Folding his big hands on his gut, he nodded in contentment. “I recall when they tore down every eagle’s nest on Marco Island. Claimed them big ol’ nests was unsightly and unsanitary. Said they’d improve on them old sticks with some nice new plastic nests, but what the eagles thought of that, I just don’t know.”
Andy shifted in his canvas chair, to converse better. “I was visitin with my niece’s son last time I come here. He’d shot a eagle and had plans to stuff it, but never got around to it. When that beautiful bird commenced to stink, he threw it out.” He banged his hands down on the chair arms. “After the law went through protecting ’em, Henry Short got offered some nice money to poach two eagles for this veterans’ club. They aimed to make the bar lounge atmosphere more patriotic. What was wanted was a breeding pair with nice white heads, a pair like that would likely have chicks back at the nest. Henry said all right, just to go along—he had no choice—but some way he never could come up with any eagles. Them red-blooded Americans hooted him, y’know! They got abusive! This boy was supposed to be a dead-eye shot! Never understood that this nigra man was more loyal to the national bird than what their club was!
“Henry plain hated any waste of the wild creatures. Probably spent less ammunition taking care of his own needs than any hunter in south Florida, because you could spin a clam shell up against the sky and he’d clip it every time with that old Winnie. How Henry learned to shoot like that, Dad never knew, and they were raised together. Way back before the century turned, Granddad House give his young nigra that old 30.30, and it wasn’t long before this colored feller could outshoot anybody on this coast, the Harden boys and E. J. Watson included. Your daddy did not care to hear that and would not be teased about it. Other men started complainin, too. Said, ‘Niggers ain’t s’posed to shoot as good as that. Got too much white in him.’ ”
Rabbit Key was a gravel bar with a lone mangrove clump on the west point. Watching the barren key as it passed astern, Lucius asked Andy if he’d ever heard why E. J. Watson’s body had been brought out here instead of being buried on Chokoloskee.
Andy thought a minute. “I recollect Dad sayin that nobody could rest easy while that body lay there in the dark down by the shore, and nobody wanted to go near him in the nighttime. Superstition. What they thought they seen during the shooting was beyond all nature. That weren’t their neighbor anymore but a bloody-headed fright out of a nightmare, lurching at ’em through the dusk with enough lead in him to stop ten men. A man who come ahead ten yards when he was full of bullets might not pay much attention to natural laws, not after nightfall. They was terrified that gory thing might sit up in the dark, and look around, and maybe come huntin ’em again.”
Here was the seed of legend, Lucius thought, sprouted into darkling flower from the grit and blood and filth on the shore at Smallwood’s, like the white lotus sprung up from the mud. He thought with a shudder of his father, fastened by bullets to the earth, eyes turning to blue ice in the rigid face.
“Next morning, the men was still leery about touchin him, so they took a hitch around his ankles, snaked him off the bank. Towed him all the way out here and buried him four feet down under sand and gravel. They knew Ed Watson was too full of lead to crawl, let alone swim, but they went and piled big coral slabs on top, just to make sure.”
Whidden Harden laughed out of nervous awe. “Might sit up in his grave and lurch into the channel and swim on back to Chokoloskee underwater! Me ’n’ Roark dreamed about that as kids—the gray-blue face and the sea grass in his bloody hair, turning and bumping up the Pass on the flood tide!”
“What’s the matter with you two!” Sally cried. “That’s Mister Colonel’s daddy you are joking about!”
“Well, we wasn’t jokin, not exactly, Sal.” Whidden smiled apologetically at Lucius, who could not smile back. Though he understood that his efforts to appear objective encouraged a certain disrespect toward the dead man, and was content that his companions felt they could speak freely, he also knew that with the making of the myth, his father was diminished as a human being.
Whidden said, “My dad would tell us that after the Great Hurricane, there weren’t nothin left here except one big tree in a clump of mangroves where them little sprouts are takin hold right now. Rigged a noose around his neck, run the line to that lone tree. Course Chokoloskee people will deny that.”
“What I heard,” Andy said, “them fellers run that rope so Watson’s family could locate the body if they come to claim it, which they did.”