Lost Man's River (93 page)

Who ended up with all that money no one knows. There's some will tell you Sheriff Tippins kept it so safe that he could never find it, and others spread stories how Ted Smallwood offered to hold it for Hugh Alderman. Smallwood kept all of his own money rolled up in deep pockets sewed inside
his coveralls, never got separated from his greenbacks for two minutes, and maybe that measly ol' five thousand dollars got lost way down inside. Anyways, when the banks come looking, them fellers scratched their heads, tried to think back about it, but none of 'em could rightly recall where that durn money could of got to.

Most folks believed that the ones who shot Frank Rice and near to drowned him were the same ones who killed his brother Leland, and they never did forgive them two young fellers. Some said them boys picked up their bad attitudes from seeing Ed Watson shot to pieces, because both of 'em was among them ones who run down there and shot into the body. Anyways, folks were ashamed of them young bushwhackers. This is a coast where moonshining and smuggling go back a hundred years and more, but there never had been no local crime to speak of. Cash could lay for a week on the kitchen table, wouldn't nobody touch it.

Leland lay on that doorstep all night long with five thousand dollars in his pocket and nobody touched him. Might of took his life for a two-hundred-buck reward, but nobody stole that feller's hard-earned money. He had a big diamond on his finger when they buried him, and nobody touched that diamond neither, though there was talk about a feller who might of gone back with his shovel later on.

All Whidden and Lucius had brought back to enhance a supper of dark bread and baked beans was one thin sea trout, a small jack, and a pail of oysters. “Beans and mullet, grits and mullet—
that
sticks to your belly,” Whidden commented. “Trout and jack don't scarcely do the job.” They squatted at the water's edge scaling and cleaning fish and shucking oysters while Sally scavenged driftwood for the fire.

“I was tellin Sally,” Andy said, “that the ones who lasted in the Islands was hard men—they had to be. Lee Harden and his brothers was as tough as knotholes and Lee had that temper. All the same, he was kinder and broader in his mind than most. My daddy knew him from way back, in the Frenchman's time. His Sadie was a strong woman, too, and she was kind—she was just wonderful! Fine people! Hung on here at Lost Man's till the end. Hardens lived here more than seventy years, the first real settlers to come here and the last to go—the greatest pioneer clan in the Islands!”

“Hear that, Mr. Whidden?” Sally cried, delighted, throwing down her driftwood. “That sure is right!”

Her husband nodded. “My pa always said that the one thing he was glad of, his daddy wasn't here to see us leave. Granddad Robert died in the nick of time, at 106 years old, and Parks run us out of here the followin year. For a
little while, we come back in the summers, set some nets from May until September. Pa was the only Harden who had title to his property, a lifetime right, but we weren't allowed to build nothin nor plant a garden. Pa got him a little houseboat we could camp on, cause we couldn't set up so much as a lean- to on the shore. Couldn't hunt nor trap nor gather nothin—all we done was fish. The more Pa visited, the more he'd grieve, and pretty soon, he give it up for good. Lost Man's was what he worked for his whole life, and the loss of it took the heart out of him, though he lived along in Naples for a few more years. I will say for the first park ranger, he knew how hard it was for the old-timers. He'd turn his head if Sadie Harden took sea turtle eggs or netted terrapins. Before that, he worked as an Audubon warden and had made good friends among the Island people.”

Sally laughed. “If I had worked as Audubon warden back in those days, I'd have made good friends among the Island people, too! Made all the friends that I could find, and then some!”

“This ranger, name of Barney Parker, never noticed if we shot for the pot. Might been too busy chasin gator poachers. One time he come up alongside a young Brown that had him a mess of gator flats under a canvas, and gator blood all through his bilge water. That ranger just set there looking at that bloody water, never says one word, till that young Brown was set to jump out of his skin. Finally Barney looks up and says, ‘Well, son, it sure looks like the time has come for you to try another line of work.' That was partly a warning and partly good advice, because the way them reptiles was disappearin from slough after slough, there weren't no more future in the gator business.

“Exterminatin the last gators was what stopped the slaughter, cause the rangers couldn't. The gator hunters knew every meander of these creeks and rivers, knew every backwater of the Glades country south to Cape Sable and Florida Bay, and the good ones always slipped away without no trouble.

“It used to be that every point and river mouth and key, and any piece of higher ground along this coast, had a family living off the water and farmin their little bit of soil to get their greens. Hard to believe that, ain't it? Parks tore out everything—houses, fruit trees, little docks, every sign of man. Course there's plenty of sign if a man knows where to look, all the way back to the Calusas, but folks today will never know what we knew about these islands, never know how beautiful they were. Used to be wild limes everywhere, smelled like pure paradise, and every little bay was full of mullet.

“Parks couldn't believe how many old trails and clearins that last hurricane uncovered, how much rusty metal and crockery and glass. The pains taken by them old-time settlers to haul their poor old stuff all them miles down here, mostly by rowboat! The lives that was used up clearin jungle, hackin furrows in the rock-hard ground on these old shell mounds! Well, all
that labor never meant a damn to them officials. Come ashore and ate up their nice lunch, set down and rustled a few papers, then destroyed what it took years and years for us poor folks to scrape together, rough shacks and home-built beds and tables and chairs and cisterns and fish houses and docks! Even our gardens! ‘This here is an American damn park, so you folks just rip out them guavas and papaws, them ol' gator pears, cause them foreign damn things ain't got no business here!' ”

Harden smiled but in his quiet way, he was bone angry. “Maybe all our families had was quitclaims, but we paid for 'em in blood! Ask the miskiters! We was the pioneers here, the first settlers, but we had to watch this deputy with a gun on his fat butt come waddlin up the beach with some damn vacate papers. Tossed some gasoline and burned our cabin to the ground, then went down the shore and done the same at Mister Colonel's. They got back in their big-ass boat, but before they left, that feller hollers out across the water. ‘Real nice fire, folks! Too bad we forgot to bring the marshmallers!' Had to listen to 'em hee-haw. Left us in the rain with no roof over our heads, just settin on that beach there like wet possums!

