Lost Man's River(241)

“Are you saying the Hardens have forgiven it?”

“No, I sure ain’t. I’m only sayin that most of us can understand how it could happen. That make sense?”

Lucius supposed that the Bay people had suspended the feud after those deaths, since Whidden had been accepted when he courted Sally.

“Not by all of ’em. Someone seen us holdin hands and commenced to holler and take on, tell the old bad stories. The Carr cousins said, ‘Why, honey, he’s a Harden!’ And Sally said, ‘That’s right, folks, and I’m fixin to marry him, cause I just dote on this here Harden boy for his sparkly green eyes and his blond hair!’ Well, she had ’em there, they couldn’t say too much, they just kept bleatin at her, ‘He’s a Harden!’

“I loved that sweet Miss Sally Daniels right from school days, she was the prettiest girl I ever seen and she still is. When I asked her to marry, she said no but I kept at it, and Finally she took a real deep breath and told me what happened about Crockett Junior. For a while, I was pretty jealous over Junior, bein as how I seen him every day, worked alongside him. But I told her I could handle that, and asked her again to be my wife. She said Nosir, not unless you leave off workin for a certain sonofabitch name of Crockett Senior, and I said, No, Sal, I can’t just quit on him, and Sally said, ‘You will, just wait and see.’ Then she leaned over to whisper in my ear, said, ‘That means “Yes, I’ll marry you,” case you don’t know it!’ ”

Whidden smiled with pleasure at this memory. “So I went to Speck and I said, ‘Well, Old-Timer, I aim to marry your fine daughter if you give her to me.’ I was aimin to marry his fine daughter whether he give her to me or he didn’t, but I never told him about that part.

“Speck Daniels was in Everglade that day, whilin away the afternoon drinkin beer in his bunk on his old boat upriver by the bridge. Looked me over for quite a while there with just one red eye, gettin his brain together. Liked a Harden better as his moonshine partner than his son-in-law, I seen that straight off. Sat up finally and finished up his beer and spat most of his chewin tobacco through that little slot into the can. Then he squints at it and says, ‘This here looks like some kind of a dang twat. What’s your opinion, boy?’—them was the first words from that man’s mouth, hearin the news that his sweet daughter aimed to marry. Then he looks up and he says, ‘Our family don’t tolerate mixed people, Whidden, you know that.’

“ ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ I says.

“Speck looks me over for a minute. ‘Heck if I know,’ he says. Next, he says, ‘You’re a bad drinker, Whidden, I been watchin you. Old days now, a man that spent up all he made on spirits and weren’t loyal to his family might get him a whippin. What’s your views on that?’

“ ‘Who’s gonna give me that whippin, Speck?’ says I.

“ ‘Heck if I know,’ Speck says again, and he cracks us both a beer. ‘I got no say about it anyways, so you are welcome to her. Don’t even know where she is livin at. Her and me been lookin crossways at the other from the first time she opened up her eyes in her layette. Weren’t for me, that gal would of married her own brother, so I reckon she can’t be too much worse off hitched up to you.’ Rolled over then and closed his eyes, wavin me the hell out of his cabin. ‘Just mind she don’t go gettin you so pussy-whipped that you can’t work nights, that is all I’m askin.’

“That was Speck Daniels’s way of saying, Let’s you ’n’ me forget it, son, cause I don’t give a shit.”

Whidden tried to laugh at his father-in-law’s low-down ways, but he didn’t have his heart in it, and stopped.

“Course Sally herself ain’t got it all doped out yet. But in my opinion, this grudge of hers, this refusin to forgive what was done to Hardens—well, that ain’t only just her kindly nature.” Whidden lifted his gaze from the night water and held Lucius’s eye. “She turned her back on her own family, and not only her own family but her own kind. She blames this on their bad attitudes, but she’s too honest to pretend that’s all it is.”

Whidden sighed. “She can’t abide her daddy. Even before she got mixed up with Crockett Junior, she could not tolerate Speck Daniels, and that goes way back to the time she heard how Speck and his brother-in-law helped lynch that nigra man at Marco. Course he done that as a young feller in the Depression—”

“That made it all right?”