Shadow Country (117 page)

THE FIRST AUTO IN THE ISLANDS

After that bad welcome at the Langford house, I gave up all ambitions for Deep Lake. Dead tired after months in county jails, I had lost the will to grind my way out of debt on this remote and overgrown plantation. Uselessly I was attracted to a life of enterprise in the great world.

One day in Fort Myers, I ran into Cole and Langford in the saloon across from the courthouse. Both looked puffy from too much time indoors sitting on money and neither had a handle on his drinking. In fact, Big Jim had been forbidden by court order to set foot in a saloon, though Sheriff Tippins chose to overlook this. As for the balding banker, he looked seedy and unshaven, despite his slicked-down strands of hair and three-piece suit.

When I came in, my son-in-law lurched to his feet and left without a greeting. “Don't let your customers smell that whiskey!” I called after him, intending to be heard by the whole place. Trapped in his booth, Cole waved me to a seat with a poor smile and asked me how my “cane patch” was progressing. I ignored the sneer behind his stupid question, wanting to see the shock on that smug face when I told him coolly that I'd like to buy the Ford auto he had recently replaced with that red Reo.

“What with?” jeered Cole, who knew I was flat broke busted. But he also knew my reputation as a businessman who made good on his debts; he did not doubt that I would restore my syrup operation in short order, and its profits, too. “What's your collateral, Ed?” he said. I thought he was just matching my bluff, but when he flagged the bartender and paid for two more whiskeys, I realized he was serious.

“An up-and-coming farm in Columbia County,” I said.

“Who's on there now?”

“My sister's family and my mother.”

“Supposing you forfeit?” He cocked his head to peer at me. “You fixing to shoot them ladies, Ed, or just run 'em off there?”

I held his eye and he covered his nerves with that curly grin. “I mean, where the hell you aim to
drive
the damn thing, Ed? Down to your dock and back?”

That same evening my Model T rode south, lashed to the foredeck of the
Gladiator.
She was wrapped in tarps against salt water, because with the wind out of the south and that weight forward, we were shipping a hard spray over the bow. At Chatham Bend, Lucius fetched planks and we drove her off onto the bank, hooting the horn in honor of the first automobile ever seen in the Ten Thousand Islands. I had planned that jalopy as a surprise, to lift our spirits, and sure enough, the kids came whooping, piled right in, and jumped around the seats. There was no sign of Kate.

Frank stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel; the way that black man's head was cocked made clear that he questioned my good sense.

“Got her in a kind of swap,” I told him before he could say anything he might regret.

“What you swap for her? Our pay?” His tone scared everyone. He stepped back inside. Nobody said a word. I stood waiting for him, getting my breath. If he didn't think better of it and step outside again—

He stepped outside again. “My oh my, that's sump'n, Boss,” he said, dangerously angry, his grimace fixed hard in a kind of death's-head smile.

Kate came outside slowly, in a daze. “What on earth can it be for?” she whispered. “And how on earth are we to pay for it?” She burst into tears. “What can you be thinking, Mr. Watson?” Annoyed because she had spoiled the children's fun, I told her too bluntly that our Fort White farm—her beloved “home on the hill”—was the collateral. “I have something on the stove,” she gasped, and ran inside.

Ruth Ellen had found the car horn—
toot-toot-toot!
I could not concentrate in such a racket. I yanked her out of the front seat, making her cry. Addison scrambled out of the back and fled around the house. I glared at Lucius—
Well?
He shrugged and went inside.
“Damn!”
I yelled, astounded to see how fast the fun had ended. But standing there alone with the new car, I was struck by my utter folly: I was losing hold.

Lucius called, “Papa? Let's go for a drive. I'll find the kids.” Out ran Ruth Ellen and Addison, miraculously cured. They sat on Lucius's lap and shrieked at the fireworks sputter as I cranked the motor, shrieked some more as we backed past the sugar kettles and turned her around in jerks and fits and starts. After a drive of one hundred yards, Ruth Ellen vomited from the thick fumes. The children ran inside, calling for Mama.

Early next morning Lucius and I set to work with Sip and Frank, alias Joe, hacking and clearing a half-mile track around the cane field. Already handy with boat engines, Lucius soon learned all there was to know about our auto, inspecting each movable part to see how it related to the rest. My son and I were never closer than we were that spring, navigating our new car on its road to nowhere.

