South of the Tamiami Trail, the road entered the coastal mangrove, arriving at last at a humpbacked bridge over the tidal creek called the Haiti Potato River, from which, in the late nineteenth century, black muck had been heaved to build a patch of high ground for a hunting camp. The Haiti Potato became the Allen River, after William Allen, the first settler, then the Storter River, after the family which established an Indian trading post and post office in 1890. Before 1913, when Walter Langford and his partners dredged a canal from Everglade north through the swamps, using the spoil bank to support a railway to Deep Lake, the shack community called Everglade, three miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, had only been accessible by sea.
The original idea for that small gauge citrus railway came from E. J. Watson, who had offered to manage the Deep Lake Plantation in a letter that his son-in-law Banker Langford never answered. George W. Storter, Senior, had driven the first spike and George W. Junior drove the second, and the rest of the fourteen-mile track was laid by convict labor. Four years later, 17,000 crates of citrus were shipped out by sea. When Deep Lake Plantation collapsed in the early twenties, the railway was used to haul construction materials eight miles north to the Tampa-Miami Trail. Subsequently the rails were removed and the rail bed surfaced for this county road.
From the small bridge across the tidal river, Lucius described to Andy House what was left of the old landmarks. In the period of Trail construction, a small community of black laborers known as Port DuPont had sprouted up across the river from the fish docks. “Looks like this river isn’t wide enough,” Sally commented, “because with all this new talk about civil rights, the white folks here on the south bank aim to move the black ones to the old construction camps back north at Copeland. As long as they stay ten miles out in the sticks, they’ll be free to enjoy any civil right they want!”
“Folks on the Bay don’t take to nigras and they never did,” Andy admitted sadly. “Black feller tries to catch a fish anywhere down around these islands, he might get a bullet past his ear to run him off. Ain’t one black man lives today at Everglade or Chokoloskee, neither one.” He looked troubled. “Course there’s good folks that don’t feel that way, but they don’t do nothin about it—they just don’t speak up. And you know something? I might been one of ’em.”
On the south side of the bridge, behind the seafood-packing sheds along the river, small, low houses were scattered loosely like spilled produce, and beyond them rose the ornamental palms in the civic center of what was now Everglades City. “A lot of these old cottages through here, that’s my kinfolks,” Sally said. “Got ’em in Everglade, got ’em in Chokoloskee, all hitched up to one another like stuck dogs. When she married a Harden, this li’l ol’ gal got disinherited from the whole bunch. Got disinherited from an old nail-sick hulk that’s sinking away into a mud bank back upriver, and an old step-side pickup with a paint job that never did get past the prime coat, and maybe some kind of measly share of one of these old shacks with the tin roof sagging from rain leak and mold, and mosquitoes riding mean dogs through the busted screens, and crusted plastic dishes and grease-stained unpaid bills on the kitchen table.
“And they don’t give a damn. They are proud to be broke and out of work and never know where the next payment is coming from, they damn well like it that way! There’s not a Harden in south Florida who lives in the sorry way of some of these damn lawless know-nothings who used to give the Harden family so much hell!
“But my old man and his kind, they aren’t poor white trash, the way people say. They are rich white trash who aim to live in the same poor-white-trash way their daddies did. Those shacks might look like they’re ready to fall down, but the occupants are in there sitting on big bank accounts from gator hides, guns, moonshine, God knows what. You fight your way through the tin door of that li’l doodad trailer over there, you’d be blasted back out by a new TV the size and voltage of the electric chair up there at Raiford, spang in the middle of their six-pack redneck mess!”
When disgusted, Sally dropped her educated accents and spoke with a harsh and grotesque humor which (though he knew better than to mention it) reminded Lucius of her rich-white-trash daddy. She stared out of the car window like something trapped.
“Whidden Harden married me because I had some spirit. My batteries weren’t dead the way they are in most of the worn-out females around here.” She tossed her chin at the dilapidated houses. “And he married me because I felt ashamed about the way the Hardens had been treated, and because he hoped our marriage might help heal the feud between our families.”
Lucius glanced back at Andy, who had closed his eyes.
“Yes, the feud! Are you two going to pretend you don’t remember how my damned uncles murdered those young Hardens at Shark River?”
Andy House opened his eyes again. “That was back there in the Fish Wars, Sally. Very hard times and hard feelins. Them young Carr boys lost their heads. That don’t mean there ain’t plenty of fine men in your family. I’ve known ’em since I was a boy, and most of ’em are First Florida Baptists who don’t touch a drop—honest, self-respectin folks who are trying to get by best way they can, same as they always done. Most of ’em ain’t smugglers nor ‘rich white trash,’ neither. They are poor people. And they are poor because this is a fishing village where the fishing has died out and the huntin along with it, and even tourists stay away because there ain’t no bathing beaches back here in the mangroves, not even a Gulf breeze, only mosquitoes.
“So men gets desperate to support their families, and some of ’em turn to night trades like their daddies done, and their granddaddies, too. This town is getting a rough reputation, cause moonshiners and smugglers don’t like outsiders. Honest citizens who got lawbreakers in the family don’t like ’em neither, so why would any visitors want to come here, let alone come back?”
“Mr. House, your dad left the Bay when you were still a boy, and most of the other Houses are gone, too!” Sally cried shrilly. “Gone to someplace civilized like Naples or Fort Myers where there’s something to do after supper besides screw your sister! Something besides high-school basketball and church bingo, is what I mean!” she finished desperately, raising her hands up to her face. The break and tearing in her voice startled them more than what she’d said, and all three fell quiet, not knowing what to say.
In midafternoon there was no one in the street, and no car moving, only a dusty road-gang truck manned by a plier-faced guard whose sunglasses twitched in their direction like the hard eyes of a fly. Two black convicts and two white ones, in juxtaposed pairs, stood on the truck bed. The young whites swayed recklessly in the center of the bed, thumbs hooked in the hip pockets of their jeans, while the two blacks, indifferent, maintained easy balance with one fingertip each on the high side boards. When Sally Brown looked out her window, the black convicts looked past her, while the white boys cocked their pelvises and whistled.
She gazed about her at the empty streets. “Great to be back home,” she said, “if you like home.” She was watching the black pickup truck, which came up from behind and slowed, then rumbled past, leaving a loud wake of country music.
The huge mahogany that had volunteered along the Haiti Potato River in the nineteenth century still guarded the old Storter trading post, now the hotel. The rambling white building was the last of the Old Everglade that Lucius had known at the turn of the century when he came from Chatham River to board with the Storter family during school days. Here they left Andy, who hoped to find Hoad Storter. “Don’t have to walk me,” he protested at the door. “My old shoes still know where to go.”
Sally Brown would stay with Sandy Albritton, one of the last old-timers who had actually witnessed the shooting of Ed Watson. The Albrittons lived at Half Way Creek, an old Bay settlement east of the new causeway built in recent years to connect Chokoloskee Island to the mainland. In front of the house was an old sign reading COLD BEER AND BAIT. A faded mullet boat was up on blocks in Sandy’s yard, and beside it sat an ancient coupe whose paint had been beaten to a grainy brown by years of sun and rain. The front porch screen was diaphanous with rust, and the porch space overflowed with yellowed newspapers and assorted litter.
A woman with gray-streaked raven hair down to her hips and a prominent mole under her left eye appeared at the front door in a mauve bathrobe. “That you, Sally? Don’t know no better than to come in at the front? Who’s that old feller fetchin your valise? You got you some kind of a sugar daddy or somethin?”
Annie Albritton waggled her fingers at Lucius Watson from behind the screen. “Only foolin, Colonel, darlin!” she said coyly. “I knew that you was who you was soon as I seen you!”
“Cousin Sally,” came an old man’s voice. “That purty little gal and me is kissin cousins.”
“Maybe she don’t admit to it,” said Annie, unhooking the screen and waving them inside. “What y’all waitin on? You like miskeeters?”
Sandy Albritton said, “Colonel? Is that really you? We heard you was here some place but we never believed it!” The two men exchanged a bony handshake. “I knowed this feller from way back when we called him Lucius! We used to visit at the Bend, see Mr. Watson’s trained-up pig by the name of Betsy! Ain’t that somethin?” He stood back a little, hands resting on Lucius’s shoulders. “Well, time ain’t been kind to you, it sure ain’t, but you look better’n me, I will say that!”
Sandy Albritton was frail and pale-haired, with hard drink marks. His wife was younger, a whiskey-voiced wild swamp darling of yore gone slack and rueful but still itched by her old demons. She jumped right in, beating her husband to their common memories.
