Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

It was Gene Roberts, up here visiting Will Wiggins, who told us how plume hunters from Key West murdered the young warden at Flamingo. And Ted reminded me for the tenth time how there was other deaths down in the rivers that no one ever heard about. Big plume hunters like the Roberts boys, they never liked no interference and they never will, but Gene Roberts was spitting mad about Guy Bradley. South Florida won't never make it into the new century, Gene said, if every man is so darn quick to settle his accounts up with his rifle!

Whispering all this, Ted sounded triumphant, even in the dark, like he'd pinned the tail on his old donkey once and for all. But when I asked if what Gene Roberts said about settling accounts didn't go to show my point about Ed Watson, Ted just flounced over with that sigh that said, There's no sense talking no sense to a woman.

The postmaster was nearest thing we had to U.S. government, so the people were waiting to see what my menfolk would do. Ted Smallwood and Daniel David House were leaders in our community, and my brother Bill was already looked to for good sense. Though they kept their distance, Houses were farming pretty close to Chatham River, and didn't want a feud with their nearest neighbor. If my husband and the House men made up their minds to give Ed Watson a fresh start, the rest of the Island men would go along. Boggesses, McKinneys, Wigginses, and a few Browns was already on his side, and that was close to half of the whole island.

I went along with Ted after a while. Mister Watson was such a gentlemen, you see, without being fancy in a way that made the men suspicious, and the women could not help but like his fine clothes and his compliments, and the nice fashions worn by his young Edna, and that dear little Ruth Ellen, and the new baby, little Addison, who came south with the Watsons in the spring of 1907. The former Mrs. Watson, Jane-Ted says Jane was the second wife, he never knew the first one's name, only that she died up in Columbia-Jane Watson took sick and went back up to Fort Myers and died just a few years after she first came here, so we never knew her, but Bill said Jane was just as sweet as Edna only not so pretty.

Now that he'd been simmered down by that young wife, most people was just as glad to have him back. He took some interest in our common lives, which we had thought was dull and dreary, and he kept things lively. All his great plans for the Islands made us imagine that progress must be on the way. We were not so backward as we thought if a man as mettlesome as this one came to live here.

It wasn't Mister Watson's manners won me over, though Lord knows manners was scarce in this rough section. It was the way he carried himself, kept a little apart. What that man understood so well-he explained this to me-you had to keep a sharp eye on your life. One careless mistake and a life unraveled, Mister Watson said, and there weren't no way in hell-Forgive me, ma'am!-to mend it back.

I said, "How come a man with such nice manners gets in so much trouble?"

He looked at me just long enough to make me nervous. Very softly he said, "I don't go looking for trouble, ma'am. But when trouble comes to me, why, I take care of it."

Later I figured he might been teasing, but the way he said "take care of it" made my chest go hollow, set my heart to jumping like it wanted to escape.

From 1906, the Watsons traveled between Columbia County and the Islands and would stay with us sometimes on their way through. Other times they stayed at Wigginses, across the island. Laura kept her little store and William farmed good cane at Half Way Creek. Now and again Watsons visited McKinneys, and Edna and young Alice, who would marry J.J. Brown, got to be friends. Mister Watson kept up his credit all around, or maybe he thought that storekeepers was more fit company for his kind of people than the fishermen and drifters who lived in the little shacks along the shore. He had his syrup business going strong again, and already he was making plans to throw in with his son-in-law and a Chicago man in their big new citrus plantation at Deep Lake. "You can't keep a good man down"-that's what he told us.

In early 1908 he went up north again, and we didn't see him until early 1909, cause he went to jail. Young Walter Alderman that married Marie Lopez, Walter worked for Mister Watson in Columbia that year, came back ahead of him. Said there'd been trouble, said he'd run off to avoid testifying. Walter Alderman would say no more in case Mister Watson got turned loose and headed south. And sure enough, that man came back to us right after the New Year, early 1909, this time for good.

Based on the account of Dr. Herlong, Mr. Watson returned to Columbia County after the Tucker killings (which were never investigated, to judge from the fact that no attempt to arrest him was made during his final sojourn in the Ten Thousand Islands. Smallwood remarks that those killings "cost him plenty" but this remark is not explained unless what's meant was a fatal worsening of Watson's reputation). Fleeting visits excepted, he had been absent from Fort White for at least twelve years, and his mother and sister and the long-established Collins clan were there to shelter him, and he had money. For these reasons, and perhaps others, he was permitted to return.

According to Smallwood, Mr. Watson acquired a ruined farm and brought it back into production, and meanwhile he married a preacher's daughter, whom he later brought to the Ten Thousand Islands. But Mr. Watson was not in Columbia very long before he was in trouble once again.

Herlong says that Watson's best friends were Mike and Samuel Tolen; that the ill wife of the latter was close to Watson's new wife and was commonly said to have willed her a lot of silver and a piano; and that when Mrs. Tolen died, her husband refused to comply with her will. Not long thereafter, both Sam Tolen and his horse were shot to death on a lonely road. (According to some accounts, his brother was also slain, though Herlong makes no mention of Mike Tolen's death.)

Watson, arrested, was in such imminent danger of a "necktie party" that the sheriff had to move him out, to Duval County. According to Herlong, Watson's lawyers obtained a change of venue to Madison County, where the aforementioned Jim Cole, an associate of Watson's son-in-law with powerful friends in Tallahassee, helped pick the jury. As for the state, it mustered just one witness-a black man-against Mister Watson, who was shortly acquitted. Captain Cole (so Herlong says) was heard to tell him, "Now you get back to the Ten Thousand Islands as fast as you can! And stay there!"

Apparently Dr. Herlong lived his whole life in north Florida after following the Watsons south from Edgefield County, and the substance of his account of Edgar Watson's life in Columbia seems as objective and dependable as Ted Smallwood's reminiscence of the later years. But finally he succumbs to the Watson legend, asserting that Watson "inherited his savage nature from his father…" and concluding his account in the best dime-novel manner "No one can say definitely what happened to change him from a decent young man, son of a good mother, to a heartless killer. I don't suppose it will ever be known how many human beings he murdered."

Even were all his victims known-I am increasingly convinced of this-the number would not be revised upward, as Dr. Herlong implies, but sharply down. Also, I question whether or not he was a "heartless killer," a designation that suggests a psychopath. Let me repeat here that Mr. Watson had admirable domestic virtues, almost never associated with the "heartless killer," far less with what is termed these days the "serial killer," who seems unable to sustain human relationships. A dangerous brawler, yes, especially when drunk, a hair-trigger temper, a seeming paranoia when threatened with exposure, and a lifelong banishment to one frontier after another in a period when making one's own law was the custom in backcountry America-and even, one might well observe, a philosophical foundation of the national policy that condoned high-handed seizure of the Spanish colonies and other territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. While not everyone behaved as Mr. Watson did, this headlong frontier climate must surely have contributed to actions that seemed to him justified by the brutal hardships of his life.