“First that comet like a warning from the heavens that painted the night with ice all that long spring! Then that huge black storm that descended in the autumn! Then the bloody slaughter of the sinners—signs of Judgment Day! A final warning from the Lord before he wiped this godforsaken coast off of this earth. Mama said, ‘Let’s leave this accursed place!’ And Daddy said, ‘Mrs. Smallwood, we have everything all bought and paid for. We’ll fix the place right up before you know it, we’ll restock and we’ll start again.’ So the poor thing never got away, she was condemned to a life sentence on this little island.
“Three murders, then that doomsday hurricane, then the Watson killing—those terrible events occurred on three straight Mondays! No wonder everyone felt that they were doomed! And after those Black Mondays came a drought. People forget about the drought, which dragged on forever. This was deep in the autumn rainy season, yet there was no rain for weeks and weeks, into December! It was spooky! Cisterns went dry and such little water as we had turned green and poisonous. Had to go up Turner River to find water!
“Well, all of these calamities were seen as signs of the Lord’s wrath. Watsons won’t recall because you left the Islands, but all folks here could talk about was Revelations and Apocalypse, bowl of wrath and rain of fire, poisoned water and the darkened sun.”
“Heck, they still talk about it around here!” Roy Thompson cried, unable to contain himself a moment longer. “But things simmered down after that death. We got religion and life was quiet for the next few years. The first Pentecostals to show up were Babe and Sallie Whidden out of Venus, Florida, who was shocked to learn that the dreadful sinners on this island had no House of God. So Charley Johnson who was in the Watson posse and never minded bein first and foremost, he stepped right up, shouted loud and clear how Charles P. Johnson was ‘the chiefest of the sinners,’ a rum runner who had done the Devil’s work! When it come to sinners, there weren’t nobody near him, Charley hollered, he was in a class all by himself! Yessir, he was burnin to repent, ol’ Charley was, he aimed to get Saved or know the reason why. So what he done, he took his rum boat, took some wages of his sin north to Fort Myers, brung back a cargo of lumber for the church! When it come to saving souls on Chokoloskee, as Tant Jenkins used to say, the Good Lord got a helping hand from the Demon Rum!”
“Are you finished, Roy? I suppose my husband was trying to explain that after 1912, Sunday was Church Day. There’s been a Church of God here on the island since that year. And other missionaries heard about our need, and the next year they held a regular revival. Forty souls—about all of Chokoloskee—were baptized in the Bay, right out in front of McKinney’s store.”
Roy laughed out loud. “First to be dunked were Mrs. McKinney and Mrs. Ida Lopez! C. G. McKinney looked kind of uneasy, he did not care to join in, he just set there fanning hard with his wild turkey wing. And I think it was Rob Storter—Rob got saved, too—who claimed he heard Old Man McKinney mutter how all them people, his own wife included, should of went elsewhere to get purified. Said a man had enough to worry about in life without having them ol’ hand-me-down sins washed up at his front door!”
“Well, Roy, you got that story from Mr. Smallwood. He always did enjoy telling that story! Not that he was baptized—not that day! Because every last one of our customers had come in from the out islands to be baptized, so Ted Smallwood kept his store open all day.”
“Ted sure hated to lose even one customer to those McKinneys! And Mamie was furious that he never closed the store to observe Church Day. He handled money seven days a week, and evenings, too.” Roy Thompson chuckled. “Fisherman passing through at midnight, if he happened to need something, all he had to do was sing out from the landing, and Ted went ‘Ho!’ and rolled right out of bed!”
“First time I ever heard Roy Thompson refer to the senior Smallwoods as ‘Ted and Mamie’!” his wife said tartly, as if daring her husband to try minding any more of her family business. Roy rushed on gleefully.
“Course most of them ones in the posse was fishermen and farmers, they wasn’t hard like them Marco men who come over and joined in. In fact, bein so close to that killin scared ’em so that they jumped right up into the strong arms of the Lord!
“The Marco men ‘came over and joined in’? Does that mean the people here knew what was coming?” But the question was lost in Roy’s eagerness to tell him more.
