Killing Mister Watson

PROLOGUE: OCTOBER 24, 1910

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting signs and seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.

In the hurricane’s wake, the labyrinthine coast where the Everglades deltas meet the Gulf of Mexico lies broken, stunned, flattened to mud by the wild tread of God. Day after day, a gray and brooding wind nags at the mangroves, hurrying the unruly tides that hunt through the broken islands and twist far back into the creeks, leaving behind brown spume and matted salt grass, driftwood. On the bay shores and down the coastal rivers, a far gray sun picks up dead glints from windrows of rotted mullet, heaped a foot high.

From the island settlement on the old Indian mound called Chokoloskee, a baleful and uneasy sky out toward the Gulf looks ragged as a ghost, unsettled, wandering. The sky is low, withholding rain, and vultures on black-fingered wings tilt back and forth over the broken trees. At the channel edge, where docks and pilings, stove-in boats, uprooted shacks litter the shore, odd pieces torn away from their old places have been strained from the flood by the limbs over the water. A clothesline flutters in the trees; thatched roofs are spun onto their poles like old straw brooms; frame buildings sag. In the dank air a sharp fish stink is infused with corruption of dead animals and blackened vegetables, of excrement in overflowing pits from which shack privies have been washed away. Pots, kettles, crockery, a butter churn, tin tubs, buckets, salt-slimed boots, soaked horsehair mattresses, and ravished dolls are strewn across the pale killed ground.

A lone gull picks disconsolate at the softening mullet along shore, a dog barks without heart at so much silence.

A figure in mud-fringed calico, calling a child, stoops to retrieve a Bible, then wipes wet grime from the Good Book with pale dulled fingers. She straightens, turning slowly, staring toward the south. From the wall of mangroves far off down the bay, the drum of the boat engine comes and goes, then comes again, a little louder.

Oh, Lord, she whispers, half-aloud. Oh no, please no, sweet Jesus.

Along toward low gray-yellow twilight, Postmaster Smallwood, on his knees beneath his store, is raking out the last of his drowned chickens. What the hurricane has left of Smallwood’s dock—a few poor pilings—sticks out at angles off the end of the spoil bank where he’d dug his canal for Indian canoes. From there the pewter water spreads away to the black walls of mangrove on all sides.

He crouches in the putrid heat. Voices are whispering, as at a funeral. One pair of bare feet, then another, pass in silence on the way down to the landing. He knows his neighbors by their gait and britches. Over the whispering, over short breaths, comes the drumming of the motor, softened by distance, east through Rabbit Key Pass from the Gulf of Mexico. In a shift of wind, the pot-pot-pot comes hard as a pulse, as if he heard his heart for the first time.

Three days before, when that boat had headed south, all ten families on the island watched it go. Smallwood was the only man to wave, but he, too, prayed that this would be the end of it, that the broad figure at the helm, sinking into darkness at the far low line of trees, would disappear forever from their lives.

Said Old Man D. D. House, He will be back.

The House clan lives one hundred yards away, east of the store. Ted Smallwood sees his father-in-law’s black Sunday boots descend the Indian mound, with Bill House and Young Dan and Lloyd barefoot behind. Calling his sister, Bill climbs the porch and enters the store and post office, which has the Smallwood family rooms upstairs. Feet creak on the pine floor overhead.

In the steaming heat, in the onset of malaria, Smallwood feels so sickly weak that when his rump emerges and he tries to stand, blood thumps his temples and the trees go black. He is a big man and bangs heavily against the wall of his frame house, causing his wife, somewhere inside, to cry out in alarm. Slowly he straightens, arches his stiff back. He takes a deep and dreadful breath, gags, coughs, and shudders. He hawks the sweet taste of chicken rot from his mouth and nostrils.

Look what come crawling out! Ain’t that the postmaster?

The postmaster’s spade, jammed at the black earth by way of answer, grates on old white oyster shells of the huge midden. Again he jams it, and it glances off a root. The House boys laugh.

Keep that spade handy, boy. Might gone to need it.

Ted Smallwood says, Got four rifles there, I see. Think that’s enough?

The old man stops to contemplate his son-in-law. Daniel David House has silver in his brows and his mustache juts into ax-head sideburns. Though he wears no collar underneath his beard, he is dressed as if for Sunday, in white shirt, shiny black frock coat, wiped boots, and stiff black pants hauled high by galluses. He stands apart from the sandy, slow-eyed boys delivered him by the former Ida Borders.

