through. As for Mister Colonel, he just lived along on his little boat, went here and there—Caxambas, Everglade, Flamingo. Kind of a drifter. Lived some seasons with other fishermen on houseboat lighters back of Turkey Key, and mostly stayed clear of Chokoloskee, like before. I reckon he liked to drink as much as most. Course us fishermen didn’t have no cocktails like you see today. Mister Colonel, he’d go get his pint and he’d turn it up till he got it all, then shiver hard like a wet dog and step out tall. Goin down the beach under the moon, his back looked like a block of wood, real stiff and straight!

When he moved away north—that’s when I lost track of him. He was finishin up his degree at the University, finishin up his history book on southwest Florida, but he never told nobody about that, and we sure never learned it till much later. When he come back south here a few years ago is when he kind of settled at Caxambas, but I never seen him from one year to the next.

Today all them Bay families will tell you how they loved ol’ Colonel. Maybe some did but damn few showed it, and that shy quiet feller never knew. That’s why he come to Lost Man’s River and stayed with us for most of thirty years.

In the phone booth on the empty mall, Lucius studied the toe of his own shoe amongst the flattened soda bottle caps and cigarette butts. Outside the booth, a shining grackle waddled on the pavement, bright cruel eye cocked for a scrap to toss and pick apart and gobble.

“You mean Colonel Watson?”

“That’s right.”

His explanation to Bill House’s son—that he was writing a biography of E. J. Watson and wished to ask about his late father’s conclusions about Watson’s death—was met by silence. Lucius breathed deeply, trying to stay calm. A meeting with Andy House was critical, not only because his clan had been the spine of the Watson posse but because only the Houses might know the truth about the man rumored to have fired first.

Among the members of the posse (all of whom he had identified and tried in vain to question years before), only a few such as the House men had readily acknowledged taking part—not that they had talked to him about it. As for the rest, anger and guilt, fear and special pleading, had muddied their “eyewitness” accounts. A few of these men, out of pride in their inside information on the most vivid event in the region’s history—or even the need of a better story with which to repay young Watson for their drink—had affirmed the rumor about Henry Short. Lucius himself thought it inconceivable that Henry Short had fired at his father, yet what had once been a stray rumor had become so commonplace that he needed the House clan to put it to rest once and for all.

Years ago he had confronted Henry—uselessly, since the man had had no choice but to deny any participation in the shooting. In those days Henry’s life was still in danger, whereas now he had moved away somewhere, and many years had passed, and those who had been out to punish him were old or gone. If he was still alive and could be located, he might dare to tell the truth, and even wish to do so, to be done with it.

House’s voice was there again, equable, mild, as if he had listened sympathetically to Lucius’s thoughts. “Just so we understand each other, Colonel. My granddad and my dad and Uncle Dan and Uncle Lloyd, they was all in on it, and none of ’em decided later they done wrong.” The voice paused a moment to let that settle. “I don’t reckon I’m the one to decide that for ’em. I ain’t glad about what they done but I don’t aim to tell you I am sorry, neither.” Another pause. “Still want to come all the way out here?”

Lucius said yes. Queried nervously by a woman in the background, House asked if he had any reason for coming that he had not mentioned. Lucius said simply, “I hoped you could help me locate Henry Short.”

“That’s honest, anyways. Maybe I can help, maybe I can’t. Depends on what you want him for.” The voice paused again. “Come ahead, then, Colonel.” There came the clatter of a dropped receiver, then the same calm voice, soothing someone else. “It’s all right, sweetheart. Yes, he’s on his way.” The telephone was fumbled roughly while being hung up, and House’s voice continued through the bump and clatter. “Now, Sue, no need to be afraid of Colonel just cause he’s a Watson …”

Golden Years Estates, in the Big Cypress country between Naples and Immokalee, was a vast pale waste in the flat landscape. Everywhere, the broken forest had been bulldozed into ramparts of tree skeletons and blackened stumps, leaving dead white clay where fossil limestone seabeds lay exposed. Fires smoldered in the desolation, and thick smoke rose to a thick and humid sky. In the near distance, ancient cypress trees in funereal Spanish moss drew back affrighted from the earth-mauling machines, which brooded among white sterile pools like yellow dinosaurs. In a litter of raw pipe and tubing, plastic cups and mud-stuck newspapers, and scraps of pine lumber crusted with gray cement, stood a lone outhouse of a bad zinc green with a stink of carnivores and a rusted door which banged in the wet wind. Here and there in this desolation, a hard-edged house perched naked on a “crescent”—Cypress Crescent, Panther Crescent, Sunset Crescent. Andy House had said laconically that his “retirement estate” could be found on Panther Crescent, but these streets seemed makeshift and unfinished, and the street signs still lay scattered on the ground.

The only living thing in sight was a big florid man in khaki shirt and trousers peering outward from a doorway. He stood like a sentinel, staring away over the white waste as if in hope of rescue, or reinforcements at the very least. “I’ll be on the lookout,” Andy House had said, but this man gave no sign that he awaited someone. Only when Lucius drew off the crescent onto the short driveway did he lift a vague hand in the car’s direction. The last time Lucius had seen this man was when the Houses lived at Chatham Bend back in the twenties.

“Notice any panthers crossing Panther Crescent?” Andy House had grown from a sturdy straw-haired boy to a big ruddy man with blue eyes in a steadfast gaze which went right past Lucius’s head toward the surrounding distance. Not until he thrust out his hand, which his visitor caught after some fumble and adjustment, did Lucius realize that Andy House was sightless.

“I chose this here retirement estate on account of all the panthers,” House said wryly. “Hoped I might hear one screamin in the night.” Holding on to Lucius’s hand, the blind man was still facing outward, as if trying to fathom the great silence of his surroundings. “Funny, ain’t it? They been sellin this swamp-and-overflowed to suckers since before I was born, and I never caught on to the deal till a few years back when I bought some myself. They couldn’t find no more darn fools to buy land underwater, so they dredged out ditches, laid roads on the fill, then called them ditches ‘bayous’ and ‘canals’ and sold ’em off as prime waterfront property. Done that first at Miami, Naples, then up and down both coasts. Today there ain’t hardly no coast left in all south Florida outside of the Park, so they’re doin the same darn thing back up inland! All you need is some old tract of swamp and you are in business. All you got to do is dredge and fill.

“Well, don’t let me get started blowin off steam about what they’re doin to the backcountry just cause I ain’t got nothin else to do!” He raised big heavy arms and let them fall. “One of the big attorneys makin a fortune on this mess you’re lookin at, he’s supposed to be some kind of kin to Watsons. I won’t say a word against the man cause he is a big shot over to Miami. Might send some Spanish over here to beat me up.”

“Watson Dyer?”

“You said the name, not me. Called him Watt or Wattie in the old days.”

“Well, at least he’s trying to help stop the Park from burning our old house,” said Lucius, sounding more loyal to Dyer than he felt.

“You mind tellin me what’s in it for him?”

“He was born there,” Lucius said finally.

“That might be reason enough for you or me.” Andy House rocked a little on the heels of high square-toed black shoes which looked more like shoe boxes. “Hell, I don’t know a thing about it. Just bitchin, is all. Don’t you pay this mean old sinner no attention.”

A woman poked her head out of the door but Lucius’s smile only scared her back inside. “Good thing God struck me blind, I guess,” Andy was saying. “What I figured I was buying in this ‘planned community’ was a little house out in the Cypress, surrounded by green woods and fresh water. Can’t see the trees too good no more, but I sure could enjoy them musky smells and swamp cries in the night, maybe the roarin of a big bull gator in the springtime. Sound just like a ol’ outboard, crankin up!” The blind man nodded. “I guess you heard that racket plenty times!”

He turned toward the door. “Well, it ain’t likely I’ll be hearin no bull gator, nor no panther neither, cause after I had this place all bought and paid for, they changed the plan, drained off the swamp, stripped off the cypress. Had to make some room for more retirement estates, I reckon. Tore out every tree they could mangle up with their machines, smashed the country flat. And before they could clean up the mess they made, they run out of money, and before I could get out of the whole deal, I run out, too.”

He waved vaguely at the wasteland all around him. “These eyes can’t see what all that money went for, and I reckon that’s a mercy. Can’t even smell it. Ain’t nothin left alive out there to smell. But I can hear the deadness of it, night or day.” He rapped the thin wall of his house. “You ever need you a retirement estate, I reckon I know where you could get one pretty cheap.”

