Lost Man’s Key lay straight across the mouth of Lost Man’s River, hiding the broad shallow bay inside. Whidden said with a shy pride, “Lee Harden came here after the Hurricane of 1910, and he swore that nobody would ever run him off. Well, Pa was wrong. But it took pretty close to forty years and it took the federal government to do it.”
The boat approached the river mouth by the south channel. Black skimmers lilted over the swift eddies that ran between the gold-brown oyster bars and channeled into the Gulf on the ebb tide. The purling cries of oyster catchers came and went across the bars, rising and falling.
“Hear that orster bird? He always been here.” Andy House smiled. “Got a big red bill, the same as me. I bet that bird been makin that lonesome sound at Lost Man’s River since before the Injuns first come, in the old centuries.”
The southwest shore of Lost Man’s Key was a crescent point of fine white limestone sand. Easing the Belle past the bars, they set out a stern anchor in the cove behind the sand point. Lucius ran the bowline to a driftwood tree so that the Belle could be pulled in close to shore, but even so, Andy lost his footing and got soaked to the hips. “Guess I’ll go swimming,” he said happily, sinking down in all his clothes, sending up bubbles. When his big face broke the surface in a joyful smile, the Gulf sky sparkled in his eyes.
From upriver came the loud and hollow knocking of the great black woodpecker, and from much nearer, the hoot of a barred owl—hoo-hoot, hoo-haw. In the silence, the large forest birds seemed far away and also very near. “That hoot owl ain’t so usual in daytime,” Whidden said, sheepish in his uneasiness. “Any Injun hearin that hoot at noon, he’d take that as a sign. Jump back in his dugout and keep right on goin.”
When Lucius asked where the Tuckers were buried, Whidden led him off into the thicket of dense buttonwood and bayonet plant, strap fern, marlberry. In the hot undergrowth, Lucius caught the skunk smell of white stopper, the antidote to dysentery at Chatham Bend. Everywhere, the sea wood’s sandy floor was marked by deft hands of raccoon, the swathe and claw prints of a gopher tortoise, the whispery traces of wood mouse and lizard, a single gray-green bobcat scat, hair-packed, ends twisted up into long points.
Harden crawled ever deeper into the tangle, and Lucius followed, brushing at the tiny flies which sought the stinging sweat around his eyes. Thornlashed, gasping, he felt dizzy with the humidity and heat, and clawed at a disconcerting numbness at the forehead—the heavy web of the golden orb spider, like a tight plaster.
Soon they came to a dim clearing in the wood where the Tucker cabin had stood years before. “That’s where they was put.” Harden seemed uneasy, still troubled by that owl. “Way back in there.” Where he pointed was impenetrable thicket.
A man patching his britches in the sun … Aunt Josie had mentioned that detail to her poor Pearl. Here at Lost Man’s, even Lucius could imagine the fell imminence of the killer, like a bruised cloud come swiftly from an unknown quadrant, crossing the dawn to break the burnished edge of a clear sunrise. Perhaps poor Tucker, in his final moment, had heard a lizard jump and scutter in dry sea grape leaves—had stopped his needle, held his breath as he half-turned, sensing those bare eyes in a shadowed visage under a black hat, and the fatal shift of light in the morning leaves, in the sweet scent of lime …
On the sand point, Sally Brown was making camp. Andy lay spread-eagled in the sun, drying his clothes. Hearing their sneakers squeeze the sand, he raised his hand in contented greeting. “Call this sunbathin,” House called, laughing happily at the very idea. They unloaded supplies from the boat, and swam, and stretched on the warm sand.
Whidden and Lucius went fishing for supper, heading east up the mangrove river—the home river, Whidden called it—crossing the vast expanse of silver bayou called First Lost Man’s Bay. In the twenties, the Hardens had been threatened when this lower river was surveyed by the Tropical Development Company of Miami. The more intrepid prospective buyers had been bounced in jalopies over the Chevelier Road to its dead end in the Glades savanna, then poled in dugouts by “genuine wild Indians” some six miles southwest to upper Lost Man’s River, where they were met by a launch from the company camp at Onion Key. A few plots were sold before the scheme collapsed when the Onion Key headquarters were destroyed by the Hurricane of ’26, which also removed most of the outbuildings from Chatham Bend.
Farther east, they passed Alderman Point, then the charcoaled ruins of Webster Harden’s homestead, on a high bank under buttonwood and figs and tall black mangroves. From there they returned down Lost Man’s River, trolling the current points and inner bends. Fishing was slow. “It’s like Speck says, them sport hunters have killed the game out, and the sport fishermen will do the same for fish. Maybe we’re ignorant crackers around here, but we never fished nor hunted nothin that we didn’t eat.”