Ted returned in time to hear me say that, and his frown told me he didn’t care for strong opinions from his woman in men’s company. But after all, I had only spoke the truth, I told him later; to risk his life that way, that nigger had to have a reason. “Nigra,” Ted complained.
Anyways, it was too late. Watson was long gone, headed for Everglade, where he sweet-talked Bembery Storter into running him as far as Marco Island even though the hurricane was on its way. (Had to pay Bembery pretty dear, I shouldn’t wonder; those Storters never give you much for nothing.)
First time the wind gusts quaked our house came after dark on Monday evening. Santinis had built this house above the drift line of the ’73 hurricane, plenty high enough for the ’96 storm and also 1909. But it weren’t nearly high enough for the Great Hurricane of 1910, which came roaring in with wind and seas all jumbled up together. Chokoloskee Bay is three miles inland from the Gulf, but big waves broke through the outer islands to come pound our shore, and our island shrank smaller and smaller as the water swirled around us. When we finally lost sight of the mainland, it seemed like our little tuft of land had been uprooted and was drifting out to sea, and that was when we fled uphill to the schoolhouse, which was ten foot above sea level. Edna Watson and her kids were staying with the Aldermans: Wilson Alderman lugged little Addison while Edna toted Baby Amy and led Ruth Ellen by the hand.
The storm flood rose till four that morning, left a line on the wall ten inches above the schoolhouse floor. According to C. G. McKinney, who passed for somewhat educated, nine tenths of Chokoloskee Island and ten tenths of Everglade went underwater. Finally the men knocked our schoolhouse down, made rafts out of the walls; their hammers were all that could be heard over the wind.
Coming from an inland county, Edna Watson had never imagined such a fearful storm. She had promised her kids safety in the schoolhouse only to see that last shelter destroyed. The men dragged their rafts to the top of the highest mound we call Injun Hill, and all nine families were up there in that weather without cover, every last soul huddled together, teeth chattering, turning blue, and staring out blind into the storm, scared to death those rafts might break apart. The kids were crying and Edna was close to hysterics but she kept her head. Finally the Good Lord heard our prayers and the roar eased a little. The seas weren’t climbing anymore but slowly falling, leaving behind dark dripping silence, mud and ruin.
No real dawn. We trooped downhill in the half-dark to see what we had left. Goods from our store that weren’t washed into the Bay were carried back into the scrub; I lost my whole new set of china. I broke down then, just shook my head and cried, but in a little while I got the nervous giggles. My mama shrilled, “How can you giggle, girl, with everything you possess lost in the mud?” Oh, Grandma Ida was real disappointed in the Lord. And I said, “Well, Mama, I am very thankful we are all still here and still alive, so this ol’ mud don’t look so bad to me.”
Only person hurt was Charlie Boggess, who dislocated his ankle jumping off a boat onto our dock when it weren’t there no more. My Ted took him up under the arms, leaned back, and let him holler when C. G. pulled his heel straight, let the ankle bone snap back into her socket. Ted carried him on his back across the island, told him to stay put at home and not cause any more trouble. But being a feller who hated to miss out, Charlie T. was right back at our landing when E. J. Watson showed up again a few days later.
OWEN HARDEN
Sunday had thin sun and a light wind, but by ten that evening, the barometer commenced to fall too fast, with gusts to thirty, forty, fifty miles, and rising. By noon next day she’d shifted, coming out of the southeast, then around out of the south. That afternoon of Monday, October 17th, is when the sky turned black and the storm blew hardest, rolling all the way across the Gulf from the Yucatan Channel.
That’s when the walls budged. Our thatch roof shifted, even lifted once as the wind moaned, trying to pry the lid. At high tide, the seas washed over the shell ridge into the cabins. We floated the skiff right to the door and threw some stuff in. Something banged and something tore and the roof was gone and the storm exploded amongst the walls and the door frame was suddenly empty. Rain slashed straight across in sheets, whipping our faces. The sky caved in and the Gulf of Mexico crashed on our coast, so wild and heavy that the waves was lost, there was only roil and thunder. We took to the boats before they disappeared, they was jumping on their moorings like wild horses.
