The Cracker Belle, which Whidden Harden kept upriver near the bridge at Everglade, was a thirty-two-foot cabin boat with a long work deck for commercial fishing. When Lee Harden owned her, Lucius recalled, she had been white, with that old-time blue trim at the red waterline, but after years of disuse, her hull was a flaking driftwood gray.
The engine started with a cavernous rumble. “Sounds pretty good, Cap,” Lucius said, and Whidden said, “Sounds good because I tinkered all this mornin. We’ll see how good she starts tomorrow.”
“He talking about his wife or his old boat?” called Sally, who was guiding Andy to a canvas boat chair in the aft end of the cockpit. In blue sweatshirt and torn-off jeans, she swung gracefully to the cabin roof and leaned back against the windshield, raising her pretty face up to the sun.
The Cracker Belle idled down current past rusty fish houses and a sagging dock and stacks of sea-greened crab pots. On a warehouse wall a notice read DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT STACKING YOUR SHIT ON THIS DOCK. “Nice,” Sally said. She fluttered her fingers at the men in rubber boots, packing ice and fish into slat boxes. Straightening, they squinted at the Belle from beneath their caps. They did not wave back.
Beyond the hotel, the tidal river turned west through the mangrove wall toward the Gulf, and the Cracker Belle set out across the bay between the sparkling white spoil banks of the channel. On the tall navigation markers, ospreys had assembled their huge nests, and cormorants, uttering low cretaceous grunts, fled their pedestals and beat away like ancient flying lizards, down the long channels between islets and out across the shallow reaches where oyster bars and mangrove sprouts and stalking egrets broke the gleam of the marl flats, all the way south to Chokoloskee Island.
Facing aft over the wake, Andy was identifying the side channels, and he grinned when they asked him how he did it. “The nests is where you hear them fish hawks, and nests in Chokoloskee Bay means channel markers.” He pointed toward the peeping osprey overhead. “In my mind’s eye I can see that bird pretty near as clear as you can, them black burnsides and that sharp crook in the wing!”
On the spoil bank stood a pair of bald eagles. The great white heads with their massive beaks like yellow ivory gleamed in the fresh sun and sparkling water. When Lucius described how unperturbed the eagles were by the boat’s wake, which washed up the shell bank, bathing their mighty talons, Andy cried out happily, “I can just see ’em!”
Folding his big hands on his gut, he nodded in contentment. “I recall when they tore down every eagle’s nest on Marco Island. Claimed them big ol’ nests was unsightly and unsanitary. Said they’d improve on them old sticks with some nice new plastic nests, but what the eagles thought of that, I just don’t know.”
Andy shifted in his canvas chair, to converse better. “I was visitin with my niece’s son last time I come here. He’d shot a eagle and had plans to stuff it, but never got around to it. When that beautiful bird commenced to stink, he threw it out.” He banged his hands down on the chair arms. “After the law went through protecting ’em, Henry Short got offered some nice money to poach two eagles for this veterans’ club. They aimed to make the bar lounge atmosphere more patriotic. What was wanted was a breeding pair with nice white heads, a pair like that would likely have chicks back at the nest. Henry said all right, just to go along—he had no choice—but some way he never could come up with any eagles. Them red-blooded Americans hooted him, y’know! They got abusive! This boy was supposed to be a dead-eye shot! Never understood that this nigra man was more loyal to the national bird than what their club was!
“Henry plain hated any waste of the wild creatures. Probably spent less ammunition taking care of his own needs than any hunter in south Florida, because you could spin a clam shell up against the sky and he’d clip it every time with that old Winnie. How Henry learned to shoot like that, Dad never knew, and they were raised together. Way back before the century turned, Granddad House give his young nigra that old 30.30, and it wasn’t long before this colored feller could outshoot anybody on this coast, the Harden boys and E. J. Watson included. Your daddy did not care to hear that and would not be teased about it. Other men started complainin, too. Said, ‘Niggers ain’t s’posed to shoot as good as that. Got too much white in him.’ ”
Rabbit Key was a gravel bar with a lone mangrove clump on the west point. Watching the barren key as it passed astern, Lucius asked Andy if he’d ever heard why E. J. Watson’s body had been brought out here instead of being buried on Chokoloskee.
Andy thought a minute. “I recollect Dad sayin that nobody could rest easy while that body lay there in the dark down by the shore, and nobody wanted to go near him in the nighttime. Superstition. What they thought they seen during the shooting was beyond all nature. That weren’t their neighbor anymore but a bloody-headed fright out of a nightmare, lurching at ’em through the dusk with enough lead in him to stop ten men. A man who come ahead ten yards when he was full of bullets might not pay much attention to natural laws, not after nightfall. They was terrified that gory thing might sit up in the dark, and look around, and maybe come huntin ’em again.”
Here was the seed of legend, Lucius thought, sprouted into darkling flower from the grit and blood and filth on the shore at Smallwood’s, like the white lotus sprung up from the mud. He thought with a shudder of his father, fastened by bullets to the earth, eyes turning to blue ice in the rigid face.
“Next morning, the men was still leery about touchin him, so they took a hitch around his ankles, snaked him off the bank. Towed him all the way out here and buried him four feet down under sand and gravel. They knew Ed Watson was too full of lead to crawl, let alone swim, but they went and piled big coral slabs on top, just to make sure.”
Whidden Harden laughed out of nervous awe. “Might sit up in his grave and lurch into the channel and swim on back to Chokoloskee underwater! Me ’n’ Roark dreamed about that as kids—the gray-blue face and the sea grass in his bloody hair, turning and bumping up the Pass on the flood tide!”
“What’s the matter with you two!” Sally cried. “That’s Mister Colonel’s daddy you are joking about!”
“Well, we wasn’t jokin, not exactly, Sal.” Whidden smiled apologetically at Lucius, who could not smile back. Though he understood that his efforts to appear objective encouraged a certain disrespect toward the dead man, and was content that his companions felt they could speak freely, he also knew that with the making of the myth, his father was diminished as a human being.
Whidden said, “My dad would tell us that after the Great Hurricane, there weren’t nothin left here except one big tree in a clump of mangroves where them little sprouts are takin hold right now. Rigged a noose around his neck, run the line to that lone tree. Course Chokoloskee people will deny that.”
“What I heard,” Andy said, “them fellers run that rope so Watson’s family could locate the body if they come to claim it, which they did.”
“Rigged a noose?” Lucius said sharply. “Dragged him out here underwater, scraping on the bottom, instead of laying his body under a canvas in the stern?” He shook his head, outraged. “I think they needed to degrade him in order to feel better about what they’d done.”
“I always heard you come down here with Tippins,” House said carefully. “You remember seeing any rope?” When Lucius shook his head, House said, “Well, maybe there was a hanging rope and maybe not. Maybe they dragged him on the bottom, maybe not. The main thing was, they didn’t want no part of him on Chokoloskee. Some will tell you they aimed to bury him outside the county line, just south of where it crosses Rabbit Key. But back in them days, this was all Monroe County, so maybe that outside-the-county stuff was like that rope—somethin folks might of spliced on later to spice up the story.
“Easier to dig a grave out on this key, that’s all it is. These little islands on the Gulf, they come and go from year to year in storm and current. This year that bar might be hard gravel, but that year it might of been white coral sand. And even gravel digs easier than shell mound, cause them shells compact so hard, it’s like chipping concrete. Old Man Tant Jenkins used to say how Mr. Watson was an inspiration to a young man’s life. Said that all his valuable experience of farmin that shell-packed soil on Chatham Bend was what inspired him to a life of huntin and fishin.”
Whidden said, “That old tale about the hanging rope come straight out of the magazines,” and Sally called from the cabin roof, “I always suspected there was one of those darn Hardens who could read!” She laughed at Whidden as he reached and tickled her. “All us Hardens could read pretty good,” he said. “That was one reason—aside from bein Catholics—that all the ignoramuses around here had it in for us.”
Andy was pointing. “Pelican Key must be someplace over this way. Charlie McKinney got a lot of sea trout right back of that key, he sometimes took four hundred pounds a day. He was some fisherman, that feller. Fished by the tides like everybody else, but mostly he fished in the daytime while other fellers had to work at night. And that’s where he was that October afternoon, watchin Watson’s boat pot-pottin by on her way to Chokoloskee!”
The Gulf of Mexico was lost in sunny mist, soft silver gray. In the mute emptiness, in soft risings of the water, three porpoises parted the smooth pewter surface, drawing the hunting terns.
Traversing the shallow coastal shelf which ran north from Lost Man’s River to Fakahatchee, they swapped stories about the clam shack village on Pavilion Key, a low green island off the starboard beam. In the clam crew days, Pavilion had been stripped of every tree and shrub for cooking fires, until finally it was little more than a broad sand spit. Here two hundred people lived in makeshift shacks, including E. J. Watson’s “backdoor family,” which awaited his comings and goings out of Chatham River. The clam skiffs were staked out off this lee shore, Lucius told Whidden, who was still young when that era ended.
Andy recalled “a day in ’26, when we was living on the Watson Place, a day of hurricane when twenty-five men from Pavilion Key come up the river to find shelter. They had to stand up in the boat, they was that crowded. That clam skiff was sunk right to the gunwales, and the river lappin in, we couldn’t hardly see no boat at all. Coming up around the bend, them men looked like they was walkin on the water.
“By then, the clams was pretty well thinned out, and in the Depression, the cannery jobs at Caxambas and Marco was real scarce. The white fellers claimed that the nigra hands had undercut their pay, so they lynched a black feller at Marco to teach the rest a lesson. Only thing that poor nigra done wrong was try to make a livin. Them white boys had no education, no ambition, just wanted to feel they was better than somebody else. Cowards, you know, always in a gang. They was feelin frustrated, was all it was.”
“Frustrated.” Sally brought her knees up to her chin and put her arms around them, rocking a little. “Is it true that Old Man Speck was in on that one?” She expected no answer and she did not get one.
“That nigra had a job at Doxsee’s clam factory, which them boys didn’t,” Whidden said, as if that might explain it.
“Later they claimed this black boy looked crossways at some white woman, but most folks believed that was only their excuse.” The blind man slapped his big hands on his knees. “Them fellers knew before they done it that most of us good Christian folks wouldn’t bother our heads about it, and even them few that had doubts wouldn’t never stop ’em.”
In recent years, the Caxambas factory had been moved to Naples, where it failed for good, and the local economy had been struck down by the Red Tide. With the whole coast stinking of dead fish, and the clams dying, the Red Tide seemed an unnatural affliction associated with the coming of the Park, since both had descended on this coast in the same year. When the last clams died off in epidemic, with stone crabs, conchs, and sponges close behind, there was fear that this was no red tide but something much more evil and mysterious. Eventually the blame was put on Capt. Bill Collier’s big clam dredge, which dragged up five hundred bushels every day and tore up and disrupted the sand bottom.
The vast clam flat had never recovered. Today this shallow shelf was so plagued with sharks that men disliked going overboard to wade. Nobody knew what drew the sharks from deeper water. It wasn’t fish, because the fish had never returned after the tide, not the way they were. These days, there was talk of a shark fishery. “Imagine our granddaddies goin after sharks!” Whidden exclaimed. “I ain’t never et a shark, and I sure ain’t aimin to start now!”
“The Lord’s Creation is too old to adjust to all our meddlin.” The blind man had heard that down on Northwest Cape, two hundred killer whales had run aground and died—who had ever heard of such a thing? They all fell quiet, wondering if those doomed leviathans were a sign of the Apocalypse, a signal that the old ways of the earth were near an end.
Where islands shifted in the mist, Whidden called to Sally, who had remained on the forward cabin, hair flying in the salt Gulf wind. “That’s Mormon Key, there where I am pointin at!” Mormon Key was where his grandfather had settled after turning over Chatham Bend to the old Frenchman. “Course Mormon was closer to the Bend than Granddad Robert might of liked, bein just off the mouth of Chatham River.”
“Well,” she cried, “Mister Colonel’s daddy was never their real enemy along this coast!” Whidden nudged Lucius, then hollered back, “How come you know so much about them old-time Hardens? You think you know my family history better’n me?”
“Yes, I sure do! I spent evening after evening talking with your family when you were out in the swamp breaking the law!”
“Well, the family had our Harden story taught me pretty good by that time!”
Sally clambered back into the cockpit. “Those older Hardens always said they kept a sharp eye on your father but they learned to trust him,” she told Lucius, “and they certainly trusted you.” She helped Andy bring his chair forward to join them.
Whidden said, “Well, they didn’t care to have E. J. Watson as their enemy. And he was always generous to ’em, very kind. Never thought about ’em as mulatta people, the way some did.”
Sally groaned. “Whidden? Maybe that’s because they weren’t mulatta, ever think of that?”
“Them men from Chokoloskee Bay harassed Whidden’s family something unmerciful,” Andy said tactfully. “Once they seen how many sea trout come up on these banks on the flood tide, they aimed to run that pioneer family right off Mormon Key, and was very indignant when the Hardens would not let ’em do it. I heard this from my dad, y’know, because I’m talking about way back, now, when Colonel here was just a boy, up in Fort Myers.
“The Hardens all knew how to shoot, and they held this place with guns. Mormon Key was the real start of the Fish Wars. Men from the Bay would come down here”—he waved his arm with that uncanny orientation—“and fish this northwest side, stake gillnets all around the grasses, catch sea trout coming off the flats on the falling tide. But sometimes they left them nets too long, and couldn’t lift until the tide come in again, and by then they was lucky to save a third of the fish caught, because the rest was dead. And the Hardens hated being crowded out, hated that waste, and they would put a bullet past those fellers’ heads, to scare ’em off, and the boats took to shooting back as they departed.
“Robert Harden give up on Mormon Key because he was fed up with being harassed by the Bay people. It was only a matter of time, he reckoned, till them men bushwhacked one of his boys when they went north for their supplies. He sold the quitclaim to E. J. Watson around 1899 and bought Nick Santini’s claim to Hog Key and Wood Key, down around Lost Man’s. Stayed for life. All that old man wanted was his peace and quiet, which meant plenty of space between Hardens and Chokoloskee.”
Andy said, “Bill House got his fill of Chokoloskee on the same day Colonel’s daddy did, October twenty-fourth of 1910. Just took him a few years more to realize it. All the same, my dad loved that island, loved them people. I do, too. Can’t tell you why, cause a lot of ’em ain’t lovable. I guess Chokoloskee’s in my blood, like my cousin Ned. I just can’t get him out.”
Lucius nodded. Not willingly, he was fond of those people, too. In his long decades on this coast, he had come to admire a frontier grit, a wry integrity born of endurance, a cranky generosity and hard-grudged decency in the Bay people, including some who had been present in the crowd which killed Ed Watson, and some who harassed the Harden family later on.
“The Fish Wars was still going strong when me ’n’ Roark was growin up,” Whidden was saying. “One time Old Man Walker Carr come in off Lost Man’s Key and set his nets. He had his gun with him. The very first night, Earl Harden come up on him out of the dark. ‘What’s the matter with you, old man, never seen our sign?’ So Walker said, ‘I thought I’d help you fellers catch a fish.’ Earl hollers out, ‘We don’t allow nobody fishin in this territory! If I was you, I’d head on home right about now!’ Old Man Carr put his gun up in Earl’s face. He said, ‘I come here to make my livin, Mister, mind my own business, and I don’t know of any law which says I can’t fish any damn place I please.’ And Earl said, ‘Look here, Walker, let’s you and me get along!’ I guess Uncle Earl liked that old man’s style, because the Hardens never bothered him no more.” Sally yelled out, “Too bad he didn’t shoot him.” And Harden nodded. “It was Carrs and their Brown kin who give the Hardens so much trouble later on.”
The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on this empty coast. Passing north of Mormon Key, she neared the stilt-root mangrove islets that camouflaged the broken delta at the mouth of Chatham River. What Papa had liked best about his river was this hidden entrance. The deep and narrow channel sluicing through the islets was all but concealed from the Gulf, so that any stranger unfamiliar with this coast would pass right by the mouth and never see it.
“Dead reckoning,” Harden muttered, cutting her speed. “Got to go by your old bearings, your old courses, listen to what’s under your propeller. Used to be markers, but I reckon them terrible moonshiners and smugglers ripped ’em out.” He had to grin. “Come in off the Gulf at night, hit this narrow channel at high speed, and any law that tried to follow ’em, lookin for markers, would go buckin aground up on a flat or tear out the bottom of their boat on one them orster bars.”
“You suppose any of those smugglers might answer to the name of Brown or Daniels?” Sally inquired. “Used to be one by the name of Harden, I know that much.”
Harden laughed. “Might come across one-two Danielses, Sal, now that you mention it. I don’t know about no Browns unless you would count them few that went to jail.”
“The cargo changes, but the smuggling sure don’t!” Andy reflected. “It’s been a way of life here on this coast since pirate times, and Spanish times—since white men first showed up on the horizon! My uncle Dan and my uncle Lloyd, they was both rum runners, and Old Man Nick Santini done plenty of night work out of Estero Bay, there at Fort Myers Beach.”
“Is that the man Mister Colonel’s father—?”
“His brother,” Lucius told her. He did not feel like explaining. The knifing of Adolphus Santini at Key West had been witnessed by a dozen men and could never be argued away, and it did no good to explain that it was but one of hundreds of near-fatal knifings on this coast, long since forgotten. What he would state in the biography was true, that there was no witness to any killing ever attributed to E. J. Watson, or no known witness, at any rate. He thought unwillingly of that “memoir” in Rob’s satchel. If Rob had died far away and long ago, as his family had supposed, the biography could make that claim without hesitation.
Inside the delta lay the mangrove archipelago of Storter Bay, where years ago the Storter boys liked to net mullet. In Chatham River, the incoming tide swelled upstream between the gleaming walls of thick-leaved seacoast trees, meeting and turning back upon itself the fresh flow from the Glades, and carrying the brackish mangrove fringe far back inland. By his own reckoning—elapsed time, shifts in boat speed and direction, scents of dry ground vegetation on the air—the blind man navigated the old river of his youth as intently as an eel nosing upstream, tracing the minerals and shifts of current toward the mouth of the home creek from which it first descended to the sea.
Where broken trees had stranded on a shoal, the thin bare branches dipped and beckoned, slapped by brown froth in the curl of the boat’s wake. Two miles above the river mouth, they neared the bar off the north bank where the bodies of the two men killed by Cox had nudged aground. The rotted cadavers had been too loose to take into the boats, so the clammers from Pavilion Key had rigged soft hitches to the remains of Green and Dutchy and towed them slowly out across the river. “Buried what was left of ’em up here a little ways on the south bank, longside of Hannah Smith,” the blind man finished. Asked how he knew where that place was, Andy supposed his father had shown him Hannah’s grave when the House family was living on the Bend, but he looked surprised by the questions, as if he had always known the answer in his sinew. Like fish and tides, human deaths and burials were in the grain of local knowledge—signs to mark the passing years and commemorate those corners of this silent landscape where old-time people had left small scars in the green and gone away again.
