Lloyd Brown was one of the last full-time fishermen on the Bay, and his backyard was cluttered with crab pots, buoys, sun-bleached netting, rusted gear, dead outboard motors, a big mushroom anchor.
A gray head peered at Lucius from behind a curtain of blue plastic lace. Then the head vanished, and the kitchen door of the old cottage opened slowly. “I know who you are,” the woman said, to warn him, and he came no closer. Still yanking at her hair, she did not invite him in. The last time he recalled seeing her, back in the twenties, pretty Mary Hamilton had been one in a long line of towhead kids.
“You remember me, Mary? You were pretty young—”
“Nobody forgot you around here.” Arms folded on her breasts, she smoked and squinted. “Bet you made ’em kind of nervous over yonder,” Mary said wryly. She cocked her head, the better to enjoy his consternation. “You still messing around with that ol’ list?” She squinted at him through a shroud of smoke, then turned and went inside without a word, leaving the door open. By the time he entered, knocking lightly, she had resumed her place behind her coffee cup and ashtray on the far side of the linoleumed kitchen table. “You want coffee, it’s in the pot,” she said, in a fit of smoker’s coughing. When he brought his coffee to the table, she whispered hoarsely, “I been thinking about writing up my memoirs, too.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep.” She snubbed her cigarette, lit up another. “And all that Watson stuff is going straight into my story.” She nodded a long time, looking him over. “Course some folks were resentful of Mr. Watson right from the time he started out at Half Way Creek, cause everything he touched just turned to gold. And he’d been in trouble, and he found some more, so of course they made up stories just to pull him down. You ever hear about old bones that somebody dug up on the Bend back in the thirties? Supposed to been Bloody Watson’s victims?” Seeing Lucius’s expression, she added quickly, “Well, you can rest easy on that one, Colonel, cause those were the bones of old-time Indians that had a village on there long ago, or maybe some bones from a hog barbecue or something. What people tell about your daddy is a crying shame!
“My husband’s aunt—the husband I have now, I mean—she was a McKinney, and she went down there and visited with Edna Watson for a week. Old Man McKinney, who was very strict, would never have allowed that visit if he didn’t have a lot of faith in Mr. Watson. Mr. McKinney took no part in the shooting, said he never messed in other folks’ affairs. For the rest of his life, he would remind those men that his friend Watson never killed nobody from our island. Might of cut Santini’s throat, but as Ted Smallwood used to say, ‘He never killed that old Corsican completely.’ That business happened at Key West, where there were always foreigners and knife fights, and anyways those darn Santinis were some kind of darn Catholics to start off with.”
Her voice died to a whisper as she stopped to listen, turning her ear with the precision of a cat. Uncoiling slowly, recoiling again, Mary Brown pulled her wrap close and sat up primly at the table, raising her voice as her husband reached the kitchen door. “I was just now telling Colonel Watson how I don’t believe C. G. McKinney would have let his daughter go to Chatham Bend, not if he thought Colonel’s daddy was a killer!”
The man in the doorway had dark frown lines in a weathered face and curly hair blown back across a brow crusted by sun. “I seen a car out there,” he told his wife. Despite Lucius’s warm greeting—he had always liked Lloyd Brown—Brown made no answer but appraised his visitor, making certain who he was. “How-do, Colonel,” he said finally. “Been a very long time since we seen you on this island.”
His wife observed both men obliquely through her long strayed hair, her expression ironic and affectionate at the same time. “He says he’s only interested in old-time stuff,” she told her husband, who slopped himself a cup of coffee and sat down glowering.
“Well, your family took no part in the killing, I know that much,” Lucius said.
“My aunt seen the whole thing,” Lloyd Brown recalled. “She was visiting that day with Mrs. Watson there at Smallwood’s, and she had a pretty darn good view down through the trees. Said Watson run his boat aground, then jumped ashore with Cox’s hat in one hand and his double-barrel shotgun in the other. When the crowd didn’t believe his story, he snapped off both barrels, which misfired. Went for his .38 but never got to it, because a man who had no business there, he put a bullet right between his eyes.”
Lucius said, “Henry Short?”
