Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

Folks told themselves they didn't know Chevelier, never liked him any, he was a outsider, ain't that right? Hobnobbed with the Devil and never cared who knowed it, so maybe it was the Devil who come got him. Anyways, it wasn't nobody's damn business what that cranky old foreign feller done with his money. Maybe them mulattas done him in, maybe Carey run off with his silver dollars, who's to say? Never could trust them Key West pirates-that's the way it went. Nobody blamed Ed Watson, even behind his back, that's how scared they was that he might hear about it, cause after Santini, the fear of E.J. Watson had grown up thick as weeds in a June garden. Watson knew this and enjoyed the stir in every place he would walk into, and later this was held against him, too, along with being better educated than most everybody else, not to mention smarter, and a better farmer, and a better trader.

But I was in friendship with that Frenchman, we was both outsiders, and I couldn't come up with a good excuse to turn my back on it. Watson knew what my kids must have told me about Jean Chevelier's fresh-dug grave on Possum Key, and maybe he knew I could not let it pass. He never missed much. I seen as quick as I come into the store that he knew I was on the island, he expected me. It was very hard to take that feller by surprise.

I told John Leon, Stay outside. I don't mind saying I was feeling gloomy.

Ed Watson and me got on all right, and it was natural to say good morning. He had on that frock coat he always wore when he come up to Chokoloskee Bay on business, and he shifted as I come forward, cocking his head with that little smile of his, and put the lard tin he was buying back down on the counter with a small sharp click. That freed his hands and give me fair warning, both.

Facing him down made Watson dangerous, you could feel him coiling. I had heard how quick he struck Santini, how quick Dolphus went from a big mouth to a slit throat. Watson's smile had no give to it at all, he was just waiting on me, ready to let go whatever I seen building up behind them eyes.

"Why, howdy, Ed," is what I said.

"Howdy," he says, dead flat. Didn't use my name. His voice advised me there was no way to question him about Chevelier without hinting that he knew more than he should of, and it also advised me to back off while there was time.

I did. I ain't proud about it, but that is what I done. If his knife come out, never mind his gun, there wasn't a man in Chokoloskee would jump in on the side of Richard Hamilton, cause no damn redskin, let alone no damn mulatta, asked hard questions of a white man. The only one who would jump in was John Leon, and I couldn't risk him even if I felt like going up against Ed Watson, which I didn't.

When Watson seen I was aiming to be sensible, he sticks his hand out, and I shake it. Only hand was offered me all day.

"What's the news," he asks me, "from the Choctaw Nation?"

I was raised not far from where Watson used to live, out in the Nations, Oklahoma Territory, so this was just to pass the time of day. But some of my wife's Daniels kin, they heard us, and took his words as a joke on Richard Hamilton. They laughed real loud to flatter their friend Ed, and I grinned, too. I told myself long, long ago to live and let live, not react to the mangy ways of white people, and I never regretted it. I said, "Indins ain't never got no news, Ed, you know that."

My second boy was the one who spread that story about how he caught Ed Watson red-handed at Possum Key, and how it sure looked like Watson killed the Frenchman. Gene was scared to death of Watson, claimed he hated him, but the rest of us had growed accustomed and were not afraid. Ed Watson was always bountiful with my family, never failed to help us out when times were hard. John Leon got real friendly with him in later years, and his sweet wife, Sarah, even more so. They knew what kind of man he was and liked him anyway. Yessir, they was proud to know that feller.

My opinion, Watson never killed my friend Chevelier, and he never bought nor paid for Possum Key. He went over there to talk about it, found Jean Chevelier dead, and he just took it. Being it was only that mean Frenchman, folks was content to let him get away with it.

Even when Mister Watson disappeared, not long after the turn of the century, no one squatted on Possum Key for a long time. Not until a few years later, when it looked like he was never coming back, did people here start in to saying that he done away with that old foreigner to get his money and the claim on Possum Key. And I reckon that's what Mister Watson wanted people to believe, so long as he knowed we wouldn't do a thing about it. It was less trouble to scare squatters off the mounds than it was to shoot 'em.

There's another part to this Chevelier story I don't tell too much. Some way them Mikasukis in the Cypress, they learned about what was dug up at Marco, and they didn't like it. Them old things should been left where they belonged. An Indin burial place had been disturbed, the earth was bleeding from the massacre of birds and gators, and the Mikasukis was afeared that bad spirits of their old enemies might be set loose.

To give fair warning to the white people, the chief medicine man, Doctor Tommie, went to Fort Myers with the trader from Fort Shackleford, east of Immokalee. That trader brought in a covered wagon with three yoke of oxen, an eighteen-day round-trip of seventy miles, all loaded down with gator flats for Henderson's store. Doctor Tommie set quiet on them flats until they got there, then stood up on that wagon to protest all the ruination of his country. That old Indin give warning to the white people, especially Bill Collier and Cushing, and also Mr. Disston, who had paid, that something bad was bound to happen if them sacred masks and ceremony cups and such were not give back to the mother earth where they belonged.

This was early 1898, the Maine had just been sunk in Havana Harbor and the Spanish-American War was cranking up, and nobody had time to listen to no loco savage in queer headgear and long skirt. Straight off Doctor Tommie seen that the white people did not care to hear his warning, and so he wouldn't speak no more but walked back out into the Cypress before they decided to ship him off to Oklahoma.

Weren't two weeks later, Bill Collier's schooner Speedwell capsized in a squall in the Marquesas, down here about eighteen miles off of Key West. Two of his young sons drowned in the cabin along with a whole family of passengers, and Captain Bill, who scarcely got away with his own life, seen their little hands scratching on the porthole glass as that boat slid down. Meanwhile, Disston killed himself from not knowing what to do with all his money, and pretty soon Frank Cushing died, not fifty years of age, never knew fame nor fortune from his great discovery. Cushing's house burned down after his death, and most everything he looted from sacred Indin ground went back into the earth by way of fire.

You will say that all of this is funny coincidence, but if you was Indin, you would understand it. Indins don't know about coincidence, that is just white-man talk.

Richard Hamilton asked the Frenchman to be godfather when Leon and Mary Elizabeth, called Liza, got baptized by a traveling priest. Seemed peculiar that Daddy Richard chose the Frenchman in spite of the way Chevelier ranted on against the Church, and even more peculiar that a man in cahoots with the Devil would agree to it. But both those old fellers were mischievous to start with, and Daddy Richard, once in a long while, liked to stick a pin in that big wife of his to hear her scream. As for the Frenchman, he esteemed Richard Hamilton without ever admitting how much he depended on his kindness. Them two was a couple of old misfits, sure enough, but Daddy Richard stayed real calm, never tangled with nobody, while the Frenchman was thorny as old cat-claw, raked everyone who come across his path except Liza and Leon.