Lost Man's River (61 page)

Now Grandmother Maisie was a cruel, strong-hearted person, but she worshiped the ground that her boy Lee walked on. That old lady never did believe that his “conch bride” was good enough for Lee, and as for Sadie, she could not stand her mother-in-law, though she did her best not to say so. But even Sadie would admit that Mother Harden stood up strong for Henry Short, no matter what, and never had much use for Libby after she ran off with that Mound Key man, who had the habit of picking up anything loose he could lay his hands on, Libby included. Lee Harden said, “He might be a fine feller, but I never met a single soul who really liked him.”

That pretty Libby had been Henry's consolation for a lonely life. He was
heartbroken when he lost her and never got over his abandonment. He followed the Hardens to Flamingo, fished for some years around Cape Sable, but when he returned to Lost Man's River, who should he find living there but Libby and her husband. They were not happy to see Henry, and Henry couldn't stand to be so near, and he took to drinking for the first and only time in his whole life. He couldn't handle moonshine, and one night when he was drunk, he was heard to mumble that somebody ought to take and shoot that Mound Key cracker. The Hardens knew that Henry's threat was only a way to ease his torment, but they had to hush him up for his own safety. Because of the rumors about Henry's part in Watson's death, it was worse than dangerous for this man to talk this way against a white man.

Not that he talked much, having never had much practice. Libby dearly loved a conversation, and she always complained that Henry never gave her more than the bare facts even when he talked about the weather.

Before she took up with Henry Short, some of the Bay women called Libby Harden “white trash.” None of their slander changed the fact that every man along the coast would have sold his soul for a bite of that golden apple, and those women knew it. So they were happy when she humiliated her family—as they saw it—by marrying Henry Short and delighted anew when she abandoned him. It did their hearts good to see the Lord humble that mulatta who had married that supposed-to-be white woman.

Henry Short was a high type of man who had a low opinion of himself. White people had robbed him of all hope for a decent life, and they took away his self-respect right along with it. That's what we did to him, the Hardens said. But Lee Harden believed that losing his Libby to another man might have saved his life, because it got the young men cracking mean jokes instead of shooting off their drunken mouths about a lynching. “When there is enough lynching talk, it is going to happen,” said Lee Harden.

Sometime after World War I, Henry told Lee Harden he would not remarry and would never return to Lost Man's River. Though his grief had something to do with that decision, he also knew that his presence might draw more trouble to the Hardens, who had plenty of trouble without that. And perhaps he'd heard that Ed Watson's son was on his way back to the Islands.

The blind man was waiting in his doorway, a small suitcase beside him. His wife was off at church, he said, otherwise he would ask them in for a cup of coffee. Reminiscing with Colonel had made him kind of homesick, he confessed, and he wondered if—after looking for Henry at Immokalee—he might travel on with them to Chokoloskee, to visit with his relatives and
friends. “As a boy, I knew your family on both sides,” he told Sally politely. “Your mama's brothers were my friends down in the Islands.”

“Is that a fact,” Sally said coolly, as Lucius slid the blind man's bag into the trunk. She opened the front door for Andy, but the big hand fumbled deftly for the other handle and he climbed into the back over her protests. “Can't see much anyway,” he told her cheerfully, “so I might's well ride in style.”

They headed eastward past the Corkscrew Strand bound for Immokalee, at the edge of the Big Cypress. On the narrow road across the rough savanna, Lucius slowed to pick up a black man, although the man had not stuck out his thumb nor even turned to observe the car coming up behind. Lucius had murmured, “Must be hot, walking the road,” and Andy House said, “Let's give him a ride, then.”

“It's only a field hand, Mr. House—” Sally checked herself, annoyed. “I thought you might have some objection.”

“If he can take it, I guess I can,” Andy said easily. “I rode with plenty of em.”

With a rattle of limestone bits striking the fenders, the car slowed and drew up on the shoulder. The stringy figure sprang sideways as if startled by a snake. Alarmed that these whites had stopped, he was smiling hard, as if resigning himself to some rough joke. When Sally offered him a bright Good morning! the black man doffed a dusty cap. “Yesm,” he said. Even this single word was guarded, all one blurred and neutral syllable. He took out a bandanna and wiped his brow, glancing over his shoulder at the pine woods.

“We're headed for Immokalee,” Lucius told him. “Care for a ride?”

“Hop in,” said Andy, reaching across to find the door handle, patting the seat.

The man raised a hard-veined gray-brown hand to the bill of his soiled cap. Slow and careful as a lizard, trying to enter without touching anything, he eased into the car in a waft of humid heat and hard-earned odors. He could scarcely bring himself to close the door.

Asked how he liked living in Immokalee, the man chuckled,
cuk-cuk-cuk
, like a dusting chicken. “Mokalee.” He nodded, feeling for safe ground. He would not look at them. “Any man ain't been a nigger in 'Mokalee on Sat'day night, dat man ain't
lived
right!” He chuckled a little more,
cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk
. “Dass what us niggers say.”

“Oh Lord!” said Sally, when her companions laughed. She faced around toward the front.

The black man hummed a little, peering outward at the pine savanna. Over the woods, vultures circled like swirled cinders on a smoky sky. “Gone be fryin hot t'day.” The black man sighed deeply, hoping for the best. “Deep-fryin hot.”

“Ever come across a colored fella name of Henry Short?” Andy House asked him.

“Henry Sho't, you said?” He looked alarmed. “Nosuh I sho' ain't, nosuh. I sho' doan know no nigger by dat name.”