“Well now, let me think back. After 1910, the Willie Browns who were my Brown cousins—Sally here don’t think too much of ’em, but I enjoyed ’em—they got the quitclaim to the Watson Place, cause they was very best of friends to Mr. Watson. Us kids got to visit Chatham every summer! I recall one time we come in without warning, scared poor Aunt Fanny so darn bad she dropped a whole pot of fresh milk. She said her nerves was shot to hell around that place, cause she expected Leslie Cox at any minute! Us little girls was always scared down there, wanted to sleep in bed between the bigger kids. The boys wanted us in there, too, but their reasons was different, if you get my meanin.” Pinning her hair with a rhinestone barrette in the form of a red-eyed alligator, she winked at Sally. “Nosir, they never got the blood up off that floor.”
Sandy said, “She ain’t even from here. She’s one of them damn Lowes from Marco. I don’t believe she ever went to Chatham in her life.” He glared balefully at his wife. “So I can’t figure your damn story out too good.”
Sally asked, “Has he always been as rude as that?”
“You know why I’m rude.” Sandy’s sneer expressed the sincere disgust in which decent men viewed the deceits of women.
Annie shook her head. “He was all lovey-dovey when I married him. He was after young meat, that dirty feller. I didn’t know what I was in for, marryin a fisherman. Up at three A.M. to get his breakfast for him, that was the worst part, and even at three A.M. he was all over me—”
“She’s still doin it,” Sandy confided to Lucius. “Makin my breakfast, I mean.” He contemplated his wife with mixed emotions. “Before she got so fat she looked all right—hard to believe that, ain’t it? I don’t guess nobody would have her now,” he added gloomily.
Holding Lucius’s attention, Annie waved him off. “The days I’m talkin about, o’ course, was when Walker Carr was on Chatham Bend in the Depression. His boys was all after me—”
“Listen to that! Them Carr boys wasn’t after you, they was after Edie Harden, same as I was!”
“Now in them times,” his wife persisted, “there was still a lot of Injuns coming into Chokoloskee, used to set around that great big pot of sofkee grits, pass the wood spoon. The women had their babies under Smallwood’s store, they’d go out in the water to wash off—I seen that a time or two myself. My husband here—he married me when I turned thirteen, filthy old feller—he used to sell moonshine to the Injuns, then go drink with ’em till he got back most of what he sold!”
She gazed at Sandy, who gazed right back with the same rancorous affection. “I think you was a drunk,” she said. “You used to scare me. His best friend was the medicine man, ol’ Doctor Tiger, remember, Colonel? Still wore that old-time Injun skirt and neckerchief and blouse, and Injun turban?”
“When he got drunk, Doc Tiger used to hint how he knew what become of Leslie Cox.” Sandy Albritton coughed up some catarrh. “I seen that feller Cox a time or two, so I was fixin to ask Doc Tiger all about it, but that ol’ Injun’s secret went down with him, if he ever had one.”
“Oh my, them were the days! That night this old man settin here, he was so darn drunk he was snowed under, and Doc Tiger right along with him. That ol’ heathen was down to just a-mumblin. Sandy jumped up hollerin how that mumblin must mean that Doc Tiger wanted to head home, so we pushed him off in his dugout, aimed him east. Might of pushed too hard, cause darn if that ol’ dugout don’t turn turtle! First time we ever seen a Injun so drunk he capsized his dugout! We kept an eye peeled for a while, but nope, there weren’t no sign of him. That old medicine man weren’t nowheres to be seen, just his poor dog swimmin round and round, barkin, you know.” Annie chuckled at the memory, shaking her head.
“I think we drowned him,” her husband agreed. “That old redskin was never laid eyes upon again.” Lucius searched their faces for some sign of irony or regret and felt a little chill when he found nothing. “Them were the days, all right,” Annie repeated.
“Now them old-time Injuns,” she said, “they wasn’t just dirty redskins, they was our friends. Them days we didn’t have nothing but a skiff and a set of oars. This old man here would take me coon hunting down around Chevelier Bay, go up them creeks. Prettiest sight in all the world, to see them Injuns setting quiet around their fire, and the firelight glinting off them beads that their women wore in stacks around their necks.” Her fingers played a little at her throat. “My life with the Injuns was the most beautiful time of my whole life. If I tried till doomsday I could never tell you how beautiful it was or what it meant to me.” She looked momentarily confused. “Even I don’t hardly know what all it meant to me, I only know it tore me up and broke my heart.”
“Well, she had me tore up a good while before that, so she had it coming,” her husband said, sour again.
Annie ignored him, still thinking about Indians. Her face, which had been close to tears, turned sullen. “Colonel? You been up on the Trail lately?” she said accusingly. “You seen them faked-up Injun villages they got there for the tourists? Rasslin alligators? Genuine-type Injun jewelry from Hong Kong and New Jersey? Well, them people ain’t beautiful no more! They ain’t even real Injuns no more, and that’s the truth!”
During their visit the phone rang twice, and Annie Albritton’s response made clear that these callers wished to know exactly what their visitor was up to.
“Why he ain’t no such of a thing! Just asking a few questions, is all. What? Not nosy questions! Asking about his daddy, s’all it is. Old-timey things! What’s that? Course I’ll be careful!” She listened a moment, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. “You ain’t workin for the federal gov’ment, are you?”
“You’ve been spotted for a fed,” Sally whispered, gleeful.
Sandy frowned and muttered. The feds were not a joke. “Way them boys figure, you might be informin. Revengin on your daddy that way,” Sandy said.
Annie put down the phone with care and picked her way like a sick cat back to her place. The little house had fallen silent, all but the relentless tick-tack-ticking of that rickety alarm clock in the kitchen that seemed to be dogging Lucius’s steps all over Florida. The Albrittons stared imploringly at Sally, who was enjoying the whole business and perversely refused to clarify the atmosphere.
Annie hummed a little, kicked the bent dog away—“Spot’s just the lovinest dawg!” Settled down again, she marveled, “Colonel Watson!” and hummed a little more. “I like to eat good, don’t you, Colonel? That’s all us old folks can still do, so we might’s well do it good.”
“I been thinkin I’ll prob’ly take up sex again,” her husband said.
“Now Lucius Watson was a fisherman for years,” Annie told Sally in a dreamy voice. She glanced at Lucius slyly, humming a bit more. “It was only later on they called him Colonel. I was scared of him because he was exactly like my daddy said his daddy was—bow to you, wouldn’t let you pay for nothing, too goody-goody altogether. One time he bought me a ice cream, I weren’t but fourteen-fifteen years of age. Bought my husband here a beer while he was at it. Oh, Colonel was always so polite, like his daddy before him; do anything you want, then he might kill you. Colonel Watson’s manners, they was just upstanding.”
Her husband ignored her. “I got bunions, do you?” he said to Lucius. “Want to see ’em? Worstest thing I ever got, and I had plenty.”
“My dad said he was always scared of Mr. Watson, said they all were. They knew a desperado like Ed Watson would never let himself be taken, never had and never would, so every man on that landing knew what was coming. When E. J. Watson swung that gun up, them men froze.”
“Colonel come here to find out about his daddy, and all you want to talk about is your old man, who was over to Marco and weren’t nothin much to talk about in the first place!”
“So anyways”—Annie rolled her eyes—“Mr. Colonel Watson made him up a list of all them men.” She gave Lucius a crafty look. “Colonel? Where d’you suppose that list of yours has got to?”
“Hardly anybody on that list is still alive,” Lucius said casually. The very mention of the list made him feel weary. “Anyway, it never meant much. Kind of a hobby.”
Sandy Albritton looked skeptical and somber. “The sons are still around, and grandsons, too. Man lookin for revenge would not have to hunt far to find a target, especially a man who shoots like you done, man and boy—”
“He’s not looking for revenge,” Sally declared in a firm voice. She had been smiling at Lucius’s discomfiture, but now she saw that the atmosphere was shifting and that the Albrittons, infected by small-town paranoia, were growing uneasy and afraid. “We had one of the sons in the car with us all morning, and if Mister Colonel wanted his revenge, Andy House was probably the one to start with.”
“Hell, I trust Colonel and I always did.” Sandy got to his feet, motioning to his old friend to follow him outside. “That woman don’t know nothin about E. J. Watson,” Sandy told him, plenty loud enough for his wife to hear. The screen door banged behind them. He led the way down the rain-greened rotten steps and crept into the colorless old car, where he cranked the windows tight against mosquitoes. “My office,” he explained. In the stifling heat, through the cracked windshield flecked with broken insects, he glowered at the hulk of his rotting boat. “A man don’t need no aggravation whilst he’s talkin, that is all I’m sayin.”
Old Man Sandy scrunched down in the seat, hiked his knees high as his nose, swung his black shoes onto the dashboard, and recited his eyewitness impressions of Mr. Watson’s death. When he was finished, he turned his head to see how his friend had taken it. When Lucius asked calmly if the men had planned it, Sandy gave no sign that he had heard this question, gazing out past his old mullet boat toward Half Way Creek.