Where’s his missus, then? the old man says.

She’s right inside here with her young ’uns. With your daughter and granddaughters, Mr. House. When the old man grunts and turns away, Ted’s voice goes higher. Them women and children gone to have ’em a good view!

Henry Short, expressionless, moves past, holding his rifle down along his leg.

You, too?

Leave Henry be, says Bill House, coming out. Bill House is thirty, a strong florid man creased hard by sun.

Mamie Smallwood has followed Bill outside. When her brother turns to calm her, the plump young woman cries, Let me alone! She weeps. Where is her little boy? He’s only three!

Old Man Dan shakes his big head and keeps on going, refusing to listen anymore. Young Dan and Lloyd follow him close, down toward the shore.

A young woman comes around the house. Mr. Smallwood? Please? Tell me what’s happening? When the postmaster stands mute, she cries, Oh Lord! and hurries off again. She is still calling her boy.

The island men are gathering, twenty or more. All have shotguns or rifles.

Charlie T. Boggess, who twisted his ankle in the hurricane, is limping. "All right, woman, all right! he shouts, to his wife’s calling. To the postmaster he says, Why couldn’t he keep right on going? To Key West!"

Ted says, Don’t hear Ethel hollering? You best hobble home, take care that ankle.

Isaac Yeomans, coming by, says, Key West? Nosir! That feller ain’t the kind likes to back up. Isaac is fiery with drink; he looks almost cheered up by what the others dread. You recall Sam Lewis, Ted? At Lemon City?

Smallwood nods. They lynched Sam Lewis, too.

Bill House stops on the steps. This ain’t no mob!

Don’t think so? The postmaster pitches his voice toward Bill’s father. What if he’s just coming back here to pick up his family and keep right on going?

Bill House says, Keep right on going, Ted, just like you say, and do the same thing somewheres else.

Mr. Smallwood? Have you seen little Addison?

The men turn their backs to the young woman and stare away toward the south. The oncoming boat is a small dark burr in the pewter light of Chokoloskee Bay.

Henry Short leans his 30.30 Winchester into a fork of the big fish-fuddle that the hurricane has felled across the clearing. The gun is hidden when he leans against the tree, and his arms are folded as if in sign that none of this is any of his business.

Twilight gathers behind the coming boat. The armed men stand half-hidden in the undergrowth, too tense to slap at the mosquitoes. In the dusk of a dark day, in the tree shadow, the postmaster can no longer make out faces beneath the old and broken hats. His neighbors seem anonymous as outlaws.

Not slowing, the boat winds in among the oyster bars. The helmsman stands in silhouette, his broad hat forward on his head.

Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops two shells in, sets his felt hat. Seems like you ought to throw in with us, Ted. Isaac is gazing out over the water. We’re in friendship with him too. We don’t care for this no more’n you do.

He pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain’t got a single thing agin him. Smallwood speaks urgently to Yeomans and to Boggess, who have been his friends for fifteen years. You boys never had no trouble with him, and you can’t hit nothing anyway. Put them damn guns down.

Others hesitate beside the store, as if loath to go down to the landing. They have worn the same shirts for a week, they are scared and cranky, they are anxious to involve Ted Smallwood. At the very least, the postmaster’s participation might make what must happen more respectable. If no one is innocent, who can be guilty?

Storm refugees from Lost Man’s River stand back by the store porch, a hundred yards from the boat landing.

One calls, Looks like y’all are fixing to gun him down. Henry Thompson is a tall and sunworn man, lank as a dog.

Another man nods urgently, clearing his throat. "Thought you fellers was aiming to get deputized! Thought you was aiming to arrest him!"

"Won’t let hisself get arrested, Bill House says. Men here found that out the other day."

Best if nobody hangs back! calls Old Dan House.

One man says, I believe Ted knows what must be done as good as we do. He just don’t want no part of it. Another cackles, Why, hell, Ted, bushwhacking ain’t nothing to be scared of! Not with his one against two dozen!

"Maybe I ain’t scared the way you think. Maybe I’m scared of killing in cold blood."

He ain’t scared of cold blood, Ted. Colder the better.

Ain’t nobody proved that in a court of law!

Ain’t no law down here to prove it by.

Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and single-shot .22s. Shouted at, they slink into the trees and circle back, bright-eyed as coons.