“I don’t recall no names no more,” Lloyd said. He stared his wife down when she piped up, and she looked away with a miffed expression, like an ousted cat. She blew thin smoke, drowned her cigarette in the spilled coffee in her saucer, and tamped a new one, bouncing it on the table.
Lloyd Brown was still glowering at Lucius. “How come you’re askin about Henry Short? He on your list?” He looked resentful. “What you up to, Colonel? You already know all there is to know about your daddy. Know it better’n we do, very likely, cause we was youngsters when you first went around askin all them questions.”
They nodded over that awhile, until Lucius said, “I’m trying to learn who lived on the Watson Place in the years I was away—”
“Let me think back a little, Colonel,” Lloyd Brown said. “For the first years after your dad died, there weren’t no one on the Bend at all, that’s how scared of Leslie Cox the people was. Weren’t till about 1913 that Willie Brown moved on there the first time, and it might been Willie who sold it to the Chevelier Corporation. Bill House was the first caretaker, then Henry Thompson, that’s how I remember it.
“My uncles took over in the early thirties, and I lived there awhile. All the outbuildings was swept away in the ’26 Hurricane, but some of the old dock platforms was still there. Had to patch the screens, douse ’em with cylinder oil, cause the mosquitoes was terrible, worse than ever. That was Depression times, no work anyplace and the net fishin poor. Mostly we cooked shine and gator-hunted, ricked some charcoal, lived off of the land. A bear broke into the kitchen wing, come in after our venison—that bear sure made a mess, I can tell you that!
“Chatham Bend is where me and my cousins learned to hunt, and we always thought of it as home. Still do, I guess. I never heard nobody around our family run down Watsons. No matter what he might of did, E. J. Watson was E. J. Watson. Like my dad said, ‘That man was who he was! He weren’t like some!’
“About 1934, I reckon, Chatham Bend was turned over to the Audubon warden Charlie Green. Mac Johnson and his wife come on there after that but didn’t last long, because Dorothy lost her mind down there, tried to burn them bloodstains off the floor and near to burned down the whole house while she was at it. She was ravin that the ghost of Mr. Watson would come get her, on account of her daddy Henry Smith was in the posse.”
“Oh, my,” said Mary Brown. “It takes all kinds, I guess.”
“After Mac Johnson, it was mostly gator hunters, moonshiners. Some common drifters. None of ’em stayed long, and none of ’em loved ol’ Chatham the way we done, they just used it hard. Just before the Park come in, some Miami politicians got the use of it for a huntin camp. Done more drinkin and screwin than huntin and fishin, left the house a mess.” Lloyd Brown lifted his eyes from the petition. “Know who brought them sports there in the first place? Same lawyer who got up this here paper!”
“So I have heard,” said Lucius.
“That Great Hurricane might been the worst one, but last year’s storm took out all them giant mangroves down around Shark River. You hear about that, up there to Caxambas? Got to be a good blow to do that, cause some of them trees went eighty-foot tall, must of been back there since Calusa days. But it never done real damage to the Watson house, not the way Parks claims. She’s as strong as ever, from the look of her.”
“We heard you come here to the Bay with Andy House—we think a lot of Andy,” Lloyd Brown said. “Course his family wasn’t so much liked because Old Man House taught all his kids how they was some
way better’n the rest of us, and Mamie House took that attitude over to Smallwood’s. But one of my McKinney cousins married young Dan House, and I always got on good with Smallwoods, all but that one who claims his daddy started up the post office—well, we know better. C. G. McKinney was the founder, and Mr. Ted Smallwood took it over from him later.”
“Probably Ned gets those ideas from his sister Wilma,” Mary said. “Visitors come into their store to find out who they should ask about the old days, and Wilma never mentions the name Brown, although Browns and McKinneys were on this Bay a good ten years before her own family showed up.”
“Old Man McKinney’s heart failed on the dock at Everglade, 1926, and his only boy never had nothin but daughters, so that good old name is almost gone from around here. His boy Charlie was all tore up about not havin no sons, cause he was a feller had his heart set on the past. Uncle Charlie went barefoot year in and year out, would not buy shoes nor get into a car. His wife put in some indoor plumbing but he never lost faith in his outhouse. Passin in my boat, sometimes, I’d see him settin in there peerin out like a old possum.