Eventually he said, “That feller who rung my telephone just a while back? Crockett Junior.” Again he turned his head to peer at Lucius, to see how much he knew. “And that woman settin in my house is his damn mother. Sally tell you?”
Lucius was astonished. “Annie?”
“Annie. Yessir. That’s her name, all right.” He rolled down the window, spat, rolled it up tight again. “Life is a bitch, now ain’t it?”
“Sally has never said a word. I even forgot until just lately that Speck Daniels was her father—”
Sandy Albritton held up his hand. “Nobody mentions that name without my permission!” He worked up more phlegm and spat it forcefully out of the window, remaining silent until satisfied that Colonel Watson was ready to hear his story without interrupting.
“Back in the Depression-time, we was pret’ near starvin around here, so me’n a couple of other boys, we took and killed a steer to feed our families. We was turned in, turned over to the law, and me and them other boys, we done a year at Raiford on the chain gang.”
“I remember something about that,” Lucius said.
“Well, you don’t remember what I aim to tell you, cause you never knowed about it, nor me neither. The baby boy that welcomed his daddy home from Raiford was still all red and wrinkled, hot out of the oven. But the mother told me, ‘No, no, honey! He is goin on three months of age, he was born just nine months to the day after our sweet partin!’ I was fixin to name the little feller Crockett Albritton after Speck, cause Speck was my best friend since we was boys, and he’d promised to look out for Annie while I was away. But my wife said, ‘No, no, honey!’ Said this baby boy was a chip off the ol’ block and she wanted his name to remind her of her darlin! Said her lovin heart was dead set on the name of Sandy Junior.
“Right about then, the news come out how that damned Speck was the one who told the owner how he seen us boys butcher that steer. We done it, all right, cause times was hard, but Speck Daniels never seen us do it, he just heard about it. Nobody couldn’t figure out why he was so willin to make trouble, knowin it wouldn’t earn him one thin dime. Well, not long after that, ol’ Speck was found half-dead back in the bushes here, boot treads all over him and a mouthful of broken teeth. I believe he spent a pretty good while in the hospital. Anyone else would of left the Bay or tried to make amends. Didn’t do neither. He took his punishment, never spoke about it, went right on like before. Takes a real ornery sonofabitch like him to stick around a place where nobody had no use for him at all. Didn’t need no friends in life, I guess.”
Albritton glared at him, in pain. “I never talked to nobody about this stuff!” he said, resentful.
“Sandy, you don’t have to tell me—”
“I told you it already. Anyways, if I don’t tell, they’s other ones that will. Might’s well hear the truth.” He hawked and spat again. “So years fly by the way they do, and next thing you know, this Sandy Junior and Speck’s daughter Sally, they get goin pretty hot and heavy in the high school. Annie got wind of it and done her best to break it up without spillin no more beans than what she had to. That Marco woman that I got in there”—he pointed at his house—“interfered so bad she almost caused a feud in the two families, cause only Speck knew what she was up to, and Speck never cared to admit nothin nor get drawed into the mess in any way. Them two kids could hump their selves to death for all he cared. But Annie nagged and threatened him so much that he got fed up and tossed poor little Sally into his truck and hauled her away to some kinfolk in Fort Myers.
“Only thing, them kids had no idea what they done wrong. The boy was rarin to foller her, he just weren’t aimin to be stopped, so that female in there, she feared the worst. Finally she come blubberin to me with the whole story about how my ol’ partner Speck Daniels was the natural born daddy of the both of ’em.”
He nodded for a long while, looking grim. “I put a stop to it. I notified Sandy Junior Albritton how his rightful name startin that day was Crockett Junior Daniels, and I sent him off to live with Crockett Senior. And his little sister that he loved so dearly and wanted so bad to put his dingus into was told the sad news as soon as she come home.”
They sat in silence for a while, out of respect for this disagreeable life situation.
“So that poor girl settin inside was so darn horrified by her own daddy, and so tore up in her feelins about her brother, that she run out of her house, never went back. Took her mama’s name, but her mama bein dead, she didn’t rightly have no place to go. Well, me and Annie, we was scrappin all over the house, but we always been so fond of our almost-daughter-in-law that we put her in Sandy Junior’s room in place of him. Probably been in there with her panties off a time or two already, but none of us didn’t say nothin about that.
“That’s how come that girl got married so fast, sheerly out of her terrible mortification. Sally got scarred up pretty bad, and she ain’t over it. You ever notice she got kind of a sharp tongue? She is still pretty hot under the collar, and she’s out to prove somethin, don’t ask me what.
“I never blamed Annie all that much. I wore out a stick on her big butt so’s she couldn’t sit down for a month and let it go at that. I understood her, see. She was full of life to overflowin back in them days, and Speck bein her husband’s oldest friend, he sidled up while I was in the pen. Got some liquor into her, to comfort her, y’know, and next thing you know, she had to have it. They’s fellers will take advantage of a sad and lonesome female, especially females that look as good as Annie did. And anyways, it weren’t nobody but me that asked that bastrid to look out for my darlin while I done my time. I kind of knew who Speck was before then, but I didn’t think he’d do somethin like that to the last friend he had left in southwest Florida.
“I never took a stick to Speck, in case you’re wonderin. With Speck, there ain’t no halfway measures. You shoot at Speck, you best not miss, cause he ain’t goin to.” He squinted at Lucius. “Sure, I thought about it. But I knew I couldn’t kill him, not in a fair fight, and I also knew I weren’t the kind to shoot him from behind. Not that there’s many would of minded. Folks would of stepped right up and shook my hand, I reckon, stead of laughin behind my back all my whole life. But I made my choice and I have lived with it, and I’ll die with it, too, one of these days.
“Know somethin? I don’t hate that man no more. As the years go by, it’s him I miss the most out of that bunch I was raised up with! Crockett Daniels is a lot of fun to get rip-roarin drunk with, I will tell you that. A lot of fun! He was right there when we drowned poor ol’ Doc Tiger by mistake! Ain’t hardly got a enemy that won’t admit that ol’ Speck was his drinkin buddy to start off with. Yessir, we had wild nights together, Speck and me. I get to thinkin about them times we had as boys, huntin and drinkin, chasin after the bad girls, we just never seemed to stop hootin and laughin. Life was real long back in them days, and the nights never seemed to end. Funny, ain’t it? I been thinkin lately that I miss Speck more than I would of missed that woman in there if she got drunk and fell into the river. But all them good old times we had never meant no more to that damn feller than the fish gurry in the bilges of his boat.”
Watching the women come out onto the porch, Sandy raised his voice to drown out his wife, who was railing at him for taking Colonel outside. When Lucius rolled his window down, Annie Albritton told him to return next morning when her husband was out if he wanted the real lowdown on his daddy—“no ifs, ands, or buts!”
“Might give you more butt than you bargained for!” her husband shouted for her benefit, but his voice was muffled by his rolled-up window.
“She was brave to come to you that time, to protect the young people,” Lucius reminded him before leaving the car.
“Well, that ain’t none of your damn business, Colonel, but it’s true. That’s why I’m still settin here thirty years later.”
Sally pointed across a weedy lot toward the small houses on the creek. “You can go visit those old friends of yours,” she said ill-humoredly, as if suspicious of what Sandy might have told him. “One of those damn Carrs who shot the Harden boys, I mean. See that purple house, the one on posts? See that chain-link fence he’s got around it? It’s Sunday so he’s probably in there right this minute. Afraid some Harden might come by and blow his head off before he can get safely to his grave.”
Lucius climbed the outside stair to the door of the purple house. At his knock, a reedy voice told him to come in. Mr. and Mrs. Owen Carr, seated in their front room, were intent on a small black-and-white TV, and neither rose or offered him a seat, or seemed to hear his apologies for the intrusion. He thought at first they’d been expecting someone else, since Owen Carr, looking thin and sickly, was staring at him with that horror of mortality which seemed to anticipate a dark old age. Eyes and nostrils reddened, thin arms twitching, he clutched his chair arms as he might a wheelchair. His wife was an ample pinkish woman, uncomplicated in demeanor. Her face had betrayed a tremor at Lucius’s intrusion, then composed itself as smoothly as a pond. She continued knitting.
A little tall for the low room, Lucius seemed to loom over the inhabitants. Penny Carr pointed her baby-blue needle at a chair, but not until he was moving toward it of his own accord. “We got word you’d be coming,” she told Lucius, her voice flat, without inflection.
Before he could ask how they had learned so fast, Owen Carr burst out, “I was just tellin Penny how Walker Carr was your dad’s best friend, right from the day a stranger name of Watson first showed up at Half Way Creek and bought a schooner from William Brown, who was my granddad on my mamma’s side. My daddy and Ed Watson, they was real good friends! Watson visited regular, liked to talk crops, and our whole family had a high opinion of him, a very high opinion!” Carr talked faster and faster. “Colonel, if I said it once, I said it a thousand times, I don’t believe the Watson family got one thing to be ashamed about!” By now he was glancing wildly at his wife.
