Lost Man's River (84 page)

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!”