“When the new causeway come along and let the world in—that about broke him. He never been much good for nothin since that happened. Still pines away for the grand old days of the Florida frontier, don’t care for modern times at all. Takes out most of his disappointment on the automobile, says he wouldn’t get into one of them damned things if you paid him. Ain’t never goin on no auto ride till the day they ride his carcass to the cemetery, and even then, he wants a wheelbarrer if they have any respect for his last wishes, which they won’t.”
Cap’n Lloyd relaxed a little when his guest laughed. He poured more coffee. “It was Mamie pushed so hard to get that causeway, she was always lookin to escape off of this island. Us Browns was more like Charlie McKinney, we liked this good old place the way it was. All them autos honkin around, stinkin up the air—I reckon progress was the last thing our home people needed.” He waved his arm, indicating the out-of-doors. “Hell, that ain’t Chok! It ain’t even an island, not no more!”
Lloyd took a deep breath. “What you here for, Colonel?”
His wife winked at Lucius Watson. “What Colonel wants to know is, honey, will we sign this paper. He aims to circulate it over to the store. Wants our old families to help protect the Watson Place, especially them ones like us that used to call it home.”
Captain Lloyd signed the petition without reading it, then shoved it at his wife, who did the same.
Ernestine Thompson, who lived on the last high mound on Chokoloskee, was a small, owlish lady in thick glasses who reminded Lucius of her mother, Mamie Smallwood. Indicating a chair, she returned to her place on the sofa, where she was joined by round-faced Roy, her spouse. When Lucius grinned at him, he beamed. Roy Thompson and Lucius had been friendly in the twenties, but his wife introduced them anyway, on general principles. Lucius said he was sorry to impose on them with so little notice, and she said, “Nobody’s going anyplace. Not on a Sunday.”
Ernestine Thompson offered no refreshment. Neither friendly nor unfriendly, she sat waiting for their visitor to state his business. No, they would not sign the petition without consultation with her cousin Bill Smallwood. As for family memories of Mr. Watson, her mother had always told the children that he was a fine-looking man with bright blue eyes and dark red hair. “That’s temper.” Mr. Watson was courtly in his manners, acted like a gentleman, but there were awful stories. “As Mama always said, she liked him very much but didn’t want to!”
“You couldn’t help but like him!” Roy piped up. “He was interested in everybody and he made ’em feel good. Life got a spark when Mr. Watson was around! He would of made a heck of a politician! Could of run for president!”
His wife closed her eyes for a long moment in sign that she, Ernestine S. Thompson, did not necessarily agree that E. J. Watson could or would or should have run for president. When she opened them again, she said, “Everything went along all right until that man Cox showed up at Chatham River. Leslie Cox was Edna Watson’s age, she had known him since a child, had gone to school with him, and he took advantage, that’s what she told Mama. So most of the time, Edna and her little children stayed on this island—stayed with Smallwoods, stayed with Wigginses, stayed with McKinneys.”
“Cox took advantage, you say?”
“He tried to.”
“Sexual advantage?”
“She stayed with Aldermans sometimes,” Roy Thompson said, hurrying them past his wife’s curdled expression.
“ ‘Stayed with Aldermans,’ says Roy, who wasn’t here.”
“Ain’t that who she was staying with, time of the hurricane? That’s what your mama told us.”
His wife’s demeanor made it plain that no matter how plausible her husband might appear, he had a lamentable tendency to be mistaken. “Roy? Whose mother are you speaking for?”
“Old Man Watson now, he was in Bonita Springs, night of the storm. Bonita was Surveyor’s Creek or Survey back in them days.”
“He’s not here to inquire about Survey, Roy.”
“All I’m tellin is, Mr. Watson stayed over that night with Postmaster A. M. Smith at Survey. Had to go by boat, Marco to Naples, then to Survey by horse and wagon, sand track through the woods. Next morning, the Postmaster got somebody to take him as far north as Punta Rassa, where a feller called Bill Leitner run him up the river to Fort Myers.”
“I never heard until this moment who took him upriver!” Lucius noted down the name, astonished anew by the tenacity with which old-timers clung to their precious scraps of the Watson legend. He spared Roy Thompson what he already knew, that Papa had spent that stormy night with the Naples postmaster Pop Stewart and headed north by way of Survey the next day. In any case, legend foreshortened time, as dreams did. There was no coast road in those days, only poor trails, and considering the distance overland, and the strong weather, his father’s journey might well have required stopping over one night in each place.