Inside, the house was neat and comfortable, with all blinds drawn against the desolation. “This here is Colonel Watson, Sue.” House spoke in the general direction of the kitchen, where a pretty white-haired woman, wiping her hands upon her apron, peered out at their guest. “Don’t you make no false moves, Colonel,” the blind man whispered for his wife to hear, “cause that poor little lady in the kitchen is deathly afraid of Watsons. Scared you might of come out here to bump me off.” He shifted a chair in Lucius’s direction, then lowered himself with a heavy sigh onto the sofa. “Speaking about bumping off, you might be doing me a kindness,” he confided. “You make a nice clean job of it, don’t make no mess for poor Sue to clean up, I might throw this here retirement estate in on the deal.”

“Andy, you just stop those kind of jokes!” his poor wife cried, and he said sheepishly, “Now, Sue, you know I’d never leave you out here all alone. Not with all them panthers!” Hearing Lucius laugh, Andy smiled for the first time, and his wife looked reproachfully at this stranger for encouraging her husband’s wry despair.

“Never sat still in my whole life, now I sit all day,” Andy House said, still surprised. “Can’t get the hang of it. Nosir, God struck this sinner blind, and I don’t know why.” He waved a big hand toward the kitchen where his wife was preparing lemonade and cookies. “She hauls me off to church, y’know, morning, noon, and night, but I don’t think that’ll change His mind, do you?”

Unsettled by House’s wide clear gaze, Lucius could find nothing comforting to say. And the blind man spared him, folding big gold-haired hands upon his lap. “So,” he said. “I remember that day many years ago when you come to Chatham Bend to speak with Houses.”

Lucius nodded. “Your dad didn’t care to speak with me, remember?”

“Colonel, my dad liked you fine. He felt real bad about what happened, as far as the Watson children was concerned. He weren’t naturally unfriendly, you know that—just the opposite. But I reckon he figured that if Watson’s son was out to take revenge, Bill House would probably serve as good as anybody.

“W. W., known as Bill—my dad—looked just like me, remember? Big nose and ruddy, not what you’d call top of the line for looks. That second time you come, huntin for Henry, Dad weren’t so much unfriendly as plain frustrated. This was mostly because of his own brother-in-law—don’t you put this in your book!—who every year was growin to be more successful in his store while poor Dad endured one failure after another. He was still swallerin the fact that he had ended up in middle life as caretaker for the Chevelier Corporation on that half-overgrowed and godforsook plantation.

“One time my dad went to see your brother Eddie. Had the money saved for some insurance, and he aimed to show him there weren’t no hard feelings, nothing personal. Told him he wanted to let bygones be bygones, and Eddie acted like he felt that same way. But I bet you won’t drop dead from surprise if I tell you your brother could be, well, kind of malicious. For all his friendly words and jokes, he talked bad about most everyone behind their back. Eddie was very polite that day, and he took Dad’s business, but after that insurance was all bought and paid for, he stood up from behind his desk and he let Dad know that E. E. Watson was a good Christian businessman who done his best to practice his Christian forgiveness, but still and all, Mr. House should of took his business someplace else. And Dad come out of there red in the face, never got over it! He said, ‘See that? Good Christian businessman, practicin forgiveness! Forgive me for just long enough to take my money!’ ”

Andy House fell quiet, as if giving his visitor an opportunity to defend his brother. With his clear eyes, he seemed to measure not only the workings of Lucius’s brain but the world beyond. When Lucius remained silent, Andy shrugged. “Took you a good while to show up at the Bend to talk with Dad, as I recall. We wondered why. Saved Bill House for last, is what we figured, and that kind of spooked us. I wasn’t but a boy back then, but I can still see your blue cedar skiff coming down the river under sail, how she turned up-current, lost her headway, and touched at our little dock light as a butterfly. I don’t believe you ever used an oar!” He shook his head with pleasure in that memory.

Hearing his wife fixing a tray, Andy included her in his account of Lucius Watson, knowing she had not missed a word. “Colonel sung out a hello, and he waited right there for an answer before coming any closer to the house—that was Island custom—and when he got it, he come up the path unarmed. All the same, Dad had his rifle loaded, not rightly knowing what Ed Watson’s son was after. Maybe Colonel didn’t know himself, is what my Dad thought. All we knew about this feller, he was keeping some kind of a list, and Dad was on it, maybe number one.

“Dad told us to get out of the way, there might be trouble. He stood in the doorway, offered our visitor a seat on the screened porch. Colonel said ‘Thank you, much obliged,’ but never crossed the sill. He stood there in the sun on the porch steps, turning his straw hat in both hands, and inquired real quiet and polite if Dad would care to tell him exactly what led up to E. J. Watson’s death that day at Smallwood’s landing.”

House turned toward his guest. “My dad did not care to talk to you, not really. Granddad House was dead, and Dad had the responsibility for the House family, and here was Watson’s son right on his doorstep. This was more’n fifteen years after the shooting, and by that time the Watson story was all turned around so that Ed Watson was a real fine feller who got murdered because them House people was jealous of his cane! Houses was the ringleaders in a darned ambush, they shot Watson in the back—that story was started up by our own kin!”

Andy ruminated bitterly, almost as if—because he could not see him—Lucius were not there. “No, Dad never had no argument with Colonel Watson. He felt bad for you. But having heard about that list, he was leery, too.

“See, Dad never took to Mr. Watson the way Smallwoods done, never pretended to. I believe he told you short and plain how he fired at your dad and probably hit him, and how that was all he aimed to say about it. He would not tell who else was present, let alone who fired the first shot. And he told you you were a damn fool to keep that list. Spoke pretty rough, as I recall, and you went redder’n a redbird. Next, you asked to speak with Henry Short, and I guess you did. That was twenty-five years ago, and now you’re back, wantin to speak with Henry Short again! Don’t look like we’re making too much progress!”

“It’s just that I’d like to understand things better—”

“That day Henry stayed out of the way until you asked to see him. When you went over to the boat shed and talked to him alone, Dad kept a close eye on you from the screened porch. Had his gun handy in case you lost your head, tried to shoot our nigra. I reckon Henry was uneasy, too.” The blind man thought awhile. “But you must of come to some kind of understanding, because Henry wouldn’t never tell what Colonel Watson asked nor how he answered. I reckon Henry had lived long enough to know that anything a nigra said could be turned against him.”

Lucius told Andy that Henry had been tense, which had made his account cryptic and unsatisfactory. If he could locate him, he would like to try again. When the other remained silent, Lucius added, “I was told you might know where to find him.”

“I might,” the blind man said, still noncommittal. He raised a big hand in a plea for silence while he considered this. Finally he said, “And I might not.” The blue eyes were unblinking, and the silence grew. Lucius knew that any effort to assure House about his good intentions would only make him appear more intent on Henry. Finally he stood up, saying thank you. He fully understood, he said, why Andy had to be careful, but reminded him that if he’d wanted to harm Henry Short, “there were many years down in the rivers when it would have been easy to catch Henry alone. And nobody would have said a thing about it.”

Andy raised thick colorless eyebrows. “I reckon that is correct,” he said. “Sit down, Colonel. I’ll tell you what I know.”

ANDY HOUSE

Henry Short was a very uncommon man. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do planter from my granddad’s district, out of Spartansburg, South Carolina. She was a white girl but the father was brown—mostly Injun with some white and nigra, what country people used to call red-bone mulatta.

Now this was in the early years after Reconstruction was got rid of and what they called Southern Redemption had come in, and Redemption was the worst of times for any nigra who still hung on to any notion he was free and equal. Henry’s father was one of that kind, very brave and foolish. He was a handsome kind of feller, and he had him a fine horse from his days out west as a buffalo soldier in the federal militia. Fought Comanches in Texas and the like. He got dead sick of killing Injuns, that’s what he told people, cause in his opinion, it weren’t the Injuns who deserved killing. Talk like that made folks uneasy, black folks, too, and this young feller never fit with neither. He would not learn that a colored man could no longer speak out in the same manner he had got away with during Reconstruction, even in the Indian Territory, where his breed was common.

That buffalo soldier was not ashamed about his blood, and his pride cost him his life. He rode too hard and talked too much, he figured that was his bounden right as a cavalry soldier and new citizen. Henry’s daddy was just the kind them redshirts and night riders would come after, and when he got mixed up with a white girl—well, that finished him. The girl denied that he had raped her, but nobody paid that no attention. That baby was all the proof they needed that this nigger was too big for his damn britches. Folks never give a thought back then to a brown baby with a white daddy, but a white mother was another thing entirely, never mind that the baby might be the exact same shade, same sound, same smile and smell.