“About all us local people got is our long memories, along with the history that come down in our families,” Whidden agreed. “Bad hurricanes and feuds and shootings might roil things up now and again, but otherwise our seasons stay mostly the same. That’s why we remember deaths and the old stories, and carry that remembrance back a hundred years. And that’s why the Watson Place is so important, Mister Colonel, even to the younger ones who never seen it.”
The burial place lay close to Hannah’s Point, which was downstream and across the river from the Bend. Maybe thirty feet back from the bank, the blind man said, was a square dent in the ground about one foot deep, “as if you had crowbarred a half-buried barn door out of the ground.”
“You mean you can still see it?” Sally wrinkled up her nose.
“I imagine so. That’s one of the things still spooks people about this place. Burial ground will generally sprout up in heavy weeds, but nothing has growed over that square patch in fifty years. Them three sinners is still there unless the river took ’em.”
“No coffin?”
“No time for coffins. This weren’t hardly two days before the hurricane, and the sky was very strange and murky, in the darkest October ever recollected, so them men was certain a bad storm was on the way. Another thing, that nigra who helped Cox sink the bodies had escaped to Pavilion Key, so they knew that Cox was still there at the Watson Place, not a mile upriver from this grave. Them men was clam diggers, they was unarmed, and they didn’t want to mess with Cox without the Sheriff.
“Anyways, the poor lost souls that was fished out of the river never had no family to come after ’em, nobody who cared enough to build a coffin or mark the place where they had died. But the burial party kind of hated to throw earth on their bare faces, so they laid a scrap of canvas down, then let the dirt fly fast as they could, holding their breaths so’s they wouldn’t puke into the grave.
“Course them victims was lucky they got into the ground at all, let alone stayed there. If they was still in the water, their bodies would been lost after that storm. I was on this river in the Hurricane of ’26, and the Gulf rose up and washed way back inland, and when that rush of water come back down out of the Glades on the next tide, it sounded like thunder rolling past the Bend. Nothin could of stayed put in this river! But the Watson Place stood up to bad hurricanes in 1909 and 1910, and again in ’26 and ’35, remember, Colonel? And she done just fine!”
A snakebird fled from a low snag, brushing the surface before beating away over the water. At a rounded point on the south bank where buttonwood and gumbo-limbo rose from higher ground, they eased ashore and tied up to the mangroves. Leaving Andy in the boat, they hunted along the riverbank through broken thicket until they found a rectangular indentation in the marly soil. Already one corner of the common grave was eroding bit by clod into the river.
“Won’t last too much longer,” Andy whispered, when they described it. “That grave is closer to the water than it was.” In the heat and silence, he listened intently to the flood as it curled past, a lic-lic-lic along the waterline, a relict sound of those ancient far millenniums when briny rivers poured from the wave-washed limestone of the great peninsula as it inched upward, upward, parting the surface of the silent seas.
In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, black pigeons with sepulchral white pates bobbed, craned, and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in mournful columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe. “This stretch of river can still spook me,” Andy murmured, when his friends came back aboard. “Poor Hannah’s bones are right there in that marl, along with Waller and young Dutchy. Won’t do no harm to give ’em a nice prayer, in case that burial party was in too much of a hurry.”
Woe-woe-wuk-woe.
Bending their heads, they joined the blind man’s meditation. “Hear us, O Lord. One of these years, this river will take these poor lost souls and carry their poor bones down to the Gulf. And we pray You will have Mercy, Lord, and lift them from the Bosom of the Deep and give them rest.” The words were intoned slowly and mindfully—the one prayer ever offered on behalf of Hannah Smith, Green Waller, and young Herbert Melville, alias Dutchy.
“Amen,” they murmured.
The Watson Place lay on the point of a large island between rivers, a higher ground where the mangrove along the river edge gave way to subtropical forest and salt prairie. Perhaps the Calusa had built up this ground on the shoal of silt which would have formed on this big bend. Upriver at the eastern end of the great island was House Hammock Bay, where Andy’s family had grown sugarcane for many years. “I sure come up this river enough times,” Andy explained when Sally complimented him on his close knowledge of the river after years away. His face turned a gold red like a rare apple in his gratification that this thorny young woman whose face he could not see had offered a conciliatory word. “I’m sure tickled you folks let me come along,” he blurted, heaving his canvas chair around to smile toward the khaki haze which was Lucius Watson.
“Now Henry Short was working at House Hammock while we was living on the Watson Place, remember? Raised fine tomatoes, and a world of bananas to go with ’em. Slept in Granddad’s old shack, cracks in the walls, plenty of snakes and spiders. That Hurricane of ’26 had blowed the roof right off the cistern, and this moonlit night he was awoke by somethin out there, lappin at the water. Peekin through the cracks, he seen this real big panther, and he got so excited by the size that he raised up his rifle and fired without thinkin, shot it through one ear and out the other. Made a bad job because the blood spoiled the cistern, you’d of thought the lifeblood of every panther in the Glades was in that water.
“Henry hoisted that big cat out of the cistern and rowed him around to Chatham Bend. Laid straight, he went eleven feet counting tail and whiskers. Henry and Dad skinned him out, they got twenty-five dollars for that hide. Should have got more, but as usual, my dad was took because he couldn’t read.
“Oh, that was a beautiful animal! I never in my life seen a cat that size, and I never heard about one like it since. Course back in them days, panthers was still common in the Islands, swam from island to island same way deer will, used to catch ’em in a bear trap baited with fish. Sometimes one’d kill a hog or take some chickens. Kill a dog, too, if they got the chance. Panthers will eat a dog, all but the head. They’ll bury that dog head but they won’t come back for it.
“Them big cats is all but gone out of the Everglades, gone out of Florida, and the bears is close behind. What bothers me today is all them ones we wasted. Shot ’em on sight, never give it a thought, cause folks was poor and their stock was precious, and they naturally thought that them beautiful things was only varmints.”
Lucius tried to envision “the Watson Place” as seen in his first impression as a child—the roof peak of “Papa’s new house in the jungle,” rising out of the green river walls as the small schooner called the Gladiator rounded the broad bend, then the white beacon of the house itself, miraculous and bright as any castle.
The year was 1896, when the new house prepared for the family’s arrival was barely finished. They had sailed down the green and silver coast from the railroad terminus at Punta Gorda and tacked up Chatham River with the tide. Like Mama and the other children, he had never seen the sea and became seasick, but the shining waves sweeping past the bow had been magnificent, and the children cried out at the bronze porpoises gleaming in the sea under the bowsprit, and the swift white birds dancing upward from the whitecaps. Papa and his young crewman Henry Thompson had rigged troll lines, and the children caught silver fishes—kingfish or Spanish mackerel, Lucius remembered, and barracuda.
He had never forgotten the Watson Place as it was on that first arrival, the red blossoms of the twin poincianas between the white house and the river, planted years before by the old Frenchman, and the smell of fresh paint which scoured his nostrils in the hot small children’s rooms upstairs. He was seven then, rushing pell-mell into boyhood, and a great new passion for small boats and fishing would sweep his dimming memories of Oklahoma and north Florida into the past.
He had wept that day they were taken from the Bend to be put into the day school at Fort Myers—all but Rob, who stayed behind to help on the plantation, only to disappear for good a few years later. After his mama’s death in 1901, Eddie had gone north to Columbia County to help his father while Lucius returned to live here in the Islands. The only house ever built on Chatham River was also his first real and beloved home.
A half mile above Hannah’s Point, a roof peak emerged slowly from the ragged tree line, sinking away again as the river turned, then reappearing. Below wind-warped shingles like saw teeth on the roofline, the house was a brilliant white against the trees behind. Whidden burst out, “I’ll be damned!” as Sally cried, “It’s beautiful!” But to Lucius, his old home looked stunned, as if blinded by the sun, like a senile person dressed too festively and trotted out uncomprehending for an anniversary.
All by itself, stark on its mound, the Watson Place was eerily identical to the house first beheld in 1896. Only gradually, as the Belle drew closer, did he see that fresh paint could not disguise the sag of old wood weariness along the peak. The windows without glass or shutters were gaunt naked holes, as black as if burned through the white facade.
Between the river and the house, the two great twisted royal poincianas, thick roots exposed by decades of erosion, were the last of the old trees planted by the Frenchman. And soon these, too, would lean away and follow the old sheds and docks and the last of Papa’s coco palms into the current.
Whidden slowed the boat to scan the banks. Nobody had appeared out of the house. Lucius had told them about Addison Burdett, and now they saw across the river an old skiff with a scabby outboard motor tied up to the mangroves, which formed a thin wall between the current and the salt prairie of white marl muck, hard scrub, and bitter grasses. They crossed the river and eased the Belle up alongside. Except for bilge water and empty paint cans, the boat was empty, yet all agreed that Burdett had not gone ashore. There was no destination here, nothing but wasteland of salt prairie and dead marl.
Harden rerigged the skiff’s bow line to the branches. “Whoever tied her up as poor as this never cared whether she drifted off or not. This boat was towed across the river so nobody could escape off of the Bend.” Grumpy with uneasiness, he straightened, the line still in his hand, and gazed back across the water at the silent house. “Maybe like they took him someplace else,” he said.
Lucius thought, Or he is in the river. Whidden must have considered this, too, for he added quietly, “Well, I reckon they ain’t harmed him, Mister Colonel, or they wouldn’t leave his boat where somebody who came lookin for him would see her.” Whidden’s instinct was to wait awhile for someone to appear before they went ashore across the river. “If them boys catch us snoopin at the house, they might shoot first and ask their questions after, especially if they been drinkin.” He looked around some more. “I want to sniff things out a little, keep my distance, till I get the feel of it.” When Sally asked him what that meant, Whidden was unable to explain, but Lucius thought he knew. He felt the same.
Lucius sat cross-legged on the bow, staring at the shining house across broad soft swirls of current. At one time he had known every eddy and hole in this stretch of the river, on those long-ago slow summer days when a deft hook might land half a hundred fish of a half dozen species in an afternoon, more than enough to feed the field hands in the harvest. In later years, as a commercial fisherman, he and his partner—usually Hoad Storter, sometimes Lee Harden—might come upriver to draw fresh water from the cistern, which Fred Dyer had built to hold 10,000 gallons. They would scour the overgrowth for the last guavas and alligator pears and slip through the old cane fields to the salt ground known as Watson Prairie to shoot one or two young ibis for their supper. The grass was low and sparse on that marl ground, which held fresh puddles where the wild creatures could come get their water. Papa had burned his prairie every year to keep its small ponds open for the ducks and rails, ibis and deer. Occasionally they took a black bear or a panther.
Behind him, the muted voices rose and fell as the wind shifted. Andy was pointing down the river. From here, he was saying, they could probably see that bar off the north bank where some fisherman come across what was left of a dead colored man, in that last summer before all hell broke loose in that black October. “The way Ed Watson used his field hands, people said, was like something out of the old century. Replaced a hand like you replaced a horse.”
They were all gazing at the house. “Back in the early days,” Whidden told his wife, “an old nigra got his sleeve caught in a cane presser. He lost his arm and he bled and bled, all over everything. Mister Watson couldn’t take the time to run him to Key West, not in the harvest. Anyways, it wouldn’t do no good, he said, that boy is done for. The women took him to the house, laid him down in the front room, but they couldn’t stop it, he just bled to death while he lay there watchin ’em. Couldn’t never get that stain up, couldn’t never paint it out, now ain’t that something? Cause sooner or later that blood rose through the paint. Still there today! You can go through that door and see it for yourself!
“That nigra blood was like a spell on that old house. After Watson’s death, folks would go ashore and point to it—’See there? That’s a murder victim’s blood!’ Well, it weren’t no such a thing! It were only the lifeblood of that poor feller whose arm got overtook by that machine!”
My God, Lucius thought, they have heard that tale so often, and still they are reciting it, like myth or scripture—not that the story was untrue. He recalled Sybil Dyer hurrying her Lucy away from the dreadful sight of so much blood, and Papa mopping his brow by the shed, knowing how that dying black man would come back to haunt him.
“The only way that blood is going to come out is burn it out.” Lucius called this from the bow, to close the story in the traditional way in which local people had always closed it. Not wishing to eavesdrop, he came back astern, inquiring if anyone recalled the name of the black man who had gone to Pavilion Key to report the murders. He vaguely recalled the name “Sip Linsy,” but he needed confirmation.
“I don’t believe I ever heard his name.” Andy’s fair skin was deep red with chagrin that he and the Hardens had been overheard. “We was told he showed up at Pavilion with the flap of his forehead skin hanging down where a bullet creased his scalp—had to hold that flap out of his eyes. Claimed Cox had shot at him as he took off.”
Whidden was skeptical. His cousin Weeks Daniels, who had seen the man that day, had always described him as dark and husky, very calm and “cunnin-lookin.” He had not mentioned any wound. Whidden said, “It ain’t so easy to look calm and cunnin with a flap of skin hangin down into your eyes.”
Whidden’s wife gazed disgustedly from face to face as the men laughed. “You know something?” she said. “There’s something cruel and hateful in the whole male sex.”
In the years after E. J. Watson’s death, before Lucius came back to the Islands, these rivers had been all but empty. The settlers had been flooded out by the Great Hurricane, all but the Hardens, and none of them ever found the heart to accept such hard loss and discouragement and return to the ruined clearings to rebuild. There was also a dread of Leslie Cox, who might still be lurking somewhere in the Glades, might still come prowling down around the coast, to be glimpsed toward dusk of some fateful day when an unknown craft slipped behind some wooded point, leaving the frightened settler to wonder if that silhouetted figure in the stern might have been Cox, if Cox were stalking him, if Cox were watching at this moment from the mangrove shadows, ready to trail him back to his defenseless family.
The dread of Cox would fade as years went by, but not the dread of hurricanes in these barrier islands. Many of those who ventured south were not settlers but fugitives and drifters, content with makeshift shelters and hand-to-mouth existence, with no ambition to help them endure the dull humidity and biting insects which made existence here all but unbearable. The only inhabitants who had prevailed year after year, setting out smudge pots for mosquitoes and taking hardship and contentment where they found it, were Robert Harden and his three strong sons and the pioneer women of that family.
“Course plenty of strangers tried camping in your house, but no one stayed long,” Andy said. “Seen that place in the parlor where somebody had fired off a shotgun. That charge of shot chewed up one corner pretty good, and was always connected to them bloodstains from that black man’s death, which was took to mean that somebody got in the way. Folks wondered was that some of Cox’s work, when he killed them people? Or was that your daddy killing Cox? Cause nobody knew for absolutely sure that he never done that.
“So people got the shivers from them bloodstains, never liked the feel of the whole place. You didn’t sleep good in that house till you got used to it. I ain’t the only one had nightmares. Mac Johnson’s Dorothy went wild down here, tryin’ to burn that blood out, and Bill Smallwood wouldn’t hardly go ashore, slept in his boat, though he wouldn’t admit that them bloodstains was the reason.” Andy laughed. “Ol’ Bill! Come down here to fish-guide for some northern people who was anchored off Mormon Key on a big yacht. Bill was still in his late teens, but he had him a twenty-six-foot launch with a Model-T Ford marine-converted engine. I recall we took all the snook we wanted over there front of the house, and plenty of small tarpon, too. Best tarpon bait he ever found was a strip of mullet on a green parrot-head feather. ‘I ain’t failed with that ol’ parrot-head too many times,’ Bill used to say. And every time he never failed, we had to hear about it!”
Andy shook his head in the glow of reminiscence. “Remember that day you come visitin, Colonel? Huntin Henry Short? Good thing you didn’t stay the night, cause there weren’t hardly no place to lay down, weren’t a mattress left. Hunters and moonshiners had took every last one. But some of the heavy crockery was still there, and that big pine table. Sat fourteen, cause your daddy fed a lot of hands at harvest time. My dad took it with us when we left.
“Hurricane of ’26, the Watson Place rode this wild jungle river like a ship at sea, stood up just fine. Next year, Henry Thompson took over as the caretaker. He wasn’t paid but fifty bucks a month by the Chevelier Corporation, cause developers was losin faith in the Florida Boom. Anyway, we was all loaded in the boat but we couldn’t take off till Thompsons come, cause we wasn’t supposed to leave the place un tended. Left three dogs behind for Thompsons because we had too many, and if I know Henry, he shot one of ’em before he set foot on the dock. Big yeller hound that liked to run them bobcats off the chickens. One day at Chokoloskee, that yeller dog had bit him pretty good, woke that man up a little. I heard him mutter, ‘Dog, I’ll git you one day, see if I don’t.’ Well, I bet he did!
“As I recall him, Henry Thompson was a tall thin kind of a feller, kind of a far-off person, you might say. Sandy hair bleached whitish by the sun, but his hide would bake brown as a bun, where mine boils up hot red, like a boiled crawfish. I don’t guess him and his Gert Hamilton never bothered nobody, but they didn’t much approve nobody, neither. Not even God!”
Lucius grinned. “Well, that atheist streak Old Henry had came straight from his old boss! When pretty ladies were around, my dad might get religion, but he never found much use for God at other times.”
“Henry Thompson never talked too much when he weren’t talking about Watson,” Andy said. “I guess he was the authority on Watson, but toward the end he got tired of what he knew. Drank quite a lot, kept his own company, got skinnier and skinnier like an old white leghorn. When he did speak, he had a way of trailin off, shruggin his shoulders, like havin any opinion about life plain wore him out.
“Henry Thompson always claimed that Ed Watson had been good to him, he had nothin against the man whatever. Said he never had no reason to be scared of him, and neither did his half-uncle Tant Jenkins, cause Ol’ Ed never hurt a fly that didn’t hurt him first. Only thing was, in later life, Henry needed a little drinkin money, so he give an interview to some magazine writer about all of his close shaves with Bloody Watson. Got paid cash money for his firsthand knowledge of the cold cold heart of that terrible desperado, might of threw in some gory details he made up, to keep things lively.”
Intent upon the silent house, the others were content to listen as Andy rambled on. “What d’you reckon happened to your daddy’s schooner?” Andy said after a while, as if to make sure the others were still there. “I been puzzling about that since you mentioned her. She was tied up here at the Bend during the hurricane, then disappeared. People talked about Cox sellin her, and they talked about how Watson’s boy might of helped him get away—”
Lucius shook his head. “I never took Cox anywhere. That was another rumor, like the hanging rope. And Cox never took the schooner, either. That summer of 1910 was his first time off the farm in Columbia County. He couldn’t swim, much less handle a schooner. He was afraid of the water and plain terrified of crocs and gators, and back then we had both. As for the launch, my dad brought her to Chokoloskee on the day he died, so the last I heard, she was right there at Smallwood’s. Local people must know what happened to her, but by the time I came back—that was nine years later—nobody seemed to recall. Strange, don’t you think? Folks can remember all the lies, like the hanging rope and the gold watch, but nobody recalls what happened to those boats.”
“Weren’t no Watson sons around to keep an eye on ’em,” Andy reminded him, and Lucius changed the subject.
