Lost Man's River (72 page)

“Nosir, it sure don't matter none,” she said—not to mimic his unlettered speech but to confront this local man on common ground. “Nosir, not one little bit. Less you're a Harden.”

House was red-faced and nettled. “Might not matter much to Hardens neither, not no more, Miss,” Andy warned her.

Beyond lay the wooded Smallwood cemetery, where they all got out. Looking around him, Andy smiled, saying that some way he could see everything better when he was standing up on his two feet. He made a slow circle on the grass, getting the feel of things, as a big dog makes its turn before lying down. Long ago, with other boys, he had played in this canal and its deep inner basin, which was perhaps fifty feet across, ringed around by trees. Canal and basin had been excavated by the Calusa, whose seagoing dugouts had been hewn and fire-hollowed from great cypress. “You could lay a long rifle in the bottom crossways,” Andy said.

“My dad moved us off this island when I was still a boy, and it sure don't look like I'll be comin back. The House family was close-knit once, but we're scattered now, we're all over west Florida. Smallwoods stayed, the most of 'em, but they're squabbling over what little land is left. The rest of the old families don't hardly own no land no more, they got just about everything sold off to strangers.”

Lucius could recall the abounding gardens and fine avocado groves which the early families had hacked and hoed from the old shell. Already those gardens were disappearing, and a few years from now, this island,
beaten flat, would disappear beneath the tar and concrete, the tourist courts and house trailers, the noisy cars of vacationers with their red faces, funny sun hats, candy-colored clothes. Here and there, some faded figure might be glimpsed along the weedy edges—a relict islander, living along on government handouts and thin reminiscence of the way things were.

“It's important to line up the old frontier families behind the petition,” Lucius said. “Smallwoods. Browns and Thompsons. Carrs.”

“Browns and Thompsons. Carrs!” Sally rolled her eyes and went ahead on foot.

Andy turned toward the sound of her retreating steps. “Well, I'm kin to all them families, kin to
all
these folks down here,” he reminded Lucius. “And they're all related to each other, back door, front, and every whichy-way, which is why they all think the same when they get around to thinkin, which ain't often.” He smiled with wry affection. “No sense thinkin if you know what your daddy thought. Just get yourself all flustered up for nothin.

“What Sally forgets, there is a difference between ignorance and evil. I'd like to take and shoot some of these Chok folks for being so ornery and cranky, but I love 'em, too—I do! It's only a crowd of 'em that bothers me. I take after Bill House, I guess. Whenever he spoke about that day your daddy died—well, he never regretted it or nothing, but he'd sure mutter some about the way us rednecks act when we're in a crowd. Different animal altogether, Dad would say.”

Lucius said, “I was talking with Hoad Storter yesterday about those Harden boys killed at Shark River.”

Andy stopped short, pointing his cane at him. “Colonel? You best not stir up that ol' mud, not if you're huntin up support for that petition.” He resumed walking. “I was heartsick for them Harden families when them boys come up missin, same as you were. Roark and Wilson was close to my own age, so I knowed 'em good when our family was living at the Bend.”

“And you don't think all that bad gossip about the Harden family was involved.”

“Nosir, I sure don't. Them two cousins was wild and angry boys. They was looking for trouble, and you know that good as I do.”

“Are you saying they got what they deserved?”

“Darn it, Colonel, I never said nothin like that! Don't you go to cornerin me like she done, just cause I ain't educated good!” He fumed and stumped along. “Sure, Hardens had some Injun, like the girl says. But that ain't all they had! I ain't sayin that is bad nor good, but facts is facts! And when they commenced to shootin rifles over the men's heads, folks just naturally got their dander up against 'em!”

“That's not all they had—you sure about that, Andy?”

“Hell, Colonel, everybody was sure about it! I never heard my daddy say no different!”

“No sense thinking if you know already what your daddy thought. Get yourself all flustered up for nothing.”

“Hell, I'm flustered up right now!”

The blind man headed down the road alone. When he heard the motor come up slow behind him, he waved it off, using his cane. “Leave me be! I see the sun and I see this white shell road—don't need much else to find my way on my home island!”

Lucius caught up with Sally Brown, who had paused to watch Andy's slow progress. “Think he'll be all right?” she said, annoyed by her own concern. She would keep an eye on Andy, see him safely to the Smallwoods. Whidden, she said, might turn up at the Smallwood store toward noon.

Lloyd Brown was one of the last full-time fishermen on the Bay, and his backyard was cluttered with crab pots, buoys, sun-bleached netting, rusted gear, dead outboard motors, a big mushroom anchor.

A gray head peered at Lucius from behind a curtain of blue plastic lace. Then the head vanished, and the kitchen door of the old cottage opened slowly. “I know who you are,” the woman said, to warn him, and he came no closer. Still yanking at her hair, she did not invite him in. The last time he recalled seeing her, back in the twenties, pretty Mary Hamilton had been one in a long line of towhead kids.