In his old leaf-colored clothes, in the brown shadows at the wood edge, Henry Short has sifted in against the tree bark like a chuck-will’s-widow shuffling soft wings. He seems intent on the white bow wave where the dark boat parts the gray chop of the channel, and the rifle-fire pot-pot-pot, loud and louder. The silhouette of the lone boatman rises slowly on the evening sky.

The women are calling from the wood. Old Man Dan shouts to his son-in-law, If you’re his friend, go find his little feller!

He circles through the wind-stripped trees. The wood is hushed, the last birds mute, the dogs gone still. Only mosquitoes are abroad, keening in the twisted gumbo-limbos.

He calls and calls.

A razorback hog grunts abruptly, once, in the startled silence.

The young mother follows him back to the house and goes inside. In white aprons, behind the salt-dark screen, the women loom like ghosts. Neither weeps. Their little daughters tug softly at their skirts. The children’s eyes stare toward the boat over sucked thumbs.

Smallwood pushes past, indoors, not sure where he is headed. His wife is gripping the hand of the boy’s mother. Ought to kept him home, he says. When he bangs his lantern, Mamie raises a finger to her lips, as if the man out in the boat might hear.

Daddy’s the one behind this, ain’t he? she whispers. Bill and Dan, too!

Smallwood slaps a mosquito, lifts his fingers, investigates the blood. Light that smudge, he says. Little Thelma runs to the crumpled bucket of black mangrove charcoal damped with earth.

He gazes at his Mamie Ulala, ignoring the young woman, who appears entranced. He says, They’re all behind it. All but the men from Lost Man’s.

This dark day has been coming down forever. Even the young woman, in her pale foreboding, seems to know this. The day is late, and a life runs swiftly to its end.

They want an end to it, he mutters.

Little Thelma and her friend Ruth Ellen stand in the corner, guarding the toddlers from something scary. Ruth Ellen’s mother clutches Baby Amy, born five months before down at Key West. Ad, she whispers to the missing boy. Oh, please.

The motor dies, in a long wash of silence. Daddy, Thelma says, starting to whimper. When the postmaster takes her up into his arms, she sucks her thumb. Beside himself, he thrusts her at her mother and follows the young woman back outside. He cannot stop yawning.

Seen through the broken branches, in the onshore wind, the launch coasts down on Smallwood’s landing, just west of where the dock had been before the storm. Ted’s heart pounds so that the boatman must surely feel it and take warning, must sense the islanders in the dark trees.

In the last light the postmaster sees little Addison hid in the sea-grape, spying on all those grown-up men with guns. Smallwood’s voice breaks when he calls the boy, and goes unheard. Hurrying down the steps, he does not call again.

What had he feared? That his neighbors would denounce his call as a shout of warning?

Warned or not, the man would come in anyway.

Now Henry Short glides like a shadow from the trees, crossing behind the men, down to the shore. He wades without a splash into the water, just to the right of Bill House and Bill’s father.

A suck and wash as the bow wave slaps ashore. Time stops, spun upward in a vortex. Smallwood’s heart caroms, his hands rise to his ears.

The boat stem crunches old dead mollusks. Silence.

The earth turns. A quiet greeting, an exchange of voices. The men drift forward, spreading out along the water. Smallwood gasps for breath. With the day of reckoning unbearably deferred, the postmaster’s relief is mixed, without elation.

Soon Mamie and her friend venture outside. They talk and smile to ease their nerves, starting down the little slope toward the water.

A twig snaps and the twilight stiffens. A hard shift, the whip crack of a shot, two shots together. There is time for an echo, time for a high shriek, before the last evening of the old days in the Islands flies apart in a volley of wild fire.

The young woman stands formally before his house, as for a picture, brown dress darkened by the dusk, face pale as salt.

Mamie runs to her, but it is she who takes the sobbing Mamie to her bosom, strokes her hair, regards the postmaster over his wife’s shoulder without the mercy of a single blink. She appears calm. It is Mamie who has shrieked; he can still hear it. He wanders toward them, feeling weak and shy.

Mamie twists away from him, mouth working. In a low and awful voice she says, I’m leaving! I am leaving this godforsaken place! I’m leaving! The children stare. He shoos the little girls inside, to the staccato of boys’ hoots and scared dogs barking. When little Thelma whines, he shakes her hard. Inside, I said! At the fury of his voice, her face disintegrates, she runs into the house.