“I guess that after they calmed down a little, most folks decided that my father must have killed Cox after all,” Lucius suggested.
“Is that a fact? Us Hardens never thought so. A few years after your daddy died, the Rice boys claimed they seen Cox on the east coast near Lemon City. They said Cox recognized Leland Rice, slipped away quick. Hardens decided that sonofagun was still holed up someplace back in the rivers, because one day that old cabin we built for Chevelier just disappeared off Possum Key. No fire or nothin, she was just tore down and took away, probably hammered back together someplace else.
“Course some claimed it was Henry Short done that. Claimed he moved that cabin board by board way back up inside of Gopher Key, where he was kind of hidin out from some of them younger fellers around Chokoloskee. Spent his days diggin for Calusa treasure, which the Frenchman always did believe was there. But some concluded it was Cox who took that cabin. For a little while in the late twenties, when Roark and our cousin Wilson come up missin, there was rumors that Cox had done away with ’em some way. Course Hardens never took that serious, cause we knew who done it.”
Sally said, “Probably those Carrs spread that rumor about Cox, trying to cover their tracks!”
Whidden shrugged, still studying the house through his binoculars. “I recollect one time Fonso Lopez was tellin how Desperado Cox was put to death by Mr. Watson. And Mama said, ‘Why, Fonso, you know better than that! That man is living along somewhere just as mean as ever!’ ”
“Anyway, if Cox cleaned all the stuff out of that house, folks would have heard about it,” Sally declared. “Sadie Harden told us that Mr. Watson had some good silver and crystal, and she always declared it was the Carrs who cleaned him out. Probably claimed that good old E. J. left it all to them!”
“Well, that’s just gossip, Sally,” Andy said. “Sadie always had it in for the Carr family. It might been anybody who came here after the shooting.”
“People felt free to lug away all they could carry!” Lucius said. “Why was that, do you suppose? Because of my father’s reputation? Because they thought that he deserved no better?”
Andy looked impatient. “Because he was dead, and because you Watsons had abandoned the damned place, and because if the first comers didn’t take that stuff, the next bunch would. You take them thieving Houses, now, them people stole Ed Watson’s pine deal table!” Andy’s laughter was infectious. “Course he’d been gone for sixteen years by the time we done it.”
It was getting late. Harden lowered the binoculars. “Okay?” he said. “We better have a look.” Gunning the engine in reverse, he backed the Cracker Belle into the current, then drummed upstream while letting the current carry her across the river. Wide of the dock, he cut back on the throttle, taking the binoculars from Sally.
“Nobody home,” she said.
“Got to be sure.”
As the boat lost headway, drifting back downstream, he studied the frame house. In its fresh paint, the old building on the mound looked stripped and naked on its cement pillions, which lifted the main floor two feet above ground to permit high storm water to rush beneath. Loose roof shingles lay scattered on bare earth from which most of the vegetation had been scoured by the high salt tides of last year’s hurricane.
“In the late thirties some Miami sports come over here, used this place hard, remember, Mister Colonel? Huntin and fishin, plenty of booze, and loud blond women. Them men had no respect at all, and the place was pretty much let go. Nobody fixed no broken screens nor windows, let alone rain gutters. All the same, I seen this house after last year’s storm and Parks could of touched her up without no trouble. Storm damage is only their excuse for doin somethin they been itchin to do for years.”
Whidden eased his boat upstream again, letting the current sweep her in against the leaning skeleton of the old dock and leaving her engine running even after Lucius took a turn around a post. Lucius made no hitch or knot, making sure the line could be slipped quickly.
DANGER. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.
BY ORDER OF SUPT.
U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Near the official notice, nailed to a stake jammed into the bank, was an unofficial sign painted in rude black letters on a driftwood board:
KEEP OUT!! THIS MEANS YOU!!
“That sign weren’t put up by no damn Park Service and it ain’t meant for tourists,” Whidden said, “cause nobody never seen no tourist back in here.” He cut the engine. In the wash of silence came that hard licking at the bank as the brown current searched along under the branches, in the whisper of leaning trees in the river wind, and the boat’s exhaust stink was replaced by the musk of humus and that scent of hot wild lime in the dry foliage which stirred Lucius Watson’s heart and brought him home.
Lucius went forward to rig a bow line, and Whidden jumped ashore, running a stern line to a mangrove. In the noon silence, the only answer to their shouts and calls was the dry, insistent song of a small bird from the wood edge. A heavy odor came and went on the shifting wind. “That ain’t the housepainter, if that is what you’re thinkin. That is gators. Might of shot one or two of ’em myself.” Whidden whispered this in Lucius’s ear, keeping a wary eye on Sally, who had guided Andy onto the bank, and led him toward the house. “Gator hides!” he yelled when they stopped short and turned and looked back, uneasy.
Whidden had been with the Daniels gang when it first came to the Watson Place, which Speck liked to refer to as “my huntin camp.” Because a tight roof and dry ground-floor rooms with solid floors were needed for heavy storage, they had boarded up and nailed the windows and installed big chains and padlocks on the doors. On the south side of the house, facing the poincianas and the river, was a screened porch from which the screens were missing. Whidden went up onto the porch and checked the padlocked door. He knocked and hollered, “Anybody home?” He spat away the bad taste of the stench. “I never thought they’d cure them hides as poor as that!”
When Speck was around, the hides had been cured properly, said Whidden, but his men had let things go after he left. They knew little about the Watson Place and had no curiosity about its history, and they had used it in the same hard way as the Miami men, ripping off porch steps and posts and the old storm shutters for their cooking fires. Meanwhile, they ranged out into the Glades country, killing every last gator they came across, big and small. “Course gator poachin was only part of it. Speck’s distillery ain’t a hundred yards back in the bushes. Ran his barrels of shine by airboat far as Gator Hook, and from there by truck east to Miami. He found customers as fast as he could brew it, never stored a pint. Never got caught neither. Same thing for the gator hides while there was a market.”
Circling the house, checking the ground-floor windows in search of some way to get in, they paused to see if the cistern still held water. Whidden hoisted the corner of its green tarpaper roof, which was splatted white with bird droppings and scattered with dry leaves and twigs, red-seeded coon scat, bright coral bean in long hard pods, owl pellets, spiderwebs, a bobcat feces woolly green with mold.
“This cistern is twenty-four foot by sixteen—pretty fair size for the Islands,” Lucius said proudly. “We dug her down into the ground, the way she should be—that’s why there’s water in there now.”
“That ol’ water must be pretty rank. Ain’t nobody has fixed them gutterins in years.” Harden pointed at the rotted rain gutters, split and half fallen. “They tell me the brackish-water mosquitoes which breeds in this here cistern are the worst in all the Ten Thousand Islands.
“At Lost Man’s, after Parks took over, a real big gator got into our cistern. Found him there when we went back to visit, couldn’t get him out. Still there, I reckon. And there was a drowned deer in the one at Possum Key, still had his hide on. Parks claims they want things back the way they was, and burnin our old homes was kind of fun, but I notice they never get around to digging out old cisterns or coverin ’em or fillin ’em—might be hard work!” He shook his head. “Don’t have to fill ’em! Just knock a hole into one side so’s a wild thing can go get his water, climb back out again.”
When Lucius looked up, Harden was watching him. “The man who built this cistern was Fred Dyer,” Lucius said vaguely, struggling to recover the feel of the lost conversation. For some reason, he had been daydreaming about Lucy, wondering if they would find each other before it was too late. “His daughter married a Summerlin, but she’s a widow. I believe she is still living at Fort Myers.”
Whidden Harden laughed. “I believe that, too! On account of you already told me about her yesterday. You met her at the cemetery, remember?”
They had a piss before returning to the others, and facing the woods, Lucius located the bird which made that small, insistent song. “White-eyed vireo!” he blurted, wondering if Papa had ever heard its ancestor, or rather, listened to it.
“White-eyed? You sure?” Whidden was shading his brow like an explorer, staring purposely in the wrong direction. “Sure looked like a wall-eyed to me!” Affectionate, he patted Lucius’s shoulder.
On the porch, Andy was talking to Sally, instinctively keeping his voice low as if there were somebody asleep inside. “When we come here in 1924, this good old place was already stunk up by every kind of varmint, not just humans. Coons and possums, sometimes a bear, all kinds of snakes and lizards—I seen a rattler by the cistern one time, big around as my arm. Upstairs, all kinds of bats and rat snakes and swallers flying in and out all them empty winders, and ceilin wasps, and some of them big narrow black hornets, flickerin their wings under the rafters—you never knew what kind of varmint might be layin for you up that stair, that Cox included!”
Whidden went up on the porch again and put his ear to the door. “Thought I heard creakin.” Again they called, and again they got no answer. “I don’t reckon this new paint will keep them people from burning this place down,” Whidden said. “The Island homes was mostly lean-tos and old shacks, whacked together any whichy-way, ain’t that right, Colonel?—palmetto fan thatch, driftwood scrap, patched out with tarpaper and tin. Weren’t much lost when Parks destroyed ’em except lifetimes of hard work, which don’t count for nothin these days, it don’t seem like.” In his quiet way, Harden was very angry.
“Setting this old house afire, that is something else,” Andy House said. “Dade County pine, cures hard as iron, so her frame and flooring is as sound as ever. Likely Parks don’t even know that, and don’t care. Why them people are so hot to burn this good old house is hard to figure. Got the rest of ’em destroyed already, I suppose. Want to look like they’re doing somethin to earn them government salaries, is what it is.”
Lucius told Andy about Fred Dyer, who had built the porch and cistern. Andy nodded. “I sure heard about them Dyers from an early age. Back in 1905, my uncle Dan ran the mail boat, Punta Rassa to Cape Sable, and he had young Gene Gandees as his crew. Them boys was maybe fifteen at that time. So one day they turned up here when Mr. Watson was away, and the Dyer family come flyin out with their little girl and baby boy, leavin toys and clothes all scattered out behind. Never went back for that stuff neither, just jumped aboard the boat and yelled, ‘Let’s go!’
“On the way downriver, Uncle Dan asked ’em why they was in such a hurry. They admitted that they never seen no bad deeds while they was here, no sign that Watson killed his help on payday, the way people said. But they knew somethin very bad had happened to the young couple that was here before ’em, and they was worried about their little children. Around that time, rumor come about Watson murderin the Audubon warden at Flamingo—well, that done it. The woman seemed calm enough, Uncle Dan said, but her husband was sick afraid.
“Mrs. Dyer let on how it was her who wished to leave, and how she was always scared in this wild country, what with all the snakes and panthers and wild Injuns. But Uncle Dan believed she only said that to cover up her husband’s fear of Mr. Watson. On the way north, she mentioned that in her estimation, Mr. Watson was a good and generous man, a gentleman, and a good Christian. Every Sunday morning without fail, they would all sing hymns in the front room and Mr. Watson would read aloud out of the Bible.
“Twenty years later, Dan House saw the husband in Fort Myers, and he said to him ‘Well, Mr. Dyer, you might not be walking around this town if it weren’t for me.’ I reckon Fred Dyer thought so, too, cause seein Uncle Dan, he whooped for joy and hugged him like a long-lost friend.”
Sally Brown said shortly, “Maybe Dan House and Gene Gandees made so much of that story because both of ’em were in the Watson mob a few years later, and they wanted to justify the execution of a neighbor who helped folks out when times were hard and never did a bit of harm to either one of them.”
“Well, Miss Sally, that is possible,” Andy House said.
When Lucius Watson first returned to the Ten Thousand Islands, people made sure that he heard the rumors about Henry Short and the death of Lucius’s father. Though he thought these stories dangerous and absurd, he eventually decided to seek out Henry and hear what he had to say.
Henry had not been easy to track down. He no longer visited the Hardens, who claimed they did not know where he might be found. This was more or less true, but it was also true that, much as they liked Lucius, they could not be sure of his true intentions. Only later did they tell him that Henry Short, still feeling unsafe, had dismantled the Frenchman’s shack again and moved it by skiff piece by piece from Gopher Key all the way south to Cape Sable, where he lugged the boards three miles or more inland to a desolate area of scrub and brackish water (“That whole cabin traveled on that one man’s shoulder,” Lee Harden marveled) only to have it blow away in the Hurricane of ’26. Meanwhile he worked from time to time for the House family here on the Watson Place, and learning of this, Lucius came to see him. Not wanting to scare Henry into hiding, he slipped up Chatham River with the tide and was at the dock at daybreak. Trying to calm the House’s mean dogs, he walked unarmed toward the house, careful to keep his empty hands out to the side.
Bill House was already on the porch. In his nightshirt, he stood like a ghost in the porch shadows. Warning Henry, he sang out, “Ain’t that a Watson?”
“Morning, Bill.”
“Lookin for me?”
“Looking for Henry.”
Henry Short appeared at the corner of the boat shed, holding his rifle down along his leg. When Lucius said good morning, Henry Short lifted his hat a little but did not come forward. He was a strong, good-looking man with blue-gray eyes, composed and very clear in his appearance. Like most men in the Islands, he went barefoot, but unlike most, he kept himself clean-shaven, and his blue denims were well-patched and clean.
Lucius drew closer, out of earshot from the porch. He had planned to open this difficult conversation with a few civilities, but at the last second he came right out with it. “There’s been some rumors, Henry.”
Oddly, Henry chose this moment to lean his rifle against a sawhorse by the boat shed wall. His face was set, without expression, like a prisoner resigned to a harsh sentence.
“Some say you took part in my father’s death,” Lucius continued, keeping his voice low. “That you were first to shoot.”
The night before, camped under the moon at Mormon Key, his purpose had seemed clear, but standing here in the new heat of morning, with the Houses watching from the porch, he no longer knew why he had come nor what he might be looking for. He had finally caught up with Henry Short, yet within instants his whole inquiry seemed empty and unreasonable—what was the man to say? How could he act on anything this man confessed to, since even if Short’s bullet was the first one, striking Papa dead before the others fired, that astonishing circumstance could not have changed the outcome in the slightest way.
“Well?” he demanded stupidly. “Is it true?”
The man’s headshake was scarcely more than a twitch, as if he were bone tired of telling a truth which had never been believed—tired of lying, tired of running, tired of an unfulfilled existence. He seemed to indicate that the white man could do anything he liked, and Henry Short would go along with it out of indifference. “Your daddy always treated me real good,” Henry said politely, not to ingratiate himself but to ease the ridiculous situation in which Lucius had put them.
Lucius saw that he and Henry Short could have been friends. He had an impulse to offer his hand, but under the sharp eye of Bill House he could not bring himself to do that, knowing how weak and sentimental it would appear. Instead he told him, “You have nothing to fear from me,” and Henry nodded. “All right, Mist’ Lucius,” he said simply. They did not say good-bye. Lucius turned and walked toward the dock.
“Well, that was quick!” Bill House called out as he went by the porch. Lucius raised his hand, taking time to smile at the husky blond boy who stood close as a calf at House’s elbow. The boy had to subdue a friendly grin. This chip off the old block had his gun with him, too—the oldest boy, named for Bill’s cousin Andrew Wiggins.
“How’s your list coming, Colonel?” Bill House called after him. “I sure hope you got my name on there!” When Lucius kept on going, he yelled angrily, “You hear me, Watson? Next time, don’t try slippin up on us so quiet!”
Lucius Watson’s visit to the Bend fired up old rumors in regard to Henry Short and did nothing to resolve the ambiguities. He had been too circumspect, failing to demand that Short refute the story in so many words—not that his denial would signify a thing. But in that case, why had he gone there in the first place?
Lucius recognized that the Bay families, despite their wariness of “Watson’s boy,” had done their best to welcome him when he came back—that it was his own ambiguous behavior which had scared and angered them. Even the Hardens had warned him from the start that in asking his questions, he was making a serious mistake. The Harden clan was already shunned at Chokoloskee Bay, and Lucius Watson’s presence made their danger worse, since it was believed that in any showdown, Lucius Watson would throw in with the Hardens, and would bring his gun. Except for Earl Harden, they had not complained, for they were tough and independent, but feeling guilty about worsening their danger, and trying to ease the tension on the Lost Man’s coast, Lucius would leave from time to time, live on his boat and fish out of Flamingo or fish-guide out of Marco or perhaps go on a long bender at Key West. Yet he never strayed from the Harden family very long. For thirty years, until the Park came in, the wilderness at Lost Man’s River was his home.
Two years later, the House family had gone north to the Trail to grow tomatoes and the Thompsons had replaced them on the Bend. “Probably heard there wasn’t much hard work involved in caretaking,” Andy said, “or maybe Thompson believed those tales about Watson’s buried gold. Henry Short must of heard them stories, too, because he stayed behind here after we left, kept right on diggin.
“Bein friends of E. J. Watson, Thompsons resented Henry Short. They believed he had raised his gun against a white man. Told him to start his digging over here back of the cistern, and when he was done, Gert made that place her kitchen garden, which she had planned to put in all along. Had him dig a pit for a new outhouse that bein a nigra he was not allowed to use.”
Lucius visited Henry Short again after the arrival of the Thompsons. “He’s hidin on ye,” Thompson told him when Lucius showed up at the Bend—his way of hinting without saying so that Yes, indeed, Henry Short had been involved. Thompson shooed his girls inside without offering help, and Lucius hunted Short down by himself.
It was the first real autumn day, a norther, when mosquitoes seemed listless even at dawn and dusk. He found the man mending net around the corner of the boat shed, perched on a sawhorse in the October sun, out of the wind. The ancient Winchester was leaned against the shed, well out of reach, though Short had heard his motor on the river and could have kept that gun at hand if he had chosen to.
Henry Short laid down his net needle and touched his hat. He rose slowly, ceremoniously, standing not stiffly but dead straight, and as before, he appeared resigned to anything his black man’s life still had in store for him, including its relinquishment here and now at the hands of Watson. Had Lucius put a revolver to his temple, he might have flinched but would have remained still, less out of fortitude than fatalism and perhaps relief that his trials were coming to an end.
Henry brushed coon scat off a fish box for his visitor. Yes sir, he agreed, he had gone down to the shore that day. He had done so because his Miz Ida had told him to go keep an eye on Mist’ Dan Senior.
“Why did you carry your rifle down there if you never meant to use it?”
“I don’t know, suh.”
“If you don’t know, then why should I believe your story?”
“I don’t know, suh.” Neither insolent nor evasive, careful to speak in an open, earnest manner, Henry had looked his inquisitor straight in the face.
Lucius tried to be hard-minded and objective. “My father knew that Mr. D. D. House adopted you when you were little, and that you owed a debt to Mr. House. And we can assume that my father saw you standing in that crowd of armed frightened men who might panic and gun him down at any second. He knew that you were a crack shot, and he knew you might feel obliged to shoot if any of the House men became threatened. That correct so far? And being afraid of him, you probably feared that he might shoot you unless you shot him first—was that your thinking?”
