“Now Henry Short was working at House Hammock while we was living on the Watson Place, remember? Raised fine tomatoes, and a world of bananas to go with ’em. Slept in Granddad’s old shack, cracks in the walls, plenty of snakes and spiders. That Hurricane of ’26 had blowed the roof right off the cistern, and this moonlit night he was awoke by somethin out there, lappin at the water. Peekin through the cracks, he seen this real big panther, and he got so excited by the size that he raised up his rifle and fired without thinkin, shot it through one ear and out the other. Made a bad job because the blood spoiled the cistern, you’d of thought the lifeblood of every panther in the Glades was in that water.
“Henry hoisted that big cat out of the cistern and rowed him around to Chatham Bend. Laid straight, he went eleven feet counting tail and whiskers. Henry and Dad skinned him out, they got twenty-five dollars for that hide. Should have got more, but as usual, my dad was took because he couldn’t read.
“Oh, that was a beautiful animal! I never in my life seen a cat that size, and I never heard about one like it since. Course back in them days, panthers was still common in the Islands, swam from island to island same way deer will, used to catch ’em in a bear trap baited with fish. Sometimes one’d kill a hog or take some chickens. Kill a dog, too, if they got the chance. Panthers will eat a dog, all but the head. They’ll bury that dog head but they won’t come back for it.
“Them big cats is all but gone out of the Everglades, gone out of Florida, and the bears is close behind. What bothers me today is all them ones we wasted. Shot ’em on sight, never give it a thought, cause folks was poor and their stock was precious, and they naturally thought that them beautiful things was only varmints.”
Lucius tried to envision “the Watson Place” as seen in his first impression as a child—the roof peak of “Papa’s new house in the jungle,” rising out of the green river walls as the small schooner called the Gladiator rounded the broad bend, then the white beacon of the house itself, miraculous and bright as any castle.
The year was 1896, when the new house prepared for the family’s arrival was barely finished. They had sailed down the green and silver coast from the railroad terminus at Punta Gorda and tacked up Chatham River with the tide. Like Mama and the other children, he had never seen the sea and became seasick, but the shining waves sweeping past the bow had been magnificent, and the children cried out at the bronze porpoises gleaming in the sea under the bowsprit, and the swift white birds dancing upward from the whitecaps. Papa and his young crewman Henry Thompson had rigged troll lines, and the children caught silver fishes—kingfish or Spanish mackerel, Lucius remembered, and barracuda.
He had never forgotten the Watson Place as it was on that first arrival, the red blossoms of the twin poincianas between the white house and the river, planted years before by the old Frenchman, and the smell of fresh paint which scoured his nostrils in the hot small children’s rooms upstairs. He was seven then, rushing pell-mell into boyhood, and a great new passion for small boats and fishing would sweep his dimming memories of Oklahoma and north Florida into the past.
He had wept that day they were taken from the Bend to be put into the day school at Fort Myers—all but Rob, who stayed behind to help on the plantation, only to disappear for good a few years later. After his mama’s death in 1901, Eddie had gone north to Columbia County to help his father while Lucius returned to live here in the Islands. The only house ever built on Chatham River was also his first real and beloved home.
A half mile above Hannah’s Point, a roof peak emerged slowly from the ragged tree line, sinking away again as the river turned, then reappearing. Below wind-warped shingles like saw teeth on the roofline, the house was a brilliant white against the trees behind. Whidden burst out, “I’ll be damned!” as Sally cried, “It’s beautiful!” But to Lucius, his old home looked stunned, as if blinded by the sun, like a senile person dressed too festively and trotted out uncomprehending for an anniversary.
All by itself, stark on its mound, the Watson Place was eerily identical to the house first beheld in 1896. Only gradually, as the Belle drew closer, did he see that fresh paint could not disguise the sag of old wood weariness along the peak. The windows without glass or shutters were gaunt naked holes, as black as if burned through the white facade.
Between the river and the house, the two great twisted royal poincianas, thick roots exposed by decades of erosion, were the last of the old trees planted by the Frenchman. And soon these, too, would lean away and follow the old sheds and docks and the last of Papa’s coco palms into the current.