Lucius was astonished by Carr’s fear of him, which he worsened inadvertently by saying, “I believe you were a witness to my father’s death—”
The man’s stare reflected his belief that Colonel Watson must have come in search of vengeance. Racing to disassociate himself from that event, he quickly became short of breath, in fact looked ill. “In 1910, I was only a little feller, Colonel! Only nine years old! I was over on the island, stayin with kin. Whole island knowed trouble was comin!
“My dad was dead set against that killing, and I sure hope nobody ain’t told you different! Him and Willie Brown yelled at them men to go to Everglade, see Justice Storter, see what they should do accordin to the law. Tried and tried but he couldn’t head ’em off, it was too late. Every man there knew what was goin to happen! They aimed to shoot Ed Watson dead no matter what! I heard it was Old Man Henry Smith spoke up and said, ‘Let’s draw straws, put a live round in only the one gun, so’s nobody will know for sure who done the killin!’ But no man there thought one bullet would stop him!”
Lucius nodded. “How about Henry Short? Was he there with them?”
Owen Carr winked slyly. “Now don’t you go fallin for that ol’ rigamarole! Them men was hunters, they could clip the plumes off an egret’s head, never draw blood! They never needed no damn nigger to take care of nothin!” He uttered a derisive squawk, meant to be laughter. “Colonel? You still keepin that ol’ list? Cause if I was to think back on it a little, I bet I could name you every last man in that crowd!”
“You already named one,” his wife warned him. “Anyways, the man didn’t ask you about names.” Coolly she met Lucius’s gaze, her needles feeding swiftly on the wool like the quick mandibles of a blue beetle. “He can read the names off of his own list any time he wants.”
Owen spoke again, in gusts of breath. “Course I don’t rightly remember now just who was in on it. All us boys runnin around—Crockett Daniels, Harley Wiggins, Sandy Albritton—Jim Thompson might been with us, come to think about it.”
Here he glanced at his wife, who said, “Might been, is right. Jim weren’t but six years old.”
“Well, I was there and don’t deny it! A eyewitness! I seen your dad’s old shotgun comin up, double-barrel shotgun! I ain’t never forgot that sight! Then a rifle cracked out of the dusk, and after that, all hell broke loose, just a hellacious racket, I can sit back and hear it still today! Cause if all of ’em shot, then who would know who done it? I reckon that’s what they settled on beforetime!”
“According to your daddy,” his wife said.
Owen Carr’s testimony, which directly disputed the posse’s claim of self-defense, was too significant to be accepted lightly. Lucius gave the man a moment to calm down. Then he said carefully, “So the killing was planned in advance. You are quite sure of that.”
The Carrs looked at each other. “That’s what come down in our families,” Penny said.
“That’s right! It come down in our families!”
“Did your father tell you which men planned it?” Lucius paused. “Or when the killing was discussed? You can tell me, Owen—they’re all dead now—but accuracy is important.”
“Important to who?” the woman said coldly. “Not to us folks around here.”
Lucius ignored her, trying to hold the eye of Owen Carr, who twitched in consternation. “I was there that day,” he muttered. “I weren’t but nine years old. I remember a heck of a racket and dogs barkin. Mrs. Smallwood sent after his gold watch for Mrs. Watson, and Isaac Yeomans laughed and said, ‘Tell the Widder Watson that we sure are sorry but that nice gold watch has been blowed to smithereens.’ ”
“That’s two,” his wife said.
“I had those names long ago,” Lucius assured her, keeping his gaze fastened on her husband.
Carr cried out eagerly, “One thing our family always did agree about, Colonel Watson was a real fine man, same as his daddy! I was younger’n you but we knew you good because you was in friendship with our family before the trouble!”
“The trouble,” said Lucius, to encourage him.
“He never asked you nothing about that,” his wife warned Owen, who gave her a panicked look. She was knitting more rapidly, quick-fingered, impassive, and Lucius decided to back off a little.
“You say someone told you I was coming here today?”
“Now, honey, who was tellin us about Colonel Watson?” Owen looked furtive again, and his voice had lost all animation. Trying to dodge his visitor’s gaze, he whined a little like a dog in nightmare, as if racking his poor brain for names was exquisite torment.
To give them a chance to smooth their feathers, Lucius asked after Penny’s father, Jack Demere, who had worked at Chatham Bend in Papa’s time—did she think he might sign a petition? “Nosir, I don’t think he will,” she said. “He’s dead.” When he said he was sorry to hear that, she shrugged. “Oldest man on Chokoloskee. Couldn’t hold that job forever, I don’t guess.”
While she talked, her husband twitched and brooded, frowning hard. As if unable to bear so much suspense, he brought up the Harden feud again of his own accord, but so obliquely that for a moment Lucius had no idea what he was talking about. “I already told folks all I know about that, Colonel. You was there. You come there to the Bend that day, come with the Harden men.” Having blurted that out, he looked confused and gloomy, lifting his arms from the chair, letting them fall again, then falling still except for spasmodic twitching of his hands. “Life happens to a man, is all it is,” he mourned.
“I went there with the Harden men when you boys still denied it,” Lucius said gently. “I never did hear your side of that story.”
Penny’s needles paused as if the mandibles had stopped while the beetle listened. “What story might that be?” she warned again, as her frail husband took cover in a coughing fit. She took a deep breath and put her needles down entirely, smoothed her lap. She stood up. “Well, we won’t keep you,” Penny said, compelling Owen’s silence with a needle pointed at his eye.
Before departing, Lucius asked them to sign his petition to the Park to save the Watson house, since both members of this household had known Chatham Bend well during their youth. Mrs. Carr glanced at her husband, who seemed unnerved by their visitor’s request. She said, “Nosir, we won’t sign nothing in this house. Not today.”
Entering the dark pine lobby of the Everglades Hotel, with its yellowing marine charts and huge mounted fish, Lucius stopped a moment at the desk. The blue-haired receptionist, engaged in her own telephone gossip, was utterly indifferent to his presence, and he waited at a discreet distance, hands clasped behind his back, flexing his legs a little with small knee bends. When eventually he cleared his throat, the woman looked up, battle ready. The color of her eye makeup was running, and she seemed to be biting the telephone as she talked. Finally she tucked it under her ear and waved him forward. Perhaps, he thought, she would be less haughty if she knew how much lipstick was smeared like gore across her teeth.
Asked if there were any message for L. W. Collins or Lucius Watson, Blue-hair snapped, “Which?” When he gently persisted, the woman yawned with that red grimace, like a carnivore. “No messages,” she said, without a glance at the scattered memos on her desk. He wondered how to tangle with this brute. “From Mr. Arbie Collins? Or a Robert Watson? How about Watson Dyer?” She ignored him.
Disgruntled, he went out onto the porch overlooking the water, where Hoad Storter was describing the river scene to Andy House with gestures which the blind man could not see. Lucius listened with pleasure as his old friend portrayed the crab boats passing down the tidal river and the gold-and-purple bronzing on the heads of pelicans on their nests on the bright mangrove wall across the water. Although aware that his listener was dozing, he urged the blind man to listen for the silver mullet, flipping upward toward the air and light, then falling back to the surface of the channel with that dainty smack so mysteriously audible from far away. Lucius suspected that these wistful sketches were for Hoad’s benefit, too, imprinting images against the day when he could no longer come to Storter River to witness these common miracles moment by moment as they rose and vanished in the great turn and glisten of his passing world.
Hoad greeted Lucius with that chipmunk grin, pointing to an old green wicker chair. “I come back every year just to remember! Course Andy knows everything I’m telling him, but he might have forgotten a few things about this coast after so many years as a city slicker in Miami.” He chuckled when the blind man grunted in comfortable protest, refolding his big hands on his stomach.
Hoad was a small man with round red cheeks and a seraphic smile, and his transparent girlish skin appeared to have gone unshaven throughout life. In fact, he looked much as he had when they were boys, fooling and fishing in small boats along this river. “Speaking of mullet, you recall them schools we seen south of Caxambas? Remember, Lucius? Two-three miles across!”
When Lucius nodded, his friend laughed out of sheer pleasure in the sight of him. “Andy told me you’d be coming, Lucius!” Having known him since boyhood, Hoad used his given name. “I expected to see that professor who spoke at Naples, all dressed up in navy blue jacket and linen trousers like those Yankee yachtsmen who tied up to this dock back in the twenties, you remember? And what do I see but the same good old feller I remembered! Same old sun-bleached khakis and salt-rotted sneakers and faded shirt buttoned at wrists and collar against insects—‘so’s the dirt won’t show,’ you used to say, though all of us knew that Lucius Watson wore the cleanest shirt—maybe the only clean shirt!—in the Ten Thousand Islands!