“Nosuh,” Henry mumbled, suddenly retreating into negritude. “Wouldn’t nevuh shoot Mist’ Edguh Wasson, nosuh, wouldn’t nevuh shoot no white mans, nosuh.” When Lucius gave him a severe look, he hunched a little in subservience, neck bent, eyes cast down. “White folks ’customed to seein Nigger Henry with Mist’ Dan’s old rifle. Maybe dat las’ afternoon, dey imagine dey seen Henry raise it up like he fixin to shoot.” He shook his head. “Jus’ mistaked dereself, dass all. Dem mens was busy watchin yo’ daddy, see what he might do, dey nevuh paid no mind to no ol’ nigger. Anyways,” he wheedled, “dem white folks roun’ de Bay was allus good to me. Dem Chrishun folks wouldn’ nevuh tell no lies ’bout po’ Henry.”
Lucius had jumped up in a rage. This man had lived his whole life among whites, and spoke like one, and furthermore, Henry knew well that Lucius Watson would never be taken in by this performance. What Henry was saying to him was, Is this minstrel show what I must offer before you will let me live my life in peace?
Henry Short stood motionless, staring straight back at him. Then he blinked and slowly shook his head. That might have been all the denial Lucius needed, but Henry, reverting to his normal voice, resumed, unbidden, as if alerted long before to Lucius’s coming, and to the inevitability of his questions, and to the necessity of answering him, at whatever risk. Very carefully, Henry said, “Mist’ Edguh knew as good as anybody that Henry Short would never raise a gun against him.” Lucius searched his face for any sign of ambiguity. It remained impassive. They held that gaze and then, minutely, both men nodded.
After that meeting, their paths would cross from time to time along the rivers. They would lift their hats or make a vague half wave. Rarely, they smiled, then looked away and kept on going. Both were outcasts, taken in by the same outcast family, and that alone should have disposed them to a common trust, yet they shared an instinct not to seek the other out. They had spoken together only twice, yet felt no need to speak, because they knew. And though neither man would have referred to this odd bond in terms of friendship, a friendship was what, in its mute way, it had become.
High cirrus. Sun. A strange loud racketing, rising and falling, coming downriver.
“Ah hell.” Whidden stood up. They hurried the blind man back toward the boat.
Ibis and egrets scattered out across the sky, their squawking lost in the oncoming noise, which grew violently loud, as if the airboat had sprung free of the river surface, to rise over the treetops and crash down on them. Though it had not emerged from behind the bend, leaves shuddered and spun where the windstream from its airplane propeller tore at the trees. Then the motor howled—“They seen the Belle!”—and the airboat skidded into view, skating out wide onto the open river. There it idled, slopped by its own wake. When it circled back toward the bank, the metal hull pushed a bow wave crossways to the current.
Perched on a platform raised above the propeller, which was housed in a heavy wire cage over the stern, Crockett Junior in black T-shirt and dark glasses yanked at the controls with dexterous grabs and swings of his good arm. Dummy and Mud on the deck below were jamming clips into their carbines. On the bow, straining to jump, crouched the brindle dog.
“Ah hell,” Harden repeated, cranking the engine.
Andy and Sally were already in the cockpit, and Lucius was ready to let go the lines when Whidden raised a hand to check him. He cut the engine and, in no hurry, joined Lucius on the bank. An attempt at flight could excite a predatory instinct which might get them shot at, and anyway, the airboat could overtake them within seconds.
That they were so suddenly in peril, that the battering wind and awful racket might end in senseless violence, seemed incredible to Lucius, who could scarcely take it in. In this instant, there was less danger from the guns than from that dog—a large knob-headed male, squat and tawny, patched with brown, as if hacked rudely from a block of tropic wood. “He ain’t tied,” Whidden’s mouth was shouting, over the airboat’s roar.
Crockett Junior spun the propeller in reverse, and the roar died in a buffet of hot wind as he killed the engine. In the stunned quiet, the airboat lost headway, riding its bow wave toward the bank. “You huntin trouble, Whidden boy? You come to the right place!” And Sally shrieked, “Junior? Take it easy, honey! There’s no need to act crazy!”
Mud and Dummy had lowered their automatic rifles but neither made a move toward the dog. The pit bull, shivering, strained forward on the bow, tendons, jaws, and dirty gold eyes taut. As Whidden yelled, “Mud, grab that fuckin dog!” it sprang, striking the bank with an audible hard thud of bone-filled paws.
Stiff-legged, the dog circled the two strangers, leg by leg, the bristles of its nape as stiff as wire. A rank canine smell rose from its hide, and from its clamped jaws came a low steady rumble. Lucius’s instinct was to freeze and not look down, as if the least twitch might betray his fear to this morose animal. That in these stark instants he could still hear the light tsik-teriu-tsik of the vireo would strike him later as the furthest reach of hallucination.
Sally had sunk onto the gunwale, weak with fear, perhaps trying to defuse the situation. Not sure what was happening, Andy House folded his arms and clutched his elbows, as if holding himself quiet by main force.
“Junior,” Crockett mimicked Sally. He jumped down from the pilot seat as his men swung aboard the Cracker Belle. Covered by Dummy, Mud pushed Andy aside and poked the muzzle of his carbine into the boat cabin.
“We’re not armed,” Whidden said, face set and drawn. The pit bull turned toward his voice and jammed its snout against his calf and left it there.
“If I tole him to,” Crockett muttered heavily, “that dog’d go for a bull gator.”
“That a fact?” Whidden’s voice was amiable and easy, but their eyes were locked like adversaries in a fight. “Yessir, you stupid fuck,” growled Crockett, “that is a fuckin fact. I lay a T-bone by Buck’s nose and go out to the store, he won’t never touch it.”
“You got him trained up good, all right.” Whidden risked a downward glance at the rigid dog. “Course I ain’t seen Buck since a pup. Might not remember me.”
“Buck don’t forget.” Crockett’s voice had turned aggrieved and bitter. “Buck don’t never forget. He ain’t like you.”
“We’re supposed to meet Watson Dyer here, and the Parks people,” Lucius explained. As Sally hissed at him to stay out of this, he pointed at the skiff across the river. “My younger brother—” But he stopped as the one-armed man yanked a third carbine from a rack on the helmsman’s platform and the dog turned toward him.
Whidden whispered, “You shut up, okay?”
“No safety on this thing,” Crockett warned Lucius, “cause I ain’t learned to work a safety with my teeth.” He swung the short rifle like a crutch and pointed the black hole of it at Lucius’s eyes.
“We ain’t lookin for no trouble, Junior,” Whidden said. The rifle swung toward him, and again the pit bull pushed its muzzle hard into his leg, bulk shivering. Whidden let all expression fade. With his eyes half closed, he looked almost sleepy.
“Whidden boy? You never read our sign?” The carbine swung toward the sign reading KEEP OUT and swung right back again. “You’re lookin to get some people killed,” he muttered.
House cleared his throat. “You don’t mean that, son.”
The one-armed man breathed noisily. “Mr. House?” he grated. “No disrespect. You shut the fuck up, too.”
Mud’s head emerged from the cabin of the Belle. “Nothin down here, Junior,” he told Crockett, who tossed his head sideways toward the house itself. Mud circled the house, checking the doors and windows. “Okay,” he called. Reboarding the airboat, he leaned his gun against the platform. “Your old home sure stinks,” he said to Lucius.
Crockett whistled to the dog—“Come in here, Buck!” He climbed back up onto his seat, yelling at Whidden. “Get off this river, boy!”
When Lucius called desperately, “Now wait a minute!” Sally cried, “Let Whidden handle this!”
“Let Whidden handle this!” But there was no heart in Crockett’s sarcasm. He seemed to brood, easing the airboat slowly off the bank. To his own men, his quiet appeared ominous, for both moved aft, out of Crockett’s line of fire, Whidden spoke quietly to Mud Braman, “How come you fellers won’t tell Mister Colonel his brothers is all right? That ain’t askin so much.”
“Dammit, Whidden! Just do what he says!” Mud was very uneasy, and even Dummy adjusted his genitals through his greased coveralls.
The gorgon head of the one-armed man high on his perch was cocked back oddly on his shoulders as he spun the airboat. “You Watsons are a bunch of lunatics, you know that? I ought to take and blow the heads off them two crazy brothers, and yours, too!” He revved the airplane motor to a roar so loud and battering in its own wind that they could hardly hear him in his maddened howling, then slowed the engine to a sudden idle, as leaf and bark bits torn from the old poincianas spun down into the water, to drift away in the slow spirals of the current.
Crockett sat motionless against the sky. In the river light, the world seemed fixed in a frieze of stillness, a silvered dance of death. The pit bull’s hackles rose, and its nails clicked on the metal deck. The pit bull whined. Crockett leaned and said something to Braman, then looked sleepily away. In a hoarse whisper, Braman said, “Get goin, Whidden. Make camp on Mormon so we know right where you’re at, then head for Lost Man’s first thing in the mornin.”
The airboat, taken by an eddy of brown current, drifted gradually from the bank. Lucius shouted, “But we have to be here day after tomorrow!” And Mud screeched back, “He ain’t talkin about day after tomorrow! He is talking about now! Get movin now!”
Lucius cast off the Belle’s lines and followed Whidden aboard. He shouted, “Why the hell can’t they at least tell us that those men are alive!” Sally seized Lucius’s arm, but he wrenched free of her, as Whidden gunned the engine of the Belle to blur his shouting and the old boat’s bow swung off into the current. “He told you,” Whidden said. “Sayin he ought to blow their heads off was Junior’s way of saying he ain’t done it yet.”
Even now, headed downriver, they were scared and agitated. In the stern, the blind man sat unnoticed. No one felt like speaking. Finally Sally went aft and hunkered down beside his chair, to draw him back into their company.
Below the bend, Harden cut the motor, letting the boat drift in a slow orbit as they listened. “They ain’t leavin. We would hear that motor. Only pretended they was takin off to see if we’d try sneakin back. And Crockett is listenin the same as we are, right this minute, and when he don’t hear our motor, he might come have a look.” He cranked the motor and, shaking off Lucius’s questions, ran his boat downriver toward the Gulf.
Whidden guessed that both brothers were in the house, tied up and gagged. “Probably heard us callin but they couldn’t answer.”
Andy House agreed. “When Sally and me was settin on the porch, there come this little kind of thump and scrapin. Figured it must be raccoons, but now that I think about it, that don’t seem likely.”
Whidden supposed that the Daniels gang was clearing its contraband out of the house before Parks arrived the day after tomorrow. Lucius scarcely listened. He was trying to imagine his two misfit kinsmen, born more than a quarter century apart. One called himself Burdett, the other Collins. They had finally laid eyes upon each other for the first time in their lives only to find themselves—if Whidden was correct—bound captives in their father’s house, perhaps entirely unaware that they were brothers.
Crockett Junior Daniels, Sally said in a tense flat voice, had been exposed all his life to an evil influence. “Speck was smart and Speck never got caught. He let his big dumb son get caught instead! Know where he spent his sixteenth birthday? In the county jail! Judge released him on probation if he would join up in the Marines, go get his head blown off for God and country.” He might have come out all right, she said, if he had not gone to war, since he’d always hoped to attend college, but when he returned from Asia, he was angry and bitter, boozing and brawling and breaking things and doing harm. It was only a matter of time before he sank back down into the swamp beside his goddamned father.
“Whidden honey,” she finished bitterly, “you are so darn smart for a man who has wasted the best years of his life making moonshine and skinning alligators! I bet you were the brains of that whole outfit!”
“This fine young woman here got me back on the straight and narrow path, and bound for Glory,” Whidden told the others. Holding his wife’s eye, he added, “We wasn’t such terrible bad fellers, Sal. Only kind of crooked.”
“Crooked,” she said. With Lucius watching, she went stiff when Whidden put his arm around her shoulders.
The Belle anchored off a little beach in the lee of Mormon Key, where Sally said she needed some time alone. Whidden tossed the dinghy overboard and she jumped down neatly on the thwarts, pushing off at the same time, taking up the oars. “Look at that Sally Brown!” her husband called. “Real old-time Island gal!” He opened a beer and sat on the boat transom and watched his darling row away to Mormon Key. Finally he turned and said to Lucius, “Mister Colonel? I don’t believe them boys will hurt ’em lest they has to.”
Crockett Junior is messed up and he is violent. He killed plenty over there in Asia, but he weren’t a natural killer before he went and he ain’t today. When he first come home, Junior used to say, “Them flag-wavin old farts up there to Washington, D.C., has lost me my damned arm, but that don’t mean they can take away my livelihood.” That poor feller is so angry that he can’t hardly get his breath, and I don’t see how any good can come of it. Got a terrible need to blow the head off somethin. That’s what Speck knows and that’s why Speck stays away.
Dummy now, he don’t care if he kills or if he don’t, he don’t care nothin about nothin, and that’s dangerous, too. But most of the time Dummy ain’t there. He’s still in Asia, talkin to them voices in his head. So Mud is the feller that we have to work with. Ol’ Mud is tough and he is wild, but he is pretty good-hearted behind all his hot air, and he tries to keep them other two out of trouble. Mud has hero-worshiped Junior since a boy and he’ll go down in flames with Crockett if he has to, and Dummy will go right along with ’em for the goddamn hell of it.
I ain’t sayin that Junior ain’t pretty good at his daddy’s business, never mind that he ain’t got but the one arm—fact he’s better’n most that has all their equipment. But when Old Man Speck first seen the way them boys was spendin up their money, he made hisself real scarce from that day on. Sally’s mother was long gone by then, and Sally, too, so he turned his shack over to Junior, threw his gear down in his boat, and run her south around Cape Sable to Flamingo. Meets those boys on business at the Bend or Gator Hook, then disappears again. “I ain’t doin no association with known criminals,” is what he told me. “I told Junior I don’t aim to be around when they run up against the law and start to shootin. I’ll turn my back on ’em like I never seen ’em in my life and head on down my road, same as I always done.”
Speck is out for Speck and always has been. Even his own family never put no trust in him. But I will say this for Crockett Senior Daniels, he knows every last foot of this Glades country. Learned it the hard way, which is just about the only way a man can learn it. Put in many a long day alone out here, and long nights, too. I admired that when I threw in with him, and I still do. This wilderness out here, or what is left of it, might be the one thing in his life he loved, when you come to think about it. Speck don’t know he loves it, naturally, and wouldn’t hardly admit to it if he did.
Course he always poached and smuggled and made moonshine, always broke the law. But you fellers know as good as I do that Speck ain’t only just a common outlaw. He was a expert hunter, too, and a expert fisherman, until Parks come along and put him out of business. He can tinker motors, pretty fair country mechanic. He builds good shacks and boats and traps, and hangs nets, too. If Speck ever decided to go straight, he’s got a half dozen trades that he could choose from. That’s another difference between him and them. Cause unless there’s some kind of a call for a militia, mercenary soldiers, them boys of his have no idea how to make a livin. They’d have trouble makin a day’s pay inside the law.
This new breed don’t care nothin about wilderness. All they know is how to use it hard, same way they use their women and their gear. Shoot everythin that moves in case some other feller beats you to it, find out later if it’s any use—that’s their damn attitude. That’s why they got all them gator hides rottin in there. Never look ahead and don’t look back, got no respect at all for land nor life. Maybe this country could use a dose of Speck’s old-time outlaw spirit, but not this kind.
Them boys got handed every bit of that man’s hard-earned knowledge, and they don’t appreciate it. Sure, Speck is dead ornery and ignorant, and greedy, too, but he been known to leave a little room for other people long as they don’t get in his way. These younger ones don’t leave no room for nobody, and their war experience give ’em their excuse. To their way of thinkin, the country owes ’em a free ride for sendin ’em halfway around the earth to get mangled up in some stupid Asia war that nobody give a shit about in the first place.
Like I’m sayin, that is only their excuse, because long before they went off soldierin, them kind done what they pleased around the backcountry. And that is because they know for a damn fact that the Everglades is their God-given inheritance. Got it straight from the Bible, Faith, and Revelation that the Merciful Lord hates nigras and won’t stand for Yankees, turned His back on Injuns and despises Spanish. The Almighty, He detests a Jew, the same way they do. Nosir, their Redeemer won’t put up with nobody who ain’t Old-time Religion, which is why it’s okay to go persecutin in His Holy Name.
So when them fellers say, “This here is God’s Country,” what they mean is, it is their country, and not only the Park but the Big Cypress. Not countin Injuns—who just naturally don’t count—their granddaddies was the first to hunt out here in the last century, so these boys don’t give a hoot in hell whether it’s state, federal, or private-owned. A man who ain’t local born and bred tries to build him a legal huntin camp back in the Cypress—well, it just don’t matter if he paid his lease, paid up his taxes. If he ain’t one of ’em, they burn him out, cause he don’t belong out there no more’n them Australia trees or them walkin catfish that come in from Louisiana. Them boys get wind of that invader, they’ll grab their guns and a few six-packs of beer, go roarin over there, swamp buggies or airboats, high-power rifles and bad dogs, throw gasoline and torch that camp right to the ground. Maybe they’ll look-see who’s inside, maybe they won’t. And what’s to stop ’em, way to hell and gone out there back of that Glades horizon?
Tryin to deal with that mean kind is like baggin up a bunch of bobcats. Older generation now, they played hell with a new warden or park ranger, but they wouldn’t kill him, not if they could help it. These fellers here, I ain’t so sure. Older ones, if the warden was a local man, they’d tease him, play along with him, maybe throw a scare into him so next time he might shy away, all the while knowin that no local jury would convict ’em.
A few years back, this young ranger spotted Ol’ Man Speck in his binoculars, slippin across between two hammocks in the sloughs. Speck was mindin his own business, just huntin along in his own private preserve, maybe two-three miles inside the Park boundary. He was snarin his gators, so’s not to create no disturbance. This ranger used a scullin pole to sneak around the backside of a hammock, took him half the mornin probin through the saw grass, but finally he was set. Let Speck work his way to him, he had him dead to rights—Mornin, Mr. Daniels! Speck’s rifle was layin where he couldn’t reach it, and havin the drop on this bad ol’ feller, that ranger laughed at him, feelin real cocky. All that sweat and nerves and plain hard work had made him the first man and the only man who ever brung this wily old rascal to the bar of justice.
When that young ranger comes up alongside, Speck is shakin his head real pathetic, doin his best to look old and slow and heartbroke, is what he told me. Real wore-out and discouraged. He takes this three-foot gator by the tail, says “Ye ain’t fixin to run a old man in for this here lizard, are ye?” Distracted that ranger for one second, which was all Speck needed. Before the poor feller could speak up and say, “Yessir, I sure am!” Speck is uncoilin like a cottonmouth. Brings that young gator up off of the deck, whaps that feller upside of the head and knocks him sprawlin. Grabs that boy’s rifle, pumps the cartridges into the water, jams the muzzle deep into wet mud, then lays it back real careful in the ranger’s boat so’s nobody can’t never say he broke nor stole no gov’mint property. Ol’ Speck cranks up and heads for home, and no hard feelins. And sittin up watchin him go, that poor feller felt so sheepish and so stupid that he clean forgot to report his great adventure with Speck Daniels!
