Harden shook his head. “Easterly wind might of drifted off their sloop, but my dad and his brothers found the bodies in the shallers off the Key. That’s where Tuckers had their palm-thatch hut, in the Gulf breeze.”
Andy said, “I sure do like James Daniels, and I always did. But James weren’t but a little feller then, and he might recall most of it all right and still be wrong about the bodies. Nobody wrote nothin down about it, only Ted Smallwood, who weren’t here, and Uncle Ted had to think back a half century by the time he done that. There weren’t no hearing, nothing in the papers. Two dark stains fading down into the sand was about all them young folks left behind to show they ever walked upon God’s earth.”
No matter what the circumstances of the killings, these could only seem inconsequential when set against the horror of the act itself. Yet Lucius disliked this discussion very much, and his own part in it seemed to him dishonest. He had encouraged objective discussion of his father, trying to learn something—to remain equable and simply listen—but his companions were talking more freely than he liked about E. J. Watson, as if his own feelings were beside the point, as if Papa were no longer his father but a figure of legend, therefore in the public domain. On the other hand, any comment by the son appeared self-serving and beside the point, no matter what that point happened to be.
Having defended the Kind Parent, the Good Neighbor, the Inspired Farmer for so long, he was feeling tremors of unhappy dread and self-deception. Even those well-disposed toward his father seemed in agreement on the menace of him, and the pall that his violence had cast over this coast. As the beloved younger son, safe under Papa’s roof, what could he know of the long nights and days—and months and years—which others had spent in this lonesome mangrove wilderness in the shadow of a man allegedly involved in cold-blooded murders in at least three states?
“Them bodies with their eyes wide open underwater give Uncle Earl a fright he never got over,” Harden was saying. “Once he made sure Watson had gone north, he went to Key West and give an affidavit. Swore on his oath that the three men and one nigra who found them murdered had recognized the keel mark made by Watson’s boat. Uncle Earl claimed his whole family had read Tucker’s note defyin Watson that was found on the kitchen table at the Bend. Well, where was that note now? the Sheriff asked him. How could he show a grand jury an underwater sand track nearly one month old, off of Lost Man’s Key, forty miles north? Anyway, no self-respectin jury in the sovereign state of Florida would accept a Harden’s testimony against a white man.
“ ‘You sayin I ain’t white?’ Uncle Earl yelled, as if this was the first time he’d ever heard about it. And them lawmen said, ‘We know who you are, boy. Now go on home.’ So Earl went home humiliated, and dead cold furious at everybody.
“Earl Harden hated the prejudice against his family, but not as bad as he hated his family for lettin Henry Short eat at their table. He hated nigras so darn bad that some of the Bay folks took a shine to him, decided he must be a white man after all. He was good friends with Browns and Thompsons, and with Fonso Lopez, too. Them families liked him somewhat better than his own did.” Whidden sighed, avoiding his wife’s glare. “Uncle Earl weren’t all bad by no means, and I felt sorry for him—got to be sorry for any man who don’t feel easy in his skin.
“Ed Watson had been good to us, and very generous, and nobody but Uncle Earl would act against him. They give Earl credit for sticking to his guns, but they knew he done it more out of his fear of Watson than in public duty. And after that year, Earl was more afraid than ever, in case that man might come back to the Islands and get wind of what Earl Harden told the law.
“Once Watson was dead, Uncle Earl got drunk and started hollerin about how he wished he’d been at Chokoloskee, how he would of been first man in line to shoot that sonofabitch, and all like that. Kind of surprised people, I reckon, because while Mr. Watson was alive, he never talked that way. And he was still talkin that way when Mister Colonel come back to the Islands a few years later.”
“Couldn’t shake that habit, I guess.” Lucius tried to smile. “Earl made sly remarks where I could hear ’em, and when he was drinking, he got abusive to my face. In all the years I lived at Lost Man’s, I never went near him if I could help it. If he was at one of the Harden parties, I just stayed away.”
“Well, after he heard about your list, Uncle Earl stopped shootin off his mouth about Ed Watson. He got over all them kind of speeches!”