Henry’s daddy would not repent or beg, and for that he was punished something terrible. A merciful death was about all of the Lord’s mercy he could hope or pray for, but them men tutored him about repentance first—whip, knife, and fire. Them good Christians was just plain “indignant,” that’s what their weekly newspaper reported. But after a while, the evening was gettin late so they give up on his education, just gelded and burned that poor young feller and went home to bed.

The baby boy was give to a wet nurse and hid away on the next plantation. His mother would slip over there to visit, help as best she could. But Henry weren’t but four years old when that planter moved away and took his nigras with him. It must of broke the poor mother’s heart to see her firstborn carried off just like a slave child! That little boy was riding up behind the man and crying for his mama, so the man got tired of his yowling and threw him down and made him walk. When he couldn’t keep up, the man commenced to whipping him along, and right about then, Mr. D. D. House come down the road.

My granddad Daniel David House was fiery and stubborn, no one jostled him or told him what to do. He was the black sheep of a well-to-do family, ran away to the War Between the States with his daddy’s favorite horse, went north and south with it. When the War was over, he returned that horse somewhat the worse for wear, and his father cared more about that horse than he did about his boy safe home from war. He was disowned.

Granddad had two wives as a young man, lost ’em both in childbirth. Bein D. D. House, he figured the mothers must be faulty, so he dumped them children off on their maternal grandparents and hunted up another female that might suit him better. Granddad House was hard that way, though a good man in most respects. When he got married that third time, he headed south to the Florida frontier to change his luck.

See that old photograph across the room? That fierce-lookin feller in the round black hat is D. D. House, and that scared young thing beside him is the former Miss Blanche Ida Borders, who knew everything there was to know about Christian worshiping. Mamie Ulala and my dad were already in the world when that was taken.

Riding down to Florida, Granddad seen one of the many things he would not tolerate. This little brown boy on the high road was so scrawny and so weak, and here was this jackass whipping him along. So Granddad rode up, told the man to quit, and when he refused, he knocked him sprawling. Feller hollered, “That there pickaninny is lawful mine to do with what I please!” And Granddad said, “Nosir, not no more he ain’t.” He set that little boy up on his wagon and took him on south to Arcadia. Give him the last name of Short because he was so small and puny, and after that, he pretty much forgot about him. But that little boy never forgot. Far as Henry was concerned, Daniel David House was right up there with God.

Now Granddad House fought Abolition in the War but he didn’t hold no more with common slavery. He never seen Henry as no slave, and I sure would hate to think we ever owned him. But Henry Short was with my family from the age of four years old, and people always spoke of him as “Houses’ nigger.”

The family stopped off in Arcadia on the Peace River, homesteaded 160 acres, improved it up, had 5 good acres of bearing orange grove. In them days plenty of kids died off, got pin worms, got big bellies and went all yeller-looking, turned up their toes. But when they went with Granddad over to the coast, ate plenty of mullet, why, they would get well. So he decided to live near the sea, and he loaded ’em all into the wagon, went to Punta Gorda and took ship to Everglade, and farmed for a few years up Turner River. Had to board the hogs up every night, that’s how thick the panthers was in them days. And the kids got well, got meaner’n the devil, and Grandma raised Henry right along with ’em. Henry and my dad was the same age, them two come up together.

D. D. House raised his boys up to be honest, and most of ’em stayed that way, least till he died, but there wasn’t a one of ’em except my dad was as dead honest as Henry grew to be. He was the most honest man I ever knew, never mind all the pretendin that nigras had to do back then just to stay healthy.

So Henry started out in life a scared and puny little feller, but later on he grew into his own, six foot two and solid. Had the skull and features of a white man, and his skin stayed light. He had bushy eyebrows, too, and a mustache. He was very clean and neat, shaved every day—Henry Short wore out a lot of old straight razors!

In his younger years, Henry was well-esteemed in Chokoloskee. Never had no trouble with white folks before Watson died. Ate apart and slept apart—that’s how he wanted it—because Granddad’s family back in Carolina always had nigras and knew how to treat ’em, so Henry Short was treated that same way. He was the only colored on Chokoloskee Island at that time, and there ain’t been one since, not so’s you’d notice. Even today, you can walk around that island for a month and never spot one.

In Jim Crow days, right up into the thirties, good Christian men was terribly concerned, saying nigras was too primitive to handle their black animal natures around white women. Burnings and lynchings was still popular all around the country, to teach ’em a lesson for their own darn good. That’s what become of Henry’s daddy, and lynchings by fire was all the rage in Henry’s day. So Henry Short always made sure he was never alone with no white woman, no matter what. White woman might holler an order to come help her—even Grandma Ida!—and he’d go stone-deaf on her unless other folks was there to witness it. A woman wanted Henry Short to do something, she would have to get her man to tell him, that’s how very careful Henry was.

One time our men was out huntin in the Glades, and Henry was hunting right beside ’em, so it bothered Dad to see Henry always eatin a ways off and by himself. So my dad said, “Henry, you just bring your plate on over here, you set with us.” Well, Henry went deaf on him, pretended he didn’t hear. So Dad said, “Come on, boy, dammit, ain’t nobody lookin, we’re out here by ourselves!” And Henry just shook his head, he would not do it, not until Dad got mad and ordered him to do it—then it was okay. Dad told him, “Boy, you best look out you don’t get yourself whipped for disobedience!”

Later Dad felt sheepish and pretended he was joking, but Henry knew he wasn’t joking, not entirely. After that he would eat with the House men when they were out somewhere away from everybody, but always setting just a little bit off to one side, and not until he’d fixed our dinner first. Finally Dad give up on him, let him eat by himself if that was what he wanted.

No, Henry Short never forgot what they done to his father. He was a man who knowed his place, and probably that’s what saved his life, more’n one time. Henry fished and farmed right alongside of us, but he wanted to be treated like a black man. Ate apart and slept apart and never talked to no one, hardly, cause there weren’t hardly nobody he could talk to. I reckon he figured that loneliness was his punishment in life for what his mama done, his punishment for being Henry. I don’t reckon he ever once looked up to ask his Merciful Redeemer if he himself done a blessed thing to deserve such a lonesome fate. Henry would figure he deserved a nigra’s life, so he just hunkered down and took it.

In the year after Mr. Watson’s death, some of them men weren’t so proud no more about that killing and were looking around for somebody to blame. That was when that story started that Henry Short had fired the fatal shot, because being a nigger, he had naturally lost his head. Next, they wanted an explanation of how he got there in the first place, and why that black sonofabitch was armed, and what made him think he could get away with it—they were all for getting to the bottom of this thing right then and there.

The only trouble was, Henry was gone. Being leery of the atmosphere around that place, he had left Chokoloskee quick and he never went back. He went to fish with the Hardens around Lost Man’s, and got himself hitched up to Libby Harden. Henry was lighter than his wife, but he was supposed to be mulatta and she was supposed to be a white, so there was talk. It tore up Henry, broke his heart, when she run off with another man. That feller was certified white, I guess, but that was about all.

Some time after that, he left Lost Man’s for good. Came back to our family, worked with my dad who was caretaking at Chatham Bend for Cheveliers and worked his own patch at House’s Hammock, up the river. One time I said, “Henry? Ain’t it lonely over there?” And Henry said something peculiar. He said, “Mist’ Andy, it’s less lonely alone.” First time in all the years I knew him that I picked up a hair of bitterness in that man’s voice.

In them days, this was up in the late twenties, we had lots of bananas on House Hammock, we grew ninety-pound heads! Bananas just went wild down there, you took a cane knife and chopped around ’em to clear off the vines a little, then just stood back and let ’em go! Henry had a rusty old five-horse Palmer engine in an open boat, and one day he loaded a cargo of bananas, thinking to run ’em up to Everglade next morning. But when he come down at break of day, his boat was gone! He had her tied up with a new piece of line, so he knowed for a fact that his line had never parted. He made his way across to Chatham Bend, wading and swimming, and we come back with him and we searched hard for that boat all around the bays and never found her. A few days later he found her tied up in the same place she had disappeared from. By that time his banana crop was sunburnt black, couldn’t be sold.

That’s the kind of tricks them brave young fellers done to That Nigger Who Dared to Raise a Gun Against a White Man. Don’t rightly know which boy it was, but Shine Thompson always flared when we asked questions. I never heard of any family that resented Henry for himself. Every soul that knew that man before the trouble had a very high opinion of him as a nigra. But he left Chokoloskee after Watson died, and the younger ones had never hardly known him, only his name. So when they come across him in the rivers, they might yell at him over the water. “Hey, boy? We’ll git you one day, boy, see if we don’t!”

