Shadow Country (116 page)

Around her eyes was a shadow like a bruise. “If you two didn't do it, then who did?”

“Kate?” I lifted my fingers and gently brushed the hair out of her eyes, which were streaming tears. “What would you like me to say?”

She made a little squeak like a caught mouse. “We can never go back to Fort White, it is too dangerous!” Jumping up, she rushed to the cell door. I tried to soothe her while she waited for the guard but she only clapped her hands over her ears and shook her head. Though she knew this was unreasonable under the circumstances, she could scarcely believe that her own husband would permit Leslie Cox to testify in his defense.

The one witness left who might do harm was Calvin Banks, who was concentrating on his duty as a citizen while forgetting that his testimony might get me hung. Having given up trying to bribe him, the defense wanted him off the stand as fast as possible.

Testifying for the defense, Cox had made a good impression, declaring earnestly that Mr. Watson had always liked and respected Commissioner Tolen, which was true. But Leslie's real mission here, as Lawyer Cone explained, was to “influence” Calvin Banks. At one point in Calvin's testimony, Leslie feigned outrage at Calvin's account, jumping up to point a warning finger at the witness. Next, he tried to spook him, rising up in the back row like a haunt until Calvin noticed him, then running his forefinger across his throat. Though Cox sank down quick before the prosecutor could protest, that mule-headed old nigra stopped speaking and was silent. Cone whispered, “He is finished.” I knew better. Calvin was frightened but he wasn't finished.

Fierce as a prophet, the old man raised his arm and pointed a crooked finger straight at Leslie. The courtroom saw that bony finger aimed at the young man in the back row, as if Cox, not Watson, were the man on trial. There was a stir as Cox stood up and left the room, scared that old Calvin would identify him to the judge as the second man standing over the body on the road. Puzzled, the judge struck his gavel, calling for order, and Calvin Banks returned to his dogged testimony.

•                           •                           •

The jury was out less than an hour, enjoying Jim Cole's cigars. When they came back, we stood. Mr. E. J. Watson was acquitted, then the negro Reese. When the verdict was read, Frank watched our lawyers smiling but showed no emotion.

The judge discharged us there and then and went so far as to bid me Merry Christmas—I'd clean forgotten it was Christmas the next day. Attorney Cone smiled and shook my hand and shuffled his papers back into his case: a man's life or death was all in the day's business. Jim Cole came forward with a hearty shout and slapped my back as he might slap the rump of whore or heifer. He owned me now, that slap informed me. “Dammit, Ed, we sold our souls to get you off,” he wheezed, “so see if you can't stay out of trouble on the way home!” His mouth was laughing but his eyes were not as he stood ready to receive my gratitude. I felt none. Suppose I had pled guilty, the way this man wanted? And if I had pled guilty, how about the innocent Frank Reese?

I opened my mouth but not a word came out. I let Cole grab my hand and shake it but he moved away without my thanks, flushed red to bursting.

Winking and joking, the state's attorney was congratulating the defense attorney. “Why are you hanging around here, Ed?” Larabee called, throwing his arm around Cone's shoulders. “You going to miss us?” And Cone, easing out from beneath that arm, laughed, too, although only a little.

There had been no trial—amateur theater, maybe, some light farce. All the attorneys on both sides that day were in on this big joke, having learned in advance from Tallahassee how E. J. Watson's trial for his life had been decided—whether his life was to continue or it wasn't. Realizing this, I could scarcely thank my lawyer and his staff, who had taken every penny that I had.

I looked past all these smiling men at Reese. Having no place to go, he had simply sunk down after the verdict and resumed his old place at the far end of the bench. The bailiff would soon notice and evict him.

Leaving that building, I was all nerved up and edgy. Old Calvin was across the street, saddling up his mule for the long journey home across north Florida to Ichetucknee. He would wear his white shirt and Sunday suit all the way there, sleep where night found him. Kate clutched at my arm but I shook her off and walked over to confront him. “I'se glad, Mist' Edguh,” is what that old slave said as he hitched his cinches. “I sho is mighty glad dey has set you free.” Then why had he testified against a man he had known nearly forty years?

Calvin blinked and turned to look at me, surprised. “Mist' Cory Larabee, he say, Tell nothin but truth, so help me God, Mist' Edguh. Tol' me speak out,” he continued. “Called dat de bounden duty of de citizen, called dat de solemn duty of de negro. Said black folks dat doan speak up for de truth, doan speak up like
mens,
dem ones might's well go back to bein slaves again. Mist' Larabee instruct me. Den he say I mights well say de truth cause what ol' darkies say doan nevuh make no difference in no court of law. Promise me dat Mist' Edguh Watson gone to walk out of dat courthouse a free man. And here you is!”