The young woman goes to her little boy, who has tripped and fallen in his wailing flight and has patches of hurricane mud daubed on his knees. She pulls him to her, as if away from the armed men, who are milling in the dark like one great animal. Some turn to stare.

In a moment, she will crawl under the house, dragging her brood into the chicken slime and darkness.

No, Lord, she whispers, as the terror overtakes her.

Oh, dear God, she moans.

Oh Lord! she cries. They are killing Mister Watson!

HENRY THOMPSON

We never had no trouble from Mister Watson, and from what we seen, he never caused none, not amongst his neighbors. All the trouble come to him from the outside.

Ed J. Watson turned up at Half Way Creek back in ’92, worked on the produce farms awhile, worked in the cane. Hard worker, too, but it don’t seem like he hoed cane for the money, it was more like he was getting the feel of our community, what was what and who was where. He was a strong, good-looking feller in his thirties, dark red hair, well made, thick through the shoulders but no fat on him, not in them days. Close to six foot and carried himself well, folks noticed him straight off, and no one fooled with him. First time you seen the man you wanted him to like you—he was that kind. Wore a broad black hat, wore denim coveralls over a frock coat with big pockets. Times we was cutting buttonwood with ax and hand saw, two-three cords a day—that’s hard and humid work, case you ain’t done it, and even them coveralls got sweated—Ed Watson never changed his outfit. Used to joke how he kept his coat on cause he expected some company any day now from up north.

Nobody knew where this man come from, and nobody asked him. You didn’t ask a man hard questions, not in the Ten Thousand Islands, not in them days. Folks will tell you different today, but back then there wasn’t too many in our section that wasn’t kind of unpopular someplace else. With all of Florida to choose from, who else would come to these overflowed rain-rotted islands with not enough high ground to build a outhouse, and so many skeeters plaguing you in the bad summers you thought you’d took the wrong turn straight to Hell.

Old Man William Brown was cutting cane, and he listened to them men opining how this stranger Ed J. Watson was so friendly. And when Old Man William never said a word, they was bound to ask him his opinion, and he took him a slow drink of water, give a sigh. Never knew a real bad feller yet that wasn’t nice and easy in his ways. Feller running his mouth all the time, I done this and I’m fixing to do that—no need to pay that feller no attention. But a feller just taking it easy, waiting you out—you better leave that man go his own way.

So Willie Brown, strong and lively little feller, thought a lot of Mister Watson all his life, Willie Brown said, Well, now, Papa, are you telling us this man is a bad actor? And his daddy said, "I just feel something, is all, same way I feel the damp." The men respected Old Man William, but there wasn’t one out in the field that day that took him serious.

All the same, we noticed pretty quick, you couldn’t draw too close to Mister Watson before he eased out sideways like a crab, gave himself more room. My half uncle Tant Jenkins claimed he once come up on Mister Watson letting his water, and Mister Watson come around on him so fast that poor Tant thought this feller aimed to piss on him. Well, it weren’t his pecker he had in his hand. By the time Tant Jenkins seen that gun, it was halfway back into them denims, he wasn’t so certain he seen it after all.

Tant was always brash and kind of comical. He says, Well, now, Mister Watson! Specting some company from the north? And Mister Watson says, Any company that shows up unexpected will find me ready with a nice warm welcome. Very agreeable, y’know, very, very easy. But he never let nobody come up on him.

For many years Tant Jenkins and myself run his boats for Mister Watson. Especially when Tant was drinking, which was mostly all the time, he would tease poor Mister Watson something pitiful. Told him that no friend of S. S. Jenkins had a single thing to fear from north or south, though sometimes east and west could give Tant trouble. Mister Watson got a real kick out of that. Well, Tant, he’d say, "knowing you are on the job, I’ll sleep much better."

Ed Watson had money in his pocket when he come to Half Way Creek, which ain’t none of my business nor yours neither. In all the years that I knew Mister Watson, right up until them bad days near the end, he always come up with money when he had to. We didn’t know till later he was on the dodge, and maybe even Half Way Creek—half way between Everglade and Turner River, on the east side of Chokoloskee Bay—was too close to the lawmen for his liking. Ain’t nothing much out there today but a few old cisterns, but Half Way Creek had ten or a dozen families then, more than Everglade or Chokoloskee or anyplace else from Marco Island south to Cape Sable. Weren’t hardly more’n a hundred souls in all that hundred mile of coast, counting the ones that perched awhile at the mouths of rivers.

