“Rigged a noose?” Lucius said sharply. “Dragged him out here underwater, scraping on the bottom, instead of laying his body under a canvas in the stern?” He shook his head, outraged. “I think they needed to degrade him in order to feel better about what they’d done.”
“I always heard you come down here with Tippins,” House said carefully. “You remember seeing any rope?” When Lucius shook his head, House said, “Well, maybe there was a hanging rope and maybe not. Maybe they dragged him on the bottom, maybe not. The main thing was, they didn’t want no part of him on Chokoloskee. Some will tell you they aimed to bury him outside the county line, just south of where it crosses Rabbit Key. But back in them days, this was all Monroe County, so maybe that outside-the-county stuff was like that rope—somethin folks might of spliced on later to spice up the story.
“Easier to dig a grave out on this key, that’s all it is. These little islands on the Gulf, they come and go from year to year in storm and current. This year that bar might be hard gravel, but that year it might of been white coral sand. And even gravel digs easier than shell mound, cause them shells compact so hard, it’s like chipping concrete. Old Man Tant Jenkins used to say how Mr. Watson was an inspiration to a young man’s life. Said that all his valuable experience of farmin that shell-packed soil on Chatham Bend was what inspired him to a life of huntin and fishin.”
Whidden said, “That old tale about the hanging rope come straight out of the magazines,” and Sally called from the cabin roof, “I always suspected there was one of those darn Hardens who could read!” She laughed at Whidden as he reached and tickled her. “All us Hardens could read pretty good,” he said. “That was one reason—aside from bein Catholics—that all the ignoramuses around here had it in for us.”
Andy was pointing. “Pelican Key must be someplace over this way. Charlie McKinney got a lot of sea trout right back of that key, he sometimes took four hundred pounds a day. He was some fisherman, that feller. Fished by the tides like everybody else, but mostly he fished in the daytime while other fellers had to work at night. And that’s where he was that October afternoon, watchin Watson’s boat pot-pottin by on her way to Chokoloskee!”
The Gulf of Mexico was lost in sunny mist, soft silver gray. In the mute emptiness, in soft risings of the water, three porpoises parted the smooth pewter surface, drawing the hunting terns.
Traversing the shallow coastal shelf which ran north from Lost Man’s River to Fakahatchee, they swapped stories about the clam shack village on Pavilion Key, a low green island off the starboard beam. In the clam crew days, Pavilion had been stripped of every tree and shrub for cooking fires, until finally it was little more than a broad sand spit. Here two hundred people lived in makeshift shacks, including E. J. Watson’s “backdoor family,” which awaited his comings and goings out of Chatham River. The clam skiffs were staked out off this lee shore, Lucius told Whidden, who was still young when that era ended.
Andy recalled “a day in ’26, when we was living on the Watson Place, a day of hurricane when twenty-five men from Pavilion Key come up the river to find shelter. They had to stand up in the boat, they was that crowded. That clam skiff was sunk right to the gunwales, and the river lappin in, we couldn’t hardly see no boat at all. Coming up around the bend, them men looked like they was walkin on the water.
“By then, the clams was pretty well thinned out, and in the Depression, the cannery jobs at Caxambas and Marco was real scarce. The white fellers claimed that the nigra hands had undercut their pay, so they lynched a black feller at Marco to teach the rest a lesson. Only thing that poor nigra done wrong was try to make a livin. Them white boys had no education, no ambition, just wanted to feel they was better than somebody else. Cowards, you know, always in a gang. They was feelin frustrated, was all it was.”
“Frustrated.” Sally brought her knees up to her chin and put her arms around them, rocking a little. “Is it true that Old Man Speck was in on that one?” She expected no answer and she did not get one.
“That nigra had a job at Doxsee’s clam factory, which them boys didn’t,” Whidden said, as if that might explain it.
“Later they claimed this black boy looked crossways at some white woman, but most folks believed that was only their excuse.” The blind man slapped his big hands on his knees. “Them fellers knew before they done it that most of us good Christian folks wouldn’t bother our heads about it, and even them few that had doubts wouldn’t never stop ’em.”