Shadow Country (27 page)

We was all bad scared, which makes men skittish, very dangerous. We was tense and all bunched up; he could do some heavy damage with a shotgun. But after so many close calls on so many frontiers, the man might have seen in them stiff weary faces that this time his neighbors meant business, that maybe his luck was running out, that the day had come when he might not talk his way into the clear.

When D. D. House stepped forward to take his gun, Ed Watson raised his palm up high like some kind of old-time prophet in the Bible. At first I thought he was about to say,
Okay, I quit. You win.
Later I realized he had stopped us at good shotgun range if killing and crippling more than two was what was wanted. Maybe that were not his plan but that's the way it looked. Two charges of buckshot would knock down the leaders, scatter the rest, and he might keep 'em ducking with his revolver while he pushed his boat back off the beach, crouched to reload, shot his way out of there. At that range, with a panicked crowd, he might have got away with it; the trouble was—so's to keep his gun handy when he jumped instead of fooling with a bow line—he'd run his boat aground on a falling tide to where he'd never push her off without some help.

A bad mistake, some said. I don't think so. I don't think Watson made mistakes like that. I doubt if he ever considered shooting his way out. His chances were poor and anyway, a man so proud would not leave his family behind.

When Watson swung that shotgun up, my guts clenched tight to meet the burning lead. I knew we was done for, Pap did, too, because we was looking down both barrels and we seen them jump, that's how hard Watson pulled his triggers. To fit storm-swollen shells into the breech, he'd peeled 'em down too much, the paper didn't hold, that was the theory: when them barrels tipped, the buckshot rolled right out the muzzles. I ain't saying I seen them pellets but some claim they did.

I don't recall swinging my rifle up or squeezing the trigger but I do know I fired. After that, all them guns let go together.

Ed Watson was spun half around but didn't fall. I reckon he died before his shotgun hit the ground, but his legs kicked back some way and drove his body on, pitching him forward against that roar and fire. His coat and shirt jumped, whacked by lead, the sound of his hard life being whacked out of him. Some say they seen his gun stock splinter, seen his revolver spin away. Me, I seen his mouth yank, seen blood jump where his left eye burst. Christ. And still he came.

Hell, we all seen it, ain't one man won't say the same: with all that lead in him, Ed Watson kept on coming, that's how headstrong that man was even in death—that was the demon in him, Mama Ida House would say for long years after, cause only a demon could scare folks as bad as that after they exercised him. He never crumpled but fell slow as a felled tree.

Seeing him come ahead that way, the men yelled and crowded backward. Then the evening broke apart, the line surged forward, near to knocked me down. It was purely uproar, hollering and cussing. They were a damn mob now for sure, with young boys running up and down snapping their slingshots at the body, yapping like dogs, and every dog on that dark island howling.

Our neighbor lay face down on the bloody ground like he wanted to peer into the darkness all the way down to the center of the earth. The broad back in the black coat had no breath to swell it. Never jerked nor spasmed, never groaned nor gargled. Them fire-colored curls on his sun-creased neck was all that twitched even a little in the evening wind.

Fallen angel, Mama Ida said, and it was true. Laying so still at our feet, Mister Watson looked like he had fell all the way from Heaven. You never seen a man so dead in all your life.

HOAD STORTER

In Everglade the cisterns were four-five feet below the ground, two above, and the water generally stayed cool and clear, but after the Great Hurricane they were flooded out with brine and mud and after that we had more'n a month of wind and a hard drought. The heavens were gray as old torn rags wrung dry.

On October 24, late afternoon, my brother and I had rowed across to Chokoloskee, hunting fresh water. We were rounding the point west of Smallwood's store when a loud racketing of guns broke out; it was just dark enough to see the muzzle fire. For a few moments, silence fell over that island like a blow, and out of that silence for just one brief moment rose the voice of a night bird, over and over, so loud and clear I had to wonder if that bird had sung right through the shooting and continued on through the dog and human outcry we heard next.

Mister Watson had run his
Warrior
right up on shore. His body lay on the bank just off her bow, circled by sniffing dogs. No man stood near him. We went ashore with our water jugs, trying to keep out of the way. Watching from a little distance we could see that while some men were yelling angrily, others were crowing in relief, passing a jug. Some seemed to wander around shocked, avoiding talk with anyone at all; other ones could not stop talking—not listening, you know, just talking, the way crazy people do—and these ones swore it was nobody's fault, the dead man tried to attack the crowd, kept coming after he was shot to death three or four times over. And all this while, over the excited voices, that night bird came and went, over and over and over,
wip, wip, WEE-too
!

