Lost Man's River(216)
“I don’t believe I ever heard his name.” Andy’s fair skin was deep red with chagrin that he and the Hardens had been overheard. “We was told he showed up at Pavilion with the flap of his forehead skin hanging down where a bullet creased his scalp—had to hold that flap out of his eyes. Claimed Cox had shot at him as he took off.”
Whidden was skeptical. His cousin Weeks Daniels, who had seen the man that day, had always described him as dark and husky, very calm and “cunnin-lookin.” He had not mentioned any wound. Whidden said, “It ain’t so easy to look calm and cunnin with a flap of skin hangin down into your eyes.”
Whidden’s wife gazed disgustedly from face to face as the men laughed. “You know something?” she said. “There’s something cruel and hateful in the whole male sex.”
In the years after E. J. Watson’s death, before Lucius came back to the Islands, these rivers had been all but empty. The settlers had been flooded out by the Great Hurricane, all but the Hardens, and none of them ever found the heart to accept such hard loss and discouragement and return to the ruined clearings to rebuild. There was also a dread of Leslie Cox, who might still be lurking somewhere in the Glades, might still come prowling down around the coast, to be glimpsed toward dusk of some fateful day when an unknown craft slipped behind some wooded point, leaving the frightened settler to wonder if that silhouetted figure in the stern might have been Cox, if Cox were stalking him, if Cox were watching at this moment from the mangrove shadows, ready to trail him back to his defenseless family.
The dread of Cox would fade as years went by, but not the dread of hurricanes in these barrier islands. Many of those who ventured south were not settlers but fugitives and drifters, content with makeshift shelters and hand-to-mouth existence, with no ambition to help them endure the dull humidity and biting insects which made existence here all but unbearable. The only inhabitants who had prevailed year after year, setting out smudge pots for mosquitoes and taking hardship and contentment where they found it, were Robert Harden and his three strong sons and the pioneer women of that family.
“Course plenty of strangers tried camping in your house, but no one stayed long,” Andy said. “Seen that place in the parlor where somebody had fired off a shotgun. That charge of shot chewed up one corner pretty good, and was always connected to them bloodstains from that black man’s death, which was took to mean that somebody got in the way. Folks wondered was that some of Cox’s work, when he killed them people? Or was that your daddy killing Cox? Cause nobody knew for absolutely sure that he never done that.
“So people got the shivers from them bloodstains, never liked the feel of the whole place. You didn’t sleep good in that house till you got used to it. I ain’t the only one had nightmares. Mac Johnson’s Dorothy went wild down here, tryin’ to burn that blood out, and Bill Smallwood wouldn’t hardly go ashore, slept in his boat, though he wouldn’t admit that them bloodstains was the reason.” Andy laughed. “Ol’ Bill! Come down here to fish-guide for some northern people who was anchored off Mormon Key on a big yacht. Bill was still in his late teens, but he had him a twenty-six-foot launch with a Model-T Ford marine-converted engine. I recall we took all the snook we wanted over there front of the house, and plenty of small tarpon, too. Best tarpon bait he ever found was a strip of mullet on a green parrot-head feather. ‘I ain’t failed with that ol’ parrot-head too many times,’ Bill used to say. And every time he never failed, we had to hear about it!”
Andy shook his head in the glow of reminiscence. “Remember that day you come visitin, Colonel? Huntin Henry Short? Good thing you didn’t stay the night, cause there weren’t hardly no place to lay down, weren’t a mattress left. Hunters and moonshiners had took every last one. But some of the heavy crockery was still there, and that big pine table. Sat fourteen, cause your daddy fed a lot of hands at harvest time. My dad took it with us when we left.
“Hurricane of ’26, the Watson Place rode this wild jungle river like a ship at sea, stood up just fine. Next year, Henry Thompson took over as the caretaker. He wasn’t paid but fifty bucks a month by the Chevelier Corporation, cause developers was losin faith in the Florida Boom. Anyway, we was all loaded in the boat but we couldn’t take off till Thompsons come, cause we wasn’t supposed to leave the place un tended. Left three dogs behind for Thompsons because we had too many, and if I know Henry, he shot one of ’em before he set foot on the dock. Big yeller hound that liked to run them bobcats off the chickens. One day at Chokoloskee, that yeller dog had bit him pretty good, woke that man up a little. I heard him mutter, ‘Dog, I’ll git you one day, see if I don’t.’ Well, I bet he did!