Mister Watson weren’t at Half Way Creek but a few days when he paid money down for William Brown’s old seventy-foot schooner. Later he bought the old Veatlis off Ben Brown, and he always remained in friendship with that family. Used to stop over at Half Way Creek, talk farming with the Browns, every time he come up to the Bay. Ain’t many men would buy a schooner that didn’t know next to nothing about boats, but a man that is good at one thing most generally’s good at another, and Ed Watson could put his hand to anything. Time he was done, he was one of the best boatmen on this coast.

I seen straight off that Mister Watson was a man who meant to go someplace, I seen my chance, so I signed on to guide him down around the Islands. I had already worked for a year down there, plume hunting and such for Old Chevelier, before I turned that Frenchman over to Bill House. Me and Bill was just young fellers then, a scant fourteen, but a man got started early back in them days. Until some years into this century, there weren’t no regular school on Chokoloskee, so you went to work. Nothing else to do when you come to think about it.

Folks ask, Would I have throwed in with Mister Watson if I knowed about him what I know today? Well, hell, I don’t know what I know today, and they don’t neither. With so many stories growed up around that feller, who is to say which ones are true? I was just a kid, though I never would admit it, and what I seen were a able-bodied man, quiet and easy in his ways, who acted according to our ideas of a gentleman. And that was all we had, ideas, cause we never seen one in this section, unless you would count Preacher Gatewood, who first brought the Lord to Everglade back in ’88 and took Him away again when he departed.

Mister Watson and me cut buttonwood all around Bay Sunday and down Chatham River, run it over to Key West, three dollars a cord. Cepting Richard Hamilton, who run off down there back in the eighties and stayed on in the Islands fifty years, most of the Island pioneers was drifters. There was even a few old runaways from the War Between the States, never got the word that the war was finished. Never had nothing but thatch lean-tos and a skiff and pot and guns, and maybe a jug of aguedente for fighting off the skeeters in the evening. Plume hunters and moonshiners, the most of ’em. Put earth in a tub, made their fire in the skiff, had coffee going morning, noon, and night.

A man who called himself Will Raymond was the only settler down on Chatham River—more of a squatter, you might say, camped with his wife and daughter in a palmetta shack on that big forty-acre mound down on the Bend. Will Raymond was like most of ’em down in the Islands, getting away from it all, you know, living along on grits and mullet, taking some gator hides and egret plumes, selling a little moonshine to the Injuns. The Frenchman had the Bend before him, and Old Man Richard Hamilton before that. Biggest Injun mound south of Marco and Chokoloskee, which was why the Frenchman went there in the first place. The Injuns always called it Pavioni. But in them days Pavioni was all overgrowed cause Will Raymond weren’t much of a farmer, and Mister Watson would cuss him out every time we went downriver, saying how pitiful it was to see so much good ground going to waste. And maybe he’d already reckoned that Chatham Bend was across the line, in Monroe County, with the closest law near a hundred miles away, down to Key West. But that never occurred to nobody, not at the time.

Oh yes, we seen plenty like Will Raymond in the Islands, thin piney-woods crackers with them knife-mouthed women, hollow-eyed under bent hats, lank black hair like horses, touchy, on the run. Go crazy every little while, get their old-time religion all mixed up with guns and whiskey, shoot some poor neighbor through the heart. I guess that’s what Will done more’n once, he got the habit of it.

Will must have been wanted pretty bad—dead or alive, as you might say. Probably should have picked him a new name, got a fresh start, cause the law got wind of him some way and deputies come a-hunting him, out of Key West. Will said Nosir, he’d be damned if he’d go peaceable, and he whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it. But he was peaceable and then some by the time the smoke cleared, so they threw his carcass in the boat. The law asked the Widder Raymond would she and her daughter like a boat ride to Key West along with the deceased, and she said, Thankee, don’t mind if we do.

Next thing you know, Ed Watson tracked the widder down and bought Will’s claim, two hundred and fifty dollars. That was a lot of cash in them days, but there was forty acres of good soil and more across the river, the most high ground anywhere south of Chokoloskee, and Mister Watson liked Pavioni from the start. Protected on three sides by mangrove tangle—you had to come at him straight on or not at all. And he admired the deep channel in that river, used to talk sometimes of dredging out the mouth, make a harbor and stopover place for coastal shipping.

