Lost Man's River (87 page)

It was getting late. Harden lowered the binoculars. “Okay?” he said. “We better have a look.” Gunning the engine in reverse, he backed the
Cracker Belle
into the current, then drummed upstream while letting the current carry her across the river. Wide of the dock, he cut back on the throttle, taking the binoculars from Sally.

“Nobody home,” she said.

“Got to be sure.”

As the boat lost headway, drifting back downstream, he studied the frame house. In its fresh paint, the old building on the mound looked stripped and naked on its cement pillions, which lifted the main floor two feet above ground to permit high storm water to rush beneath. Loose roof shingles lay scattered on bare earth from which most of the vegetation had been scoured by the high salt tides of last year's hurricane.

“In the late thirties some Miami sports come over here, used this place hard, remember, Mister Colonel? Huntin and fishin, plenty of booze, and loud blond women. Them men had no respect at all, and the place was pretty much let go. Nobody fixed no broken screens nor windows, let alone rain gutters. All the same, I seen this house after last year's storm and Parks could of touched her up without no trouble. Storm damage is only their excuse for doin somethin they been itchin to do for years.”

Whidden eased his boat upstream again, letting the current sweep her in against the leaning skeleton of the old dock and leaving her engine running even after Lucius took a turn around a post. Lucius made no hitch or knot, making sure the line could be slipped quickly.

Near the official notice, nailed to a stake jammed into the bank, was an unofficial sign painted in rude black letters on a driftwood board:

“That sign weren't put up by no damn Park Service and it ain't meant for tourists,” Whidden said, “cause nobody never seen no tourist back in here.” He cut the engine. In the wash of silence came that hard licking at the bank as the brown current searched along under the branches, in the whisper of leaning trees in the river wind, and the boat's exhaust stink was replaced by the musk of humus and that scent of hot wild lime in the dry foliage which stirred Lucius Watson's heart and brought him home.

Lucius went forward to rig a bow line, and Whidden jumped ashore, running a stern line to a mangrove. In the noon silence, the only answer to their shouts and calls was the dry, insistent song of a small bird from the wood edge. A heavy odor came and went on the shifting wind. “That ain't the housepainter, if that is what you're thinkin. That is gators. Might of shot one or two of 'em myself.” Whidden whispered this in Lucius's ear, keeping a wary eye on Sally, who had guided Andy onto the bank, and led him toward the house. “Gator hides!” he yelled when they stopped short and turned and looked back, uneasy.

Whidden had been with the Daniels gang when it first came to the Watson Place, which Speck liked to refer to as “my huntin camp.” Because a tight roof and dry ground-floor rooms with solid floors were needed for heavy storage, they had boarded up and nailed the windows and installed big chains and padlocks on the doors. On the south side of the house, facing the poincianas and the river, was a screened porch from which the screens were missing. Whidden went up onto the porch and checked the padlocked door. He knocked and hollered, “Anybody home?” He spat away the bad taste of the stench. “I never thought they'd cure them hides as poor as that!”

When Speck was around, the hides had been cured properly, said Whidden, but his men had let things go after he left. They knew little about the Watson Place and had no curiosity about its history, and they had used it in the same hard way as the Miami men, ripping off porch steps and posts and the old storm shutters for their cooking fires. Meanwhile, they ranged out into the Glades country, killing every last gator they came across, big and small. “Course gator poachin was only part of it. Speck's distillery ain't a hundred yards back in the bushes. Ran his barrels of shine by airboat far as Gator Hook, and from there by truck east to Miami. He found customers as
fast as he could brew it, never stored a pint. Never got caught neither. Same thing for the gator hides while there was a market.”

Circling the house, checking the ground-floor windows in search of some way to get in, they paused to see if the cistern still held water. Whidden hoisted the corner of its green tarpaper roof, which was splatted white with bird droppings and scattered with dry leaves and twigs, red-seeded coon scat, bright coral bean in long hard pods, owl pellets, spiderwebs, a bobcat feces woolly green with mold.

“This cistern is twenty-four foot by sixteen—pretty fair size for the Islands,” Lucius said proudly. “We dug her down into the ground, the way she should be—that's why there's water in there now.”

“That ol' water must be pretty rank. Ain't nobody has fixed them gutterins in years.” Harden pointed at the rotted rain gutters, split and half fallen. “They tell me the brackish-water mosquitoes which breeds in this here cistern are the worst in all the Ten Thousand Islands.

“At Lost Man's, after Parks took over, a real big gator got into our cistern. Found him there when we went back to visit, couldn't get him out. Still there, I reckon. And there was a drowned deer in the one at Possum Key, still had his hide on. Parks claims they want things back the way they was, and burnin our old homes was kind of fun, but I notice they never get around to digging out old cisterns or coverin 'em or fillin 'em—might be hard work!” He shook his head. “Don't
have
to fill 'em! Just knock a hole into one side so's a wild thing can go get his water, climb back out again.”

When Lucius looked up, Harden was watching him. “The man who built this cistern was Fred Dyer,” Lucius said vaguely, struggling to recover the feel of the lost conversation. For some reason, he had been daydreaming about Lucy, wondering if they would find each other before it was too late. “His daughter married a Summerlin, but she's a widow. I believe she is still living at Fort Myers.”

Whidden Harden laughed. “I believe that, too! On account of you already told me about her yesterday. You met her at the cemetery, remember?”

They had a piss before returning to the others, and facing the woods, Lucius located the bird which made that small, insistent song. “White-eyed vireo!” he blurted, wondering if Papa had ever heard its ancestor, or rather, listened to it.

