Lost Man's River (92 page)

“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.