Oh, he had big plans, all right, about the only feller down there ever did. Started right out by building a fine cabin, used buttonwood posts to frame it up, had wood shutters and canvas flaps on the front windows, brought in a wood stove and a kerosene lamp and a galvanized tub for anyone that cared to wash. We ate good, too, all the fish and meat you wanted, had a big iron skillet and made johnnycakes the whole size of that pan. Put a little oil to his good flour, cooked ’em up dry. I remembered them good johnnycakes all my whole life.

Mister Watson said Will Raymond’s shack weren’t fit for hogs, so he patched it up before he put our hogs in it. We had two cows, and chickens, too, but E. J. Watson had a old-time feel for hogs. I can take a hog or I can leave it, but that man loved hogs and hogs loved him, they followed him all over, I can hear him calling down them river evenings to this day. The hogs was brought in every night cause of the panthers, which was very common on the rivers, and he fed ’em garden trash and table slops and such so they wouldn’t get no fishy taste from feeding on crabs and orsters at low tide like them old razorbacks of Richard Hamilton. Kept a old horse for breaking up the ground, and sometimes he’d saddle up of a fine evening and ride around his forty-acre farm like it was a spread of four thousand and forty.

Mister Watson worked us like niggers, and he worked like a nigger alongside us. Brought in a couple of regular niggers from Fort Myers for the dirty work, and they worked hard—that man knew how to get work from his help. The niggers was scared of him cause he was rough, but they kind of liked him when he wasn’t drinking. Told ’em nigger jokes that had ’em giggling for hours, but I never got them nigger jokes too good. Me and niggers just don’t think the same.

The old-time Calusas was the ones built up that shell mound, same ones that killed Old Man Ponce de León maybe right in that same place four hundred years ago. And Calusas was still there, the Frenchman said, back in 1838, at the time of the Army expedition to the Islands. In his opinion, them Pavioni people was the last of them big fishing Injuns, said that big Pavioni mound must of been Calusa for two thousand years, same as the big mound at Chokoloskee. Them redskins set there shucking a good while, to fling a forty-acre shell pile over their shoulders. Somewhere not far from Pavioni, on a mound hid from the rivers, there had to be a sacred burial place, the Frenchman said. Used to talk sometimes about sacred rites and human sacrifice and such, like it was common knowledge, but I never really got the hang of it.

Old Man Chevelier spent most of his last years out hunting his lost mound, shooting plume birds and museum specimens just to get by. Most of my knowledge about Injuns come from him. Maybe he wasn’t no American, and atheistical, to boot, but he was the most educated man ever turned up here. Seems funny it would take a foreigner to know more about Injuns than we did. Our own old fellers never cared one bit. Said, Shoot them pesky redskins first, ask questions later, cause they ain’t one bit less ornery than your common Spaniard.

Old Man Richard Hamilton was mostly fishing when he had that place, and Chevelier and Will Raymond, who come after him, never farmed neither, not to speak of. Ed Watson was the first one since the Injuns to hack out all that thorn, dig out palmetta roots thick as your leg, scrape off enough of that old shell to make a farm. That’s why it’s called the Watson Place today. Grew all kinds of vegetables, and cane for syrup, and tomatoes and alligator pears that the old Clyde Mallory Line shipped straight out of Key West for New York City. One time Mister Watson come back from Fort Myers with some seed potatoes! Them farmers at Half Way Creek and Chokoloskee liked to laugh behind his back, but Mister Watson shipped potatoes for three-four years before he reckoned potatoes didn’t pay, and he always raised a few for our own table.

We got good money for our produce, but too much spoiled before it reached the auction room down to Key West. Coleman and Bartlum, General Commission Merchants—we’re probably on the books down there today. And pretty soon, except for our own table, we give up on general vegetables. Long as he could scare him up some field hands, Mister Watson figured there was more future in sugarcane, cause cane don’t spoil. After that he figured out that making syrup right on the plantation, instead of shipping all them heavy stalks, made a lot more sense in a out-of-the-way place like Chatham River, cause syrup could be stored till he got his price.

Meanwhile he worked out his own way of letting the cane tassel before cutting. Syrup from tasseled cane will boil down a lot stronger without sugaring. When he went over to our high-quality syrup is when Mister Watson made his first good money, and got him a bigger schooner from Key West, called her the Gladiator. Packed that syrup in one-gallon tin cans, six to the case, shipped it to Port Tampa and Key West. Our Island Pride syrup become famous. There was planters at Half Way Creek like Storters and Will Wiggins, and Old Man D. D. House up Turner River, they made plenty of good syrup, but Mister Watson had ’em beat right from the start.