“
White
-eyed? You sure?” Whidden was shading his brow like an explorer, staring purposely in the wrong direction. “Sure looked like a wall-eyed to me!” Affectionate, he patted Lucius's shoulder.

On the porch, Andy was talking to Sally, instinctively keeping his voice low as if there were somebody asleep inside. “When we come here in 1924,
this good old place was already stunk up by every kind of varmint, not just humans. Coons and possums, sometimes a bear, all kinds of snakes and lizards—I seen a rattler by the cistern one time, big around as my arm. Upstairs, all kinds of bats and rat snakes and swallers flying in and out all them empty winders, and ceilin wasps, and some of them big narrow black hornets, flickerin their wings under the rafters—you never knew what kind of varmint might be layin for you up that stair, that Cox included!”

Whidden went up on the porch again and put his ear to the door. “Thought I heard creakin.” Again they called, and again they got no answer. “I don't reckon this new paint will keep them people from burning this place down,” Whidden said. “The Island homes was mostly lean-tos and old shacks, whacked together any whichy-way, ain't that right, Colonel?—palmetto fan thatch, driftwood scrap, patched out with tarpaper and tin. Weren't much lost when Parks destroyed 'em except lifetimes of hard work, which don't count for nothin these days, it don't seem like.” In his quiet way, Harden was very angry.

“Setting
this
old house afire, that is something else,” Andy House said. “Dade County pine, cures hard as iron, so her frame and flooring is as sound as ever. Likely Parks don't even know that, and don't care. Why them people are so hot to burn this good old house is hard to figure. Got the rest of 'em destroyed already, I suppose. Want to look like they're doing somethin to earn them government salaries, is what it is.”

Lucius told Andy about Fred Dyer, who had built the porch and cistern. Andy nodded. “I sure heard about them Dyers from an early age. Back in 1905, my uncle Dan ran the mail boat, Punta Rassa to Cape Sable, and he had young Gene Gandees as his crew. Them boys was maybe fifteen at that time. So one day they turned up here when Mr. Watson was away, and the Dyer family come flyin out with their little girl and baby boy, leavin toys and clothes all scattered out behind. Never went back for that stuff neither, just jumped aboard the boat and yelled, ‘Let's go!'

“On the way downriver, Uncle Dan asked 'em why they was in such a hurry. They admitted that they never seen no bad deeds while they was here, no sign that Watson killed his help on payday, the way people said. But they knew somethin very bad had happened to the young couple that was here before 'em, and they was worried about their little children. Around that time, rumor come about Watson murderin the Audubon warden at Flamingo—well, that done it. The woman seemed calm enough, Uncle Dan said, but her husband was sick afraid.

“Mrs. Dyer let on how it was her who wished to leave, and how she was always scared in this wild country, what with all the snakes and panthers and wild Injuns. But Uncle Dan believed she only said that to cover up her
husband's fear of Mr. Watson. On the way north, she mentioned that in her estimation, Mr. Watson was a good and generous man, a gentleman, and a good Christian. Every Sunday morning without fail, they would all sing hymns in the front room and Mr. Watson would read aloud out of the Bible.

“Twenty years later, Dan House saw the husband in Fort Myers, and he said to him ‘Well, Mr. Dyer, you might not be walking around this town if it weren't for me.' I reckon Fred Dyer thought so, too, cause seein Uncle Dan, he whooped for joy and hugged him like a long-lost friend.”

Sally Brown said shortly, “Maybe Dan House and Gene Gandees made so much of that story because both of 'em were in the Watson mob a few years later, and they wanted to justify the execution of a neighbor who helped folks out when times were hard and never did a bit of harm to either one of them.”

“Well, Miss Sally, that is possible,” Andy House said.

When Lucius Watson first returned to the Ten Thousand Islands, people made sure that he heard the rumors about Henry Short and the death of Lucius's father. Though he thought these stories dangerous and absurd, he eventually decided to seek out Henry and hear what he had to say.

Henry had not been easy to track down. He no longer visited the Hardens, who claimed they did not know where he might be found. This was more or less true, but it was also true that, much as they liked Lucius, they could not be sure of his true intentions. Only later did they tell him that Henry Short, still feeling unsafe, had dismantled the Frenchman's shack again and moved it by skiff piece by piece from Gopher Key all the way south to Cape Sable, where he lugged the boards three miles or more inland to a desolate area of scrub and brackish water (“That whole cabin traveled on that one man's shoulder,” Lee Harden marveled) only to have it blow away in the Hurricane of '26. Meanwhile he worked from time to time for the House family here on the Watson Place, and learning of this, Lucius came to see him. Not wanting to scare Henry into hiding, he slipped up Chatham River with the tide and was at the dock at daybreak. Trying to calm the House's mean dogs, he walked unarmed toward the house, careful to keep his empty hands out to the side.

Bill House was already on the porch. In his nightshirt, he stood like a ghost in the porch shadows. Warning Henry, he sang out, “Ain't that a Watson?”

“Morning, Bill.”

“Lookin for me?”

“Looking for Henry.”

“What you want with him?”

Henry Short appeared at the corner of the boat shed, holding his rifle down along his leg. When Lucius said good morning, Henry Short lifted his hat a little but did not come forward. He was a strong, good-looking man with blue-gray eyes, composed and very clear in his appearance. Like most men in the Islands, he went barefoot, but unlike most, he kept himself clean-shaven, and his blue denims were well-patched and clean.

Lucius drew closer, out of earshot from the porch. He had planned to open this difficult conversation with a few civilities, but at the last second he came right out with it. “There's been some rumors, Henry.”

Oddly, Henry chose this moment to lean his rifle against a sawhorse by the boat shed wall. His face was set, without expression, like a prisoner resigned to a harsh sentence.