In the old days, we had a tougher breed of warden. A lot of them men was hunters theirselves and knew the country, and generally they had a local clan behind ’em. You messed with one, you was messin with ’em all. You take and hit one them old wardens with a gator, you better finish it. You best leave him out there.
Whidden watched Sally’s boat on its way from shore. “Before them other boys come home from overseas and Speck went over into runnin guns, we was just your common moonshiners and gator hunters, puttin to use what Speck was taught by his uncle Tant and Old Man Joe Lopez. We never bothered with no gator longer’n eight feet, cause after that they grow these hard buttons inside that spoils the hide. No market for that hornback, not no more. We stripped off the belly flat and left the rest, except for maybe a few tails to sell to restaurants. Any damn fool can shoot a gator, skin it out, but strippin that flat quick without nickin it or tearin it, that’s another breed of gator man entirely.
“Big gator now, before you cut that tail, you have to cut the back open, use a stick to pry the spinal cord and twist it out, otherwise that tail could spasm, break your leg. But gator tail is ‘larripin good,’ as Old Man Smallwood used to say! Tastes somewhere between frog legs and a rattler, so they tell me.”
Andy said, “You never et one, Whidden?”
“Never et them crawly things, nosir, I didn’t. Ain’t one gator hunter out of five that cares to try one. We had our fill of ’em already, from all that raw meat and guts and blood smell, skinnin ’em out.”
“Well, I weren’t never a real gator hunter,” Andy said, “so I always et a piece if someone give it to me. Them crawly things is pretty good when you know how to fix ’em like the Injuns done. You get hungry enough, a nice fat rattlesnake can put you in mind of some lean chicken.”
“Mikasukis eat them cold-blood things but they won’t touch a rabbit. Claim it takes away your manlihood. Can’t get your courage up, you know.” Whidden leaned down to help Sally aboard. When he hugged her, she grumped, “I’m going to fix you some nice rabbit then. Get me some rest.”
For supper, they fried small jack and mangrove snappers, and two blue catfish, pin-hooked by Andy from the stern. “Better’n ladyfish, I guess,” he said, to disguise his pride in them, “but them sail-fin cat in the deeper channels eat a little better than these blues. Course in the old days, we wouldn’t touch these things. We’d have a good snook or a pompano, maybe trout or grouper. All them good kinds was right here for the takin.”
Because of mosquitoes, they prepared to sleep aboard. Whidden said, “Sally and me’ll sleep here in the cabin, and you two fellers can lay out on deck in this nice Gulf breeze. I got some mesh, so miskeeters won’t be too bad. We’ll give you a blood transfusion in the mornin.” He put his arms around Sally from behind, but she was still brooding, and was cool with him. “Or maybe I can take turns on deck with you two fellers,” Whidden sighed.
Sally said she had been told by Sadie Harden that whoever last pillaged the Watson house had stripped out the only built-in cabinets in all the Islands—
“You sneakin up on those bad ol’ Carrs again?” Whidden was cross. “Dammit, Sally, them young Carrs killed two young Hardens in an argument over some coon skins. We all know that, known it for thirty years! That don’t mean that all that family are no good from here on out!”
Sheepish, she said in a whiny cracker voice, “Honey, ah ain’t nevuh said all of ’em was bay-yud! Ah jus’ said the mos’ of ’em, is all!”
“Killed a couple of dirty Hardens, that’s all,” Whidden said.
“ ‘Dirty Hardens’! That’s exactly how they talked! There was still lynch talk when I was in school!”
“Even in the thirties, lynching was common all around the South,” Lucius reminded them, “and up north wasn’t much better. And there were massacres.”
Andy nodded. “I guess we all got our bad story. Cousin of mine was in Tavernier around 1933 when some sports fishermen went in and gunned down an old black man and his family. Didn’t like what the old man charged for bait and didn’t care for the expression on his face when they cussed him out. Went back for him after dark, of course. Drank some shine to get their courage up and found some more brave fellers to help out. The son got away, come running with his baby to get help. They was the only survivors.”
“And nobody was charged, I don’t suppose.”
“Well, the Monroe Sheriff done the sensible thing, to keep the peace. He charged that hysterical young nigra with massacring his own family, and nobody bothered their heads no more about it.”
The blind man stared away into the night, as if awaiting the judgment of the heavens upon Florida. “I ain’t too proud about them days, are you? God Bless America, we say, but I’d hate to think that God would bless the ignoramus gun-crazy Americans that done things like that.” His words were uttered quietly with a terrible finality, as if he had slowly opened up his hands on his stigmata.
Lucius lay down on the cabin roof with a life jacket under his head and hunted the Southern Cross in the Gulf sky, but fear for his brothers, seeping back into his lungs, made him sit up again. How long could an old man survive, tied and gagged in the suffocating heat and stench inside that house! The image wrenched a small cry from his throat, and beside him, the blind man’s eyes opened wide under the starry heavens.
Considering the poor alternatives of flight or prison, was an octogenarian such as Rob better off dead? If that old man were killed, he would be grief-stricken—oh God! of course!—but would he also feel that Rob’s end might be a mercy? No! He denounced himself for an unworthy idea which he vowed never to recognize again.
Above the bank of thunder heads to westward, the Gulf night was clear, and heat lightning flashed across the firmament as if shot from the farthest bright clear stars of deepest heaven. That lightning shimmer would be followed in a day or two by a southwest blow, after which the wind would back around to the northwest. The winds came and went away again, with more wind at certain times of year, more heat and rain, but fundamentally the Island seasons remained monotone, as they must be, Lucius imagined, in the realms of purgatory.
The Cracker Belle headed south at dawn toward Lost Man’s River. Off to the eastward the sun swelled behind the night wall of coast jungle, and the rim of the coast forest was a band of fire.
Cryptic fins of porpoise parted a silken sea. The faint smudge of a freighter on the Gulf horizon was the only sign of man. “We’re comin up on Turkey Key,” Harden told Andy in a while. “I heard the clams was startin to come back behind Little Turkey.”
“Turkey Key, Plover Key, Wood Key, Hog Key,” Andy said, counting his fingers. “Don’t all of them islands have a high shell beach tossed up by storms? The pioneers chose these windward beaches because the sea wind kept the mosquitoes back in the bushes, and the shell ridge behind was higher ground in time of hurricane. I reckon the Hardens tried out every one!”
Whidden nodded. “Hardens liked being far away, farther the better, so the Great Hurricane never drove ’em from the Islands, it just scattered ’em. Earl rebuilt on Wood Key near his daddy, and Lee moved our bunch over to South Lost Man’s, and Webster went four miles upriver past First Lost Man’s Bay. After that nobody saw him much. Slim, quiet feller. Stayed up in the river. Made moonshine back in there and done some voodoo.”
Sally said, “Whidden’s mama told me that Webster lived apart because Earl made him feel bad about his color. She said Webster was dark but had good pointed features and straight hair, and was very handsome. Some men who work all of their lives out in the sun go very dark, that’s all.”
Andy agreed. “Some men just take the sun that way. My own cousin Harley Wiggins was as dark as Webster Harden, nobody never questioned Harley cause he was a Wiggins!”
“Back in the old days,” Sally said, “the Hardens gave a square dance once a week, and people came in from all over the Islands. Mr. Watson came, too, and he always sat with his back to the corner—had his place saved for him. If he went outside, he never came into the firelight where somebody might shoot at him out of the dark. That man was wary!”
Listening to his wife talk about his family, Harden winked at Lucius. “Yep, Harden men all played some kind of music,” he recalled. “Lee Harden called the dances, played the fiddle. He’d put a keg of moonshine on his elbow and throw it down. Uncle Earl picked the guitar but he couldn’t sing, and Uncle Webster played fiddle and mandolin. My pa’s favorite tunes were ‘Sugarfoot Rag’ and ‘That Dear Old Gal of Mine.’
“Pa burned his linings out so bad on moonshine that in later years he went all numb, didn’t feel a thing. He could take and lift a coffeepot right off the fire and drink black coffee right out of the pot, was famous for it. He never let moonshine get the better of him, the way most did, but he had that temper and he had that Injun in him and he wouldn’t take no nonsense, not from nobody. He was tough, all right, and so was Webster, but them two never turned mean when they was drinkin. I mean, they never killed nobody, not completely.”
“Not completely, no!” Andy smiled broadly. “Oh my, oh my,” he said with a happy sigh.
Sally contemplated the three men. “ ‘Oh my, oh my’ is right! This man’s father was supposed to be a famous killer, and this one’s daddy helped to kill him, and the third one’s brother was killed by my cousins—dangerous bunch here!”
Though her husband laughed, he was quick to change the subject. “My pa knew them men would be layin for Ed Watson because rumors traveled fast even in them days. He aimed to warn him. After the hurricane, Mr. Watson come back south, hunting for Cox, but the Hardens never seen him. If Lee Harden could have got to him first, he might not of gone back there and got shot to pieces.
“Pa always said that E. J. Watson knew a whole lot better than to return that day to Chokoloskee. He must of got tired of running—either that, or he had a purpose no one knew about. Said E. J. was just too darn smart not to suspect something. Them men was scared of him as well as jealous, and scared men are the most dangerous, and E. J. knew that.”
“Well, Mr. Watson never stooped down to their level,” Sally said. “He kept apart and they never forgave it. They were out to revenge that and make their name by killing a famous desperado. That’s why Lee Harden called ’em outlaws. Called ’em the mob.”
The blind man stifled a red-faced retort. He cleared his throat. “All the same, them fishermen-farmers you call the mob was your family’s neighbors, and good people, too.”
“Good people? Let their young boys run over there and shoot into that body?”
“You sure of that?” The blind man grunted. “One of them boys you always mention was eight years older’n me, and I reckon he stayed that way till the day he died. That would make him about six years of age when he was puttin all them bullets in that body. Course he might of had him a durn popgun or something. Might of shot a cork.” Andy turned his sightless gaze in Lucius’s direction, and his heavy sigh was open warning to distrust anything this young woman might say about the Bay people.
“What was unforgivable,” she persisted, “was putting the blame on Henry Short for shooting Mr. Watson. Henry Short, who never raised his gun!”
Like a manatee breaking the surface, Andy emitted a short emphatic puff. Even her husband protested, “Honey, you don’t know that! Not for sure!”
“Well, that’s what Henry told your father, who told me. Henry swore on his Bible that he never raised his gun.”
Andy leaned back with his hands behind his head. “You’re sayin Henry swore that on the Bible? You pretty sure of that?”
“No, I’m not!” she blurted, close to tears.
“Because Henry was standing right beside my dad,” Andy said carefully, “and my dad told me he seen that rifle comin up, longside of his own.”
Lucius peered at the blind face for some sign of ambiguity. “Why would he raise his gun unless he meant to fire,” he said carefully.
“Maybe he meant to bluff your dad,” Andy said gloomily, looking out to sea. “I never asked him.” He shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, Colonel, then quit askin!” He closed his eyes.
Whidden was eager to show Sally his home coast. Taking advantage of fair weather, they continued south to Lost Man’s River. The water of the Gulf was cloudy green, and its long slow swells swept inshore from distant storms of the Antilles.
A low island rising dead ahead stood out a little from the shore, in the middle of the Lost Man’s River delta. “My dad bought the claim to Lost Man’s Key but built his house south of the river mouth on Lost Man’s Beach,” Whidden told Sally. “Built again after the ’26 Hurricane, built again after the tornado, 1940. He farmed his corn and peas there where I’m pointin at. That little cove back over there was full of fish, so he called it Sadie’s Hole, after my ma.”
“The Carrs called it the same thing,” she said, “because any Carr who tried to sneak in there to fish was asking for a bullet hole from Sadie Harden!”
“Well, after 1929, you might be right, Sal. Course I ain’t no authority on my own family.”
Bougainvillea was resurgent in its red-lavender bowers over the charcoal shadows of Lee Harden’s cabin. There was no trace of Lucius’s small shack, only coast undergrowth. Behind the white ridge of storm-washed shell and sea grape rose the black columns of the coco palms burned by the Park.
“Pioneer families might have no news for many months, the world went past them,” Sally said solemnly. “But those folks knew every shift of wind and turn of current, they could see and smell and listen, and they knew.” She looked from one man to the other, misty-eyed in her evocations of the old traditions. “They just knew.”
“Knew what?” Lucius could not hide his impatience. Yet seeing her so moved by this wild coast, and so embattled by her demons, he stifled his annoyance at her tendency to instruct them in a place and way of life that all three men had known before she was born. Sally was principled and gallant, but her need to right old Island wrongs had killed the fun in her—the tart observations and the goofiness and whimsy which had so delighted him on their journey south.
Whidden was pointing out old landmarks. “See that little stretch of sand nearest the creek mouth? That’s where the Tuckers farmed, and my family, too. Call it Little Creek, had a freshwater spring that Mr. Watson had his eye on. That’s where Tuckers had their garden and that’s where my folks had their farm after 1910.”
“Jim Daniels and his family were living down this beach because his daughter was married to Frank Hamilton,” Lucius reminded them. “His son recalls that the Tuckers were living here on a little sloop. James remembers hearing shots, at least he thinks he does. He says the killer put the bodies aboard Tucker’s little sloop, set her afire, drifted her out to sea. James told me once he’d seen that burning boat himself, he’d seen the smoke of her, offshore.”
Harden shook his head. “Easterly wind might of drifted off their sloop, but my dad and his brothers found the bodies in the shallers off the Key. That’s where Tuckers had their palm-thatch hut, in the Gulf breeze.”
Andy said, “I sure do like James Daniels, and I always did. But James weren’t but a little feller then, and he might recall most of it all right and still be wrong about the bodies. Nobody wrote nothin down about it, only Ted Smallwood, who weren’t here, and Uncle Ted had to think back a half century by the time he done that. There weren’t no hearing, nothing in the papers. Two dark stains fading down into the sand was about all them young folks left behind to show they ever walked upon God’s earth.”
No matter what the circumstances of the killings, these could only seem inconsequential when set against the horror of the act itself. Yet Lucius disliked this discussion very much, and his own part in it seemed to him dishonest. He had encouraged objective discussion of his father, trying to learn something—to remain equable and simply listen—but his companions were talking more freely than he liked about E. J. Watson, as if his own feelings were beside the point, as if Papa were no longer his father but a figure of legend, therefore in the public domain. On the other hand, any comment by the son appeared self-serving and beside the point, no matter what that point happened to be.
Having defended the Kind Parent, the Good Neighbor, the Inspired Farmer for so long, he was feeling tremors of unhappy dread and self-deception. Even those well-disposed toward his father seemed in agreement on the menace of him, and the pall that his violence had cast over this coast. As the beloved younger son, safe under Papa’s roof, what could he know of the long nights and days—and months and years—which others had spent in this lonesome mangrove wilderness in the shadow of a man allegedly involved in cold-blooded murders in at least three states?
“Them bodies with their eyes wide open underwater give Uncle Earl a fright he never got over,” Harden was saying. “Once he made sure Watson had gone north, he went to Key West and give an affidavit. Swore on his oath that the three men and one nigra who found them murdered had recognized the keel mark made by Watson’s boat. Uncle Earl claimed his whole family had read Tucker’s note defyin Watson that was found on the kitchen table at the Bend. Well, where was that note now? the Sheriff asked him. How could he show a grand jury an underwater sand track nearly one month old, off of Lost Man’s Key, forty miles north? Anyway, no self-respectin jury in the sovereign state of Florida would accept a Harden’s testimony against a white man.
“ ‘You sayin I ain’t white?’ Uncle Earl yelled, as if this was the first time he’d ever heard about it. And them lawmen said, ‘We know who you are, boy. Now go on home.’ So Earl went home humiliated, and dead cold furious at everybody.
“Earl Harden hated the prejudice against his family, but not as bad as he hated his family for lettin Henry Short eat at their table. He hated nigras so darn bad that some of the Bay folks took a shine to him, decided he must be a white man after all. He was good friends with Browns and Thompsons, and with Fonso Lopez, too. Them families liked him somewhat better than his own did.” Whidden sighed, avoiding his wife’s glare. “Uncle Earl weren’t all bad by no means, and I felt sorry for him—got to be sorry for any man who don’t feel easy in his skin.
“Ed Watson had been good to us, and very generous, and nobody but Uncle Earl would act against him. They give Earl credit for sticking to his guns, but they knew he done it more out of his fear of Watson than in public duty. And after that year, Earl was more afraid than ever, in case that man might come back to the Islands and get wind of what Earl Harden told the law.
“Once Watson was dead, Uncle Earl got drunk and started hollerin about how he wished he’d been at Chokoloskee, how he would of been first man in line to shoot that sonofabitch, and all like that. Kind of surprised people, I reckon, because while Mr. Watson was alive, he never talked that way. And he was still talkin that way when Mister Colonel come back to the Islands a few years later.”
“Couldn’t shake that habit, I guess.” Lucius tried to smile. “Earl made sly remarks where I could hear ’em, and when he was drinking, he got abusive to my face. In all the years I lived at Lost Man’s, I never went near him if I could help it. If he was at one of the Harden parties, I just stayed away.”
“Well, after he heard about your list, Uncle Earl stopped shootin off his mouth about Ed Watson. He got over all them kind of speeches!”
Lost Man’s Key lay straight across the mouth of Lost Man’s River, hiding the broad shallow bay inside. Whidden said with a shy pride, “Lee Harden came here after the Hurricane of 1910, and he swore that nobody would ever run him off. Well, Pa was wrong. But it took pretty close to forty years and it took the federal government to do it.”
The boat approached the river mouth by the south channel. Black skimmers lilted over the swift eddies that ran between the gold-brown oyster bars and channeled into the Gulf on the ebb tide. The purling cries of oyster catchers came and went across the bars, rising and falling.
“Hear that orster bird? He always been here.” Andy House smiled. “Got a big red bill, the same as me. I bet that bird been makin that lonesome sound at Lost Man’s River since before the Injuns first come, in the old centuries.”
The southwest shore of Lost Man’s Key was a crescent point of fine white limestone sand. Easing the Belle past the bars, they set out a stern anchor in the cove behind the sand point. Lucius ran the bowline to a driftwood tree so that the Belle could be pulled in close to shore, but even so, Andy lost his footing and got soaked to the hips. “Guess I’ll go swimming,” he said happily, sinking down in all his clothes, sending up bubbles. When his big face broke the surface in a joyful smile, the Gulf sky sparkled in his eyes.
From upriver came the loud and hollow knocking of the great black woodpecker, and from much nearer, the hoot of a barred owl—hoo-hoot, hoo-haw. In the silence, the large forest birds seemed far away and also very near. “That hoot owl ain’t so usual in daytime,” Whidden said, sheepish in his uneasiness. “Any Injun hearin that hoot at noon, he’d take that as a sign. Jump back in his dugout and keep right on goin.”
