Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

The Everglade schoolhouse went off of its foundation and went up the river.

Mr. Wm. Brown, on Turner's River, lost his crop, and his cistern-the best and largest in the county-was filled with salt water. All the Everglade cisterns were ruined with salt water.

A lot of our folk here fled to the schoolhouse. The water ran up over the floor ten inches and they took off the door and the blackboards and made a raft of them, tied with a rope, on which to flee to other parts if the house left its foundation. Nearly three fourths of Chokoloskee Island was underwater. We began to realize what those high mounds were built for.

All of our own folk are very busy hunting up their lost household goods and stores of grub, boats, nets, etc. Some of us are planting again. I find a few of my peppers sprouting out and growing and some tomatoes and cabbage that the water was six feet deep over are growing. Okra could not stand the racket at all, but I have some seven-top turnips that are growing and they were under three feet or more…

The day Mister Watson come to Lost Man's was a Friday, three days before the hurricane and four days after Cox went wild at Chatham Bend. Where was he all them days in between? Mister Watson told us he come up from Key West, but later we learned he was at Chokoloskee, him and Dutchy. Did he come to us after he dropped off Dutchy? What was he doing so far south? Where was he headed? Did he want us to back up his Key West story so he had an alibi? And where was Cox? Was that bloody-handed sonofabitch hid in the cuddy of that launch while he was talking to us?

I believe he knew about the killings, I believe he was setting up an alibi he never needed. Being such a thorough man, he must of knowed he was in bad trouble whether he ordered them three deaths or not. Maybe he figured if he took our savings, he could head out for Key West or Port Tampa, find a ship out of the country. Tampa, more likely-they would be looking for him at Key West. If so, something changed his thinking, cause he showed up again in Chokoloskee one jump ahead of the bad news from Pavilion Key, and he talked his way out like he had so many times before. Swore he was going for the sheriff, swore he would bring Cox in, then got away from there while the getting was good.

By the time the hurricane struck in, Leslie Cox was all alone on Chatham Bend, if you don't count that dead squaw in the boat shed or them three bodies in the pit across the river. You had to wonder what was going through his mind, if he was dead drunk or just wild-eyed and jittery, like Watson's horse, whinnying away out in the shed. That storm must have looked to him like the wrath of God come to strike him off the earth.

We was down there in the rivers and we seen it, and I'm telling you now, it filled our hearts with dread. That howling sky and gales and roaring river in that Hurricane of 1910 was enough to scare the marrow out of anybody, let alone a direful sinner that has slaughtered three poor souls and gutted out their carcasses like they was hogs and rolled the bodies off the bank into the river. If Leslie Cox had a human spark left in him, he spent that night upon his knees just a-howling for the Lord's forgiveness. Whether or not he got it no one knows.

Few days later, Mister Watson come back through alone, and went hunting for Cox down Chatham River. So many times I have pictured him walking around that place of his, shouting and listening, feeling them old ghosts. Maybe Cox hailed him from the mangrove, maybe they talked. All we know is, there was no sign of life when Henry Thompson went up there after the storm. Course Uncle Henry never knew there was three dead buried by the river, never imagined Leslie Cox might been watching through some crack or broken pane. When he realized that, he got the shakes. Took a snort every little while to stiffen up his nerves, and never lost that habit all his life.

Yessir, we had a time of it that day! Hurricane of 1910, October 17th of 1910. That storm was the worst to strike this coast until Hurricane Donna come along fifty years later. Every house at Flamingo washed away. Louie Bradley and the Roberts boys, all the docks and houses down there, even that old copra warehouse on Cape Sable. As for us islanders, most was living in board cabins, and some had lean-to camps, y'know, moving from garden to garden, way the Injuns done. Excepting Ed Watson's big strong house at Chatham Bend, there weren't one roof left in that whole stretch of Islands. Course Chokoloskee is four miles inland, with high ground, but Jim Howell's Chokoloskee house, that was lost, too.

Hurricane caught twenty-two clammers out on Plover Key, took all their skiffs but three. Rowed back to Caxambas, but they were in poor shape by the time they got there. Brought the news that Josie Jenkins lost her baby boy to drowning while she hung on where her brother Tant had her hoisted up a tree. Got tore right out of her poor arms when the waves broke all across Pavilion Key. She found him when the seas went down, where his little arms stuck up out of the sand. Later we heard he was a Watson, and far as I know, Aunt Josie never denied it. Some folks made too much of it that Mister Watson's little feller was the only human soul lost in that storm.

Us Hamiltons come out all right, the Lord be praised, but that hurricane blowed what fight was left out of our family. When that storm got done with us, we didn't have no home nor garden, we had to take what help we could at Chokoloskee.

After all them years, the time had come to say good-bye to Lost Man's River. Grandpappy James was old and poorly, and times was plenty hard enough without having to wonder where Cox might of got to. We took Grandpap to Chokoloskee and from there to Fakahatchee but he never come back from the woesome ruin of that hurricane of 1910, and died soon after. Before he passed, he told his sons that his name was James Hopkins and not Hamilton. Said he come from a rich Baltimore family but acted rashly in his youth, had to kill some dastard in a duel, something like that, had to change his name and travel to other parts to seek his fortune. So his sons went down to Everglade to discuss this matter with Justice Storter, and George Storter said, You boys come into this world with the name of Hamilton, so you might's well go out of it that same way.

"You boys know Sheriff Tippins," Collier says.

At Marco Island, most of the men are gathered at Bill Collier's Mercantile Store. The small limestone building stands apart from his Marco Hotel, with its twenty small guest rooms, parlor, dining room, and bathroom. Constructed from burnt oyster shell the year before, the store has a hurricane crack three inches across from roof to ground and is still draining eighteen inches of high water. The bare ground around both buildings, littered with brown fronds, is set about with salt-killed planted palms.

Worn by wind and liquor to a nervous edge, the men talk fitfully. Two days before, on the eve of the hurricane, Captain Thad Williams had delivered the black suspect at Fort Myers. I returned with Captain Thad to Marco, where the Cannons and Dick Sawyer and Jim Daniels had confirmed Thad's story that in his first testimony at Pavilion Key, the black suspect had implicated E.J. Watson.

Turns out Watson had come through here on Monday, and crossed to the mainland before the storm struck in. He had probably arrived at Fort Myers this very morning. Said he was looking for the sheriff, Bill said, and might been hunting up that nigra, too, while he was at it.

"You ask me, that nigger told the truth when he claimed that crazy Watson was behind it."

"Nigra changed his story," I tell this man. The Monroe sheriff has been notified to come get him, and I wonder if I shouldn't start on back, in case Watson finds a way to get him first.