Shadow Country (118 page)

When the six cartridges ran out, he came up quick with a small revolver he had in his boot and made me dance in that same foolish fashion. I tried to grin, stay calm about it. “Not many men, let alone boys, would try this game on Ed Watson,” I warned him, but he only hooted and went right ahead. When his friends dragged him out of there, he was still laughing. It was only after he was gone that Dick Sawyer sidled up and said, “Ain't that Dutchy a ripsnorter, Ed?”

I was disgusted. This ripsnorter had killed Clarence Till, a fair and well-liked lawman, and also robbed businessmen and committed wrongful arson, and yet he was a local hero whom folks talked about with shining eyes. To join his pals at Eddie's Bar with a reward posted, then draw attention to himself, show off with weapons at the risk of being sent back to the chain gang? His
arrogance
was criminal, never mind the rest, but because he got away with stuff like that, he made it seem dashing and defiant.
I laugh at your law. And what will you do about it? Nothing!

Headed home next day, I was somewhere off Shark River when the sky turned black and the
Gladiator
was caught in a hard squall. When I stuck my head into the forward cuddy to dig out my oilskins, I found myself looking straight into the muzzle of a six-gun. Naturally, I backed out and raised my hands. “What's that cannon for? Piracy on the high seas?”

“If I was you, I wouldn't talk so smart.” The man climbing out after me was green olive in his color from being pitched and rolled in that hot cuddy, but he looked like a pirate all the same—big nose, pocked skin, hard black wire hair, and a second pistol stuck into his belt. He also looked like the self-same sonofabitch who had danced me in Eddie's Bar, so I knew better than to mess with him. These cocky greenhorn pistoleros out to prove themselves tend to shoot first and think afterward, if they think at all. Ever since Billy the Kid caught the nation's fancy, the country had been plagued by boys like this, out to play and die as fast and hard as William Bonney.

“Maybe I'd better grab the helm before she yaws on a big sea and capsizes,” I warned him. A flicker of fear crossed that swart face: he waved me toward the stern. Starting aft, I felt a whole lot better. If this kid had spent even one day on the water, he'd have noticed that the helm was lashed, with no risk of yawing or capsizing.

I freed the tiller while he guarded me, standing up straight, and at the first chance, I swung her off the wind and let her jibe. In a rush of canvas, the boom swung back across the hull and knocked him flying; he'd heard that creak of wood behind him but not knowing he should duck, he spun right into it. If he hadn't grabbed a shroud, he would have gone overboard and stayed that way because I sure had no plan to go back after him. As it was, he'd had to drop his gun to grab that line, and now he was dragging in the water, hanging on to a rope fender with both hands.

Very quick, he hauled himself halfway up and got one leg over the gunwale. I leaned over and yanked the second Colt out of his belt and whapped his fingers with the barrel. “Damn!” he said as he lost his hold and went back down. Clutching the fender in the wash along the hull, he was very pale, he thought he was a goner. Having emptied the chamber of the Colt and tossed it into the cockpit after the first one, I lit up a cigar and took the tiller, letting him drag while the
Gladiator
resumed her course.

“Can't swim too good,” he gasped. Having no way to wipe the sea out of his eyes, he looked like he was crying. “I reckon my arms ain't goin to last much longer,” he said next. I blew some cigar smoke down into his face to make him cough. His eyes snapped with black anger over getting himself into this fix, and naturally I was angry, too, yet I had to admit this boy had grit, considering his piss-poor situation. He had stated the facts, he had not begged or whined.

Seeing that Watson wasn't going to help him, my stowaway knew he had to save himself if he was going to be saved, and he had to do it now while he still had strength, even if Watson planned to shoot him if he tried it. One boot swung up onto the rail, which was all the purchase this quick varmint needed. The rest was cat strength, timing the boat's roll. Melville was back aboard so fast that I grabbed for the first gun, which was still loaded.

Seeing he'd startled me, he dared a little grin as he eased down out of the wind in his wet clothes. Even now, safely aboard, he hung onto the rail; after that bad scare, he was no threat to me at all. Far at sea off a distant coast, he had more sense than to harm the man who piloted the boat.

“Dutchy is the name,” he said. “You heard of me?” I shook my head, emptying his cartridges into my pocket.

“Don't want to know what I'm doing on your boat?”

“I
know
what you're doing on my boat.”

He nodded. “Emperor Watson!” He grinned some more. “If a man drew down on
me
on my own boat, I'd blow his head off.”

“After the harvest, maybe.”

“Watson Payday?” He'd heard the bad stories, his grin said, but he kind of liked my style. “Know something, Mister Ed? You wasn't so sociable last night in Eddie's Bar so I never got to shake the hand of the Man Who Killed Belle Starr. But the way you turned the tables on me here today? Real slick! I'm proud to know you!”

“One month's work, no pay. How's that?”

“Mister Ed,” he repeated softly, nodding his head as if this were his lucky day. He couldn't get over Mister Watson, I was wonderful. “We'll see,” he promised cheerfully, wringing out his shirt. “Call me Dutchy, okay, Mister Ed?”

“Okay, Herb,” I said.

I'd guessed correctly that he hated his given name. On the other hand, he was flattered that I knew who Herbie was.

At Chatham, Melville had to learn to take orders from a black foreman. However, he respected Frank's long prison record and got along with him about as well as could be expected. He wanted to stay on, “take the nigger's job,” he announced in front of Frank, “cause foreman ain't no job for a nigger,” but the way he said this made Frank laugh because these two had lawman made friends.