Andy’s wife brought lemonade and cookies. The blind man thanked her and took the glass into his hand but he did not drink it, not a drop, just held his glass tight and sat in silence, working through some thought or other. Over the air-conditioning, an old-fashioned clock ticktocked in the kitchen, reminding Lucius of Ruth Ellen’s house in Neamathla.

Lucius said, “At the time of the shooting, your dad signed a deposition. Ever hear about it? It seemed like he was defending someone against rumors.” Lucius paused. “Was that Henry? From what you tell me about Henry, that rumor never made very much sense.”

“No sense at all. Henry was dead scared of E. J. Watson, and he wasn’t crazy.”

Andy’s tone seemed slightly enigmatic. Lucius said gently, “No. But did he do it?”

“What are you after, Colonel? What do you think I been trying to tell you here?” The blind man turned a dangerous red, and his wife came trembling to the kitchen doorway. Sensing her there, Andy waved to reassure her.

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me,” Lucius said carefully, and the blind man nodded. Aware of his wife hovering, he said in an even voice, “I don’t know where Henry is living, Colonel. Last I heard, he was someplace over near Immokalee. I have the name of some people in his church. You want to run me over there tomorrow, we might try to find him.”

According to the newspaper, there was a second suspect in the Gasparilla shooting, but there had been no formal arrest, and the victim—“the noted east coast attorney Mr. Watson Dyer”—had announced that for the moment he would press no charges. Since Rob had been kidnapped by Speck’s men, and since Speck was Dyer’s man on Chatham Bend, Lucius had to conclude that Dyer himself had arranged the abduction.

At Caxambas, Lucius passed an unsettled evening with his father’s urn, which stood in the window like an art object or vase. At sunset, it appeared to glow in a bronze fire. He could not sleep. Feeling ridiculous, he draped the urn with a white cloth, which gave him a start when something awoke him in the night. Hearing only the soft riffles of the tide flooding the salt grass, he got up and placed the shrouded thing in a far corner before stepping outside to urinate off the deck under the flying moon.

On their way to Golden Years Estates next morning, Sally questioned Andy House’s objectivity about Henry Short. “If you go listening to people who raised him up as a near-slave, then you’d better learn how his real friends felt about him!” And she told Lucius what she knew of Henry’s friendship with the Harden family.

Henry Short had first visited the Harden clan before the turn of the century, on Mormon Key. He went there the first time with Bill House, when they worked for Jean Chevelier, collecting bird eggs. After the Hardens sold Mormon Key to E. J. Watson and moved on south to Wood Key and Lost Man’s River, Henry still came to visit when he could, because that family made him feel like a human being. Henry trusted Lee and Sadie Harden, who were to become his lifelong friends. After the death of Mr. Watson, Henry assured them that he had not taken part, but he also said, “They will hang it on the nigger.”

Lee Harden said that Henry Short could swing his rifle up so fast that it would scare you, said this man was the best shot on this coast, Watson included. But he never believed that Henry shot at Watson because Henry would never line a man up in his rifle sights and pull the trigger. “Henry loved the Lord, and he lived by the Ten Commandments.”

When Henry started courting Libby Harden, nobody but her brother Earl paid much attention. Libby was a beautiful coffee-colored girl, while Henry was the color of new wheat—lighter than any of the Hardens except Lee and Earl and the youngest sister Abbie. He even had blue eyes, like Mr. Watson! Henry told the family his mother was a white, and that on his daddy’s side he was mostly Indian. As Sadie Harden used to say, “Henry Short is a lot more white than some of those who call him a mulatta.” Except for Earl, the Hardens never thought about his color, all they saw was a fine man and a friend.

Robert Harden was mostly Choctaw with some English and Portagee mixed in, but he never cared too much what people called him so long as they let him live in peace. Some of his children favored his wife, Maisie, whose mother was Elizabeth Osceola, a granddaughter of the great war chief. So the Hardens were white and Indian on both sides, and they had nothing against black people—that much was true.

Henry Short and Libby Harden were married by the constable at Cape Sable, but pretty soon Libby ran off with a white man from Mound Key. This man told her he had money. He did not. Libby claimed her marriage to Henry Short had been performed outside the Catholic Church and was therefore officially annulled, but she never claimed that anyone annulled it. Being strong-minded like her mother, she probably just annulled it by herself.

Now Grandmother Maisie was a cruel, strong-hearted person, but she worshiped the ground that her boy Lee walked on. That old lady never did believe that his “conch bride” was good enough for Lee, and as for Sadie, she could not stand her mother-in-law, though she did her best not to say so. But even Sadie would admit that Mother Harden stood up strong for Henry Short, no matter what, and never had much use for Libby after she ran off with that Mound Key man, who had the habit of picking up anything loose he could lay his hands on, Libby included. Lee Harden said, “He might be a fine feller, but I never met a single soul who really liked him.”

That pretty Libby had been Henry’s consolation for a lonely life. He was heartbroken when he lost her and never got over his abandonment. He followed the Hardens to Flamingo, fished for some years around Cape Sable, but when he returned to Lost Man’s River, who should he find living there but Libby and her husband. They were not happy to see Henry, and Henry couldn’t stand to be so near, and he took to drinking for the first and only time in his whole life. He couldn’t handle moonshine, and one night when he was drunk, he was heard to mumble that somebody ought to take and shoot that Mound Key cracker. The Hardens knew that Henry’s threat was only a way to ease his torment, but they had to hush him up for his own safety. Because of the rumors about Henry’s part in Watson’s death, it was worse than dangerous for this man to talk this way against a white man.

Not that he talked much, having never had much practice. Libby dearly loved a conversation, and she always complained that Henry never gave her more than the bare facts even when he talked about the weather.

Before she took up with Henry Short, some of the Bay women called Libby Harden “white trash.” None of their slander changed the fact that every man along the coast would have sold his soul for a bite of that golden apple, and those women knew it. So they were happy when she humiliated her family—as they saw it—by marrying Henry Short and delighted anew when she abandoned him. It did their hearts good to see the Lord humble that mulatta who had married that supposed-to-be white woman.

Henry Short was a high type of man who had a low opinion of himself. White people had robbed him of all hope for a decent life, and they took away his self-respect right along with it. That’s what we did to him, the Hardens said. But Lee Harden believed that losing his Libby to another man might have saved his life, because it got the young men cracking mean jokes instead of shooting off their drunken mouths about a lynching. “When there is enough lynching talk, it is going to happen,” said Lee Harden.

Sometime after World War I, Henry told Lee Harden he would not remarry and would never return to Lost Man’s River. Though his grief had something to do with that decision, he also knew that his presence might draw more trouble to the Hardens, who had plenty of trouble without that. And perhaps he’d heard that Ed Watson’s son was on his way back to the Islands.

The blind man was waiting in his doorway, a small suitcase beside him. His wife was off at church, he said, otherwise he would ask them in for a cup of coffee. Reminiscing with Colonel had made him kind of homesick, he confessed, and he wondered if—after looking for Henry at Immokalee—he might travel on with them to Chokoloskee, to visit with his relatives and friends. “As a boy, I knew your family on both sides,” he told Sally politely. “Your mama’s brothers were my friends down in the Islands.”

“Is that a fact,” Sally said coolly, as Lucius slid the blind man’s bag into the trunk. She opened the front door for Andy, but the big hand fumbled deftly for the other handle and he climbed into the back over her protests. “Can’t see much anyway,” he told her cheerfully, “so I might’s well ride in style.”

They headed eastward past the Corkscrew Strand bound for Immokalee, at the edge of the Big Cypress. On the narrow road across the rough savanna, Lucius slowed to pick up a black man, although the man had not stuck out his thumb nor even turned to observe the car coming up behind. Lucius had murmured, “Must be hot, walking the road,” and Andy House said, “Let’s give him a ride, then.”

“It’s only a field hand, Mr. House—” Sally checked herself, annoyed. “I thought you might have some objection.”

“If he can take it, I guess I can,” Andy said easily. “I rode with plenty of em.”

With a rattle of limestone bits striking the fenders, the car slowed and drew up on the shoulder. The stringy figure sprang sideways as if startled by a snake. Alarmed that these whites had stopped, he was smiling hard, as if resigning himself to some rough joke. When Sally offered him a bright Good morning! the black man doffed a dusty cap. “Yesm,” he said. Even this single word was guarded, all one blurred and neutral syllable. He took out a bandanna and wiped his brow, glancing over his shoulder at the pine woods.

“We’re headed for Immokalee,” Lucius told him. “Care for a ride?”

“Hop in,” said Andy, reaching across to find the door handle, patting the seat.