“Mac Johnson was just a youngster at the time, but he always claimed he was with the gang that done the burial on Rabbit Key. No prayer was spoke, there weren’t no box, only the bloody body. Lookin down on him, Mac was scared to death that Mr. Watson might come back to haunt ’em. Before the first spade of gravel sand was throwed on top of him, Mac looked down into the hole and hollered, ‘I sure hope you are goin where I ain’t!’ ”
“Roy? Do you think Mr. Watson cares to hear these tales about his own father’s remains?”
“All I mean to say, Mac looked right down into them eyes! Ted Smallwood claimed he had went there and closed ’em, but maybe the man had enough life left to open ’em for the last time! Course them wild blue eyes was rolled back hard, the way they do, they were gone kind of a bad purply gray, Mac Johnson said.”
“At Rabbit Key, the eyes were closed,” Lucius said quietly. “I saw the corpse.”
“For pity’s sake, Roy! As I was saying—Roy? As I tried to tell you before my husband interrupted, the Lord heard our prayers and folks got religion all around the Bay, and naturally they flocked to the brand-new gospel that came here all the way from California. Pentecostal and the Second Coming—that’s how desperate for salvation people were! Course we never could keep a minister nor schoolmarm very long, not in the early days. In summer this climate weighed down something terrible on those poor outsiders, as thick and heavy as the black mud in the Bay, and the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were even worse. Even folks who hardly ever left this island took to going off in summertime to worship at big prayer meetings in central Florida.”
“Camp meetins! Yessir! Done that every summer! Went by wagon, brought their hogs and vittles, held three services a day for weeks, with all kind of religious fellowshipping in between. As Mr. McKinney wrote in his news column in the papers, a dose of religion strong as that would stand ’em in good stead with the Lord for a whole year!”
“Johnsons! McKinneys! He came to hear about my family, Roy!” She frowned at her husband until order was restored.
“Our Mama always told us girls that our Chokoloskee men had some kind of a pent-up need to kill someone. Hunting and fishing were dying out, folks were poor as poor, and some of the men were just itching to make somebody pay for their hard life, get that misery and crankiness out of their system. She said Mr. E. J. Watson was killed not because he was a killer but because he was a gentleman who kept himself apart. He was not their kind.
“Well, the House men grumbled but they only said that our Mama had forgotten how scared she’d been of Mr. Watson. Forgot how sometimes while he was alive, she had wanted him dead—she confessed it later in her life, when she was an old lady. There was too much dread around that man, too much suspense. But all the same, she was horrified by how he died.
“Mama always hated all the violence, all the fighting and the senseless feuds. The young men had nothing to do at night, no electric light, no radios, just hung around the store and talked loud talk and swatted mosquitoes in the dark. So they made their own moonshine and got drunk and cussed and fought bare-knuckle out behind the store, those crazy Danielses and Yeomanses, the Lopez boys, and plenty of others, too. Mama didn’t like it, it plain scared her. She always said, ‘The way those boys are carrying on, one of ’em is bound to come up killed!’
“Yes, the drinking and fighting had resumed, church or no church, and Mama said, ‘They’re getting set to kill another one.’ And sure enough, there was another killing on this island—this was along about 1915, when you were living at Fort Myers. Two of the older boys bushwhacked a bank robber named Leland Rice
who came to Chokoloskee to hide out. This young man had been a fisherman, he was well thought of around here. Young Harley Wiggins was about fifteen, and Crockett Daniels not much older, and the women said, ‘That goes to show you how boys can take to killing if the men are going to set ’em that example!’
“Anyway, our Mama grew to despise Chokoloskee! In her last years, she never stopped campaigning for the causeway, she longed for some connection to the outside world. But by the time that road came in, the poor thing was dead and gone. The last time she got into the boat to go visit her brother up in Sarasota, she’d been sick from Christmas until August, and her legs were all swollen and full of water from heart dropsy—oh, it was pitiful! Saying good-bye to us girls, she looked up with her big blue eyes and she said fervently, ‘I hope I never see this place again!’ And she never did. But she never escaped, either, because her husband brought her right back home here to be buried. She’s over in the Smallwood cemetery right this minute!