Wood Key was flooded over when we chopped the lines, let the storm carry the boats away inland. Where they finally snagged, we lashed ’em tight into the jungle trees. Hour after hour, our folks prayed to the Lord Almighty for deliverance; in the next tree, a family of possums, white faces staring out, seemed to pray, too. My Sarah cried, “Are we in Hell?” And Daddy Richard yelled into her ear, “No, girl! We are still here on God’s earth!” Ma Mary screeched, “Well, then, God’s earth is Hell enough for me!”
Them winds of the Great Hurricane of 1910 lasted thirty hours, seemed like the world was coming to an end. When the barometer blew away at Sand Key Light, down by Key West, it already registered 28.4, the lowest pressure ever recorded in the U.S.A. until that day.
When the storm eased some toward morning, a great emptiness came in behind it although there was still considerable wind. We were very thirsty but at least could catch a breath. All agreed that the Great Hurricane was foretold by that silver light across the heavens in the spring. Such a terrible storm, just seven days and seven nights after so much bloody murder, could only be sign of the Lord’s Wrath, but Mister Watson’s infant boy, drowned at Pavilion Key, was the only life He took on this whole coast.
ERSKINE THOMPSON
Our sloop drifted us way back into the woods. Gert set her washtub over our smallest, trying to keep him dry. By daybreak, the worst of it was past, the wind was down, but the sloop’s hull got stove in, all busted up. She never made it back to the salt water.
All the world looked heavy dead lead-gray, like all life and color had been bled away. The river was thick with mud and broken branches; gray marl crusted the banks and trees like a disease. With Lost Man’s Key awash from end to end, the river mouth looked a half mile across, with tide and current jumbled in thick roil and tree trunks passing. Some trees had varmints clinging tight, looking back where they come from as they was rode far out to sea. After that long night, the women and kids was all wrung out exhausted, and seein them wild things starin back as they passed away forever is what finally gave our kids their excuse to cry.
The shore was empty, all our cabins gone. Hamiltons lost about everything except their lives. Seeing what had befell him in that one black night, Mr. James Hamilton looked all around him like a little child woken up. Everything that old feller had put together in twenty years’ hard work was twisted down or washed away. Never cursed nor wept nor acted jagged, only stared around him hour after hour. After that day, talk didn’t interest him, he hardly spoke again, just took to murmuring his memories of lost hopes in times gone by.
Having no regular family, then marrying young Gert, I become kind of a Hamilton, and like the Hamiltons was not so proud about our Harden kin, but when Owen come over from Wood Key to see how we was farin, I was glad to see him—took that storm to make us talk like neighbors. Him and me sailed his skiff north to the Watson place to see who might be left. That white house was still there but she looked stranded, up on her bare mound, and the outbuildings was all smashed flat: boat shed and bunkhouse swept away and the cabin, too. Called and called but got no answer, only silence. Neither of us made a move to go ashore. We never spoke about it. It weren’t we were ashamed so much as havin no words to explain what we was feeling.
Some way the Gladiator had rode it out lashed tight to them big poincianas and the busted dock. With my sloop gone, I reckoned Mister Watson would not mind if I used his ship to carry our Lost Man’s folks to Chokoloskee. Owen told me Hardens would stay put, start rebuilding right away, but Thompsons and Hamiltons s
ailed north next day, taking Andrew Wiggins along with wife and baby. Having lost their boat, that family abandoned the Atwell place and had picked their way along the shore to Lost Man’s Beach from the mouth of Rodgers River. We was anchored off Smallwood’s by early evening and got our first word about the Chatham massacre an hour later. Hearing that news, and recalling that silence on the Bend the day before, give me the creeps all over again, cause me’n Owen never knew about them dead, never imagined this man Cox might of been watching through some broken pane. Maybe he never answered because he had drew a bead on us, to kill us, too. That night I had a ugly dream about Cox laying in wait, mouth set in the way a snake’s mouth sets, little fixed smile.