But Calvin's voice had diminished as he spoke. He cleared his throat, then asked me almost shyly if I aimed to kill him. To throw a scare into him, I said my neighbors might take care of that. This ornery old feller dared to smile. “Nosuh, Mist' Edguh, ain't Calvin they gwine take care of. I was you, I'd stay away from dem home woods a
good
long while!” Then his smile faded like water into sand, he looked tired and sad, considering this member of his old plantation family who had gone so wrong, with nothing to be done about it any longer. “I sho' did hate to tell 'em whut I seed, Mist' Edguh. I sho is thankful dat dem white folks paid dis ol' man no mind.”

“Watch out for Leslie,” I said gruffly and I walked away.

Frank Reese appeared. He could not go home to Fort White, either. Even if Cox weren't running around loose, he was not safe there and probably never would be, which meant he would lose Jane. Frank looked as beaten as a man can look who is cold and hungry on a winter night at Christmas, without friends, family, future, or one dime in his pocket, and no place to sleep.

“Frank,” I said, “you come on south with us.”

CHAPTER 9

MODERN TIMES

On the first day of 1909, on the new railway, E. J. Watson and family crossed the Alva Bridge over the Calusa Hatchee and rumbled downriver into Fort Myers Station. I sent Frank over to Niggertown—Safety Hill, as it was called, because black folks felt safe there after evening curfew—to round up a few hands while bags and baggage were transferred to Ireland's Dock to be loaded aboard Captain Bill Collier's
Falcon.

Since the arrival of the railroad, the WCTU had sent Miss Carrie Nation, and a circus had also paid a call, complete with elephant. The first stock-roaming ordinance, fought by the cattlemen for years, now protected the public thoroughfares and gardens. Indian mounds up and downriver were being leveled for white shell for cement streets and Thomas Edison had leased Cole's steamer to bring in royal palms from the Island coasts to ornament his Seminole Lodge and decorate Riverside Avenue for the tourists.

When Henry Ford came to visit Mr. Edison, Walter and Carrie were invited there to dinner, and not long after that, Cole and Langford bought Ford motorcars and went tooting and farting north and south the entire quarter mile from one end of our manure-strewn metropolis to the other. Jim Cole's self-esteem was geared to ownership of the newest, best, and biggest—this year, the most expensive automobile in town. Quick turnover of everything from real estate to cattle had been the secret of his success, and he soon replaced his Model T with a bright red Reo.

On Riverside Avenue, I stepped right up and rapped the banker's new brass knocker. In a moment little Faith was tugging the lace back at the window. Carrie's daughters were only slightly older than Ruth Ellen and Addison, and I thought our girls might play and get acquainted while Kate washed up and rested for our voyage. When I waggled my fingers, Faith's pretty face flew open like a flower and then vanished; she was running to the door. I heard Eddie's voice and after that a silence; her face at the window was the last we were to see of my sweet granddaughter.

No one else appeared. We stared stupidly at the closed door. Begrimed and hot and cranky from the train, my poor rumpled family waited dumbly in the street while Papa wrestled with his rage. I rapped again, three good hard knocks, and this time the door cracked and a black maidservant stared out as if the Antichrist himself had come to call.

“Tell your Missus,” I said, “that Mr. Watson—”

The girl disappeared and Carrie stood there instead. “Well, I do declare!” my daughter cried. Her smile was terrible. She did not come forward and did not invite us in. “Papa,” she whispered. “Walter . . .” She could not finish and she didn't need to. We had been preceded from north Florida by my son and son-in-law, doubtless bearing word that Mr. E. J. Watson had gotten away with murder.

“Since when does Walter wear the pants around your house?” I started away before I uttered something worse.

“Papa? Please, Papa,” Carrie begged.

I turned on her. “If your husband and brother thought me guilty, why did they testify in my defense?”

“Oh Papa, what choice—”

“I'll have them indicted for perjury.” But my sour joke only frightened my bewildered family. Kate Edna stared wide-eyed from father to daughter, as if discovering for the first time how these Watsons worked.