When the great day came—we waited until May Day—all but Kate Edna piled into the “T” and went for a drive around the circumference of the Watson Plantation, chugging and honking, children screeching and dogs barking. Though all were good sports, the little ones had not traveled very far before they turned greenish from the fumes and jolting. We only completed a single round before we had to stop.

With Frank, I made a second round. Kate watched us from an upper window. How pale she looked up in that window, far away across the field.

WILDLIFE

In the damp cloudy weather of the spring, we were “in the mosquitoes” all day long, but except at daybreak and in early evening, when biting insects were at their worst, the children played around the water edge and dock and boats. They were never happy very far from water, and I was never quite at ease while they were there. I warned Addison and Ruth Ellen about the swift strong current and gators up to fifteen feet and that huge croc that hauled out from time to time on the far bank. Where one of my coco palms had fallen over into the river, Lucius built an eddy pool walled in by brush: here the kids could splash a little, protected from marauders. Even so, I did my best to put a scare into the children, describing how those monsters cruised the riverbanks hunting unwary animals and wading birds, how they drifted in close and hung there unseen in that silted water. Eye ridges and snout tips might be glimpsed but often not. Gators had snatched more than one dog off our bank; they could lunge and seize a small child in the shallows and disappear with one thrash of that armored tail.

When they weren't fooling in the boats, the children sailed toy boats across the cistern, which was straight-sided and slippery with green algae.

Lucius rigged a rope ladder, just in case, but knowing a child would panic with the first mouthful of black water, I finally forbade them to go near.
Any child who falls in there is a goner!

Sturdy and stubborn, Ruth Ellen disobeyed me. One day I came up behind and grabbed and held her way out over that black tarn. The little girl screamed until she lost her breath. Kate got very upset with me for scaring the child so badly. “Better scared than dead,” I said. We spoke no more about it. After that day, Ruth Ellen dreaded the cistern and would not go near it and would not let Addison anywhere near it, either. She would fly around him yapping like a sheepdog, chivvying our little boy away from such a dreadful fate.

Like all children, they loved to hear about wild creatures, panthers and reptiles especially. Lucius described the big panther scat he'd found in the scrub behind Cape Sable on the hot white sand mound of a croc nest. The scat had been dropped fast in the cat's escape—Lucius reconstructed the whole event from tracks—when what must have looked like a drift-wood log back in the salt brush turned suddenly into a crocodile, risen on its short quick thick legs to drive the prowler from her nest. Lucius dug up the cache of leathery white eggs to experience the feel of them, then put them back; he described the warmth and firmness and the slow throb of ancient life in those strange oblong shapes.

On another day, east of Flamingo, he had traveled far up Taylor Slough to the hardwood hammocks, where in the airy stories of the huge mahoganies, he had seen a small flock of nine lime-colored parakeets—the beautiful bird so often spoken of by Jean Chevelier, who had sought them in vain along the rivers of our coast.

It pleased my son greatly that America's last wild Indians lived not far south of us on hammock islands in the Shark River drainage, and that every attempt to open up their last territory with a road had foundered in the muck and broken limestone of this water wilderness. Unlike most, Lucius saw the Glades as beautiful, especially far up beyond the tidal reach where the mangroves were replaced by vast sparkling wet grasslands that stretched away forever to the north and east. “And that damned sawgrass,” I'd protested, “taller than a man, with nothing underfoot but muck and jagged limestone holes that will tear a man's boots to pieces in a day.”

“And poisonous snakes, even poison trees—all sorts of fascinating things,” he agreed, enthusiastic, which was why the Everglades might yet prevail when all the rest of the wild places in the country had been overrun by roads bringing more people. He never criticized my ideas for west coast development, only the new canals east of Okeechobee: the canal projects were encouraging more talk of a cross-Florida highway which would lay open the Everglades once and for all. My son only hoped that all that dredging in the headwaters, muddying the rivers, would not spoil our paradise on this wild coast.

