Lost Man's River (68 page)

“I remember your daddy, too! Other night there at the church hall, I was thinking how my dad Cap'n Bembery always saw the good side of Ed Watson. Harry McGill who married my sister Eva, he might of been in the crowd that day at Smallwood's, but there weren't no Storters mixed up in it, not one. It was only when my uncle George got old, after so many years of telling newcomers about Ed Watson, that he concluded he had took part, too. Lucky thing we had written proof that Uncle George was on jury duty at Fort Myers or he might have wound up on some darn old list!”

Lucius laughed unhappily—“Oh Lord!”—and Hoad reached and patted his friend's arm, to take any sting out of his teasing. “Yep, Storters stayed friends with everybody—those who took part and those who didn't—and we're friends today.” And he offered a fine friendly smile to prove it.

On this afternoon beside the river, Hoad was happy to be reminded of the very little that he had forgotten. Together, they regathered the details of how they had netted pompano off the Gulf beaches, mostly at night in the cool
season, following the fish schools from Captiva Island all the way south to the middle Keys. When they wanted sea trout, they fished the grass banks and the current points. For snook, they worked the channel edges, and the deep holes around a river mouth for the big grouper.

“I was telling Andy what a fine life it was, to have your own boat at your own dock, and go to work when you felt like it and not before!” Hoad cried. “Sometimes them mullet jumping was as thick as raindrops, Andy, so many that it sent the price down! We left off netting, hooked up mullet strips, hand-lined redfish and big trout, two-three hundred pounds a day! This man here could tell you! But mullet strip don't work no more, got to use shrimp, and you're very lucky if you catch enough to pay your bait!” He laughed. “I quit when the fishing got so poor that I had to eat my own bait for my supper, to get some use out of them shrimps 'fore they went bad!

“Yessir! Mullet schools two and three miles across! Won't never forget that! I tell my grandchildren all about it—got me some pretty nice grandchildren, Lucius! I'm a lucky man! You got you any, Lucius? No? I think grandchildren are pretty nice! I tell 'em all about the mullet, and how the noise of millions on the surface, it would deafen you! And know what them children told me? Said when they grow up, they aim to take good care of the wild things, and bring 'em back to the way they was, so they could see what their granddad was talking about!” Hoad sat back sighing, shaking his head. “Well, them poor little fellers ain't never going to see nothing like we seen. It's a pity, ain't it? And all because that good Glades water is pouring away through them canals. How long can we go on wasting God's good water, instead of taking care of it for our grandchildren?

“The Glades is getting bled to death by all that draining! At low tide at the end of rainy season in October, especially in a northeast wind, a man could lean out of his boat and drink the water in any inside bay along this coast, remember? Freshwater pressure flooding them rivers held the salt tide out where it belongs. Today you might have a quarter of that volume, and the brackish waterline where you find fish has moved back up into the creeks, way back up inside where a net fisherman can't work!”

Lucius told Andy about setting net off the oyster bars at Lost Man's, sliding up to the bars at night and punching down into the bilges with an oar blade and listening for the mysterious grunt of startled fish. The volume of the grunt would tell them whether there were enough fish around the bars to bother striking—fish enough to make the set worthwhile. Sometimes mullet would skip out nearer the shore, and he and Hoad would set around them with a gill net and smack the oars flat on the surface to drive the schools into the mesh.

But Andy had never been a fisherman and he dozed off again, and
though Hoad smiled at Lucius's evocation, nodding his small head, his reveries had strayed. Talking about his grandchildren had saddened him about the future of the Glades, which in their youth had been immense and inaccessible, mysterious. “Ducks by the thousands! Clouds of 'em! Now they're all gone, too! Even the wasps are gone, you noticed? Them big hives along the mangrove channels? Darn it, boys, our good old earth is just fading away! Seems like we don't know what we're doing to this country, and we don't care neither, long as there's money in it. Seems to me that this country used to have more honor than you see today! I mean, what do
you
think, Lucius?”