When Lucius asked where the Tuckers were buried, Whidden led him off into the thicket of dense buttonwood and bayonet plant, strap fern, marlberry. In the hot undergrowth, Lucius caught the skunk smell of white stopper, the antidote to dysentery at Chatham Bend. Everywhere, the sea wood’s sandy floor was marked by deft hands of raccoon, the swathe and claw prints of a gopher tortoise, the whispery traces of wood mouse and lizard, a single gray-green bobcat scat, hair-packed, ends twisted up into long points.
Harden crawled ever deeper into the tangle, and Lucius followed, brushing at the tiny flies which sought the stinging sweat around his eyes. Thornlashed, gasping, he felt dizzy with the humidity and heat, and clawed at a disconcerting numbness at the forehead—the heavy web of the golden orb spider, like a tight plaster.
Soon they came to a dim clearing in the wood where the Tucker cabin had stood years before. “That’s where they was put.” Harden seemed uneasy, still troubled by that owl. “Way back in there.” Where he pointed was impenetrable thicket.
A man patching his britches in the sun … Aunt Josie had mentioned that detail to her poor Pearl. Here at Lost Man’s, even Lucius could imagine the fell imminence of the killer, like a bruised cloud come swiftly from an unknown quadrant, crossing the dawn to break the burnished edge of a clear sunrise. Perhaps poor Tucker, in his final moment, had heard a lizard jump and scutter in dry sea grape leaves—had stopped his needle, held his breath as he half-turned, sensing those bare eyes in a shadowed visage under a black hat, and the fatal shift of light in the morning leaves, in the sweet scent of lime …
On the sand point, Sally Brown was making camp. Andy lay spread-eagled in the sun, drying his clothes. Hearing their sneakers squeeze the sand, he raised his hand in contented greeting. “Call this sunbathin,” House called, laughing happily at the very idea. They unloaded supplies from the boat, and swam, and stretched on the warm sand.
Whidden and Lucius went fishing for supper, heading east up the mangrove river—the home river, Whidden called it—crossing the vast expanse of silver bayou called First Lost Man’s Bay. In the twenties, the Hardens had been threatened when this lower river was surveyed by the Tropical Development Company of Miami. The more intrepid prospective buyers had been bounced in jalopies over the Chevelier Road to its dead end in the Glades savanna, then poled in dugouts by “genuine wild Indians” some six miles southwest to upper Lost Man’s River, where they were met by a launch from the company camp at Onion Key. A few plots were sold before the scheme collapsed when the Onion Key headquarters were destroyed by the Hurricane of ’26, which also removed most of the outbuildings from Chatham Bend.
Farther east, they passed Alderman Point, then the charcoaled ruins of Webster Harden’s homestead, on a high bank under buttonwood and figs and tall black mangroves. From there they returned down Lost Man’s River, trolling the current points and inner bends. Fishing was slow. “It’s like Speck says, them sport hunters have killed the game out, and the sport fishermen will do the same for fish. Maybe we’re ignorant crackers around here, but we never fished nor hunted nothin that we didn’t eat.”
“Plume birds and gators?”
“Well, them things was our livelihood! Anyways, we never took much, only the belly flats and plumes!” Harden grinned, clearing a backlash from his reel. “Couldn’t let all them poor Yankee ladies pine away for egret bonnets and nice alligator boots!” But while he picked and fiddled, his mood changed. “Ain’t that somethin, what we done, and our forefathers, too? Leavin all them carcasses to rot day after day? Ate at my gizzard every time I done it. I purely hate to think about them hides stacked in that house. I do. But if them wild critters ever come back the way they was, I reckon I’d do the same damn thing all over.”
Whidden cast a bright white-feathered lure across the broad expanding smiles of turning water. The disks of current moved downriver, slow as planets, and the tide changed, and the wind shifted. They drifted downriver toward First Lost Man’s Bay. Like an ancient fort in the river mouth, Lost Man’s Key rose in black subtropic tangle, eclipsing the sun as it started its slow fall to the Gulf horizon.
Alderman Point upriver there got that name back in 1915, when you was in Fort Myers. That year, times was very hard—the fishin poor, no jobs to speak of, nothin but clammin, rickin charcoal. But the Ashley boys was getting by, robbing banks and such on the east coast. So Leland and Frank Rice and Hugh Alderman, along with a stranger name of Tucker—them four fellers give it a try and robbed the Homestead bank. We always heard them Rice boys was in the crowd killed Mr. Watson, but I reckon you know all about that, better’n me.
The Rice-Alderman gang escaped after a shooting scrape at Jewfish Creek, over in the east of Florida Bay. They killed two deputies. A fisherman took ’em as far west as Flamingo, where they hired a boat to take them north around the Cape. Man dropped ’em off at a place up Lost Man’s River—Alderman Point—and probably these boys bought some supplies off our Harden family. The Rice gang didn’t want to stay no place too long. Knowin the back creeks, they rowed as far as Lopez River. Hugh Alderman’s cousin Walter had married Marie Lopez, and they figured they would get a little help. All they got was water from the cistern, cause the Lopez Place was empty. Next thing, their skiff drifted off, and they had to clamber through the mangroves all the way downriver to the nearest point across from Chokoloskee. By that time a reward notice was posted on the door at Smallwood’s post office.
At dusk, Leland swum over to the island. Two boys seen him swimming and bushwhacked him when he come ashore. Harley Wiggins and a younger boy. Remember Harley? Big, dark-complected feller? And that younger boy was Crockett Daniels—Speck. Them boys was nervous, they just shot and run, and Leland crawled away. The sun went down before the word got out that a wounded bank robber was out there in the dark. Only ones who weren’t scared to death were Rob Storter and his pretty Cassie who come in late from fishing and never knowed a thing about it. Next morning Old Man McDuff Johnson come pounding on the door, informin Rob he had a dead man on his stoop. It was Leland Rice with a pistol in one pocket and five thousand dollars in the other.
It bothered people that them boys killed Leland Rice for the reward. Everybody knew the Rice boys, they were real nice fellers, never made no trouble. They weren’t local men, they come from up around Lake Okeechobee, but they fished around here for some years and they had kinfolk on the island.
Them boys always claimed they tried to arrest Leland, but he went for his gun and so they had to shoot him. Maybe that’s the way it was. I wasn’t there. But shooting a feller for a cash reward? Weren’t nobody felt good about that killing. Harley’s sister still don’t like to talk about it! Maybe twenty years later, when that Rice story come up in a conversation, she sat up very straight and stiff and tugged her skirt. “Harley Wiggins is my brother and he never said a thing about it, not to me!” That was the last we ever heard on that subject!
The men wrapped Leland in a canvas shroud and buried him. They took Leland’s money to Ted Smallwood, thinking the postmaster would know what to do with it, but Ted was a stickler for minding his own business, he didn’t want the responsibility. Ted weren’t one to turn his nose up at five thousand dollars, but he knew it wouldn’t be much use to him if he was dead. Some tough hombre with a gun was bound to come hunting for that money, and he did not care to be the one holding the bag. When Ted said that, the rest decided they didn’t want nothing to do with that blood money. They turned it over to the captain of the Pal, a big old boat that run produce once a week to Punta Gorda.
Sure enough, Frank Rice swum over from the east side of the Bay and asked after his brother and they told him that since he seen him last, Leland was dead and buried. So after Frank had blew his nose and put his neckerchief away, he asked where that money might be and was told he could go claim it on the Pal, which was tied up to a fish house off of Smallwood’s. But when Frank rowed out, tried to climb aboard, a sniper hid back in the mangrove put a bullet in his back, and he dropped back into the water. He was hauled aboard and patched up some, and he lived long enough to die in prison.
Next day Hugh Alderman decided to swim over, and the fourth man, Tucker, followed. Told Hugh he’d rather go to prison than spend another day with them damned miskiters, and anyways he was dog sick from eatin raw orsters morning, noon, and night. Those were John Tucker’s last complaints, cause he didn’t swim good and he didn’t make it. The mud bar where his body came ashore is still Tucker Key today. He lay in the sun quite a good while, and by the time Ted Smallwood whacked a box together and they got him buried, he had turned black as any nigra that you ever seen.
Some claimed that Tucker was the brother of that feller who got killed at the turn of the century at Lost Man’s River, because once before, when this same man come through Chokoloskee on his own two feet, he said he was gunnin for Ed Watson. Must of stayed away a good long while, getting his nerve up, cause by the time he got here, his intended victim was five years in the grave. Maybe the poor feller went over to bank robbing because he had all that nerve saved up and didn’t want to let it go to waste. Then Bill House took a good look at that body and come up with the opinion that the dead man weren’t nobody but young Rob Watson, who had ran away at the time of the Tucker killings, but it looks like Bill might of been wrong, as usual.
Who ended up with all that money no one knows. There’s some will tell you Sheriff Tippins kept it so safe that he could never find it, and others spread stories how Ted Smallwood offered to hold it for Hugh Alderman. Smallwood kept all of his own money rolled up in deep pockets sewed inside his coveralls, never got separated from his greenbacks for two minutes, and maybe that measly ol’ five thousand dollars got lost way down inside. Anyways, when the banks come looking, them fellers scratched their heads, tried to think back about it, but none of ’em could rightly recall where that durn money could of got to.
Most folks believed that the ones who shot Frank Rice and near to drowned him were the same ones who killed his brother Leland, and they never did forgive them two young fellers. Some said them boys picked up their bad attitudes from seeing Ed Watson shot to pieces, because both of ’em was among them ones who run down there and shot into the body. Anyways, folks were ashamed of them young bushwhackers. This is a coast where moonshining and smuggling go back a hundred years and more, but there never had been no local crime to speak of. Cash could lay for a week on the kitchen table, wouldn’t nobody touch it.
Leland lay on that doorstep all night long with five thousand dollars in his pocket and nobody touched him. Might of took his life for a two-hundred-buck reward, but nobody stole that feller’s hard-earned money. He had a big diamond on his finger when they buried him, and nobody touched that diamond neither, though there was talk about a feller who might of gone back with his shovel later on.
All Whidden and Lucius had brought back to enhance a supper of dark bread and baked beans was one thin sea trout, a small jack, and a pail of oysters. “Beans and mullet, grits and mullet—that sticks to your belly,” Whidden commented. “Trout and jack don’t scarcely do the job.” They squatted at the water’s edge scaling and cleaning fish and shucking oysters while Sally scavenged driftwood for the fire.
“I was tellin Sally,” Andy said, “that the ones who lasted in the Islands was hard men—they had to be. Lee Harden and his brothers was as tough as knotholes and Lee had that temper. All the same, he was kinder and broader in his mind than most. My daddy knew him from way back, in the Frenchman’s time. His Sadie was a strong woman, too, and she was kind—she was just wonderful! Fine people! Hung on here at Lost Man’s till the end. Hardens lived here more than seventy years, the first real settlers to come here and the last to go—the greatest pioneer clan in the Islands!”
“Hear that, Mr. Whidden?” Sally cried, delighted, throwing down her driftwood. “That sure is right!”
Her husband nodded. “My pa always said that the one thing he was glad of, his daddy wasn’t here to see us leave. Granddad Robert died in the nick of time, at 106 years old, and Parks run us out of here the followin year. For a little while, we come back in the summers, set some nets from May until September. Pa was the only Harden who had title to his property, a lifetime right, but we weren’t allowed to build nothin nor plant a garden. Pa got him a little houseboat we could camp on, cause we couldn’t set up so much as a lean- to on the shore. Couldn’t hunt nor trap nor gather nothin—all we done was fish. The more Pa visited, the more he’d grieve, and pretty soon, he give it up for good. Lost Man’s was what he worked for his whole life, and the loss of it took the heart out of him, though he lived along in Naples for a few more years. I will say for the first park ranger, he knew how hard it was for the old-timers. He’d turn his head if Sadie Harden took sea turtle eggs or netted terrapins. Before that, he worked as an Audubon warden and had made good friends among the Island people.”
Sally laughed. “If I had worked as Audubon warden back in those days, I’d have made good friends among the Island people, too! Made all the friends that I could find, and then some!”
“This ranger, name of Barney Parker, never noticed if we shot for the pot. Might been too busy chasin gator poachers. One time he come up alongside a young Brown that had him a mess of gator flats under a canvas, and gator blood all through his bilge water. That ranger just set there looking at that bloody water, never says one word, till that young Brown was set to jump out of his skin. Finally Barney looks up and says, ‘Well, son, it sure looks like the time has come for you to try another line of work.’ That was partly a warning and partly good advice, because the way them reptiles was disappearin from slough after slough, there weren’t no more future in the gator business.
“Exterminatin the last gators was what stopped the slaughter, cause the rangers couldn’t. The gator hunters knew every meander of these creeks and rivers, knew every backwater of the Glades country south to Cape Sable and Florida Bay, and the good ones always slipped away without no trouble.
“It used to be that every point and river mouth and key, and any piece of higher ground along this coast, had a family living off the water and farmin their little bit of soil to get their greens. Hard to believe that, ain’t it? Parks tore out everything—houses, fruit trees, little docks, every sign of man. Course there’s plenty of sign if a man knows where to look, all the way back to the Calusas, but folks today will never know what we knew about these islands, never know how beautiful they were. Used to be wild limes everywhere, smelled like pure paradise, and every little bay was full of mullet.
“Parks couldn’t believe how many old trails and clearins that last hurricane uncovered, how much rusty metal and crockery and glass. The pains taken by them old-time settlers to haul their poor old stuff all them miles down here, mostly by rowboat! The lives that was used up clearin jungle, hackin furrows in the rock-hard ground on these old shell mounds! Well, all that labor never meant a damn to them officials. Come ashore and ate up their nice lunch, set down and rustled a few papers, then destroyed what it took years and years for us poor folks to scrape together, rough shacks and home-built beds and tables and chairs and cisterns and fish houses and docks! Even our gardens! ‘This here is an American damn park, so you folks just rip out them guavas and papaws, them ol’ gator pears, cause them foreign damn things ain’t got no business here!’ ”
Harden smiled but in his quiet way, he was bone angry. “Maybe all our families had was quitclaims, but we paid for ’em in blood! Ask the miskiters! We was the pioneers here, the first settlers, but we had to watch this deputy with a gun on his fat butt come waddlin up the beach with some damn vacate papers. Tossed some gasoline and burned our cabin to the ground, then went down the shore and done the same at Mister Colonel’s. They got back in their big-ass boat, but before they left, that feller hollers out across the water. ‘Real nice fire, folks! Too bad we forgot to bring the marshmallers!’ Had to listen to ’em hee-haw. Left us in the rain with no roof over our heads, just settin on that beach there like wet possums!
“Our old homesteads is all grown over now, and Wood Key, too, you’d never know that human beins ever lived here. They was worried that our poor ol’ shacks might spoil the scenery for their Park visitors. Never gave a good goddamn for those who was born and lived their lives here and was kicked out without one thing to show for it!”
Whidden swore with such uncustomary violence that the others fell silent, giving him some room. After a long while he said somberly, “I was tellin Mister Colonel about Leland Rice, how he come through Lost Man’s with his gang after the bank robbery. I never got to the other half of that old story.”
“Whidden? I’m sure Mister Colonel knows the rest of it—”
“This was back in World War I, when he was gone.” Stolid, stubborn, Whidden said to Lucius, “When them fellers come through here, Abbie Harden fell in love with Leland, wanted to run off with him. Well, her parents said no, and next thing she knew, that young bank robber was killed on Chokoloskee. Aunt Abbie was wailin and screechin how that tragedy would not have happened if she had been allowed to go with that young man, and she threatened she might destroy herself almost any day. Course Abbie weren’t a young girl no more, and she might of thought that Leland Rice was her last chance in life. And Leland bein dead and buried, we never got to hear his side of the story.
Abbie Harden was tall and slim, she never got heavy like her sisters, and she had them nice manners that she learned in Key West convent school. You might recall her helpin out at some of your daddy’s parties, makin sure that everything looked nice. A lot of local boys was after her but she weren’t interested, she had her own romantical ideas.
“Abbie took after her brother Earl, she was ashamed of the dark ones in the family. Probably it was Earl taught her to think that way. Whenever she went up to Chokoloskee, folks would find ways to humiliate her because her sister had married Henry Short, and she was furious because her own family saw nothing wrong in that. ‘It’s not bad enough,’ she screeched, ‘that we’re called mulattas up and down the coast, without Libby marrying up with some darned nigger?’ Well, Grandmother Maisie grabbed her daughter by the scruff of her white neck and washed her mouth out with lye soap. Yelled, ‘Girl, are you fool enough to listen to them mean-mouth hypocrites up on the Bay? Didn’t Henry tell us he was part Indian, the same as us? He is a good Christian man and would not lie about it!’ And she told Abbie she should count her blessins, having such a fine man in the family, told her she didn’t care to hear no more about it.
“You recall my grandma, Mister Colonel? From her Seminole side, Grandma Maisie was darker than anybody in her family except Uncle Webster, but because her daddy was John Weeks, the first pioneer to settle Chokoloskee, she was a white woman and that was that. She never paid her own color no attention, so nobody else did neither, only Earl and Abbie. Abbie Harden vowed she would never forgive her family, she was out to spite them. And what she done, she run off with the Storters’ man Dab Rowland, from Grand Cayman Island. This young Carribean man at Everglade was the only other black person around the Bay, and he weren’t wheat color like Henry, he was black—”
“Other black person?” Sally looked cross. “You’re saying Henry Short was black?”
“In them days Dab was fishing with Claude Storter, and he played the banjo for our Harden parties. Well, one night Abbie drank too much, which she weren’t used to, and she grabbed that banjo picker and run off with him and got married by the Cape Sable constable, same way Aunt Libby done. Maybe she told Dab she would holler rape and see him lynched if he didn’t go along, because Abbie was as headstrong as the rest of ’em. If Abbie had married out of love instead of spite, things might been different, but Dab was so black that it seems like she picked him out for his wrong color. Poor feller must of woke up in the mornin and knew he was fixin to get lynched no matter what. Some folks wondered why that nigra would let that wild young woman risk his life, but one way or another, I don’t reckon he had no say about it.
“Aunt Abbie announced that marryin Dab Rowland was all she could think of to get even with her family for ruinin her life by lettin Libby marry Henry. Because, said she, Henry Short was a nigger just as much as Dab, a nigger was a nigger, there weren’t one speck of difference between niggers.”
Andy said sorrowfully, “That’s the way folks seen it—there weren’t no difference between Henry and Dab.”
“Whatever he was, Granddad Robert disowned her, not so much for marryin a black man as for marryin him out of spite to wreck her family. Granddad Robert knew who he liked and who he didn’t, and family had damned little to do with it. He never liked his oldest boy and never pretended that he did, which is probably why Uncle Earl always lived near that old man hopin to change his daddy’s poor opinion of him.
“Dab and Abbie went to Key West for a trip, then back to Everglade, where Dab had some protection from the Storters. But Earl believed that Abbie was flauntin her black husband on the Bay to pay back her family for disowning her, and some of our Weeks and Daniels cousins came over from Marco with a plan to string Dab from the big mahogany out front of the trading post, same ol’ tree that is standin there today.