“Paradise!”
cried Kate. “My goodness, Lucius!” Yet Kate loved him because he was so good with the children—an antidote to her old brute of a husband, I suppose. He cheered her and kept her company—they were the same age—and offered the kids whatever time he had to spare, showing them such mysteries as the round and pearly glow of the star spider.

THE STOWAWAY

Key West is and always was half-Yankee, and even back before the War, its attitudes were jumbled up when it came to coloreds. Many good people clung to old bad prejudice including my friend Gene Roberts and his brothers, who ran the old
Estelle
from Flamingo to Key West, carrying outbound mail and cargo and bringing back supplies.

Melch, Jim, and Gene—the Roberts boys—refused to tolerate blacks mixing with whites, they would not put up with it. They'd go over to Key West, have a drink or two, then walk arm-in-arm down the sidewalk, and any black man who failed to get out of their way, they'd knock him down. One time they went into a restaurant, sat down, ordered their breakfast, Gene was telling me, and the next thing they knew, a great big buck came walking in, sat down at the next table. When those boys reared back and glared at him and he didn't leave, Melch got up without a word and took his chair and wrapped it over that man's head. Hauled him up off of the floor, Gene said, and booted his black ass into the street.

Of course Key West had no use for these Mainlanders. On the way to jail, the sheriff would say, “Well, here ye are again! The Mainlanders!” And they'd say, “Yessir, we sure are, and proud to say so!”

Returned to office, the sheriff was as truculent as ever about E. J. Watson. One day he accosted me at Duval and First as I came out of W. D. Cash Provisions and Ship Chandlery. He'd heard that a fugitive killer might be hiding out at Chatham Bend, in which case I was flouting the law again by harboring a known criminal.

Young Herbie Melville, known as Dutchy, had been notorious at Key West for several years. Back in 1904, when my friend Deputy Till tried to arrest him for breaking into a coffee shop at White Street and Division, this young feller grabbed Clarence's pistol, beat him to the floor with it, then drew his knife, apparently to scalp him. Bleeding, Clarence broke away and ran to borrow a weapon; he returned to that coffee shop without waiting for reinforcement and Melville shot and killed him.

Dutchy Melville was convicted and sentenced to be hung, but because his family had local influence, the charge was reduced to manslaughter and a one-year sentence. During his detention, the enterprising jailer rented Melville's labor to the fire station, a part-time job which provided him the leisure to rob stores, covering his tracks by burning these places down. In destroying the Cortez Cigar Factory, however, he went too far. Murdering a law officer was bad enough but damaging rich men's property was far more serious: the indignant judge sentenced the young arsonist to thirteen years at hard labor.

Recently young Dutchy had escaped the chain gang, but not before confiding to another convict (who had the ear of the authorities) that he hoped to hide out at the Watson place at Chatham Bend. And the reason for
that,
the sheriff said, looking me straight in the eye, was because this man Watson was notorious for hiring fugitives and other undesirables as low-paid field hands.

This was true. I sometimes recruited harvest workers at Key West, mostly blacks but some white drifters, too. These men were called Doc and Slim and Blackie and John Smith: I never asked if they were fugitives, that was a man's own business. They accepted whatever pay was offered with no back talk and they never stayed long, field labor in the cane being hard and dangerous. That way everyone came out ahead—sound business practice.

I informed the sheriff that I knew no Dutchy and no Herbie either, and also that I did not care for his insinuation that E. J. Watson had no respect for law and order. The sheriff said, “Them words sound all right, Watson. But a man gets knowed by the company he keeps, ain't that right, too?”

And I said, “Well, in that case, Sheriff, we'd best part company right now because I have my good name to think about,” whereupon I tipped my hat and kept on going.

Eddie's Bar had a stylish sign—dining and dancing, nine to eleven, fighting from eleven to two—and the cost of a drink was all that was required to enjoy this lively social situation. With so many good fights to choose from, any man of healthy tastes could fit right in. Knives and pistols were frowned upon, of course, but that same night I had to wrench a brandished six-gun from a client who was dead drunk but still dancing, threatening to shoot. I gave this fool a taste of his own medicine. “Let's see can I work this thing!” I hollered, waving it around the same way he had. It kept going off, made one hell of a racket, and with each shot I yelled to warn him lest he stagger and cross the half circle of holes his own six-gun was punching through the floor around his toes.