The man raised a hard-veined gray-brown hand to the bill of his soiled cap. Slow and careful as a lizard, trying to enter without touching anything, he eased into the car in a waft of humid heat and hard-earned odors. He could scarcely bring himself to close the door.

Asked how he liked living in Immokalee, the man chuckled, cuk-cuk-cuk, like a dusting chicken. “Mokalee.” He nodded, feeling for safe ground. He would not look at them. “Any man ain’t been a nigger in ’Mokalee on Sat’day night, dat man ain’t lived right!” He chuckled a little more, cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk. “Dass what us niggers say.”

“Oh Lord!” said Sally, when her companions laughed. She faced around toward the front.

The black man hummed a little, peering outward at the pine savanna. Over the woods, vultures circled like swirled cinders on a smoky sky. “Gone be fryin hot t’day.” The black man sighed deeply, hoping for the best. “Deep-fryin hot.”

“Ever come across a colored fella name of Henry Short?” Andy House asked him.

“Henry Sho’t, you said?” He looked alarmed. “Nosuh I sho’ ain’t, nosuh. I sho’ doan know no nigger by dat name.”

At a main corner in the outskirts of the town, the man tapped a gray fingernail on the window, saying, “Thank’ee kin’ly, kin’ly,” soft as a lullaby—kin’ly, kin’ly—until the car stopped at last and he got out. He was recognized at once, and cheered, by a pair of morning celebrants leaned on a wall, who brandished small flat bottles in brown paper bags. He turned to wave. “I’ve in good hands now as you can see!” he cried, no longer hiding a sly smile. “I thank’ee kin’ly, white folks!” he called cheerily.

“Kin’ly, kin’ly!” Lucius repeated, not unkindly, as he drove on down the street, crossing the railroad tracks. But Sally Brown, watching the men grin, just shook her head. “Perhaps that performance still amuses your generation,” she snapped tartly, “but it isn’t funny, Professor, you know that?” She frowned, seeking a way to say this clearly. “I mean, if they go calling themselves niggers, acting like trashy niggers, then that’s the way they’re going to be seen!” This was well-intentioned, Lucius decided, but in her distress over the man’s manner—his protective coloration—she had missed not only his mischievous irony but his profound rebuke, and the great poignance in it, and a dogged love of life, and beyond everything, that brave cheerfulness and in-the-bone endurance which Lucius found so moving in such people.

Eventually they tracked down a black family named Cooper which worshiped at Henry’s former church. The Coopers lived in a small house at the north end of town. After consultation with their neighbors, measuring the white folks from their stoops and dooryards, they all agreed that Deacon Short didn’t live here anymore, having taken work in the cane fields around Moore Haven. Yes, United Sugar. No, he had no phone and they knew no address. Their reserve seemed a sign that others had come looking for him, for these people were certainly protecting him. After another consultation, Mr. Cooper mentioned worriedly that the Deacon might be in the hospital over there. With the meeting with Dyer and the Park attorneys scheduled for next day, Moore Haven was too far out of their way. They decided to visit Henry Short on the way back.

They headed east on the main street, past dealerships of bright green farm machinery and auto junkyards and car body shops and whistle-stop brown saloons. Still brooding, Sally pared her nails. In this damn redneck town, back in the twenties, she had heard, a local man entered the hardware store and took a revolver from the showcase, saying, “This one kill niggers?” Then he stepped to the door and shot a field hand at the end of the pay line. “Shoots pretty good,” he told the storekeeper, “I’ll take it.” Though the black man died, the man was never arrested, far less taken to court.

Sally stared outraged from one man to the other, awaiting their horrified reaction. When they could find nothing to say but only shook their heads, she cried out, “Can you believe that? Shoots pretty good! I’ll take it!”

“Found the model he was looking for, I reckon,” Andy said.

Speechless, Sally scrabbled for a hankie in the old straw bag that served her as a purse. Dabbing tears, she stared stonily ahead. In a bad silence, in the growing heat, the old car crossed grassy railroad tracks past stranded freight cars, then turned due south, and all the while Lucius frowned mightily in order not to smile at the sight of Andy’s innocent wide eyes in the rearview mirror.

The blind man had cauterized the wound of Sally’s outrage with a darker fire even more outrageous, and his boldness, under the circumstances, was breathtaking. However, he had gone too far, and both men knew it. “That weren’t funny, ma’am. I know that. And I sure am sorry.” The blind man frowned at the big hands in his lap, sincerely penitent. “It was just … you were so … serious, Miss Sally. Beg pardon? No, ma’am, I ain’t makin excuses. I was wrong.”

Southeast of Immokalee, where the county road made a big bend, Andy tried again to make amends. “I lived down this road in the late twenties when the KKK was cranking up, Miss Sally, and that story you told don’t surprise me one little bit. That was along about the time of the Rosewood Massacre, remember that one, Colonel? When they burnt out that nigra community down west of Gainesville?” He took a great deep breath. “Folks don’t care to remember no more how it was for black people in this part of the country. Still pretty bad today when you scratch down a little.”

Lucius observed that Jim Crow days might have been worse around this south part of the peninsula than almost anywhere, because so many Florida pioneers had been fugitives from the Civil War or Reconstruction, bitter and unregenerate men who identified the freedmen with their loss of home. That was why so few blacks had drifted into southwest Florida, and why so few besides the migrant field hands at Immokalee had settled in this region even today.

Andy nodded. “Course in recent years, the law there in Immokalee has been a nigra. Call him Big Boy. Ain’t too many, black or white, that cares to go up against this Mr. Big Boy.”

“But black especially.”

“But black especially. That sure is right, ma’am.”

“Because blacks know that in the end your Mr. Big Boy will do what white folks tell Big Boy to do.”

“Reckon that’s right, too. But you got to start somewheres, I reckon.”

Sally seethed and brooded, then spoke all in a burst. “I hear you’ve talked to Mister Colonel about Henry Short. I bet you told him Henry Short was a mulatta, and here was a man who was no more mulatta than the Hardens! Robert Harden had some Portuguese blood, and Portuguese people have that tight curly black hair—the so-called kink you people tried to pin on him!”

“You people?” The blind man raised his thick colorless brows, tugged his red ear. Anxious to be fair but unwilling to retreat, he finally said, “So far as I know, Miss Sally, I never set eyes on a Portagee even in the days I could still see one, so I don’t know much about Portagee hair. But it could be that Henry told the Hardens what they wanted to hear from a brown feller who was aimin to marry up with their pretty daughter.”

“Oh Lord!” said Sally. “Your family may have left there a long time ago, Mr. House, but you’re still Chokoloskee through and through!”

The county road south to the Tamiami Trail and the Gulf coast at Everglade, fifty miles away, ran through the flat palmetto scrub of the Big Cypress. The two-lane asphalt, straight and shiny, writhed and shimmered in mirage toward its point of disappearance on the low horizon. Across the white sky, dark-pointed as a weapon, a swallow-tailed kite coursed the savanna for small prey.

“Cattlemen held a big panther hunt out this way a few years ago—that about finished ’em—but there’s still more panthers here in the Big Cypress than anyplace in Florida except maybe my front yard on Panther Crescent.”

They rode for a long while in silence without meeting or overtaking other vehicles, as Andy kept track of their southward progress through his own dead reckoning. “Deep Lake,” he said after a while. He pointed off toward the west, where a lone vulture tilted down along the cypress wall. “Ever seen it? Deep small lake in a two-hundred-acre hammock. Seems like I can feel that water back in there. Twenty miles inland from the Gulf but connected some way to salt water. There’s been tarpon in Deep Lake as far back as any old-timer can remember.”

In the days of Billy Bowlegs, in the Third Seminole War, Lucius told them, the Indians had kept large gardens on that hammock. After the band gave itself up and was shipped away to the Oklahoma Territory, Deep Lake knew a half century of silence before Walter Langford and his northern partners learned of that rich ground and rode over from Fort Myers to plant citrus.

Andy nodded. “Why do you think Sheriff Tippins put his prison camp way out here at Copeland? Langford paid next to nothing for that convict labor, and Sheriff Frank held back the little that they made, being as how it was against state law for them terrible black criminals to receive payment.” He grunted. “Big businessmen don’t worry much about whose sweat and blood makes all their money—don’t even know about it if they can help it! So maybe Langford knew how Tippins worked things, maybe not. But a lot of sweat and a lot of blood was spilled out in this scrub, I will tell you that.”

He seemed subdued. “Deep Lake had a bad reputation right from 1913, when they laid that rail line north from Everglade to get the citrus out. Them nigras workin on that line was kept at Weaver’s Camp, and every little while when some run off, they’d take and shoot a few, make an example, and bury ’em in that nice soft fill on the railway spoil bank. Later years, when they was surfacing that old rail bed for this county road, they dug up so many human bones it was embarrassing.”

