Lost Man's River (83 page)

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.