By the time the hurricane struck in, Cox was all alone on Chatham Bend, if you don’t count that dead squaw in the boat shed or the corpses across the river or Mister Watson’s old horse running wild, shrieking and crashing through the cane. Maybe Cox never believed in God, no more’n me and Mister Watson, but if he did, he must of figured God had come to blast him straight to Hell for his black sins. We was down there in the rivers and we seen it: the roaring of the Hurricane of 1910 would of scared the marrow out of anybody, let alone a killer that has slaughtered feller human beings and gutted out their carcasses like they was hogs. Cox would of spent that storm night on his knees wild-howling for forgiveness, never knowing there weren’t nobody to forgive him.
At Pavilion Key, Tant hoisted Aunt Josie into the mangroves, but waves broke all across the island and tore her babe out of her arms. Found him by miracle at low tide next morning, little hands sticking up out of the sand—like he was cryin for his mama to come pick him up, Tant said. Maybe folks made too much of it that Mister Watson’s offspring was the one soul lost but it makes you wonder, don’t it? Even if you don’t believe in God.
After all them years, the time had come to say good-bye to Lost Man’s River. Thompsons come out all right, far as our health, but that hurricane blowed what fight was left out of our families. Lost our boats, our homes, had to take charity from kinfolk that didn’t have nothing neither. We moved Grandpap James Hamilton to Fakahatchee but he never found his way back from that storm and died soon after.
Them Hardens swept off of Wood Key settled again near our old ground back of Lost Man’s Beach. The dark one, Webster, built a cabin a good ways up into the river like he wanted to hide from hurricanes (or maybe his own niggerness, as I told Gert). All them people ever wanted was, Let us alone. Course mulattas never had no right to that proud attitude, never mind all the good fishing ground they claimed, but say what you like about that family, them Hardens was the only ones that never left. I’m talking about real pioneers trying to make a life down in the Islands, not moonshiners nor fly-by-nights that came and went.
FRANK B. TIPPINS
When that black prisoner was delivered to Fort Myers, I telegraphed the Monroe County sheriff that he could find his witness in my jail. That same day, I traveled south as far as Marco, which was an unholy mess after the storm. Collier’s Mercantile Store, built of burnt oyster shell, had a wall crack three inches across from roof to ground and was still draining the eighteen inches of floodwater inside. The homes were worse, and having no place to roost, nearly every man in the small settlement was in there drinking hard to ease his nerves. Left their women and kids sloshing around back in the shacks, waiting in darkness for a scrap of food or maybe another beating if the husband was a drunkard, which many were on the Florida frontier.
“You boys know Sheriff Tippins,” Bill Collier said when I came in. Worn by the hurricane to a nervous edge, the unwashed men looked snarly, set to bait me. These people complain that they have no law so they have to make their own, but when the law shows up, there’s not much of a welcome. One man belched and another rasped, “Finally turns up when he ain’t needed.” Another wiped a stubbled chin with the back of his hand, got me in focus. “Them bankers and cattle kings gone to cover up for him again, ain’t that right, Sheriff? Got you in their pocket, too, from what we heard.”
Collier put down the ax blade he was filing and hoisted this small feller off the floor and set him down again, facing the other way. Teeter Weeks turned, drawing his fist for a roundhouse punch while letting himself stagger back to a safe distance. There he spat on his hands and commenced bobbing and weaving. “Cap’n Bill? You lookin for a scrap? You found the right man this time, Cap’n Bill!”
Bill Collier was storekeeper and postmaster, trader and ship’s master, shipbuilder and keeper of the inn, also the owner of the dredge that worked the clam flats at Pavilion Key. Had a copra plantation of five thousand palms and a citrus grove on the mainland at Henderson Creek with fifteen hundred orange-bearing trees. So naturally it was this lucky feller’s spade that struck into those Calusa treasures back in ’95 while getting out muck for his tomatoes. Having done much and seen more in life, he had no time for the likes of Teeter Weeks; he banged his ax head on the counter to command attention for the sheriff and resumed filing.
I asked what anyone could tell me about the whereabouts of E. J. Watson or his foreman. So far as they knew, Cox was still at Chatham Bend. As for Watson, he had come through yesterday on his way north to Fort Myers, looking for me.