“I remember your daddy, too! Other night there at the church hall, I was thinking how my dad Cap’n Bembery always saw the good side of Ed Watson. Harry McGill who married my sister Eva, he might of been in the crowd that day at Smallwood’s, but there weren’t no Storters mixed up in it, not one. It was only when my uncle George got old, after so many years of telling newcomers about Ed Watson, that he concluded he had took part, too. Lucky thing we had written proof that Uncle George was on jury duty at Fort Myers or he might have wound up on some darn old list!”
Lucius laughed unhappily—“Oh Lord!”—and Hoad reached and patted his friend’s arm, to take any sting out of his teasing. “Yep, Storters stayed friends with everybody—those who took part and those who didn’t—and we’re friends today.” And he offered a fine friendly smile to prove it.
On this afternoon beside the river, Hoad was happy to be reminded of the very little that he had forgotten. Together, they regathered the details of how they had netted pompano off the Gulf beaches, mostly at night in the cool season, following the fish schools from Captiva Island all the way south to the middle Keys. When they wanted sea trout, they fished the grass banks and the current points. For snook, they worked the channel edges, and the deep holes around a river mouth for the big grouper.
“I was telling Andy what a fine life it was, to have your own boat at your own dock, and go to work when you felt like it and not before!” Hoad cried. “Sometimes them mullet jumping was as thick as raindrops, Andy, so many that it sent the price down! We left off netting, hooked up mullet strips, hand-lined redfish and big trout, two-three hundred pounds a day! This man here could tell you! But mullet strip don’t work no more, got to use shrimp, and you’re very lucky if you catch enough to pay your bait!” He laughed. “I quit when the fishing got so poor that I had to eat my own bait for my supper, to get some use out of them shrimps ’fore they went bad!
“Yessir! Mullet schools two and three miles across! Won’t never forget that! I tell my grandchildren all about it—got me some pretty nice grandchildren, Lucius! I’m a lucky man! You got you any, Lucius? No? I think grandchildren are pretty nice! I tell ’em all about the mullet, and how the noise of millions on the surface, it would deafen you! And know what them children told me? Said when they grow up, they aim to take good care of the wild things, and bring ’em back to the way they was, so they could see what their granddad was talking about!” Hoad sat back sighing, shaking his head. “Well, them poor little fellers ain’t never going to see nothing like we seen. It’s a pity, ain’t it? And all because that good Glades water is pouring away through them canals. How long can we go on wasting God’s good water, instead of taking care of it for our grandchildren?
“The Glades is getting bled to death by all that draining! At low tide at the end of rainy season in October, especially in a northeast wind, a man could lean out of his boat and drink the water in any inside bay along this coast, remember? Freshwater pressure flooding them rivers held the salt tide out where it belongs. Today you might have a quarter of that volume, and the brackish waterline where you find fish has moved back up into the creeks, way back up inside where a net fisherman can’t work!”
Lucius told Andy about setting net off the oyster bars at Lost Man’s, sliding up to the bars at night and punching down into the bilges with an oar blade and listening for the mysterious grunt of startled fish. The volume of the grunt would tell them whether there were enough fish around the bars to bother striking—fish enough to make the set worthwhile. Sometimes mullet would skip out nearer the shore, and he and Hoad would set around them with a gill net and smack the oars flat on the surface to drive the schools into the mesh.
But Andy had never been a fisherman and he dozed off again, and though Hoad smiled at Lucius’s evocation, nodding his small head, his reveries had strayed. Talking about his grandchildren had saddened him about the future of the Glades, which in their youth had been immense and inaccessible, mysterious. “Ducks by the thousands! Clouds of ’em! Now they’re all gone, too! Even the wasps are gone, you noticed? Them big hives along the mangrove channels? Darn it, boys, our good old earth is just fading away! Seems like we don’t know what we’re doing to this country, and we don’t care neither, long as there’s money in it. Seems to me that this country used to have more honor than you see today! I mean, what do you think, Lucius?”
But Hoad’s nature was too cheerful and inquisitive to stay depressed for long. Fed up with “old men who nagged after the past,” he talked about the Storter trading post, which was passing itself off these days as a hotel. The original house had been built by William Allen—twice, he said, because Allen had rebuilt on stilts after the Hurricane of 1873. He got engaged to the daughter of the French consul in Key West, but for some reason—and Hoad’s eyebrows rose in mock astonishment—she was so set against her banishment to this mangrove paradise that she threatened to destroy herself if she were brought here, and being a young woman of her word, that is what she did. William Allen sold his holding to the Storter family and went off to Pine Level, where he married a Mrs. Ellen Graham, a widow with two sons.
“I was telling Andy some of that old history here a while ago, and he got real excited, wondering if those sons could be the Grahams who turned out to be half brothers to Henry Short. I knew Henry well, fished with him often—good fisherman, too!—and he never breathed a word about those brothers!
“Plenty of Injuns around here at that time, but this place never had no nigras to speak of. In the early days, William Allen moved a mulatta cropper off his property for taking up with a white woman, and not long after that, the body of their little boy came floating down this river, right out here. Folks said that woman killed her boy, out of her shame, you know, but more’n likely it was her brothers who done it. No place for that poor little feller in their family line, I guess.
“A young black boy from the Cayman Islands, Erskine Rowland—we called him Dab—he turned up as a stowaway out of Key West. Lived in the jelly house, where we stored cane syrup and our jams and jellies, but some way he never felt that he belonged. At that time, Henry Short was the only other nigra on the Bay, but Henry was over on Chokoloskee and anyway, he moved south to the Islands after 1910. Dab got lonesome, he wanted to leave, he tried to stow away on my dad’s boat even after my Aunt Nannie took him into her own house. Course Dab didn’t eat with the family nor attend our school, but Aunt Nannie taught him to read and write, and Uncle George give him a banjo, he’d sit up practicing so late at night they had to holler at him. Dab Rowland became an expert banjo picker and an expert syrup maker and a fine all-around hand, he used to set net down in the Islands with me and my brothers, sometimes Henry Short. Yessir, them two boys was real fine fishermen, they done their work as good as anybody and a lot better’n most. It always did seem funny when you come to think about it—one of ’em lighter than most of the white men around here and the other one black as black can be, but both called niggers cause the way folks looked at things, there weren’t no difference!
“Dab and Henry fished with me and my brother Claude right around the mouth of Chatham River, this was 1910, and Henry would carry his rifle in the boat, never went without it. He had worked for Mr. Watson, said Watson always treated him real fine, but he purely dreaded him. Thought the world of him and scared to death of him, Claude always said. Mr. Watson might been the one man in south Florida on which black people and whites seen eye to eye.
“Later on, Dab got in trouble, had to move away. That was before you came back to the Islands. As for Henry, I don’t know what become of him—probably dead someplace. Seems like nigras couldn’t never get adjusted to our ways.”
The blind man grunted. “Amazin, ain’t it? How them darned nigras couldn’t never get adjusted to our ways?” Hoad stared at him, cheeks coloring, but Andy’s eyes remained closed, and in a moment he softly snored once again. He seemed to have spoken from deep in his dream, making Hoad uneasy.
Hoad spread old fingers on his knees and got carefully to his feet. “Feel like stretching your legs? Have a look at the old town or what is left of it?” He asked the waitress to notify Mr. House as soon as he awakened that they would be back in a short while. “I ain’t likely to skip town,” the blind man murmured.
Walking along under the old-fashioned streetlamps toward the former Collier County Courthouse on the circle, Hoad and Lucius were passed by the road-gang truck from Deep Lake prison camp. One of the whites now sat up front with the plier-faced guard, while on the truck bed, the other white boy stood apart from the two blacks. Any of them could have jumped and run, but the only way out of Everglade was that narrow road which ran eight miles north through water, mud, and mangrove before striking the higher ground along the Trail, and presumably the convicts knew that Plier Face was not a man to pass up a chance for a shot at a human target.
Tattooed arm stuck out the window, the favored con in the front seat was wearing the guard’s black cowboy hat. He raised his hand above the roof and erected his middle finger toward Hoad and Lucius, as if contemptuous of everything his elders stood for, and Lucius was glad that Storter hadn’t noticed.
At Half Way Creek somewhere around the early nineties, Cap’n Bembery Storter met Mr. E. J. Watson and became his friend. This was before Mr. Watson’s family come here from north Florida. Every Tuesday Mr. Watson came in his boat to Everglade, picked up his mail and his supplies from Uncle George Storter at the trading post, and consigned his packet to Cap’n Bembery on the Bertie Lee. He made it over to our house long about noon and ate at our table almost every week.