Ed Watson was the only planter south of Chokoloskee that ever made more than a bare living in the rivers, he was the best farmer I ever saw. And all the while we done fishing, too, sold some salt fish, took turtle eggs in season, shot gators and egrets when they was handy. Up them inland creeks, Last Huston Bay, Alligator Bay, egrets was thick, pink curlew, too, and we never failed to take a deer or two for venison, sometimes a turkey. Trapped otters and coons and panthers for the hides, and every little while we’d kill a bear. I thought I was pretty handy with a shooting iron, but I’m telling you now, Mr. Ed J. Watson was a deadeye shot. Only man I ever saw could shoot like that was Henry Short.

After D. D. House moved his farm from Turner River down to the hammocks back of Chatham River, Henry Short used to come over from House Hammock on a Sunday to see how young Bill was getting on with the Old Frenchman, who lived up the river, Possum Key. Henry and me got on all right, I never held a thing against him, but when he visited the Hamiltons, them people let that nigger eat right at the table. That ain’t James Hamiltons I’m speaking about. This is Richard Hamiltons.

Only one besides me and Mister Watson hunting plume birds in them creeks was Old Chevelier. One afternoon Mister Watson seen the Frenchman’s skiff coming out in back of Gopher Key. Sometimes Chevelier had Injuns with him, and this day I seen a log canoe slide back behind the green, soft as a gator. In the Glades Injuns use dugouts made from cypress logs, and they use push poles. Never seen Injuns paddle a canoe in my whole life.

In a dugout, the braves are standing, so they always seen you first, you were lucky to spot a Injun at all. But Injuns was watching you most all the time, that was something you got used to or you didn’t. Watched us white men when we come into their country and watched us when we went away, the same way the wild critters did, the deer, the panther, stopping at the edge of cover and looking back over their shoulder. Give you a funny feeling to be watched like that, you begun to think the trees were watching, too. But a man wouldn’t hear nothing but the moan of wasps, them creeks used to be full of wasp nests way back then.

If Mister Watson seen that dugout, he never paid it no attention. Chevelier lifts off his straw hat to mop his head, and Mister Watson hikes his gun and shoots that hat out of his hand. That bullet clipped right past his ear, made him skedaddle like a duck into the mangroves.

You won’t hear me deny it. I was shocked. There was a silence fell across that water for a mile away. Weren’t nothing to be seen in them long mangrove tunnels but green air and brown stilt roots, and that hard sparkle where the sun come through the trees, but I could feel the black eyes in them stone faces right between the leaves.

Mister Watson hollers to them trees, Sir, that hat can be replaced at Chatham Bend! I knew the Frenchman would not see the joke of it. Scared that poor old man to death, I reckon, cause we never heard a whisper from the mangroves.

I told Mister Watson all about Chevelier, how he was a hermit collecting rare birds for museums, used three different-size guns so as not to spoil ’em, and paying his keep by selling plumes; how he had all kinds of books there in his cabin, knew all about Injuns and wild critters, spoke some Injun lingo and had wild Injuns visiting that would never go near to Chokoloskee Bay. Them wild ones traded hides and furs through Richard Hamilton, who claimed to be Choctaw or some such, though nobody never paid that much attention. The Frenchman was always close to that Hamilton bunch, and probably it was Old Man Richard who brought them Injuns to him in the first place.

I could not stop telling all about the Frenchman, because Mister Watson was watching me so hard I just got nervous. That feller would look right past your eyes and not show nothing, or look at you straight for a minute or more without a blink. Then he would blink just once, real slow, like a old turtle, keeping his eyes closed for a moment as if resting ’em up from such an awful sight.

It was that day, while he rested up his eyes, that I first took notice how fiery he looked, that chestnut hair the color of dried blood, and the ruddy skin and sun-burned whiskers. Them whiskers had a little gold to ’em, he looked like he was glowing from inside. Then them blue eyes was watching me again, out of the shadow of that black felt hat he wore winter and summer. Only hat in the Ten Thousand Islands, I imagine, that had a label into it from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Then he looks up, cuts me off in a hard voice. What’s that old man up to, back yonder?