At a main corner in the outskirts of the town, the man tapped a gray fingernail on the window, saying, “Thank'ee kin'ly, kin'ly,” soft as a lullaby—
kin'ly, kin'ly
—until the car stopped at last and he got out. He was recognized at once, and cheered, by a pair of morning celebrants leaned on a wall, who brandished small flat bottles in brown paper bags. He turned to wave. “I've in good hands now as you can see!” he cried, no longer hiding a sly smile. “I thank'ee kin'ly, white folks!” he called cheerily.

“Kin'ly, kin'ly!” Lucius repeated, not unkindly, as he drove on down the street, crossing the railroad tracks. But Sally Brown, watching the men grin, just shook her head. “Perhaps that performance still amuses your generation,” she snapped tartly, “but it isn't funny, Professor, you know that?” She frowned, seeking a way to say this clearly. “I mean, if they go
calling
themselves niggers,
acting
like trashy niggers, then that's the way they're going to be seen!” This was well-intentioned, Lucius decided, but in her distress over the man's manner—his protective coloration—she had missed not only his mischievous irony but his profound rebuke, and the great poignance in it, and a dogged love of life, and beyond everything, that brave cheerfulness and in-the-bone endurance which Lucius found so moving in such people.

Eventually they tracked down a black family named Cooper which worshiped at Henry's former church. The Coopers lived in a small house at the north end of town. After consultation with their neighbors, measuring the white folks from their stoops and dooryards, they all agreed that Deacon Short didn't live here anymore, having taken work in the cane fields around Moore Haven. Yes, United Sugar. No, he had no phone and they knew no address. Their reserve seemed a sign that others had come looking for him, for these people were certainly protecting him. After another consultation, Mr. Cooper mentioned worriedly that the Deacon might be in the hospital over there. With the meeting with Dyer and the Park attorneys scheduled for next day, Moore Haven was too far out of their way. They decided to visit Henry Short on the way back.

They headed east on the main street, past dealerships of bright green farm machinery and auto junkyards and car body shops and whistle-stop brown saloons. Still brooding, Sally pared her nails. In this damn redneck town, back in the twenties, she had heard, a local man entered the hardware store
and took a revolver from the showcase, saying, “This one kill niggers?” Then he stepped to the door and shot a field hand at the end of the pay line. “Shoots pretty good,” he told the storekeeper, “I'll take it.” Though the black man died, the man was never arrested, far less taken to court.

Sally stared outraged from one man to the other, awaiting their horrified reaction. When they could find nothing to say but only shook their heads, she cried out, “Can you believe that?
Shoots pretty good! I'll take it!
”

“Found the model he was looking for, I reckon,” Andy said.

Speechless, Sally scrabbled for a hankie in the old straw bag that served her as a purse. Dabbing tears, she stared stonily ahead. In a bad silence, in the growing heat, the old car crossed grassy railroad tracks past stranded freight cars, then turned due south, and all the while Lucius frowned mightily in order not to smile at the sight of Andy's innocent wide eyes in the rearview mirror.

The blind man had cauterized the wound of Sally's outrage with a darker fire even more outrageous, and his boldness, under the circumstances, was breathtaking. However, he had gone too far, and both men knew it. “That weren't funny, ma'am. I know that. And I sure am sorry.” The blind man frowned at the big hands in his lap, sincerely penitent. “It was just … you were so … 
serious
, Miss Sally. Beg pardon? No, ma'am, I ain't makin excuses. I was wrong.”

Southeast of Immokalee, where the county road made a big bend, Andy tried again to make amends. “I lived down this road in the late twenties when the KKK was cranking up, Miss Sally, and that story you told don't surprise me one little bit. That was along about the time of the Rosewood Massacre, remember that one, Colonel? When they burnt out that nigra community down west of Gainesville?” He took a great deep breath. “Folks don't care to remember no more how it was for black people in this part of the country. Still pretty bad today when you scratch down a little.”

Lucius observed that Jim Crow days might have been worse around this south part of the peninsula than almost anywhere, because so many Florida pioneers had been fugitives from the Civil War or Reconstruction, bitter and unregenerate men who identified the freedmen with their loss of home. That was why so few blacks had drifted into southwest Florida, and why so few besides the migrant field hands at Immokalee had settled in this region even today.

Andy nodded. “Course in recent years, the law there in Immokalee has been a nigra. Call him Big Boy. Ain't too many, black or white, that cares to go up against this Mr. Big Boy.”

“But black especially.”

“But black especially. That sure is right, ma'am.”

“Because blacks know that in the end your Mr. Big Boy will do what white folks tell Big Boy to do.”

“Reckon that's right, too. But you got to start somewheres, I reckon.”

Sally seethed and brooded, then spoke all in a burst. “I hear you've talked to Mister Colonel about Henry Short. I bet you told him Henry Short was a mulatta, and here was a man who was no more mulatta than the Hardens! Robert Harden had some Portuguese blood, and Portuguese people have that tight curly black hair—the so-called kink you people tried to pin on him!”

“You people?” The blind man raised his thick colorless brows, tugged his red ear. Anxious to be fair but unwilling to retreat, he finally said, “So far as I know, Miss Sally, I never set eyes on a Portagee even in the days I could still see one, so I don't know much about Portagee hair. But it could be that Henry told the Hardens what they wanted to hear from a brown feller who was aimin to marry up with their pretty daughter.”