Mr. E. J. Watson was not a man you were liable to forget. I could draw his picture! Being his son, you probably thought he never changed, but over the years my dad had watched him thicken—still very strong but tending more toward stout. E. J. Watson had a deep red-brown hide—“That’s fire, from a life of sun and drink,” said Cap’n Bembery—but his auburn hair was grizzled in those later years, with gray mixed into a heavy mustache that tangled with long bushy sideburns and made him bristle out like a wild boar.
In those days, Mr. Watson was a friendly man, a jolly man, full of ginger, full of get up and go. Always had something funny to tell, good sense of humor, and always carrying on about the future of America—“the greatest nation in the history of the world!”—and also about Hawaii and the Philippines, and land claims in the Islands. He aimed to file a title claim on Chatham River, as Storters had done in Everglade and Smallwoods on Chokoloskee. It was only a matter of time, he declared, before this southwest coast was developed, and maybe he was just the man to do it. He’d laugh a little at his own ambition, but nobody had any doubt that he meant business. Uncle George always claimed he was the one who nicknamed your dad Emperor Watson, but Bill House said no, it was the old Frenchman, Jean Chevelier. Whoever it was, that name never bothered the Emperor one bit!
Mr. Watson also loved to talk about strains of sugar cane that might do better here in the sub tropics, how many gallons of syrup per acre and all that—he was getting close to 700 gallons at that time. Had a ten-horse engine with steam coils that fed into a 150-gallon kettle, twice the size of our Storter kettles, and Wiggins and House, too. Used fine Cuba cane, not our Georgia cane, and his syrup came out amber-gold in color, clear as fine honey. Island Pride—that syrup was famous! Got a good price for every gallon he could make, and he made 333 gallons every day! Old Man House, he would complain how Watson bought that good equipment with bad money, not honest money made by the sweat of his brow. And my dad said, “Well, Dan, maybe that’s so, but I never seen a man work harder than Ed Watson.”
Mr. Watson had been on this coast as long as most, but they still called him an outsider and standoffish. Claimed he wouldn’t hardly associate with nobody except Storters and Smallwoods cause he wanted to stay on the good side of the traders, who were the most well-to-do and influential. Well, that don’t seem fair neither. Your daddy liked people and most of ’em liked him. The William Browns at Half Way Creek who sold him his first schooner, they always said that E. J. Watson was a good man to do business with, and they wouldn’t hear a single word against him. It was only those ones scared of him who claimed he was aloof, and that was because they steered clear of him themselves.
Your dad was always well-behaved on Chokoloskee Bay and at Fort Myers, very careful about his family and good name, but in Key West and Port Tampa, he was a hell-raiser and no mistake. Cap’n Bembery brought back many a wild story about shooting the lights out in the bars and such as that. My dad was a loyal friend to him, no matter what, but sometimes he seemed leery of him, too.
One night in Eddie’s Bar—this was Key West—Mr. Watson grabbed a revolver away from some drunk young feller who was waving it around. “How in the hell do you work this thing!” he hollers, pretending he never shot a gun, and he shoots a half circle right around this feller’s toes as if the gun was just shooting by itself and he had lost control of that darned trigger. But when the chamber was empty, this young feller came up with a derringer he had hid in his boot, told E. J. Watson to dance in that same manner!
“Ain’t many men would try that trick with me,” Mr. Watson warned him, “let alone boys.” But this young feller only laughed and went ahead and made him do it. And that was the first we ever heard about Dutchy, who killed a deputy later that year. Dutchy was an arsonist, for hire, and the lawman caught him setting fire to a cigar factory. Went on the chain gang, got away after a year or two, and went and hid out at the Watson Place.
When Mr. Watson tried that shooting dance in Tampa, he got thrown in jail. But Key West was a wilder kind of place, seamen and soldiers, ships from all over the world, DINING AND DANCING, NINE TO ELEVEN; FIGHTING FROM ELEVEN TO TWO—that was the sign in Eddie’s Bar! There were so many fights that Mr. Watson could cut loose all he wanted, he just fit right in.
For many years Ed Watson was the bad man in that town. But until that extra drink when he got unruly and the crowd was looking for the door, they all wanted to step up and drink with him, they all wanted to trade stories about him, they were proud as pelicans about good ol’ E. J., so my dad said. The men told strangers in the bar how their ol’ pardner here, Ed Watson, had killed tough hombres out in Oklahoma where he had that famous shoot-out with Belle Starr. And Ol’ Ed, he’d just sit there looking dangerous, and finally he’d drawl out kind of modest how Belle and her foreman rode him down, had him cut off in a narrow neck of woods, so he had no choice but to swing around and drill ’em both.
There’d be a wild cheer for frontier justice, and right while those men were cheering he would turn to Cap’n Bembery and give him that slow old wink of his, hiking his thumb over his shoulder as if that bar crowd was the dumbest bunch of hayseeds he had ever come across. Them onlookers might not care for that, but they kept laughing anyway, pretending they knew right along it was all a joke.
Maybe five years after your dad’s death, before you came back to the Islands, my brother Rob was fishing with Harry McGill, and they went upriver to the Bend and took some cane cuttings. That plantation was already growed over, very rough and shaggy, but new cane sprouts were still volunteering through the tangle. They grubbed ’em out, stacked ’em on deck, and carried a boatload up the coast and on up the Calusa Hatchee to Lake Okeechobee. They say that small boatload of cane from Chatham Bend was the start of the Big Sugar industry as it is today. Probably your dad is rolling in his grave over how his cane—after his years of hard struggle—has made fortunes for other growers at Moore Haven, because those Watson cuttings stretch today from Okeechobee south to the horizon. Many’s the time I’ve thought about how Emperor Watson could of stood up on those dikes and enjoyed a grand view of that sugarcane plantation he had probably dreamt of all his life.
The white courthouse building on the circle reminded the old friends of Barron Collier, a New York businessman who became interested in Deep Lake through Walter Langford. Talk about enterprise! Now there was a man whom Emperor Watson himself might have admired! When Langford died in 1920, Barron Collier acquired the Deep Lake holding, railroad and all, then bought up the whole south half of Lee County, more than a million acres of unbroken wilderness, the biggest private empire in the U.S.A. By then the Trail was under way, and it looked like the authorities had been paid off to get the section coming due west from Miami turned northwest beyond Forty-Mile Bend, circumventing the Chevelier Road and Monroe County in favor of Barron Collier’s domain and leaving the Chevelier Corporation stuck in the mud. Meanwhile Collier paid off politicians to get his empire set aside as a whole new county, which he named in honor of himself—“the biggest landowner in Florida,” Hoad said, “if not the country!”
When the Storters sold most of Everglade to Collier, the Storter River became the Barron River, and Everglade was renamed Everglades City. Because Collier needed a county capital that was more than just a trading post and a few shacks, he brought in twelve-inch suction pipe and dredged enough mud out of the river to make a channel for large boats and build up spoil banks and high ground to enlarge the settlement. This was 1923, when the only other settlements in his new county—Naples, Immokalee, Marco, Chokoloskee—could not claim a thousand souls between them, even with outlaws and Indians thrown in!
That same year, Prohibition became law, and one of the “Pro-hi” agents who came here hunting moonshine stills never made it back out of the Islands. Bahamas rum came in at night and was stacked in Collier’s pasture, Hoad recalled. The Deep Lake railway was extended to Immokalee by 1928, the same year the Trail was finally completed, and distilled spirits loaded here in Everglade traveled straight from Immokalee to Chicago on the Atlantic Coast Line. “I don’t know if that’s true or not,” Hoad Storter said, “but men who knew something believed that Barron Collier paid for his new county during Prohibition by running contraband liquor to Scarface Al Capone. That is none of my darn business nor yours neither, but it goes to show you what your daddy knew so well, that a businessman who aims to make his mark here in America can’t let no finer points of law stand in his way.”
With the completion of the cross-Florida highway, modern times thundered right past Everglades City, down there in the mangroves eight miles off the Trail, and this community died back down to nothing. In the Depression, the Collier Corporation dumped its brave new county back on the federal government, and as usual, the taxpayers picked up the bill. Some of it was set aside as the Big Cypress preserve, and the rest would be called the Everglades National Park. The Park dedication in 1947 was the first ceremony of significance ever held in this Collier County Courthouse, and the last one, too, because the county seat was moved to Naples.
They contemplated the white courthouse on the empty circle, the sterile facade set about with planted palms. They recalled the brass band and the flags and windy speeches, and also the stony grief of the Mikasuki—the ragtag “Cypress Indians”—who stood off to one side, watching the Muskogee Creeks in their bright-striped blouses who stood beside the white people hailing the new Park. These government-sponsored “Seminoles,” who had never inhabited these southern Glades, ignored the silent witness of the Mikasuki, who long ago had withdrawn into the Grassy Waters, Pa-hay-okee, still undefeated by the U.S. Army, only to be vanquished by bureaucrats a century later. Excluded from their hunting and fishing grounds around Shark River, they camped like refugees on the north boundary of the Park, along the canal banks of the Trail. The president of the United States was declaring the new park a grand beginning, but for the silent Mikasuki, this great day was the beginning of the End.