“Well, I guess they ain’t too many left that knows the Survey part of the Ed Watson story.” Roy looked proudly at his wife, who sat eyes closed for a little while, perhaps in prayer. “Uncle Dick Moore, he was from Survey, told me all about the Survey story! Used to visit his friend Lucius Watson at the Bend! Went down there about 1909, worked there the best part of a year, never changed the opinion that Mr. Edgar Watson was the nicest man he ever met in all his life. Later years when Uncle Dick and me was working the clam flats off Pavilion Key, we went up to the Bend to fetch some water, and we took some of his alligator pears, which was still pushin up out of the overgrowth. I don’t believe I’ve had a pear so good, that day to this one!
“My Uncle Dick was on Mormon Key in the Great Hurricane, and a feller yelled, ‘Better lift your hands and pray to God!’ and Uncle Dick yelled, ‘The hell I will! I need ’em both to hang on to this tree!’ ” Roy Thompson laughed, and Lucius laughed, too, happy to hear about his good old friend Dick Moore.
Raising thin eyebrows at her husband’s language, Ernestine said, “The man did not call on us to hear your jokes, Roy.” And she cleared her throat rather testily before resuming.
“Now when the shooting started, Edna Watson threw her hands up, crying, ‘Merciful God, they are killing Mr. Watson!’ The Smallwoods never forgot that woeful cry! Millicent was three years old and not in bed yet, so she heard the shooting, and surely the little Watson children heard it, too. Wilma was a little older, that’s why she remembered.”
“Merciful God, they are killing Mr. Watson!” Roy Thompson marveled. “Heck yes, I bet them Watson kids remembered something! Just don’t remember they remembered! And how about the little feller? Was it Addison? He must of remembered, honey, cause he seen it!”
“And that was Edna’s birthday! October the twenty-fourth of 1910! The poor creature was twenty-one years old that very day!” Ernestine laid a firm hand on her husband’s forearm to put a stop to any further contributions. “Edna Wa
tson and her three little ones were staying with Marie Alderman. Marie was a Lopez from Lopez River, Old Man Gregorio’s daughter. She married Walter Alderman in 1906.”
Now it was Roy Thompson’s turn for a warning look. “Honey, like you said yourself, we ain’t so sure it was the Aldermans they stayed with.…”
“Goodness gracious, Roy! Wasn’t it you who told us it was Aldermans? Anyway, there was so much fear on this little island that after her husband had been murdered, that local family was too scared to take her back—whichever family Mr. Thompson thinks it was, him being only a young boy down in the Islands.”
“Walter Alderman went up to Columbia County to work for Mr. Watson, and came home in a hurry when Watson got in trouble up there around nineteen and oh-eight,” Roy said, hot on the scent. “And I always heard he was right there in that crowd! Might been why he wouldn’t keep Edna and the children in his house! Might of felt ashamed, bein around her!”
“Those were the very words our Mama used: ‘They wouldn’t take her back’! They couldn’t look her in the eye, they were so ashamed!”
Roy Thompson said, “Course it could be that the widow had seen Walter in the crowd and didn’t want to stay there at his house no more. Or maybe Aldermans was scared that Leslie Cox might come there huntin her and make more trouble.”
“Anyway, our Mama took ’em in. She said to Edna, ‘Don’t set there weeping, girl, we got plenty o’ bedding and there’s beds upstairs.’ Her new kitchen had been flattened down by hurricane, her new woodstove and new set of dishes all destroyed—she was just heartbroken. Even so, she took those Watsons in. She fed and tended them until Edna was well enough recovered from her shock to leave forever.
“All that water through the house, all those drowned chickens underneath the store that raised up such a smell—poor Mama was sorely depressed by so much rot and wreckage, she thought she’d never get that reek of death out of her nostrils. Then came Mr. Watson’s death, when they’d hardly started to clean up after the storm—that uproar finished her. Mama knew the man, knew who he was, but she felt such terrible disgust about the way he died, and so much pity for that young widow and her little ones, and so much anger against those men who terrified them, including her own father and three brothers, that she vowed to run off and leave this place forever.