The servant girl came down the steps with a tray of milk and cookies, which she held out fearfully toward my children as if feeding wild monkeys through bars. I recognized the rosewood tray I'd given Mandy as a wedding present. Without my say-so, nobody would touch a cookie, and the darkie was so rattled by the children's hungry staring that she banged the tray down on the stoop before them like a bowl of dog food and ran back inside.

Carrie stooped, picked up the tray, and offered it again, eyes brimmed with tears. Addison reached first but my eye stopped him. “We came as kin, not beggars. We'll be going.” I tried in vain to put some warmth into my voice because Carrie was at least trying to be nice, unlike her brother who had not come out to greet us, a discourtesy I was never to forgive.

“Thank your kind sister for her hospitality,” I told Ruth Ellen, who curtsied. Little Ad did, too. “No, Ad,” I told him. “Gentlemen pay their respects like this.” I put one hand behind my back, lifted my black hat with the other, and bowed to my beautiful Carrie, who burst into tears, knowing her rejection of her father would ensure that in all likelihood, we would never meet again.

“Oh Papa!” she cried. But we went away with resolution, leaving Carrie in the public street with her tray of milk and cookies. Addison fretted, looking back, but did not say one word.

“I love you, Papa!” Carrie called, glancing around for neighbors. For that small courage, I almost forgave her.

I lifted my hat but did not turn. “My daughter loves me,” I told Kate, ironic. My unhappy wife struggled to smile but her dry upper lip had caught on her front teeth so she looked away.

Poor Kate had had a dismal year, with her husband languishing in county jails under threat of hanging and her Fort White neighbors hostile, all but her faithful Herkimer Burdett, who had come around often, it appeared, to see how his childhood sweetheart might be faring—a little more often (according to the leering Cox) than her husband might have cared for. When I mentioned this, my wife burst out that Herkie had been very kind and that the only one who had hung around “in the wrong way” was Leslie himself. “If I should die, would you go straight to Herkie?” I inquired. Kate colored as if slapped, having no idea how to answer that, much less dissemble.

At Dancy's stand at the head of Ireland's Dock, I consoled my doleful tribe with candy, fruit, and peanuts we could not afford. The last of my money lined the pockets of my attorneys and once again I was faced with gnawing debt.

Lucius turned up on the run before we sailed. Announcing he was coming with us, he hefted a satchel to show me he meant business.

“Chatham is my home, Papa, and you'll find work for me, I know.”

I nodded slowly. “This young feller is your brother Addison,” I said. Lucius, who had now turned twenty, shook the hand of little Ad, who sat astride my shoulders: at Addison's age, in Arkansas, Lucius had no memory of his father nor any idea what he might look like. When Lucius said, “How do you do?” the little boy thrust out a half peanut, which his brother was polite enough to eat from his sticky fingers. “An excellent peanut,” Lucius assured Ad, wishing he hadn't when Ad unstuck another. I felt a great wave of affection for these boys, all the more poignant because Rob and Eddie were my sons no longer.

Because Frank Reese still had a record and might be subject to arrest, I introduced him to Lucius by his prison nickname, which was “Joe” or “Little Joe.” No one knew his last name.

SHARK RIVER MIKASUKI

We arrived at the Bend on a winter norther and that wind was cold, with iron seas churning the Gulf and swift gray skies. A sweet reek of pig manure was everywhere, even inside the house, which we found in woeful condition. Green Waller mostly emulated the habits of his hogs, which seemed to have the run of Chatham Bend. Since Green was a rough carpenter at best, his rickety hog shed swayed in the faintest breeze, and in recent weeks two prime shoats had been lost to a marauding panther. In his uneasiness Green demanded in the fierce tones of the drunkard that their worth be deducted from his salary—an empty offer in my present straits. Green had gone more or less unpaid for years. He had so little use for money that he had purposely lost count of what I owed him, fearing that if I paid him off, I might get rid of him. This poor old reiver was five years my junior, but due to a sadly misspent life, had overtaken me in our race to the grave and now appeared to be my elder. Green Waller saw the Bend as Paradise, with all the hogs and moonshine a man could ask for.

Kate seemed stunned and the rest dispirited: I put them right to work as the only cure. We patched mesh screens and painted them with oil to keep out sand flies, swept out spiders, scraped rust, crust, and vermin from the stove. We burned off and harvested the small neglected crop and brewed a batch of lightning to tide Green over into the next year.