But Hoad's nature was too cheerful and inquisitive to stay depressed for long. Fed up with “old men who nagged after the past,” he talked about the Storter trading post, which was passing itself off these days as a hotel. The original house had been built by William Allen—twice, he said, because Allen had rebuilt on stilts after the Hurricane of 1873. He got engaged to the daughter of the French consul in Key West, but for some reason—and Hoad's eyebrows rose in mock astonishment—she was so set against her banishment to this mangrove paradise that she threatened to destroy herself if she were brought here, and being a young woman of her word, that is what she did. William Allen sold his holding to the Storter family and went off to Pine Level, where he married a Mrs. Ellen Graham, a widow with two sons.

“I was telling Andy some of that old history here a while ago, and he got real excited, wondering if those sons could be the Grahams who turned out to be half brothers to Henry Short. I knew Henry well, fished with him often—good fisherman, too!—and he never breathed a word about those brothers!

“Plenty of Injuns around here at that time, but this place never had no nigras to speak of. In the early days, William Allen moved a mulatta cropper off his property for taking up with a white woman, and not long after that, the body of their little boy came floating down this river, right out here. Folks said that woman killed her boy, out of her shame, you know, but more'n likely it was her brothers who done it. No place for that poor little feller in their family line, I guess.

“A young black boy from the Cayman Islands, Erskine Rowland—we called him Dab—he turned up as a stowaway out of Key West. Lived in the jelly house, where we stored cane syrup and our jams and jellies, but some way he never felt that he belonged. At that time, Henry Short was the only other nigra on the Bay, but Henry was over on Chokoloskee and anyway, he moved south to the Islands after 1910. Dab got lonesome, he wanted to leave, he tried to stow away on my dad's boat even after my Aunt Nannie
took him into her own house. Course Dab didn't eat with the family nor attend our school, but Aunt Nannie taught him to read and write, and Uncle George give him a banjo, he'd sit up practicing so late at night they had to holler at him. Dab Rowland became an expert banjo picker and an expert syrup maker and a fine all-around hand, he used to set net down in the Islands with me and my brothers, sometimes Henry Short. Yessir, them two boys was real fine fishermen, they done their work as good as anybody and a lot better'n most. It always did seem funny when you come to think about it—one of 'em lighter than most of the white men around here and the other one black as black can be, but both called niggers cause the way folks looked at things, there weren't no difference!

“Dab and Henry fished with me and my brother Claude right around the mouth of Chatham River, this was 1910, and Henry would carry his rifle in the boat, never went without it. He had worked for Mr. Watson, said Watson always treated him real fine, but he purely dreaded him. Thought the world of him and scared to death of him, Claude always said. Mr. Watson might been the one man in south Florida on which black people and whites seen eye to eye.

“Later on, Dab got in trouble, had to move away. That was before you came back to the Islands. As for Henry, I don't know what become of him—probably dead someplace. Seems like nigras couldn't never get adjusted to our ways.”

The blind man grunted. “Amazin, ain't it? How them darned nigras couldn't never get adjusted to our ways?” Hoad stared at him, cheeks coloring, but Andy's eyes remained closed, and in a moment he softly snored once again. He seemed to have spoken from deep in his dream, making Hoad uneasy.

Hoad spread old fingers on his knees and got carefully to his feet. “Feel like stretching your legs? Have a look at the old town or what is left of it?” He asked the waitress to notify Mr. House as soon as he awakened that they would be back in a short while. “I ain't likely to skip town,” the blind man murmured.

Walking along under the old-fashioned streetlamps toward the former Collier County Courthouse on the circle, Hoad and Lucius were passed by the road-gang truck from Deep Lake prison camp. One of the whites now sat up front with the plier-faced guard, while on the truck bed, the other white boy stood apart from the two blacks. Any of them could have jumped and run, but the only way out of Everglade was that narrow road which ran eight miles north through water, mud, and mangrove before striking the higher ground along the Trail, and presumably the convicts knew that Plier Face was not a man to pass up a chance for a shot at a human target.

Tattooed arm stuck out the window, the favored con in the front seat was wearing the guard's black cowboy hat. He raised his hand above the roof and erected his middle finger toward Hoad and Lucius, as if contemptuous of everything his elders stood for, and Lucius was glad that Storter hadn't noticed.

