Circling the house, checking the ground-floor windows in search of some way to get in, they paused to see if the cistern still held water. Whidden hoisted the corner of its green tarpaper roof, which was splatted white with bird droppings and scattered with dry leaves and twigs, red-seeded coon scat, bright coral bean in long hard pods, owl pellets, spiderwebs, a bobcat feces woolly green with mold.
“This cistern is twenty-four foot by sixteen—pretty fair size for the Islands,” Lucius said proudly. “We dug her down into the ground, the way she should be—that’s why there’s water in there now.”
“That ol’ water must be pretty rank. Ain’t nobody has fixed them gutterins in years.” Harden pointed at the rotted rain gutters, split and half fallen. “They tell me the brackish-water mosquitoes which breeds in this here cistern are the worst in all the Ten Thousand Islands.
“At Lost Man’s, after Parks took over, a real big gator got into our cistern. Found him there when we went back to visit, couldn’t get him out. Still there, I reckon. And there was a drowned deer in the one at Possum Key, still had his hide on. Parks claims they want things back the way they was, and burnin our old homes was kind of fun, but I notice they never get around to digging out old cisterns or coverin ’em or fillin ’em—might be hard work!” He shook his head. “Don’t have to fill ’em! Just knock a hole into one side so’s a wild thing can go get his water, climb back out again.”
When Lucius looked up, Harden was watching him. “The man who built this cistern was Fred Dyer,” Lucius said vaguely, struggling to recover the feel of the lost conversation. For some reason, he had been daydreaming about Lucy, wondering if they would find each other before it was too late. “His daughter married a Summerlin, but she’s a widow. I believe she is still living at Fort Myers.”
Whidden Harden laughed. “I believe that, too! On account of you already told me about her yesterday. You met her at the cemetery, remember?”
They had a piss before returning to the others, and facing the woods, Lucius located the bird which made that small, insistent song. “White-eyed vireo!” he blurted, wondering if Papa had ever heard its ancestor, or rather, listened to it.
“White-eyed? You sure?” Whidden was shading his brow like an explorer, staring purposely in the wrong direction. “Sure looked like a wall-eyed to me!” Affectionate, he patted Lucius’s shoulder.
On the porch, Andy was talking to Sally, instinctively keeping his voice low as if there were somebody asleep inside. “When we come here in 1924, this good old place was already stunk up by every kind of varmint, not just humans. Coons and possums, sometimes a bear, all kinds of snakes and lizards—I seen a rattler by the cistern one time, big around as my arm. Upstairs, all kinds of bats and rat snakes and swallers flying in and out all them empty winders, and ceilin wasps, and some of them big narrow black hornets, flickerin their wings under the rafters—you never knew what kind of varmint might be layin for you up that stair, that Cox included!”
Whidden went up on the porch again and put his ear to the door. “Thought I heard creakin.” Again they called, and again they got no answer. “I don’t reckon this new paint will keep them people from burning this place down,” Whidden said. “The Island homes was mostly lean-tos and old shacks, whacked together any whichy-way, ain’t that right, Colonel?—palmetto fan thatch, driftwood scrap, patched out with tarpaper and tin. Weren’t much lost when Parks destroyed ’em except lifetimes of hard work, which don’t count for nothin these days, it don’t seem like.” In his quiet way, Harden was very angry.
“Setting this old house afire, that is something else,” Andy House said. “Dade County pine, cures hard as iron, so her frame and flooring is as sound as ever. Likely Parks don’t even know that, and don’t care. Why them people are so hot to burn this good old house is hard to figure. Got the rest of ’em destroyed already, I suppose. Want to look like they’re doing somethin to earn them government salaries, is what it is.”
Lucius told Andy about Fred Dyer, who had built the porch and cistern. Andy nodded. “I sure heard about them Dyers from an early age. Back in 1905, my uncle Dan ran the mail boat, Punta Rassa to Cape Sable, and he had young Gene Gandees as his crew. Them boys was maybe fifteen at that time. So one day they turned up here when Mr. Watson was away, and the Dyer family come flyin out with their little girl and baby boy, leavin toys and clothes all scattered out behind. Never went back for that stuff neither, just jumped aboard the boat and yelled, ‘Let’s go!’