“My sister Wilma became postmistress before her father died, and ran the store, and people would come in and ask questions, and sometimes she’d answer a question about Mr. Watson and it got in the paper. So your brother Eddie would get very upset, drive all the way down here from Fort Myers to see Wilma, ask her to please stop stirring up all that old scandal. And Wilma would say, ‘Well, now, it’s a little late to put the lid on, don’t you think?’ Your brother never wished to know what really happened, he wasn’t the least bit curious about his father, he just wanted Wilma to keep quiet.”
“Well, Eddie Watson was already in his twenties when his daddy died,” Roy Thompson said, “so he might of knew as much about him as he wanted.”
“The younger son was just the opposite, they say,” Ernestine reflected. “Just couldn’t hear enough about his father. He must have realized who his father was but could not live with that hard truth. Went around for years and years asking dangerous questions.” Only now did she raise her eyes and look straight at him, as if mildly surprised to see Lucius Watson there. “And I bet you wondered why no one would talk to you!”
“No, they sure wouldn’t!” Lucius smiled. “Made me wait another thirty years!”
Ernestine harrumphed as she got to her feet, permitting herself a ponderous sigh as she left the room. Roy Thompson smiled to reassure his guest. “Going back to the hurricane,” Roy said hurriedly, speaking in a whisper while his wife was absent, “Henry Thompson and his family was camped over on Wood Key not far from Hardens, and that terrible storm washed right over the island. Dad got us all into his boat and tied her up into the mangroves and put a washtub over the baby, trying to keep him dry. Baby Wesley was saved, grew up to marry, but the hand of God was on him, he was first to go. Mama had eleven kids and that baby boy was the only one she lost, the only one that never did survive her.”
“Hard to think about ol’ Shine as Baby Wesley!” Lucius exclaimed, and Roy Thompson laughed. “Shine was a good name for a feller in that business. Only thing, he drank most of his product, got rambunctious. A few years back, he pulled out blind in front of another pickup on the Trail, and that was the finish of Shine Thompson.
“After the Great Hurricane, us Thompsons went to Fakahatchee, came back to this island in 1917, stayed on here for good except that one time in the twenties when we were living on the Bend. You were at Lost Man’s at that time, but you showed up at Chatham now and then, remember, Colonel? And Henry Short came and went in those years, too. He was drawn back to the Bend the same as you were, Colonel, couldn’t stay away. I believe he was huntin for Calusa gold—that was his dream—but Dad reckoned that nigra was trying to make his peace with Mr. Watson’s ghost—not that he ever talked to Dad about it. Dad got on all right with him, but my brothers might have teased him some just for the sport of it. He was the first nigra man I ever laid my eyes on, cause coloreds weren’t never seen so much around these islands.
“After a few years on the Bend, we came back to Chokoloskee, and in the thirties, they made my dad superintendent of the little school. Not much of a job but he held on to it twenty-two years. Later on in life, he fell back into quiet and never hardly raised his voice again. Lived out his life like he was sentenced to it. He just faded out. Spent most of his last years in Everglade, looking out his little window in Bet’s Trailer Park, there by the bridge. One time he had an abscess tooth and no darn money, so he went after that bad tooth with his own pocketknife. Took him to Naples to let a dentist clean up after him, and this man yanked every last one of Dad’s teeth while he had the old man sitting in the chair. The rest of his life my dad would say, ‘I got a toothache but I got no teeth!’ and suck his gums to prove it.
“Henry Thompson was the last man on the Bay could remember every hurricane of the twentieth century, and he always said that the Great Hurricane of 1910, that was the worst one, even worse than ’26 and ’35. Told how they boiled up mullet heads and snook roe to make cooking oil, that’s how bad off our folks were for common stores.
“My dad never knew his father, so he was grateful when Mr. Watson treated him like his own son. Said nobody never treated him no better. But Dad never let his children know him—not me anyways.