“Our old homesteads is all grown over now, and Wood Key, too, you'd never know that human beins ever lived here. They was worried that our poor ol' shacks might spoil the scenery for their Park visitors. Never gave a good goddamn for those who was born and lived their lives here and was kicked out without one thing to show for it!”

Whidden swore with such uncustomary violence that the others fell silent, giving him some room. After a long while he said somberly, “I was tellin Mister Colonel about Leland Rice, how he come through Lost Man's with his gang after the bank robbery. I never got to the other half of that old story.”

“Whidden? I'm sure Mister Colonel knows the rest of it—”

“This was back in World War I, when he was gone.” Stolid, stubborn, Whidden said to Lucius, “When them fellers come through here, Abbie Harden fell in love with Leland, wanted to run off with him. Well, her parents said no, and next thing she knew, that young bank robber was killed on Chokoloskee. Aunt Abbie was wailin and screechin how that tragedy would not have happened if she had been allowed to go with that young man, and she threatened she might destroy herself almost any day. Course Abbie weren't a young girl no more, and she might of thought that Leland Rice was her last chance in life. And Leland bein dead and buried, we never got to hear his side of the story.

Abbie Harden was tall and slim, she never got heavy like her sisters, and she had them nice manners that she learned in Key West convent school. You might recall her helpin out at some of your daddy's parties, makin sure
that everything looked nice. A lot of local boys was after her but she weren't interested, she had her own romantical ideas.

“Abbie took after her brother Earl, she was ashamed of the dark ones in the family. Probably it was Earl taught her to think that way. Whenever she went up to Chokoloskee, folks would find ways to humiliate her because her sister had married Henry Short, and she was furious because her own family saw nothing wrong in that. ‘It's not bad enough,' she screeched, ‘that we're called mulattas up and down the coast, without Libby marrying up with some darned nigger?' Well, Grandmother Maisie grabbed her daughter by the scruff of her white neck and washed her mouth out with lye soap. Yelled, ‘Girl, are you fool enough to listen to them mean-mouth hypocrites up on the Bay? Didn't Henry tell us he was part Indian, the same as us? He is a good Christian man and would not lie about it!' And she told Abbie she should count her blessins, having such a fine man in the family, told her she didn't care to hear no more about it.

“You recall my grandma, Mister Colonel? From her Seminole side, Grandma Maisie was darker than anybody in her family except Uncle Webster, but because her daddy was John Weeks, the first pioneer to settle Chokoloskee, she was a white woman and that was that. She never paid her own color no attention, so nobody else did neither, only Earl and Abbie. Abbie Harden vowed she would never forgive her family, she was out to spite them. And what she done, she run off with the Storters' man Dab Rowland, from Grand Cayman Island. This young Carribean man at Everglade was the only other black person around the Bay, and he weren't wheat color like Henry, he was black—”

“
Other
black person?” Sally looked cross. “You're saying Henry Short was black?”

“In them days Dab was fishing with Claude Storter, and he played the banjo for our Harden parties. Well, one night Abbie drank too much, which she weren't used to, and she grabbed that banjo picker and run off with him and got married by the Cape Sable constable, same way Aunt Libby done. Maybe she told Dab she would holler rape and see him lynched if he didn't go along, because Abbie was as headstrong as the rest of 'em. If Abbie had married out of love instead of spite, things might been different, but Dab was so black that it seems like she picked him out for his wrong color. Poor feller must of woke up in the mornin and knew he was fixin to get lynched no matter what. Some folks wondered why that nigra would let that wild young woman risk his life, but one way or another, I don't reckon he had no say about it.

“Aunt Abbie announced that marryin Dab Rowland was all she could think of to get even with her family for ruinin her life by lettin Libby marry
Henry. Because, said she, Henry Short was a nigger just as much as Dab, a nigger was a nigger, there weren't one speck of difference between niggers.”

Andy said sorrowfully, “That's the way folks seen it—there
weren't
no difference between Henry and Dab.”

“Whatever he was, Granddad Robert disowned her, not so much for marryin a black man as for marryin him out of spite to wreck her family. Granddad Robert knew who he liked and who he didn't, and family had damned little to do with it. He never liked his oldest boy and never pretended that he did, which is probably why Uncle Earl always lived near that old man hopin to change his daddy's poor opinion of him.

“Dab and Abbie went to Key West for a trip, then back to Everglade, where Dab had some protection from the Storters. But Earl believed that Abbie was flauntin her black husband on the Bay to pay back her family for disowning her, and some of our Weeks and Daniels cousins came over from Marco with a plan to string Dab from the big mahogany out front of the trading post, same ol' tree that is standin there today.

“My pa was about the only one took up for Abbie. When his brother Earl was fixin to join up with the lynchin party, he stepped in. He told him, ‘That man's wife is our little sister, so Hardens will stand by 'em.' And Earl paid some attention, too, because Pa was very strong, with that fiery temper. If Lee Harden give you his word, you could lay your life on it, men always said, so I guess Earl figured if he took a part, he could lay his life on his brother's promise he would kill him. Earl Harden never forgive his brother for makin him back down about Dab Rowland.

“Course the Bay families liked Earl better'n Lee because he was more like them. Earl was friends with the same folks who became Hardens' worst enemies and whenever my pa run into trouble, it always seemed like Old Man Earl was hid behind it.