“Is it possible,” Lucius said, “that those bones were the source of some of those bad stories about E. J. Watson? About those skeletons supposedly dug up on Chatham Bend?” Sally Brown nodded a little, ready to accept this possibility, but that lake-like gaze in the blind man’s blue eyes was unrelenting. Clearly he thought the question disingenuous.

“Well, we blame too much on your daddy, that is correct,” Andy said finally. “We forget how much competition that man had, and I’m not talking about common criminals nor backwoods varmints like that feller Cox. I’m talking about ordinary business people who let poor folks get worked to death to make more money. At Deep Lake, them miserable lives was all wrote off to free enterprise. E. J. Watson might of called that progress, and he weren’t the only one, not by a long shot.

“Right up to the twenties, the Sheriff supplied convict labor to them Deep Lake partners—bankers, railroad men, and such. When convicts tried to run away, they paid Injuns to track ’em. All swampy country out here then, so them runaways never got too far in chains. Left tracks or sign that any Injun could follow blindfolded, and miskeeters and thorns and heat and snakes just took the heart out of ’em. Time they was finished, they was beggin to be caught—hell, they got rescued!

“When we was farming down this way at Turner River, Dad would get deputized sometimes to catch them runaways. He took that work tracking for Tippins cause we needed the money, but he never liked it. Tippins kept up his friendly reputation in Fort Myers, same way your daddy did, but he didn’t behave right at Deep Lake, where nobody was watchin. He’d handcuff them prisoners, knock ’em around, give ’em a taste of what was waitin for ’em if they didn’t go out and work in that swelterin heat until they dropped. And finally Dad swore out loud and said, ‘You goin to abuse a handcuffed man that ain’t done nothin wrong, you better find some other stupid feller to do your trackin for you.’ But then Dad would go broke again, and he’d come back.

“Course the Sheriff was never friendly with my dad on account of what Bill House told him in Fort Myers Courthouse back in 1910—that the men who killed Watson were not criminals, and that he wanted a grand jury hearing to clear his name. Tippins likely agreed with him, cause he never cared for nobody coming in to meddle with the law, not in his early days. But he had pressure from Langford and his friends to let the case slide beneath the surface—that was that. Pretty soon, he become a real politician, he wanted to get reelected worse than he wanted to be honest, and after a while, he got the habit of sellin his public service to the highest bidder, same as the rest of ’em.

“When the Florida Boom collapsed, the Deep Lake plantation went down with it, but the Collier Corporation took over that convict labor, making logging roads to lumber out the Cypress. The prison camp weren’t but four miles from our farm, so they made me captain of the road gang when they was shorthanded. Them nigras never run off on me, neither, seein how nervous I was—scared my gun might go off, kill somebody by mistake!

“The bookkeeper was bragging all the time about how much work they got out of those convicts, how every week they’d flog a man whether he deserved it or he didn’t, to improve the attitude among the rest. Course road gangs was very bad all over Florida. Black convict or white, it made no difference, not when it come to chains and rawhide whips. Road gangs was why so many outlaws run away to Watson’s—Leslie Cox, y’know, and Waller and Dutchy that was killed by Cox, and plenty of others, too, from what we heard.

“No, we never thought much of the Sheriff’s Department. Dad only let himself get deputized to do the dirty work cause we was poor. One time he went after a man who had killed a mess of people, brought him in meek as a lamb, because Dad was amiable but he was also a dead shot, so nobody wanted to trade bullets with him. A lot of men thought Bill House was the feller who put the first bullet into Watson, but Dad always left that claim to my uncle Dan. Said he didn’t want to make a liar out of his own brother.

“In them years our Sheriff made his peace with Prohibition, and him and Dad’s bootlegger brothers got together, cause a man can’t go far in the bootlegging trade without some friendly understanding from the law. Frank Tippins learned a live-and-let-live attitude, long as the man’s skin were the right color.

“One time Tippins killed a prisoner in his own cell. Might of saved that unfortunate nigra from committin suicide, but he called it an escape attempt, as I recall. Claimed this man was the only prisoner he ever killed in the line of duty. Never thought to count all them poor devils that never went home from his labor camp here in the Cypress.

“Yessir, when it come to nigras, Collier County was very hard, Lee County, too. A free black man down here in south Florida would of been far better off being a slave. Right up until recent times, any black man not attached to a white family, the way Henry was, he’d get grabbed right off the street and charged with loitering or vagrancy and sentenced to farm labor or the chain gang. A nigra that belonged somewhere weren’t never bothered, not even when he done something pretty serious, because folks won’t stand for messin with private property, not in this part of the country. No fool lawman who tried that could get reelected. So if you was black with white people behind you, you could murder your wife if you didn’t make a racket, and the Sheriff might look the other way. After all, he weren’t never elected to go spendin up the taxpayers’ money for nothin.

“Nigras was free men but they belonged to you, right up into the thirties and the forties. The only black in Everglade was known as Storters’ nigger, same way Henry Short was Houses’ nigger to some people. Sounds awful, don’t it? But that’s the way it was around the Bay. And you know something? Them boys was glad about it! Any nigra that wanted protection, wanted to get along, he was very very glad that he belonged to somebody.”

Of the old prison camp at Copeland, little sign was left but overgrown rough thorn and lianas, and shadow ruins on white limestone sand back off the roads. A pileated woodpecker’s loud solitary call rang strangely in the high noon heat, over the dead scrape of palmetto, in the sunny wind. The Copeland settlement, named for the Trail engineer, had become field headquarters for Lee Tidewater Cypress, which in recent years had been logging out the last of the great strands. Copeland’s journals, which contained a brief account of E. J. Watson’s death, described the group which confronted him on that October evening as D. D. House and Charley Johnson and three transient fishermen. “When D. D. House told him to hand over his gun, Watson raised the gun, growling, ‘I’ll give you my gun,’ and pulled the trigger.” Paraphrasing this passage, Lucius turned to watch Andy’s expression. “Where did Graham Copeland get that stuff? Is that how your dad told it?”

“Mr. Copeland was particular about his facts, that was his training, and what he wrote was accurate, far as it goes. Course it don’t go far enough. The names, I mean. He only mentioned Charley’s name because Charley wanted his name mentioned. Charley used to boast how he took part.”

“Any idea who those transient fishermen might have been?”

“Ain’t got your list on you?” Disliking his own sarcasm, Andy frowned. “Course there was always drifters down around the Islands, but I believe Dad told me them three fishermen was Frank and Leland Rice, who showed up most years in the mullet season, and Horace Alderman from Marco, who was over visiting his brother Walter.

“Before he was done, Horace Alderman made his name as ‘the Gulf Stream Pirate,’ smuggling bootlegged liquor and Chinese. Them Orientals was kind of a nice sideline, cause the new railroads needed ’em for coolie labor. Took all their savings, up to five hundred dollars a head, to smuggle ’em in from Cuba or someplace. Unload ’em off ships, sneak ’em ashore a few head at a time. Sometimes they ran ’em right up Taylor Slough, dumped ’em off in the Glades and pointed ’em northeast, told ’em Miami was just up the road, if they could find a road. But Immigration was keepin a sharp eye on the east coast and the Key West railroad, so Horace might come in off Cape Sable, scan the shore for any sign of trouble, then land his cargo at Middle Cape and move ’em over the old Homestead trail to the east coast.

“As a businessman, Horace Alderman was prudent, out of respect for the law. If he seen something wrong, he’d holler a order to transfer the cargo to a smaller boat, then knock each yeller man over the head as he come on deck, relieve him of his valuables, and slide him overboard. Other times, they might chain the whole string to a heavy anchor, and if the federals was gainin on ’em, they’d destroy the evidence, let ’em go rattlin over the side. Might waste a cargo if they dumped ’em too quick, but better safe than sorry, that was Horace’s motto. Anyways, he had their money, so it weren’t what you would call a total loss. So Horace was doin pretty good in that line of business until that night the Coast Guards come up alongside. Bein after him for bootleggin, they only found them Chinese when they searched his boat. Horace said, ‘There must be some mistake.’ He had a weapon hid under his mattress, and he come out shootin. Killed two Coast Guards and a Secret Service man and commandeered their vessel, but later one of his own men lost his nerve and they got captured.

“Horace’s mother always said her poor boy was a real nice feller till he married up with a greedy woman and went for the fast money. The Law hung Horace in Fort Lauderdale around 1925. Before he went, Horace wrote up his life story, explained all about it, but maybe his mama never got around to readin it. That old body puzzled and prayed but never did conclude where her boy went wrong.

