Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“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.

If Watson’s gun had not misfired, Daddy House would of been dead-Daddy knew that, too. He turned his back on all the racket and just walked away looking real old and rickety because some way he had busted his one gallus and was holding his pants up with a forearm across his belly. Walked stiff and slow like he had a bad gut.

His sons was pretty twisted up about how it ended. All the blood and them damned dogs and kids running around. Young Lloyd, follering his daddy home, was so mad he was in tears but never could figure out what he was mad at. For days us boys tried to talk it out, but our dad would never join in. What happened there at Smallwood’s had went bad in him and turned him sour. I reckon that was his first day as an old man.

When the crowd drifted off into the dark and the dogs forgot why they was barking, Charlie Boggess fetched a lantern, helped Ted turn him over. Ted tried to fold the arms across the chest, but on account of rigger mortis, them arms opened out again like the claws on a blue crab speared through the back. Or that’s how Charlie Boggess told it, because Charlie T. made up for his short size with his tall stories. He was spooked by them slow arms much worse than by that one bloody blue eye-that’s what he related to visitors in later years after everyone had put away the truth, Charlie T. included. Seems Ted had tried to close that eye but come too late. The lid was stiff, it just peeled back off the eyeball. Hunting around amongst the hurricane scraps spread through the bushes, them two come up with a toy flag from the Fourth of July, spread that over the eyes. (D. D. House had rode for a soldier in the War Between the States and never had no use for the stars and stripes, but he concluded that a Yankee flag was good enough for the man that tried to kill him.)