“You remember me, Mary? You were pretty young—”

“Nobody forgot you around here.” Arms folded on her breasts, she smoked and squinted. “Bet you made 'em kind of nervous over yonder,” Mary said wryly. She cocked her head, the better to enjoy his consternation. “You still messing around with that ol' list?” She squinted at him through a shroud of smoke, then turned and went inside without a word, leaving the door open. By the time he entered, knocking lightly, she had resumed her place behind her coffee cup and ashtray on the far side of the linoleumed kitchen table. “You want coffee, it's in the pot,” she said, in a fit of smoker's coughing. When he brought his coffee to the table, she whispered hoarsely, “I been thinking about writing up
my
memoirs, too.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep.” She snubbed her cigarette, lit up another. “And all that Watson stuff is going straight into my story.” She nodded a long time, looking him over. “Course some folks were resentful of Mr. Watson right from the time he started out at Half Way Creek, cause everything he touched just turned to gold. And he'd been in trouble, and he found some more, so of course they
made up stories just to pull him down. You ever hear about old bones that somebody dug up on the Bend back in the thirties? Supposed to been Bloody Watson's victims?” Seeing Lucius's expression, she added quickly, “Well, you can rest easy on
that
one, Colonel, cause those were the bones of old-time Indians that had a village on there long ago, or maybe some bones from a hog barbecue or something. What people tell about your daddy is a crying shame!

“My husband's aunt—the husband I have now, I mean—she was a McKinney, and she went down there and visited with Edna Watson for a week. Old Man McKinney, who was very strict, would never have allowed that visit if he didn't have a lot of faith in Mr. Watson. Mr. McKinney took no part in the shooting, said he never messed in other folks' affairs. For the rest of his life, he would remind those men that his friend Watson never killed nobody from our island. Might of cut Santini's throat, but as Ted Smallwood used to say, ‘He never killed that old Corsican completely.' That business happened at Key West, where there were always foreigners and knife fights, and anyways those darn Santinis were some kind of darn Catholics to start off with.”

Her voice died to a whisper as she stopped to listen, turning her ear with the precision of a cat. Uncoiling slowly, recoiling again, Mary Brown pulled her wrap close and sat up primly at the table, raising her voice as her husband reached the kitchen door. “I was just now telling Colonel Watson how I don't believe C. G. McKinney would have let his daughter go to Chatham Bend, not if he thought Colonel's daddy was a killer!”

The man in the doorway had dark frown lines in a weathered face and curly hair blown back across a brow crusted by sun. “I seen a car out there,” he told his wife. Despite Lucius's warm greeting—he had always liked Lloyd Brown—Brown made no answer but appraised his visitor, making certain who he was. “How-do, Colonel,” he said finally. “Been a very long time since we seen you on this island.”

His wife observed both men obliquely through her long strayed hair, her expression ironic and affectionate at the same time. “He says he's only interested in old-time stuff,” she told her husband, who slopped himself a cup of coffee and sat down glowering.

“Well, your family took no part in the killing, I know that much,” Lucius said.

“My aunt seen the whole thing,” Lloyd Brown recalled. “She was visiting that day with Mrs. Watson there at Smallwood's, and she had a pretty darn good view down through the trees. Said Watson run his boat aground, then jumped ashore with Cox's hat in one hand and his double-barrel shotgun in the other. When the crowd didn't believe his story, he snapped off both barrels,
which misfired. Went for his .38 but never got to it, because a man who had no business there, he put a bullet right between his eyes.”

Lucius said, “Henry Short?”

“I don't recall no names no more,” Lloyd said. He stared his wife down when she piped up, and she looked away with a miffed expression, like an ousted cat. She blew thin smoke, drowned her cigarette in the spilled coffee in her saucer, and tamped a new one, bouncing it on the table.

Lloyd Brown was still glowering at Lucius. “How come you're askin about Henry Short? He on your list?” He looked resentful. “What you up to, Colonel? You already know all there is to know about your daddy. Know it better'n we do, very likely, cause we was youngsters when you first went around askin all them questions.”

They nodded over that awhile, until Lucius said, “I'm trying to learn who lived on the Watson Place in the years I was away—”

“Let me think back a little, Colonel,” Lloyd Brown said. “For the first years after your dad died, there weren't no one on the Bend at all, that's how scared of Leslie Cox the people was. Weren't till about 1913 that Willie Brown moved on there the first time, and it might been Willie who sold it to the Chevelier Corporation. Bill House was the first caretaker, then Henry Thompson, that's how I remember it.

“My uncles took over in the early thirties, and I lived there awhile. All the outbuildings was swept away in the '26 Hurricane, but some of the old dock platforms was still there. Had to patch the screens, douse 'em with cylinder oil, cause the mosquitoes was terrible, worse than ever. That was Depression times, no work anyplace and the net fishin poor. Mostly we cooked shine and gator-hunted, ricked some charcoal, lived off of the land. A bear broke into the kitchen wing, come in after our venison—that bear sure made a mess, I can tell you that!

“Chatham Bend is where me and my cousins learned to hunt, and we always thought of it as home. Still do, I guess. I never heard nobody around our family run down Watsons. No matter what he might of did, E. J. Watson was E. J. Watson. Like my dad said, ‘That man was who he was! He weren't like some!'

“About 1934, I reckon, Chatham Bend was turned over to the Audubon warden Charlie Green. Mac Johnson and his wife come on there after that but didn't last long, because Dorothy lost her mind down there, tried to burn them bloodstains off the floor and near to burned down the whole house while she was at it. She was ravin that the ghost of Mr. Watson would come get her, on account of her daddy Henry Smith was in the posse.”