“And the Rices? Wasn’t there something about a bank robbery, and a shooting on Chokoloskee—?” Lucius stopped short, glancing at Sally, as Andy frowned and cleared his throat.

“—and Speck Daniels?” Sally finished.

“The Rice boys come to a bad end, too. I reckon God is done with them three now, so mentionin their names ain’t goin to hurt nothin.”

“I had those names already. I was just confirming.”

“Just confirmin. You got your list all learned by heart, wouldn’t surprise me.” The blind man’s smile had an edge like a broken knife. “I sure hope there ain’t nobody named House on there.”

“I’m not gunning for anybody,” Lucius said crossly.

“Well, Bill House never thought you was real serious about it, neither, but having young children, he couldn’t take no chances.”

Lucius appraised Andy’s expression in the rearview mirror. “Bill could never be sure, though, could he, Andy?”

“Nosir. You was a Watson. He never could be one hundred percent sure.”

The sun was high and the hot noon road empty, boring ever farther south into the swamp country. On the spoil bank of the black canal that paralled the road, a thick gator lay inert, like a log of mud. Gallinules cackled in primordial woe, and long-necked cormorants and snakebirds, like aquatic reptiles, rose in the canal and sank away again. A cottonmouth lay coiled in a rotted stump along the water edge across the canal, and farther on, a bog turtle had climbed to the pavement edge to point its snout at the howl of passing tires.

Across an old railroad-tie bridge, the wall of liana, vine, and thorn was broken by a sagging roadhouse, in a yard inlaid with broken glass and bottle caps and flattened beer cans, motor oil, lube buckets, tires, defunct batteries. Big-finned autos and rangy motorcycles baked in the Sunday heat, and men in dark glasses and motorcycle boots, attended by scraggy kids and hounds and dragged-out women, leaned back on their elbows, watching strangers pass.

Among the decrepit vehicles were two big swamp trucks, one red, the other black. When Lucius braked, Sally said tersely, “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even slow down.”

At the crossroads, they turned left onto the Tamiami Trail, passing the few cabins at Ochopee and continuing on a little distance to the low shaded bridge where the Trail crossed the headwaters of Turner River. Here Capt. Richard Turner had guided a punitive expedition against Chief Billy Bowlegs at Deep Lake; here Big Hannah Smith had farmed awhile before traveling down to Chatham Bend to meet her Maker; here the House family and Henry Short had raised tomatoes for the Chevelier Corporation; here the Mikasuki Seminole, protesting this highway which had split the Everglades wide open like a watermelon, had made their last desperate plea to the encroaching white men. Pohaan chekish, the Indians had said. “Leave us alone.” The Trail engineers had commemorated this historic death song with a nice roadside picnic table and a sign.

When Sally read the sign aloud, the blind man nodded. “Yes, ma’am. ‘Leave us alone!’ ” He told them how the Indians had spied on the House family when it pioneered out this way during the Depression, how they had felt those black eyes watching from way back in the trees, or peering through the grass tips from a dugout—how they might get that feeling ten or twenty times for every Indian seen, until they realized that everywhere they went, the Indians watched them. Lucius remarked that Indian scouts had tracked white strangers day and night since the first Spaniards came ashore on this peninsula. “ ‘We are your shadow’—that’s what Indians say.”

“Course the red man favored black men over white men, least in the old days,” Andy said. “The red men—I ain’t never seen a red one yet, have you?—they give shelter to runaway slaves and also white fugitives and outlaws who hid out in the swamp. Any man the white people was after deserved help—that’s how the Injuns always seen it. That is why folks around here thought Leslie Cox might of gone over to the Injuns.

“Them Government Injuns ain’t so sure of who they are no more, so they look down on black people because the whites do. That way they might feel a little better about being nobody in their own land—land of the free and home of the brave but NO INDIANS AND DOGS ALLOWED. Might still run across that sign back in this country.”

Lucius led Andy to an opening in the trees. At Andy’s request, he described the southern prospect out across the blowing grasses and sun-glittered waters which under the broad Atlantic light slid slowly, slowly south toward Shark River. White egrets in breeding plumage lifted airy crests to the Gulf wind, and white ibis crossed the sky over Roberts Lake, where Bill House and Ted Smallwood and their partners, Andy said, had killed the thousand alligators that paid for most of Smallwood’s land on Chokoloskee. “I still see this place! Still got our Turner River shack in my mind’s eye!”

In the Florida Boom, back in ’24, the Chevelier Corporation had sent Andy’s father to this Turner River land to demonstrate to the Trail settlers how tomatoes could be grown commercially on palmetto prairie. “Once the company learned how Dad done that, it took that fine new farm right out from under him. That’s when he had to go back to Frank Tippins. Dad worked this prairie so darn well he worked himself right out of his job!

“Turner River was a clear wild stream before the Trail construction broke her. There’s a little lake back in this strand where fish are plentiful, but because there’s no trail through that hot thicket no more, nobody don’t even know about that lake, let alone go there! Why go sloggin through the backcountry when you can ride in a nice auto to Miami or sit on your sofa, watch your new TV?”

Back at the picnic grove, the blind man raised his hands in a vague gesture. “Right about here where they got these roadside tables, that’s where Henry raised his watermelons—”

“Darkies love watermelons,” Sally said, laying out forks.

“Sally? You plan to jump on Andy every time he opens his mouth from now on?”

“Well, she’s right, Colonel. Maybe I talk too much. Talkin about old times makes me happy, and when I’m happy is when I tell all the old stories.” For want of a way to give vent to his well-being, he circled the table, sniffing the air, lifting his big arms, letting them fall. And in a while, finishing his meal, he was reminded of Henry and his brothers.

ANDY HOUSE

Henry Short come to Turner River with our family, and this is where his long-lost past caught up with him. This was in 1928, maybe 1929, because the Tamiami Trail was just put through. Well, one day two white fellers showed up in a old flivver. Never mixed words about who they was and what they come for. Got out of their car and told my dad that Henry Short was their half brother and they come to visit with him. If they was ashamed of it, that never showed.

First time them brothers tried to find him was way back before World War I, a couple years after Ed Watson was killed. They tracked him all the way south to Lost Man’s River. Henry was living at Lee Harden’s then, but he hid back in the bushes, never showed himself nor talked with ’em at all, because he believed them men had come to kill him. Hardens was pretty leery, too, so they said nothin to help. Them big barefoot men just stood there with their guns, set to run them strangers right back where they come from.

At Lost Man’s them brothers left Henry a letter, and when he come in out of hiding and he read it, that poor feller wept. He kept that letter all them years, he must of read them words one thousand times, but he never showed it to our family, only said politely that his letter was them brothers’ business. I reckon he didn’t want to take a chance that some word or joke or maybe just somebody’s expression might go spoiling something. But over the years, he referred to it some—he had it memorized—and finally we had the story pieced together.

After the lynching of Henry’s father, his young mother was punished severely, but her father kept his ruined daughter, he took her back and her child, too, least till the age of four, when he got rid of Henry in the way I told you. Once the child was gone, he found some feller to marry her, and she give her husband them two sons, as white as you or me. And them two come south just to make sure their half brother was getting on all right. And when they showed up on the Trail, Henry’s eyes was shining like he seen a miracle. I met them men myself, four or five times. The name of those two brothers might been Graham, and they had settled some good land west of Arcadia, around where the old settlement called Pine Level used to be. They were ranchers—they owned cattle, they weren’t ranch hands—and both of ’em were good steady men, polite and very quiet like their brother.

Well, our House family could not get over that. We used to wonder if Henry’s mother sent ’em. Her community had made her witness it when Henry’s daddy was burned and killed, and she never forgot it. She was yearning to know where her firstborn was, and if he was all right. In the eye of God, she was a sinner, but to us mortals she must be a good woman if she could raise up two white sons to take responsibility for that half brother they had never seen and never had to see, him being a poor colored field hand way off in some godforsaken part of Florida who didn’t even know them two existed.

Granddad House told his boys many’s the time what that lynch mob done to Henry’s daddy, but I’m shamed to say I never give much thought to it. It’s sinful how we shut things out that we don’t care to look at! But after I met his two half brothers, I had a gruesome dream about Henry’s father, a man of flesh and blood like me who become me in my dream, or I was him, nailed up to that oak in that night fire circle, sufferin them torments of the torch and rope in woe and terror, looking down into the howling faces of them Christian demons. That dream has come back all my life, no matter how hard I try not to think about it.

