Across death’s river our friends have gone,
And we are following, one by one …
They adorned the grave with crimson coral bean and scarlet poinciana, which reminded Sally of Rob’s flagrant red bandanna. “What’s the matter with me?” Sally sniffled, dabbing her eyes. “I hardly even knew that poor old man!” But of course she was mourning the lost brother, the long-lost lover, and refused to be comforted even—or especially—by Whidden. Nor had she cried out when shortly after her father’s departure, the shooting stopped and the helicopters departed. “I could feel it coming,” she whispered intensely. “I could feel it.” After that, she would not speak and could not stop weeping. Even so, in a subdued way, she seemed at peace, and gentle and affectionate with everyone, even the blind man.
Smoke plumes rose from the darkening embers, wandering like companies of ghosts. Dark herons crossed the mangrove and the river. With his friends already in the boat, he paid a last visit to the grave. Off the bank, the snag of a drowned tree dipped and beckoned in the heavy current. The channel was shifting and the bend eroding as slabs of old alluvial earth were borne away into the Gulf of Mexico. He promised Rob he would come fetch him before his grave was taken by the river.
In the boat, the blind man murmured quietly, “Well, how you doin, Colonel? Goin to be okay?”
The Cracker Belle drifted down current before her propeller, gathering her weight, took hold of the muddy flow and churned her back upstream past the burned clearing. “Jungle will take this ol’ place back before you know it,” Whidden said, with a last look around him. “Won’t be nothing left of the old days for our kids to look at.”
Gazing downriver as the Bend turned and disappeared, Lucius saw how this wild river had looked before the first crafts of the aborigines rounded the point, in those ageless days innocent of human cry, only the puff of manatee and suck of tarpon, harsh heron squawk and shriek of tern on the gray sky, the mournful calling of the white-pated black pigeons. And he wondered if life would ever bring him back.
Following the inside route, the old boat headed east and north into the diadem of amber waters between the outer Islands and the coast, crossing the oyster bottoms and broad tannin reaches of the inner bays. Feeling the shift in her vibrations and the rise of water in her wake, Andy nodded in contentment. “Chokoloskee to House Hammock, we traveled these back bays, but as my granddad used to say, the water could be pretty skinny in through here.”
Lifting free from the green walls, white egrets crossed the bow, and hearing their guttural hoarse squawks, the blind man said, “Them white birds scare a whole lot easier than the blue ones, ever notice? Many years have come and gone since the last plume hunting, but them egrets has learned all they need to know, because they’re still scared of anything two-legged.”
“Me, too!” cried Sally. She gave the blind man an impulsive hug. “Well, now, Mister Andy House, you happy you came with us? Cause we sure are!” On her way below to rest, she stuck out her tongue at the other two, and Harden smiled at Lucius. “You seen the way she took it? About Junior? I believe she has let go of something, don’t ask me why. I believe she might be past the worst of it.” He grinned. “Your ex-ex-wife—that’s what she called herself just now! I believe my ex-ex-wife is really back!” And Lucius smiled, too, in profound loneliness.
Whidden would drop his passengers at Everglade, then head back south to help Speck if he could. “Them boys was my partners,” Whidden said, dispensing with any further explanation. When Lucius asked him if Sally would mind the risk he might be taking, Whidden shook his head. “She knows I have to go,” he said, “and she knows that I won’t stay.”
Crossing Alligator Bay, the Belle passed the mouth of the grown-over canal dredged originally by the Chevelier Corporation. “Follow that canal maybe six miles, you’ll hit a good high hammock,” Andy told them. “As a young boy, Charlie Green was in there deer huntin with his daddy and the Robertses. They’d shot four or five curlew for their supper, so Charlie’s dad said, ‘Well, we got enough to eat, so you boys go hunt us a good place to camp on that high hammock yonder.’ Charlie and the Roberts boy found a good place, all right, but somebody was on there a good while ahead of ’em, cause his skull lay grinnin at ’em from the brush. Alongside the skeleton, fallin apart, was a flat-bottomed scull boat, hauled up and hid a little ways back in the hammock, and also an old rifle and old coffeepot and fry pan. Well, that was enough, they made camp someplace else!