“My pa was about the only one took up for Abbie. When his brother Earl was fixin to join up with the lynchin party, he stepped in. He told him, ‘That man’s wife is our little sister, so Hardens will stand by ’em.’ And Earl paid some attention, too, because Pa was very strong, with that fiery temper. If Lee Harden give you his word, you could lay your life on it, men always said, so I guess Earl figured if he took a part, he could lay his life on his brother’s promise he would kill him. Earl Harden never forgive his brother for makin him back down about Dab Rowland.
“Course the Bay families liked Earl better’n Lee because he was more like them. Earl was friends with the same folks who became Hardens’ worst enemies and whenever my pa run into trouble, it always seemed like Old Man Earl was hid behind it.
“Lee Harden went to Everglade and warned his sister that the lovebirds better fly, so they went over there to Arizona. Wrote back to inform us that out in the West where nigras ain’t so plentiful, the Injuns and Mexicans are treated even worse. Just ain’t enough black people out there for good Christians to get worked up about, cause they already have their hands full, bein mean to Injuns. Aunt Abbie never had no children, but they adopted a little black boy and they sent his picture and we sure liked the look of him. She ended up enjoy in her black family.”
Whidden stopped to sort his feelings. “In some way, the Hardens’ troubles went back to their friendship with Mr. Watson,” he said finally. “I ain’t blaming him, Mister Colonel—I said, went back to him. Because his friendship with Hardens was a warning to the Bay people: leave these folks be. Maybe all he wanted was the support of Harden guns, like some has said—that worked both ways. As long as Mr. Watson was known to be our friend, nobody messed with us. But after his death, the Hardens was resented worse than ever, especially Lee Harden, who called the men who gunned down his old friend ‘a mob of outlaws.’ Even the ones who took no part had kinsmen in that crowd, and they resented it. Mamie Smallwood purely hated what her dad and brothers done that day, but she never forgive Lee Harden for them words. That woman had it in for Hardens till the day she died.
“Once Mr. Watson was out of the way, the men took to fishing farther and farther south toward Lost Man’s River, and pretty soon, the Fish Wars started up again. The Harden clan was outcast more than ever, and when one sister married Henry Short, it got worse still, and when another run off with Dab Rowland—well, she ruined her family. Aunt Abbie give our enemies all the argument they ever needed that Hardens must be some kind of mulattas who had no right to run no white men off that Lost Man’s coast. The Bay fishermen and the trappers, too, was after our Harden territory, and it got so they were huntin an excuse to come down here in a gang and wipe us out.”
“My cousins! Carrs and Browns—!”
“Your line of Browns had nothin much to do with that feud with Hardens. Matter of fact, your uncle Harry stayed pretty good friends—remember Dollar? Called him that name because back in the old days, he sold his Lost Man’s Key claim to my dad for one silver dollar. Dollar was always selling somethin, he was full of big ideas, a real finagler. It was Dollar who invented commercial stone crabbing, he was the first man around here to set him a line of deep water traps floored with cement that would sink to the bottom and set upright in fifty foot of water. Stone crabs crawl better in winter and rough water and at night, and they are partial to a good tough bait like stingray.
“Anyways, it was Dollar Bill who warned my pa that the Lopez bunch might try to run him off this Lost Man’s claim. Lopezes lived at Mormon Key for quite a while, raised some sugarcane because fishin was so poor—two cents a pound was all we was gettin for pickled mullet—and they was very jealous of our territory. Pa always believed it was one them Lopez cousins who caught him from behind one night at Chokoloskee, cut him up like pork chops with an ax. Pa went to the hospital for the first time in his life, and when he got out, he stopped off at Smallwood’s on his way home. Didn’t suspect Old Man Ted was behind it, just pretended that he did, knowin Ted was friends with the ones who probably done it. Stood there awhile not sayin a word, just watchin Ted tryin not to look at him, cause his face was all ripped up and swollen purple. He was waitin to see if Ted would come apart, and he damn near did, he couldn’t hardly speak. So finally Pa said, ‘The day I catch up with the man who carved this Halloween mask you are lookin at’ ”—and Whidden tapped his own face, his eyes squinted—“ ‘that man is as good as dead.’ Old Man Smallwood says, ‘No, no, no, Lee! I never knew a thing about it!’ And he probably didn’t. But he spread the word about what Pa said, until even the innocent ones got nervous, in case Lee Harden decided it was them.” He shook his head. “Pa wore them heavy face scars all his life. And every year the tensions between Hardens and the Bay kept growin worse.
“Takin a life was about the only way them wars was goin to end, and both sides knew that. Even the weather give us warning signs, like that strange cold breath out of the sky before a thunderstorm. That atmosphere along this coast had to bust like a woman’s water before anybody could breathe easy again.
“Seems terrible to say it but my pa said this himself: if them ones that tried to kill him with an ax had knowed their job, and drawed off that dangerous head of steam by killin him, my brother Roark and my cousin Wilson might not of lost their lives down at Shark River.
“Dollar Bill might been the only Brown who ever did our family a kind deed, and the only one was welcome at our musical parties after them murders. But one day Dollar got drunk and run his mouth off, trying to patch the feud. He was lettin on how it weren’t nothin but a tragical misunderstandin, and how Hardens should quit holdin a grudge against his young Carr cousins. Pa run him right off Lost Man’s Beach, told him he weren’t welcome anymore.”
“Why should the Hardens begrudge the Carrs a couple of ol’ murders?” His wife glared at Whidden, who lay back on the sand again, looking resigned. “Damn it, Whidden,” Sally said then, “Mister Colonel better hear our side of that old story!”
“Honey, he already knows our side.” Whidden pointed across the river mouth toward Lost Man’s Beach. “He was livin right down the beach over there when it happened.” He folded his arms across his knees, his expression enigmatic in the firelight.
It was true that Lucius knew the tragic story. He did not know how the Hardens perceived it decades later, and when Sally looked at him, he urged her to go ahead. Anxious to pull herself together, to set her emotions aside, she folded her hands upon her lap and for almost a minute sat in silence, in her instinct that the recounting of human death deserved formality.
“Roark Harden was eighteen years of age and his cousin—Earl’s boy Wilson—was just one year older. One day Wilson came over from Wood Key to pick up Roark in his skiff. They sailed out to the Gulf sky to pick up wind, then took a bearing southward. Sadie Harden was worried by bad dreams, and she watched from shore until they disappeared.
“The family knew that the two boys planned to spend their first night at Shark River Point. Nobody owned that country down around Shark River, that was Indian country. The boys hoped to make a grubstake trapping coons back of Cape Sable, then go hunting crocodiles out of Belize.”
“They was going across to Belize in a sailing skiff?”
“Mr. House? They were going to Key West, catch a coast trader!” She took a long deep breath.
“Now this was the worst time of the Fish Wars, too many bullets too close to people’s heads, and Roark decided to leave Lost Man’s River before he killed somebody or somebody killed him. Roark and Wilson were real hotheads, they wanted to get away for a while until they simmered down, but they weren’t out hunting trouble, they were avoiding it.
“Those boys were never seen again except by those who killed them! But Roark’s daddy knew who trapped around Shark River and which ones had it in for Hardens. He had no proof but he was sure it was the sons of Walker Carr, who was living at the Watson Place on Chatham Bend.”
Once again, the Bend had been involved in a dark and violent episode in Island history. Lucius wondered if this thought had occurred to Andy House, who lay beside him, staring sightless at the canopy of ocean stars high overhead as if to receive some vision of existence. When the blind man shifted with a weary sigh, Sally stopped talking and awaited him.
“If they was headed for Belize, Mis Sally, and they never come back home, how did their families learn that they was missin? How did Hardens know them boys never got no farther than Shark River? You ever talk to your own family about this?”
“I never talk to my ‘own family’ at all!”
Andy sighed again and lay back on the sand as if expiring, and Sally waited pointedly before resuming.
“The Harden men had hunted for their sons for two long years, even visited a Georgia prison on a rumor. With each failed search, they became more convinced about what actually happened, and Lee Harden was so upset that he swore when he was drinking that he was going after those damned Carrs and no more talk about it. By that time there were plenty of rumors, and Walker Carr had removed his family from the Watson Place, and his sons steered clear of Harden territory, never went south of the fish house at Turkey Key.
“Sadie Harden never doubted that her missing boy was right there in Shark River, killed by Carrs. One time she shot at Cap Daniels’s boat because it looked like a Carr boat.”
Whidden laughed, “Poor Cap went back to Fakahatchee and painted that darn boat of his a different color!”
“For years those Carrs denied the rumors, just barefaced denied them. I believe it was the youngest brother, Alden, who spat up the truth. He was camped there at Shark River with his brothers Owen and Turner, and he’d seen what happened. Couldn’t live with it, I guess, he was having nightmares. He did not know that the Johnson boy he was drinking with at Tavernier was a Harden cousin.
“Alden Carr told the Johnson boy that some coon hides had been taken from their camp. They thought the Harden boys must have them, so they went over there to take them back. Owen Carr was leader, and he crept up and shone a carbide lantern, and when Wilson heaved up on one elbow, he shot him in cold blood where he lay there on the ground under his mosquito bar. Later he claimed the Harden boys were threatening to fire, and another time he kind of hinted that his little brother Alden got buck fever and fired that first shot. But Alden claimed he never fired, he was screeching at his brothers not to shoot.
“Roark sat up at the noise and turned to face them. Seeing his gun was out of reach, and seeing poor dying Wilson there beside him, he was very frightened. According to Alden, he put his hands up, begging them to spare his life. The panicked Carrs yelled and argued right in front of him, waving their guns around. ‘We don’t kill him, he’ll run home and tell, and them Hardens will come gunnin for us!’ Can you believe it? While poor Roark huddled in the light beam, awaiting their decision? Can you imagine anything more terrifying for that poor boy?
“While they were yelling, Roark bolted, scrambling away into the dark. They had that lantern and they chased him down and started shooting, but being scared, not wanting to get close, they just kept firing and wounding him as he crawled away under the stilt roots of the mangroves, until finally he lay down from loss of blood and finally died. They dragged those two boys into their skiff and towed that skiff all the way upriver to the saw grass, then way on up some little creek. They were thinking to bury the bodies, set the skiff on fire, but they were so frightened that they made a mess of the whole business and never finished it. First they heard owls and then a panther screamed, and they just cut and ran!”
Lucius said quietly, “Well, that was Alden’s story, all right.” He gazed across the firelight at Sally. “That’s what he told me, too. Panther scream and all.”
“I don’t believe that Alden fired. It was Owen and Turner!”
Andy House grunted unhappily, sorting his own memories and ruminations. He cleared his throat. “Sally, I ain’t excusin what they done. But when Turner grew up, he married into our House family, and we never found nothin the matter with him. You are tellin this story only from the Hardens’ side, which is all right, but like I say, somebody should speak up for your family if you won’t do it.”
“The Hardens are my family,” Sally cried, as if he were being dense. Upset, she rose and walked off down the beach, and after waiting a little to give her dignity some room, Whidden rose and followed her toward the point.
“Well, Colonel, you was here at Lost Man’s then. You know the story.” When Lucius urged him to tell how he perceived it, Andy cleared his throat, frowning in his determination to speak responsibly and to avoid contradicting Sally’s story more than he had to.
In the first part of the Depression, young Roark Harden and his cousin Wilson come up missing. Because they was known to be coon hunting around Shark River, their daddies suspected the young Carrs, who was camped nearby. Only trouble was, they had no evidence. Up to here, Sally and me don’t have no problem.
That year I was seventeen years old, so I can recall about it pretty good. Our family was truck-farming up near the Trail, so all we had was hearsays, but we knowed Walker Carr’s boys was suspected, knowed all hell broke loose anytime a Carr tried to net mullet south of Turkey Key. And we heard how them Carr boys was claiming that five hundred dollars’ worth of coon hides had been stole out of their camp—a lot of money in Depression times, for folks like us.
Maybe you was too close to ’em to notice, Colonel, but a lot of men said those Harden boys was not only hotheads, they was troublemakers. There was angry talk how somethin had to be done to put a stop to ’em, because them two cousins was the ones most likely to wing a bullet past the ear of any fisherman who came anywhere within two miles of Lost Man’s Beach. After so many years of bad talk and harassment, Hardens was bitter, you can’t blame ’em, and they aimed to scare Bay fishermen off that territory, because Lost Man’s River was the last wild heart of the last wild country left in southwest Florida.
On their side, the men resented Hardens for puttin signs up, tryin to keep others off so much good fishin ground. All the Bay families had it in for ’em, not only Carrs. The fishermen would tear their signs down, cuss ’em out, yell filth across the water at their cabins, hollerin how these Island waters was free territory and how no damn half-breeds weren’t goin to get away with hoggin the whole coast for theirselves.
Us Houses knowed somethin was up pretty soon after it happened. Walker Carr rowed up Turner River to where we was farmin near the Trail. Showed up one night, never said what he was after—might of muttered about hard times and prospectin for gator holes or somethin. At first light, he walked off toward the east. He was a strong little feller but not young no more, so my dad was worried and he follered him a ways before he give up and let him go.
Back then there weren’t much traffic across Florida, and the few trucks and autos never picked up drifters, not in the Depression, not way out there in the middle of the Glades. Anyways, he must of walked a good ways east over the Trail, cause he never come back through till near a fortnight later. Might of spent that second night at Monroe Station, then headed off on some Injun path south and east across the Cypress and out across that long pine ridge on the old Chevelier Road and on down into the Shark River Slough. That’s hard goin, bogs and saw grass and limestone solution holes that slash your boots, never mind the varmints, and no dry place to sleep after the summer rains.
That’s a big country down there, so Carr must of had a rough idea where he was headed. But why he would take that hard overland journey is a mystery, unless he was aimin to make sure that there weren’t no bodies layin out in the Shark River savannas where turkey buzzards might find ’em, maybe draw some Injuns that was out huntin. Wouldn’t want to go in there by river in case he might run across the Hardens, who was out searchin for them bodies, too. The difference was, the Hardens had nothin to hide. They was searchin for sign along the edges of the creeks in broad open daylight. They wanted to find their boys, take ’em home for burial. I reckon Carr wanted to bury ’em for good right where they lay.
Them Hardens had a heavy cross to bear, and we all felt bad about it. Lee Harden lost his oldest boy, and Earl did, too. Earl could be likable, but he was hard. All his life, he seemed kind of discontented, and he complained a lot as he grew older. Rounder than Lee, a little shorter, but not fat. Lee was a big man, and he looked real tough and craggy with that ax-scarred face, but he was easygoing, he could laugh at himself, which Earl could never do. All the same, nobody messed with Lee, because when he drank, he had that dangerous temper.
For a few years, Lee come up to Everglade and haunted them young Carrs. Never harassed ’em directly, just anchored his boat in the river off Carrs’ fish house. Couldn’t shoot ’em only on suspicion—though men done a lot just on suspicion, back in them days! Never called out, never said a word, like he was studying on what to do and had probably come to the right place to do it. That big boat anchored out front was Lee’s way of saying that Carrs and Hardens had unfinished business, and it might of been what caused one of ’em to crack.
Well, the truth finally come out, like Sally says. The Carr boys said they never meant to shoot, they was just nervous, and when Wilson Harden heard somethin and reared up under his miskeeter bar, a gun went off. They claimed they thought the Harden boys was up and shootin so they fired—a pure case of self-defense, to hear Carrs tell it. They admitted they run down Roark in the swamp, admitted they was shriekin at each other, tryin to decide what they should do, because Roark Harden wasn’t likely to forget what he had witnessed.
Those Harden boys was angry wild young fellers, no doubt about it, but Walker Carr’s boys, they weren’t angels neither. One of ’em was always fidgetin his eyes, and I reckon he’s still doin that today. Got so you always had to watch what was laying around loose—life weren’t never that way in the old days.
Whatever them Carr boys done or didn’t do, they are the ones who has to live with it, die with it, too. But it was a shame, the way they killed that poor young feller beggin for his life—that was the part that ate at Turner Carr. Said shootin Roark Harden while he crawled away was the worstest thing he ever had to do. Well, I sure hope so!
I won’t speak for Owen Carr, but I known Turner all my life and I don’t believe he ever bragged about that killin. Nosir, he was real upset and very close to tears just in the tellin of it—this was two years later! Told me that all they wanted was their coonskins, and how when one boy got shot by mistake, they went ahead because they could not leave a witness. I warned young Turner that he better keep his mouth shut, pray for forgiveness, but he could not stop talkin—not braggin, the way Sally tells it, only talkin, like confessin his sins over and over was his only hope of getting shut of what they done.
After the news got out, the whole Bay hunkered down, expectin trouble. The guns come out every time them Harden men come up from Lost Man’s, and them young Carrs was pretty hard to find.
Outside of their family, most people took that coonskin story with some salt. Roy Thompson who married my cousin Ernestine, he fished with Lee Harden for some years, and fished with one of them Carr brothers, too, so he heard the inside story from both sides. Roy Thompson told me he did not believe them Hardens stole no coon hides. Whether he’d say that to the Carrs, I just don’t know.
What it comes down to, the Carr boys knew that no matter what, the community was behind ’em. There weren’t no law south of Caxambas, that was understood by everybody, Sheriff included. Carrs knew they could take the law in their own hands, like was done with Guy Bradley and the Rice boys and Ed Watson and a lot of other men who come to a bad end down in this country.
Like I say, Earl and Lee was tough old boys, and crack shots, too. Robert Harden was an old feller by that time, might not of known what he was shootin at but could still hit it if you got him pointed in the right direction. Even the women in that clan were as handy with shootin irons as they were with hoes. Besides that, they had Webster Harden, who usually finished what he started, and a feller named Watson right next door who could shoot as good as any of ’em and maybe better. Altogether, that was not a gang you would want to mess with.
So everybody on the Bay was set for trouble, but the years went by and not a thing was done about it. Maybe Lee and Earl was startin to get old, or maybe too much time had passed before they learned for sure what really happened, or maybe they never did agree on what to do. They was good brothers as boys, is what my dad told me, but later in life them two men could not agree on the best place in the woods to take a piss.
Crossing her ankles, Sally Brown sank down on the sand. Hands in hip pockets, Whidden stood behind her. In the Gulf wind, they had come up quietly, and Andy House, not knowing how long they had been in earshot, looked chagrined.
“What was done to those Harden boys,” Sally said brusquely, “was what those people wanted to see done. The whole community was behind it, as you say. And those murders were excused by calling the Hardens mixed breed or mulatta. Well, if Hardens are mixed, then the Bay people are, too, because most of those families are blood kin to the Hardens whether they admit it or not. Sandy Albritton is not ashamed of it, but the rest will try to let on to this day that they are no kin to Hardens whatsoever. Probably think that after fifty years of telling that old lie, it might be true.”
Andy House said carefully, “Them young Carrs were not the least bit proud about what happened.”
“Back then? I’m not so sure.”
“You weren’t born back then.”