One night before his white brothers showed up, Henry whispered, looking deep into the fire, “If there is one thing that is sorrier than a nigra, it is a white woman who traffics with a nigra.” We never did know if he meant his mother or his wife, but we was shocked to hear such bitter words. After his brothers come and claimed him, and told him how much his mother missed him all her life, I never heard him speak such words again. I believe he was tore up and sick at heart that he had said something so cold and hard about his mama.

If Henry understood why his half brothers stayed in touch with him, he never said, but knowing Henry, he probably thought them men was plain darn crazy to go up against the common prejudice that way! All the same, he was very very grateful, he would whistle and smile for days after they left, we never seen him look that way before nor since!

I was always sorry I never knew them two men better. What they stood up for, so simple and so clear, made me ashamed of my whole way of thinking about nigra people, it woke me up and turned me right around. Yessir, I was mighty impressed, and I am today.

The last time Henry’s brothers came to Turner River, we was real happy to see them, and we invited ’em to share our supper. We meant well, but it didn’t sound right, it felt funny, and it made ’em uncomfortable, so they would not eat with us. They didn’t act angry or upset, they were polite about it, but they said, No thank you, they had come there to see Henry, and they built their own cooking fire off a little ways. I never got over the sight of them three men setting on their hunkers by their fire, chuckling and trading stories while they cooked and served each other, like Henry had ate with other people all his life.

After they left, Henry never said what they had talked about, it was too precious. That was his life, the only family life he ever had. And the following year, Henry left the House family for good, and we never saw them Graham men again.

Sometimes Henry rowed down Turner River and headed north or south along the coast, hunting for gold. That feller was a fool for gold since way back in the nineties. Picked up tales of buried treasure from Old Man Juan Gomez on Panther Key, who claimed he’d sailed before the mast with Gasparilla. The God’s truth never did catch up with that old Cuban. Drowned in his own net off Panther Key but his lies are going strong right to this day.

One time Henry worked for strangers who come to Everglade in a old schooner, hired a crew and went prospecting on Rabbit Key. Took ranges all over the place and worked like beavers for two-three days digging up that island. Well, E. J. Watson had been buried on that key, and Henry was scared to death of Watson’s spirit. He knew the body had been dug up and taken to Fort Myers, but he weren’t so sure Watson’s spirit had went with it. A hoot owl was calling from the mangrove clumps, and Henry knew there weren’t no owls out there, he knew that owl weren’t nothing in the world but a wandering spirit.

Henry had the ghost of Watson on his mind when a shovel struck something deep down in the sand on the third evening. It was close to dark, so the men was ready to knock off, but first they wanted to dig up whatever the heck it was that shovel scraped on. But the strangers told ’em to go back to camp on Indian Key, they would set a guard and start fresh in the morning. And when the men come back bright and early, thinking to finish up, get paid their wages—yep! Them strangers was all gone. The schooner was gone, and their wages was gone, too. There was only this square pit in the sand, shaped like a chest.

Henry never got over being so close to Gasparilla’s treasure, he was prospecting gold for the whole rest of his life. Seemed like there was rascals setting up all night making genuine parchment maps to sell to Henry. He drilled on Pine Island, Sanibel, wherever Gasparilla might of gone ashore. Sent away for a certified surefire drill and drilled up and down the coast, he was hot for gold. Even drilled on Chatham Bend when nobody was looking, cause there was rumors that your daddy struck Calusa gold or maybe Ponce de Leon’s gold when he first plowed that place. As Dad used to say, “Henry Short is a smart man, but that gold fever has diseased his brain.”

After the Hurricane of ’26 Henry went over to Pelican Key, and there he seen these lumps of metal laying on the sand where the storm cast up big slabs of coral rock. He could have had ’em for the picking up, he told me, but he thought they was scraps off an old engine block half sanded up out there. Later a feller showed me scraps from the same spot, said, “Looky here what I just bought! Pieces of eight them Spaniards buried out on Pelican Key!”

Never come out until years later how Gasparilla the Pirate weren’t nothing but a publicity stunt thought up by some city slicker to fool tourists. To this day you can read about Gasparilla’s buried treasure right there on your lunch mat in your Sun Coast Restaurant while you’re waiting on your jumbo shrimps and key lime pie. Wipe off the coffee spill and ketchup and that mat will tell you all you need to know about how Emperor Napoleon patted Juan Gomez on his head back there in Madrid, Spain, and how Juan sailed with Gasparilla, who become so famous that all kinds of tourist enterprises got named after him. Yessiree, that Sun Coast menu got a real nice picture of Gasparilla in his official pirate hat with skull and crossbones and a eye patch and a sword between his teeth. You got that authentical evidence right there by your plate alongside your home fries and red snapper, and a lot of other history thrown in for free.

Henry Short was the most able man in this coast country, so my dad always found some work for him to do. Bill House was a good man, kind to black men, and they give him back a lot of work. Treat ’em like fine horses and they’ll run for you, is what he said. He always had a nigra to help out, whether we needed him or not—it just come natural to him. If Henry Short weren’t nowheres around, he’d find another, but he always said he liked Henry the best.

In the Depression when it got so hard to make a living, Dad sent Henry with a bunch of men who was going to Honduras hunting gators. Well, Henry didn’t want to go. He was near to fifty now, and he’d heard life was dangerous in them Spanish countries. Dad told him not to be a fool, this was his chance, and after so many years, it never occurred to him not to do what my dad told him. But when I took Henry to Immokalee—he was going to Fort Myers to board ship—he got out at the bus stop with his little bindle and stood a minute looking down the street. Then he turned slowly and he said, “Your daddy’s tired of me. He’s getting shut of me before I get too old.” He said good-bye and walked over to the bus and went down to Honduras.

Them hunters like to starved to death, couldn’t find no gators. They never come close to making their expenses, couldn’t pay for their own beans, so bein Spaniards, the authorities locked ’em up without no food. The American consul got some grub in to ’em, bribed somebody, finally shipped ’em home. Henry Short came back from Honduras but he never came back to Bill House. He was very bitter. Lived mostly at Immokalee, La Belle, ricked charcoal and cut cane, done what work he could find. The House family ain’t heard from him in years.

But God works in mysterious ways, and God saved Henry Short at Turner River, because after Henry left for good, he was tracked here by that stranger he had been afraid of all his life since Watson’s death. We caught this man skulking around toting a rifle with a hunting scope. Dad hollered, told him to lay down that rifle and step out where we could see him. Well, he steps out from behind that bush but he don’t put that rifle down. Seeing none of us is armed, he rests that weapon back over his shoulder. He was a city feller from the poor color of him. He says real bold, “I ain’t here to hurt you people, and I ain’t broke no law. I got some business with a nigger name of Short.” Claimed he had something for Henry but would not say what.

Dad never took his eyes off him. He had the idea this man was sick inside his head or some way crazy. I was whispering how I better run and fetch his gun. Dad said, “Don’t try nothin.” He told the man we didn’t know where Henry Short was at and wouldn’t tell him even if we did. He said, “Mister, you are trespassin, and trespassin is breakin the law. Don’t never come back onto my property.” And the man laughed at him. He said, “It ain’t even your property! I know all about you, Bud!” Then he walked off down the Trail to where he’d hid his car and headed back east where he come from.

When I finally got out of the convict labor business, I drove a school bus, I become a carpenter, I went back farming just so I could eat. Then I quit farming, went over to Miami, built me a gas station, and a few years later, this same man rolled in there. Course he was older, but I knew him—same ice blue eyes with that dark ring, same solid set to him. He said straight off he was still huntin that nigra, said this man Short was kind of like his hobby. I told him to get his automobile out of my station.

This feller nods but he don’t go no place, he’s setting there lookin me over out his window. And I’m getting edgy, I’m starting to get mad, when he says to me real soft, “Back up, my friend, don’t get your pecker in the wringer. Let’s say some nigger shot your daddy, and none of your brothers had guts enough to go take care of it. Now what would you do?”

I guess he figured he had brung me around to his own way of thinking, cause he flashed me a bad grin like he had proved his point. And damn if he don’t hand me this card with a phone number—no name, only that number. And he says, “You understand me, Mr. House? All you got to do is call and then you’re out of it.” Lifted his fingertips to his brow in a kind of a salute, and winked and drove on out of there, screeching his tires!

Not long after that I left Miami, because all them Cubans that was taking over, they wouldn’t buy no gas from us poor Angle-os. Spanish-American War all over again, guns and all, only this time them Spaniards run us Angle-os right out. My last customers give me a nice sticker to put on my rear bumper when I left for good: LAST AMERICAN OUT OF MIAMI BRING THE FLAG.