When Melville finally realized I'd meant just what I said—hard work, no pay—he got to brooding, concluding finally that E. J. Watson had taken ad-vantage of his youth and generous nature. In my experience, criminals
always
feel angry and abused, which partly accounts for why such men turn criminal in the first place. Also, they can be counted on for retribution. They get even.

A fortnight later, returning from a trip with Bembery to Tampa Bay, I discovered that this criminal had gone off on a fishing boat but not before spoiling the thousand gallons of good syrup I had counted on for unpaid salaries and lawyers' bills and enough supplies to see the plantation through until next harvest. Two months after that, a picture postcard came from New York City:

To my friend Dutchy it was all a joke but for Chatham Bend it was a crisis. For a fortnight or more, I forgot my vow that never again would I raise my hand in violence. Every time I thought about that devil, my head split with that old pain out of my boyhood, so violent that I had to sit or I would fall. If I'd had the money, Jack Watson would have taken ship for New York City and finished that young villain once and for all.

I told my crew I was dead broke but would pay them when I could. Some bitched, of course, but most blamed Dutchy Melville. As for Kate, she had always been unhappy that I hired wanted men, fearing that one of them might harm our children. When I told her about our loss, she cried, “Well, that's what comes of harboring these outlaws, Mr. Watson! Why can't we live like ordinary, decent people?” And I said, “Didn't you tell me just last week that you were fond of Dutchy?” Kate went off sniffling after admitting that the children liked him, too. They did. Followed him everywhere. The Hamilton and Thompson kids rowed all the way north from Lost Man's Beach to see Dutchy and his six-guns, same way they used to come to see my trained pig Betsey. Everybody liked that rascal, even Lucius, even Reese, and even “Mister Ed,” who had vowed to kill him.

LINCH LAW

After I was acquitted, I had written a long letter to Nap Broward, thanking him for his kind interest and assistance. In that letter I outlined some long-range proposals for the Everglades, “the last American frontier,” and requested an appointment at the statehouse as soon as I could afford the railway fare to Tallahassee. Surely the governor would be interested in my idea for a Broward ship canal that would follow old Indian water trails across the southern Glades from Fort Dallas on the Miami River to the Lost Man's headwaters; the dredged spoil from this canal could become the bed for a cross-Florida highway. While acknowledging the difficulties of the terrain, I mentioned the much more challenging canal under construction in Panama, with locks to lift great ships over the mountains.

The only answer to my letter was a typewritten copy of a document from the archives of his predecessor in office. Though unaccompanied by any note, it could not have been sent without Broward's approval. Dated Chokoloskee, Florida, February 1896, it was addressed to Governor Henry Mitchell:

Dolphus had gotten his revenge and never knew it. That Broward permitted his complaint to be sent to his friend Watson made it clear that I would be unwelcome at the statehouse until I had rebuilt my reputation—in other words, until I was prosperous again, which in this great land of ours amounts to the same thing. And so I was forced to stand by and watch as Florida's west coast development fell far behind the east. Nap Broward had committed most of the state's money to his steamboat canals east of Okeechobee, while John D. Rockefeller's partner Henry Flagler, with flags, fanfare, and fine speechifying, was finishing the last leg of his Florida East Coast Railway, from Homestead south across the keys and channels toward Key West. From his beachside headquarters, Flagler described his railway as “the hardest job I have ever undertaken,” oblivious of the brute labor done by the thousands of unknown men who worked like animals in that humid heat to make his fortune. (One newspaper reported that the num-bers of railway construction deaths in Florida were rivaling those in Panama, where the railroad company helped defray expenses by packing its corpses into brine barrels and selling them to medical schools back in the States.) Nobody wanted to investigate all that dying, least of all the U.S. government, because Flagler was opening up south Florida for development, commerce, and big investors. “The kind of red-blooded American who made this country great”—that's what the newspapers called Flagler. There was red blood, all right, but it wasn't his.

Our field hands were better housed and fed than the immigrants and Caribbean blacks and crackers who perished over there when Flagler's crews revolted, forcing his thugs to bring in drunks and bums to break the strikes. Not that I opposed strong measures to support progress in this brave new century—on the contrary, I ached to be involved. But it enraged me that a small cane planter on a remote frontier river should be reviled for “Watson Payday” while more powerful men supported by the government were writing off human life as overhead as an everyday matter.

Lucius would nod politely at my earnest outrage, but next day he might say something quiet that his mother might have said, like, “I've been thinking about progress, Papa. Shouldn't progress in our great nation mean progress for everybody?”

Those two men on my place had died for the common good because they had obstructed the progress of this region—that's what I told myself when I thought about it, which I tried not to. Occasionally I came close to discussing those Tuckers with Lucius, who was still sad that he'd never heard from his missing brother, but being shamelessly in need of this boy's good opinion, I did not dare.

Our new cane crop came up better than expected in those rain-swept days of spring and early summer when new shoots can grow six to eight inches in a day. But on the eleventh of September, 1909, just before harvest, the worst hurricane in memory flattened my cane to a tangled mat of leaves and twisted stalks. Because the new cane was still green, the storm bent those stalks over without killing the plants, and the damp weight of that green mat threatened the entire harvest. I drove Green Waller off his hogs, sent Kate and Lucius into the field, and we worked like nigras because, being broke, I had no real ones except Sip and Frank. Grabbing and chopping night and day, we salvaged what we could and burned the rest, but the new sugar was watery and the syrup so thin that I would not put my label on the cans. I shipped a single small consignment for the little it would bring at Tampa Bay.