Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

We done our best to forget about that killing, but no one forgot that hurricane, not around here. Everything got all tore up, salt-soaked, and rotting, everything mildewed, trees down everywhere, and everlasting mud. It seemed like our world was covered in muck and would not come clean again. Mullet cast up by that storm was a foot deep on the beach. Poor Ted raked out most of our drowned chickens the first week, but putrefaction rose up through those loose boards a month or more before he could get the store put back together and take the time to crawl back under there, bury the last of 'em.

Poor Edna was very grateful we had took her in but the smell of corruption was something terrible. Mama called it the stink of Satan's sulphur coming up from Hell. Might of had a stuffed-up nose or something. Anyway, she upset Edna, who got that chicken stink confused with everything, said she feared that stench would fill her nostrils till her dying day.

CHOKOLOSKEE, OCTOBER 27, 1910. We are still having trouble Here. On the 24th Mr. E.J. Watson came up from his place in his launch, and came to the shore and had some words with some of the folks. There was a little misunderstanding, and Mr. Watson pulled his gun and tried to fire on some of our neighbors. His gun failed fire, and he lost the deal, and was shot and instantly killed. His body was taken out to Rabbit Key and buried on the 25th. I don't know of any other grave out there. A lot of men went down to Mr. Watson's place on the next day to hunt one Leslie Cox that Mr. Watson said he had killed when he was there, but they did not find him.

FORT MYERS, OCTOBER 27, 1910. Thomas A. Edison, the famous electrician, telegraphed on Tuesday to know the depth of the water on the Caloosahatchee-

Mrs. Watson and children arrive from down coast today…

Later years, Old Man Willie Brown would tell how he tried to stop them men that day, tried to see Justice Storter about what to do, get a warrant for Mister Watson's arrest. But Willie's boat was still at Smallwood's landing after the shooting, right there alongside of the Brave, so I don't know if he recollects things right or not.

My uncle George Washington Storter Junior was justice of the peace for the Chokoloskee Bay country, closest thing to law we had in them days. But Uncle George was in Fort Myers, summoned to jury duty, him and C.G. McKinney both. They was the two most solid citizens on Chokoloskee Bay, I guess, along with Smallwood. They was there in the courthouse when Sheriff Tippins brought them men from Chokoloskee for a hearing and ended up deputizing 'em instead. Appointed deputies to arrest a man that was already stone-cold dead by their own hand, stretched out in the bloody sand on Rabbit Key.

Before he deputized 'em, Sheriff Tippins took some depositions on the death, and the court clerk who wrote all of it down was Eddie Watson. After their mother died, back in 1901, Eddie and Lucius had lived awhile with their sister, Mrs. Langford, but pretty soon Young Ed went to live with his daddy in north Florida, never came back again until 1909. Walter Langford and Tippins was good friends-Tippins named his second son Walter Tippins-and Tippins seen to it that Eddie Watson got a job down at the court when he come back.

Well, Uncle George never got over seeing Eddie Watson on that day. Uncle George's own children done their schooling at Fort Myers, and he knew them older Watson children pretty good and liked 'em fine. That day in court, Uncle George told us, young Eddie Watson looked like he'd been bent by lightning. Never cracked during the hearing, but he never got unbended neither. Done his duty in life as a husband and provider, he was a ardent churchgoer, always up in a front pew where it was hard to miss him. He run a nice insurance business, slapped a back or two, and told some jokes. But there was something stiffened up in Eddie Watson, like a tree dead at the heart, like if he fell down he might split in two.

James Hamiltons and Henry Thompson and their families left Lost Man's River for good, and so did almost everybody else. Their houses were all swept away and their gardens spoiled by four foot of salt water. They had to make a fresh start somewheres else, cause that storm left nothing they could work with. So there was a lot of Islanders in Chokoloskee by the time Mister Watson come back from the Bend.

Folks hung on in the Islands after bad hurricanes in 1873 and '94 and 1909, but that hurricane of 1910 cleaned 'em right out. In my opinion, Watson and Cox was a big part of it. Them dark mangrove walls closing out the world, with the empty Everglades to eastward where the sun rose, and that empty Gulf out to the west where the sun set, the silence and miskeeters and the loneliness, the heavy gray of land and sea during the rains, the knowing that all you hoed and built, so much hard work and discouragement for years and years, could be washed away by storm in a single night-put that together with the fear that any stranger glimpsed around some point of river might be the man who called himself John Smith, come to take your life. All that dread had wore 'em out, never mind the blood in them black rivers.

When those men told how E.J. Watson died, I kept my boots spread and my arms folded on my chest. I didn't show them sympathy or comment, only grunted, so pretty quick the talk diminished into mutters.

Something was missing in the story, and I said so. Sheriff Jaycox took the hint and whistled and sucked his teeth in official skepticism. Questioning their word made them draw together and fall still, like quail. Their faces closed. They had told their story, and the sheriffs could take it or the sheriffs could leave it, because no man there was going to change a word.

Well, boys, the law's the law, Jaycox informed them, and they had took that law in their own hands where it don't belong. Never mind if Mister Watson had it coming or he didn't, there was murder done here on the shores of Monroe County, Sheriff Jaycox said. Begging your pardon, Sheriff, I said, this here is Lee County, ever since 19 and 02, when they checked the survey. Mister Ed Watson was massacred in Lee County, Florida, and the Lee County sheriff could not just walk away, forget about it. Besides, the deceased had folks back in Fort Myers, and fine upstanding folks at that.

"Well, we ain't so particular which county," Charlie Boggess said. "What we been looking for is law. Ain't none showed up." Charlie T. Boggess was Ted Smallwood's sidekick and some way kin to my own clan up around Arcadia, and so felt entitled to speak his mind. But when I took a pad out of my pocket, Charlie T. thought better of his attitude, explaining that while he himself, having been crippled in the storm, had took no part, he could not find it in his heart to blame his neighbors for what they had to perpetrate in self-defense.

"That so?" I said.

"That's the way I look at it," Charlie T. concluded modestly, and everybody nodded, all but Smallwood, who harumphed and put his hands behind his back, as if encouraging us lawmen to get cracking and lay down some law.

All well and good, I told them, moving cautiously, but still and all I had to take those men responsible back to Fort Myers, procure some depositions in the case for a grand jury hearing. That put a scare in them, and certain men wanted the postmaster to come along to explain their situation, even though he disapproved of what they did.

Smallwood had an awful mess to clean up at his store, but after he had thought a minute he agreed to go. "All right, Bill?" he asked his brother-in-law.

"Up to you," said W.W. House, who was short-spoken that day with almost everybody.

At Chatham Bend we found no sign of Leslie Cox, nor the dead squaw-that's where all the trouble started, went the story. The men decided her own people "must of cut her down and took her home," but how did the Indians know that she was dead? Had the nigra lied about Cox and that squaw, and if so, why? And if he lied about the Indian, what else did he lie about?