BILL HOUSE

What I never forgot was the shock of silence after the shock of noise. First thing I heard out of that silence was a woman's high clear voice—
Oh God! Oh God! They are killing Mister Watson!
By the time Edna Watson realized what had happened, her husband was dead and on his way to Hell.

Watson's young family was sunk down on the store steps in a sobbing heap. Poor Edna was plain terrified, my sister said, that this “mob,” having tasted blood, might turn on the dead man's widow and his little children. I hate to admit this but she weren't all wrong. Their fear made these men vengeful, and the most dangerous was the very ones who had looked the other way for all them years—the ones claimed Watson never killed a soul, only one-two riffraff on his place that had it coming. Same ones who was so angry he had scared 'em all them years that they pumped bullets into the dead body. These same brave fellers scared his widow so bad that she grabbed her kids and crawled on hands and knees under the store, even cheered and jeered the fine round of her hip when her frock tore as she crawled into the dark, then dirty-joked about Old Man Watson mounting his young mare. If that man laying there had could of heard how them men terrified his wife and little children, he'd of flew straight back from Hell like an avenging angel.

I hollered, tried to shame 'em off like I'd caught 'em peeping at some lady in the bushes, then quit because I weren't no better. I peeped, too.

Mortified, I called under the store, “Come on out, Mis Edna! Ain't nothing to be feared of!” (To say something that stupid with my rifle barrel still warm and her dead husband, too? That poor widow must of thought I lost my mind!) All that come back was little squeaks and whimpering. Poor things was huddled in there amongst them putrefied chickens for damn near an hour, laying still as rabbits, though the skeeters was whining something terrible and that stink was sickening, just awful.

My sister done her best to soothe 'em, murmuring down between her storm-warped floorboards like she might talk to a scaredy-cat or something. When finally the last men was gone and she could coax 'em out, them poor souls stunk so bad that the family where they was lodging wouldn't take 'em back. That stink was only the excuse for what them people was aiming to do anyway. They had a new baby and was scared Cox might come prowling after Edna like he done up in north Florida, was the excuse. Told that little family they weren't welcome because they had the stench of Hell on 'em. Pushed her stuff at Edna through the door crack. Didn't want no truck with outcasts, not with armed drunks wandering around, not with Cox still on the loose. And here Wilson Alderman who was supposed to be Ed Watson's friend was right there alongside of us down at the landing, though of course he would claim he never pulled his trigger. Didn't want either side to think the less of him, I reckon.

So here it was black moonless night and the mother crazed by her own fear and them broken kids bewailing that queer mound down by the water that had been their daddy.

Mamie took Edna and her kids into her tore-up house. My sister has ugly ideas when it comes to nigras, but she has grit and a big heart. Lots of our Chokoloskee folks are that same way. Mule-head ignorant, suspicious of everyone except their own, but good, tough, honest, God-fearing Americans that lives out a hard poor life and don't complain.

HOAD STORTER

We never got home to Everglade till bedtime. We told our family all we'd seen and heard, and still they pestered us with questions, trying to figure out what they should feel as their dead friend's friends. I told 'em what we had been told (the official story, as Dad called it, kind of bitter), how Mr. Watson tried to murder Mr. D. D. House but his damp shells misfired, by which time the posse was already shooting.

“The
posse
?” Dad shook his head, disgusted. “If his shells misfired, what makes 'em so darned sure he pulled his triggers?”

“One man claimed he saw his barrels yank when he tried to shoot. Saw pellets rolling out the barrels.”

“What man?”

“You sound like you doubt Hoad's word,” my mother chided him. “It's not Hoad's word I doubt,” Dad said. “It's the whole story. Something's missing.” But I got the feeling that in the end, they felt some way relieved. Didn't
want
to feel relieved, just couldn't help it.

Some would say in later years that folks just had enough of Mister Watson, they got tired of him. Said the lynching had been planned by Houses, who wanted to make sure his 150-gallon boilers and new machinery didn't put their own small sugar operation out of business. Others in the crowd protested, said if they'd known this was supposed to be a lynching they would have never taken part. His neighbors were split bad over Ed Watson and they are today.