“If I’da knowed what I know now, boys, I’d of never saved his life.” The men half-listened as Dick Sawyer told his story of that day he’d hailed the Gladiator at Key West and had gone aboard and found his friend Ed down sick with typhoid fever: he had run to fetch a doctor. “Not a word of thanks for saving the man’s life,” Sawyer complained, “and that is funny, cause Ed’s manners is so excellent.”
Jim Daniels grinned. “Friend Ed is a mannerly man, for sure, especially when he has you where he wants you.”
“Had a couple of your sisters, Jim, right where he wanted ’em. Netta, and then Josie—”
Jim Daniels cut him off just by sitting up straight, but Sawyer, drunk, refused to let it go. “Them Hardens now, they’s kin to you, ain’t that right, Jim?”
Bill Collier intervened smoothly. “I bet Dick ain’t forgot that time E. J. needed a boat ride back to Chatham River because Hiram Newell setting over there who was Watson’s captain at that time had Watson’s boat up on the ways. So them two went over to Sawyer’s, that right, Hiram? And Hiram hollered through the winder that Mister Watson was outside, wanted to know if Dick would take him home to Chatham River. Thinking Hiram was joking, Dick sings out, ‘Why don’t you and your damned Watson go to Hell?’ But when he seen who was standing at his door, ol’ Dick turned nice as rice. Said, ‘Howdy, Ed! You needin a ride home?’ ”
Hiram Newell cleared his throat. “Well, I ain’t ashamed to be in friendship with Ed Watson. If Cap’n Bembery or Willie Brown was here tonight, he’d say the same. Under that rough bark, Ed got him a big heart—”
“Jesus, Hiram!” Jim Daniels wheeled around. “Too bad them Tuckers ain’t here tonight to tell us about that big heart of his! Jesus Sweet Christ!”
“One time in Tampa, what I heard, he knocked some Spaniard down, hauled out his Bowie knife. Says, ‘Maybe I’ll fillet this greaser here cause I never got to ride up San Juan Hill!’ ”
The door banged open in the wind, banged closed again. The Marco men heaved back, groaning like cattle. Back to the door, Ed Watson stood observing me; probably had me spotted through the window before he came in, and he didn’t miss the shift I made to free my holster. I heard a voice whine, “Oh my God!” Not till I hoisted my boot onto a nail keg and clasped both hands on my knee where he could see ’em did he withdraw his hand from the right pocket of his coat.
Ed Watson looked exhausted, waterlogged, his ruddy face packed with dark blood, his breathing hoarse, but the man could have been dead drunk and buck naked and still had this bunch buffaloed. One feller that made a half move toward the back door froze like a dog on point when Watson turned, and his tin mug clattered to the floor. Scared faces were watching me to see what the law would do, knowing this man would resist arrest and somebody
was going to get hurt.
Keeping his hands loose at his sides, Watson spread his feet a little. “I didn’t do it, boys.”
“Ed? Ain’t none of us never said you done it, Ed.”
That was Dick Sawyer. Watson never glanced at him, never took his eyes off mine. “Looking for me, Sheriff?” When I said, “Yep,” he yanked open the door. “Let’s go,” he said.
“You men stay put.” My voice was pinched and reedy. When I crossed the room, Watson swung the door wide to the wind, followed me out. But not until the door was closed did he show his revolver, waving my hands up before he took my weapon. Even at this galling moment, prodded toward the dock, I had to appreciate his tact in not disarming me inside.
“That gun necessary?” I said. “We’ll see,” he said.
Swift black clouds across the moon, a pale light on the sand: we boarded Collier’s schooner. At her mess table, by lantern light, I had finally met Ed Watson face-to-face. He was slouched into the corner of the bulkhead where he could not be shot at through the cabin window. “You’d be safer in my jail,” I remarked sourly, my heart not calm yet.
He shook his head. “Ever hear Smallwood’s story about Lemon City? Mob goes right into the jail to lynch this feller, shoots the nigra jailer, too, while they are at it.” He emptied my revolver, dumping the cartridges onto the table. “Don’t try telling me they won’t hang Watson the first chance they get.”
“Not in Fort Myers.”