“Toward the end, Dad mostly listened to his radio. Sat hunched up over it like a old blue heron, like any moment it might give a message, tell him what his life was all about.” Roy smiled a wistful smile. “ ‘This all there is?’ he’d say, looking out his little window. ‘Well, it sure ain’t much.’ And we never could think up a good saying that might tide him over.”
Roy Thompson grinned at his guest in open pleasure. “I sure am tickled to welcome you to Chokoloskee, Colonel! Us fellers that knowed you pretty good, we knew you never meant no harm with your ol’ list. But them ones that took part needed time to learn that. Them men couldn’t never be easy around you, Colonel. And in the Fish Wars, they thought you was on the Hardens’ side, so that made folks leery of you, too.”
Lucius nodded, standing up to stretch. “Roy, I wanted to ask you if you ever heard any resentment of Henry Short.”
“Henry Short? I don’t believe that nobody resented him.” Roy Thompson looked guarded as his wife returned, bringing some coffee.
“Resented who? For what?” she said, poised in the doorway with the pot. “You leaving?” she said, because Lucius was still standing.
“What I mean is, folks liked Henry,” Roy continued as his friend sat back down. “Folks didn’t go against him just because he was a nigger. If you was a nigger and they liked you, everything was fine.”
“Nigra,” his wife corrected him. “Times are changing, Roy, in case you haven’t heard.” She sat down slowly, tugging at her skirt to smooth it. “The trouble was, this nigra man married a woman who was white, to hear her family tell it.”
“Now, Mama—”
“Long as those two stayed at Lost Man’s, nobody said much. It was God’s Mercy that they had no children. Then the younger sister married Storters’ man—not a light mulatta this time but a coal black darkie. And after all that, Mrs. Sadie Harden dared to march into our store, expecting to be served like anybody else—”
Lucius stopped her with a harsh noise in his throat. Coolly she awaited his protest. He recrossed his long legs, loath to spoil their meeting, yet feeling obliged to protest that Henry and Dab were both good Christian men, and that anyway, Sadie had no say about whom her husband’s sisters chose to marry.
In his sweet high voice, Roy Thompson struggled to mute his wife’s insinuations.
“Now, Mother, that ain’t fair! Up till the Fish Wars, us fishermen used to camp at Hardens’, ate with Hardens, went to all their parties down at Lost Man’s! And here’s Colonel, setting right here, he lived with ’em for many, many years! Sure, Hardens was always kind to Henry Short. But I never seen Henry go near their table, not when they had visitors, never mind how loud we hollered at him to sit down. Yessir, I sure liked them Hardens, and I liked Henry, too. I never could figure what all that spite and meanness was
about.”
“Roy? Mr. Watson came here—”
“The Hardens was all fine fishermen and hunters, they was real nice Christian people, very generous people. And I don’t care to hear no more against ’em.” He looked resolutely at his wife, who seemed astonished by this insurrection.
“Well, those people never learned their lesson. They became very unfriendly to their neighbors,” she complained, “all except Earl. Earl Harden would play up to our community, joking and smiling, but he looked like he might bite at the same time.”
Roy said, “Well, I got on with Earl all right, he was a good fella when he wanted.” He looked delighted when Lucius Watson laughed.
“Those Hardens are everywhere these days, up and down the coast. The woods are full of ’em.” She shook her head.
“The Harden kids have come right to the front, grandchildren, too. Fine-looking people,” Roy said joyfully, casting his henpecked condition to the winds. Yet a certain doomed cast to his eye betrayed an awareness that he would pay dearly once Lucius left the house. “Nosir, they ain’t callin ’em no names, not anymore.”
“Edna Watson moved far, far away,” Ernestine said, returning to safer ground, “but she never did forget our Mama’s kindness. They corresponded till poor Mama’s death. Even then, Edna kept on writing to my sister Wilma, and her oldest daughter stays in touch right to this day.”
“A few years back, we took Ruth Ellen down to Chatham River! She never been there since a real small girl!”