Altogether, we saw close to twenty men, mostly Chok fellers, with two or three who were there that day from Marco and Fakahatchee, and a few fishermen passing through. Isaac Yeomans, Andrew Wiggins, Saint Demere, Henry Smith—all those men were in on it. Harry McGill, who would marry my sister Maggie Eva, was among the few who fired and never denied it; Charley Johnson was another, and Mr. House and his three older boys would never be ashamed that they took part. Hard to say who else for sure because over the years too many changed their stories. I do know that some who later claimed to be among the men who killed Ed Watson were not even present on the island. Others like Wilson Alderman decided they only went there to arrest him, not to shoot him, so they never fired. A lot of 'em have poor memories, I guess.

Just lately, a young lady told me that her dad was among the shooters. Well, he wasn't. He was with me in my skiff. We saw the finish.

Folks had hung on in the Islands after bad hurricanes in '73 and '94 and 1909, but the Great Hurricane of 1910 cleaned 'em right out. Their boats and cabins were all wrecked and their gardens spoiled by four feet of salt water, leaving almost nothing they could work with. The green emptiness of the Everglades for a hundred miles to eastward and the gray emptiness of the Gulf out to the west—the dead silence and the loneliness, along with the knowing that all a man had cleared off, hoed, and built, all the hard labor and discouragement of years and years, could be washed away overnight—that knowledge broke their spirit, that and the scent of human blood back in the rivers. By the time Lucius's father was shot down a week later, all but the Hardens had cleared out, and not one of those Island clans ever came back, because any stranger glimpsed around some point of river could be Leslie Cox, who might kill you in cold blood. That fear that was always lurking there plain wore 'em out.

After those murders came that hurricane, then the death of E. J. Watson—all on Mondays, one after the other. And after those three black Mondays came the drought. People forget about the drought. Here we were deep into the rainy season and no rain for weeks and weeks, into December. It was spooky! Such little water as we had turned green and poisonous and cisterns all around the Bay went dry. Had to row way up beyond the tides in Turner River.

Folks saw all these calamities as signs of the Lord's wrath. All folks could talk about was Revelation and Apocalypse, bowl of wrath and burning bush. Those first Pentecostals who came to save us were shocked to learn that the doomed sinners on this accursed Bay had no house of God. That called for an emergency Revival. Forty souls were baptized in the Bay, right out there in front of McKinney's store. And Charley Johnson who was in the Watson posse and never did mind being first and foremost, Charley stepped up and hollered loud and clear how he was a rum-runner doing the Devil's work. When it came to sinners, nobody came close to Charley G. Johnson, Charley swore. Yessir, he was burning to repent, ol' Charley was, he aimed to get saved or know the reason why. To prove it, he took his rum boat all the way north to Fort Myers and brought back a cargo of lumber for the new church. When it came to saving souls on Chokoloskee Bay, Mr. McKinney said, the Lord got a helping hand from E. J. Watson and the demon rum.

Willie Brown likes to recall how he tried to find my uncle George to get a warrant for Ed Watson's arrest, head off the showdown. Justice of the Peace George Storter was the closest thing to law we had back at the time, but that week Uncle George was away on jury duty in Fort Myers, and C. G. McKinney, too—those two men were right there in the courthouse when the Chokoloskee witnesses were brought in. Sheriff Tippins took some depositions and the court clerk wrote 'em down and that court clerk, so help me God, was Eddie Watson, the dead man's son, Uncle George told us.

After leaving the Bend in late September, Lucius had gone gill-netting with me and Claude, provisioning the clam crew at Pavilion Key; in early October, he was fishing with the Roberts boys out of Flamingo. That's where he was in mid-October when the word came of bloody murders at the Bend, along with the first warnings of the Great Hurricane. He departed next day but was turned back at Cape Sable by the storm. Because his boat got damaged and needed repairs, it was late in the week before he started out again, rounding Cape Sable and camping that night at Shark River. Next morning at Lost Man's, the Hardens informed him that his father had stopped by two days before the storm, behaving strangely; they could not quite make out why he had come and seemed uneasy.

Lucius rushed north. Finding nobody at Chatham Bend, he came to our house in Everglade, where we broke the awful news. He went out on the dock and watched the river for a while; Lucius was always beloved in our family, and as Mother said, it was a blessing that he was with good friends at such a time. We talked all night and he left for Fort Myers at dawn. because he had refueled at our dock, he did not stop at Marco, where he might have learned that his father had crossed paths with the sheriff before heading south to deal with Cox at Chatham Bend. What actually happened there will always be disputed and it seems unlikely we will ever know.