I told him about the clamshell midden that the old Calusas had built back in that hammock, and the clamshell canal that come all the way in there from the open water. The way I figured it, I said, Old Man Chevelier was hunting Calusa treasure back on Gopher Key.

His eyes flicked, but he made no comment, just waited politely for my talking to run out. Then he replied, meaning no offense, that he’d give a lot for some educated company like M’sieu Chevelier—Che-vell-yay, he called him, stead of Shev-uh-leer, the way we said it—and he reckoned he’d picked a piss-poor way to scrape acquaintance.

He was right. I knew that Frenchman, knew he had grit or he wouldn’t have made it by himself out in the Islands, where the skeeter whine can get so loud you think some kind of a meteor is coming. Richard Hamilton was going to hear about that bullet, and this story was not over by a long shot. But from that day on, we had the egret rookeries to ourselves.

I worked for Mr. Ed J. Watson for five years in the nineties, and run his boats in later years when he came and went. If he done all the things laid at his door, it seems to me I would have knowed something. S. S. Jenkins worked at Watson’s a good while, and if you could take and dig Tant up, he’d say the same. A whole heap of people from Caxambas, Chokoloskee, Fakahatchee, including more’n one of my own kin, worked at Chatham Bend at one time or another, and a heap more had dealings with him here and there. E. J. Watson drove him a hard bargain when that mood was on him, cause he had a good head for business, but the only one would ever claim that Mister Watson done him wrong was Adolphus Santini, who got cut in the neck in that drinking scrape down to Key West. There’s men will tell you old Dolphus was drunk, too, and had it coming, but I don’t want to say that, cause I wasn’t there.

Sir—

The enclosed material relating to E. J. Watson is culled from interviews with pioneer Floridians made years ago for the History of Southwest Florida which drew your attention to my modest researches in the first place. Though I placed no emphasis upon our subject, these interviews (arranged here in a rough chronology) contain a remarkable amount of comment on Mister Watson. Decidedly they affirm his eminence in the imagination of his wilderness community, so isolated from the new century on these coastal islands.

Also included are pertinent clippings from the American Eagle and the Fort Myers Press, including excerpts from their local news columns. These contemporary accounts seem more dependable than the many magazine articles and books in which E. J. Watson’s name has since appeared, which tend to contradict one another on small points as well as large, and fail to represent a picture consistent with the man remembered in these narratives by those who knew him best. Indeed, they raise as many questions as they answer concerning the enigmatic figure who looms behind the few hard facts of his dark history.

The following sketch of Watson’s life is submitted in the sincere conviction that is it truthful in its general statement as well as in significant particulars. It is largely based on two brief chronicles published in the 1950s, each of them considerably more accurate than any of the better-known accounts. One appeared in a letter submitted to a Pioneer Florida column in the Miami Herald by the late Dr. M. B. Herlong, a pioneer physician in this state, who apparently knew the Watson family in his younger days, both in South Carolina and later in north Florida. The other, by the late Charles Sherod Ted Smallwood, who was raised not far from Mr. Watson’s district in north Florida and became his friend in the Ten Thousand Islands, turns up among Smallwood’s reminiscences. The absence of contradictions in these two accounts (by firsthand sources entirely unacquainted with each other) seems to strengthen the reliability of both.

Edgar Watson was born on November 11, 1855, in Edgefield County, South Carolina, just across the northeast Georgia line. According to Dr. Herlong, who was also born in Edgefield County, Edgar’s father was Elijah Watson, a sometime state prison employee and celebrated brawler, known, from a knife scar that encircled his eye, as Ring-Eye Lige. The doctor says that Ring-Eye Lige so brutalized his family with his drinking and intemperate behavior that Mrs. Watson felt obliged to flee with her two children to relatives in northern Florida.

The family traveled to the Fort White region of Columbia County rather early in our subject’s life, since both Herlong and Smallwood state that he was raised there. Dr. Herlong relates that Edgar and his sister, Minnie, grew up and married in that section.

One bright moonlight night, Dr. Herlong continues, I heard a wagon passing our place. It was bright enough to recognize Watson and his family in the wagon. The report was that they settled in Georgia, but it couldn’t have been for long.

Probably Ted Smallwood was correct in saying that Mr. Watson married three women from Columbia County, and one may assume that the people in the wagon included a son by the first marriage, Robert or Rob Watson; his second wife, Jane S. Watson; his daughter, Carrie, born in 1885; and an infant son, Edgar E., born in 1887. Another son, Lucius, would be born