Sally laughed. “If I had worked as Audubon warden back in those days, I’d have made good friends among the Island people, too! Made all the friends that I could find, and then some!”
“This ranger, name of Barney Parker, never noticed if we shot for the pot. Might been too busy chasin gator poachers. One time he come up alongside a young Brown that had him a mess of gator flats under a canvas, and gator blood all through his bilge water. That ranger just set there looking at that bloody water, never says one word, till that young Brown was set to jump out of his skin. Finally Barney looks up and says, ‘Well, son, it sure looks like the time has come for you to try another line of work.’ That was partly a warning and partly good advice, because the way them reptiles was disappearin from slough after slough, there weren’t no more future in the gator business.
“Exterminatin the last gators was what stopped the slaughter, cause the rangers couldn’t. The gator hunters knew every meander of these creeks and rivers, knew every backwater of the Glades country south to Cape Sable and Florida Bay, and the good ones always slipped away without no trouble.
“It used to be that every point and river mouth and key, and any piece of higher ground along this coast, had a family living off the water and farmin their little bit of soil to get their greens. Hard to believe that, ain’t it? Parks tore out everything—houses, fruit trees, little docks, every sign of man. Course there’s plenty of sign if a man knows where to look, all the way back to the Calusas, but folks today will never know what we knew about these islands, never know how beautiful they were. Used to be wild limes everywhere, smelled like pure paradise, and every little bay was full of mullet.
“Parks couldn’t believe how many old trails and clearins that last hurricane uncovered, how much rusty metal and crockery and glass. The pains taken by them old-time settlers to haul their poor old stuff all them miles down here, mostly by rowboat! The lives that was used up clearin jungle, hackin furrows in the rock-hard ground on these old shell mounds! Well, all that labor never meant a damn to them officials. Come ashore and ate up their nice lunch, set down and rustled a few papers, then destroyed what it took years and years for us poor folks to scrape together, rough shacks and home-built beds and tables and chairs and cisterns and fish houses and docks! Even our gardens! ‘This here is an American damn park, so you folks just rip out them guavas and papaws, them ol’ gator pears, cause them foreign damn things ain’t got no business here!’ ”
Harden smiled but in his quiet way, he was bone angry. “Maybe all our families had was quitclaims, but we paid for ’em in blood! Ask the miskiters! We was the pioneers here, the first settlers, but we had to watch this deputy with a gun on his fat butt come waddlin up the beach with some damn vacate papers. Tossed some gasoline and burned our cabin to the ground, then went down the shore and done the same at Mister Colonel’s. They got back in their big-ass boat, but before they left, that feller hollers out across the water. ‘Real nice fire, folks! Too bad we forgot to bring the marshmallers!’ Had to listen to ’em hee-haw. Left us in the rain with no roof over our heads, just settin on that beach there like wet possums!
“Our old homesteads is all grown over now, and Wood Key, too, you’d never know that human beins ever lived here. They was worried that our poor ol’ shacks might spoil the scenery for their Park visitors. Never gave a good goddamn for those who was born and lived their lives here and was kicked out without one thing to show for it!”
Whidden swore with such uncustomary violence that the others fell silent, giving him some room. After a long while he said somberly, “I was tellin Mister Colonel about Leland Rice, how he come through Lost Man’s with his gang after the bank robbery. I never got to the other half of that old story.”
“Whidden? I’m sure Mister Colonel knows the rest of it—”
“This was back in World War I, when he was gone.” Stolid, stubborn, Whidden said to Lucius, “When them fellers come through here, Abbie Harden fell in love with Leland, wanted to run off with him. Well, her parents said no, and next thing she knew, that young bank robber was killed on Chokoloskee. Aunt Abbie was wailin and screechin how that tragedy would not have happened if she had been allowed to go with that young man, and she threatened she might destroy herself almost any day. Course Abbie weren’t a young girl no more, and she might of thought that Leland Rice was her last chance in life. And Leland bein dead and buried, we never got to hear his side of the story.