At Half Way Creek somewhere around the early nineties, Cap'n Bembery Storter met Mr. E. J. Watson and became his friend. This was before Mr. Watson's family come here from north Florida. Every Tuesday Mr. Watson came in his boat to Everglade, picked up his mail and his supplies from Uncle George Storter at the trading post, and consigned his packet to Cap'n Bembery on the
Bertie Lee
. He made it over to our house long about noon and ate at our table almost every week.

Mr. E. J. Watson was not a man you were liable to forget. I could draw his picture! Being his son, you probably thought he never changed, but over the years my dad had watched him thicken—still very strong but tending more toward stout. E. J. Watson had a deep red-brown hide—“That's fire, from a life of sun and drink,” said Cap'n Bembery—but his auburn hair was grizzled in those later years, with gray mixed into a heavy mustache that tangled with long bushy sideburns and made him bristle out like a wild boar.

In those days, Mr. Watson was a friendly man, a jolly man, full of ginger, full of get up and go. Always had something funny to tell, good sense of humor, and always carrying on about the future of America—“
the greatest nation in the history of the world!
”—and also about Hawaii and the Philippines, and land claims in the Islands. He aimed to file a title claim on Chatham River, as Storters had done in Everglade and Smallwoods on Chokoloskee. It was only a matter of time, he declared, before this southwest coast was developed, and maybe he was just the man to do it. He'd laugh a little at his own ambition, but nobody had any doubt that he meant business. Uncle George always claimed he was the one who nicknamed your dad Emperor Watson, but Bill House said no, it was the old Frenchman, Jean Chevelier. Whoever it was, that name never bothered the Emperor one bit!

Mr. Watson also loved to talk about strains of sugar cane that might do better here in the sub tropics, how many gallons of syrup per acre and all that—he was getting close to 700 gallons at that time. Had a ten-horse engine with steam coils that fed into a 150-gallon kettle, twice the size of our Storter kettles, and Wiggins and House, too. Used fine Cuba cane, not our Georgia cane, and his syrup came out amber-gold in color, clear as fine honey.
Island Pride
—that syrup was famous! Got a good price for every gallon
he could make, and he made 333 gallons every day! Old Man House, he would complain how Watson bought that good equipment with bad money, not honest money made by the sweat of his brow. And my dad said, “Well, Dan, maybe that's so, but I never seen a man work harder than Ed Watson.”

Mr. Watson had been on this coast as long as most, but they still called him an outsider and standoffish. Claimed he wouldn't hardly associate with nobody except Storters and Smallwoods cause he wanted to stay on the good side of the traders, who were the most well-to-do and influential. Well, that don't seem fair neither. Your daddy liked people and most of 'em liked him. The William Browns at Half Way Creek who sold him his first schooner, they always said that E. J. Watson was a good man to do business with, and they wouldn't hear a single word against him. It was only those ones scared of him who claimed he was aloof, and that was because they steered clear of him themselves.

Your dad was always well-behaved on Chokoloskee Bay and at Fort Myers, very careful about his family and good name, but in Key West and Port Tampa, he was a hell-raiser and no mistake. Cap'n Bembery brought back many a wild story about shooting the lights out in the bars and such as that. My dad was a loyal friend to him, no matter what, but sometimes he seemed leery of him, too.

One night in Eddie's Bar—this was Key West—Mr. Watson grabbed a revolver away from some drunk young feller who was waving it around. “How in the hell do you work this thing!” he hollers, pretending he never shot a gun, and he shoots a half circle right around this feller's toes as if the gun was just shooting by itself and he had lost control of that darned trigger. But when the chamber was empty, this young feller came up with a derringer he had hid in his boot, told E. J. Watson to dance in that same manner!

“Ain't many men would try that trick with me,” Mr. Watson warned him, “let alone boys.” But this young feller only laughed and went ahead and made him do it. And that was the first we ever heard about Dutchy, who killed a deputy later that year. Dutchy was an arsonist, for hire, and the lawman caught him setting fire to a cigar factory. Went on the chain gang, got away after a year or two, and went and hid out at the Watson Place.