With his growing family, Erskine Thompson stayed mostly at Lost Man's with the Hamiltons, so Lucius took over the boats. On Sundays he and I went fishing while Kate went crabbing with the children, but without Laura Collins and her gales of sweet laughter, Kate's fun in life seemed to be gone. Knowing we could never go back to Fort White, she felt banished to a purgatory of humid heat, unrelenting insects, and the endless raining greens of mangrove wilderness, with no end to her loneliness and nothing to look forward to. From her first day back on Chatham Bend, she felt imprisoned, a fate made worse by nagging dread of the calamities that might befall her children—flood or hurricane and drowning, alligators, panthers, poisonous serpents, wild Indians and tropical disease, to name only the fates that scared her most.

These Mikasuki or Cypress Indians, who called themselves
At-see-na-hufa,
would make camp at Possum Key on their way north from Shark River. When Lucius found a strong freshwater spring right off that island, and tried to be helpful by telling them about it, they heard him out without expression, grunting assent once in a while to keep him going. When he was finished, they laughed for a long time, paying no attention to him anymore We concluded that the At-see-na-hufa had always known about that spring, but having had everything else stolen away from them, they never let on to the white people who lived there, preferring to watch them struggle along with rain gutters and barrels. Sometimes a few Indians stopped by the Bend, and we did our best to put something in their stomachs, if only our bad coffee and hard biscuits. One of the young Osceolas, a leader of their band, was some kind of cousin to Richard Harden's Mary, who had been born into that family, too.

The animals had now retreated deep into the Glades. The Indians concluded that the land was dying, and the red man, too, so they might as well shoot everything they could get a bead on, using guns where bows and arrows once sufficed. Stripped off the skins, left the carcasses to rot, and headed straight back to the trading posts to trade for liquor. Deer were so scarce that even Tant Jenkins gave up hunting and went out to the clam flats off Pavilion, where even the clams had been thinned out due to the dredging.

As for the plume hunters, the House boys and their Lopez cousins were traveling all the way south to Honduras to find egrets. Those plumes were now contraband, mostly confiscated at Customs. One year Gregorio Lopez came home so sick that his boys lugged him off the boat on his chicken-feather mattress with the Customs men trotting alongside asking hard questions. And Old Man Gregorio rolled his eyes back, croaking, “This here is my deathbed, boys, so don't go harassin a poor old feller that is givin up the ghost before his time.” Well, Gregorio could have died right there as far as those federals were concerned and it wouldn't have helped his case even a little, because one of 'em had spotted a white quill sticking out where the old mattress stitching had unraveled: he drew forth a fine egret plume and twirled it in the sun, saying, “If this here is a chicken mattress, like you said, what I got here just has to be the purtiest white leghorn feather in the world.” Gregorio Lopez made a full recovery right before their eyes. Got up off that mattress and stalked away disgusted, giving those Customs men a taste of a proud Spaniard's scorn.

Wilson Alderman of Chokoloskee had married Gregorio's daughter in 1906, and because there was no work on the coast, I had taken him north to Fort White to work for me. At the time of my trials, my lawyers tried to subpoena Alderman to testify in defense of his employer, but as Sheriff Dick Will Purvis told the court, this feller “was no longer to be found in the county of Columbia, having returned to his residence in the Ten Thousand Islands.”

Alderman had slunk away as soon as my troubles started. His feeble excuse turned out to be that he had to go home to take care of his pregnant Marie, the apple of old Gregorio's ferocious eye. That old Spaniard had never abandoned his belief—which I now shared—that any daughter of Gregorio Lopez was much too good for the likes of this young man. To the delight of her friend Kate, who rushed off to help tend her, Marie gave birth to Gregorio's grandson two months after our return in 1909. For Kate's sake, I forgave the feckless husband.

I could not forgive my son Eddie and Walter Langford. Carrie had explained in a long letter that as “a civic leader” her husband could not afford the breath of scandal. “He has put his foot down, forbidding me to have you in our house,” wrote Carrie in her tear-blotted missive to her “dearest Daddy.” Like many strong women with weak husbands, my daughter pretended that her spouse's castle quaked in terror of his wrath, but she knew I knew whose foot carried the real heft in that household.

Kate Edna tried to make excuses for my daughter. Surely the idea of a younger stepmother would take getting used to for someone who so adored her daddy—“You're talking nonsense, Kate,” I interrupted. Poor Kate went soft as a crushed peony, and Lucius fixed me with that enigmatic look which was as far as he ever went in criticism of his father, though his very restraint let you know his mind. I said to Kate, “Come here, then, girl,” and sat her comfy bottom on my knee to draw the sting from my harsh words.