Lucius never forgot the bitterness in those black eyes, tight as currants stuck into brown dough. One big strong Indian had drunk too much and fallen off the bridge before he had hardly set out on his long walk home, and Lucius and Hoad had waded in and dragged him out. This man was said to be descended on his mother’s side from the “Big People”—the vanished Calusa, later called Spanish Indians, because a few found refuge with the Spaniards in Cuba. This despairing man was in spiritual training, and not long thereafter he had disappeared, taking along the sacred Green Corn Bundle. What became of him the Mikasuki did not know, they only knew that without the sacred bundle, the old ways must wither. The story was that he had gone to Oklahoma in search of the Creek Nation elders, whose counsel might teach him how to help his people find their way in a time of change and terrible desecration of the Mother Earth. Not until some years had passed had the man returned with the sacred bundle, and not until this moment—he recalled that dim sense of recognition at Caxambas—did Lucius realize with a start that the Indian could only have been Billie Jimmie.
“Billie Jimmie. Yep. That was him,” Hoad agreed.
The Miami Herald had sent a reporter to the Park ceremony. Inevitably, she had dragged Lucius’s father into her article, reporting that he was still “a touchy subject.” Lucius quoted from memory: “If everybody who says he shot Watson actually shot him, the dock must have been a frightful mess.” This reporter would write a fine book about the Everglades in which E. J. Watson was awarded three whole pages, including the misinformation that Watson shot and wounded C. G. McKinney (who had not been present), and was thereupon killed by a white fisherman, Luke Short.
“So that’s where Ol’ Luke came from!” Hoad cried, remembering the query from the Naples audience. “Luke Short! He on your list?” The old friends laughed.
At the bridge, they circled back downriver, passing the fish houses and the stone crab and mullet boats along the docks and the stacked crab pots, gray-green with dried algae. It was near twilight. A few old cars came and went.
“Uncle George was Justice of the Peace when he sold out to Barron Collier, so he was made the first county judge there at the courthouse. Funny thing was, the two cases that most interested him never came to trial. The first one was the Watson case—was Watson lynched?—and the second was the mystery of those two young Hardens who disappeared in the late twenties down around Shark River.”
Lucius nodded, “One was Roark, Whidden’s older brother. Roark and his cousin were murdered.”
“That so, Lucius? It’s like the Watson case—depends on who you talk to. Suspicious circumstances, Uncle George called it. Maybe those boys had it coming, maybe not.”
Lucius changed the subject. “Lots of For Sale signs around here. Looks like too many houses up for sale and too few takers.”
“Naturally. The place is dead. Only reason I come back here is because I’m homesick, but I sure don’t care much for this ‘Everglades City.’ Can’t hardly find old Everglade no more, can’t hardly make head or tail of the whole place. Big trees gone, old houses, too, got all these power lines and trailer homes and plywood houses that look more like chicken coops. Instead of citrus, bougainvillea, they pave the whole yard, nothing but driveway. Brick barbecues, y’know, and tin flamingos. Got their plastic boat parked on the concrete alongside the car.
“Can’t hardly tell boats from cars no more, with all the shine and chrome. And the noise of them big outboards—Lord! Scaring the last fish out of the bays! Hit the throttle when they hit the water, take off howling, throw up waves that bash our old wood boats against the bulkheads. No experience of fish or tides or weather, no knowledge of the backcountry, no idea where in heck they might be headed for, let alone why, just roaring around bouncing off each other’s wakes like damn fool chickens with their heads cut off!”
Stopping to get a breath, Hoad glared at Lucius, poking his stick at the insolent hard weeds that pushed through big cracks in the broken sidewalk. “Even this darn weed only come here lately!” He smiled unwillingly. “Well, dammit, Lucius, a man’s boat has no business in his yard! That ain’t Everglade! Might be Everglades City but it sure ain’t Everglade! That Yankee never done this place one bit of good!”
Hoad stopped waving his thin arms and resumed walking. “Lord!” he groaned, disgusted with himself. “No wonder people hate crabby old men! I can’t live with what I’m turning into! Heck, my family got nothing to complain about—I know that. Storters sold our old home place, so it’s our own darn fault! Sold out our paradise for paper money—not greenbacks even, just numbers in the bank that only exist in thin air! Traded in our fine old home for a pink ranchette on a grid street in a new subdivision on a hot bare stretch of bulldozed scrub inland. The same thing Andy done! Big show window with a ugly view of the same darn ugly thing cropping up next door!”
He frowned and smiled at the same time, trying to air out his dyspeptic humor. “Ranchettes sure ain’t much to leave your grandchildren. They sure ain’t nothing much at all when you go comparing ’em to the wood homes we used to have here on this good old river. The mullets jumping and the pelicans, and all that good ol’ family living that we lost.”
He paused again to stare balefully at Lucius, who could think of no way to console him. Torn and incomplete, the two old friends stood ruminating in the dusk. At the end of every street, the encircling green mangroves lay in wait, as if this dense forbidding growth might come in after dark to smother the small town, returning the former Haiti Potato Creek to coastal jungle. “Our family had our good out of this place, and we never came back,” Hoad Storter said. “My dad died the year the Park came in—good thing for him!—and my brother Claude’s gone, too. That sign might still say Storter Avenue, but there aren’t too many living there today who would even remember who the Storters were.”
Taking cold bottles of beer, they sat on crab pots on the dock, looking out across the tidal river, where the sun falling to the Gulf out to the westward was firing the highest leaves on the mangrove wall. When darkness came, they went up onto the hotel porch, where Andy joined them for a stone crab supper. There was still no word from Rob or Dyer, and in the absence of word about his brother, the talk made Lucius unbearably restless. He said good night and went into the bar, which was almost empty.
Sally Brown lay drunk and half-reclined across a tiny table. She must have heard some rumor about Lucy Summerlin, for she was regaling the barman in her local dialect about “Ol’ Colonel” and his “widder woman.”
“Now this here widder woman’s friend run and told the widder, says, ‘Guess who I seen only this minute, down to the Jif-Quik Convenience Store! Your ol’ schooldays sweetheart Mr. Lucius H. Watson, buyin hisself a six-pack of Ol’ Fishhead Beer! He come a-slippin through the vestee-bule as I was leavin!’ So that ol’ widder jumps into her finery and runs down to the Jif-Quik for a look! Sure enough, there’s good ol’ Colonel, homin right in on the chunky peanut butter plus the high-grade cat food that’s one hundred percent certified safe to eat by senior citizens!
“Well, that smart widder props her hair up, dabs her lips, and comes sailin right on down the aisle, big bosom first, she plows smack into him. Pops her big eyes open wide and hollers, ‘Oh my goodness!’ like this Mr. Lucius Watson were some kind of a visitation that the Merciful Lord sent down to that convenience store. She went all soft, fell up against him bosom first, till he had to grab her to keep her from swoonin dead away and bringin down a few racks of comestibles right along with her. When she come to in his manly arms, she batted her eyes like just the cutest l’il girl and sighed and thanked him ever so sweet for savin her pore life, and when she recovered, which she done real quick, she struck up some of that snappy conversation she is knowed for. Well, poor ol’ Mr. Lucius Watson—who might not of talked to nothin but stray dogs for a month of Sundays—poor ol’ Lucius never knew what hit him. Next thing he knew, she had him wrapped up like a ham, ready to take home and eat for dinner!”
Hearing Lucius laugh, Sally whirled and glared, embarrassed but too dazed to be apologetic. As he came forward, she sat up straight and crossed her legs and produced a sort of smile but did not ask him to sit down and have a drink with her. “Don’t tell Whidden, for Christ’s sake,” she said. She lit a cigarette, her crossed leg twitching like the stiff tail of a cat, eyes looking past him toward the door. “You see Mr. House out on the porch? He’s waiting for you.” Then Crockett Junior filled the doorway, and she closed her eyes and groaned and said, “Oh boy.” She blew her cigarette smoke from her mouth, watched it disperse.
On his way out, Lucius told Crockett that if Rob Watson failed to show up by tomorrow, he would call the Sheriff and report a kidnapping. “Call him, then,” said the one-armed man and shouldered him aside. He crossed the room and yanked out the other chair at Sally’s table, shouting roughly at Lucius that somebody was expecting him at the front door.