Cutting off their wrangling, Whidden sounded tired. “Owen Carr was hot after my sister Edie. He never came around, not once, after Roark disappeared, that was one reason our family suspected him. But we knew that if we done anything about it, we would give ’em their excuse to stage a raid down here and lynch them mixed-breed sonsabitches once and for all. My mama heard that lynch talk. Folks made sure she heard it. In the store.”
“And even if Hardens got the case to a grand jury,” Andy said thoughtfully, “they knew that the Carr boy would testify how he never confessed to no such thing. And they knew a jury would accept that coonskin story whether they believed it or they didn’t because no self-respectin jury was going to sit still for no supposed-to-be mulattas takin white folks into court, not in Collier County nor in Lee nor Monroe neither.”
Slowly he turned toward the Hardens. “I sure do hate to be the one to say that, Whidden, but ain’t that about right?”
Whidden and Sally stared into the fire and did not answer, and Lucius did not know what to say to make things better. Andy’s conclusion was also self-condemnation, a gagging down of bitter medicine, but unable to see anyone’s expression, hearing no comment, the blind man, too, seemed cast down, filled with despair. Even in firelight, Andy looked ashamed of his own need to hammer out his “truth.” Yet his calm and measured voice would not relent. “And even after it come out who done it,” he resumed, “I never heard no Harden claim they was deprived of legal justice. Why?”
Sally burst out, “I know what you think, Mr. House, because people like you all think the same! You think it’s because the Hardens knew that as ‘supposed-to-be-mulattas,’ they were not going to get justice, no matter what!” Sally Brown was very close to tears. “On the other hand, they couldn’t claim race prejudice, because claiming prejudice would seem to be admitting that there might be something for people to be prejudiced about—that about right?” She mimicked him sarcastically, voice quavering.
Yet a moment later she spoke to him without rancor. Picking up cool sand, watching it pour away between her fingers, she blurted finally, “Oh, I guess what you’ve been saying is ‘true’ enough, Mr. House. A half-truth, anyway.”
Whidden hauled the bow of the Cracker Belle onto the sand. Followed by Lucius, he clambered aboard and ducked down into the cabin, where he fished a bottle from beneath the coils of anchor warp in the forward cuddy and brought it back on deck. Each took a snort and gasped as the liquor eased him.
“Like Andy says, they was wild and they was angry, they sank boats and broke up traps, they was reckless with their mouths and with their guns. And knowin how people talked about our family, that made ’em angrier than ever. Them boys swore over and over they would never be run off their home territory without a fight. Roark and Wilson was the most ornery amongst the Hardens—or bravest, depending how you look at it.” Whidden paused, observing Lucius. “So you might say—and people did say—that they had it comin.”
“Do you believe they had it coming?”
“I guess I do. If you believe them Carrs about them coonskins.” Whidden shrugged. “Carrs are my wife’s kinfolks. I sure do hate to call ’em liars as well as murderers.” He smiled with Lucius but his eyes were serious. “Sally wonders how them Carrs could shoot another boy while he was beggin for his life—she can’t get over that! Well, don’t let on I said this, Mister Colonel—and I’m not just sayin it, I have done some thinkin on it—but I never wondered about that, not for one minute. Back in them Fish Wars, in the Depression, with poor people so hungry on this coast, and all the ugly bitter feelins that there was? In them Carrs’ place, so scared and angry, I might of done no different than what they done.”
“Are you saying the Hardens have forgiven it?”
“No, I sure ain’t. I’m only sayin that most of us can understand how it could happen. That make sense?”
Lucius supposed that the Bay people had suspended the feud after those deaths, since Whidden had been accepted when he courted Sally.
“Not by all of ’em. Someone seen us holdin hands and commenced to holler and take on, tell the old bad stories. The Carr cousins said, ‘Why, honey, he’s a Harden!’ And Sally said, ‘That’s right, folks, and I’m fixin to marry him, cause I just dote on this here Harden boy for his sparkly green eyes and his blond hair!’ Well, she had ’em there, they couldn’t say too much, they just kept bleatin at her, ‘He’s a Harden!’
“I loved that sweet Miss Sally Daniels right from school days, she was the prettiest girl I ever seen and she still is. When I asked her to marry, she said no but I kept at it, and Finally she took a real deep breath and told me what happened about Crockett Junior. For a while, I was pretty jealous over Junior, bein as how I seen him every day, worked alongside him. But I told her I could handle that, and asked her again to be my wife. She said Nosir, not unless you leave off workin for a certain sonofabitch name of Crockett Senior, and I said, No, Sal, I can’t just quit on him, and Sally said, ‘You will, just wait and see.’ Then she leaned over to whisper in my ear, said, ‘That means “Yes, I’ll marry you,” case you don’t know it!’ ”
Whidden smiled with pleasure at this memory. “So I went to Speck and I said, ‘Well, Old-Timer, I aim to marry your fine daughter if you give her to me.’ I was aimin to marry his fine daughter whether he give her to me or he didn’t, but I never told him about that part.
“Speck Daniels was in Everglade that day, whilin away the afternoon drinkin beer in his bunk on his old boat upriver by the bridge. Looked me over for quite a while there with just one red eye, gettin his brain together. Liked a Harden better as his moonshine partner than his son-in-law, I seen that straight off. Sat up finally and finished up his beer and spat most of his chewin tobacco through that little slot into the can. Then he squints at it and says, ‘This here looks like some kind of a dang twat. What’s your opinion, boy?’—them was the first words from that man’s mouth, hearin the news that his sweet daughter aimed to marry. Then he looks up and he says, ‘Our family don’t tolerate mixed people, Whidden, you know that.’
“ ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ I says.
“Speck looks me over for a minute. ‘Heck if I know,’ he says. Next, he says, ‘You’re a bad drinker, Whidden, I been watchin you. Old days now, a man that spent up all he made on spirits and weren’t loyal to his family might get him a whippin. What’s your views on that?’
“ ‘Who’s gonna give me that whippin, Speck?’ says I.
“ ‘Heck if I know,’ Speck says again, and he cracks us both a beer. ‘I got no say about it anyways, so you are welcome to her. Don’t even know where she is livin at. Her and me been lookin crossways at the other from the first time she opened up her eyes in her layette. Weren’t for me, that gal would of married her own brother, so I reckon she can’t be too much worse off hitched up to you.’ Rolled over then and closed his eyes, wavin me the hell out of his cabin. ‘Just mind she don’t go gettin you so pussy-whipped that you can’t work nights, that is all I’m askin.’
“That was Speck Daniels’s way of saying, Let’s you ’n’ me forget it, son, cause I don’t give a shit.”
Whidden tried to laugh at his father-in-law’s low-down ways, but he didn’t have his heart in it, and stopped.
“Course Sally herself ain’t got it all doped out yet. But in my opinion, this grudge of hers, this refusin to forgive what was done to Hardens—well, that ain’t only just her kindly nature.” Whidden lifted his gaze from the night water and held Lucius’s eye. “She turned her back on her own family, and not only her own family but her own kind. She blames this on their bad attitudes, but she’s too honest to pretend that’s all it is.”
Whidden sighed. “She can’t abide her daddy. Even before she got mixed up with Crockett Junior, she could not tolerate Speck Daniels, and that goes way back to the time she heard how Speck and his brother-in-law helped lynch that nigra man at Marco. Course he done that as a young feller in the Depression—”
“That made it all right?”
“No, but he’s changed some. Might not do nothin such as that today.” Whidden cast again, hard, with a light whipping sound. “I ain’t goin to criticize Speck Daniels, Mister Colonel. I knowed all about that Marco business when I went to work for him, and it never kept me from feelin proud about my job with the number one moonshiner and gator poacher in South Florida. I never thought too much about the right and wrong of it. Never thought much at all, and that’s the truth, not till Sally come along and woke me up.” He considered Lucius with a rueful gaze.
“But why does Sally—”
“The Hardens are her family now cause she ain’t got one of her own, so she’s bein fierce, she tries to take on all the pain our family suffered. She can’t make these people say they’re sorry, or apologize, though she’s sure try in—you seen her in Naples!
“In her heart, Sally wants me to be white, wants our kids to be white, not only because that is right but because our kids will have a better chance that way. But she is ashamed of wanting that so bad, cause it makes her feel disloyal some way to those old-time Hardens that were so discriminated. That’s why she’s so ready to scrap with folks like Andy who might still think that the Hardens were … mixed.
“What I’m learning is—real slow but deep—it just don’t matter. It don’t matter! There’s a lot of families on this coast got a little color that they ain’t owned up to. Well, that ain’t nothin to be ashamed of! It comes from the wild nature of our Florida history. You take them Muskogee and Mikasuki Creeks, some were mixed-blood when they first come down here out of Georgia, and the early pioneers had children with ’em, and with runaway slaves, too. In thees meex blood ees foking gee-nee-us of America! That’s what old Chevelier used to holler at my granddad. Claimed there weren’t one white man on this earth who didn’t have some black or brown in him, because all mankind got started out in Africa!
“You got a million drops of white, one drop of black, and you’re supposed to be a nigra, accordin to that old redneck arithmetic. Well, in a century, that one drop can travel a long ways, and these local families are so much intermarried that whatever is true of one is true for all. That one little drop is just a-spreadin all the time, but it stays hid, like a molasses drop in milk. Most of the time you never notice, and then you might get a glimpse of it, one little trace, or one person that’s too dark in a fair-haired family, or might be bad hair. Most likely that family never knew that it was there, so they don’t even recognize it when they see it. Depends how strong your family is in your community. If you are strong enough, it just don’t count. Nobody sees it.
“Our pastor and his wife was narrow-minded. They would not accept a boy from Marco that their daughter wanted because he weren’t raised up Pentecostal Church of God. Weren’t one thing wrong with that young devil that a bullet wouldn’t cure, it was only he was runnin kind of wild. So that girl done what Abbie Harden done, she run off with a young black feller, to spite ’em. And now them poor worshipful folks got to smile until it hurts, cause that black son-in-law is just as God-lovin as they are, and not only that but a decorated American hero, a veteran of the United States Marines!” Whidden laughed quietly. “If that preacher had a second chance, he’d take and hogtie that wild Marco heathen to his daughter, never mind if they took their vows in jail. But bein a good Christian, he must stand up and be proud that she married this patriotic soldier boy from the black community, this fine upstandin young American that risked his life for freedom and democracy. They got to be happy about that boy—ain’t that a terrible thing? They got to be happy! Whether they like bein happy or they don’t!”
But in a moment, his jaw set again. “Yep,” he said. “Miss Sally Brown is still burnt up over the old days, and she’s over there at the Historical Society every year, fighting her heart out for our family name. And everyone wishes—Hardens especially—that that pretty little gal would just shut up, because all she is doing is stirring up old gossip.
“Today Hardens are doin fine all over southwest Florida, ranch homes and new pickups and fair-haired kiddies everywhere you look. They have left most of them old Baptists who looked down on ’em back in the dust. These new Hardens have forgot all that old bitterness, if they even knew about it. Wouldn’t of never doubted they was white people if that darned female Cousin Whidden married didn’t stir up so much sand tryin to prove it.”
Whidden smiled faintly. “Got this big fight goin against herself, and they ain’t no way she can win, poor little sweetheart. She wants it both ways, same as the rest of us, but can’t admit to it. That’s why you see her strugglin so hard.”
“And that’s hard on Whidden,” Lucius said.
“I wanted to think we could heal things some between our families by bein together, bein who we was. Sally agreed with that idea but she don’t cooperate. She’s been to college, takes it real hard about race prejudice, she just despises people for despisin nigras. Sally says over and over that the color of your skin don’t matter, it’s your heart and mind that count. Trouble is, at the same time she is sayin skin don’t matter, she is out to make them old-timers admit that the Hardens weren’t mulattas, but only had some Injun in their blood. She even wants ’em to admit that Henry Short was probably Injun, to show the world that Libby Harden never run off with a colored man.
“Well, them old-timers ain’t going to admit no such a thing. That generation got their idea about the old-time Hardens and they ain’t goin to change it. And with the world they knew changin so fast, you can’t hardly blame ’em.”
“You don’t blame them?”
“Aunt Libby married a brown man, Henry Short, then Aunt Abbie run off with a black one. Can you blame folks for thinking the way they do?”
“Blame,” Lucius said shortly, tasting that word.
“I been talking about Sally, ain’t I. But it looks like I am fightin that hook, too.”
Lucius Watson had helped raise Roark Harden. He knew Wilson, too, since these cousins had been inseparable. Because of Earl’s hostility, he had never been quite comfortable with Wilson, but had always very felt close to Roark, who was nine when they first met, and who, even as a boy, had been generous and dead honest like his father. However, Lucius was also fond of Walker Carr’s son Alden, who had remained friendly throughout that period in the twenties when almost everyone except the Hardens was avoiding him.
When the Johnson boy brought word from Tavernier that Alden Carr had made a drunk confession in a bar, the Harden men had loaded up their guns. Even Earl, who took such pride in his Bay friends, was raging around about a raid on Chatham Bend. Lucius went to Lee and offered to go instead. He would talk with Alden, make sure they had the story straight before steps were taken that might get the wrong ones killed. Suspicious, Lee had studied Lucius’s eyes before he nodded.
By the time Lucius turned up at the Bend, poor Alden was more frightened of his brothers than he was of Hardens, but he took responsibility for what he’d said at Tavernier and did not try to contradict that story. When Lucius confronted the others, both denied it, saying that when Alden was drunk, he sometimes made up crazy stories to get attention to himself, which, alas, was true. Then Old Man Walker, who had been listening behind the door, blew up and came bursting in, yelling at the visitor to ease his nerves. Before his boys could hush him, he hollered out that those damned Hardens had stolen five hundred dollars’ worth of pelts, then threatened his boys when they went to get them back. One of their guns must have gone off, and his sons, afraid they were being shot at, had no choice but to return their fire, “not intendin to hit nobody! It was self-defense!” After firing that one wild volley in the dark, his boys had hurried back to their own camp. So far as they knew, the Harden boys had left Shark Point early the next morning, for their skiff was gone.
When their father started hollering, Owen and Turner slipped away, but Alden trailed Lucius to the dock. He asked whose side Lucius was on, and Lucius asked how he could take sides without knowing the truth. Alden squinted at him. “What Pa told may not be the God’s truth, Lucius,” Alden said coldly and carefully. “But it’s our Carr truth. This year, anyways.”
Lucius was already cast off when Old Man Walker roared down to the dock and cuffed poor Alden out of the way and bellowed at Watson’s son across the water. “I was very old friends with your dad! You know it, too! Done my best that day to stop that crowd. So if it comes down to some kind of a showdown, Lucius, are you on your old friends’ side or ain’t you?” Next, he hollered, “Lucius, boy, for ten years now you been wanderin around these islands askin a whole hell of a lot of stupid questions, and it sure looks like you’re doin that again! If it weren’t for me tellin the men you was only a heartbroke poor damn fool that meant no harm, it’s you who might of come up missin, boy, not no damn Hardens!” Red and sweating, Walker Carr turned his back on him and stumped away. Within a day, the Carr family was gone from Chatham River.
Lucius reported the Carrs’ account in the same words it was told to him, Lee Harden asked if he believed their story, and he admitted he did not. At the same time, he reminded Lee that the Hardens had no evidence whatever, which meant they had no hope at all of seeing the Carr boys prosecuted in a court of law. And if they took the law into their own hands, they would bring a firestorm down on their clan which would destroy it.
Lee Harden thanked Lucius gruffly, saying that his family would take care of the problem in their own good time. For the moment, all Lee needed to know was what Walker Carr had effectively admitted, that his sons had fired at the Harden boys down at Shark River.
After Carr moved his family back to Everglade, a silent tension would pervade the settlement whenever the Harden men came north from Lost Man’s River. No one spoke to the Hardens, not one word, as if they were trying to “hate” them out of the region, a traditional remedy in the old Border lands from where most of their clans had come.
One day Lee Harden ran into the culprits, down the street from Barron Collier’s new courthouse. Though the Carr boys were frightened, they did not run because a small crowd gathered. They stood with eyes down when Harden circled them twice, three times, as if consigning some unpleasant scent to future memory. Abruptly he broke off his circling and walked away.
In later years, as the tension eased, folks started saying that those Hardens had it coming and that everything had worked out for the best. Owen when drunk would even hint behind his hand that you-know-who had put a stop to those damned mixed-breeds. And young Turner went along with it, confiding that he had fired, too—in fact, how he was probably the one (though he sure felt terrible about it) who had finally put that Roark Harden out of his misery.
A month after the young Hardens disappeared, Henry Short rowed his skiff down Turner River and on south through the inland bays, coming ashore and walking up the beach as Lee Harden jumped up and went to meet him. Shaking hands, kicking the sand, Henry asked if there was any way that he could help. Even Earl Harden finally agreed to let Henry go, look for the bodies, knowing that Short was the best tracker on the coast.
Henry Short knew plenty of reasons why it was a poor idea for him to go. He owed a lot to the Harden family, but he also knew how dangerous it was for him to get mixed up in this at all. “Lordy, Lordy,” he kept saying, tugging on his earlobe. Lee decided it was not fair to ask him, but Henry decided that he had no choice.
At Shark Point, Henry located a rain-rotted pelt salted and stretched in the painstaking way that Henry had taught those Harden boys himself. Another camp not far away had been abandoned in a hurry. He poled upriver, checking the mangroves on both banks for any small sign of disturbance. He poked and prowled and pried and peered till he found overhanging willow branches, bent and broken, in a small hidden creek on the east side of Shark Lake. All alone, far back up in the Glades, he pushed upstream.
At the head of the creek the Harden skiff, charred by a hasty attempt at burning, lay half-sunk and half-hidden beneath hacked-off branches. Taking his shovel and a length of rope, rigging his shirt over his nose and mouth, he followed the mud smear of the gator’s belly and great tail, matting the saw grass. Vultures flapped aloft as he drew closer.
The bodies lay on the open savanna, bloated so badly and so torn that he could scarcely tell which boy was which. He buried what was left of the boys’ bodies. Then he said a prayer under the sun and returned to the main river. On his way north, anticipating what Lee Harden would do, and fearing the certain retribution which any such action would bring down upon the Hardens—and knowing, finally, how often black men had been put to death for the mere witnessing of evil acts they had no part in—he decided that no good could come from telling the Harden clan what he had found.
Arriving at Lost Man’s after dark, Henry stopped at Lucius Watson’s cabin. Asked about that second camp he had located at Shark Point, he would only say that three trappers had used that place and that they had broken their camp in a hurry, and that their prints were also present in the Harden Camp. He did not identify the Carrs by name. Lucius agreed with Henry’s instinct not to tell what he had found, because that would leave the Hardens with no choice but to load their guns and take the law into their own hands.
Keeping their secret from this family which had been so good to both of them became one of their uncommon bonds. By the time Alden Carr blurted out the truth a few years later, Earl had renewed his Chokoloskee friendships and his invitation to maintain them. Even Lee resigned himself to the fact that there was no way to avenge his son and nephew without inviting the annihilation of the Harden clan.