Lucius nodded. Not willingly, he was fond of those people, too. In his long decades on this coast, he had come to admire a frontier grit, a wry integrity born of endurance, a cranky generosity and hard-grudged decency in the Bay people, including some who had been present in the crowd which killed Ed Watson, and some who harassed the Harden family later on.
“The Fish Wars was still going strong when me ’n’ Roark was growin up,” Whidden was saying. “One time Old Man Walker Carr come in off Lost Man’s Key and set his nets. He had his gun with him. The very first night, Earl Harden come up on him out of the dark. ‘What’s the matter with you, old man, never seen our sign?’ So Walker said, ‘I thought I’d help you fellers catch a fish.’ Earl hollers out, ‘We don’t allow nobody fishin in this territory! If I was you, I’d head on home right about now!’ Old Man Carr put his gun up in Earl’s face. He said, ‘I come here to make my livin, Mister, mind my own business, and I don’t know of any law which says I can’t fish any damn place I please.’ And Earl said, ‘Look here, Walker, let’s you and me get along!’ I guess Uncle Earl liked that old man’s style, because the Hardens never bothered him no more.” Sally yelled out, “Too bad he didn’t shoot him.” And Harden nodded. “It was Carrs and their Brown kin who give the Hardens so much trouble later on.”
The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on this empty coast. Passing north of Mormon Key, she neared the stilt-root mangrove islets that camouflaged the broken delta at the mouth of Chatham River. What Papa had liked best about his river was this hidden entrance. The deep and narrow channel sluicing through the islets was all but concealed from the Gulf, so that any stranger unfamiliar with this coast would pass right by the mouth and never see it.
“Dead reckoning,” Harden muttered, cutting her speed. “Got to go by your old bearings, your old courses, listen to what’s under your propeller. Used to be markers, but I reckon them terrible moonshiners and smugglers ripped ’em out.” He had to grin. “Come in off the Gulf at night, hit this narrow channel at high speed, and any law that tried to follow ’em, lookin for markers, would go buckin aground up on a flat or tear out the bottom of their boat on one them orster bars.”
“You suppose any of those smugglers might answer to the name of Brown or Daniels?” Sally inquired. “Used to be one by the name of Harden, I know that much.”
Harden laughed. “Might come across one-two Danielses, Sal, now that you mention it. I don’t know about no Browns unless you would count them few that went to jail.”
“The cargo changes, but the smuggling sure don’t!” Andy reflected. “It’s been a way of life here on this coast since pirate times, and Spanish times—since white men first showed up on the horizon! My uncle Dan and my uncle Lloyd, they was both rum runners, and Old Man Nick Santini done plenty of night work out of Estero Bay, there at Fort Myers Beach.”
“Is that the man Mister Colonel’s father—?”
“His brother,” Lucius told her. He did not feel like explaining. The knifing of Adolphus Santini at Key West had been witnessed by a dozen men and could never be argued away, and it did no good to explain that it was but one of hundreds of near-fatal knifings on this coast, long since forgotten. What he would state in the biography was true, that there was no witness to any killing ever attributed to E. J. Watson, or no known witness, at any rate. He thought unwillingly of that “memoir” in Rob’s satchel. If Rob had died far away and long ago, as his family had supposed, the biography could make that claim without hesitation.
Inside the delta lay the mangrove archipelago of Storter Bay, where years ago the Storter boys liked to net mullet. In Chatham River, the incoming tide swelled upstream between the gleaming walls of thick-leaved seacoast trees, meeting and turning back upon itself the fresh flow from the Glades, and carrying the brackish mangrove fringe far back inland. By his own reckoning—elapsed time, shifts in boat speed and direction, scents of dry ground vegetation on the air—the blind man navigated the old river of his youth as intently as an eel nosing upstream, tracing the minerals and shifts of current toward the mouth of the home creek from which it first descended to the sea.
Where broken trees had stranded on a shoal, the thin bare branches dipped and beckoned, slapped by brown froth in the curl of the boat’s wake. Two miles above the river mouth, they neared the bar off the north bank where the bodies of the two men killed by Cox had nudged aground. The rotted cadavers had been too loose to take into the boats, so the clammers from Pavilion Key had rigged soft hitches to the remains of Green and Dutchy and towed them slowly out across the river. “Buried what was left of ’em up here a little ways on the south bank, longside of Hannah Smith,” the blind man finished. Asked how he knew where that place was, Andy supposed his father had shown him Hannah’s grave when the House family was living on the Bend, but he looked surprised by the questions, as if he had always known the answer in his sinew. Like fish and tides, human deaths and burials were in the grain of local knowledge—signs to mark the passing years and commemorate those corners of this silent landscape where old-time people had left small scars in the green and gone away again.