“About all us local people got is our long memories, along with the history that come down in our families,” Whidden agreed. “Bad hurricanes and feuds and shootings might roil things up now and again, but otherwise our seasons stay mostly the same. That’s why we remember deaths and the old stories, and carry that remembrance back a hundred years. And that’s why the Watson Place is so important, Mister Colonel, even to the younger ones who never seen it.”
The burial place lay close to Hannah’s Point, which was downstream and across the river from the Bend. Maybe thirty feet back from the bank, the blind man said, was a square dent in the ground about one foot deep, “as if you had crowbarred a half-buried barn door out of the ground.”
“You mean you can still see it?” Sally wrinkled up her nose.
“I imagine so. That’s one of the things still spooks people about this place. Burial ground will generally sprout up in heavy weeds, but nothing has growed over that square patch in fifty years. Them three sinners is still there unless the river took ’em.”
“No coffin?”
“No time for coffins. This weren’t hardly two days before the hurricane, and the sky was very strange and murky, in the darkest October ever recollected, so them men was certain a bad storm was on the way. Another thing, that nigra who helped Cox sink the bodies had escaped to Pavilion Key, so they knew that Cox was still there at the Watson Place, not a mile upriver from this grave. Them men was clam diggers, they was unarmed, and they didn’t want to mess with Cox without the Sheriff.
“Anyways, the poor lost souls that was fished out of the river never had no family to come after ’em, nobody who cared enough to build a coffin or mark the place where they had died. But the burial party kind of hated to throw earth on their bare faces, so they laid a scrap of canvas down, then let the dirt fly fast as they could, holding their breaths so’s they wouldn’t puke into the grave.
“Course them victims was lucky they got into the ground at all, let alone stayed there. If they was still in the water, their bodies would been lost after that storm. I was on this river in the Hurricane of ’26, and the Gulf rose up and washed way back inland, and when that rush of water come back down out of the Glades on the next tide, it sounded like thunder rolling past the Bend. Nothin could of stayed put in this river! But the Watson Place stood up to bad hurricanes in 1909 and 1910, and again in ’26 and ’35, remember, Colonel? And she done just fine!”
A snakebird fled from a low snag, brushing the surface before beating away over the water. At a rounded point on the south bank where buttonwood and gumbo-limbo rose from higher ground, they eased ashore and tied up to the mangroves. Leaving Andy in the boat, they hunted along the riverbank through broken thicket until they found a rectangular indentation in the marly soil. Already one corner of the common grave was eroding bit by clod into the river.
“Won’t last too much longer,” Andy whispered, when they described it. “That grave is closer to the water than it was.” In the heat and silence, he listened intently to the flood as it curled past, a lic-lic-lic along the waterline, a relict sound of those ancient far millenniums when briny rivers poured from the wave-washed limestone of the great peninsula as it inched upward, upward, parting the surface of the silent seas.
In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, black pigeons with sepulchral white pates bobbed, craned, and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in mournful columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe. “This stretch of river can still spook me,” Andy murmured, when his friends came back aboard. “Poor Hannah’s bones are right there in that marl, along with Waller and young Dutchy. Won’t do no harm to give ’em a nice prayer, in case that burial party was in too much of a hurry.”
Woe-woe-wuk-woe.
Bending their heads, they joined the blind man’s meditation. “Hear us, O Lord. One of these years, this river will take these poor lost souls and carry their poor bones down to the Gulf. And we pray You will have Mercy, Lord, and lift them from the Bosom of the Deep and give them rest.” The words were intoned slowly and mindfully—the one prayer ever offered on behalf of Hannah Smith, Green Waller, and young Herbert Melville, alias Dutchy.
“Amen,” they murmured.
The Watson Place lay on the point of a large island between rivers, a higher ground where the mangrove along the river edge gave way to subtropical forest and salt prairie. Perhaps the Calusa had built up this ground on the shoal of silt which would have formed on this big bend. Upriver at the eastern end of the great island was House Hammock Bay, where Andy’s family had grown sugarcane for many years. “I sure come up this river enough times,” Andy explained when Sally complimented him on his close knowledge of the river after years away. His face turned a gold red like a rare apple in his gratification that this thorny young woman whose face he could not see had offered a conciliatory word. “I’m sure tickled you folks let me come along,” he blurted, heaving his canvas chair around to smile toward the khaki haze which was Lucius Watson.