The black car had its motor running, and the passenger door swung open when Lucius appeared. They drove in silence down along the riverfront, under the moon. Where the tidal river widened near its mouth, Dyer swerved and stopped with a hard yank, so close to the bulkhead that the large eagle ornament on the front of the car hood stuck out over the water. He did not turn the motor off and he left the car in gear, foot on the clutch. Fists clamped on the top rim of the steering wheel, he confronted the wide portal in the mangroves where the river opened out onto the Bay.
Beyond the portal, a moon-spun silver tide hurried west between pale spoil banks of the channel to Indian Key Pass and the barrier islands on the Gulf horizon. He’s looking right at everything and he sees nothing, Lucius thought. This strange brother of his, staring right at it, had never seen that brilliant tide in all his life. And he had to wonder if their father had seen it, either.
“I guess you know that crazy old man tried to shoot me,” Dyer said at last.
“Shoot out your car tires, you mean? How can you be certain it was Rob when so many others seem to have it in for you?”
“Brother Lucius,” Dyer pronounced slowly, still facing straight ahead. In the glare of the old streetlamps, his face was a fungus white. “Brother Lucius knows about my tires. Brother Lucius knows all about that shooting.” Dyer turned to look at him. “You knew Robert Watson was armed and dangerous. You didn’t warn me.”
“Old and harmless, you mean.”
“Aiding and abetting in a double murder? No jury in this state is going to call that ‘harmless’!”
So Dyer had seen that packet in Rob’s satchel, or had heard about it, probably from Crockett Junior. Lucius said carefully, “Even if Rob happened to be present, whatever occurred took place more than fifty years ago, and nobody can show what preceded it—what caused it.”
“You know what I’m referring to, I see. And probably you also know that there’s no statute of limitations on first-degree murder.”
“Nobody was ever charged with murder. That case was never on the books. No hearing, no indictment, and no evidence.”
“You’ve read the written statement? The confession?”
“Yes,” he lied, feeling all twisted. Perhaps he did not want to read Rob’s statement (though it had his name on it). Why read the thing? He saw no point in it. Even if Rob had his facts straight about the Tucker case, it might only mean that Papa had lost his senses on that one occasion—temporary insanity or something. One could scarcely dismiss his whole career on the basis of one aberrant episode!
Dyer’s bloodless hands clenched the top rim of the steering wheel, as if, at any moment, he might release the clutch and let the car lurch off the bulkhead into the channel. He was relating in his courtroom tone that the police had found a cartridge casing “consistent with” the slugs taken from Dyer’s tires. That evidence cast strong suspicion on Robert Watson, but probably insufficient to convict, without the weapon. “There’s other evidence, of course. The suspect’s brother Lucius had pointed the finger at Robert Watson at a public meeting in Naples before a hundred witnesses. It’s on the record. However,” Dyer added coolly, turning to Lucius, “we might not use your … testimony? … unless we had to, since drawing attention to the Tucker case could be counterproductive in our effort to rehabilitate your father.”
“Our father, you mean.”
“There you go again.” Watt Dyer’s eyes closed in his slow tortoise blink. Otherwise his face showed no expression, only that queer shivering of skin above his lip. Slowly he looked back along the riverfront toward the hotel, then gazed fixedly again at the night river. There was no one in the street, and only Crockett Junior, Lucius realized with a start, knew where he’d gone. But for the moment, Lucius was much more concerned about the purring motor, still in gear—he shifted a little in his seat, opened his door a little.
Dyer noted this. He said, “At any rate, we now have the revolver. If Robert Watson is turned over to the law, he returns to prison automatically as an escaped felon. If I turn the weapon over to the police, the ballistics tests will show that Robert Watson was guilty of attempted murder. He will be sentenced with due consideration of his prior record and will finish out his life in federal prison.”
He drew a power-of-attorney form out of his briefcase. “On the other hand, if you people cooperate, the gun will be returned. That eliminates the ballistics evidence, without which there can be no case, even if I press charges, which I won’t.”
“And the so-called confession?”
“You can have that, too.”
“How can I be certain you will keep your word? What if I refused to sign until this so-called evidence was returned?”
“In that case, you will certainly delay—and jeopardize—the Watson Claim. Meanwhile you will endanger your brother and ensure my ill will, which as your attorney I do not recommend.” Dyer almost smiled. “You might as well cooperate, since you have no choice.”
“And if I do sign, then you will release him?”
“I haven’t got him. But if the men who have him know you are cooperating—”
Lucius took the form, scribbled a signature, and sat back, strangely out of breath.
Dyer snapped on the car light and put the document into his briefcase. He withdrew a clipping and read aloud from a newspaper feature about “Emperor Watson’s” frontier house on a “lost” Indian mound in a remote region of the Park where “most authorities agreed” that the legendary Fountain of Youth had been located, where Ponce de León had been slain by the Calusa, where the giant Chief Chekaika (who massacred the whites at Indian Key back in 1842 and was later caught and hanged on a Glades hammock by the noted Indian fighter General William Harney) had made his hideout—“This is all nonsense!” Lucius protested—and where the pioneer planter E. J. Watson had first developed the fine strain of Cuban sugarcane that seeded the vast agricultural empire at Okeechobee which helped put the sovereign state of Florida where it was today.
Dyer thrust the clipping at him and he scanned it quickly. Quoted throughout was the well-known Miami attorney Watson Dyer, who had lately obtained a temporary injunction against the proposed burning of the house, citing the unextinguished land claim of the Watson heirs. According to the article, the Park was contesting the injunction on the grounds that any land claim E. J. Watson might have made was no longer valid, and that the historic traditions being ascribed to this site were “unproven or demonstrably untrue.” Nevertheless, attorney Dyer had expressed full confidence in the claim, which was supported by an amici curiae motion from several esteemed colleagues of the presiding judge. Leading businessmen and political figures in the state had interested themselves in the case and stood ready to endorse the Watson claim, attorney Dyer asserted.
Unless the taxpayers protested the senseless burning of the Watson Place, the article concluded, what Mr. Dyer termed “the only tourist attraction in the whole Park” would be destroyed by the same technocratic lack of vision that was already obliterating the wildlife of the Everglades and the world-famous marine fisheries in surrounding waters. In that event, the journalist suggested, it was time to recommend that this tragically degraded region should be taken away from a remote and foolish federal bureaucracy and restored to the people of Florida before its utter destruction was complete.
“How’s that?” Dyer grinned with satisfaction. Nevertheless, he had wanted to make sure that the Watson Claim was unassailable, that it would be sustained by the court in perpetuity. A preexisting building helped the claim, he said, because without the house, there was no historic monument. Since any man-made structure within Park boundaries could never be repaired or replaced, and because Park land could not be used for private purposes, the loss of the house might weaken the whole claim by making it appear frivolous, in fact pointless.
“With your endorsement of the claim”—he tapped his briefcase—“we should win an indefinite extension of the court injunction against burning. Meanwhile, your biography will establish Watson’s prominence in our state history and provide good cause to make the house a monument. With public opinion in our favor, it becomes unlikely that the Park will continue to contest our claim. We’ll have these family affidavits, we’ll have your petitions from the local families, and we’ll have favorable publicity from the newspapers which will save face for our farsighted Park officials by giving them all the credit. I’m even arranging the requisition of a new military helicopter to junket them across the Glades in a few days for our official meeting at the Bend!”
Dyer put his clipping away, and still they sat there on the moonlit river with the car still running. Beside himself, Lucius burst out, “Goddammit, what about Rob? How can I be certain they’ll release him?”
“Why don’t we simply assume that he will be turned over to you at Chatham Bend. All he has to do is sign our documents.”
And still they were dissatisfied, not finished. Lucius said, “How about Fred Dyer’s affidavit that you are E. J. Watson’s natural son?”
For the first time since Lucius had known him, Watson Dyer was taken by surprise. Clearing his throat, Dyer said finally, “Just wanted to cover all contingencies. In a tight decision, it might be helpful to make the formal claimant a Watson heir who was actually born on Chatham Bend—”
“How about Pearl and Minnie? They were born there, too.”
“—but as long as you and your brother are present at the meeting,” Dyer continued, “I hardly think such an affidavit will be necessary.”
“Formal claimant. That the same as the sole claimant? Under your new name? Watson Watson, maybe? You could hyphenate it!” He brooded bitterly. “Something’s missing, Dyer. The truth, maybe? If the house is set aside as a historic monument within the park, what does it matter whose name is on the claim? Am I missing something? What do the Watsons have to lose by making you the ‘formal claimant,’ if that saves the house?”
“Precisely. The point is to win the claim. If the claim is denied, then the Watson family loses. Not that you’ve welcomed me into the family.”
“And you’re going to all this trouble out of sentiment? Out of the goodness of your heart? I don’t believe it!”
“You have a better explanation?”
“Not yet. But I will.”
Anxious to catch up with Crockett Junior, Lucius got out of the running car and hurried back to the hotel, walking upriver, but Crockett and Sally were no longer in the bar.